271 articles from TUESDAY 20.4.2021

A future of helpful engineered 'living' machines?

Engineered, autonomous machines combined with artificial intelligence have long been a staple of science fiction, and often in the role of villain like the Cylons in the "Battlestar Galactica" reboot, creatures composed of biological and engineered materials. But what if these autonomous soft machines were ... helpful?

Deregulated US government oversight on interstate waters leaves murky implications for states

The familiar murkiness of waters in the Gulf of Mexico can be off-putting for beachgoers visiting Galveston Island. Runoff from the Mississippi River makes its way to local beaches and causes downstream water to turn opaque and brown. Mud is one factor, and river runoff is another. However, concern tends to ratchet up a notch when pollution enters the river runoff discussion on a national scale,...

Was Cascadia's 1700 earthquake part of a sequence of earthquakes?

The famous 1700 Cascadia earthquake that altered the coastline of western North America and sent a tsunami across the Pacific Ocean to Japan may have been one of a sequence of earthquakes, according to new research presented at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting.

Predicting the next pandemic virus is harder than we think

The observation that most of the viruses that cause human disease come from other animals has led some researchers to attempt "zoonotic risk prediction" to second-guess the next virus to hit us. However, in an Essay publishing April 20th in the open access journal PLOS Biology, led by Dr. Michelle Wille at the University of Sydney, Australia with co-authors Jemma Geoghegan and Edward Holmes, it is...