A robotic spacecraft made history Thursday by becoming the first civilian spacecraft to land on the moon and the first U.S. vehicle to accomplish the feat in more than 50 years.
The lander, built by Intuitive Machines, touched down on the moon around 6:23 p.m. ET after overcoming a late-stage malfunction with its onboard laser equipment. The Nova-C lander, nicknamed Odysseus, was the first American spacecraft to reach the moon’s surface since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
“Houston, Odysseus has found a new home,” Tim Crane, the company’s chief technology officer, radioed back from the control room as employees cheered and celebrated.
It took several minutes to confirm the landing. As expected, mission controllers lost contact with the spacecraft as it made its final descent.
The company said it was able to detect a weak signal from one of Odysseus’ antennas, but needed more data to determine how the spacecraft landed and in what conditions. About two hours later, the team received good news.
“After troubleshooting communications, flight controllers confirmed that Odysseus was upright and beginning to transmit data,” Intuitive Machines said. mentioned in the X update. “Currently, we are working on downlinking the first images from the lunar surface.”
Intuitive Machines CEO Stephen Altemus called the landing an “outstanding effort” and praised the entire team. “I know this was a blow, but we’re on the ground and communicating. Welcome to the moon,” Artemus said.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson also congratulated Intuitive Machines on their landing, calling the milestone a “victory.”
“Odysseus took the moon,” Nelson said in a video message played during a live broadcast of the event. “This feat is a huge step forward for all humanity.”
Odysseus was launched into space on February 15th aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The 14-foot-tall lander then traveled more than 620,000 miles over six days to reach the moon.
The landing time was adjusted several times on Thursday as Intuitive Machines adjusted the spacecraft’s orbit around the moon.
When Odysseus descended to the moon’s surface, he targeted a landing site near a crater called Malapart A, near the moon’s south pole. The moon’s south polar region has long intrigued scientists because water ice is thought to be relatively abundant in the region’s permanently shadowed craters. .
Odysseus travels with a combination of commercial cargo and NASA scientific equipment. The lander is expected to spend about a week collecting data on the lunar surface before lunar night begins and the spacecraft powers down.
About an hour before landing, the company also scrambled to resolve a problem with its laser equipment, which is designed to help the rover assess the lunar surface terrain and find a safe, non-hazardous landing site. . Odysseus’s laser rangefinder was inoperable, but a sensor from NASA’s scientific instruments aboard the lander was reused.
The mission is part of the Commercial Lunar Landing Services Program, established by NASA to help private companies develop lunar landers. NASA will eventually hire these companies to transport cargo and scientific equipment to the moon’s surface as part of the agency’s broader ambitions to return astronauts to the moon.
NASA awarded Intuitive Machines $118 million to perform the moon landing.
Last month, another company tried unsuccessfully to send a lander to the moon under the same NASA program. The spacecraft, built by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology, suffered a catastrophic failure shortly after launch, forcing the company to abort the entire mission.
In addition to being the first commercial spacecraft on the moon, Odysseus also joined an elite club. To date, only the space agencies of the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, India, and Japan have successfully made a controlled or “soft landing” on the moon. Moon.
Photo taken by the Odysseus spacecraft in lunar orbit
intuitive machine
Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander has landed on the moon. This is the first time a private company has landed a spacecraft on the moon, a welcome success after a string of recent high-profile landing failures by other companies.
The Odysseus spacecraft launched on a Falcon 9 rocket on February 14 for the flight, called the IM-1 mission. It entered lunar orbit on February 21st and landed near the moon's south pole on February 22nd.
Live footage from air traffic controllers became tense as the scheduled landing time passed without any contact from the lander. Finally, minutes after Odysseus was scheduled to land, Tim Crane, mission director in Intuitive Machines' mission control room, said, “We're receiving a signal. It's faint, but it's definitely there.'' “I'm doing it.”
The signal indicated that the spacecraft had landed on the moon, but the state of the spacecraft is still unknown. However, the landing was successful. “We know this has been a pain, but we're on the surface,” said Stephen Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines. “Welcome to the moon”
Before this landing, three other companies attempted to send landers to the moon. SpaceIL's Beresheet spacecraft was launched in 2019, and ispace's Hakuto-R mission was launched in 2022, but both crash-landed and were destroyed.
Astrobotic's Peregrine lander didn't even get very far after launching in January. A fuel leak forced the operators to return to Earth to burn up in the atmosphere. The success of the IM-1 has brought Intuitive Machines into an elite club. To date, only the national space agencies of the Soviet Union, the United States, China, India, and Japan have successfully landed on the moon.
Now that we have landed safely, we can begin the second part of the IM-1 mission. Odysseus carried six NASA payloads and six commercial payloads to the Moon. Some of these already serve that purpose, such as landing aids and cameras to take pictures of the landing. Some people have succeeded simply by reaching the moon. Perhaps most notable is artist Jeff Koons' collection of his 125 small sculptures. Other instruments are also now beginning their missions, including instruments that will measure how the moon's surrounding environment affects its surface.
The IM-1 mission is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, through which government contracts are awarded to private companies to build spaceflight capabilities through public-private partnerships. Three more moon landings are planned through CLPS in 2024, including an Intuitive Machines mission to harvest water ice from the moon's south pole.
What does this mean? McCann distills the answer into her 46-word sentence, which gains more meaning with each dozen readings. Or it doesn't make much sense.
The sentence is as follows: “Such a relationship is speculated to be based on a hypothesized but poorly understood genetic link between handedness, personality, and political beliefs and attitudes; genetic predisposition The effect of left-handedness in the population may have a much larger impact on the correlation. blatant left handed level. ”
Feedback points out that these 46 words, and the paper as a whole, leave a lot to the imagination.
in lonely splendor
A person's individuality shines more when they are alone than when they are with friends.
In particular, researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia and the University of Edinburgh in the UK say that “vocalization is rare when other sheep are present, suggesting that this behavior is a response to loneliness.”
when nothing is good
James Hodges writes: “In response to your segment about doctors waiting for patients to recover on their own, it's completely part of our job.
“I'm a pediatrician. We take doing nothing very seriously. “Cat-like observation and admirable inactivity” are firmly believed in our world. It's a belief. We often admit patients with viral illnesses for which there is no cure. We watch, we support, and the child gets better.
“There are certainly times when doing nothing is the best treatment. If you have a child who is quite unwell and unstable, getting excited will make the condition worse. We often use the 'minimum response' approach.” This is a categorical way of telling your child to leave you alone. If possible, let your child sleep with your parents so they don't bother you too much. Never force the needle or medicine into it. Experienced pediatric nurses are very good at this (it's truly an art of medicine).
“This is not just children who are acutely unwell. Babies with colic (most of the time) do not become adolescents with colic. There are countless childhood diseases that we do not treat. Depurative purpura is a great example. There are a lot of places where we're treating it, but there's pretty little evidence that it's changing anything.
“Children's physiology is really amazing, and I often feel like a passenger, watching them fix themselves, sometimes providing reassurance and distraction. It's such a great job. .”
(Feedback indicates that, with this letter being an exception, nearly all answers we receive on this question are from retired physicians.)
fresh as an onion
Dimple Devi and her colleagues have devised a way to use onions to extend the freshness of milk.
When used in this way, researchers say onions have almost endless benefits. “Addition of onion peel extract to biopolymers decreased water content, water solubility, swelling index, and transparency, and significantly increased antioxidant activity and total phenolic content.'' Utilized agricultural/food processing waste that is generated in large quantities.”
The report does not address the question of how consumers would react to the idea that milk is protected despite not being flavored. – onion.
keep carrying it
As Ken Taylor peruses the ever-growing list of trivial superpowers in his feedback, he asks questions about his abilities. As a teenager, I delivered milk and could manage 6 full pint milk bottles and 10 empty milk bottles. As an adult, I was able to impress my friends by carrying four pints of beer (beer without a handle) with my fingers spread wide and wrapped around the rim. It looks pretty cool as long as you don't drop it. Does this count as a superpower? It's your phone. ”
Ken's calm tenacity as he carries the container embodies the Carry On tradition.
Mark Abrahams hosted the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Previously, he was working on unusual uses of computers.his website is impossible.com.
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Micrograph of a cross-section of a mouse brain highlighting neural pathways (green)
Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute/Scientific Photo Library
By analyzing a mouse’s brain activity, scientists can tell where the animal is and the exact direction the mouse is looking. With further research, the findings could one day help robots navigate autonomously.
The mammalian brain uses two main types of neurons for navigation. “Head direction cells” indicate where the animal is facing, and “grid cells” help provide her two-dimensional brain map of where the animal is located.
To learn more about the firing of these neurons, Vasilios Marlas and colleagues at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, worked with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to analyze data from previous studies.
In this experiment, probes were inserted into the brains of several mice. They then combined data about their neural firing patterns with video footage showing their position and head position as they moved around their open environment.
Because of this, Marlas and his colleagues developed an artificial intelligence algorithm that can figure out where the mouse is looking and where it is.
In practice, it’s similar to the drop pins and directional arrows on your smartphone’s map app, except instead of connecting to GPS satellites, scientists analyze the subjects’ brain activity.
“This method eliminates the reliance on updating GPS coordinates based on preloaded maps, satellite data, etc.,” Marulas says. “In a sense, the algorithm ‘thinks’ and perceives space in the same way as a mammalian brain.”
AI could eventually allow intelligent systems to move autonomously, he says. “In other words, we are taking advantage of the way the mammalian brain processes data and incorporating it into the architecture of our algorithms.”
Adam Hines Researchers from Australia’s Queensland University of Technology say the smartphone app analogy is helpful. “The location information (drop pin) and the direction (blue arrow) match, and during navigation, as he moves, the two pieces of information are constantly updated. Grid cells are like GPS, heading cells are It’s like a compass.”
Gail Huntley picked up the phone and immediately recognized Joe Biden's raspy voice. Huntley, a 73-year-old New Hampshire resident, had planned to vote for the president in the state's upcoming primary and was perplexed when she received a prerecorded message urging her not to vote.
“It's important to save your vote for the November election,” the message said. “Only this Tuesday's vote will allow the Republican Party to seek re-election of Donald Trump.”
Huntley quickly realized the call was fake, but thought Biden's words had been taken out of context. She was shocked when it was revealed that the recording was generated by AI. Within weeks, the United States outlawed robocalls that use AI-generated voices.
The Biden deepfake was the first major test for governments, tech companies, and civil society groups. Governments, technology companies and civil society organizations are grappling with how best to police an information ecosystem where anyone can create photorealistic images of candidates or replicate their voices. It is embroiled in a heated debate. Terrifying accuracy.
As citizens of dozens of countries, including the US, India and possibly the UK, go to the polls in 2024, experts say democratic processes are at serious risk of being disrupted by artificial intelligence. .
AI fakes are already being used in elections Slovakia,Taiwan, Indonesiaand they are thrown into an environment where trust in politicians, institutions and media is already low.
Watchdog groups have warned that more than 40,000 people have been laid off at the tech companies that host and manage much of this content, and that digital media is uniquely vulnerable to abuse.
Mission Impossible?
For Biden, concerns about the potentially dangerous uses of AI spiked after watching the latest Mission: Impossible movie. Over the weekend at Camp David, the president relaxed in front of a movie in which Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt takes on a rogue AI.
After watching the film, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reid said that if Biden wasn't already concerned about what could go wrong with AI, “he has much more to worry about.” It turns out there are a lot of them.”
Since then, Biden has signed an executive order requiring major AI developers to share safety test results and other information with the government.
And the United States is not alone in taking action. The EU is about to pass one of the most comprehensive laws to regulate AI, but it won't come into force until 2026. Proposed regulations in the UK have been criticized for moving too slowly.
But because the United States is home to many of the most innovative technology companies, the White House's actions will have a major impact on how the most disruptive AI products are developed.
Katie Harvath, who spent a decade helping shape policy at Facebook and now works on trust and safety issues at tech companies, says the U.S. government isn't doing enough. Concerns about stifling innovation could play into this, especially as China moves to develop its own AI industry, she says.
Harvath discusses how information systems have evolved from the “golden age” of social media growth, to the Great Reckoning after the Brexit and Trump votes, and the subsequent efforts to stay ahead of disinformation. I watched what happened from my ringside seat.
Her mantra for 2024 is “panic responsibly.”
In the short term, she says, the regulators and polices for AI-generated content will be the very companies developing the tools to create it.
“I don't know if companies are ready,” Harvath said. “There are also new platforms whose first real test will be this election season.”
Last week, major tech companies signed an agreement to voluntarily adopt “reasonable precautions” to prevent AI from being used to disrupt democratic elections around the world, and to coordinate efforts. We took a big step.
Signatories include OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, as well as Google, Adobe, and Microsoft, all of which have launched tools to generate AI-authored content. Many companies have also updated their own rules to prohibit the use of their products in political campaigns.. Enforcing these bans is another matter.
OpenAI, which uses its powerful Dall-E software to create photorealistic images, said its tool rejects requests to generate images of real people, including candidates.
Midjourney, whose AI image generation is considered by many to be the most powerful and accurate, says users should not use the product to “attempt to influence the outcome of a political campaign or election.” Says.
Midjourney CEO David Holtz said the company is close to banning political images, including photos of leading presidential candidates. It appears that some changes are already in effect. When the Guardian asked Midjourney to produce an image of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in a boxing ring, the request was denied, saying it violated the company's community standards. A flag was raised.
But when I entered the same prompt, replacing Biden and Trump with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and opposition leader Keir Starmer, the software produced a series of images without a problem.
This example is at the center of concerns among many policymakers about how effectively tech companies are regulating AI-generated content outside the hothouse of the U.S. presidential election.
“Multi-million euro weapons of mass operation”
Despite OpenAI's ban on using its tools in political campaigns, its products were used to create campaign art, track social media sentiment, build interactive chatbots, and engage voters in Indonesia's elections this month. Reuters reported that it was widely used as a target.
Harvath said it's an open question how startups like OpenAI can aggressively enforce their policies outside the United States.
“Each country is a little different, with different laws and cultural norms. When you run a US-focused company, you realize that things work differently in the US than they do in other parts of the world. can be difficult.”
Last year's national elections in Slovakia pitted pro-Russian candidates against those advocating stronger ties with the EU. Ballot papers include support for Ukraine's war effort, and EU officials say the vote could be at risk of interference by Russia and its “multi-million euro weapons of mass manipulation” emphasized by those.
As the election approached and a national media blackout began, an audio recording of pro-EU candidate Michal Šimeka was posted on Facebook.
In the recording, Simechka appears to discuss ways to rig elections by buying votes from marginalized communities. The audio was fake, and AFP news agency reported that it appeared to have been manipulated using AI.
However, media outlets and politicians are required to remain silent under election concealment laws, making it nearly impossible to uncover errors in the recording.
The doctored audio appears to have fallen through a loophole in how Facebook owner Meta Inc. polices AI-generated material on its platform.below it community standardsprohibits posting content that has been manipulated in a way that “the average person wouldn't understand,” or that has been edited to make someone say something they didn't say. However, this only applies to videos.
Pro-Russian candidate Robert Fico won the election and became prime minister.
When will we know that the future is here?
Despite the dangers, there are some signs that voters are better prepared for what's to come than officials think.
“Voters are smarter than we think,” Harvath said. “They may be overwhelmed, but they understand what's going on in the information environment.”
For many experts, the main concern is not the technologies we are already working on, but the innovations that are on the other side of the horizon.
Writing in MIT's Technology Review, academics said the public debate about how AI threatens democracy is “lacking imagination.” The real danger, they say, is not what we already fear, but what we cannot yet imagine.
“What rocks are we not examining?” Halvath asks. “New technologies emerge, new bad guys emerge. There are constant high and low tides, and we have to get used to living with them.”
Some AIs may be able to hack websites without human assistance
Ole.CNX/Shutterstock
Researchers have discovered that OpenAI’s artificial intelligence model GPT-4 has the ability to hack websites and steal information from online databases without any human assistance. This suggests that individuals and organizations without hacking expertise could unleash AI agents to carry out cyberattacks.
“You literally don’t have to understand anything; you just let the agent hack your website on its own,” he says. Daniel Kang At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “We believe this will significantly reduce the required expertise…
Planting forests helps reduce further global warming by absorbing some of the carbon dioxide we emit into the atmosphere. But the global climate benefit could be about 15 to 30 percent smaller than previously estimated, due to other influences such as sunlight absorption by trees.
“We're not saying don't plant trees,” he says. james webber at the University of Sheffield, UK. It's just that the climate benefits aren't as big as we thought, he says.
The impact of trees will depend in part on what other actions are taken to address climate change. Weber and his colleagues showed that the more forests are planted, the greater the benefits. “It’s more positive and efficient to do other things at the same time,” he says.
It has long been known that plants have both warming and cooling effects. In particular, dark foliage can have a warming effect by absorbing light that would otherwise be reflected into the space. This effect is strongest when trees are replaced by snow or ice, but can occur in other situations as well.
Plants also release volatile organic compounds into the air. “Those are the chemicals that create the smell of the forest,” team members say james king also at the University of Sheffield.
These biogenic compounds can affect the climate in a variety of ways. One important example is that it can react with chemicals in the atmosphere that react with methane. “So the methane stays around longer, and methane is a powerful greenhouse gas,” Weber said.
Compounds emitted by plants can also react with nitrogen oxides to form ozone, another greenhouse gas.
These effects will lead to further warming. However, compounds of biological origin can also form aerosol particles that reflect sunlight and have a cooling effect.
To understand the overall climate impact of afforestation, the researchers incorporated these and other processes into a climate model in which all available land is forested. This means, for example, trees that are located in areas that are currently grasslands, but not in farmland or urban areas.
“To our knowledge, this is the first time this has been done on a global scale and based on a plausible reforestation scenario,” King said.
The researchers modeled two scenarios. For one, little is being done to tackle climate change other than planting trees. In this case, the warming avoided by CO2-absorbing forests is reduced by 23 to 31 percent, once other forest impacts are taken into account.
In the second, more optimistic scenario, strong action is taken to limit further warming. In this case, avoided warming was reduced by 14 to 18 percent.
One reason for the difference is that reducing fossil fuel emissions reduces aerosols from air pollution. In a polluted world, adding more aerosols from forests won't make much of a difference, but in a cleaner world, the cooling effect will be greater.
The team acknowledges that the model is still incomplete and does not include all feedback effects. For example, it includes the greenhouse effect of ozone, but not its effects on vegetation. High levels of ozone can kill trees, meaning less CO2 is removed from the atmosphere. The model also does not include the effects of wildfires.
“It's very complicated,” King says. “It's not really possible to consider all feedback in one study.”
“Importantly, this study shows that preventing deforestation is a much more efficient way to mitigate climate change compared to reforestation, and therefore should be prioritized. It’s a necessity,” he says. Stephanie Law Climate Scientist at WWF in Washington, DC.
Another feedback missing from the model is the cooling effect of water evaporating from leaves, which can be greater in tropical regions, Roe says. So the climate benefits of tree planting may be overestimated, she says, but the study doesn't yet tell the full story.
Additionally, tree planting has many other benefits for humans and wildlife, including reducing erosion, maintaining water supply and quality, providing food and jobs, and reducing extreme heat in the region. “Afforestation, especially reforestation in forest biomes with native species, is absolutely worth pursuing,” says Lo.
“We've always known that forests have a warming effect under certain conditions and a cooling effect under others. What this study shows is that forests have an overwhelming net The effect is a cooling effect.” thomas crouser in ETH Zurich Swiss.
“But most importantly, even if the effects of cooling were not as great, we still need to conserve our natural forests to support the planet's biodiversity and the billions of people who depend on it.” “There is,” he says.
Chemical reactions in volcanic pools may have contributed to the birth of life on Earth
Michael S. Nolan/Alamy
One of the most important molecules in living organisms is synthesized from scratch under everyday conditions. The discovery suggests that this chemical formed naturally early in Earth's history and may have played a role in the origin of life.
The substance in question is called pantetheine. It is not a well-known name at the DNA or protein level. However, pantetheine is an important component of a larger molecule called pantetheine. acetyl coenzyme A, A “cofactor” that helps enzymes work.
“Coenzyme A is present in every organism ever sequenced,” he says. Matthew Powner At University College London.
Powner has spent most of his career discovering ways to make biomolecules from simple chemicals in a way that can occur naturally. Over the past decade, he has shown that: aminonitrile can be used to make nucleotide – the building blocks of DNA – and peptide, Short version of protein.
His team has now shown that aminonitrile can be used to make pantetheine in a series of reactions starting with simple chemicals like formaldehyde. This was done in water, often at such dilute concentrations that the reaction mixture appeared like clear water. The team sometimes used heat to speed up their work, but otherwise did not need to intervene once the reaction started.
“We just put everything in one pot. We literally just throw everything in, we don't change anything, we don't do anything, and we have a 60% yield of product,” Powner says.
Acetyl coenzyme A is involved in the synthesis of several biologically important chemicals. Some of the oldest microbial groups use processes involving microorganisms to obtain carbon from the environment.
Importantly, pantetheine is the active portion of the acetyl-coenzyme A molecule. No more than one bit is “essential to its functionality,” Powner says.
“Obtaining key organic biological cofactors from scratch,” he says, is impressive, “not to mention one of such centrally important ones.” Zachary Adam from the University of Wisconsin-Madison was not involved in the study.
For Adam, the importance of this research extends beyond pantetheine and acetyl coenzyme A. “They report this particular part of the cofactor, but intermediates have been shown to be important as well,” he says. Other chemicals produced in the process have been shown to aid in the production of other biomolecules. “They're building a network of compounds.”
Many ideas about the origin of life have assumed that a small set of biomolecules formed long before other molecules. For example, the “RNA world” hypothesis states that first life was made solely of RNA, and other chemicals such as proteins and lipids were added after RNA was able to make them. .
Powner is one of several researchers pushing for an alternative scenario in which many important molecules form early and interact from the beginning. “These products can all be products of the same chemical reaction,” he says. Rather than starting with just RNA, or just peptides, “it might be easier to make them all together, so the chemical reactions they perform are integrated from the original state.”
Even if it's sweet, it's over
Most people die when they get old.
Roughly speaking, that short sentence can summarize the Dutch/Danish/British study called “.Coffee and tea sugar use and long-term mortality risk in older Danish adult men: 32 years of follow-up in a prospective cohort study”.
The study states: “A total of 2,923 men (mean age at participation: 63±5 years) were included, of whom 1,007 (34.5%) had added sugars. Over 32 years of follow-up, 2581 participants ( 88.3%) died, 1677 (87.5%) in the non-sugar group and 904 (89.9%) in the sugar group.
The nifty and parsimonious summary of the feedback is reminiscent of Yoshiro Nakamatsu's speech at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. (Nakamatsu, also known as Dr. Nakamatsu, won the Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition in 2005 for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he consumed over a 34-year period; (This will continue into 2024.) Mr. Nakamatsu said: Speeches should be short. ”
shocking news
Practicing mindfulness allows you to focus on one thing at a time. A 10-year-old study called “The Role of Mindfulness-Based Psychological Support in the Process of ECT'' has been attracting attention and feedback has continued.
ECT is an acronym for electroconvulsive therapy. This study was one of the most successful attempts, and perhaps the only one, to intentionally combine mindfulness with this therapy.
The researchers reported that after receiving the electric shock, the patients “remained cognitively functional enough to participate in simple mindfulness-based psychotherapy, with no evidence of difficulty recalling new information.” are doing.
They (researchers), then at the Mid-Central District Health Board in Palmerston North, New Zealand, came to a multisyllabic conclusion.
They write: “This study confirms the benefits of Ultrabrief Pulsed ECT in reducing adverse cognitive effects…but also proves that psychological interventions and physical treatments are not mutually exclusive.”
take care of the dishes
Just one year later, American researchers published a study called “.Washing dishes to wash dishes: Brief instruction in informal mindfulness practices.”. They had a goal in mind. “We found that compared to a control condition, participants who received mindful dishwashing instruction reported higher levels of mindfulness, perceived attention, and positive We hypothesized that it would show emotion,” they wrote.
They tested their hypothesis on 51 college students and reported that the test was successful. Their study ended with the big-picture recognition that “the implications of these findings are wide-ranging.”
Be mindful of mindfulness
You can also become aware of mindfulness. Three researchers (two at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and one at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia) took a close look at the large body of research published on mindfulness and found out what they thought they saw. Published research. Their research isExploring the past, present, and future of the field of mindfulness: A multi-technique bibliographic review” and are more or less dissatisfied that many people are not paying attention to these studies.
The researchers explain why so few people are paying attention to mindfulness research: “Low citation rates may simply indicate that the document pertains to a narrow field of research. Therefore, it should not be misinterpreted as evidence of poor quality.”
resistance to antibiotics
David Gordon added his non-normative perspective to the collection of professional opinions on feedback on whether “medicine equals entertaining the patient while nature influences healing” .
“Every intervention comes with potential side effects, so it makes sense to avoid unnecessary interventions. As a retired family physician, I try to control the fear caused by symptoms and treat self-limiting and primarily viral infections.” By explaining the natural history of acute respiratory tract infections, we have significantly reduced antibiotic prescriptions, especially for mothers with young children.
“These principles can sensibly be applied to other medical scenarios. Unfortunately, this is not good for business, nor for doctors, nor for the pharmaceutical companies who unavoidably act as proxies.” The number of “re-examinations” to deal with undiagnosed anxiety is decreasing. More importantly, in the long run, patients are denied the belief that all illnesses require a prescription. ”
loss of power
Superpowers are not all permanent, even the little things readers add to their feedback summaries. Grainne Collins reveals: “I had a superpower: I could look at any list or table of numbers and immediately see that there was a mistake.” It might take him 10 minutes to figure out what was wrong. But I was always right. Unfortunately, since my dyslexia has been cured (I can now tell the difference between “shape'' and “kara'' without studying), my superpower has also been cured! ”
Mark Abrahams hosted the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Previously, he was working on unusual uses of computers.his website is impossible.com.
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Early Thursday morning, cell phone outages affected cities across the United States, causing thousands of AT&T customers to experience service interruptions. These interruptions prevented them from sending text messages, accessing the Internet, making phone calls, and even calling 911.
Around 7 a.m. ET, more than 50,000 incidents were reported, and that number exceeded 70,000 by 9 a.m. ET. However, by 11 a.m. ET, reports of service failures had decreased to 60,000.
AT&T spokesperson Jim Greer stated, “Some customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service. He recommends using Wi-Fi calling until service is restored. I recommend it.”
AT&T, the largest U.S. mobile phone service provider with 240 million subscribers, did not offer a possible explanation for the outage. The company also did not provide a timeline for when full service would be restored. Despite intermittent outages in recent days, Thursday’s outage was much larger.
The most affected cities, according to the website, included San Francisco, Houston, Atlanta, and Chicago.
Users of other carriers such as Verizon, T-Mobile, Cricket, and UScellular also reported outages, but those were much smaller compared to AT&T. Verizon and T-Mobile confirmed that the outage did not affect their own customers, except when trying to contact customers of other carriers.
T-Mobile stated, “No outages occurred,” while Verizon’s statement said, “Verizon’s network is operating normally.”
The San Francisco Fire Department and the City of Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications were actively addressing the issues affecting AT&T Wireless customers.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens confirmed that calls with the city’s emergency services continued to work. However, Massachusetts State Police advised against using phone services and dialing 911 due to a flooding of concerned callers testing the service.
The police department stated, “Many 911 centers across the state are inundated with calls from people trying to see if 911 works from their cell phone. Do not do this. Call another number via your cell phone service. If you can make a non-emergency call, 911 service will also work.”
Crohn’s disease can cause abdominal pain, diarrhea, and weight loss
Jacob Wackerhausen/iStockphoto/Getty Images/www.peopleimages.com
A one-year study of 386 people found that receiving advanced treatment soon after diagnosis of Crohn’s disease improves outcomes for patients.
This disease is a lifelong inflammatory bowel disease; impact millions of peopleIn the world. Symptoms include abdominal pain, diarrhea, fatigue, and weight loss.
“These symptoms have a huge impact on people’s quality of life, education, relationships, and ability to work,” he says. Miles Parks at Cambridge University. “While there is no cure, there are ways to reduce some of these negative outcomes.”
Treatment often includes dietary changes, immunosuppressants, and steroids. In the UK, a drug called infliximab (an antibody that targets a specific protein in the body that is thought to contribute to intestinal inflammation) is given to people who regularly experience flare-ups of Crohn’s disease, or other mild symptoms. It can be prescribed to people who are not responding to. Treatment.
“This is a ‘step-up’ approach where treatment is progressively escalated in a reactive manner as the disease returns,” he says. Nurlaminnuralso at the University of Cambridge.
To see what happens if this more powerful treatment is used as early as possible, Parkes and Noor et al. studied 386 newly diagnosed Crohn’s disease patients aged 16 to 80 in the UK. Recruited people.
They were divided into two groups. One patient received infliximab immediately regardless of symptoms, and the other was treated with other Crohn’s disease drugs. If symptoms persist or continue to worsen, participants in the second group will also be prescribed infliximab, in line with a “step-up” approach.
After one year, 80 percent of patients who initially received infliximab had their symptoms under control over time, compared with only 15 percent of those who did not receive treatment immediately.
Additionally, only 0.5% of people in the group who received infliximab immediately required abdominal surgery for Crohn’s disease, compared to 4.5% in the second group.
The results of this study suggest that giving patients with Crohn’s disease intensive treatment as soon as they are diagnosed may be more effective in improving their lives, Dr. Noor said.
Parks said the extra money spent on medication would be balanced out by not having to pay for subsequent scans, colonoscopies and surgeries for people with repeated relapses.
“People with Crohn’s disease don’t want to be hospitalized or undergo surgery. They want to go out into the outside world and live their lives. Anything that speeds the path to remission. It can only be a good thing,” says Ruth Wakeman of the charity Crohn’s & Colitis UK.
IEvery good RPG has a point where the protagonist has to leave the safety of their homeland. After learning the gravity of the threat they face, gathering a party and stocking up on food, they are ready to embark on an epic adventure.
Now, ironically, popular RPG creator Square Enix is being forced to do the same. His second installment in an ambitious trilogy that began with the 2020 remake, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth retains the beloved dystopian cityscape of Midgar and builds on his 1997 PlayStation classic. reimagined his second disc as its own full-fledged adventure. After the eco-terrorist Avalanche collides with the shady giant corporation Shinra, Reverse follows the hero Cloud (he of the oversized sword) and his friends on a journey around the world in pursuit of the loud-screaming villain Sephiroth.
Square Enix wasted no time in showing off its cinematic chops, sending players headfirst into the flashback section of Game Thief, forcing them to relive Cloud's storied military past, and Sepiroth. It perfectly depicts the character's descent into an unstoppable villain. This is a masterclass in interactive storytelling that hammers home the stakes before you go. Cloud He Few spiky-haired protagonists are as revered as Strife. It's easy to see why his creators opted for a strictly written retelling of a gaming classic in the first place. But where Remake forced you to wear the tattered boots of a legendary mercenary and chase cats during recess, Rebirth allows players to occasionally sit in the director's chair.
Show off your cinematic chops – Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Photo: Square Enix
Weave your way through glorious, story-driven scenes, dungeon-like enclaves, and luxurious environments full of distractions. The vast plains of Junon, a tropical paradise, and the sparkling desert you can drive your buggy across. When you emerge from a series of battles and explore new areas, it feels like filling your lungs with fresh air. Traveling feels really exciting and brings some welcome visual variety to this cross-map road trip. Rebirth's freer approach offers a welcome antithesis to Remake's narrow hallways and frees players from chains.
The remake's core combat is back, but it incorporates the cinematic flourishes of last year's FFXVI with a welcome party-centric approach. In the remake's battle, I simply controlled Cloud and repeated the same attack several times, nauseatingly. But here we have to make the most of our cast of lovable weirdos. There are satisfying cinematic synergistic moves with partners and a variety of spellcasting “materia” that can be combined, and mastering the various nuances of your party's members is essential to defeating the boss. . Creating a new combat system that everyone is happy with seems like an almost impossible task, but somehow Square has managed to pull it off with aplomb. By swapping party members during battle, the game perfectly combines the depth of a turn-based RPG with modern action.
From conversation choices that strengthen your bonds with party members and side quests that determine who you can romance, to a series of odd jobs, Rebirth's take on this mythical world is as vivid as it gets It feels like. From the bustling townspeople of Calm walking around talking about their day, to suspicious fishermen muttering comments about you under their breath, to deer frolicking around Junon's fields, this is a sequel to Ship It is firmly embedded in a “bigger, better” approach. Dancing in a parade, racing chocobos, taking pictures of landscapes, zooming on a Segway…it seems like there are endless ways to cleanse your mouth. The frighteningly addictive new card game King's Blood is a highlight and a distraction deep enough to become a full-fledged obsession in its own right.
Bigger and better… Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Photo: Square Enix
The problem is that as the journey progresses, these once frivolous digressions become mandatory. Mini-games and side quests gradually become obstacles to progressing the plot, Cloud vs. Sephiroth's narrative thread gets lost in a vast world, and high-stakes adventures become uneven and twisty-toned whiplash movements. It will change to . His second disc in FF7 was originally only 10 hours long, but Rebirth expands his once modest story into his terrifying 50-hour epic. That shows it.
With side quests galore, engaging combat, and polished cinematic flourishes, Rebirth is a fun celebration of video game maximalism at its best. But this breadth comes at the expense of narrative focus, with cleverly scripted cinematic moments punctuated by a momentum-killing parade of mini-games, puzzles, and fan-fueled filler.
Longtime fans will devour every bite of the sweet fanservice here and savor every extra moment spent with this beloved cast. For Avalanche enthusiasts, this is a nostalgic dream come true. However, newcomers looking to experience his one of the medium's most beloved tales in a new, modern form should be prepared for yawn-inducing low notes, along with the high notes of the buster sword swinging. there is.
Intuitive Machines is preparing to create history as the first private company to land on the moon following last week’s launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The Nova-C lander named Odysseus (affectionately nicknamed “Odie”) is scheduled to touch down at 5:30pm ET (10:30pm GMT) and everything is proceeding as planned. This will be the first instance of an American-led mission reaching the moon since the end of the Apollo program over 50 years ago.
The mission is part of NASA’s Artemis Commercial Lunar Payload Service (CLPS) initiative, aiming to return humans to the moon by the end of this decade, led by a private company.
Since NASA’s Apollo 11 landed in 1969, several countries including the former Soviet Union, China, India, and Japan have successfully placed equipment on the moon.
Today’s “space race” is different not only because more countries are involved but also due to the private sector having a central role on the forefront. It is now possible for an individual or company with sufficient funds to place something on the moon.
The mission includes all of NASA’s key experiments, with a total of six experiments collecting data critical to NASA’s crewed Artemis missions later this decade. This leaves room for additional unique additions.
1. Puffer jacket
Columbia Sportswear has developed a lining for the Omni-Heat Infinity Jacket, designed to keep explorers warm in harsh environments, to be used on the Odie during the mission to protect the lander’s equipment from extreme temperatures.
Image credit: Intuitive Machines
2. Photos for the gram
Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus challenged students back in 2019 to capture photos of the landing from a third-person perspective, leading to the creation of the EagleCam which is poised to capture snapshots of the lunar landing.
The EagleCam is the first third-person photo camera for a landing and also serves as the first moon landing project built by a college student, it also uses WiFi on the moon.
3. Miniature satellite
Renowned American artist Jeff Koons has created 125 stainless steel sculptures depicting the moon as seen from Earth, along with an array of scientific equipment to be placed on the moon.
4. (Almost) All Human Knowledge
The Arch Mission Foundation is sending a permanent archive of human information along with the lander, ensuring that human knowledge is safely stored for posterity.
According to Intuitive Machines, the repository includes archives like the Rosetta Project, Long Now Foundation content, Project Gutenberg content, and other cultural archive datasets, and an English version of Wikipedia.
5. A very stylish file cabinet
Lone Star Data Holdings has secured a location for the Independence data center within the IM-1 mission, allowing the safe storage and transmission of documents on the moon.
When can we see the moon landing?
Coverage of the Intuitive Machine’s moon landing can be followed live through NASA’s web services from 4pm ET (9pm GMT). Live videos and comments can be accessed through NASA TV, NASA+ streaming service, or the NASA app.
About our experts
Science writer and journalist Joel Renstrom and computer scientist and author Peter Bentley provided insights for this story.
Google has temporarily blocked a new artificial intelligence model that generates images of people after it depicted World War II German soldiers and Vikings as people of color.
The company announced that its Gemini model would be used to create images of people after social media users posted examples of images generated by the tool depicting historical figures of different ethnicities and genders, such as the Pope and the Founding Fathers of the United States. announced that it would cease production.
“We are already working to address recent issues with Gemini's image generation functionality. While we do this, we will pause human image generation and re-release an improved version soon. “We plan to do so,” Google said in a statement.
Google did not mention specific images in its statement, but examples of Gemini's image results are widely available on X, along with commentary on issues surrounding AI accuracy and bias. 1 former Google employee “It was difficult to get Google Gemini to acknowledge the existence of white people,” he said.
1943 illustration of German soldier Gemini. Photo: Gemini AI/Google
Jack Krawczyk, a senior director on Google's Gemini team, acknowledged Wednesday that the model's image generator (not available in the UK and Europe) needs tweaking.
“We are working to improve this type of depiction immediately,” he said. “His AI image generation in Gemini generates a variety of people, which is generally a good thing since people all over the world are using it. But here it misses the point.”
We are already working to address recent issues with Gemini's image generation capabilities. While we do this, we will pause human image generation and plan to re-release an improved version soon. https://t.co/SLxYPGoqOZ
In a statement on X, Krawczyk added that Google's AI principles ensure that its image generation tools “reflect our global user base.” He added that Google would continue to do so for “open-ended” image requests such as “dog walker,” but added that response prompts have a historical trend. He acknowledged that efforts are needed.
“There's more nuance in the historical context, and we'll make further adjustments to accommodate that,” he said.
We are aware that Gemini introduces inaccuracies in the depiction of some historical image generation and are working to correct this immediately.
As part of the AI principles https://t.co/BK786xbkeywe design our image generation capabilities to reflect our global user base and…
Reports on AI bias are filled with examples of negative impacts on people of color.a Last year's Washington Post investigation I showed multiple examples of image generators show prejudice Not just against people of color, but also against sexism. Although 63% of U.S. food stamp recipients are white, the image generation tool Stable Diffusion XL shows that food stamp recipients are primarily non-white or dark-skinned. It turned out that there was. Requesting images of people “participating in social work” yielded similar results.
Andrew Rogoiski, from the University of Surrey's Institute for Human-Centered AI, said this is “a difficult problem to reduce bias in most areas of deep learning and generative AI”, and as a result there is a high likelihood of mistakes. said.
“There is a lot of research and different approaches to eliminating bias, from curating training datasets to introducing guardrails for trained models,” he said. “AI and LLM are probably [large language models] There will still be mistakes, but it is also likely that they will improve over time. ”
electoral dysfunction Wide range of weekly episodes available
Sky News politician and poker star Beth Rigby is sandwiched between Conservative MP Ruth Davidson and Labor MP Jess Phillips in this promising new podcast leading into a ‘prolific election year’. What voters want, leadership, and the sorry state of things are all on the table. This trio offers a refreshing change from the usual daddy cast, valuing heart and insight over political point-scoring. There’s also a story about Priti Patel’s kindness… Hannah Verdier
tard cast Widely available, on sale now “A lot of people actually wanted to listen to the podcast…and you mostly know why.” Joe Lycett announced the poop pod as a campaign prank against sewage leaks, but Gary Lineker’s Thanks to demand for more details on World Cup poop, it’s now actually here. It’s so funny that it makes your stomach hurt, and it also includes the shocking revelation that “Gaza was often left alone in the public bath.'' Holly Richardson
Indira Varma. Photo: Suki Dhanda/Observer
A tiger tamer who went out to sea Wide range of weekly episodes available Victorian superstar Bob Carlyle was fired from the circus for drunkenly walking a tiger around town on a leash, but at least he had the stamina of a pushcart to get back on his feet. This isn’t your typical history podcast where Dave his Dr. Musgrove chronicles Carlisle’s very interesting life.HV
significant other Wide range of weekly episodes available Our new series of podcasts about lesser-known figures in history begins with the story of Peggy Shippen. History books remember American Revolutionary War general Benedict Arnold for switching allegiance, but in reality it was his wife who motivated the rebellion. Host Liza Powell O’Brien examines how “America’s Most Handsome Woman” influenced events. HV
The Spy Who… Wide range of weekly episodes available starting Tuesday Indira Varma (pictured above) hosts a dive into “a dank, murky world full of dark corners, sinister motives and rotten morals” occupied by spies. The first is the story of Dusko Popov, the spy whose playboy ways inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bond. The scenes from that time are dramatically recreated, making it irresistibly cinematic. HV
There’s a podcast for that
Twelve boys and their coach rescued from a cave in Thailand have mourned the loss of a former Navy SEAL who died while taking part in the mission. Photo: AFP/Getty Images
From escaping a grizzly bear attack to a 2018 cave rescue in Thailand. Ella Braidwood Choose 5 podcasts about survival stories
vice versa
Since 2021, Against the Odds has been exploring some of the most famous survival stories from past and present. Adventurers Mike Corley and Kathy de Pecol take turns hosting each story, each told in detail over several episodes. The podcast is based on historical research, but dramatizations are used to bring headline-grabbing stories to life. For example, there is a five-part series about the 2018 cave rescue in Thailand, and a four-part series about the famous Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash in 1972, when 16 people were forced into the Andes Mountains. He survived for 72 days in the camp. He turns to cannibalism.
real survival story The weekly podcast, narrated by actor John Hopkins, launched this year and explores stories of “ordinary people forced into extraordinary circumstances.” Hopkins is a smooth storyteller, and his musings are deftly interspersed with audio excerpts from the survivors themselves. Among those featured is a paraglider caught in a storm. A prospector trapped in a gold mine 100 feet underground. and a couple caught in a wildfire while on vacation. Background music adds suspense, and stories are drawn from around the world, including the Rocky Mountains, Hawaii, and New Zealand.
special live While it’s not just about survival stories, this podcast focuses on the amazing stories of people who have overcome extraordinary circumstances. In each episode, LADbible’s former creative director, Ben Powell-Jones, sits down with an interviewee and reveals what happened to them. Mr. Powell-Jones has a calm demeanor that allows his interviewees to speak candidly about their experiences. Video footage for each episode is available at: YouTube. Highlights include an interview with journalist Sean Langan, who was taken hostage by the Taliban;Park Ji Hyun person who fled from North Korea And now I live in the UK. and Nick Yarris, who was wrongly convicted of murder and spent 22 years on death row.
out alive Backpacker Magazine’s biweekly podcast features short episodes featuring outdoor tips from experts, interspersed with inspiring survival stories. The episodes, hosted by editor Louisa Albanese, tell stories of people who have survived amazing events, from a man who fell 50 feet into a hidden ice cave to a runner who became stranded after falling on a trekking pole. We are featuring interviews. Some of the brief episodes debunk some of the most common questions about survival, and others about the rise in bear attacks. Transcript too You can read it online.
not today Since launching their podcast in 2020, husband and wife team Steph Fitt and Alex Hunt have grown their following. Features It was in the top 1% of most followed podcasts on Spotify last year. Hosted by Fit and Hunt, this podcast features recent and more historical survival stories. In one episode, Fit tells listeners about Lydia Tillman. Her brave escape led to her conviction. travis forbes In 2011, he was charged with crimes against her and the murder of Kenya Monge. A more historical episode is the one about the Titanic.The other is about entertainers Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn, the latter of whom was once attacked by a tiger on stage.
sound off Conversation with Katie Henriksen features deep conversations that explore creativity at the intersection of art, music, and literature.
A mix of comedy, tragedy, and everything in between. possession Focuses on the world of professional sports ownership with former NBA player Rex Chapman.
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The artificial intelligence boom has pushed demand for Nvidia products beyond Wall Street’s already high expectations.
The company announced fourth-quarter results on Wednesday that significantly beat analysts’ expectations, with revenue of $22.1 billion versus the $20.55 billion expected and earnings of $4.93 per share versus the $4.64 expected. became. Revenue increased 22% sequentially and 265% year over year.
Revenue from data centers, Nvidia’s most-watched revenue, increased more than 400% year-over-year to $18.4 billion.
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a press release: “Accelerated computing and generative AI have reached a tipping point. Demand is surging around the world across companies, industries, and nations.”
Nvidia’s earnings and stock demand are seen as a bellwether for overall interest in artificial intelligence, as the company relies heavily on its products to develop AI. Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Meta, and Google have all signed deals to buy the company’s chips in bulk as they race to release new AI products and features.
Some major companies, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, are launching their own AI chip ventures to compete with established Nvidia, which would likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars. .
Nvidia plans to ship a new chip, the B100, which will be the top of its product line, in 2024, raising expectations for explosive growth. Nokia and Nvidia on Wednesday announced a partnership to develop AI solutions that can improve communications infrastructure.
Wall Street has come to expect big growth from Nvidia. Analysts’ baseline forecast on Wednesday was for sales to increase his 240%. Tech companies are rushing to develop AI products that leverage the company’s proprietary AI chips and software, considered the best on the market.
Nvidia’s revenue tripled last quarter, and its profits for the past four quarters have exceeded analyst expectations.
The company’s stock price has more than tripled over the past year, valuing the company at more than $1.5 trillion. The company surpassed Google and Amazon in market capitalization last week, making it the world’s third-largest company by value within days.
Being optimistic, believing in your abilities, practicing affirmations, being grateful, and setting clear goals can bring real benefits. But is manifestation pure pseudoscience, or does it mean something? We look at how the WOOP approach can actively support you on your journey towards realizing your dreams. I’ll go.
volcanic eruption
After three years of violent eruptions, experts now believe that Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula has entered a new phase of volcanic activity.
counterintuitive universe
The world is not what it seems. This special feature explores how science has exposed fallacies and false beliefs about heaven and earth throughout history.
planet nine
Something strange is happening beyond Neptune, and it may change everything we think we know about our solar system. Could orbital oddities reveal the existence of undiscovered planets near our heavens? Or is it something else?
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CES 2024’s biggest innovations: Every year, Las Vegas hosts the Consumer Electronics Show, where technology manufacturers from around the world gather to unveil their latest developments. From transparent technology to domestic robots and the latest cooking appliances, technology expert Alex Hughes shares some of the highlights.
Pothole: There are 750,000 potholes in Britain’s roads, creating a crater-like structure. These can cause serious damage to vehicles and pose a danger to drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. But with bacteria and self-healing asphalt, it could be smooth again.
First moon base: Head to the moon’s south pole to peer inside what may be the first human habitation on the moon. Initially he planned to house 144 people, but the modular design of the Lunar Habitat Master Plan will expand and evolve with the inhabitants.
don’t forget that BBC Science Focus Also available on all major digital platforms. There is a version of android, Kindle Fire and Kindle e-readers, but also, iOS app For iPad and iPhone.
The black hole in the newly discovered quasar SMSS J052915.80-435152.0 (J0529-4351) accretes about 1 solar mass per day on top of its existing mass of 17 billion solar masses.
This image of the exceptional quasar J0529-4351 is from the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey DR10. Adjacent M stars are displayed in red.Image credit: Wolf other., doi: 10.1038/s41550-024-02195-x.
In 1963, Dutch-born American astronomer Maarten Schmidt identified the first quasar, known as 3C 273. It appeared as a very bright star of magnitude 12, and its redshift suggested that it was one of the most distant objects known in the universe. time.
These two facts suggest an incredibly huge light output, and ever since, newly discovered quasars have impressed with their ability to emit enormous amounts of energy from small regions of the universe. Ta.
This can only be explained by the conversion of gravitational energy into heat and light in a highly viscous accretion disk around a supermassive black hole.
Currently, about 1 million quasars are known, but a few specimens stand out. In 2015, ultraluminous quasar J0100+2802 was confirmed to be a supermassive black hole with 10 billion solar masses.
