The Influence of Language on Eye Movements
Vocab Used : languages, bilinguals, stamp, influence, linguistics, intersection
Psycholinguistics is a field at the intersection of psychology and linguistics, and one if its recent discoveries is that the languages we speak influence our eye movements. For example, English speakers who hear candle often look at a candy because the two words share their first syllable. Research with speakers of different languages revealed that bilingual speakers not only look at words that share sounds in one language but also at words that share sounds across their two languages. When Russian-English bilinguals hear the English word marker, they also look at a stamp, because the Russian word for stamp is mark.
“Quantitative Linguistics”
Vocab Used : computational, technique, disputed, rigor, linguistics, proponents
The computational technique used in the new analysis is hotly disputed among linguists. But its proponents say it promises to bring more quantitative rigor to the field, and could possibly push key dates further into the past, much as radiocarbon dating did in the field of archaeology.
Content Crisis
Thanks to a bevy of easily accessible online tools, just about anyone with a computer can now pump out, with the click of a button, artificial-intelligence-generated images, text, audio and videos that convincingly resemble those created by humans. One big result is an online content crisis, an enormous and growing glut of unchecked, machine-made material riddled with potentially dangerous errors, misinformation and criminal scams. This situation leaves security specialists, regulators and everyday people scrambling for a way to tell AI-generated products apart from human work. Current AI-detection tools are deeply unreliable. Even OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently took its AI text identifier offline because the tool was so inaccurate.
AI Detection
That’s an interesting finding! It seems like the study suggests that this new machine-learning tool has the ability to detect when chemistry papers are authored by a chatbot like ChatGPT. This advancement, as outlined in the study published on November 6 in Cell Reports Physical Science, showcases the potential for specialized classifiers to outperform existing AI detectors in distinguishing papers generated by AI text generators. This could be a valuable tool for academic publishers in maintaining the integrity of scientific literature.
Moral Complexity
A tricky term, morality can’t be neatly defined. This is partially because morality is broad; our moral values often extend beyond compassion and fairness and include group-focused concerns of loyalty and obedience. Defining morality is also hard because people are “moral acrobats” who can easily convince themselves of the righteousness of their actions. Most people genuinely believe that they are morally above average; this includes people we would normally find less moral, such as prisoners and perpetrators of genocide. In lieu of a clear definition, I use the word “moral” to mean the mental processes that are engaged when people think about the world in terms of good and evil.
Sci-Fi Billionaires
Billionaires who grew up reading science-fiction classics published 30 to 50 years ago are affecting our life today in almost too many ways to list: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos prefers 1970s plans for giant orbital habitats. Peter Thiel is funding research into artificial intelligence, life extension and “seasteading.” Mark Zuckerberg has blown $10 billion trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. And Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has published a “techno-optimist manifesto” promoting a bizarre accelerationist philosophy that calls for an unregulated, solely capitalist future of pure technological chaos.
Viagra Revolution
In 1998, Viagra received FDA approval. A financial bonanza followed for its manufacturer, Pfizer, and later for its competitors. Although initially approved—and marketed—specifically for erectile dysfunction, Pfizer and later competitors used aggressive targeted marketing to catapult the drug from an erectile dysfunction treatment to a lifestyle pill pocketed by nervous 30-year-olds heading out on Internet dates.
Muooni Meeting
When she began the job, she called a morning meeting in Muooni with local stakeholders. The village administrator and elders spread the word. Several dozen people toting plastic chairs gathered at the Muooni River, where mining was rampant, and sat in the shade. Yusuf had rehearsed her spoken Kikamba, the local language. Although she had taken part in stakeholder meetings in her fisheries job, she had never led one like this. “The entire county is watching,” she thought at the time. “I have to bring it forward.”
Sands Disfigured
They turned around and began to creep back down the rough road, but as soon as the gendarme was out of sight they turned off and snuck along a hidden side of the ridge. About 400 meters further they stopped and cut the engine. Abderrahmane walked quietly to the crest of the bluff to peer down, keeping low to avoid being seen. Despite all his research into illegal sand mines, he was unprepared for the scene below. Half a dozen dump trucks scattered across a deeply pitted moonscape were filled high with brown sand. Just beyond lay the light blue sea. Abderrahmane was stunned by the “major disfiguration” of the dunes, he told me later on a video call. “It was a shock.”
Subterranean Microbial Diversity
Now an abandoned gold mine in South Dakota is allowing the deepest look yet into this secret world of buried biodiversity. In new research published in the journal Environmental Microbiology, a genetic analysis of the mine’s microbes from as deep as 1.5 kilometers beneath the surface reveals a schism in survival strategies. Some microbes have big, bulky genomes that prep them to digest any nutrient that might come their way. Others are so genetically streamlined that they can’t even make some of life’s fundamental building blocks and instead rely on scavenging them or living symbiotically with other species.
Ingenuity: Mars Helicopter Triumph
The agency launched the little four-pound chopper in July 2020, with Ingenuity hitchhiking to Mars in the belly of NASA’s Perseverance rover. The tissue box-size craft made its first-ever flight in April 2021. Launched as a month-long technology demonstration, the helicopter was built to make a mere five hops to prove that powered flight is possible on the Red Planet.
