Science News

A new Chinese AI app called ‘DeepSeek R1’ (深度求索 - shēndù qiúsuǒ ) has roiled the AI stockmarket sector to the tune of $1 Trillion, and has taken the #1 position in Apple’s App Store, ahead of ChatGPT and other competing AI products. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/27/tech-shares-asia-europe-fall-china-ai-deepseek What has attracted so much attention from analysts and investors is that the Hangzhou-based startup who created DeepSeek claim to have spent little more than $6 Million in developing the product, and they did so without the help of Nvidia’s most advanced H100 chips which have been banned by USA from export to China since September 2022. De…

A surge in cases of the flu-like human metapneumovirus (HMPV) in China has raised fears of another Covid-style pandemic. Images of hospitals overrun with masked patients have circulated widely on social media, but health experts say HMPV is not like Covid https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c23vjg7v7k0o Here we go again other Covid like outbreak.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c728ven2v9eo

What did Earth look like? Pick your time period...I found it interesting. https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth/#105

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-dark-energy-doesnt-lumpy-universe.html "One of the biggest mysteries in science—dark energy—doesn't actually exist, according to researchers looking to solve the riddle of how the universe is expanding. Their analysis has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters." Basically, they claim that there is no need for dark energy because the apparent accelerated expansion of the universe is really due to how we calibrate time and distance.

Just saw this in my FB feed. It's different to how I imagined it. I pictured a collision of solids with fragmentation and gravity doing its stuff after.

Somebody moved UK's oldest satellite, and no-one knows who or why https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpwrr58801yo

Two studies find SARS-CoV-2 virus becoming resistant to antiviral drugs used to treat patients Two studies have found that the virus that causes COVID-19 is becoming resistant to two drugs used to treat patients with infections. As part of that effort, two such therapies, named remdesivir and nirmatrelvir, have become the go-to drugs for patients with immune systems that are not capable of fighting off the virus. But because they are antivirals, they run the risk of obsolescence as the virus mutates. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-09-sars-cov-virus-resistant-antiviral.html ================ It is strange how first two years of the …

A pair of Australian mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta have published a new paper called A numerical evaluation of the Finite Monkeys Theorem which demonstrates that the estimated lifespan of our universe renders it impossible for an infinite number of monkeys to type out the complete works of Shakespeare. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2773186324001014 As a BBC news article explains:

This could be used to argue that animals have a sense of the sacred: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mysterious-chimpanzee-behavior-may-be-evidence-of-sacred-rituals/ Even more intriguing than this, maybe we found the first evidence of chimpanzees creating a kind of shrine that could indicate sacred trees. Indigenous West African people have stone collections at “sacred” trees and such man-made stone collections are commonly observed across the world and look eerily similar to what we have discovered here.

“Study finds standing desks may be bad for your health Every 30 minutes spent standing beyond two hours increases the risk of circulatory disease by 11% We've long been told that sitting at a desk all day is the new smoking, resulting in a higher risk of dangerous health conditions. It's why companies such as Google offer employees the option to use standing desks. However, according to a new study, standing all day may not be as good for us as we think, and could even increase the risk of conditions such as swollen veins and blood clots in the legs.” https://www.techspot.com/news/105176-study-finds-standing-desks-may-bad-health-increasing.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0lw0nxw71po Now for the first time scientists researching the brain of a fly have identified the position, shape and connections of every single one of its 130,000 cells and 50 million connections.

This caught my eye in my FB feed. Thought it might interest a few here.

An interesting study looks at factors related to COVID-19 refusal. There has been an ongoing debate whether hesitancy was fueled by lack of good information or whether there are other drivers. This study focuses on how folks process information and found an important impact in the form of deliberate ignorance: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41541-024-00951-8

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/science/ig-nobel-prize-ceremony-2024-intl-scli/index.html CNN — The world still holds many unanswered questions. But thanks to the efforts of the research teams awarded the IG Nobel Prize on Thursday, some of these questions – which you might not even have thought existed – now have answers. We now know that many mammals can breathe through their anuses, that there isn’t an equal probability that a coin will land on head or tails, that some real plants somehow imitate the shapes of neighboring fake plastic plants, that fake medicine which causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine without side-effects…

LQG (loop quantum gravity) predicts the minutest dependence of the speed of light on frequency, which would be best detectable on large populations of high-energy photons with very long astrophysical paths. A good candidate to test this would be a very far away (=> very early) gamma ray burst. GRB 221009A stepped forward some years ago. From: Stringent Tests of Lorentz Invariance Violation from LHAASO Observations of GRB 221009A Although this doesn't totally do away with LQG, it seems to rule out a vast landscape of the LQG parameter space. The somewhat less hyped version of these news is that we are a tad surer that LIV does not occur in Nature.

The stratigraphic record is very sparse to missing for the period when it was thought that there may have been an intense ice age of the magnitude tojustify the name Snowball Earth. This report suggests that this was about 720 mya. It also suggests that the full stratigraphy is to be found on some remote Scottish Islands. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj9l2mrn43jo

Brain Scientists Finally Discover the Glue that Makes Memories Stick for a Lifetime The persistence of memory is crucial to our sense of identity, and without it, there would be no learning, for us or any other animal. It’s little wonder, then, that some researchers have called how the brain stores memories the most fundamental question in neuroscience. A milestone in the effort to answer this question came in the early 1970s, with the discovery of a phenomenon called long-term potentiation, or LTP. Scientists found that electrically stimulating a synapse that connects two neurons causes a long-lasting increase in how well that connection transmits sig…

The WHO has (again) declared the rapid spread of mpox across 13 countries in Africa an emergency over fears of a global spread.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c99zn92g2qgo "Scientists sampling DNA in the air to monitor the spread of deadly diseases say their work could help make food prices cheaper " I can think of potato blight as a candidate but there must be much more. I wonder what they might test for.

Reservoir of liquid water found deep in Martian rocks Image source, NASA Image caption, The discovery comes from analysis of data from Nasa's Insight lander, which took a seismometer to Mars Victoria Gill

New paper regarding Hubble contention https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06153 Edit forgot to add a few years back local cluster measurements by HOLICOW were not matching up to CMB measurements. The bulk of the research as to cause from what I've been able to gather have been in regards to local group calibrations similar to the above paper.

Scientists find humans age dramatically in two bursts – at 44, then 60 US findings suggesting ageing is not a slow and steady process could explain spikes in health issues at certain ages If you have noticed a sudden accumulation of wrinkles, aches and pains or a general sensation of having grown older almost overnight, there may be a scientific explanation. Research suggests that rather than being a slow and steady process, aging occurs in at least two accelerated bursts. The study, which tracked thousands of different molecules in people aged 25 to 75, detected two major waves of age-related changes at around ages 44 and again at…

Scientists may have solved one long standing mystery that has puzzled Egyptologists and archaeologists alike for well over a century according to a recent paper: https://elifesciences.org/articles/87513 Egyptian writings and inscriptions dating back to the reign of the pharaoh Sahure in the period of the Old Kingdom c. 2500 BCE testify to a prosperous trade relationship with another kingdom called Punt that supplied the Egyptians with luxury items such as Frankincense, ebony, leopard skins and baboons. The relationship was documented in a Middle Kingdom fictional tale called ‘The Shipwrecked Sailor’ dated to 2000 BCE, and also by an inscription found in a mort…