Posts Tagged ‘fromnpc’
The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia | Nature
June 23, 2022https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04800-3
Great analysis of ancient (microbial) DNA!
The brain-reading devices helping paralysed people to move, talk and touch
June 11, 2022QT:{{”
Finally, there is widespread acknowledgement that ethical oversight must keep pace with this rapidly evolving technology. BCIs present multiple concerns, from privacy to personal autonomy. Ethicists stress that users must retain full control of the devices’ outputs. And although current technologies cannot decode people’s private thoughts, developers will have records of users’ every communication, and crucial data about their brain health. Moreover, BCIs present a new type of cybersecurity risk.
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Great article. Amazing technology. But I am worried about the long-term #privacy implications of real mind-reading devices.
A common sunscreen ingredient turns toxic in the sea — anemones suggest why
June 4, 2022One wonders if this can happen with oxybenzone sunscreen on people too. Perhaps a good reason to favor TiO2 or ZnO sunscreens.
Particle’s surprise mass threatens to upend the standard model
May 29, 2022Hot news in ’22, but this was based on data collected by 2011!
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01014-5
QT:{{”
Old experiment, new tricks
In the latest work, Kotwal and his collaborators aimed to take the most precise measurement ever of the W’s mass. The data had all been collected by 2011, when Fermilab’s Tevatron — a 6-kilometre-long circular machine that collided protons with antiprotons and was once the world’s most powerful accelerator — shut down. But the latest measurement would not have been possible back then, says Kotwal. Instead, it is the result of a steady improvement of techniques in data analysis, as well as the particle-physics community’s improved understanding of how protons and antiprotons behave in collisions. “Many of the techniques to achieve that kind of precision we had not even learned about by 2012.”
The team looked at roughly four million W bosons produced inside the CDF detector between 2002 and 2011 — a data set four times larger than the group used in an early measurement in 20122. The researchers calculated the energy of each decay electron by measuring how its trajectory bent in a magnetic field. One painstaking advance over the past decade improved the resolution of the trajectories from roughly 150 micrometres to less than 30 micrometres, says Kotwal.
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Mutation bias reflects natural selection in Arabidopsis thaliana | Nature
April 14, 2022https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04269-6
https://twitter.com/MarkGerstein/status/1510065060806283269
Interesting paper, relating de novo mutation rate to epigenetic features. Wonder exactly how this connects to the fact that the background mutation rate in cancer genomes depends strongly on epigenetics.
Important genomic regions mutate less often than do other regions https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00017-6
Commit to transparent COVID data until the WHO declares the pandemic is over
April 14, 2022Liked the line: “A simple text file would do.” People should be more aware of how useful the most basic of formats is!
The race to save the Internet from quantum hackers
March 27, 2022https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00339-5
What if Q-day occurs on Pi-day?
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