Researchers have proposed a new explanation for the origin of biological handedness or "homochirality," reports Science Magazine. "In three new papers, researchers suggest magnetic minerals common on early Earth could have caused key biomolecules to accumulate on their surface in just one mirror image form, setting off a positive feedback that continued to favor the same form." From the report: Chemical reactions are typically unbiased, yielding equal amounts of right- and left-handed molecules. But life requires selectivity: Only right-handed DNA, for example, has the correct twist to interact properly with other chiral molecules. To get life, "you've got to break the mirror, or you can't pull it off," says Gerald Joyce, an origin of life chemist and president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Over the past century, researchers have proposed various mechanisms for skewing the first biomolecules, including cosmic rays and polarized light. Both can cause an initial bias favoring either right- or left-handed molecules, but they don't directly explain how this initial bias was amplified to create the large reservoirs of chiral molecules likely needed to make the first cells. An explanation that creates an initial bias is a good start, but "not sufficient," says Dimitar Sasselov, a physicist at Harvard University and a leader of the new work.

[...] Now, Sasselov and his colleagues have put these two pieces together. They wondered whether magnetic surfaces might favor a single RAO chiral form. To find out, they turned to magnetite, a magnetic mineral that is common in Earth's crust. They applied a strong external magnetic field, aligning electron spins in the magnetite and strengthening its magnetism. When they exposed the magnetite surface to a solution containing an equal mix of right- and left-handed RAO molecules, 60% of those that settled on top were of a single handedness. This created a crystalline seed that caused additional like-handed RAOs to bind, eventually forming pure single-handed RAO crystals, the researchers reported last week in Science Advances. When they flipped the field's orientation and repeated the experiment, crystals with the opposite handedness took shape. [...]

In a report accepted last week in The Journal of Chemical Physics they show that once an excess of chiral RNA is formed, known chemical reactions could pass on this chiral bias, templating amino acids and proteins with the opposite handedness and ultimately fostering other chiral molecules essential to cell metabolism. The quest that began with Pasteur isn't quite over, though. One loose end, Sasselov acknowledges, is that RAO has only been shown to lead to the synthesis of two of RNA's four nucleotides, cytosine and uracil. It isn't known to produce the other two, adenine and guanine, although Sasselov says there's a "big push" to search for RAO reactions that could do it. If they can, the mystery of biological handedness might be another step closer to being solved.

Owen Gingerich, a renowned astronomer and historian of science, has passed away at the age of 93. Gingerich dedicated years to tracking down 600 copies of Nicolaus Copernicus's influential book "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium Libri Sex" and was known for his passion for astronomy, often dressing up as a 16th-century scholar for lectures. He believed in the compatibility of religion and science and explored this theme in his books "God's Universe" and "God's Planet." The New York Times reports: Professor Gingerich, who lived in Cambridge, Mass., and taught at Harvard for many years, was a lively lecturer and writer. During his decades of teaching astronomy and the history of science, he would sometimes dress as a 16th-century Latin-speaking scholar for his classroom presentations, or convey a point of physics with a memorable demonstration; for instance, The Boston Globe related in 2004, he "routinely shot himself out of the room on the power of a fire extinguisher to prove one of Newton's laws." He was nothing if not enthusiastic about the sciences, especially astronomy. One year at Harvard, when his signature course, "The Astronomical Perspective," wasn't filling up as fast as he would have liked, he hired a plane to fly a banner over the campus that read: "Sci A-17. M, W, F. Try it!"

Professor Gingerich's doggedness was on full display in his long pursuit of copies of Copernicus's "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium Libri Sex" ("Six Books on the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres"), first published in 1543, the year Copernicus died. That book laid out the thesis that Earth revolved around the sun, rather than the other way around, a profound challenge to scientific knowledge and religious belief in that era. The writer Arthur Koestler had contended in 1959 that the Copernicus book was not read in its time, and Professor Gingerich set out to determine whether that was true. In 1970 he happened on a copy of "De Revolutionibus" that was heavily annotated in the library of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, suggesting that at least one person had read it closely. A quest was born. Thirty years and hundreds of thousands of miles later, Professor Gingerich had examined some 600 Renaissance-era copies of "De Revolutionibus" all over the world and had developed a detailed picture not only of how thoroughly the work was read in its time, but also of how word of its theories spread and evolved. He documented all this in "The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus" (2004). John Noble Wilford, reviewing it in The New York Times, called "The Book Nobody Read" "a fascinating story of a scholar as sleuth."

Professor Gingerich was raised a Mennonite and was a student at Goshen College, a Mennonite institution in Indiana, studying chemistry but thinking of astronomy, when, he later recalled, a professor there gave him pivotal advice: "If you feel a calling to pursue astronomy, you should go for it. We can't let the atheists take over any field." He took the counsel, and throughout his career he often wrote or spoke about his belief that religion and science need not be at odds. He explored that theme in the books "God's Universe" (2006) and "God's Planet" (2014). He was not a biblical literalist; he had no use for those who ignored science and proclaimed the Bible's creation story historical fact. Yet, as he put it in "God's Universe," he was "personally persuaded that a superintelligent Creator exists beyond and within the cosmos." [...] Professor Gingerich, who was senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, wrote countless articles over his career in addition to his books. In one for Science and Technology News in 2005, he talked about the divide between theories of atheistic evolution and theistic evolution. "Frankly it lies beyond science to prove the matter one way or the other," he wrote. "Science will not collapse if some practitioners are convinced that occasionally there has been creative input in the long chain of being." In 2006, Gingerich was mentioned in a Slashdot story about geologists' reacting to the new definition of "Pluton." He was quoted as saying that he was only peripherally aware of the definition, and because it didn't show up on MS Word's spell check, he didn't think it was that important."

