Science

Humpback whales may be trying to communicate with us, using bubbles.

Link to the abstract: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2836060

Link to associated paper/study

Stephen Hawking, a British physicist and arguably the most famous man suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), communicated with the world using a sensor installed in his glasses. That sensor used tiny movements of a single muscle in his cheek to select characters on a screen. Once he typed a full sentence at a rate of roughly one word per minute, the text was synthesized into speech by a DECtalk TC01 synthesizer, which gave him his iconic, robotic voice.

The U.S. Department of Defense will no longer provide satellite weather data, leaving hurricane forecasters without crucial information about storms as peak hurricane season looms in the Atlantic.

First off, that hed is terrible. And this could have gone in either Food and Drink or Environment; for that reason, I'm splitting the baby and putting it here, as the "this" referenced is still in research phases.

Bacteria can be used to turn plastic waste into painkillers, researchers have found, opening up the possibility of a more sustainable process for producing the drugs.

The publication of AviList today means that, for the first time ever, there is a unified global checklist of all bird species found on planet Earth.

Newswise — Cambridge, MA— A new landmark study has pinpointed the location of the Universe's "missing" matter, and detected the most distant fast radio burst (FRB) on record. Using FRBs as a guide, astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and Caltech have shown that more than three-quarters of the Universe's ordinary matter has been hiding in the thin gas between galaxies, marking a major step forward in understanding how matter interacts and behaves in the Universe. They’ve used the new data to make the first detailed measurement of ordinary matter distribution across the cosmic web.

Direct link to the image in the browser: https://cosmos2025.iap.fr/fitsmap/?ra=150.1203188&dec=2.1880050&zoom=2

Extractive activity in international waters – including fishing, seabed mining, and oil and gas exploitation – should be banned forever, according to top scientists.

A cure for HIV could be a step closer after researchers found a new way to force the virus out of hiding inside human cells.

TL;DR

https://archive.is/K5mdP

Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold. Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other.

You might think that a power plant could easily start generating power, but in reality, only a limited number of facilities have everything they need to handle a black start. That's because it takes power to make power. Facilities that boil water have lots of powered pumps and valves, coal plants need to pulverize the fuel and move it to where it's burned, etc. In most cases, black-start-rated plants have a diesel generator present to supply enough power to get the plant operating. These tend to be smaller plants, since they require proportionally smaller diesel generators.

In 1924, motivated by the rising eugenics movement, the United States passed the Johnson–Reed Act, which limited immigration to stem “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions”. A century later, at a campaign event last October, now US President Donald Trump used similar eugenic language to justify his proposed immigration policies, stating that “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now”.

Galaxy Lenses Galaxy from Webb

Painting with Jupiter

Comet C/2025 F2 SWAN

In March, Kat Bolstad returned from an Antarctic expedition where she had used a new camera system specially built to search for the elusive colossal squid.

https://archive.is/ZoGpY

Archive link

https://archive.is/UrZ0a

Evolutionary biologists have tended to view each of these transitions as a contingent event. But within the functional-information framework, it seems possible that such jumps in evolutionary processes (whether biological or not) are inevitable.

https://archive.ph/H5h3n

The coronavirus membrane protein (M) is the main organizer of coronavirus assembly1,2,3. Here, we report on an M-targeting molecule, CIM-834, that blocks the assembly of SARS-CoV-2. CIM-834 was obtained through high-throughput phenotypic antiviral screening followed by medicinal-chemistry efforts and target elucidation. CIM-834 inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 (including a broad panel of variants) and SARS-CoV. In SCID mice and Syrian hamsters intranasally infected with SARS-CoV-2, oral treatment reduced lung viral titres to nearly undetectable levels, even (as shown in mice) when treatment was delayed until 24 h before the end point. Treatment of infected hamsters prevented transmission to untreated sentinels. Transmission electron microscopy studies show that virion assembly is completely absent in cells treated with CIM-834. Single-particle cryo-electron microscopy reveals that CIM-834 binds and stabilizes the M protein in its short form, thereby preventing the conformational switch to the long form, which is required for successful particle assembly. In conclusion, we have discovered a new druggable target in the replication cycle of coronaviruses and a small molecule that potently inhibits it.

