Tag: Science

  • Reporting the Covid Pandemic from the Global South

    This piece in The Open Notebook delves into the experiences of “journalists in India and throughout the Global South” who were covering the Covid pandemic and the challenges they faced (and overcame) “as they sought to tailor coverage of a global pandemic to their unique, regional audiences.” 

    This is how the authors of the piece frame the commonalities in these experiences: 

    “There was the language issue, of course: The world’s 8 billion people speak over 7,000 languages, yet English is the lingua franca of science and scientific research, and many other languages lack even the terminology to convey science’s more complicated technical concepts. But newsrooms also had to bridge the social and cultural divides that often separate the science world from the communities they serve. Meanwhile, they were battling an infodemic of false and misleading claims, which spread across borders, continents, countries, and into even the most remote communities almost as quickly as the virus itself.”

    The authors spoke to journalists from India, Nigeria, China, Peru, Colombia, Philipines, and Kenya for the report. 

    Read the full article here.

  • Researchers Claim to Have Detected A Cosmic Gravitational Wave Background

    As widely reported, including in this piece on the Caltech website, “[s]cientists are reporting the first evidence that our Earth and the universe around us are awash in a background of spacetime undulations called gravitational waves.” 

    As the article reminds us, “[g]ravitational waves were first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1916.” The new evidence confirming their existence is a result of “15 years’ worth of observations made by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), a National Science Foundation-funded (NSF) Physics Frontier Center of more than 190 scientists from the United States and Canada.” 

    The article gives some background on NANOGrav: 

    “NANOGrav is an international collaboration dedicated to exploring the low-frequency gravitational-wave universe through radio pulsar timing. NANOGrav was founded in October 2007 and has grown to more than 190 members at more than 70 institutions. In 2015, it was designated a National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontiers Center.”

    The methodology of this long-term study has been summarised in lay terms as follows: 

    “NANOGrav used data from radio telescopes—the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and the Very Large Array in New Mexico—to monitor 68 dead stars, called pulsars, in the sky. The pulsars acted like a network of buoys bobbing on a slow-rolling sea of gravitational waves.” 

    and 

    “When gravitational waves travel across the cosmos, they stretch and squeeze the fabric of spacetime very slightly. This stretching and squeezing can cause the distance between Earth and a given pulsar to minutely change, which results in delays or advances to the timing of the pulsars’ flashes of light. To search for the background hum of gravitational waves, the science team developed software programs to compare the timing of pairs of pulsars in their network. Gravitational waves will shift this timing to different degrees depending on how close the pulsars are on the sky […]” 

    Reportedly, a “series of papers detailing the new NANOGrav results have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Including the Global South in Science Writing in the West

    In this piece for The Open Notebook, which “is widely regarded as the leading online source of training and educational materials for journalists who cover science,” freelance science and technology journalist Karen Emslie talks about coming to the realisation that the Global South is under-represented or often completely absent from science writing and reporting: 

    “As a Scottish journalist reporting predominantly for publications in the United States, I have spent most of my career writing in English and interviewing expert sources in Europe and the U.S. That has been the easy path for me and many others. After all, most leading scientific journals are published in English; many studies’ corresponding authors are in the U.S. or Europe. And it generally takes less time for me and other English speakers to connect with sources in these countries than in others where we might run up against language and cultural barriers.”

    As she points out, this is an important issue because its consequences “aren’t just about a loss of narrative detail—they risk misportraying what science is, and whom it is done by.” 

    Realising that she “wasn’t entirely sure where to start looking for geographically diverse scientists to talk to,” Emslie sets out to remedy the situation. To that end, she shares “a few tips to leverage some of the tools and strategies you probably already use in cultivating sources.” 

    Furthermore, she has compiled a nonexhaustive yet growing “sampling of directories and other resources that can help reporters find expert sources around the world, with a particular focus on regions of the Global South.” 

    Read the full article and access the directory here.

  • The Illusion of The Self: From Eastern Philosophy to Neuroscience

    This piece for Big Think by a neuropsychologist discusses how experimental science may be coming to the same conclusion that Eastern philosophy has provided for more than 2,500 years: “that the individual self is more akin to a fictional character than a real thing.” 

    The author points out that in Western thought ““I” represents the idea of our individual self” and “[t]his I/ego is what we think of as our true selves, and this individual self is the experiencer and the controller of things like thoughts, feelings, and actions.” However, the author challenges us, “The next time there is an intrusive thought, consider the very fact that your being unable to stop it proves that there is no inner self that controls it.” 

    Eastern schools of thought like Buddhism, Taoism, and the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, on the other hand, say “that this idea of “me” is a fiction, although a very convincing one” and that “the concept of the self is seen as the result of the thinking mind”: 

    “The thinking mind reinvents the self from moment to moment such that it in no way resembles the stable coherent self most believe it to be.” 

    The author points out that several studies over the years “have shown that the left side of the brain excels at creating an explanation for what’s going on, even if it isn’t correct, even in people with normal brain functioning”:

    “The truth is that your left brain has been interpreting reality for you your whole life, and if you are like most people, you have never understood the full implications of this. This is because we mistake the story of who we think we are for who we truly are.”