Public Perception of UAP
Many in the American public feel a personal connection to the topic. Recent surveys find that about one quarter of Americans report having seen some kind of UFO. Research we worked on at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation has found clusters of UFO reports across most U.S. states over the past several decades. These constituencies—and their elected officials—can be expected to have strong feelings about UAP data and what it does or doesn’t show.
Upholding Rational Governance
Carl Sagan popularized the maxim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This advice should not be optional for policy makers. In today’s world of misinformation, conspiracy driven decision-making and sensationalist-dominated governance, our capacity for rational, evidence-based critical thinking is eroding, with deleterious consequences for our ability to effectively deal with multiplying challenges of ever increasing complexity.
The Invisible Government Legacy
One of the most influential books of this era to raise this question was The Invisible Government, written in 1964 by journalists David Wise and Thomas Ross. They opened their account with a stark declaration: “There are two governments in the United States today. One is visible. The other is invisible.” They then set out their thesis that the CIA had occasionally acted outside the authority of elected officials, and that such covert operations were not merely an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, but had actively shaped it. Though their thesis was more nuanced and narrowly focused than that of many contemporary purveyors of deep state conspiracy theories, their book provided the language and narrative apparatus that would eventually metastasize into the widespread skepticism in American society toward officialdom, and in particular toward the U.S. intelligence community.
The Age of Conspiracy
America has always been a suspicious society, famed for its persecution of imaginary subversives, from witches to commies hiding under the bed. But that terrible history almost seems quaint today when disinformation experts agree we now live in the Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories. This movement has even swept up pop idol Taylor Swift and the 2024 election, as you may have heard, into only the latest reductio ad absurdum of the era.
Life: Conway’s Universal Constructor
At about the same time, Conway was exploring the idea of the universal constructor, which was first studied by American mathematician John von Neumann in the 1940s. A universal constructor is a hypothetical machine that could build copies of itself—something that would be very useful for colonizing distant planets. Von Neumann created a mathematical model for such a machine, using a Cartesian grid—basically, an extended checkerboard—as his foundation. Conway simplified the model, and it became the now famous game of Life.
Conway’s Mathematical Wonderland
Stepping into John H. Conway’s office at Princeton University is like stepping into a mathematician’s playpen. Dozens of polyhedra made of colored cardboard hang from the ceiling like mirror balls at a discotheque. Dangling among them is a Klein bottle constructed from chicken wire. Several models of crystal lattices sit beside the window, and a pyramid of tennis balls rises from the floor. At the center of it all is Conway himself, leaning back in his chair, his face obscured by oversize glasses and a bushy, gray beard. The eclectic 61-year-old mathematician is clearly in his element.
Conway’s Mathematical Wonderland
Stepping into John H. Conway’s office at Princeton University is like stepping into a mathematician’s playpen. Dozens of polyhedra made of colored cardboard hang from the ceiling like mirror balls at a discotheque. Dangling among them is a Klein bottle constructed from chicken wire. Several models of crystal lattices sit beside the window, and a pyramid of tennis balls rises from the floor. At the center of it all is Conway himself, leaning back in his chair, his face obscured by oversize glasses and a bushy, gray beard. The eclectic 61-year-old mathematician is clearly in his element.
Knuth’s Writing Adventure
In the early 1970s mathematician Donald Knuth spent a sabbatical with his wife in Norway. The time was meant to be spent relaxing. Yet one night he woke up his partner in a state of agitation. He urgently needed to write a book. Don’t worry, he reassured his spouse, it will only take a week. To concentrate on his writing, he reserved a hotel room just for himself in Oslo.
Efficiency Gap Calculation
To visualize this, we can again use the initial example with the 50 voters (20 for red, 30 for blue) and calculate the efficiency gap for the different divisions. In the first case, when all boundaries were drawn vertically, the first and second districts (from the left) each have 10 red votes, wasting four each. The third, fourth and fifth districts, on the other hand, each have 10 blue votes, four of which are also wasted. Thus, the efficiency gap is as follows (the vertical bars indicate absolute value): |(2 x 4) – (3 x 4)|/50 = 2/25 = 0.08.
Gerrymandering Indicators
One possible clue that gerrymandering may be present is the length of the outer boundary: the more jagged a district, the larger the perimeter. The literature related to redistricting sometimes advocates drawing the smallest possible circle to include the area within a district and comparing it to the area of existing boundaries. The more the district’s borders deviate from a circle, the greater the possibility that the district has been redrawn to suit partisan ends. The average distance between residents of a precinct may also indicate gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering Legacy
Even today, in most U.S. states, legislatures decide on the division of electoral districts about every 10 years (with the appearance of the new census). Time and again, the incumbent parties are suspected of using redistricting to their advantage. This can often be seen in strange-shaped electoral districts, similar to the one in Massachusetts at the beginning of the 19th century. A cartoonist at the time noticed that one of the districts resembled a salamander and thus coined the expression gerrymandering.
