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A recent study has unraveled some of the secrets concealed within the entangled web of quantum systems.

A recent study has unraveled some of the secrets concealed within the entangled web of quantum systems.

An interdisciplinary research team has unveiled the world's first artificial intelligence (AI) model designed to classify both the cancer stage and risk category of thyroid cancer, achieving impressive accuracy exceeding 90%. This innovative AI model promises to significantly cut frontline clinicians' pre-consultation preparation time by approximately 50%, aligning with the HKSAR Government's initiative to harness AI technology in healthcare.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, researchers have identified a breakthrough that could make AI technologies faster and more efficient.

Researchers found a strategy to create catalysts that make the production of hydrogen for clean fuel more efficient and affordable.

A recent global survey of 156 institutions reveals strong interest in VR-haptic technology for dental training, yet significant barriers impede widespread adoption.

Historically, small molecule drugs have been precisely designed down to the atomic scale. Considering their relatively large complex structures, nanomedicines have lagged behind. Researchers argue this precise control should be applied to optimize new nanomedicines.

Astronomers have discovered that super-Earth exoplanets are more common across the universe than previously thought. While it can be relatively easy to locate worlds that orbit close to their star, planets with wider paths can be difficult to detect. Still, researchers estimated that for every three stars, there should be at least one super-Earth present with a Jupiter-like orbital period, suggesting these massive worlds are extremely prevalent across the universe.

Researchers have developed a new therapy that can be injected intravenously right after a heart attack to promote healing and prevent heart failure. The therapy both prompts the immune system to encourage tissue repair and promotes survival of heart muscle cells after a heart attack. Researchers tested the therapy in rats and showed that it is effective up to five weeks after injection.

Many products in the modern world are in some way fabricated using computer numerical control (CNC) machines, which use computers to automate machine operations in manufacturing. While simple in concept, the ways to instruct these machines is in reality often complex. A team of researchers has devised a system to demonstrate how to mitigate some of this complexity.

Many products in the modern world are in some way fabricated using computer numerical control (CNC) machines, which use computers to automate machine operations in manufacturing. While simple in concept, the ways to instruct these machines is in reality often complex. A team of researchers has devised a system to demonstrate how to mitigate some of this complexity.

The article below from MedpageToday (click headline below to read, or find it archived here) reports that the government has begun policing at least three scientific journals, asking them if they enforce viewpoint diversity and how their vet their manuscripts, especially those with “competing viewpoints.” In other words, the Trump administration is now doing to scientific journals (well, at least a few) what it’s doing to American colleges and universities. The only difference is that the letter to the journals doesn’t have an explicit threat, though there’s an implicit one since the letter is from a U.S. Attorney and requests a response.

An excerpt from MedpageToday:

A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor, probing whether the publication is “partisan” when it comes to “various scientific debates.”

Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles “misinformation” and “competing viewpoints,” among other things.

MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters.

“It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” the letter stated.

Martin’s letter asks five questions, including how the journal assesses its “responsibilities to protect the public from misinformation,” and how it “clearly articulate[s] to the public when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others.”

It also asks whether the journal accepts manuscripts from “competing viewpoints” as well as how it assesses the role of “funding organizations like the National Institutes of Health in the development of submitted articles.”

Finally, it asks how the journal handles allegations that authors “may have misled their readers.”

“I am also interested to know if publishers, journals, and organizations with which you work are adjusting their method of acceptance of competing viewpoints,” Martin wrote. “Are there new norms being developed and offered?”

Martin requested a response by May 2.

The letter to CHEST was dated April 14 and was originally posted on Xopens in a new tab or window by Eric Reinhart, MD, of Chicago.

These of course are not only unethical but probably illegal attempts at censorship—trying to chill science, and for reasons I can’t quite discern.

The article has a few responses, including one from FIRE:

Adam Gaffney, MD, MPH, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, said the letter “should send a chill down the spine of scientists and physicians.”

“It is yet another example of the Trump administration’s effort to control academic inquiry and stifle scientific discourse — an administration, it warrants mentioning, that has embraced medical misinformation and pseudoscience to reckless effect,” Gaffney said in an email to MedPage Today. “Journal editors should join together and publicly renounce this as yet more thinly guised anti-science political blackmail.”

JT Morris, a senior supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, noted that in a First Amendment case such as this, the law is clear: “A publication’s editorial decisions are none of the government’s business, whether it’s a newspaper or a medical journal.”

“When a United States Attorney wields the power of his office to target medical journals because of their content and editorial processes, he isn’t doing his job, let alone upholding his constitutional oath,” Morris said in an email to MedPage Today. “He’s abusing his authority to try to chill protected speech.”

CHEST is, according to Wikipedia, “a peer-reviewed medical journal covering chest diseases and related issues, including pulmonology, cardiology, thoracic surgery, transplantation, breathing, airway diseases, and emergency medicine. The journal was established in 1935 and is published by the American College of Chest Physicians.”  It’s not a predatory journal, as far as I can see, but a reputable one of value to the relevant group of doctors. You can see the contents of the latest issue of the journal here; there doesn’t seem to be anything amiss. And here’s the letter to Chest from (gulp) the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Sounds official and scary, no? (Click to enlarge or go to the link just given.)

 

 

The best response to such a stupid letter is no response: were I the editor, I wouldn’t respond, and then if the government pulls out the heavy artillery, sue them. As the reader who sent me this link noted, “This request is simple to address.  If the DOJ were shown the rigor and vigor with which  scientific viewpoints are attacked and defended during the review process, they would be disabused quickly of any suspicion that competing, non-frivolous  viewpoints are underrepresented in the journals.”

But of course the government doesn’t care about that. It’s more concerned with bullying and chilling science. I hope this doesn’t go to every journal, because you’d see an outcry bigger than the one accompanying the administration’s threat to universities.  In the case of journals, which I don’t believe get federal funding, it’s a case of attempted censorship, pure and simple, and although the government may have some rationale for trying to control the behavior of universities, there is none for censorship of scientific publications. The only censors of such publications are scientists or the journals themselves.

 

h/t: Edwin

Rather than a volcanic winter, the Toba eruption 74,000 years ago resulted in several years of warm and dry weather, geochemical evidence from India suggests

Today Athayde Tonhasca Júnior has another text-and-photo biology lesson for us. Athayde’s narrative is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. The article is about the Asian giant hornet, a creature I also wrote about in Why Evolution Is True as the opening to Chapter 5 on natural selection.

Athayde:

An undesirable pilgrim   

It’s Saturday morning in an English town, and Mr and Mrs Smith set out for their favourite weekend activity – visiting the local garden centre. Wandering among rows of potted plants, clothing, shoes, tools, ceramic gnomes, barbecue gear, deck furniture and myriad other items made in China, all undoubtedly uniquely crafted, Mr and Mrs Smith spot that week’s acquisition: a gorgeous plant imported from the continent at the discounted price of £4.99. The couple drive home pleased with their purchase, which will be a nice addition to their new conservatory. Mr and Mrs Smith would be less pleased, dismayed in fact, if they knew the vase holding their plant hid a menacing stowaway: a dormant Asian hornet queen (Vespa velutina).

Mr and Mrs Smith’s tale is fiction, but something along those lines happened in France in 2004: one or more Asian hornet queens sneaked into the country hidden in pottery imported from China. When the hornet’s presence was formally recognised in the following year, it was too late. The invader had already spread out, and soon made its way into other countries in continental Europe.

Plant nurseries and garden centres are potential ports of entry for invasive species © Arpingstone, Wikimedia Commons:

Queens of hornets and related species have special skills to spend the winter safely. They build a cell in the soil, rotten wood, stumps or logs lying on the ground, also in manmade structures that offer comfy spots such as holes in ceramic pots, cracks in wooden boxes, and gaps in farming equipment. The queen will form a tunnel a few centimetres long leading to the cell and plug it with earth, scrap wood or some other material. This enclosed chamber, known as a hibernaculum (plural hibernacula), from the Latin for ‘wintering residence’, will shelter the queen from the elements, predators and pathogens. The queen also prepares herself for the long fasting spell ahead. She will put a lot of weight by tucking glycogen, lipids and proteins into her trophocytes, cells that function as a storage organ. Fats make up about 10% of a worker’s dry weight, shooting up to 40% for a queen about to go into hibernation. Despite all these measures, most queens don’t survive the harshness of winter. Those few that do, secure and well-nourished, can stay dormant for a long time – 6 to 8 months, depending on the species (Matsuura & Yamane, 1984). Eventually they come out of their slumber, fly away to build their nests, and produce a first batch of workers. From then on, colonies grow rapidly.

A German wasp queen (Vespula germanica) tucked in inside a hibernaculum built in a fallen tree © MaxNikon, Wikimedia Commons:

Queens’ ability to hibernate for long periods hidden in goods transported around the world gives the Asian hornet excellent opportunities to colonise new territories. On top of that, members of the genus Vespa have tremendous dispersal capability. Adult Asian hornets can spread at a rate of 75 to 100 km/year, and gynes (females that will mate and become queens) can fly 18 km/day. Also, hornets have high reproductive rates and adapt easily to novel conditions. They are not fussy about nesting materials and location, and the ability to thermoregulate their nests increases their chances of survival.

An Asian hornet nest. The combs that house the brood are enveloped by an external wall that keeps the nest at around 30°C, even when ambient temperatures are 20° lower © Mossot, Wikimedia Commons:

Like all related species, adult Asian hornets feed on nectar but hunt prey for their young. They have a catholic diet, going after the most abundant and vulnerable insects but not letting fortuitous opportunities such as bird and mammal carcasses go to waste. One nest can consume an average of 11.3 kg of insect biomass in one season (Rome et al., 2021), and if solitary bees, bumble bees and flies are there for the taking, pollination services may be affected. But to the consternation of beekeepers, European honey bees (Apis mellifera) make up a significant portion of the Asian hornet’s menu.

