Dire wolves went extinct some 13,000 years ago, and for a long time researchers believed that Canis dirus (translation: “fearsome dog”) were a sister species to the gray wolf.What researchers found was that instead of just being some kind of beefed up gray wolf, dire wolves actually had very distinct DNA.
Recent experiments reveal that some proteins spontaneously gather into transient assemblies called condensates, in response to molecular forces that precisely balance transitions between the formation and dissolution of droplets inside the cell.
It’s a dramatic departure from how a hardware developer like Boston Dynamics goes about teaching a robot how to move , using decades of human experience to hard code, line by line, the way a robot is supposed to react to stimuli like, um, a person’s foot.
Such digital extortion attempts have been around for decades, but the Vastaamo situation was particularly egregious, because the stolen data, which went back roughly two years, included psychotherapy notes and other sensitive information about patients' mental health treatment.
That led a pair of researchers to publish a new perspective piece in the journal Science today calling for a multidisciplinary push to better characterize these microbes and determine how they might be making wildfire smoke even worse for human lungs.
The busy beaver game asks: Given a certain number of rules, what’s the maximum number of steps that a Turing machine can take before halting.Of 6,561 possible machines with two rules, the one that runs the longest—six steps—before halting is the busy beaver.
The people who may have the toughest recovery are those living through pandemic-related trauma.But some survivors of trauma end up embarking on what Canevello and other psychologists call post-traumatic growth.
You see, Davies, along with conservation scientist Emily Duncan of the University of Exeter and other researchers, had not long before released the bottle and nine others into the Ganges as part of a clever experiment to show how plastic pollution moves through rivers and eventually out to sea.
Eastern mole (Scalopus aquaticus © Chris Helzer/TNC For one week each fall, in between bouts of watching football, harvesting the garden or cleaning up all those fallen leaves, hundreds of thousands of people deliberate on some really fat bears.
Their measurement of the reaction rate, published on November 11 in Nature, nails down the most uncertain factor in a sequence of steps known as Big Bang nucleosynthesis that forged the universe’s first atomic nuclei.
“It’s really easy for someone to dismiss the idea and say, ‘On the back of an envelope, it looks great, but if you actually build it, you're never going to get those theoretical numbers,’” says Benkoski, a materials scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory and the leader of the team working on a solar thermal propulsion system.
The act of brood parasitism allows females to forgo the costs of nest building, incubating eggs, and feeding and protecting vulnerable young.
He said his own Thanksgiving may look very different this year and warned people to be careful about social gatherings, calling gathering for holidays a risk.Public health experts tell WIRED there is no completely safe way to hold a Thanksgiving gathering this year, but there are ways to reduce risk.
Hawking and others sought to describe matter in and around black holes using quantum theory, but they continued to describe gravity using Einstein’s classical theory—a hybrid approach that physicists call “semiclassical.” Although the approach predicted new effects at the perimeter of the hole, the interior remained strictly sealed off.
Our most significant, and surprising, finding was that only 15 percent of users who post with the #depressed hashtag do so with what we call “real name” accounts (through which users share their name, pictures of themselves, and other identifying details).Most people using #depressed—76 percent of the accounts in our data set—do so pseudonymously to share humorous memes and inspirational content about mental health.
In the study, the Carnegie Mellon researchers used a technique that has spurred big improvements in automated translation of words and phrases between different languages.
President Trump is isolating himself in the White House, having tested positive for the coronavirus last night.Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, says the first step is to work out when Trump likely became infectious.
Now a group of HIV researchers, impatient with the delay, has proposed taking one of those plans, the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, as the basis of a comprehensive Covid-19 response, one that would define what it means to beat back this disease, and set out the steps to get there.
Illustration: Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine, Virgo/Frank Elavsky, Aaron Geller/NorthwesternAlas, the flirtation with primordial black holes soured in 2017, after a paper by Yacine Ali-Haïmoud, an astrophysicist at New York University who had previously been on the optimistic Kamionkowski team, examined how this type of black hole should affect LIGO’s detection rate.
But smell screening tools aren’t widespread yet, and researchers are still trying to puzzle out how prevalent anosmia is among Covid-19 patients, and why it lasts only a few weeks in some people and months in others.
What was not at at all normal: The group was launching an international network to detect pathogens that can jump from wildlife to the human population, a field of inquiry that’s become politicized since the coronavirus pandemic began—and they were doing it with federal money, even though the United States government has been the source of the politicization.
“Both policymakers and voters need to know that we still cannot answer most basic questions about this pandemic with the tools we have on hand,” says Douglass, who has been a vocal Twitter critic of the type of studies like the one published this week about Sturgis, and has coauthored a forthcoming paper on similar shortcomings in the rapidly ballooning Covid literature .