We show that the human brain contains diverse mitochondrial phenotypes driven by both topology and cell types. Compared with white matter, grey matter contains >50% more mitochondria. Moreover, the mitochondria in grey matter are biochemically optimized for energy transformation, particularly among recently evolved cortical brain regions. Scaling these data to the whole brain, we created a backwards linear regression model that integrates several neuroimaging modalities11 to generate a brain-wide map of mitochondrial distribution and specialization.

Rice University researchers have developed an innovative solution to a pressing environmental challenge: removing and destroying per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), commonly called “forever chemicals.” A study led by James Tour, the T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Chemistry and professor of materials science and nanoengineering, and graduate student Phelecia Scotland unveils a method that not only eliminates PFAS from water systems but also transforms waste into high-value graphene, offering a cost-effective and sustainable approach to environmental remediation. This research was published March 31 in Nature Water.

The morning is sunny and uncharacteristically mild for mid-March as we tramp through the crunchy remains of snow, which up until a few days earlier obscured the carpet of dead leaves and was crisscrossed with coyote tracks. We stop in front of a small tree with an odd contraption strapped to its trunk. It’s made of a section of white plastic pipe anchored to a piece of lumber by a long bolt that the pipe can rotate around like a propeller blade. The pipe is sealed on the bottom end with duct tape and filled with dog treats.

Nearly half (47%) of all clinical trials remain unpublished.

In 1856, decades before the term “greenhouse gas” was coined, Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated the greenhouse effect in her home laboratory. She placed a glass cylinder full of carbon dioxide in sunlight and found that it heated up much more than a cylinder of ordinary air. Her conclusion: more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere results in a warmer planet.

Interesting look into why we can't remember most things before about 4, but that the memories can in theory be triggered.

Perovskite LEDs are emerging as a game-changing technology, offering vibrant colors, lower costs, and easier manufacturing compared to traditional LEDs.

An Australian man in his forties has become the first person in the world to leave hospital with an artificial heart made of titanium. The device - BiVACOR - is used as a stopgap for people with heart failure who are waiting for a donor heart, and previous recipients of this type of artificial heart had remained in US hospitals while it was in place.

Antonio Alcamí shuddered when he saw that a new plague — which had already caused the death of hundreds of millions of birds around the world — was leaping to the Americas and sweeping relentlessly from north to south, on its way to Antarctica, killing tens of thousands of marine mammals in its path.

Misinformation is widespread, but only some people fall for the false information they encounter. This raises two questions: Who falls for misinformation, and why do they fall for misinformation? To address these questions, two studies investigated associations between 15 individual-difference dimensions and judgments of misinformation as true. Using Signal Detection Theory, the studies further investigated whether the obtained associations are driven by individual differences in truth sensitivity, acceptance threshold, or myside bias. For both political misinformation (Study 1) and misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines (Study 2), truth sensitivity was positively associated with cognitive reflection and actively open-minded thinking, and negatively associated with bullshit receptivity and conspiracy mentality. Although acceptance threshold and myside bias explained considerable variance in judgments of misinformation as true, neither showed robust associations with the measured individual-difference dimensions. The findings provide deeper insights into individual differences in misinformation susceptibility and uncover critical gaps in their scientific understanding.

The vaccine generated robust immune response in nine patients with advanced disease

Largest ever analysis of feline bones from the country suggests the animals may have been prized exotic pets

This is a baffling execution of "America First."

A domestic breeding program kept these birds from going extinct. An initial reintroduction to their native habitat on the big island was halted after their natural predators proved too adept (or the coddled crows proved not adept enough, I guess). So they're now being relocated to Maui.