3,611 articles from NOVEMBER 2022

Findings from 2,000-year-old Uluburun shipwreck reveal complex trade network

More than 2,000 years before the Titanic sunk in the North Atlantic Ocean, another famous ship wrecked in the Mediterranean Sea off the eastern shores of Uluburun—in present-day Turkey— carrying tons of rare metal. Since its discovery in 1982, scientists have been studying the contents of the Uluburun shipwreck to gain a better understanding of the people and political organizations that...

Smallest mobile lifeform created

The origin of all biological movements, including walking, swimming, or flying, can be traced back to cellular movements; however, little is known about how cell motility arose in evolution.

Scientists discover a new mechanism to generate cartilage cells

As any weekend warrior understands, cartilage injuries to joints such as knees, shoulders, and hips can prove extremely painful and debilitating. In addition, conditions that cause cartilage degeneration, like arthritis and temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ), affect 350 million people in the world and cost the U.S. public health system more than $303 billion every year. Patients suffering from...

Gaining more control over plasma accelerators by combining acceleration methods

If one particle accelerator alone is not enough to achieve the desired result, why not combine two accelerators? An international team led by physicists at the Center for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA) at LMU Munich has implemented this idea. It combined two plasma-based acceleration methods for electrons, namely a laser-driven wakefield accelerator (LWFA) with a particle-beam-driven wakefield...

Air Pollution Is Linked to Stillbirths—Especially in Poorer Countries

About 140 million babies were born globally last year—the equivalent of adding an entire new Russia to the world’s population. Not counted among those typically blessed events are the number of families whose pregnancies end tragically. According to the United Nations Interagency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, about 2 million pregnancies around the world end in stillbirth each...

While everyone waits for GPT-4, OpenAI is still fixing its predecessor

Buzz around GPT-4, the anticipated but as-yet-unannounced follow-up to OpenAI’s groundbreaking large language model, GPT-3, is growing by the week. But OpenAI is not yet done tinkering with the previous version. The San Francisco-based company has released a demo of a new model called ChatGPT, a spin-off of GPT-3 that is geared toward answering questions via back-and-forth dialogue. In a blog...

Former vaccines chief sounds warning about UK pandemic readiness

Kate Bingham raises concerns to committee of MPs as head of UKHSA suggests Covid could be on rise againUK politics live – latest news updatesThe UK is not in a significantly better place to deal with a new pandemic, the former vaccine taskforce chief has said, as a leading public health expert suggested Covid infections may be on the rise again.Dame Kate Bingham, the managing partner at the life...

Here’s my guess: Neuralink will unveil a vision implant at today’s “show and tell”

Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink likes to give progress reports via theatrically staged events that it livestreams. Its next event, scheduled for tonight at 6 pm Pacific time, was announced by the company via a brief video invitation in which the words “please join us for show and tell” appeared as if they were being typed in green letters on a screen. The...

Vaccines are in short supply amid global cholera surge

On 2 October, Haiti announced that cholera had returned to the country . Memories from the previous epidemic, which killed close to 10,000 Haitians between 2010 and 2019, are still raw; now, with violent gangs fighting for control over the country and the health system in disarray, things could again get very bad. A few days later, Lebanon reported its first...

Scientists uncover novel DNA repair mechanism for key cancer target

Scientists have identified how an enzyme involved in DNA repair (POLQ), becomes vital to the survival of certain cancers, if the cancer cells lose the ability to use a more common method of DNA repair. The work uncovers an unappreciated role for POLQ in responding to DNA replication stress, providing the scientific underpinnings for a Phase I clinical trial evaluating the effects of blocking this...

'Digital footprints' central to new approach for studying post-disturbance recreation changes

A new social media-based study of recreation visitation in the Gorge following the Eagle Creek Fire expands on research launched in 2016 -- and holds promise for other large, multi-ownership landscapes. The study shows how using new approaches that draw from social media data can help us better understand the complex relationships between wildfire, natural resource management, and people.