THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. With the Olympic torch extinguished in Paris, all eyes are turning to Los Angeles for the 2028 Olympics. The host city has promised that the next Summer Games will be “car-free.” For people who know Los Angeles, this …
Read More »So You’re Underwater: Why Do You See That Circle of Light Above You?
Have you ever sat on the bottom of a swimming pool and pondered your watery ceiling? Most of the surface is a sheet of light blue, and you can't see through it, even though the water is clear. But right above you, there's a round window of transparency. And here's …
Read More »The Next Frontier for mRNA Could Be Healing Damaged Organs
On a recent Thursday afternoon, researchers Lanuza Faccioli and Zhiping Hu wheeled an inconspicuous black and white plastic cooler from an operating room at a hospital in downtown Pittsburgh. Inside was a badly scarred liver, just removed from a 47-year-old man undergoing a transplant to receive a new one from …
Read More »The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It
Moqadi Mokoena had been feeling uneasy all day. When he’d left his home on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, for his job as a security guard, he’d had to turn around twice, having forgotten first his watch and then his cigarettes. He had reason to be nervous. His supervisor …
Read More »FDA Approves New Covid Vaccines Amid Summer Surge
Amid a summer surge of Covid-19 infections, the US Food and Drug Administration just approved updated mRNA vaccines that more closely target the currently circulating variants of the coronavirus. The updated vaccines, from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, target a variant of Omicron called KP.2, one of the several so-called FLiRT variants …
Read More »The Covid-19 Summer Wave Is So Big, the FDA Might Release New Vaccines Early
With the US experiencing a relatively large summer wave of Covid-19, the Food and Drug Administration is considering signing off on this year's strain-matched Covid-19 vaccines as soon as this week, according to a report by CNN that cited unnamed officials familiar with the matter. Last year, the FDA gave …
Read More »An ‘AI Scientist’ Is Inventing and Running Its Own Experiments
At first glance, a recent batch of research papers produced by a prominent artificial intelligence lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver might not seem that notable. Featuring incremental improvements on existing algorithms and ideas, they read like the contents of a middling AI conference or journal. But …
Read More »Bayesian Yacht Sinking: Climate Change Created Perfect Storm for Waterspouts
The waterspout blamed for the deadly sinking of a luxury superyacht carrying the British tech billionaire Mike Lynch in Italy has been called a freak “black swan” event. But scientists believe this kind of marine tornado is becoming more common with global warming. While the cause of the sinking of …
Read More »The Quest to Uncover the Secrets of Gold Hydrogen
This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian. In the quest to decarbonize the world, one element gets a lot of hype: hydrogen. “If you burn it, it produces only water, with no impact on the environment,” explains Alberto Vitale Brovarone, a professor in the …
Read More »Climate Change’s Latest Deadly Threat: Lightning Strikes
Through local papers and word of mouth, volunteer Daya Shankar keeps track of a very specific cause of death. As soon as he receives news of someone being struck by lightning around his neighborhood in Jharkhand, East India, he picks up his motorcycle and heads to the destination. Sometimes he …
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