05 Sci-Tech

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Excerpt from www.newscientist.com

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Excerpt from globalnews.ca

Ultra-processed foods, such as processed meat, fizzy drinks, ice cream and sugary cereals are linked to a higher risk of early death, according to a recent study.

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Excerpt from eandt.theiet.org

A new report has found that for the first time 30% of electricity produced worldwide came from renewable energy sources, predominantly solar and wind.

UK climate think tank Ember has published a report – Global Electricity Review 2024 – that analysed electricity data from 215 countries, as well as examining data from the highest carbon emitting countries and regions of the world.

It finds that renewables generated a record 30% of global electricity in 2023. From the analysis, 2023 saw a 23% growth in solar generation, 10% growth in wind generation and only a 0.8% growth in fossil generation.

“The renewables future has arrived. Solar, in particular, is accelerating faster than anyone thought possible,” said Dave Jones, Ember’s director of global insights.

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Excerpt from phys.org

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Excerpt from www.science20.com

After Chris Wild took over the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a UN-funded body in France that looks for statistical links between food/chemicals and cancer, they made a switch in their policies regarding participation; an epidemiologist who had ever consulted for industry could no longer vote on what to label a carcinogen.Even though it was hypocritical – epidemiologists working for trial lawyers or environmental groups were recruited – few inside IARC objected. Nor did anyone think they might. Environmental groups have manufactured an ethical halo so well that even their lawyers look like better people than other lawyers. They are, they assure us, poorly paid evangelists for health and safety against Evil Corporations.

Except none of that is true. For that ethical halo to be punctured even slightly, someone like Tom Girardi, who turned the “Erin Brockovich” case, trace levels of hexavalent chromium in Hinckley, California, into hundreds of millions of dollars for himself, has to engage in such spectacular fraud it gets attention. And even then his environmental shakedowns are minimized, though they were the same tactics he used against Pacific Gas  &  Electric.

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Excerpt from techxplore.com

Engineers at Princeton and North Carolina State University have combined ancient paper-folding and modern materials science to create a soft robot that bends and twists through mazes with ease.

Soft robots can be challenging to guide because steering equipment often increases the robot’s rigidity and cuts its flexibility. The new design overcomes those problems by building the steering system directly into the robot’s body, said Tuo Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton.

In an article, titled “Modular Multi-degree-of-freedom Soft Origami Robots with Reprogrammable Electrothermal Actuation” published May 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe how they created the robot out of modular, cylindrical segments. The segments, which can operate independently or join to form a longer unit, all contribute to the robot’s ability to move and steer. The new system allows the flexible robot to crawl forward and reverse, pick up cargo and assemble into longer formations.

“The concept of modular soft robots can provide insight into future soft robots that can grow, repair, and develop new functions,” the authors write in their article.

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Excerpt from www.indiatvnews.com

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Excerpt from www.popsci.com

Hamish Spencer, zoologist and distinguished professor at the University of Otago, was vacationing in Colombia when ornithologist John Murillo pointed out an interesting bird perched on a feeding station. The bird in question was a green honeycreeper, but it didn’t look quite like any honeycreeper they’d seen before. The right half of the bird was blue, resembling males of the species, and the left half was green—the hue typically seen in females.

This special honeycreeper is one of many animals that display bilateral gynandromorphism, a trait where animals present both male and female characteristics even though their species usually have distinct sexes.

Other birds have displayed bilateral gynandromorphism. In 2019, a cardinal with male and female plumage was spotted in Erie, Pennsylvania. In 2020, researchers in Pennsylvania found a gynandromorphic rose-breasted grosbeak that displayed male plumage on the right and female plumage on the left.

These birds, and other binary-breaking animals like clownfish and leaping lesbian lizards, are proof that nature is less into simple labels than you think. For more on the way the natural world consistently shatters our idea of how things like sex should work, check out these gene-stealing salamanders, this super-sexy slime mold, and Rachel’s book about the weird and wonderful evolution of sex.

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Excerpt from www.army-technology.com

China stands accused of hacking the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) in a major cyberattack on armed forces’ SSCL payroll data system.

The data breach compromised the names and bank details of current military personnel and veterans, Sky News reported.

When addressing the House of Commons today (7 May), UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said a “malign actor” was responsible for the attack, but that the government “cannot rule out state involvement”. He added that there was “no evidence that any data has been removed”.

Shapps has announced a “multi-point plan to support and protect personnel”, an MoD spokesperson told Army Technology.

The MoD has been working urgently to grasp the scale of the cyberattack over the last three days since discovering the data breach.

