Science and Technology

Friday, 11 August 2023 04:27

A decade after a disastrous launch, is Apple Maps finally good?

In October 2022, New York City officials unveiled a new bike lane on Schermerhorn street, one of the most dangerous and heavily trafficked streets in downtown Brooklyn and somewhere I had always avoided on my bike. Unless I was a religious reader of transportation department press releases (I’m not), I would have no way of knowing the lane existed – except that very same morning, my Apple Maps app sent me on the new Schermerhorn bike lane, instead of hurtling down Dean Street. By the time I was taking my return route, it was busy with cyclists. For Apple to…

Sunday, 06 August 2023 03:54

What is a healthy resting heart rate? Experts explain why it matters

While some measures of physical fitness such as athletic ability and one's strength or stamina may be difficult to ascertain right away, others are more obvious. One's resting heart rate, for instance, is easy to check and says a lot about a person's wellbeing. "Your heart rate is one of the first signs that gives your doctor insight into your overall health," says Doris Chan, DO, a cardiologist at NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn. "It guides us in the right direction when, and if, further testing is necessary." Despite the importance of resting heart rates, some people don't understand what…

Wednesday, 02 August 2023 04:46

Scientists achieve breakthrough that could stop Covid forever

Antibodies that can neutralise virtually all known Covid variants have been discovered by scientists, offering hope of preventing future coronavirus outbreaks. The antibodies were initially isolated from the blood of a recovered SARS patient who went on to receive a Covid-19 vaccine. Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, which led the research, said in a statement: ‘This unique combination of prior coronavirus infection and vaccination generated an extremely broad and powerful antibody response capable of stopping nearly all related coronaviruses tested.’ Six antibodies were obtained that could neutralise multiple coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2 – Covid-19 – its variants Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta…

Tuesday, 01 August 2023 04:24

World’s largest wind turbine switched on

China has long been touted as a revolutionary when it comes to wind power. Earlier this year, it was reported that the country had begun construction of a wind farm using what were then hailed as the largest turbines ever seen, each with a capacity of 16 megawatts. Now, a new milestone has been reached, with the successful switch-on of a turbine with a rotor diameter over twice the length of a football field. China Three Gorges Corporation announced that the 16-megawatt MySE 16-260 turbine had been successfully installed at the company’s offshore wind farm near Fujian Province on July…

Friday, 21 July 2023 04:44

File this under 'That's not supposed to happen!': Scientists observed a metal healing itself

File this under 'That's not supposed to happen!': Scientists observed a metal healing itself, something never seen before. If this process can be fully understood and controlled, we could be at the start of a whole new era of engineering. A team from Sandia National Laboratories and Texas A&M University was testing the resilience of the metal, using a specialized transmission electron microscope technique to pull the ends of the metal 200 times every second. They then observed the self-healing at ultra-small scales in a 40-nanometer-thick piece of platinum suspended in a vacuum. Cracks caused by the kind of strain…

Tuesday, 18 July 2023 04:00

Interest in Threads, Twitter rival collapses

Threads reached 100 million sign-ups within just five days of launch, with Mark Zuckerberg celebrating every step of the way, but the actual usage of Meta’s Twitter clone appears to have fallen off the proverbial cliff, data analysis has shown. Zuckerberg chose to launch Threads as an Instagram spinoff, prompting the photo platform’s user base to register for the text app when it launched on July 6. The cross-promotion helped the new platform reach ten million users in just seven hours, with Zuckerberg excitedly live-posting the growth. Within a week, Threads made it to 150 million downloads globally, with India…

Monday, 17 July 2023 04:41

Scientists create genetically modified fruit fly that could save farmers billions of dollars

A genetically modified fruit fly could mean the (near) end of insect-related crop loss for berry farmers. Researchers at North Carolina State University have been developing a genetically modified fruit fly to stop these pests from destroying produce. The scientists’ method involves modifying flies to have infertile female offspring and slowly reduce the population of the insect, reported Phys.org. This is huge news for farmers, who suffer 20-40% of crop loss due to pests every year. In fact, an estimated $470 billion of crops are lost annually to certain types of bugs. The NC State University researchers are not the…

