All posts tagged: discovery

Major discovery could solve one of science’s greatest mysteries

Major discovery could solve one of science’s greatest mysteries

Published by skeptic

Around 80% of the universe’s matter is dark, meaning it is invisible. Despite being imperceptible, dark matter constantly streams through us at a rate of trillions of particles per second. We know it exists due to its gravitational effects, yet direct detection has remained elusive. The team includes Dr. Michael Thompson, Professor Edward Laird, Dr. Dmitry Zmeev, and Dr. Samuli Autti from Lancaster, Professor Jocelyn Monroe from Oxford, and Professor Andrew Casey from RHUL. Dr. Samuli Autti, an EPSRC Fellow, stated, “We are using quantum technologies at ultra-low temperatures to build the most sensitive detectors to date. The goal is to observe this mysterious matter directly in the laboratory and solve one of the greatest enigmas in science.” While there is indirect evidence of dark matter density in our galaxy, the mass of its particles and their interactions with ordinary atoms are unknown. Particle physics suggests two likely candidates: new particles with ultra-weak interactions and extremely light wave-like particles called axions. The researchers are developing two experiments to search for each candidate. New particles with …

Anger and shock rock Israel after discovery of six dead hostages in Gaza Strip tunnels

Anger and shock rock Israel after discovery of six dead hostages in Gaza Strip tunnels

Published by Sam

At the funeral of Eden Yerushalmi, a Hamas hostage who died in captivity, in Petah Tikva, Israel, on September 1, 2024. SHIR TOREM/REUTERS In the early evening on Sunday, September 1, on the esplanade of Jerusalem’s Kaplan Street in front of the Israeli prime minister’s office, supporters of the hostages held in Gaza were searching for words. They seemed so desperately lacking, unable to express the emotions they’d been feeling since the morning’s announcement of the death of six Hamas captives. “You just want to scream, just scream,” said 74-year-old Riki Fishel. “Since October 7, it’s been the saddest, saddest day,” tried to sum up Tessa Shrem, a retired English teacher. The bodies of Carmel Gat, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino were discovered in a tunnel to Rafah, in the south of the Palestinian enclave, several dozen meters deep, as the Israeli army was conducting operations in the area. According to the autopsy data made public on Sunday by the Israeli Minister of Health, the hostages were killed “at …

VeriSIM Life’s AI platform wants to speed up drug discovery

VeriSIM Life’s AI platform wants to speed up drug discovery

Published by skeptic

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More We’ve already seen how AI can be used to help uncover the structure of proteins and discover new materials, so it would follow naturally that a specially trained AI model could also use data of previous drug molecular structures to find new drugs and accelerate treatments for some of the toughest diseases and medical conditions out there. That’s exactly what one company, VeriSIM Life, based in San Francisco, is hoping to do, through its platform, BIOiSIM, which contains a massive data lake of more than 3 million compounds and 5,000 human and animal datasets with AI models trained atop it, allowing pharmaceutical researchers to find, develop, and test new compounds virtually before spending the money to test them in real clinical trials. Earlier this year, VeriSIM introduced a new feature to the platform, AtlasGEN, focused on providing biological translation simulations — estimates of how well a drug actually works on the human (or animal) body. With …

We May Finally Know How The Pyramids Were Built Thanks To This Discovery

We May Finally Know How The Pyramids Were Built Thanks To This Discovery

Published by Sam

The iconic Egyptian pyramids have been a source of wonder for thousands of years as experts have tried to uncover exactly how they were built with such limitations in building technology and the geographical limitations facing them back in 3200 B.C. However, this year, archaeologists released a study which contained a vital piece of information that may actually help to determine exactly how the pyramids were built. They discovered a long-lost branch of the River Nile, which was buried beneath desert sands for millenia, which could be the secret behind how Egyptians transported the stones, which weighed upwards of 10 tonnes, to the pyramid site. What we now know about the building of Egyptian pyramids This discovery has shed light on how and why 31 pyramids, including the famous Giza complex were built. BBC Science Focus explained: “These pyramids sit on the edge of the harsh Sahara Desert, far from the modern Nile – a seemingly odd location to our modern eyes. “The newly identified 64-kilometre-long branch, dubbed the ‘Ahramat’ (meaning ‘pyramids’ in Arabic), would …

Bowel disease breakthrough as researchers make ‘holy grail’ discovery | Digestive disorders

Bowel disease breakthrough as researchers make ‘holy grail’ discovery | Digestive disorders

Published by skeptic

Researchers have discovered a major driver of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and several other immune disorders that affect the spine, liver and arteries, raising hopes for millions of people worldwide. The breakthrough is particularly exciting because the newly found biological pathway can be targeted by drugs that are already used, with work under way to adapt them to patients with IBD and other conditions. “What we have found is one of the very central pathways that goes wrong when people get inflammatory bowel disease and this has been something of a holy grail,” said Dr James Lee, the group leader of the genetic mechanisms of disease laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Lee added: “Even for pure, fundamental immunology this is a really exciting discovery. But to show this is dysregulated in people who get disease not only gives us a better understanding of the disease, it tells us this is something we can treat.” More than half a million people in the UK have inflammatory bowel disease, the two main forms of …