Election Dynamics
Designing a perfect election system for multiple parties is impossible, even with mathematical tools. But if, by and large, there are only two dominant parties, as in the U.S., things should be fairly clear-cut. The party candidate with the most votes wins, right? Anyone who has followed U.S. presidential elections in recent years knows that the reality is different. One important factor is the actual shape of the voting districts. If cleverly designed, a party that is actually losing can still gain the majority of representatives—an issue that was by no means absent in the U.S. midterm elections.
Point Partition
Interestingly the theorem holds true even if the ham and bread are broken into multiple pieces. Use a cookie cutter to punch out ham snowmen, and bake your bread into croutons; a perfectly equal cut will always exist (each snowman or crouton won’t necessarily be halved, but the total amount of ham and bread will be). Taking this idea to its extreme, we can make a similar claim about points. Scatter your paper with red and green dots, and there will always be a straight line with exactly half of the reds and half of the greens on either side of it. This version requires a small technicality: points that lie exactly on the dividing line can be counted on either side or not counted at all (for example, if you have an odd number of reds then you could never split them evenly without this caveat).
Lunchtime Geometry
Consider lunch. Perhaps a nice ham sandwich. A slice of a knife neatly halves the ham and its two bread slices. But what if you slip? Oops, the ham now rests folded under a flipped plate, with one slice of bread on the floor and the other stuck to the ceiling. Here’s some solace: geometry ensures that a single straight cut, perhaps using a room-sized machete, can still perfectly bisect all three pieces of your tumbled lunch, leaving exactly half of the ham and half of each slice of bread on either side of the cut. That’s because math’s “ham sandwich theorem” promises that for any three (potentially asymmetric) objects in any orientation, there is always some straight cut that simultaneously bisects them all. This fact has some bizarre implications as well as some sobering ones as it relates to gerrymandering in politics.
Dinosaur Decline Theory
In the late 1970s, debate began about whether dinosaurs were at their peak or in decline before their big extinction. Scientists at that time noted that while dinosaur diversity seemed to have increased in the geologic stage that spanned 83.6 million to 71.2 million years ago, the number of species on the scene seemed to decrease during the last few million years of the Cretaceous. Some researchers have interpreted this pattern to mean that the asteroid that struck the Gulf of Mexico was simply the final blow for an already vulnerable group of animals.
Diverse Ecosystem
Amphibians were not the only creatures that moved between water and land in this ecosystem. Turtles also spent time both in the lake and on terra firma. We’ve found bony plates from turtle shells with distinctive ornamentation patterns characteristic of several soft-shelled turtle species, as well as snapping turtles. Lizards made a home here, too. We have confirmed the presence of several different lizard groups, from close relatives of living iguanas, to long-tailed skinklike forms, to heavily armored insect-eating species.
Formation Mysteries
Scholars have long debated how VMBs form. One of the first hypotheses suggested that the fossils preserved in VMBs had collectively passed through the digestive tracts of ancient carnivores and that the sites represent concentrations of feces. Although scatological assemblages do exist in the fossil record, this explanation cannot, on its own, account for the quality of preservation and the geological context of the Judith River VMBs. Another hypothesis held that VMBs form when the flow of a river picks up and carries small, hard parts from an array of animals and deposits them in a single spot. But the geological and forensic data we have collected in the Judith River Formation are largely inconsistent with this transport-based scenario.
Pioneering Exploration
Through our work in the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument—or the Breaks, as it is known—we’ve been able to reconstruct one such ecosystem in remarkable detail. It’s a scene many decades in the making. In 1855 a 26-year-old explorer and naturalist named Ferdinand Hayden was the first to investigate the Breaks geologically. For a few short days he traversed the roughly 76-million-year-old outcrops there. His foray into these fossil-rich rocks yielded the first scientific collection of dinosaur bones and teeth discovered in all of North America. But Hayden didn’t just collect dinosaur remains. From what we would now recognize as a classic VMB, he also picked up a handful of bones and teeth from fish, turtles and crocodiles. With his first major find, Hayden not only populated our view of prehistoric North America with a bunch of dinosaurs but also began to reveal an ancient ecosystem.
Prehistoric Discoveries
For the past three decades we have been conducting expeditions to recover such fossils in the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, a 149-mile expanse of astoundingly beautiful badlands in central Montana. Here in the very place where scientists got their first look at North America’s dinosaurs starting in the 1800s, our team has discovered a wealth of fossils from an extraordinary array of previously unknown organisms that lived alongside those better-known dinosaurs. These fossils are a record of an ecosystem that flourished 10 million years before a killer asteroid slammed into Earth.
Tianeptine: Agitation and Adverse Effects
Data from clinical trials, case reports and poison control centers shows that tianeptine commonly induces agitation. This is typically accompanied by a fast heart rate and high blood pressure, confusion, nightmares, drowsiness, dry mouth and nausea, among other conditions. The most serious adverse events are slowed or stopped breathing, coma, heart arrhythmia and death. When long-term users try to stop tianeptine use, they often experience withdrawal symptoms reminiscent of opioid withdrawal.
