All posts tagged: Science

The Download: Legitimizing longevity science, and Harvard’s geoengineering U-turn

The Download: Legitimizing longevity science, and Harvard’s geoengineering U-turn

On a bright chilly day last December, a crowd of doctors and scientists gathered at a research institute atop a hill in Novato, California. Their goal is to help people add years to their lifespans, and to live those extra years in good health. But the meeting’s participants had another goal as well: to be recognized as a credible medical field. For too long, modern medicine has focused on treating disease rather than preventing it, they say. They believe that it’s time to move from reactive healthcare to proactive healthcare. And to do so in a credible way—by setting “gold standards” and medical guidelines for the field. These scientists and clinicians see themselves spearheading a revolution in medicine. But proponents recognize the challenges ahead. Clinicians disagree on how they should assess and treat aging. And without standards and guidelines, there is a real risk that some clinics could end up not only failing to serve their clients, but potentially harming them. Read the full story. —Jessica Hamzelou Harvard halts its long-planned atmospheric geoengineering experiment Harvard …

Flying taxis could take off in two years under new drones plan | Science & Tech News

Flying taxis could take off in two years under new drones plan | Science & Tech News

The first piloted flying taxi could take to the UK skies in two years. The Department for Transport (DfT) has released its Future of Flight Action Plan which also proposes flying taxis without pilots on board by 2030. It has also predicted regular use of crime-fighting drones and critical 999 care deliveries by the end of the decade. The “roadmap” – or more precisely flight plan – would mean the adoption of technology “once confined to the realm of sci-fi”, according to the DfT, with drone technology boosting the country’s economy by £45bn by 2030. Aviation and technology minister Anthony Browne said: “Cutting-edge battery technology will revolutionise transport as we know it – this plan will make sure we have the infrastructure and regulation in place to make it a reality. “From flying taxis to emergency service drones, we’re making sure the UK is at the forefront of this dramatic shift in transportation, improving people’s lives and boosting the economy.” Across the Atlantic, New York City mayor Eric Adams unveiled a similar plan in November …

How to close the maths and science ‘enjoyment gap’

How to close the maths and science ‘enjoyment gap’

New research reveals stark disparities in teenagers’ enjoyment of maths and science – a regional gap we must close to be a science superpower New research reveals stark disparities in teenagers’ enjoyment of maths and science – a regional gap we must close to be a science superpower David Thomas CEO, Axiom Maths 17 Mar 2024, 17:00 More from this theme Recent articles Today marks the end of British Science Week, a ten-day celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) across the UK. But despite this being a nationwide event, new research has found a stark “enjoyment gap” between London and the rest of Britain when it comes to learning maths and science in school. A YouGov survey of more than 1,000 11-to-16-year-olds commissioned by Teach First found that 83 per cent of young people in London enjoy learning science compared to just 68 per cent outside of the capital. The gap is even wider for maths, with 79.5 per cent of London-based 11-to-16-year-olds enjoying the subject, against just 57 per cent of those …

Cosmic cleaners: the scientists scouring English cathedral roofs for space dust | Science

Cosmic cleaners: the scientists scouring English cathedral roofs for space dust | Science

On the roof of Canterbury Cathedral, two planetary scientists are searching for cosmic dust. While the red brick parapet hides the streets, buildings and trees far below, only wispy clouds block the deep blue sky that extends into outer space. The roaring of a vacuum cleaner breaks the silence and researcher Dr Penny Wozniakiewicz, dressed in hazmat suit with a bulky vacuum backpack, carefully traces a gutter with the tube of the suction machine. “We’re looking for tiny microscopic spheres,” explains her colleague, Dr Matthias van Ginneken from the University of Kent, also clad in protective gear. “Right now, we are collecting thousands and thousands of dust particles, and we hope there will be a minuscule number that came from space.” Most of the extraterrestrial dust that bombards Earth each year vaporises in the atmosphere – some models suggest that 15,000 tons reach Earth’s atmosphere (the equivalent of about 75 blue whales). But about 5,200 tons of micrometeorites fall to Earth, based on an estimate from Antarctica. These particles, which most likely come from comets …

Never-Repeating Patterns of Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information

Never-Repeating Patterns of Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information