     Importantly, despite the progress in the field of brain mapping, the self has never been mapped as a function of the mind. The author argues: 

    “While various neuroscientists have made the claim that the self resides in this or that neural location, there is no real agreement among the scientific community about where to find it — not even whether it might be in the left or the right side of the brain. Perhaps the reason we can’t find the self in the brain is because it isn’t there.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Pangenome Project

    As this report in the MIT Technology Review states, “researchers announced yet another version of the human genome map, which combines the DNA of 47 diverse individuals—Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, among other groups—into one giant genetic atlas that they say better captures the surprising genetic diversity of our species.”

    The “pangenome,” as the new map is called, is the latest in a long line of human genome mapping projects. Reportedly, it “has been a decade in the making, and researchers say it will only get bigger, creating an expanding view of the genome as they add DNA from another 300 people from around the globe.” 

    The significance of this project stems from the fact that it provides a more diversified map of the human genome than previous versions: 

    “People’s genomes are largely alike, but it’s the hundreds of thousands of differences, often just single DNA letters, that explain why each of us is unique. The new pangenome, researchers say, should make it possible to observe this diversity in more detail than ever before, highlighting so-called evolutionary hot spots as well as thousands of surprisingly large differences, like deleted, inverted, or duplicated genes, that aren’t observable in conventional studies.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • New Study Raises More Doubts About the Theory That Humans Originated in A Single Region of Africa

    As widely reported, including in this article in Nature, “[m]odern people evolved all across Africa, not from a single location, a new study exploring the diversity of human genomes has found.” 

    The study adds to the scepticism about the long-popular “single-origin theory.” Reportedly, what sets this study apart is that it uses more parameters than earlier models to establish the idea of “the weakly structured stem”: 

    “The ancient hominin species, or ‘ancestral stem’, had localized populations which are thought to have interbred with each other over millennia, sharing any genetic differences that they had evolved. They also moved around Africa over time. […] The intertwining of these stems, separated only weakly by their genetic differences, gave rise to a concept of human evolution that the researchers described as a “weakly structured stem” — more like a tangled vine than a ‘tree of life’.”

    Apparently, this study gives a “clearer explanation for the variation seen in humans today” than the explanations previously put forth.

    Read the full Nature report on the study here.

  • Board of Academic Journal Resigns Over Elsevier's "Greed"

    As this report in The Guardian states, “More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the “greed” of publishing giant Elsevier.” 

    “The entire academic board of the journal Neuroimage […] resigned after Elsevier refused to reduce publication charges.” 

    Reportedly, “[a]cademics around the world have applauded what many hope is the start of a rebellion against the huge profit margins in academic publishing.” One resignee is reported to have “urged fellow scientists to turn their backs on the Elsevier journal and submit papers to a nonprofit open-access journal which the team is setting up instead.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Better Understanding Photosynthesis

    According to reports in multiple science publications, such as this one, “researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, together with collaborators from Uppsala University and Humboldt University and other institutions” have been able to shed more light on “how Photosystem II, a protein complex in plants, algae and cyanobacteria, harvests energy from sunlight and uses it to split water, producing the oxygen we breathe.” 

    As the report goes on to state:

    “Using SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) and the SPring-8 Angstrom Compact free electron LAser (SACLA) in Japan, they captured for the first time in atomic detail what happens in the final moments leading up to the release of breathable oxygen. The data reveal an intermediate reaction step that had not been observed before.

    The results, published today in Nature, shed light on how nature has optimized photosynthesis and are helping scientists develop artificial photosynthetic systems that mimic photosynthesis to harvest natural sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into hydrogen and carbon based-fuels.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Adverse Effects of Microplastics on Human Hormones

    This report in Salon covers “a new study published by researchers at Rutgers University” about how “everyday plastic pollution could be endocrine-disrupting.” 

    As the report recounts, “[p]reviously, research suggested that chemical additives used to improve plastics, like bisphenol-A (or BPA), were potentially having all kinds of disruptive effects on human hormones.” But now the “new study suggests that even plastic without BPA can have comparable endocrine-disrupting effects.” 

    An important aspect of the methodology was that “the researchers found a way to successfully aerosolize the particles so they could see what happened to them when inhaled” since “this is a common method of absorption into the body.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Quantum Effects Demonstrated at Macroscopic Scale

    As this report states, physicists have been able to bring “the bizarre behavior of the quantum world to larger scales than ever before.” Various publications are calling it the world’s heaviest or largest Schrödinger’s cat. 

    The experiment can be summarised as: 

    “The trick, performed by vibrating 100 million billion atoms inside a sand-grain-sized sapphire crystal, created the world’s heaviest quantum superposition as the crystal simultaneously oscillated in two different directions.”

    This is important because: 

    “As most quantum effects typically decohere and disappear at macroscopic scales, Schrödinger’s analogy was meant to demonstrate the fundamental differences between our world and the world of the very small. Yet no hard limit exists between the two realms, enabling physicists to begin cajoling complex, near-macroscopic-scale objects into showing freaky quantum behavior.” 