Rural Hospital Risk: Mental Health Access Decline
A recent report reveals that one in four rural hospitals are at risk of closure. That means behavioral health in rural communities is quickly becoming less available to populations that already struggle with higher rates of isolation, addiction and access to affordable care. The Behavioral Health Workforce Research Center found that 60 percent of mental health visits in rural areas are conducted by a primary care provider who may have limited expertise in behavioral health.
Farming Family Struggles: Mental Health Matters
Chris Bardenhagen used to shrug off any worries about mental health, but the stresses of taking over his struggling family farm now have him seriously considering therapy. Bardenhagen is a sixth-generation farmer who grew up on an 80-acre multicrop orchard in Michigan that his family has run since the 1800s. And it all was officially transferred to him on January 1—a transition that he says has “been too much too fast” as he has scrambled to find financial support and profitable crops.
Energy Politics Shake-Up: LNG’s Climate Impact
The idea is a bombshell in the world of energy politics, where gas has long been touted as having about half as many emissions than coal. In December 2023, 170 climate scientists signed onto a letter asking President Joe Biden to reject plans to build more LNG export terminals, mostly along the Gulf of Mexico, on the grounds that liquefied gas is “at least 24 percent worse for the climate than coal.”
Permian Methane Emissions: A Climate Crisis Concern
The Permian is also one of the country’s largest emitters of methane—a potent greenhouse gas that is increasingly being recognized as an important driver of the climate emergency. Since 2019 Scientific Aviation’s planes have been in high demand as scientists have tried to get a handle on the amount of greenhouse gases leaking from Permian oil tanks, processing plants and other infrastructure.
Gas Leak Waste: A Costly Oversight
The agency also noted that with the cost of gas rising amid supply crunches, companies that allow leaks are wasting an increasingly valuable product. The report says the volume of gas leaked in 2021, were it to be captured and sold, would have provided 180 billion cubic meters of gas, enough to supply Europe’s power sector.
Surpassing Expectations: EMIT’s Greenhouse Gas Revelations
The results aren’t completely unexpected—EMIT team members had thought they would be able to see greenhouse gases with the instrument. The quality of its performance, even in its initial work, came as a surprise, however, says Andrew Thorpe, a technologist and atmospheric scientist at JPL and lead author of the new study. “We were ecstatic when we saw the results, and we’re very excited about the performance of the instrument,” he says. “It exceeded our expectations.”
Space Station Sensor Unveils Climate Clues
The sensor, called Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT), was delivered to the space station in the summer of 2022. Its main purpose is to determine how dust in the atmosphere affects Earth’s climate. But it turns out this capability also enables EMIT to gather highly detailed observations of previously unknown plumes of the key greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide, according to new research that analyzed the instrument’s first 30 days of data. Scientists hope the ability to pinpoint emission sources can be a valuable tool in tackling the climate crisis as greenhouse gases reach ever higher concentrations in the atmosphere, as announced by the World Meteorological Organization this week.
Stakeholder-Informed Regulation
“While developing the rule, we engaged a broad range of stakeholders and incorporated feedback from nearly 1 million public comments,” he said. The result, he said, was a rule that is “ambitious, common sense, comprehensive and uniquely designed to reduce dangerous air pollution while still providing industry with the adequate time and flexibility to comply in a cost-effective manner.”
Gas Emissions Reassessment
The Biden administration is now engaged in a broader overhaul of its assumptions about the life-cycle emissions of gas. So far, that has included tough new Clean Air Act standards and a proposal to increase default leak rates at oil and gas operations. The latter policy, which is due to be final this year, could greatly increase both the number of oil and gas operations required to report methane — the main ingredient in natural gas — and the volume of emissions they report.
Toxic Tipping
Hazardous chemical spills like the one that happened in East Palestine, Ohio, last year when a train derailed, are the tip of the iceberg of our chemical pollution crisis. Scientists say we are rapidly approaching a “planetary boundary,” the point at which industrial chemicals are altering the “vital Earth system processes on which human life depends.” Current concerns regarding the global contamination of food, water and soils with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) demonstrate that the problems we face with toxic chemicals reach far beyond accidents.
Magnetic Stimulation: A Breakthrough in Smoking Cessation
Nicotine in cigarettes is highly addictive, which makes quitting smoking a miserable experience for many people. A new approach to help people kick the habit involves magnetically stimulating regions of the brain that are involved in addiction. The technique has already been approved for use in the United States, and it could improve considerably as researchers get a better handle on what goes on in a nicotine-addicted brain.
Smoking’s Lasting Impact on Immune Response
To explore which environmental factors had the biggest role, researchers measured the production of cytokines—key messenger molecules that mediate inflammation—in the blood of 1,000 healthy people after exposing the samples to either bacteria, fungi, antibodies or other agents known to elicit an immune response. Smoking was found to greatly alter both the innate response—the body’s general and immediate first line of defense—and the slower, more threat-specific adaptive response. The data suggest that the cytokine secretion in the innate immune response rapidly returns to the level of nonsmokers after a person quits smoking but that the effects on the adaptive response appear to endure for years or decades through a process called epigenetic memory. The results were published today in Nature.