In 2018, an even brighter object, J2157-3602, was discovered, which contains a supermassive black hole with a mass of 24 billion solar masses.
Its brightness suggests rapid growth, but its existence is difficult to explain. When black holes start from the debris of a star's collapse and grow temporarily, they are not expected to reach appreciable mass in the time between the Big Bang and the black hole era. observation.
The quasar that broke the new record is so far from Earth that it took more than 12 billion years for its light to reach us.
The object, called J0529-4351, was first detected using the 2.3 meter telescope at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory.
Australian National University astronomer Christian Wolff and colleagues then turned to ESO's Very Large Telescope, one of the world's largest telescopes, to confirm the full nature of the black hole and measure its mass. Toward.
“We have discovered the fastest growing black hole ever known. It has a mass of 17 billion suns and eats just over one sun a day. This makes it the fastest growing black hole in the known universe. It will be a bright object,” Dr. Wolf said.
The material drawn into this black hole in the form of a disk emits so much energy that J0529-4351 is more than 500 trillion times brighter than the Sun.
“All this light comes from a hot accretion disk seven light-years in diameter, which must be the largest accretion disk in the universe,” said Dr. Student Samuel Lai.
“Given what we know about many other less impressive black holes, it's surprising that it hasn't been detected before. It was hiding in plain sight,” says the Australian National said Dr. Christopher Onken of the university.
This finding is reported in the following article: paper in diary natural astronomy.
_____
C.Wolf other. Accretion of solar masses per day by a 17 billion solar mass black hole. Nat Astron, published online on February 19, 2024. doi: 10.1038/s41550-024-02195-x
Despite intensive efforts to prevent cardiovascular disease (CVD), substantial residual CVD risk remains, even in people who receive all guideline-recommended interventions. Niacin (vitamin B3) is an essential micronutrient fortified in staple foods, but its role in CVD is poorly understood. Excessive amounts of niacin's breakdown products may be associated with an increased risk of death, heart attack, and stroke, according to a new study.
Niacin is an essential micronutrient that is fortified in staple foods beyond dietary requirements. Image credit: Ferrell other., doi: 10.1038/s41591-023-02793-8.
Although CVD is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, only a portion of the attributable risk is explained by established risk factors.
Despite significant advances in treatment, the risk of residual cardiovascular disease remains high, and it has been suggested that additional, as yet unrecognized factors contribute to cardiovascular disease.
Research has previously shown that niacin (vitamin B3) reduces levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol.
However, this vitamin does not seem to have the expected effect in reducing CVD risk, the so-called “niacin paradox”.
“Our study shows that niacin breakdown products can promote vascular inflammation, providing a potential explanation for this discrepancy,” said Cleveland Clinic researcher Stanley Hazen, Ph.D. said.
In the study, the authors analyzed plasma samples from 4,325 people in three patient cohorts, including men and women from the United States and Europe.
They found that two breakdown products of niacin, the metabolites N1-methyl-2-pyridone-5-carboxamide (2PY) and N1-methyl-4-pyridone-3-carboxamide (4PY), are associated with increased CVD risk. I discovered that
In subsequent human genetic studies and mouse studies, the research team found that this increased risk is due to these breakdown products increasing the abundance of the pro-inflammatory protein VCAM-1 within the endothelial cells lining the blood. showed that it may be mediated by the ability of one of the (4PY). ship.
“Further studies are needed in large-scale studies to investigate the association between niacin and its degradation products and CVD,” the researchers said.
their findings It was published in the magazine natural medicine.
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M. Ferrell other. 2024. End metabolites of niacin promote vascular inflammation and contribute to cardiovascular disease risk. Nat Med 30, 424-434; doi: 10.1038/s41591-023-02793-8
Yellow-bellied shrike (Prionops alberti). Image credit: University of Texas at El Paso.
First described in 1933, the shrike is a member of the bird family. Bangidae.
Also known as the King Albert Shrike, this bird is distinguished by its black plumage and bright yellow crown.
This species is endemic to the mountains of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“The yellow shrike is endemic to the western slopes of the Albertine Rift in Central Africa, an area that has been largely inaccessible due to war and security issues, but has recently become safe to visit. '' said Dr. Michael Harvey.ornithologist University of Texas El Paso.
Dr. Harvey and his colleagues made the discovery during a six-week expedition to the Itombwe Massif, a mountain range in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“It was a shocking experience to encounter these birds,” Dr Harvey said.
“I knew they might be possible here, but I wasn't prepared for how grand and unique it would be.”
The ornithologists walked more than 121 kilometers (75 miles) deep into the Itumbwe massif, studying birds, amphibians and reptiles along the way.
While exploring the cloud forest on the side of a mountain, they encountered a striking black bird with a bright yellow “helmet”, the long-eared shrike.
“These birds appeared to be a fairly noisy and active flock in the mid-levels of the forest,” they said.
A total of about 18 birds were spotted at three locations during the expedition.
“This gives us hope that perhaps this species still maintains a reasonably healthy population in the remote forests of this region,” Dr Harvey said.
“However, mining, logging, and deforestation for agriculture are encroaching deep into the forests of the Itombwe Mountains.”
“We are in discussions with other researchers and conservation groups about further efforts to protect forests and shrike in this region.”
“Now is a great time to protect these tropical forests so species like the long-eared shrike are not lost before they are known and studied.”
The lamprey and human hindbrains are built using very similar molecular and genetic toolkits, according to a new study led by the Stowers Institute for Medical Research.
These images show an adult lamprey (top and left) and a developing lamprey embryo. Image credit: Stowers Medical Research Institute.
“Our research on the hindbrain (the part of the brain that controls important functions such as blood pressure and heart rate) is essentially a window into the distant past and can serve as a model for understanding the evolution of complexity. “, said Dr. Hugo Parker. Researcher at Stowers Medical Research Institute.
Like other vertebrates, sea lampreys have a backbone and skeleton, but they noticeably lack a jaw, a characteristic feature of the head.
Most vertebrates, including humans, have jaws, so this striking difference in sea lampreys makes it a valuable model for understanding the evolution of vertebrate traits.
“About 500 million years ago, at the origin of vertebrates, there was a split between jawless and jawed animals,” said Dr. Alice Bedois, also of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research.
“We wanted to know how vertebrate brains evolved and whether there is something unique to jawed vertebrates that jawless vertebrates don't.”
Previous research had identified genes that structure and subdivide the sea lamprey's hindbrain as identical to genes in jawed vertebrates, including humans.
However, these genes are part of an interconnected network or circuit that needs to be initiated and directed to properly build the hindbrain.
In a new study, the authors identify common molecular cues known to direct head-to-tail patterning in a variety of animals as part of a genetic circuit that guides hindbrain patterning in the lamprey. .
“We found that the same genes, as well as the same cues, are involved in hindbrain development in sea lampreys. This suggests that this process is ancestral to all vertebrates. ,” Dr. Bedwa said.
“This signal is called retinoic acid, commonly known as vitamin A.”
Researchers have known that retinoic acid signals the genetic circuits that build the hindbrains of complex species, but they believe it is involved in more primitive animals like sea lampreys. was not considered.
Surprisingly, they discovered that the lamprey's core hindbrain circuit is also initiated by retinoic acid, providing evidence that these sea monsters and humans are much more closely related than expected.
“People thought that because lampreys don't have jaws, their hindbrains don't form like other vertebrates,” says Dr. Rob Krumlauf, a researcher at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research.
“We showed that this fundamental part of the brain is built exactly the same way as in mice, and even in humans.”
Signaling molecules that signal cell fate during development are well known.
Now, researchers have discovered that retinoic acid plays another key role in signaling important steps in development, such as the formation of the brainstem.
Furthermore, if hindbrain formation is a conserved feature in all vertebrates, other mechanisms must be involved to explain its incredible diversity.
“We all come from a common ancestor,” Dr. Bedwa said.
“The lamprey provided further clues.”
“We now need to go further back in evolutionary time to discover when the genetic circuits controlling hindbrain formation first evolved.”
of study It was published in the magazine nature communications.
_____
AMH Bedwa other. 2024. Lamprey reveals the origins of retinoic acid signaling and its coupling to vertebrate hindbrain segments. Nat Commune 15, 1538. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-45911-x
The study looked at men who produced less than 1.5 million sperm per milliliter of semen, which is considered to produce very few or no sperm.
Joshua Resnick/Shutterstock
Relatives of men who have infertility problems may be at increased risk of cancer, and the odds vary widely from family to family.
Research suggests that certain relatives within three generations of such men are more likely to develop a variety of cancers, including cancers that affect the colon, testicles, and uterus. However, the risk varies by family lineage and whether the man is infertile or subfertile.
Joey Ramsay Researchers at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City suspected this might vary from family to family. To find out, they analyzed the sperm counts of 360 men who produced fewer than 1.5 million sperm per milliliter of semen and 426 men who produced no sperm at all. These men were matched in age to more than 5,600 of his others with whom he had at least one biological child. Researchers do not know whether any of the participants were transgender.
Next, they obtained information on cancer diagnoses in the men's first-, second-, and third-degree relatives from Utah's database.
The research team found that relatives of men with low sperm counts within three generations were more likely to develop colon and testicular cancer compared to the general population, and some of those related to men with low sperm counts They discovered there was a high chance of developing sarcoma, Hodgkin said. Lymphoma, cancer of the uterus and thyroid. Both of these groups had much higher rates of bone and joint cancer than the general population.
The researchers then used specially developed software to determine the increased risk of cancer combinations in 34 body regions within different families (both fertile and infertile groups). We have detected a tendency to This resulted in “clustering” that allowed trends within families to be detected.
Two-thirds of male relatives who did not have sperm were at no higher risk of cancer than the general population. However, other families showed a significantly increased risk of various types of cancer, and that risk varied by family lineage, with higher risks for childhood, adolescent, and young adult cancers. There were people too.
Relatives of men with low sperm counts all had an increased risk of at least one type of cancer compared to the general population, but the degree of risk and type of condition varied.
It is unclear why this increased risk occurs, but it may be due to genetic factors or common environmental exposures among relatives. It is hoped that further research will investigate this and lead to tests that identify families at higher risk, Ramsay said.
Archaeologists have discovered traces of an ancient ocher-based multicomponent adhesive in 40,000-year-old stone tools unearthed in Le Moustiers, France.
Photographs, drawings and details of stone tools from Le Moustiers, France. Image credit: D. Greinert / Schmidt other., doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adl0822.
“These surprisingly well-preserved tools show technical solutions that are broadly similar to examples of tools made by early modern humans in Africa, but the exact recipes reflect a Neanderthal 'spin.' “This is the manufacture of hand tool grips,” he said. Radu Iovita, researcher at New York University's Center for Human Origins Research.
In the study, Dr. Iovita and colleagues examined stone tools with traces of red and yellow colorants excavated from the French ruins of Le Moustiers, discovered in the early 20th century.
These stone tools were made by Neanderthals during the Middle Paleolithic period, between 120,000 and 40,000 years ago.
They are kept in the collection of the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin, but have not been studied in detail until now.
“The products had been individually wrapped and left untouched since the 1960s. As a result, the remains of attached organic matter were very well preserved,” says Eva, a researcher at the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin. Dr. Dutkiewicz said.
Researchers found traces of ocher and asphalt mixtures on some Mousterian stone tools, such as scrapers, flakes, and blades.
Ocher is a naturally occurring earth pigment. Bitumen is a component of asphalt and can be produced from crude oil, but it also occurs naturally in soil.
“I was surprised to find that it contained more than 50% ocher. This is because air-dried asphalt can be used directly as an adhesive, but adding so much ocher would cause it to lose its adhesive properties. '' said Dr. Patrick Schmidt, a researcher at the University of Tübingen.
Scientists tested these materials in tensile tests and other measurements used to determine strength.
“The situation was different when we used liquid bitumen, which is not very suitable for bonding. When you add 55% ocher, a malleable mass forms,” said Dr. Schmidt.
It was sticky enough to pierce stone tools, and did not stick to hands, making it ideal as a material for handles.
In fact, microscopic examination of the signs of wear from use on these stone tools revealed that the adhesive on Le Moustier's stone tools had been used in this way.