This extreme fragility might make quantum computing sound hopeless. But in 1995, the applied mathematician Peter Shor discovered a clever way to store quantum information. His encoding had two key properties. First, it could tolerate errors that only affected individual qubits. Second, it came with a procedure for correcting errors as they occurred, preventing them from piling up and derailing a computation. Shor’s discovery was the first example of a quantum error-correcting code, and its two key properties are the defining features of all such codes. The first property stems from a simple principle: Secret information is less vulnerable when it’s divided up. Spy networks employ a similar strategy. Each spy knows very little about the network as a whole, so the organization remains safe even if any individual is captured. But quantum error-correcting codes take this logic to the extreme. In a quantum spy network, no single spy would know anything at all, yet together they’d know a lot. Each quantum error-correcting code is a specific recipe for distributing quantum information across many qubits …

Invisibility Isn’t Science Fiction; It’s Interesting Engineering

Invisibility Isn’t Science Fiction; It’s Interesting Engineering

Invisibility is one of those interesting concepts that started out as imagination: What if I were invisible? Or— in the hands of a storyteller — what if my character were invisible? Tolkien famously made it a power granted by the Ring in The Lord of the Rings. The concept is used in science fiction too, for example, in the form of the cloaking device: However, as science fiction writer Douglas Adams (1952–2001) noted satirically in Life, the Universe, and Everything, in everyday life, “The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what’s more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.” Invisibility can be straightforward science today A number of methods can be used to create invisibility. They rely on the simple fact that things are visible only when light strikes them. But light can be manipulated so as not to strike something. A …

Scientists divided over whether record heat is acceleration of climate crisis | Climate science

Scientists divided over whether record heat is acceleration of climate crisis | Climate science

Record temperatures in 2024 on land and at sea have prompted scientists to question whether these anomalies are in line with predicted global heating patterns or if they represent a concerning acceleration of climate breakdown. Heat above the oceans remains persistently, freakishly high, despite a weakening of El Niño, which has been one of the major drivers of record global temperatures over the past year. Scientists are divided about the extraordinary temperatures of marine air. Some stress that current trends are within climate model projections of how the world will warm as a result of human burning of fossil fuels and forests. Others are perplexed and worried by the speed of change because the seas are the Earth’s great heat moderator and absorb more than 90% of anthropogenic warming. Graphic Earlier this month, the World Meteorological Organization announced that El Niño, a naturally occurring climate pattern associated with the warming of the Pacific Ocean, had peaked and there was an 80% chance of it fading completely between April and June, although its knock-on effects would …

AI more likely to recommend death sentence when defendant writes in African American English | Science & Tech News

AI more likely to recommend death sentence when defendant writes in African American English | Science & Tech News

AI chatbots are more likely to recommend the death penalty when a person writes in African American English (AAE) compared to standardised American English, according to new research.  AI was also more likely to match AAE speakers with less prestigious jobs. African American English is generally spoken by black Americans and Canadians. The paper, which has not been peer reviewed yet, studied covert racism in AI by looking at how the models responded to different dialects of English. Most research into racism in AI has been focused on overt racism, like how an AI chatbot responds to the word ‘black’. “African American English as a dialect triggers racism in language models that is more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally reported,” said Valentin Hofmann, one of the paper’s authors, to Sky News. “When you overtly ask it, ‘What do you think about African Americans?’, it would give relatively positive attributes like ‘intelligent’, ‘enthusiastic’ and so on. Read more from Sky News:Giant volcano spanning 280 miles discovered on MarsComputer scientist is not …

The mystery of consciousness shows there may be a limit to what science alone can achieve

The mystery of consciousness shows there may be a limit to what science alone can achieve

The progress of science in the last 400 years is mind-blowing. Who would have thought we’d be able to trace the history of our universe to its origins 14 billion years ago? Science has increased the length and the quality of our lives, and the technology that is commonplace in the modern world would have seemed like magic to our ancestors. For all of these reasons and more, science is rightly celebrated and revered. However, a healthy pro-science attitude is not the same thing as “scientism”, which is the view that the scientific method is the only way to establish truth. As the problem of consciousness is revealing, there may be a limit to what we can learn through science alone. Perhaps the most worked out form of scientism was the early 20th century movement knows as logical positivism. The logical positivists signed up to the “verification principle”, according to which a sentence whose truth can’t be tested through observation and experiments was either logically trivial or meaningless gibberish. With this weapon, they hoped to …