Fungal Menace
In New Delhi, physician and microbiologist Anuradha Chowdhary read the early case reports and was unnerved that COVID seemed to be an inflammatory disease as much as a respiratory one. The routine medical response to inflammation would be to damp down the patient’s immune response, using steroids. That would set patients up to be invaded by fungi, she realized. C. auris, lethal and persistent, had already been identified in hospitals in 40 countries on every continent except Antarctica. If health-care workers unknowingly carried the organism through their hospitals on reused clothing, there would be a conflagration.
Fungal Evolution
That fungus was already a bad actor. It did not behave the way that other pathogenic yeasts do, living quiescently in someone’s gut and surging out into their blood or onto mucous membranes when their immune system shifted out of balance. At some point in the first decade of the century, C. auris gained the ability to directly pass from person to person. It learned to live on metal, plastic, and the rough surfaces of fabric and paper. When the first onslaught of COVID created a shortage of disposable masks and gowns, it forced health-care workers to reuse gear they usually discard between patients, to keep from carrying infections. And C. auris was ready.
Pandemic Pivot
Chiller is a physician and an epidemiologist and, in normal times, a branch chief at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in charge of the section that monitors health threats from fungi such as molds and yeasts. He had put that specialty aside in March when the U.S. began to recognize the size of the threat from the new virus, when New York City went into lockdown and the CDC told almost all of its thousands of employees to work from home. Ever since, Chiller had been part of the public health agency‘s frustrating, stymied effort against COVID. Its employees had been working with state health departments, keeping tabs on reports of cases and deaths and what jurisdictions needed to do to stay safe.
Escalating Resistance in C. auris Treatment
There are only three classes of drugs used to treat patients with C. auris versus roughly half a dozen classes of antibiotics employed to treat bacterial infections. Resistance to any one drug drastically limits clinicians’ options to suppress infection. According to the new research, by 2020 nine patients in the U.S. had infections that were resistant to echinocandins, a first-option antifungal that doctors use against C. auris. By 2021 the CDC identified 27 echinocandin-resistant cases, seven of which were resistant to all antifungals.
Rare Meningitis Alert
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fungal meningitis outbreaks are rare—but they are known to sometimes occur after medical and surgical procedures. The recent alert from the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) said the travelers began to develop symptoms around three days to six weeks after the surgeries. The state health officials and the CDC recommend that anyone who had an epidural during a procedure in Matamoros after January 1 of this year should monitor themselves for symptoms and consider checking in with a health care provider. “Meningitis, especially when caused by bacteria or fungus, can be a life-threatening illness unless treated promptly,” said DSHS Commissioner Jennifer Shuford in the alert.
Digital Oversight
In the era of digital finance, supervisory oversight is paramount amidst the rapid proliferation of fintech solutions. Regulators face the challenge of adapting traditional frameworks to monitor the ever-evolving landscape effectively. Predicting and assessing emerging risks is pivotal, given the novel nature of many digital innovations. International cooperation is crucial to mitigate risks that can proliferate across borders. Supervisory authorities must also contend with the disruptive influence of agile fintech startups, necessitating flexible regulatory approaches. Additionally, the integration of AI and big data analytics offers both opportunities and risks, demanding a delicate balance between innovation and consumer protection. By investing in advanced technologies, fostering collaboration, and adapting regulatory frameworks, supervisors can navigate the complexities of digital finance. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure a safe, resilient, and inclusive financial system that benefits society.
Disaster Attribution
When a weather disaster strikes, people want to know whether climate change is to blame. And if so, to what degree? The field of “attribution science” has advanced dramatically in the past decade. As investigative journalist Lois Parshley writes, researchers are now able to say how much worse or more likely floods, hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, and other disasters were made by the human-caused climate crisis. This knowledge can help people respond to unfolding disasters and plan for future ones.
Mathematical Majesty
In Fine Hall, the unadorned brown granite tower across the road from Princeton’s iconic neo-Gothic architecture, Conway gave up his office in the math department “so he could just stay in the common room and hold court,” sometime around 1991, Sarnak said (one former student, Stark Ledbetter, said she did once see Conway’s office—“completely cluttered”). When Christopher Smyth Simons, now an associate professor at Rowan University, was a graduate student at Princeton, he would play backgammon and other games with Conway every day in that third-floor lounge, where the department enjoys a daily afternoon tea break.
Creative Compulsion
In the early 1970s mathematician Donald Knuth spent a sabbatical with his wife in Norway. The time was meant to be spent relaxing. Yet one night he woke up his partner in a state of agitation. He urgently needed to write a book. Don’t worry, he reassured his spouse, it will only take a week. To concentrate on his writing, he reserved a hotel room just for himself in Oslo.
Microbial Monoliths: Unveiling RNA Obelisks
To detect the obelisks, lead author Ivan Zheludev of Stanford University and his colleagues sifted through data from an RNA database containing thousands of sequences isolated from human excrement. RNA is similar to DNA but is usually a single strand of “letters,” or base pairs, rather than a double strand, and it typically conveys messages from DNA that instruct the body to make proteins. The researchers identified thousands of distinct loops of single-stranded RNA that did not code for proteins. They even found one group of obelisks inside the common mouth bacterium Streptococcus sanguinis. Additionally, they analyzed information on the mouth and gut microbiomes of 472 people from five previous studies and detected obelisks in nearly 10 percent of the participants.
Exploring Pluto: Lost in the Cosmic Expanse
Imagine, for a moment, that you are an intrepid space explorer, jaunting through the solar system for adventure and, if there’s time, scientific exploration. After launching from Earth in your rocket ship, you eventually find yourself on the surface of formerly-known-as-a-planet Pluto, gazing upward at the stars. Earth now lies six billion kilometers sunward, faded to invisibility by the distance, and you struggle in vain to even identify the sun. It’s lost—one star among countless thousands, or so an old sci-fi trope would have you believe.
Purple Illumination
American cities and towns started switching their streetlights from sodium lamps to LEDs about 15 years ago, which changed the color of many nighttime roads from yellowish orange to bright white. But lately an odd new nocturnal color has been spotted across the nation—and the globe. Anecdotal reports of purple-looking streetlights have been popping up since early 2021 in states including Florida, Utah, Texas and Massachusetts, as well as in Canada and Ireland.
Temperature Trouble Ahead
Though recent rains have helped firefighters get some blazes under control, the coming months are expected to bring even hotter temperatures that will likely persist until the spring rainy season begins, Echeverry Prieto said during the press briefing.
Paramos’ Fiery Future
Looking further into the future, Aguilar Garavito says wildfires in the paramos are likely to grow more frequent and severe in coming decades. A 2018 master’s thesis by Manuela Rueda Trujillo, then at the National University of Colombia at Medellín, found that Colombia’s paramos have been growing drier since the end of the last Ice Age. A study published in PLoS ONE in 2019 found that this trend has been amplified by anthropogenic climate change over recent decades, and that Andean paramos are expected to grow even drier in the decades to come. A 2022 study authored by Gwendolyn Peyre of the University of the Andes in Colombia and published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution found that 10 percent of the paramos’ endemic species “could undergo extinction by 2070.”
Climate Confluence
The current heat and drought can be linked to both climate change and the cyclical climate pattern known as El Niño, which features warmer-than-average waters across the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. The heat that those waters release into the atmosphere causes a cascade of changes in weather patterns around the world. Increases in extreme heat are a hallmark of climate change, and the fingerprints of global warming have been found in numerous heat waves—including some that brought summerlike temperatures to parts of South America last winter.
Jeopardy! Winner Reveals Entwined Memory Systems Make a Trivia Champion
The researchers then created virtual science and history museum exhibits to organically introduce new facts to individuals. The virtual museums featured exhibits on a variety of subjects, such as dinosaurs, gemstone geology and musical instrument history. Each exhibit contained placards that detailed multiple related facts that were unfamiliar to participants, alongside a corresponding photograph of a relevant object. After receiving an audio-guided tour of all the exhibits, participants answered 80 trivia questions based on the facts presented in the museums.
Researchers use such massive lattices to build cryptographic systems
Computer scientists have been studying such problems for decades and are reasonably confident that they’re very hard to solve. But when designing a new algorithm, cryptographers need to balance security with many other concerns, such as the amount of information two computers need to exchange and the difficulty of the computation required to encrypt and decrypt messages. In this respect, lattice-based cryptography excels. “Lattices fit into this sweet spot where everything is reasonable—nothing is too bad, nothing is too good,” Peikert says. “It’s sort of like Goldilocks.”
Tomorrow’s Quantum Computers Threaten Today’s Secrets. Here’s How to Protect Them
Usually it’s easy to find the logarithm, but the discrete logarithm problem is about computing the logarithm using alternative forms of arithmetic in which one counts in a circle, like on a clock. Just as RSA is based on factoring, Diffie-Hellman is based on the discrete logarithm problem. Computer scientists generally believe that there is no quick way to find the discrete logarithm with a classical computer. But Shor found a way to do it on a quantum computer. He then applied similar logic to show how to use a quantum computer to quickly factor large numbers. Together these solutions are known as Shor’s algorithm.
Why the ‘Sleeping Beauty Problem’ Is Keeping Mathematicians Awake
The problem vexing the minds of experts is as follows: Sleeping Beauty agrees to participate in an experiment. On Sunday she is given a sleeping pill and falls asleep. One of the experimenters then tosses a coin. If “heads” comes up, the scientists awaken Sleeping Beauty on Monday. Afterward, they administer another sleeping pill. If “tails” comes up, they wake Sleeping Beauty up on Monday, put her back to sleep and wake her up again on Tuesday. Then they give her another sleeping pill. In both cases, they wake her up again on Wednesday, and the experiment ends.
How String Theory Solved Math’s Monstrous Moonshine Problem
Borcherds had thus proven the connection between the monster group and a modular form. And it was not to remain the only such case: in the meantime, mathematicians have been able to connect other finite groups with other modular forms—and there, too, string theory provides the link. So even if it turns out that the speculative theory is not suitable for describing our universe, it can still help us discover completely new mathematical worlds.
Surreal Numbers Are a Real Thing. Here’s How to Make Them
Even if it all seems very abstract and strange, Knuth is convinced that surreal numbers are just as suitable for describing our world as any other. If “everybody for a hundred years had learned about this in school, [they would have] considered that this is the way numbers are,” he told Numberphile. “There is no reason for us to think that the universe obeys the laws of real numbers.” In fact, physicists have already tried to incorporate surreal numbers into their theories. The effort involved is usually very high, however, and the benefits have so far been marginal.
These Numbers Look Random but Aren’t, Mathematicians Prove
In the real world, probability is a tough thing to characterize. If I roll a die, what does it mean to say that it has a one-sixth chance of coming up 5? We say that the outcome is random because we lack the information needed to predict which side will land facing up. But it’s not truly random. If we know all the details about how I move my hand and what forces act on the die as I toss it, we might be able to predict the outcome of the roll. Practically speaking, however, we usually lack that prediction power. Mathematicians call this situation “pseudorandom”: although it looks and seems random to us, we know that, in truth, if we were to have all the information we wanted, the die roll would not be random.
Secret Mathematical Patterns Revealed in Bach’s Music
Networks of note transitions in Bach’s music packed more of an informational punch than randomly generated networks of the same size—the result of greater variation in the networks’ nodal degrees, or the number of edges connected to each node. Additionally, the scientists uncovered variation in the information structure and content of Bach’s many compositional styles. Chorales, a type of hymn meant to be sung, yielded networks that were relatively sparse in information, though still more information-rich than randomly generated networks of the same size. Toccatas and preludes, musical styles that are often written for keyboard instruments such as the organ, harpsichord and piano, had higher information entropy.
Medication Abortion Using Telehealth Is As Safe As In-Person Care, Study Finds
“The study finds that providing telehealth care is just as safe and effective as providing abortion care in person,” says Ushma Upadhyay, a quantitative public health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and the paper’s lead author. In addition to synchronous abortion care, in which a patient communicated with a health professional over the phone or a video chat, Upadhyay’s team evaluated asynchronous care, in which the patient and provider did not interact in real time. The researchers found that both approaches had equally successful outcomes.
World COVID Emergency Status Is Over, but Dangerous Threat Remains
Epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, says it is unclear whether this decision will have much practical impact given that many countries have already been relaxing their measures to combat COVID-19. “Political attention to the pandemic was lost long before this decision, unfortunately,” Nuzzo says. “Even while COVID remains a top cause of death, governments have decided to put their energies elsewhere.”
U.S. COVID Public Health Emergency Is Ending. Here’s What That Means
Declared by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal public health emergency was one of many acts and health emergencies put in place by the U.S. government in response to the rapid spread of COVID cases. Several COVID-related policies and emergency declarations have already been winding down: March saw the end of a provision in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act that kept people enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program throughout the pandemic even if their eligibility changed. That expiration puts millions of adults and children at risk of losing medical coverage. Additionally, President Joe Biden ended the COVID national emergency in April, before it was set to expire alongside the federal public health emergency this week. And last Friday the World Health Organization announced that the disease “no longer constitutes a public health emergency of international concern.” The members of the organization’s International Health Regulations Emergency Committee for COVID-19 pointed to the pandemic’s downward trend as the reason to end its emergency declaration.
Peach Fuzz Is Pantone’s Color of the Year—And It’s Everywhere in Nature
This year’s pick is not quite a pastel, but it’s lighter than last year’s bold, saturated shade, Viva Magenta, and a bit of an inversion of 2022’s rich blue-purple hue, Very Peri. “A lot of it is about what people crave,” says Elizabeth Johnson, a neuroscientist who has studied the color visual system and teaches marketing at the University of Pennsylvania. Peach Fuzz “feels a little nostalgic to me,” she says, “like a nod to 1940s and 1950s makeup [packaging].” If this color feels nostalgic, fuzzy or comforting, that’s likely a learned association, Johnson explains. Very little about color is hardwired into our brain. We know that the human visual system is especially sensitive to greens and highly attentive to reds. But beyond that, any aesthetic associations with colors have likely been picked up through experience and culture.
We Need Gun Safety Ahead of Elections in the U.S.
Threats of violence, especially armed violence, have been shaping perceptions of American democracy ahead of the 2024 elections. In a December survey 83 percent of Americans expressed concern about the threat of political violence in the U.S. today. In a similar vein a poll conducted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2023 found that 84 percent of almost 300 former members of Congress were concerned about election-related violence this year. Their fears are validated by elected officials and candidates who continue to downplay, excuse or even encourage insurrectionism, creating the conditions for such incidents to take place again. Former president Trump has notoriously predicted “bedlam” if the criminal charges he faces affect the outcome of the upcoming election, and he has failed to categorically reject political violence.
Massive Study Finds No Single Genetic Cause of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior
The researchers found five single points in the genome that seemed to be common among people who had had at least one same-sex experience. Two of these genetic markers sit close to genes linked to sex hormones and to smell—both factors that may play a role in sexual attraction. But taken together, these five markers explained less than 1 percent of the differences in sexual activity among people in the study. When the researchers looked at the overall genetic similarity of individuals who had had a same-sex experience, genetics seemed to account for between 8 and 25 percent of the behavior. The rest was presumably a result of environmental or other biological influences. The findings were published Thursday in Science.
