The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their pioneering work in the development of mRNA vaccine technology, which made possible a timely vaccine response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus are credited with helping to curb the spread of… Continue reading Covid-19 mRNA Vaccines Win Nobel Prize for Medicine 2023
Airship Mystery of 1896 and 1897 (Mystery Airships, Phantom Airships, Ghost Airships, UFOs)
Podcast: Download MYS279: In the late 1890s, there was a wave of sightings over the US of mysterious airships displaying unusual flight characteristics. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli discuss these unusual airships and the theories that they were aliens, hoaxes, or maybe something else. Get all new episodes automatically and for free: Follow by Email… Continue reading Airship Mystery of 1896 and 1897 (Mystery Airships, Phantom Airships, Ghost Airships, UFOs)
Physicists Who Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time Win Nobel Prize
To catch a glimpse of the subatomic world’s unimaginably fleet-footed particles, you need to produce unimaginably brief flashes of light. Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz have shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in developing the ability to illuminate reality on almost inconceivably brief timescales. Between the 1980s and… Continue reading Physicists Who Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time Win Nobel Prize
DC’s Revolving Door Is Swinging Briskly for the Eco-Green Eyeshade People
Washington’s revolving door is getting a fresh green paint job: Federal architects of a controversial new rule requiring businesses to measure their carbon footprints throughout their supply chains have joined a start-up company poised to reap millions by performing those calculations. The federal revolving door lately swings from the SEC … U.S. Government/Wikimedia At least… Continue reading DC’s Revolving Door Is Swinging Briskly for the Eco-Green Eyeshade People
Nobel Prize Honors Inventors of ‘Quantum Dot’ Nanoparticles
Imagine a nanocrystal so minuscule that it behaves like an atom. Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov have been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering a category of such minute marvels, now known as quantum dots, and for developing a precise method of synthesizing them. Quantum dots are… Continue reading Nobel Prize Honors Inventors of ‘Quantum Dot’ Nanoparticles
Red Meat Allergy Caused by Tick Bite Is Spreading—And Nearly Half of Doctors Don’t Know about It
Ticks are annoying creatures. These nasty, bloodsucking parasites glom on to you when you least suspect it. And if they’re not removed in time, they can transmit a startling range of pretty horrible diseases. The bite of the lone star tick, found in the U.S. South, Midwest and mid-Atlantic, can trigger a bizarre and sometimes… Continue reading Red Meat Allergy Caused by Tick Bite Is Spreading—And Nearly Half of Doctors Don’t Know about It
Meet the Activist Wife Who Networks the Anti-MAGA White House While Her Prosecutor Husband Puts January Sixers in Jail
Shown, Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and his wife, Fatima Goss Graves. By Julie Kelly, RealClearInvestigationsTuesday, October 3, 2023 Attorney General Merrick B. Garland is the public face of the government’s unprecedented effort to identify, arrest, and prosecute those connected to the Jan. 6, 2021 protest at the Capitol. But… Continue reading Meet the Activist Wife Who Networks the Anti-MAGA White House While Her Prosecutor Husband Puts January Sixers in Jail
What Makes Life Tick? Mitochondria May Keep Time for Cells
So far, these mechanisms across systems and scales — in the developing embryo’s segmentation clock, in a single developing neuron, and in more fundamental protein machinery — have all continued to beat in time. “Pretty much everything we looked at so far is scaling,” Pourquié said, “which means that there is a global command for… Continue reading What Makes Life Tick? Mitochondria May Keep Time for Cells
We Need Smart Intellectual Property Laws for Artificial Intelligence
Once a backwater filled with speculation, artificial intelligence is now a burning, “hair on fire” conflagration of both hopes and fears about the revolutionary technological transformation. A profound uncertainty surrounds these intelligent systems—which already surpass human capabilities in some domains—and their regulation. Making the right choices for how to protect or control the technology is… Continue reading We Need Smart Intellectual Property Laws for Artificial Intelligence
New ‘Physics-Inspired’ Generative AI Exceeds Expectations
The tools of artificial intelligence — neural networks in particular — have been good to physicists. For years, this technology has helped researchers reconstruct particle trajectories in accelerator experiments, search for evidence of new particles, and detect gravitational waves and exoplanets. While AI tools can clearly do a lot for physicists, the question now, according… Continue reading New ‘Physics-Inspired’ Generative AI Exceeds Expectations