Check out this video, where nine palm-sized flying robots work together to play a keyboard, drums, maracas, a cymbal and a “couch guitar” made by stretching guitar strings over a wooden couch frame: A computer program tells the robots where they need to be at certain moments in time, to hit all the right notes. Cameras set up around the ceiling talk wirelessly with each robot, telling it where it is and what obstacles are around it 100 times a second....
Everywhere I look are the skeletal steel beams of new skyscrapers rising in a Dr. Seussian jumble of shapes. Everywhere I go is the sound of hammering, the tang of asphalt, the sight of construction workers masked against choking dust and intimidating heat—peaking at 116 degrees Fahrenheit during my visit. For me, burgeoning Doha, Qatar, on the Persian Gulf beside the punishing Arabian Desert, evoked humankind’s continuing hope for a better future against the harsh realities we are grappling with today....
Scientists are still scrambling to get a full scientific picture of the Zika virus, but experts already know enough to be scared of it. “Strong public health actions should not wait for definitive scientific proof,” Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), said Tuesday, after meeting in Geneva, Switzerland with the agency’s Review Committee on Zika. New findings offer the first hint of answers about how Zika might be damaging the developing brain and fetus, and how devastating this outbreak might become....
In a notable step for male fertility preservation, a procedure that involves removing and freezing immature testicular tissue and then reimplanting it later has resulted in the first live birth of a healthy monkey. The technique could theoretically help prepubescent boys who are about to undergo cancer treatments, about 30 percent of whom become infertile from the harsh effects of chemotherapy and radiation. Currently, these boys have no options if they want to have biological children in the future....
A small, fuzzy creature might help researchers reimagine conservation in the age of rapidly changing environments. Experts expect climate change to cause more endangered species to go extinct while bringing others to the brink. Most species slowly try to adapt — often by changing the timing of major life events, like reproduction. They can also alter migration and feeding habits. Sometimes that works. But the same species can show great adaptive potential in some places while dying out elsewhere, according to a paper published this week in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment....
The images of Pakistan’s 2010 devastating flood still haunt. Women up to their necks in the waters of the swollen Indus River, carrying children to safety. Men wading through the brown currents with bags of rice on their heads and young ones on their backs. The numbers, too, were staggering. Triggered by unusually heavy monsoon rains, the fast-rising waters along the heavily populated Indus River Valley affected some 20 million people, leaving about 11 million homeless....
This year, GPT-3, a large language model capable of understanding text, responding to questions and generating new writing examples, has drawn international media attention. The model, released by OpenAI, a California-based nonprofit that builds general-purpose artificial intelligence systems, has an impressive ability to mimic human writing, but just as notable is its massive size. To build it, researchers collected 175 billion parameters (a type of computational unit) and more than 45 terabytes of text from Common Crawl, Reddit, Wikipedia and other sources, then trained it in a process that occupied hundreds of processing units for thousands of hours....
By Erik VanceOutside neurology and his family, Sean Mackey doesn’t have many hobbies. The one exception is his monstrous flat-screen television and large film collection. Driving to Stanford, California, on the day I am to visit Mackey’s lab for testing, I am reminded of a scene from his favourite movie, The Princess Bride. In the film, the villain, Count Rugen, straps the hero Westley into a sinister apparatus and confesses a “deep and abiding interest in pain”....
Maybe the zombie apocalypse starts with a virus or a supernatural event. Maybe the resulting zombies can move quickly but are more easily incapacitated, or maybe they’re slow and can be only taken out by a blow to the brain. Are these zombies cunning? Or are they awkward and uncoordinated, as I would argue any proper zombie must be? Zombie lore may give us a lot of variety, but one thing every zombie scenario has in common is reanimation of the body after death....
You’ve heard the numbers: More than half of the world’s people now live in cities, and in just a few decades more than two thirds of the globe’s rapidly growing population will be urban. Because cities already suck up much of the planet’s resources and generate much of its waste, these trends threaten to make Earth miserable unless cities become more sustainable. Scientists could hold the key—if city leaders will invite them in as partners....