    Of course, this could have far-reaching consequences for quantum technologies like quantum computing. 

    Read the full report here.

  • The Potential of CRISPR-edited Fats to Treat Cancer

    Various publications have covered a study where researchers converted white fat into brown fat using CRISPR and used it to surround tumours, starving them of essential nutrients. 

    As this report on the popular science website LiveScience summarises: 

    “Fat sucked out of the body and tweaked with the gene-editing tool CRISPR could be used to treat cancer, a study of mice and transplanted human tissues hints. 

    However, it remains to be seen whether the experimental therapy would be safe and effective in people.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Exxon's Climate Change Predictions and Climate Change Denial

    This piece by Grist is a useful short introduction to the oft-quoted fact that oil and gas corporation ExxonMobil historically funded some of the most accurate climate change predictions long before most of the world was talking about climate change. And yet, they went on to fund and spread climate change denial in the public domain for decades, knowing full well that said climate change denial was not backed even by their own research.

    Watch the video version of the piece on Youtube here. Access the video and transcript on the Grist website here.

  • The CERN of AI Research

    Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION) has launched this petition to “democratize AI research by establishing an international, publicly funded supercomputing facility equipped with 100,000 state-of-the-art AI accelerators to train open source foundation models.” They are calling such a proposed facility “a CERN for open source large-scale AI research and its safety.” 

    Significantly, the petition has this to say on AI Safety research: 

    “The proposed facility should feature AI Safety research labs with well-defined security levels, akin to those used in biological research labs, where high-risk developments can be conducted by internationally renowned experts in the field, backed by regulations from democratic institutions. The results of such safety research should be transparent and available for the research community and society at large. These AI Safety research labs should be capable of designing timely countermeasures by studying developments that, according to broad scientific consensus, would predictably have a significant negative impact on our societies.”

    LAION’s website describes them as a non-profit “aiming to make large-scale machine learning models, datasets and related code available to the general public.”

    Read the full petition here. Read more about LAION’s work and philosophy on their team blog here.

  • Claude Shannon and Information Theory

    In this tribute for Quanta Magazine, Stanford professor David Tse highlights the remarkable contributions of Claude Shannon.

    Summing up Shannon’s foundational contribution to information theory, Tse writes: “in a single groundbreaking paper, he laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age.” Shannon “applied a mathematical discipline called Boolean algebra to the analysis and synthesis of switching circuits.” This was such an important development that it “is now considered to have been the starting point of digital circuit design.”

    All our digital communication technologies can be traced back to Shannon’s work. For instance, consider:

    “Another unexpected conclusion stemming from Shannon’s theory is that whatever the nature of the information — be it a Shakespeare sonnet, a recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or a Kurosawa movie — it is always most efficient to encode it into bits before transmitting it. So in a radio system, for example, even though both the initial sound and the electromagnetic signal sent over the air are analog wave forms, Shannon’s theorems imply that it is optimal to first digitize the sound wave into bits, and then map those bits into the electromagnetic wave. This surprising result is a cornerstone of the modern digital information age, where the bit reigns supreme as the universal currency of information.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Using AI to Detect Patterns in Animal Communication

    This article published by the World Economic Forum delves into the potential of AI analysis of “the vast amounts of animal communication data that is being collected with increasingly sophisticated sensors and recording devices.”

    The process “includes analysing large data sets that contain visual, oral and physical animal communications.”  “The goal,” according to researchers, “is to determine under what conditions an animal produces a communication signal, how the receiving animal reacts and which signals are relevant to influencing actions.”

    To arrive at a richer understanding of animal communication, “AI-powered analysis of animal communication includes data sets of both bioacoustics, the recording of individual organisms, and ecoacoustics, the recording of entire ecosystems, according to experts.”

    Importantly:

    “There are ethical concerns that researchers are confronting, too. This includes, most notably, the possibility of doing harm by establishing two-way communication channels between humans and animals—or animals and machines.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Curating Math and Science Resources

    Abakcus.com is described as “the best curation site for only math and science. We do the hard job and curate the best articles, books, tools, products, videos, and projects.” Abakcus is a project by math blogger Ali who interestingly puts their vision as: 

    “We believe that learning new things is crucial for happiness. Since Abakcus is the collection of perfect sources about mathematics and science, I think we can make tons of people happy.” 

    Check out their website here.

  • Virus-eating Microorganisms

    Late last year, researchers confirmed the existence of virus-eating microorganisms. The existence of such organisms had been hypothesised earlier. The question that researchers are now seeking answer(s) to is whether these and/or other microorganisms feed on viruses “in the wild,” outside laboratory conditions.

    Read a report on this research here.

  • Reporting Accurately on New Research

    The Journalist’s Resource, a project of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, put out this tip sheet on how news outlets can report on new research studies more accurately. It warns that sometimes press releases “mistakenly state researchers have proven something they haven’t.” The author, Denise-Marie Ordway, lays out four pointers to using the correct language to convey the strength of the evidence that the new research has put forward instead of claiming it has “proven” something, a rarity outside of mathematics. 

    Read the full article here.