“The tool showed two types of micro-wear: one is the typical grinding of sharp edges, which is usually caused by machining other materials,” says Dr. Iovita.
“Secondly, there was a bright polish distributed all over what appeared to be the hand grip, but not anywhere else. We interpreted it to be the result of wear and tear.”
The use of adhesives containing several ingredients, including various sticky substances such as tree resins and ocher, was known from early Homo sapiens in Africa, but not since early Neanderthals in Europe. It wasn't known.
Overall, the development of adhesives and their use in tool manufacturing is considered to be some of the best physical evidence of early human cultural evolution and cognitive abilities.
“Composite glue is thought to be one of the first expressions of modern cognitive processes that are still active today,” said Dr. Schmidt.
In the Le Moustiers area, ocher and asphalt had to be collected from remote locations, which required a great deal of effort, planning and a targeted approach.
“Given the overall circumstances of the find, we believe that this sticky material was created by Neanderthals,” Dr. Dutkiewicz said.
“Our research shows that early homo sapiens “African Neanderthals and European Neanderthals had similar thought patterns,” Dr. Schmidt said.
“Their adhesion techniques have the same importance for understanding human evolution.”
Regarding this research, paper Published in today's magazine scientific progress.
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Patrick Schmidt other. 2024. Ocher-based composite adhesives used in Mousterian typesetting have recorded mixed recognition and significant investment. scientific progress 10(8); doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adl0822
A European satellite that is malfunctioning is expected to fall to Earth and plunge uncontrollably through the atmosphere on Wednesday.
The European Space Agency said that most of the dead satellite is anticipated to burn up in the atmosphere and any surviving debris is unlikely to cause harm. However, it is challenging to determine the exact time and location of the spacecraft’s fall.
According to the Latest blog posts, the space agency estimated that the re-entry time will be around 10:41 a.m. ET on Wednesday, which would take approximately two hours. Based on the satellite’s orbit, the spacecraft was expected to be somewhere off the coast of North America in the Pacific Ocean during that period.
The space agency explained that much of the uncertainty about the re-entry of satellites is due to the challenge of predicting atmospheric density. Changes in air density, influenced by solar activity, impact the drag experienced by objects passing through Earth’s atmosphere.
The space agency stated that although there is uncertainty about the re-entry point of the dead satellite, it is unlikely to pose a threat to populated areas.
“Most of the satellites will burn out, and the surviving debris will be scattered somewhat randomly over a ground orbit averaging hundreds of kilometers long and tens of kilometers wide (this is why the risks involved are so great). “The reason for this is low),” said an expert from the agency’s Space Debris Countermeasures Office. I wrote it in a blog post.
The spacecraft, known as European Remote Sensing 2 or ERS-2, was an Earth observation satellite that collected data about Earth’s oceans, polar caps, and surface. The space agency said the satellite, launched in April 1995, was also used to monitor severe floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters in remote areas of the world.
A rare bird with a spectacular yellow crown has been photographed for the first time in the tropical mountains of the Democratic Republic of Congo, almost 20 years after it was last seen.
Yellow-bellied shrike (Prionops alberti)Also known as the King Albert Shrike, it is a small bird that lives in the damp forests of the Albertine Rift Mountains in Central Africa. Adults are covered in glossy black feathers, with a magnificent crown of bright golden feathers on their heads. Their eyes are surrounded by distinctive orange tissue called wattles.
After not being seen for many years, the long-eared shrike was listed as an endangered species. Find a lost bird partnership.
michael harvey Researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso finally encountered this phenomenon again during a six-week expedition into the Itobwe Mountains from December 2023 to January 2024.
As team members wandered through the cloud forest, they encountered a flock of elusive birds.
“It was a shocking experience to come across these birds. I knew it might be possible here, but I wasn't prepared for how spectacular and unique it would be in my life.” ,” Harvey said in a statement.
A total of 18 Long-tailed Shrikes were spotted at three locations during the expedition. This suggests that there may be healthy populations of birds currently considered vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The group also developed the red-bellied mushroom frog (Articular leptis hematogaster), last seen in the 1950s.
“Now is a great time to protect these tropical forests so we don't lose species like the long-eared shrike before they are known and studied,” Harvey said. Ta.
MLast week's big Xbox announcement from Microsoft turned out to be somewhat anticlimactic. Just four games, none particularly shocking, will be coming to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch in the near future. (Annoyingly, Microsoft executives declined to be named, but it was later reported by Famitsu and The Verge that the games in question were Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Pentiment, and Hi-Fi Rush.) (This matches the game I have in mind; I've heard it from other sources.)
Microsoft has no intention of exiting the console market or making all its games multi-platform, as the Whiplash rumormongers have hotly speculated. And the (very valuable) Xbox Game Pass subscription service remains exclusive to Xbox and PC.
This is not essentially news. Microsoft is already one of the biggest publishers of PlayStation, especially now that it owns both Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard. So everything from Skyrim to Call of Duty to Minecraft is technically a Microsoft game. If Microsoft's head of games, Phil Spencer, announced last year that Starfield would be developed for the PlayStation 5, or if Xbox head Sarah Bond announced that Microsoft would develop an Xbox-only game, for example. If they had said they were abandoning the idea completely, well, that would have been the case. This is a big change worth reporting home (or, in my case, writing to you). Rather, it's a small extension of a strategy Microsoft has pursued for years. Every time I've talked to Microsoft executives over the years, they've always offered some variation of the line, “Play the games you want, with the people you want, wherever you want.” Last week's Xbox broadcast.
Instead, the announcement highlighted how harmful and outdated the idea of console wars is.Adults are still overly invested in the idea of a console identity, and some of the products Microsoft has spent billions of dollars developing or acquiring on other, far more popular gaming consoles. The very prospect of releasing it was enough to cause excitement. tantrums and emotional outbursts;. The Xbox community has been in an uproar over the issue for weeks, with X people posting wartime memes and YouTubers posting videos with titles like: “Xbox…it's over!”.
No doubt some of this anger is designed to get more clicks, but most of it is misplaced passion. Fans care a lot about Xbox and the games that Xbox Studios has brought us over the years, but fundamentally they care about which machine the video game is played on, Steam deck or Switch, Xbox or PlayStation. . Microsoft's own management has been saying this for years, and anyone who hasn't heard it hasn't.
Sea of Thieves on Xbox One. Photo: Rare
The console wars were never anything more than a marketing strategy. Like when Sega vs. Nintendo created one of the great business rivalries of the 1990s (remember the catchphrase “What does Sega do that Nintendo doesn't do?”) and when Microsoft , there were times over the years when it was still very entertaining. ™'s continued fumbling with his Xbox One announcement in 2013 gave Sony ample opportunity. playful piss.
But that's no longer fun, now that the culture wars have turned every aspect of modern life, from politics to parkruns, into a hostile nightmare. It's ridiculous to see people arguing over video game consoles as if it were a matter of life and death.
But even if what we're discussing doesn't matter, how we discuss it does. Toxic fandom is a problem everywhere from football to video games to Star Wars, and its loud, illogical, and mean-spirited nature reflects trends in public discourse since 2016. doing. Bad actors have tried to use video game fandom as a weapon to direct their anger. If you set goals that align with their purpose, they will try again.
Getting back to Xbox, to me, the problem with Microsoft's presence in the gaming world is that it's a huge company focused on continued growth. Unlike Sony or Nintendo, the company has nearly limitless resources, as recent acquisition activity shows. We're still working on changing our history of acquiring great studios. crush them Through corporate intervention. I wonder if some companies have the power to buy out competitors in creative industries where competition is key to the diversity, innovation, and creative value of work. Microsoft has started bringing Xbox games to rival consoles, which actually suggests do not have It's desperate to dominate this space and allow more players to benefit from the fruits of its many studio efforts. This is safe.
This isn't the end of Xbox consoles, but let's take this opportunity to call for an end to the manufactured console wars. They really make us all look bad.
what to play
pacific drive. Photo: Ironwood Studio
I understand that pacific drive It's inspired by Jeff VanderMeer's bizarre novel, and playing it is like driving a beat-up car into the exclusion zone of Annihilation. There, strange and frightening things await you under eerie hues and thunderous skies. And your poor vehicle is the only thing standing between you and them. You ride into the zone over and over again, never knowing what you're going to see. Repair the car in the garage with what you found and try to further investigate what is going on.
Everything is very peaceful until it suddenly isn't so peaceful and you fumble to manually turn the lights and wipers on and off while running away from the storm.
Available on: PC, PS5 Estimated play time: Still do not know…
what to read
Stroke Tthe Animals video game by TJ Gardner. Photo: TJ Gardner
If you've ever absentmindedly looked at the PlayStation Store, you may have seen it. pet the animal Game – A basic, eyebrow-raising game where you press a button and pet an animal (i.e. a JPEG of an animal) for a few minutes to earn a simple trophy. When Ellie Gibson looked into the contents of these games, he discovered an unexpected story.
Peripheral device manufacturers PDP It is coming out as new guitar controller Used in the festival music game component of Fornite (and Rock Band 4 for those still playing). Fun fact: Fortnite Festival was developed by Harmonix, the developer of the original Guitar Hero and Rock Band games.
If you can get to Asda, you might be able to buy a copy of last year's ill-fated Wizard FPS Immortals of Aveum On PS5 for 1 pound. It's not a bad game, but it was released in one of the busiest gaming years on record and sadly sank without a trace.
Embracer grouphas gone on a wild acquisition spree funded by Saudi speculative funds that suddenly disappeared last year, laying off 1,400 people, canceling 29 games and shuttering several of the studios it acquired. Therefore, the company's CEO Definitely a popular statement Layoffs are “something everyone has to overcome.”
Ever wanted to play Mario Kart to the accompaniment of a live jazz band? In Oklahoma, you can:
Report finds LGBTQ+ representation in video games lags behind movies and TV
Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered Edition Review – A great remaster of Lara Croft’s Lost Ark
question block
sunset overdrive. Photo: Microsoft
This week's question from reader Paul:
“What game would you like to go back and re-score (if you could)? Were you too harsh or too lenient on the game back then?”
So, Paul, it's clear that I was right from beginning to end. Except when I'm not. Most of my early critical gaffes are thankfully hidden in the pages of his 10-20 year old magazines, but some remain in the public domain. Dear reader, may I humbly declare that I was wrong about Assassin's Creed 3? should have been more strict towards.
It's easy to name people who have evolved human thinking, from Jane Austen to Albert Einstein, Zaha Hadid to Ai Weiwei, but why are these people so much more creative than others? It's much more difficult to explain what kind of thinking you do. Are their brains just built that way, or can anyone learn it? The mystery of creativity has long puzzled scientists. Now, researchers are finally making some progress towards closing the curtain. Even better, their insights can help us all exercise a little more original thinking.
Some of them are exciting insights This stems from the “dual process theory” of creativity, which distinguishes between idea generation and idea evaluation. Idea generation involves digging deep into existing knowledge for seeds of inspiration. Perhaps it is done by drawing analogies from completely different areas. Free association is key at this stage, as one thought leads to another, more original insight. The second phase, idea evaluation, requires you to apply a more critical eye to select the ideas that best fit your goals. Novelists must decide whether strange, supernatural plot twists will excite readers or turn them off. Engineers must consider whether a fish-inspired airplane would be practical and efficient. Large projects require these two stages to be repeated many times during the long and winding journey from concept to completion.
Brain scans of people engaged in creative problem solving suggest that idea generation and evaluation relies on…
Humpback whales use songs to communicate with each other across oceans
Karim Ilya
Biologists have discovered how baleen whales produce their unique songs. It involves the uniquely shaped larynx.
Baleen whales, including humpback whales, communicate through complex songs that can be heard over great distances. “People recorded the first whale sounds in his 1970s, but only recently have we started to recognize the different sounds these animals actually make,” he says. Cohen Elemans At the University of Southern Denmark. “Now the question is, how do they do this?”
To learn more, Elemans and his team extracted the larynxes of three recently deceased baleen whales.Balaenoptera borealis), humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) and the northern minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata).
The larynx, commonly known as the voice box, is an organ located in the upper neck of mammals. As air flows through the organ, the tissue folds vibrate, creating sound.