Serial killer Robert Pickton dies 22 years after a gruesome discovery

Serial killer Robert Pickton dies 22 years after a gruesome discovery

Published by Sam

The search of the pig farm was supposed to find illegal guns. That’s what the informant had told Canadian police. But when officers raided Robert Pickton’s property in British Columbia, what they found was worse. There was women’s clothing and jewelry. An asthma inhaler prescribed to a missing woman. The blood of another. That was just the start. The pig farm soon became the largest crime scene in Canadian history. That initial search led to the arrest of the serial killer who was charged with murdering 26 women and bragged in jail that he had really killed 49. On Friday, Pickton died after another inmate assaulted him on May 19, Canadian authorities said. “We are mindful that this offender’s case has had a devastating impact on communities in British Columbia and across the country, including Indigenous peoples, victims and their families,” Correctional Service Canada said in a news release. “Our thoughts are with them.” Pickton, who pleaded not guilty to the murders, was serving a life sentence. The search began in early 2002, the start …

‘He had a sarcastic turn of phrase’: discovery of 1509 book sheds new light on ‘father of utilitarianism’ | Philosophy

‘He had a sarcastic turn of phrase’: discovery of 1509 book sheds new light on ‘father of utilitarianism’ | Philosophy

Published by skeptic

One of the dangerous “fools” caricatured in a medieval printed satire called Ship of Fools is the Foolish Reader. He is shown in an illustration surrounded by his many learned volumes, but he doesn’t read any of them. This idiot, depicted with many others, including a Feasting Fool, a Preaching Fool and a Procrastinating Fool, was a warning to the wise by the German author Sebastian Brandt 530 years ago. Now research at a London university has unearthed a rare English 1509 copy of this book once owned by the renowned English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. And the 1494 satirical allegory, which pokes fun at various kinds of public folly, sheds new light on Bentham’s influential ethics. It also makes it clear that Bentham himself was not the sort of fool to ignore his own books, since he has left revealing notes and formulas inked in the margins of several pages. Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, is the man who established the principle that the best actions are those that create “the greatest good for the …

The Download: AI accelerating scientific discovery, and Tesla’s EV charging meltdown

The Download: AI accelerating scientific discovery, and Tesla’s EV charging meltdown

Published by skeptic

What’s new: Google DeepMind has released an improved version of its biology prediction tool, AlphaFold, that can predict the structures not only of proteins but of nearly all the elements of biological life. How they did it: AlphaFold 3’s larger library of molecules and higher level of complexity required improvements to the underlying model architecture. So DeepMind turned to diffusion techniques, which have been steadily improving in recent years and power image and video generators. It works by training a model to start with a noisy image and then reduce that noise bit by bit until an accurate prediction emerges—a method that allows AlphaFold 3 to handle a much larger set of inputs. Why it matters: It’s a development that could help accelerate drug discovery and other scientific research. And the tool is already being used to experiment with identifying everything from more resilient crops to new vaccines. Read the full story. —James O’Donnell Why EV charging needs more than Tesla Tesla, one of the biggest electric vehicle makers in the world, laid off its …

Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery Announce That a Bundle of Disney Plus, Hulu and Max Is Coming

Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery Announce That a Bundle of Disney Plus, Hulu and Max Is Coming

Published by skeptic

Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are already teaming up for a sports streaming joint venture, now the two companies have announced that they will be working together on a streaming bundle of Disney Plus, Hulu and Max for the US that is coming this summer.  The new bundle doesn’t yet have a price or an exact release date. The companies say that it will be available to purchase on any of the three streaming platforms’ respective websites and users can choose from ad-supported or ad-free options. When bundled together the companies tout that users will be able to access content from a host of brands including “ABC, CNN, DC, Discovery, Disney, Food Network, FX, HBO, HGTV, Hulu, Marvel, Pixar, Searchlight and Warner Bros.”  It wasn’t immediately clear if this new offer would also include Disney’s ESPN Plus or Warner Bros. Discovery’s Bleacher Report or TNT Sports. As part of the sports joint venture, which is set to arrive later this year, the companies previously announced that there would be bundles of that sports-focused service with …

How the discovery of a nest in a Roman museum caused a kerfuffle

How the discovery of a nest in a Roman museum caused a kerfuffle

Published by skeptic

Nest in mouth Curious items lurk unnoticed in large museums. The photo above shows one of them: a bird’s nest seated in the mouth of a large, ancient, carved stone human face. Feedback recently had the joy of accompanying the director of one of the Netherlands’s great natural history museums when he paid a first visit to the National Roman Museum, an archaeology repository that occupies what once were Rome’s great ancient thermal baths. The previous day, a professor from University College London had visited the same site, noticed this unusual object-inside-an-object – and alerted his Dutch colleague. The professor remarked that it was hanging high on a wall in a dusty section of a large, open-air garden known as Michelangelo’s Cloister. It looked, he said, as if nobody had even glanced at it in recent times. Surely, he said, if the museum had become aware that a bird had homesteaded in that historical mask, the nest would have been removed immediately. The Dutch museum director suspected it was the work of an Italian sparrow …