Is Bisexuality Genetic? It’s More Complex Than Some Studies Imply
A recent study has drawn controversy by implying genetic links between bisexuality in men and a propensity for risk-taking. This research on human sexual behavior, published in January in Science Advances, is an example of a genome-wide association study (GWAS). Such studies compare entire genome sequences from many people in a search for areas of overlap between genes and certain traits. The authors of the new study report that bisexual behavior in men is genetically distinct from exclusively same-sex behavior and suggest that the genes underpinning bisexual behavior are also linked to possessing an inclination for risk-taking and to having more children.
How Long Does It Really Take to Form a Habit?
One popular idea suggests that it takes 21 days to solidify a habit. A three-week time frame might sound easily reachable to someone making a resolution on New Year’s Day, when people tend to feel extra motivated to start a new habit or kick an old one, says Colin Camerer, a behavioral economist at the California Institute of Technology who has conducted research on habit formation. Yet every January 21 very few people can boast that they have kept their resolutions. One survey showed that only 9 percent of people actually stuck to their goals in 2023.
Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It
Consider Andy, who is worried about contracting COVID in 2020. Unable to read all the articles he sees on it, he relies on trusted friends for tips. When one opines on Facebook that pandemic fears are overblown, Andy dismisses the idea at first. But then the hotel where he works closes its doors, and with his job at risk, Andy starts wondering how serious the threat from the virus really is. No one he knows has died, after all. A colleague posts an article about the COVID “scare” having been created by Big Pharma in collusion with corrupt politicians, which jibes with Andy’s distrust of government. His Web search quickly takes him to articles claiming that COVID is no worse than the flu. Andy joins an online group of people who have been or fear being laid off and soon finds himself asking, like many of them, “What pandemic?” When he learns that several of his new friends are planning to attend a rally demanding an end to lockdowns, he decides to join them. Almost no one at the massive protest, including him, wears a mask. When his sister asks about the rally, Andy shares the conviction that has now become part of his identity: COVID is a hoax.
Social Media Algorithms Warp How People Learn from Each Other
People’s daily interactions with online algorithms affect how they learn from others, with negative consequences including social misperceptions, conflict and the spread of misinformation, my colleagues and I have found. People are increasingly interacting with others in social media environments where algorithms control the flow of social information they see. Algorithms determine in part which messages, which people and which ideas social media users see.
How AI Bots Could Sabotage 2024 Elections around the World
Hate speech, political propaganda and outright lies are hardly new problems online—even if election years such as this one exacerbate them. The use of bots, or automated social media accounts, has made it much easier to spread deliberately incorrect disinformation, as well as inaccurate rumors or other kinds of misinformation. But the bots that afflicted past voting seasons often churned out poorly constructed, grammatically incorrect sentences. Now as large language models (artificial intelligence systems that create text) become ever more accessible to more people, some researchers fear that automated social media accounts will soon get a lot more convincing.
Could Magnesium and TikTok’s ‘Sleepy Girl Mocktail’ Actually Help You Sleep?
The “sleepy girl mocktail” is just what it sounds like—a fizzy cherry concoction meant to lull you to sleep. This homemade tipple has taken over TikTok (and Sleepytime tea’s spot on many nightstands). The question of whether it actually works remains up for scientific debate, however. Many sleep experts argue that any benefits people may experience are probably from a placebo effect.
Newly Discovered Asteroid Fragments Are As Old as the Solar System
SETI Institute meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens was part of the team that found several of the meteorites. He told Space.com that prior to this, only 11 examples of aubrite meteorite falls had been found on Earth. The incredibly rare samples are from a family believed to represent just 1% of known meteorites. The aubrite meteorites from 2024 BX1 differ from other meteorites because they have a translucent glass crust rather than a thick crust of black glass, and they have a grey granite appearance. This made them initially difficult to differentiate from standard Earth rocks.
Rampant COVID Poses New Challenges in the Fifth Year of the Pandemic
Although the WHO declared an end to the COVID public health emergency in May 2023, the organization has emphasized that the pandemic isn’t over—it’s just entered an endemic phase, which means that the virus will continue to circulate indefinitely. Throughout the past four years, Maria Van Kerkhove, now interim director of the WHO’s Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness and Prevention, has helped lead the agency’s response to COVID. Scientific American spoke with Van Kerkhove about entering the fifth year of a pandemic that many want to ignore despite its permanent impact on lives around the world.
Fighting, Fleeing and Living on Iceland’s Erupting Volcano
Just before dawn on January 14, a kilometer-long volcanic fissure opened in the ground just north of the Icelandic town of Grindavík. Instead of roaring from a conical mountain, effusive fountains of crimson lava bled upward from this schism. Soon after, a smaller second fissure opened across the frost-flecked earth. Although intense, the eruption was mercifully brief—but it still destroyed three houses in the northeastern section of the town, which had been preemptively evacuated. Two days later, people displaced from Grindavík gathered at a sports hall in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavík to hear from politicians, scientists, and emergency managers and to discuss their town’s future. During the forum, Grindavík resident Bryndís Gunnlaugsdóttir said that the day that the eruption ended was the worst of her life because she discovered that her house had survived the invasion.