Science
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Register for the Third ISC General Assembly – before 30 November
Register for the Third ISC General Assembly – before 30 November
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Frontiers Planet Prize, Third Edition: Applications Open Until 1 November
Frontiers Planet Prize, Third Edition: Applications Open Until 1 November
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Announcing the ISC Expert Group for the Biological Weapons Convention
Announcing the ISC Expert Group for the Biological Weapons Convention
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The ISC’s Science Missions for Sustainability: A roadmap for delivering the UN Pact for the Future
The ISC’s Science Missions for Sustainability: A roadmap for delivering the UN Pact for the Future
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From siloed data to shared knowledge: How WorldFAIR is shaping the future of research
From siloed data to shared knowledge: How WorldFAIR is shaping the future of research
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Building Bridges through science diplomacy: accelerating progress towards sustainable development
Building Bridges through science diplomacy: accelerating progress towards sustainable development
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Statement of the UNSG’s Scientific Advisory Board on Trust in Science
Statement of the UNSG’s Scientific Advisory Board on Trust in Science
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Empowering local communities: lessons from Typhoon Yagi’s impact on northern Vietnam
Empowering local communities: lessons from Typhoon Yagi’s impact on northern Vietnam
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Australia and New Zealand academics sow seeds of success with Pacific Islands scholars
Australia and New Zealand academics sow seeds of success with Pacific Islands scholars
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ISC Fellows Letter to the scientific community on the occasion of the Summit of the Future
ISC Fellows Letter to the scientific community on the occasion of the Summit of the Future
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Federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals
www.lieffcabraser.com Academic Journal Publishers Antitrust LitigationAcademic Journal Publishers Antitrust Litigation On September 12, 2024, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel at Justice Catalyst Law filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Sage, Wiley, and Wolters ...
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/29254007
> https://www.lieffcabraser.com/antitrust/academic-journals/ > > "On September 12, 2024, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel at Justice Catalyst Law filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Sage, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer, on behalf of a proposed class of scientists and scholars who provided manuscripts or peer review, alleging that these publishers conspired to unlawfully appropriate billions of dollars that would otherwise have funded scientific research." >
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Protected: Vacancy: Science Officer at the International Science Council
Protected: Vacancy: Science Officer at the International Science Council
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Big Data forum adopts a new declaration to support the SDGs
Big Data forum adopts a new declaration to support the SDGs
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Big Data forum adopts a new declaration to support the SDGs
Big Data forum adopts a new declaration to support the SDGs
- worksinprogress.co Doom scrolling - Works in Progress
We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World.
Highlights
>We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World.
>We don’t have original copies of anything, not of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Herodotus, or the Bible. Instead of originals, we find ourselves dealing with copies. These were first written on scrolls but later in books – the Romans called books codexes – starting in the first century AD. Did I say copies? That’s actually not correct either. We don’t have first copies of anything. What we do have is copies of copies, most of which date hundreds of years after the original was penned. Even many of our copies are not complete copies.
>To most fully acclimate the reader to how tenuous this process is, this essay will focus on three different texts. The first will be a very well-known work that was never lost. Nevertheless, almost no one read it in earnest until the nineteenth century. I will then focus on a text that was lost to history, but that we were able to recover from the annals of time. Such examples are fortuitous. Our third example will be a text that we know existed, but of which we have no copies, and consider what important ramifications its discovery could hold. Finally, we’ll turn our attention again to the Villa of the Papyri and the gold mine of texts discovered there that new technologies are currently making available to classicists.
>However, many of the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri remain not only unread, but also unopened. This is because the eruption of Vesuvius left the scrolls carbonized, making it nearly impossible to open them. Despite this obstacle, Dr. Brent Seales pioneered a new technology in 2015 that allowed him and his team to read a scroll without opening it. The technique, using X-ray tomography and computer vision, is known as virtual unwrapping, and it was first used on one of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, specifically the En-Gedi scroll, the earliest known copy of the Book of Leviticus (likely 210–390 CE). The X-rays allow scholars to create a virtual copy of the text that can then be read like any other ancient document by those with the proper language and paleography skills. Using Dr. Seales’s technique, scholars have been able to upload many of the texts online. A group of donors led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross have offered cash prizes to teams of classicists who can decipher the writings. The race to read the virtually unwrapped scrolls is known as the Vesuvius Challenge.