An Asian hornet taking a sip of nectar © CABI Compendium:

The ability to hover allows the Asian hornet to patrol a beehive entrance, waiting for the opportunity to pounce on a bee leaving or coming home. The hornet may even invade the hive if the entrance is unguarded (Diéguez-Antón et al., 2024). Hornets may not have to kill bees to harm a colony. Their hovering in front of a beehive may cause ‘foraging paralysis’, which is the cessation or reduction of workers’ activity (Monceau et al., 2018). By killing bees or preventing them from foraging, Asian hornets weaken the hive. Queens lay fewer eggs, bee population is reduced, and susceptibility to diseases increases. With time, the colony may collapse.

Asian hornets invading a beehive © Diéguez-Antón et al., 2024:

In some places in France and other European countries, densities have reached 5 to 6 nests/km2, and up to 12 nests/km2 in urban environments. The consequences of Asian hornet arrival are not completely understood but are not likely to be trivial. In France, up to 29% of bee colonies could be lost, with a cost of up to €30.8 million to the country’s economy (Requier et al., 2023).

Asian hornet dorsal and ventral views © Didier Descouens, Muséum de Toulouse, Wikimedia Commons:

Across the English Channel, beekeepers watch these developments with justifiable apprehension. The Asian hornet, like all other Vespa species, has a remarkable invasive potential. A British incursion could be less severe than in continental Europe because of harsher weather, but nobody wants to take chances with such a highly adaptable species. Based on the French experience, the Asian hornet would stay put if it ever gets a firm foothold in the country. There have been close calls since 2016, when Asian hornets were discovered for the first time in Britain. Their nest was found and destroyed. Subsequently, there have been other 144 confirmed sightings, with 110 nests eliminated. Thanks to scientists, technicians, members of the public and a network of dedicated beekeepers monitoring Asian hornet sightings, Britain is holding the fort. But, by tweaking a well-known quote, we can say that ‘eternal vigilance is the price for keeping Britain free of the Asian hornet’.

While British beekeepers worry, their counterparts across the Atlantic may sympathise without burdening themselves with someone else’s problem. But complacency would be a mistake. In 2019, the Asian giant hornet (V. mandarinia), an even bigger headache than V. velutina, sneaked into British Columbia and Washington State. For whatever reason, this introduction seems to have fizzled out naturally. But it could happen again. And in 2023, some Asian hornets were spotted mingling about in Savannah, Georgia. One nest was found and destroyed, but others may have escaped detection: time will tell. The take-home message is that it doesn’t pay to underestimate hardy, efficient and adaptable marvels of natural selection like Vespa wasps.

Surveillance is the best defence because eradication is much more likely to succeed in the early stages of an invasion. With alien hornets, you can’t drop your guard © The War Illustrated Album de Luxe, 1916. Wikimedia Commons:

JAC: In WEIT I discuss an adaptive strategy that honeybees have evolved in Asia, but haven’t yet in other places in the world. When the first “scout” hornet invades a nest, it’s immediately surrounded by a ball of honeybees that vibrate their wings and abdoments, cooking the hornet to death by raising the temperature.  The temperature is enough to kill hornets but not bees, and the scout is unable to report back to the other wasps that it found a nest.

Dimethyl Sulfide (DMS) has been in the news again, this time for its discovery in the atmosphere of the hycean world K2-18b as a potential biosignature. In an interesting twist, astronomers have also detected DMS in comets and in giant molecular clouds. It shows there must be an abiotic way for this chemical to be produced. A team of researchers have studied DMS and developed different gas phase reactions that could produce this chemical and explain its presence that doesn’t require life.

Hackers may be able to garble the output of programs running on quantum computers, leaving other people with unknowingly incorrect results - but thankfully, there is a fix

Take a look at the Moon through binoculars or a telescope and its clear that its been bombarded through history by space rocks. Some of the impacts are energetic enough that debris is ejected from the surface facer than the Moon’s escape velocity. Much of this rock finds its way to Earth and now, a team of researchers announce they have been simulating these events. They simulated asteroid impacts and tracked the debris that escaped the lunar surface and were surprised at just how much of the ejecta found its way to Earth.

A black hole bomb - an idea first proposed in 1969 - has now been realised in the lab as a toy model made from a rotating cylinder and magnetic coils. Studying the bomb could help us better understand real black holes.

An Austrian site occupied by humans from around 24,000 to 20,000 years ago documents a switch towards hunting reindeer for their fur, which may have helped people to endure harsh winters during the last glacial period

Those of us who paid attention to their COVID wishcasting are not the least bit surprised that measles is killing and injuring children under their watch.

The post Our Current Medical Establishment Would Have Botched COVID, The Same Way They Are Botching Measles first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.