Thursday, 13 July 2023 04:34

Musk launches xAI to rival OpenAI, Google

Elon Musk on Wednesday launched his own artificial intelligence company, xAI, as he seeks to compete with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT -- a program he accuses of being politically biased and irresponsible. The xAI website said the Tesla tycoon would run the company separately from his other companies but that the technology developed would benefit those businesses, including Twitter. "The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe," the website said. Musk on Twitter added that the new company's aim was to "understand reality" and answer life's biggest questions. The startup is staffed by former…

Wednesday, 12 July 2023 04:04

Record-breaking sugar battery could supercharge transition to renewable energy

Scientists have used sugar to create a record-breaking battery capable of storing grid-scale energy for more than a year. The breakthrough could help speed up the transition to renewable energysources, which require vast amounts of battery storage in order to avoid relying on fossil fuels to meet demand when solar or wind output is low. A team from the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) made the latest discovery while researching flow batteries, which use two liquid-filled chambers to produce an electrochemical reaction to store and release energy. Flow batteries have the potential to be scaled up…

Tuesday, 11 July 2023 05:04

Musk issues new ‘strange’ challenge to Zuckerberg

Twitter owner Elon Musk has escalated his feud with fellow technology billionaire Mark Zuckerberg by branding him a “cuck” and suggesting that the two social media titans should compete by measuring their male anatomy. “Zuck is a cuck,” Musk said on Sunday in a Twitter post. “I propose a literal dick-measuring contest.” Musk and Zuckerberg -- who rank as the world’s richest and seventh-richest individuals, respectively – have been trading barbs on social media for weeks. Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., accepted Musk’s challenge to a cage match last month. Their rivalry has also heated up on…

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Friday, 07 July 2023 04:28

Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, is now live

Meta is taking on Twitter with a new app. Instagram yesterday announced the anticipated launch of its text-based social networking app, Threads, which allows Instagram users to authenticate with their existing credentials in order to post short updates, including text up to 500 characters; links; photos; and videos up to 5 minutes in length. At launch, Threads is available on iOS and Android in 100 countries, though not in the EU, reportedly due to concerns around adhering to local data privacy regulations. Users can log in with their Instagram credentials, where their username and verification status will carry over. However,…

Thursday, 06 July 2023 04:29

Breakthrough as new treatment can kill cancer while leaving healthy cells intact - Study

Nano-sized particles made from copper and silver are able to kill cancercells with minimal side effects to healthy tissues. This is the promise of new research from the Middle East, who demonstrated a new delivery mechanism for the cancer-killing nanoparticles in cell cultures in the laboratory. If realized clinically, the new treatment approach could offer an alternative to chemotherapy, which comes with some inherent limitations. Chemotherapy drugs tend to have a low tumor specificity and cause unpleasant side effects. On top of this, cancers can develop resistance to these treatments, leading to relapse. The nanoparticle approach, however, can be delivered…

Sunday, 02 July 2023 04:16

Mathematicians discovered something mind-blowing about the number 15

The simple number solves a notoriously complicated problem. A duo of mathematicians just solved a 15-year-old problem. They found an answer to how many numbers you need to fill an infinite grid under specific conditions. The answer: a simple 15. 15: That’s the answer to an incredibly complicated math problem recently solved by a two-person team at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Usually, big, complicated math problems that are hard to solve have big, complicated answers that are almost equally hard for the layperson to understand. But not this one. This one is just … 15. The question, originally posed in…

Saturday, 01 July 2023 03:10

Controversial 'vaginal seeding' shows promise in small trial, but questions remain

"Vaginal seeding," a controversial practice of exposing babies born by cesarean section to their parent's vaginal fluids after birth, may benefit newborns' gut microbiomes, a new study suggests. Babies born by C-section don't have the same gut microbes as those born vaginally, potentially because they're not exposed to their parent's vaginal microbiome during birth. Studies have shown that the gut microbiomes of cesarean-born newborns more closely resemble the communities of microbes that typically inhabit the skin, rather than the gut. This has raised questions about how birth methods affect babies' development, given evidence that the community of microbes in the…

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