Emil Kraepelin, a German psychiatrist, wrote in 1913 that the causes of schizophrenia were “wrapped in impenetrable darkness.” He outlined the symptoms that still characterize the disorder, including delusions, hallucinations and disorganized thinking. Kraepelin used a different term—“dementia praecox”—that reflected his belief in the disease’s unremitting downward course (dementia) and its early onset (praecox). Today we no longer embrace either dementia or praecox as components of schizophrenia, but the impenetrable darkness he described still lingers....
The biotechnology industry is expanding into the fashion industry, with investors backing leather substitutes made from mushrooms, animal cells or recombinant collagen produced in yeast. On January 13, MycoWorks announced a $125 million round of funding that will finance a full-scale production plant in South Carolina to make a leather alternative from Ganoderma lucidum mycelium. This follows last year’s $7 million toward a funding round by VitroLabs, which grows hide from animal cell cultures....
As U.S. EPA announces new commitments to cut potent greenhouse gases, the Department of Energy is highlighting all the ways emitters can meet those goals. The rules proposed yesterday at the White House target hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a class of chemicals used in air conditioning, foams and refrigeration (E&ENews PM, Oct. 15). These chemicals can be tens of thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat, so even small amounts leaking into the atmosphere could have an outsized impact on the climate....
BONN, Germany—A White House roundtable on fossil fuels and nuclear energy became an outlet for international rage at President Trump, who has disdained the world’s work to contain climate change. Yesterday’s event, hosted by White House energy adviser George David Banks, didn’t offer the same level of defiance shown by Trump in June when he accused the world of “laughing at us as a country” for joining the Paris Agreement. Instead, it promoted efficient energy use as a main tool to combat global warming, a message that struck attendees of the U....
Mathematician John Nash, who died May 23 in a car accident, was known for his decades-long battle with schizophrenia—a struggle famously depicted in the 2001 Oscar-winning film “A Beautiful Mind.” Nash had apparently recovered from the disease later in life, which he said was done without medication. But how often do people recover from schizophrenia, and how does such a destructive disease disappear? Nash developed symptoms of schizophrenia in the late 1950s, when he was around age 30, after he made groundbreaking contributions to the field of mathematics, including the extension of game theory, or the math of decision making....
Flashing dots on a computer screen caught the eye of Kesete Admasu when he was touring the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta in 2012. The lights were blinking over a satellite image of eastern Africa, and Admasu, Ethiopia’s minister of health, asked what they represented. It was an outbreak of hepatitis E in South Sudan, a country that shares a border with Ethiopia. Admasu wasn’t aware of an outbreak so close to home, not even one that had sickened almost 4,000 people....
WASHINGTON—Two of the nation’s leading medical centers have identified nearly two dozen patients who were scheduled to come to the United States to receive medical care from the countries subject to President Trump’s executive order on immigration. Johns Hopkins Medicine has found at least 11 patients who live in the Muslim-majority nations targeted by the immigration ban—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen—and who were set to travel to the United States in the next 90 days for medical care....
In the watery limbo between sea and river, where salt and fresh water mingle in the roots of mangrove trees, a handful of uniquely adapted species—terrestrial and aquatic—have evolved to fill the novel niche. But more than 40 percent of the land-dwelling animals that live in mangrove forests are now under pressure from habitat loss, concludes an analysis published this week in BioScience. “Mangroves are threatened by development, pollution, mariculture and changes in sea level and salinity,” wrote David Luther, an ecology researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Russell Greenberg, head of the Smithsonian National Zoo’s Migratory Bird Center....
DUJIADUN, China – Liu Changxiong has been farming in this southwestern Chinese village for more than a decade, but his years of experience aren’t of much use these days. Last year, his corn seedlings withered at a time Liu expected would be rich in rain. It took twice as many days for his green onions to grow than Liu’s estimates. But the 43-year-old farmer isn’t the one to be blamed. Instead, experts say, his farming routine is being messed up by climate change....
Even infants are drawn to the boob tube with its bewitching, transfixing blend of moving images and sound. And despite decades of concern about the influence of television and recreational computer use on children—coupled with newer worries about childhood obesity—researchers are still parsing out how this ever-expanding amount of screen time is affecting their well-being. Despite the worries, TV use among the youngest viewers has continued to increase over the years....