But that's not the case with baleen whales, Ellemans says. When the researchers examined the whale's larynx, they discovered that the organ had an unexpected shape, with a cushion of fat on one side.
When these whales breathe, air is forced against the fatty material, which vibrates and makes sound. “I've never seen this in any other animal,” Ellemans says. “This is unique to baleen whales.”
Whales can also recycle air from their lungs, which is useful when they are underwater for long periods of time. When you exhale through the trachea and larynx, air enters a sac with walls that contract, returning air to the lungs.
Using a computer model of its larynx, the researchers found that baleen whales can generate frequencies of up to 300 hertz at depths up to 100 meters below the ocean's surface. This is within the frequency range of noise emitted by ships, raising concerns that ship noise could drown out their songs.
“These whales can't escape this situation,” Elemans said. “Therefore, we need to take steps to reduce noise.”
View from a kayak on Death Valley Temporary Lake, February 9, 2024
Michael Kohler/NPS
Heavy rain has fallen in California in recent weeks, resulting in the remarkable formation of a rare temporary lake in Death Valley, the driest place in the United States.
Record levels of rain have flooded California over the past month. Numerous atmospheric river storms (narrow bands of highly concentrated moisture in the air) worsen wet conditions, putting up to 37 million people at risk of flooding.
Heavy rainfall also hit Death Valley National Park along the California-Nevada border. In fact, it rained so much that the park's Badwater Basin, normally a dry salt flat, temporarily turned into a shallow lake.
At 86 meters below sea level, the basin is the lowest point in North America and was home to an ancient body of water that researchers named Lake Manly tens of thousands of years ago.
Over the past few decades, the lake has been backfilled several times. In August 2023, rains associated with Hurricane Hillary formed a lake 11.3 kilometers long and 0.6 meters deep, which shrank in the following months. Well, it has been replenished once again. The current maximum length of the lake is nearly 10 kilometers and the depth is approximately 0.3 meters.
Last year, Death Valley National Park Closed for several weeks after Hurricane Hillary This is because flooding damaged the road network and limited opportunities for visitors to explore the temporary lake. This time, the park opened and the re-emergence of Lake Manly attracted tourists, including swimmers and kayakers.
Bitcoin Dogs raised a total of $3.1 million in the first six days of its historic presale. The project's BRC-20 token, 0DOG, is the first-ever ICO on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Bitcoin dog Leveraging the recent Ordinals protocol to break new ground in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the team plans to launch a 10,000-strong NFT collection later this year.
The opportunity to be a part of history is a key selling point for the brand, which is no doubt boosted by the token price increasing every three days until the pre-sale ends on Friday, March 15th, after which the token will be available for trading.
Within 6 days, the Bitcoin dogs X community has over 80,000 followers and an additional 145,000 people actively discussing the project. Telegram community.
Bitcoin Dogs (0DOG) is available on the official website Website.
Future path for Bitcoin dogs
Beyond the historic ICO that launched the 0DOG token, Bitcoin Dogs has a very comprehensive roadmap: White paper consisting of a new Play-to-Earn game and one of the largest Bitcoin NFT collections ever.
Retro 8-bit graphics bring the world of Bitcoin Dogs to life, subtly echoing early NFT collections like CryptoPunks and classic pet simulator games like Tamagotchi.
Gameplay is tightly integrated with social media, a mechanism aimed at building community and bringing the game to a wider audience. By sharing their progress, players have the opportunity to earn in-game currency, which they can use to compete against other players in gruesome races and canine-themed competitions.
0DOG price factors
Bitcoin Dogs' success can be attributed to a number of factors, including strong project fundamentals, a resurgence in the Bitcoin-led cryptocurrency market, and a strong value proposition.
Bitcoin Dogs offers specific products such as: Games and NFT collections On the horizon. The project roadmap is also clear, with a long-term strategy to maintain interest beyond the ICO.
The ICO itself is also an important selling point. Being the first pre-sale for Bitcoin-based tokens has attracted a large number of buyers, and the short 30-day period is encouraging potential buyers to participate early. This momentum increase can also be caused by the 3-day price increase.
The project's proximity to Bitcoin is also likely to be a boon. Bitcoin will rise in value in 2024, stabilizing above $50,000 at the time of writing ahead of the next halving scheduled for April.
including media Cointelegraph The broader market could also benefit from predicting new highs after the halving, which would put Bitcoin Dogs in a good position to benefit from Bitcoin's slipstream.
Additionally, the BRC-20 token standard (which allows new cryptocurrencies to be deployed on and secured by the Bitcoin blockchain) has been making waves since its announcement in 2023. His BRC-20 projects such as ORDI and ORNJ achieved 3,000% rallies and 677% each.
Bringing this possibility to the forefront, Bitcoin dog We aim to become a strong candidate to carry the torch of BRC-20. With only 23 days left, time is running out for the long-awaited public trading to begin.
About Bitcoin Dog
Bitcoin Dogs is breaking new ground in the Bitcoin ecosystem. For the first time ever, NFTs, games, and a new type of token come together to deliver the first ICO on the original Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin's true permissionless immutability has been leveraged to create the 0DOG token, and a play-to-earn (P2E) gaming experience and NFT collection has been developed exclusively for his 0DOG holders.
For more information (0DOG) users please visit Bitcoin Dogs. Website.
Crescent Nebula: More complex than the human brain?
Reinhold Wittich/Stocktrek Images/Alamy
Back in 2012, neuroscientist Christoph Koch wrote in his book: Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist The human brain is “the most complex object in the known universe.” This seems intuitive, given that the brain has approximately 86 billion neurons, which are connected in ways that are still beginning to be understood. But when I put it, David Wolpert At New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute, founded in the 1980s as a hub for the budding field of complexity science, he doesn't think so. “It's almost a travesty that we are the most complex system in the universe,” he says. “That question is actually misguided.”
Nevertheless, I persevere. Is there a common measure of complexity that can be applied to complex systems of all kinds? After all, if you squint, galaxy clusters and the filaments that connect them look like intertwined circuits of neurons. Masu. The human brain even has almost as many neurons as there are galaxies in the observable universe. This formal similarity may have something to do with the general laws by which complexity emerges, he says. Ricard Sole At Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. Or maybe not. “By chance, it might show up in both systems, but that doesn't mean anything,” he says.
Moreover, complexity is not defined by components and their interconnections. It's the idea that the whole is more than just something.
Over the past week, Bitcoin has experienced a bullish rally, topping the coveted $52,000 mark and recouping almost all the losses incurred since the FTX collapse. The milestone is crucial for an industry grappling with a prolonged bear market.
Consistent with Bitcoin’s upward trajectory, there has been a notable increase in the total market capitalization of major stablecoins, including: USDT, USDC, BUSDand Big. The market capitalization of these four stablecoin giants increased from $131.232 billion to $138.993 billion from February 13th to February 20th, indicating growing demand.
Stablecoins play a vital role as a bridge between fiat and crypto markets, making up the majority of crypto trading pairs and, as a result, becoming a major source of funding. market liquidity. The rise in market capitalization highlights the increasing adoption of stablecoins, solidifying their position as the preferred medium for engaging with cryptocurrencies.
Looking at the broader picture, we can see that the supply of the top four stablecoins has surged by 3.475% in the past 30 days. While a variety of factors may be contributing to this increase, it is primarily due to the overall market movement of assets into stablecoins, whether fiat or cryptocurrencies, in anticipation of future trading activity. It shows the trend. This suggests that the market is gearing up for a quick entry or exit from Bitcoin.
Supporting this trend is the notable rise in the stablecoin supply rate (SSR). SSR is a key metric that measures stablecoin supply relative to Bitcoin’s market capitalization, indicating the depth of market liquidity and potential purchasing power. A rise in SSR means a larger proportion of stablecoins compared to Bitcoin, and if these stablecoins are converted to Bitcoin, this could impact Bitcoin price growth.
SSR that exceeds the top bollinger bands This represents an unusual surge in potential purchasing power in February 2024. This suggests that investors may be poised to migrate to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in line with the Bitcoin price increase observed since January 2024.
The soaring price of Bitcoin, combined with the expansion in market capitalization and supply of major stablecoins, signals a significant influx of capital into the crypto market. For stablecoins, these trends highlight their important role in the ecosystem, serving not only as a safe haven during times of volatility, but also as an important means of putting money into Bitcoin. .
The trends observed last week highlight the interconnectedness of the stablecoin market and Bitcoin and highlight how fluctuations in stablecoin supply and market capitalization act as indicators of impending market activity. I am.
TWhat's frustrating about this adventurous multiplayer game from Ubisoft? reportedly It was in development hell for about 10 years. largely good.some things about it teeth. It offers interesting customization and even thrills when playing against well-matched opponents, including ship battles that are more flexible than you might expect. And when you're sailing from the coast of Africa to the East Indies, or navigating river channels surrounded on all sides by tropical wilderness, you can't help but admire the beauty of this game. And some things about it could get better. For now the menu is confusing, slow and messy time. A few tweaks could further increase the pace before pirate exploration becomes more exciting. This is a live service game, so there is room for evolution.
But some things about Skull and Bones are never going to be good, at least not without tearing them down and starting over, and after years of costly delays, it seems unlikely that that will ever happen. Seems low. All characters in this game have dead eyes and only their lips move when they speak. The story is so boring that even after spending over 20 hours at sea, I can tell you the relative value of rough stones and where to sell cigarettes for the most money, but I can't remember the names of a single character or faction. not. And when you're on the ground, there's no sword fighting, no treasure hunting, no meaningful exploration. A lot of effort has gone into creating a small oasis of land, but there's nothing there except a few quest-givers and a campfire. He only has two more populous pirate-based settlements on the whole map, and while you can at least find a blacksmith and a tavern, it's hard to find other interesting places to anchor.
This means you will spend 90% of your time sailing as all the action takes place on the waves. And if you're not plundering merchant ships or trying to protect yourself from other pirates, all you need to sail is raising and lowering your sails and occasionally adjusting your trajectory. Although boring, I found it peaceful to actually carry things and enjoy the scenery. The best part of Skull and Bones is the Indian Ocean. Occasionally, I felt a sense of quiet awe, such as when I was maneuvering a narrow cutter down a narrow road, seeing rocks towering from all sides and waterfalls cascading around corners. As the sun set, a soundtrack could be heard coming from the crew's shack. At that moment, like Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed games sometimes do, Skull and Bones felt like a recreation of a lost time, breathing new life into the Golden Age of Piracy.
A few tweaks could really speed up the pace – Skull and Bones. Photo: Ubisoft/Keza McDonald
Unfortunately, Assassin's Creed is the elephant in the room here. Skull and Bones is a super fun pirate-flavored adventure inspired by 2013's Assassin's Creed Black Flag. Felt It's an adventure, with lots of islands to explore, things to discover, and interesting stories to discover along with the thrill of sailing and firing cannonballs at your enemies. 2018's Assassin's Creed Odyssey still features a stunning voyage through the deep blue waters of ancient Greece, but there's so much more to do. Skull and Bones levels up sailing ever so slightly, and ship building is much better – changing ships and weapons makes a big difference in how you play – but it has nothing else to offer. The game has no personality or plot at all. The game that inspired it.
Another game I can't help but mention here is Rare's Sea of Thieves. This is another online pirate action game that launched in 2018 in Barren State, but has since evolved into something fun, chaotic, and unique, and a great time with friends. As you would expect from a pirate game. But Skull and Bones is much more serious, lonely, and a completely different game. It reminded me more of Sid Meier's Pirates than Sea of Thieves in that most of the game involves actually transporting or interfering with cargo. A faction of colonialists. The deeper you go, the more Skull and Bones will be tasked with manufacturing, selling, and transporting goods in hidden markets, or sinking other players to steal their goods. This is more than just a pirate game, it's a trade and naval battle simulator. Although he is not overbearing, he is a good sailor and has a wide selection of three-cornered hats.
If publisher Ubisoft continues to support it, Skull and Bones will appeal to avid players of naval warfare enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering with ship construction, facing off against each other, and teaming up to take on deadly fleets and cargo. It will attract a lot of people. However, if you're looking for a game that feels like a pirate adventure, Black Flag is still a better choice.
Iojima is itself a volcano, located on the edge of the massive underwater Akahoya volcanic caldera.
Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images
The largest volcanic eruption in current geological time occurred underwater off the southern coast of Japan about 7,300 years ago. This explosion produced more than three times as much material as the eruption of Mount Tambora, the largest known modern eruption. Mount Tambora exploded in Indonesia in 1815, causing dramatic climate changes that led to the “Year Without a Summer” in 1816.
The new record holder, the Kikai Akahoya eruption, originated from a submerged caldera in an area off Japan's Kyushu island.
The devastating impact this eruption had on humans living on nearby islands has been recorded by geologists and archaeologists, and analysis of volcanic ash deposits has shown that this eruption was the most recent geological event that began 11,700 years ago. It was shown to be one of the largest eruptions of the Holocene era. .
However, the origin and scale of the explosion were unclear because of the difficulty in accessing the submarine caldera, the crater formed after the volcanic eruption, and the volcanic deposits on the ocean floor.
now, Nobukazu Sema Professors at Japan's Kobe University calculated that the Kikai-Akahoya eruption produced far more rock and ash underwater than previously thought, about 70 cubic kilometers. Combining this with previous estimates from volcanic rocks deposited over Japan, the total amount of material pumped out of the volcano equates to more than 300 cubic kilometers of material. This is twice the amount of water in Lake Tahoe in the western United States. “It was huge, more than we expected,” Seema says.
However, it is still far behind the huge eruption of Indonesia's Toba supervolcano, which released more than 2,500 cubic kilometers of magma about 74,000 years ago.
To assess Kikai Akahoya, Seema and his colleagues conducted seismic surveys and mapped the underwater area around the caldera, about 200 meters below the surface. This allowed them to see layers of material around the volcano, but they could not tell which ones were due to the eruption itself.
The researchers used remote-controlled drilling robots to collect sediment from the ocean floor, take core samples from the underlying rock, and identify layers containing characteristic volcanic glass. This data allowed us to isolate the volcanic layers from seismic surveys and calculate the total amount of material produced by the volcano.
“We know that very large, caldera-forming eruptions like this are rare, but we also know that there have been many more of these events in the geological past, and we have found evidence for them. ” he says. David Pyle at Oxford University.
The main reason it took so long for the scale of the eruption to be determined is because calderas deep under the sea are difficult to locate and measure, he said.
It still remains in the Kikai Akahoya caldera. big magma chamber It's below. If this explodes, there could be another eruption, but it's unclear how big it will be because it depends on the size of the magma chamber, Seema said. He says the chance of an eruption is small, but his team is working on measuring the dome more precisely to better understand the risks.
Creating better models to predict future eruptions by combining historical information from past eruptions, such as the Kikai-Akahoya eruption, with research from recent underwater eruptions, such as the 2022 Hunga-Tonga eruption. Pyle says it could help.
Is consciousness a collection of discrete states that we move between?
PM Images/Getty Images
What is consciousness? This is perhaps the greatest mystery remaining in the human brain. No wonder it's known as the “hard problem.” We also cannot agree on whether consciousness is one thing or whether it is various states. But a new way to explore that question sheds interesting light on this most elusive of concepts.
We use words like “blacking out” to describe fainting or falling asleep, but researchers believe that consciousness is much more than simply flipping a metaphorical switch from “on” to “off.” I have long understood that it is complicated. However, there is still much debate as to whether it is a single phenomenon with many continuous shades, as imagined as a dimmer switch, or a collection of discrete states, like separate television channels. there is.
Thinking about consciousness from a physicist's perspective may help answer this question. That's because the brain is constantly transitioning between states defined by patterns of electrical signals, and physicists have metrics to study such busy, ever-changing systems. In 2014, robin carhart harris University of California, San Francisco and colleagues hypothesized that entropy may be particularly useful.
Entropy describes how chaotic a system is. One measure of entropy is how many different microscopic configurations (such as the arrangement of water molecules within a glass) exist within a particular macroscopic property (such as the volume of a glass). Researchers proposed that brain states have greater entropy when measured…
Sui Basecamp, co-organizer of the inaugural global Sui conference, today announced the first batch of confirmed speakers for the Paris event, to be held on April 10 and 11, 2024. Sui Basecamp is a celebration of the developers and entrepreneurs building on Sui, enabling innovative layer 1 blockchain and smart contract platforms, and featuring speakers and thinkers from around the world and across the greater Web3 ecosystem. Leaders participate.
Sui Basecamp's first speakers include:
Arianna Simpson, a16z General Partner
Balaji S. Srinivasan, angel investor, technology founder, author of The Network State
Meltem Demiraz, passionate cult leader
Evan Cheng, CEO of Mysten Labs and former Sui contributor
Nikola Plecas, Global Head of Product GTM and Product Commercialization, Visa Crypto
Rachel Conran, Binance Chief Marketing Officer
Sam Blackshear, Chief Technology Officer at Mysten Labs and Creator of Move
Vincent Chok, Chief Executive Officer, First Digital Trust
Logan Jastremski, Managing Partner, Frictionless Capital
Benoit Pellevoizin, Head of Marketing and Communications, CoinShares France
Robert Knight, Cointelegraph Feature Writer
Greg Ciolounis, Managing Director, Sui Foundation
Sponsored by Misten Lab and the Sui Foundation, Sui Basecamp will be held at two selected venues. The first day and opening night of his party, Suissoirée, will be held at the Pavillon Cambon Capucines, the former headquarters of Credit Foncied de France, after which participants will move to the Pavillon. The festival on the second day was Vendôme. Both locations are adjacent to the main event of Paris Blockchain Week.
Early bird tickets are available at a discounted price of $99 from now until March 1st. Ticket prices will remain at the discounted price of US$149 from March 2nd to 31st, but will increase to the full price of US$299 from April 1st until the event.
Sui is a first-of-its-kind Layer 1 blockchain and smart contract platform designed from the bottom up to make digital asset ownership fast, private, secure, and accessible to everyone. An object-centric model based on the Move programming language enables parallel execution, sub-second finality, and rich on-chain assets. With horizontally scalable processing and storage, Sui supports a wide range of applications at low cost and unmatched speed. Sui is a step-function advancement in blockchain and a platform that allows creators and developers to build amazing user-friendly experiences. learn more: https://sui.io
About Misten Lab
Mysten Labs is a team of leading experts in distributed systems, programming languages, and cryptography, and its founders were senior executives and lead architects of pioneering blockchain projects. Mysten Labs' mission is to create the foundational infrastructure for Web3. learn more: https://mystenlabs.com
Sui Foundation
The Sui Foundation is an independent organization dedicated to promoting and popularizing Sui. The Sui Foundation supports the Sui community and its projects that enable individuals and creators to take unprecedented ownership over their data and content.
TThe internet is a place rife with drug addicts and scammers. It has become a completely godless organization, with only a narcissistic malevolent actor at its helm. Honest people come here to lie, but liars come here to be honest. We have to go off-grid and destroy what has become man’s fifth limb because we fear our children will become mentally fragile. They adore skividi toilets, Rachel Finally, we confirmed that idolatry is an unforgivable sin.
Actually, I don’t care. And I just changed my mind too.
Look, you can do that on the internet. You can also share your lived experiences on the internet. How wonderful! And the thing about lived experience is that you can completely make it up – how beautiful. today? I’m Irish and Italian. I’m a DJ. And I’m a total vibe terrorist. tomorrow? A farmer with a missing child. A loving father who lives secretly in Ozempic. Revolutionary. yesterday? broken. lost. club girl hyena. Rabbit rabbit.
So bring your beautiful beluga blue eyes here, hold my hand, and let’s walk together.
1. Who cleans your toilet?
At the kick-on, you say something you think is genius, everyone goes completely silent, breakout rooms form, and suddenly you chain-smoker an entire box of Double Happiness and consider quitting drinking. You’ll know when you’re doing it. Is it really a big way? This video is like that. This captures the experience of saying something completely out of line and immediately falling victim to the reaction. I titled this my Monday monologue after an eventful weekend and waking up in the morning to receive several essay messages about my actions. Homework for therapists.
2. Ed Hardy Fashion Show, Sydney, 2009
Before Uber came along and ruined that, we were horseback riding. And Sydney was once the place where risk-taking kings were crowned. All we know now is a nude beach and a new airport next to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Oh, how empires fall! At 5:30, a group of models will dance to Sydney Samson’s Riverside. black jesus amen fashion!
The human brain is likely the most advanced computer in the world. While it operates differently than a traditional computer and has a much softer structure, its computing power is unparalleled.
Neuromorphic computing, which models machines after the human brain and nervous system, has been a growing concept since the 1980s. Many attempts have been made to achieve this, with the DeepSouth project at the International Center for Neuromorphic Systems at Western Sydney University aiming to be the most advanced yet, with the potential to perform 228 trillion actions per second.
How does a brain computer work?
DeepSouth uses an approach to computing that is inspired by the human brain and body, aiming to combine processing power and memory just like the human brain does. By distributing power to billions of tiny units (neurons) that interact through trillions of different connections (synapses), the brain becomes incredibly powerful while consuming very little energy.
What does this mean for the future of computers?
This approach could lead to significant improvements in energy efficiency and battery life for devices such as smartphones. It could also enable the development of smaller and more powerful computers, bringing high-powered computing to a variety of applications and industries.
How DeepSouth can help fight aging
While the primary goal of DeepSouth is to improve computing technology, the neuromorphic approach also offers insights into the workings of the human brain. This could lead to a better understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, dementia, and Parkinson’s and potentially aid in developing treatments for these conditions.
“Whale Bones was photographed in the most extreme conditions,” explains jury chair and renowned photographer Alex Mustard. “A breath-holding diver descends below the Greenland ice sheet to witness a carcass. This composition invites us to think about the impact we have on the great creatures on this planet. Since the advent of humans, wild animals were reduced by his 85%.
“Currently, only 4 percent of mammals are wild animals, and the remaining 96 percent are humans and livestock. We need to change the way we do things to find a balance with nature.”
Portuguese photographer Nuno Sa has been named the Save Our Seas Foundation’s 2024 Marine Conservation Photographer of the Year. His photo, dubbed “Saving Goliath,” depicts a beachgoer’s futile efforts to save a stranded sperm whale off the coast of Portugal.
Underwater Photographer of the Year is an annual competition that celebrates the best underwater photography since 1965.
Today’s competition attracts entries from all over the world, with 13 categories testing photographers in themes such as macro, wide-angle, action photography, and shipwreck photography, as well as four categories specifically for photographs taken in British waters.
Below are the winners of this year’s contest and our favorite ranked images.
Winner – Macro Category
Pot-bellied seahorse (ventral hippocampus) Pictured surrounded by bright green corals with interesting patterns. Photographed on Bear Island, Australia. Photo credit: Talia Grace/UPY2024
Dealing with snoring can be a bothersome experience for everyone involved, whether it’s falling asleep on a public bus or waking a loved one. Researchers may have found the best diet to combat this issue.
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common condition that puts people at risk for high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. This is because OSA causes multiple disruptions during sleep due to loud snoring and interruptions in breathing.
The solution may lie in a diet rich in vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, as suggested by a new study published in the journal ERJ Open Research. This diet may help prevent or treat OSA.
In order to test this theory, researchers at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, used data from 14,210 participants in the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Participants were asked to list everything they had consumed in the past 24 hours, and the research team categorized their responses into three dietary patterns: a healthy plant-based diet, an unhealthy plant-based diet, and a diet high in animal products.
The “unhealthy” plant-based diet included high amounts of refined carbohydrates, potatoes, sugary drinks, sweets, desserts, and salty foods.
Additionally, participants completed a sleep questionnaire to determine the likelihood of having OSA. The researchers found that people with diets high in plant foods were 19% less likely to suffer from snoring caused by OSA. On the other hand, those who consumed an unhealthy plant-based diet were 22% more likely to have OSA.
Researchers believe that a healthy plant-based diet may be important due to its anti-inflammatory components and antioxidants, which can impact fat mass, inflammation, and muscle tone, thereby affecting a person’s OSA risk.
Dr. Johannes Melak, the chief researcher, emphasized that diet quality is important in managing the risk of OSA, and that a healthy plant-based diet may reduce inflammation and obesity.
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