- www.quantamagazine.org The Physics of Cold Water May Have Jump-Started Complex Life | Quanta Magazine
When seawater gets cold, it gets viscous. This fact could explain how single-celled ocean creatures became multicellular when the planet was frozen during “Snowball Earth,” according to experiments.
Highlights
>When seawater gets cold, it gets viscous. This fact could explain how single-celled ocean creatures became multicellular when the planet was frozen during “Snowball Earth,” according to experiments.
>A series of papers from the lab of Carl Simpson proposes an answer linked to a fundamental physical fact: As seawater gets colder, it gets more viscous, and therefore more difficult for very small organisms to navigate. Imagine swimming through honey rather than water. If microscopic organisms struggled to get enough food to survive under these conditions, as Simpson’s modeling work has implied, they would be placed under pressure to change — perhaps by developing ways to hang on to each other, form larger groups, and move through the water with greater force. Maybe some of these changes contributed to the beginning of multicellular animal life.
>The experiment comes with a few caveats, and the paper has yet to be peer-reviewed; Simpson posted a preprint on biorxiv.org earlier this year. But it suggests that if Snowball Earth did act as a trigger for the evolution of complex life, it might be due to the physics of cold water.
>It is difficult to precisely date when animals arose, but an estimate from molecular clocks — which use mutation rates to estimate the passage of time — suggests that the last common ancestor of multicellular animals emerged during the era known as the Sturtian Snowball Earth, sometime between 717 million and 660 million years ago. Large, unmistakably multicellular animals appear in the fossil record tens of millions of years after the Earth melted following another, shorter Snowball Earth period around 635 million years ago.
>The paradox — a planet seemingly hostile to life giving evolution a major push — continued to perplex Simpson throughout his schooling and into his professional life. In 2018, as an assistant professor, he had an insight: As seawater gets colder, it grows thicker. It’s basic physics — the density and viscosity of water molecules rises as the temperature drops. Under the conditions of Snowball Earth, the ocean would have been twice or even four times as viscous as it was before the planet froze over.
>As large creatures, we don’t think much about the thickness of the fluids around us. It’s not a part of our daily lived experience, and we are so big that viscosity doesn’t impinge on us very much. The ability to move easily — relatively speaking — is something we take for granted. From the time Simpson first realized that such limits on movement could be a monumental obstacle to microscopic life, he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it. Viscosity may have mattered quite a lot in the origins of complex life, whenever that was.
>“Putting this into our repertoire of thinking about why these things evolved — that is the value of the entire thing,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it was Snowball Earth. It doesn’t matter if it happened before or after. Just the idea that it can happen, and happen quickly.”
- www.quantamagazine.org With ‘Digital Twins,’ The Doctor Will See You Now | Quanta Magazine
By creating digital twin of your circulatory system, Amanda Randles wants to bring unprecedented precision to medical forecasts.
Highlights
>Amanda Randles wants to copy your body. If the computer scientist had her way, she’d have enough data — and processing power — to effectively clone you on her computer, run the clock forward, and see what your coronary arteries or red blood cells might do in a week. Fully personalized medical simulations, or “digital twins,” are still beyond our abilities, but Randles has pioneered computer models of blood flow over long durations that are already helping doctors noninvasively diagnose and treat diseases.
>Her latest system takes 3D images of a patient’s blood vessels, then simulates and forecasts their expected fluid dynamics. Doctors who use the system can not only measure the usual stuff, like pulse and blood pressure, but also spy on the blood’s behavior inside the vessel. This lets them observe swirls in the bloodstream called vortices and the stresses felt by vessel walls — both of which are linked to heart disease. A decade ago, Randles’ team could simulate blood flow for only about 30 heartbeats, but today they can foresee over 700,000 heartbeats (about a week’s worth). And because their models are interactive, doctors can also predict what will happen if they take measures such as prescribing medicine or implanting a stent.
>It’s a lot of data. We’re running simulations with up to 580 million red blood cells. There’s interactions with the fluid and red blood cells, the cells with each other, the cells with the walls — you’re trying to capture all of that. For each model, one time point might be half a terabyte, and there are millions of time steps in each heartbeat. It’s really computationally intense.
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The United Nations Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB): Mobilizing science for a sustainable future
The United Nations Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB): Mobilizing science for a sustainable future
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Rebuilding trust in science: Challenges and responsibilities in a polarized world
Rebuilding trust in science: Challenges and responsibilities in a polarized world
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Broadening horizons: Local knowledge to strengthen foresight practices
Broadening horizons: Local knowledge to strengthen foresight practices
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Looting of the Sudan National Museum – more is at stake than priceless ancient treasures
Looting of the Sudan National Museum – more is at stake than priceless ancient treasures
- interestingengineering.com Magical equation unites quantum physics, general relativity in a first
Scientists have finally figured out a way to connect the dots between the macroscopic and the microscopic worlds. Their magical equation might provide us answers to questions like why black holes don't collapse and how quantum gravity works.
Edit: The paper is total nonsense. Sorry for wasting people's time.
https://youtu.be/Yk_NjIPaZk4?si=dasxM2Py-s654djW
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AI was born at a US summer camp 68 years ago. Here’s why that event still matters today
AI was born at a US summer camp 68 years ago. Here’s why that event still matters today
- www.livescience.com 'Closer than people think': Woolly mammoth 'de-extinction' is nearing reality — and we have no idea what happens next
Scientists are getting very close to bringing a few iconic species, like woolly mammoths and dodos, back from extinction. That may not be a good thing.
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Call for proposals: Website support and maintenance
Call for proposals: Website support and maintenance
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Researchers Map 50,000 of DNA’s Mysterious ‘Knots’ in the Human Genome
Innovative study of DNA’s hidden structures may open up new approaches for treatment and diagnosis of diseases, including cancer.
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Mitochondria are Flinging Their DNA into Our Brain Cells
www.cuimc.columbia.edu Mitochondria Are Flinging Their DNA into Our Brain CellsA new study finds that mitochondria in our brain cells frequently fling their DNA into the cells' nucleus, where the mitochondrial DNA integrates into chromosomes, possibly causing harm.
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Nominations for the ISC Governing Board closing this week on Friday 30 August
Nominations for the ISC Governing Board closing this week on Friday 30 August
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SCAR Open Science Conference in Chile: a catalyst for polar research
SCAR Open Science Conference in Chile: a catalyst for polar research
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SCAR Open Science Conference in Chile: a catalyst for polar research
SCAR Open Science Conference in Chile: a catalyst for polar research
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The collapse of science: a scientist’s personal account from Gaza
The collapse of science: a scientist’s personal account from Gaza
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Health-threat ‘forever chemicals’ removed from water with 3D-printed ceramic ink
www.bath.ac.uk /announcements/health-threat-forever-chemicals-removed-from-water-with-3d-printed-ceramic-ink/“Engineers have invented a new way to remove health-harming ‘forever chemicals’ from water – using 3D printing.
Researchers at the University of Bath say their method, using ceramic-infused lattices (or ‘monoliths’), removes at least 75% of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), one of the most common perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS), from water, and could become an important tool in future efforts to eliminate the chemicals from water supplies.
Their findings were published this week in The Chemical Engineering Journal.”
[…]
“Testing of the monoliths has surprisingly shown they have become more effective under repeated use – they undergo high-temperature thermal ‘regeneration’ treatment after each use. This is something the researchers are keen to understand more fully with further experimentation.”
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Big mission science and large infrastructure projects take a systems-based approach. Can we do the same for sustainability science?
Big mission science and large infrastructure projects take a systems-based approach. Can we do the same for sustainability science?
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Supporting at-risk and displaced Sudanese scientists: offers of assistance, news and resources
Supporting at-risk and displaced Sudanese scientists: offers of assistance, news and resources
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Science at risk: a race against time to protect seeds in Sudan
Science at risk: a race against time to protect seeds in Sudan
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Researchers offer alternatives to Eurocentric ways of doing things
Researchers offer alternatives to Eurocentric ways of doing things
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IPCC call for authors and editors for the “Special Report on Climate Change and Cities”
IPCC call for authors and editors for the “Special Report on Climate Change and Cities”
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IPCC call for authors and editors for a methodology report on inventories for short-lived climate forcers
IPCC call for authors and editors for a methodology report on inventories for short-lived climate forcers
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Nominations open for the Foundation Fellowship of the Pacific Academy of Sciences
Nominations open for the Foundation Fellowship of the Pacific Academy of Sciences