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Excerpt from www.independent.co.uk

A new vaccine could be effective against coronaviruses which have yet to emerge, with hopes it could be used to battle future pandemics, research suggests.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and Caltech in the US are developing a novel approach called “proactive vaccinology”, which aims to train the body’s immune system to recognise several different coronaviruses.

The vaccine used antigens – a substance that triggers an immune response in the body – found in eight different coronaviruses, including those circulating in bats. This trains the immune system to go after the parts of the antigens that are shared across the viruses and other similar ones, including those not included in the vaccine.

The vaccine, for instance, does not include the Sars-CoV-1 virus, which led to the 2003 SARs outbreak, but can produce an immune response to it.

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Excerpt from www.technologyreview.com

But bovines may not be far behind. There’s a large assisted-reproduction industry in cattle, with more than a million IVF attempts a year, half of them in North America. Many other beef and dairy cattle are artificially inseminated with semen from top-rated bulls. “Cattle is harder,” says Jiang. “But we have all the technology.”

ANTONIO REGALADO

The thing that came out of cow #307 turned out to be damaged, just a fragment. But later that day, in Jiang’s main laboratory, students were speed-walking across the linoleum holding something in a petri dish. They’d retrieved intact embryonic structures from some of the other cows. These looked long and stringy, like worms, or the skin shed by a miniature snake.

That’s precisely what a two-week-old cattle embryo should look like. But the outer appearance is deceiving, Jiang says. After staining chemicals are added, the specimens are put under a microscope. Then the disorder inside them is apparent. These “elongated structures,” as Jiang calls them, have the right parts—cells of the embryonic disc and placenta—but nothing is in quite the right place.

ticle
Excerpt from www.mining.com

Additionally, the researchers emphasized the safety advantages of their aqueous battery over non-aqueous lithium batteries, notorious for their high flammability.

As reported by the South China Morning Post, the water-based battery “shows promising potential for the development of next-generation high-energy-density and safe rechargeable aqueous batteries,” as quoted by the researchers.

One of the authors, Li Xianfeng, a professor at the CAS Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, stated that their findings “may expand aqueous battery applications in the power battery field.”

Currently, most electric vehicles rely on lithium-ion batteries to operate.

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Excerpt from www.forbes.com

The United States military has invested tens of billions of dollars over a half-century in the research and development of directed energy weapons. Now, it’s actually using them in battle.

The Army has used lasers to take down hostile drones in the Middle East, Doug Bush, the Army’s head of acquisitions, recently told Forbes. It’s the first time the Defense Department has acknowledged that such weapons have been used in combat.

“They’ve worked in some cases,” Bush said. “In the right conditions they’re highly effective against certain threats.”

He declined to detail the weapons used, but one appears to be a system called P-HEL. It’s based on the defense contractor BlueHalo’s Locust laser, a boxy pallet-mounted device for fixed-site defense that’s commanded with an Xbox gaming controller. The weapon is designed to discharge a relatively low-powered 20-kilowatt laser beam that melts a critical point on a drone in seconds, knocking it from the sky.

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Excerpt from www.thecollegefix.com

Modern equivalent of ‘scrawling cruel rumors on the bathroom wall,’ president says

The University of North Carolina System plans to ban anonymous social media apps across its 16 campuses, arguing the technology companies have a “reckless disregard” for students’ wellbeing.

Other universities are considering similar bans, prompting concerns from free speech advocates.

UNC System President Peter Hans announced the plan in a two page statement to the UNC Board of Governors earlier this semester. Hans said social media apps are the modern equivalent of “scrawling cruel rumors on the bathroom wall,” and the most destructive ones will be blocked by the UNC System infrastructure.

His statement did not include a timeline for the social media block. The College Fix reached out to UNC three times via email and phone call for comment in the past two weeks, but the university did not respond.

“We’re targeting a handful of smaller, hyper-local platforms that have shown reckless disregard for the wellbeing of young people and an outright indifference to bullying and bad behavior,” Hans said in his statement.

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Excerpt from www.sci.news

A team of physicists and chemists has discovered a previously unknown way in which light interacts with matter, a finding that could lead to improved solar power systems, light-emitting diodes, semiconductor lasers and other technological advancements.

Kharintsev et al. found that photons can obtain substantial momentum, similar to that of electrons in solid materials, when confined to nanometer-scale spaces in silicon. Image credit: Kharintsev et al.

“Silicon is Earth’s second-most abundant element, and it forms the backbone of modern electronics,” said Dr. Dmitry Fishman, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine.