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Circa 2021

Swiss researchers said Monday they had calculated the mathematical constant pi to a new world-record level of exactitude, hitting 62.8 trillion figures using a supercomputer.

“The calculation took 108 days and nine hours” using a supercomputer, the Graubuenden University of Applied Sciences said in a statement.

Its efforts were “almost twice as fast as the record Google set using its cloud in 2019, and 3.5 times as fast as the previous world record in 2020”, according to the university’s Center for Data Analytics, Visualization and Simulation.

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The W boson, one of the tiniest, most elementary particles in the known universe is causing a big ruckus in the field of particle physics.

New findings about the particle, which is fundamental to the formation of the universe, suggest its mass may be far heavier than predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics —the theoretical “rulebook” that helps us make sense of the building blocks of matter. If true, it could signal a monumental shift in our understanding of the universe.

According to the Standard Model, W bosons (together with another particle, called Z bosons) are responsible for the weak nuclear force, one of the four forces that hold together all observable matter in the universe. The other forces include gravitational force (for which there is currently no explanation in the Standard Model), electromagnetic force, and the strong nuclear force.

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Officials in Tokyo are concerned about the more transmissible BA.2 Omicron coronavirus subvariant, which is increasingly dominant among infections.

The capital’s expert panel says its screening indicates the BA.2 subvariant accounted for nearly 68 percent of new cases in the week through March 28. The rate has climbed nearly 30 points in the past two weeks.

Tohoku Medical and Pharmaceutical University Professor Kaku Mitsuo said, “We are at a critical moment where infections will rapidly spread or not.” He added, “We have to take measures to prevent it from happening.”

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Say cheese! Researchers have developed a tiny camera that takes amazingly clear photos. Just don’t sneeze while it’s in your hand. At the size of a coarse grain of salt, you may never find it again.

Smaller cameras could mean lighter smartphones and new James Bond–style gadgets. But that’s not all. Cameras on this scale could swim through the body, hitch a ride on an insect, scope out your brain or monitor hostile environments. And those are just a few of the possibilities.

How do you pack that much picture-taking power into something the size of a crumb? It takes a “radically different approach” to making a camera lens, says Felix Heide. He’s a computer scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey. His lab developed the camera with colleagues from the University of Washington in Seattle. The team shared its work in Nature Communications in November.

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In 1,832, Charles Darwin witnessed hundreds of ballooning spiders landing on the HMS Beagle while some 60 miles offshore. Ballooning is a phenomenon that’s been known since at least the days of Aristotle—and immortalized in E.B. White’s children’s classic Charlotte’s Web—but scientists have only recently made progress in gaining a better understanding of its underlying physics.

Now, physicists have developed a new mathematical model incorporating all the various forces at play as well as the effects of multiple threads, according to a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review E. Authors M. Khalid Jawed (UCLA) and Charbel Habchi (Notre Dame University-Louaize) based their new model on a computer graphics algorithm used to model fur and hair in such blockbuster films as The Hobbit and Planet of the Apes. The work could one day contribute to the design of new types of ballooning sensors for explorations of the atmosphere.

There are competing hypotheses for how ballooning spiders are able to float off into the air. For instance, one proposal posits that, as the air warms with the rising sun, the silk threads the spiders emit to spin their “parachutes” catch the rising convection currents (the updraft) that are caused by thermal gradients. A second hypothesis holds that the threads have a static electric charge that interacts with the weak vertical electric field in the atmosphere.

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Cognitive dissonance in the government’s decision to approve Bay-du-Nord while professing to fight fossil fuel emissions responsible for climate change.

The decision to approve Bay-du-Nord is based on the low emissions intensity of the oil that will be produced with no accounting for end-use.

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At roughly 70 years human age, the mice looked elderly and unremarkable. Yet hidden underneath was a youthful cellular clock, turned back in time based on a Nobel-Prize-winning strategy. It’s also the latest bet for finding the fountain of youth, backed by heavy-hitter anti-aging startups in Silicon Valley.

At the center is partial cellular reprogramming. The technique, a sort of gene therapy, forces cells to make four proteins, collectively dubbed the Yamanaka factors. Like erasers, the factors wipe a cell’s genetic history clean, reverting adult cells—for example, skin cells—to a stem cell-like identity, giving them back the superpower to turn into almost any type of cell.

The process isn’t all-or-nothing. In a twist, scientists recently found that they can use the factors to rewind a cell’s genetic history tape rather than destroying it altogether. And if they stop at the right point, the cell dramatically loses its age, becoming more youthful but retaining its identity. The results spurred a wave of interest in moving the therapy to humans, with Calico Life Sciences—a sister company to Google—and Altos Labs, backed by Jeff Bezos, in the race.

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