"Gingerich lead a committee of the International Astronomical Union charged with recommending whether Pluto should remain a planet," notes the New York Times. "His panel recommended that it should, but the full membership rejected that idea and instead made Pluto a 'dwarf planet.' That decision left Professor Gingerich somehwat dismayed."

"Kairan Quazi will probably need someone to drive him to work at SpaceX," writes the Los Angeles Times — because "He's only 14." The teen is scheduled to graduate this month from the Santa Clara University School of Engineering before starting a job as a software engineer at the satellite communications and spacecraft manufacturer... The soft-spoken teen said working with Starlink — the satellite internet team at SpaceX — will allow him to be part of something bigger than himself. That is no small feat for someone who has accomplished so much at such a young age...

The youngster jumped from third grade to a community college, with a workload that he felt made sense. "I felt like I was learning at the level that I was meant to learn," said Kairan, who later transferred to Santa Clara University... Kairan's family told BrainGain Magazine that when he was 9, IQ tests showed that his intelligence was in the 99.9th percentile of the general population. Asked if he's a genius, he recalled his parents telling him, "Genius is an action â it requires solving big problems that have a human impact." Once accepted to the engineering school at Santa Clara University as a transfer student, Kairan felt that he had found his freedom to pursue a career path that allowed him to solve those big problems.

While in college, Kairan and his mother made a list of places where he could apply for an internship. Only one company responded. Lama Nachman, director of the Intelligent Systems Research Lab at Intel, took a meeting with 10-year-old Kairan, who expected it to be brief and thought she would give him the customary "try again in a few years," he said. She accepted him. "In a sea of so many 'no's' by Silicon Valley's most vaunted companies, that ONE leader saying yes ... one door opening ... changed everything," Kairan wrote on his LinkedIn page...

Asked what he plans to wear on his first day, Kairan joked in an email that he plans "to show up in head to toe SpaceX merch. I'll be a walking commercial! Joking aside, I'll probably wear jeans and a t-shirt so I can be taken seriously as an engineer."

The international space station is equpped with four 39-foot blankets (11.8-meters), reports CBS News. The first one was delivered in December of 2000 — and now it's time for some changes: Two astronauts ventured outside the International Space Station Friday and installed the fifth of six roll-out solar array blankets — iROSAs — needed to offset age-related degradation and micrometeoroid damage to the lab's original solar wings.

Floating in the Quest airlock, veteran Stephen Bowen, making his ninth spacewalk, and crewmate Woody Hoburg, making his first, switched their spacesuits to battery power at 9:25 a.m. EDT, officially kicking off the 264th spacewalk devoted to ISS assembly and maintenance and the seventh so far this year. NASA is in the process of upgrading the ISS's solar power system by adding six iROSAs to the lab's eight existing U.S. arrays. The first four roll-out blankets were installed during spacewalks in 2021 and 2022. Bowen and Hoburg installed the fifth during Friday's spacewalk and plan to deploy the sixth during another excursion next Thursday.

The two new iROSAs were delivered to the space station earlier this week in the unpressurized trunk section of a SpaceX cargo Dragon. The lab's robot arm pulled them out Wednesday and mounted them on the right side of the station's power truss just inboard the starboard wings... As the station sailed 260 miles above the Great Lakes, the 63-foot-long solar array slowly unwound like a window shade to its full length. Well ahead of schedule by that point, the spacewalkers carried out a variety of get-ahead tasks to save time next week when they float back outside to install the second new iROSA.

They returned to the airlock and began re-pressurization procedures at 3:28 p.m., bringing the 6-hour three-minute spacewalk to a close. With nine spacewalks totaling 60 hours and 22 minutes under his belt, Bowen now ranks fifth on the list of the world's most experienced spacewalkers.
"Combined with the 95-kilowatt output of the original eight panels, the station's upgraded system will provide about 215,000 kilowatts of power."

Researchers at a London-based public research university had already discovered that for 5-10% of people with hypertension, the cause is a gene mutation in their adrenal glands. (The mutation results in excessive production of a hormone called aldosterone.)

But that was only the beginning, according to a new announcement from the university shared by SciTechDaily: Clinicians at Queen Mary University of London and Barts Hospital have identified a gene variant that causes a common type of hypertension (high blood pressure) and a way to cure it, new research published in the journal Nature Genetics shows.

The cause is a tiny benign nodule, present in one-in-twenty people with hypertension. The nodule produces a hormone, aldosterone, that controls how much salt is in the body. The new discovery is a gene variant in some of these nodules which leads to a vast, but intermittent, over-production of the hormone. The gene variant discovered today causes several problems which makes it hard for doctors to diagnose some patients with hypertension. Firstly, the variant affects a protein called CADM1 and stops cells in the body from 'talking' to each other and saying that it is time to stop making aldosterone. The fluctuating release of aldosterone throughout the day is also an issue for doctors, which at its peak causes salt overload and hypertension. This fluctuation explains why patients with the gene variant can elude diagnosis unless they happen to have blood tests at different times of day.

The researchers also discovered that this form of hypertension could be cured by unilateral adrenalectomy — removing one of the two adrenal glands. Following removal, previously severe hypertension despite treatment with multiple drugs disappeared, with no treatment required through many subsequent years of observation.

Fewer than 1% of people with hypertension caused by aldosterone are identified because aldosterone is not routinely measured as a possible cause. The researchers are recommending that aldosterone is measured through a 24-hour urine test rather than one-off blood measurements, which will discover more people living with hypertension but going undiagnosed.

In less than two years, NASA plans to have astronauts walking on the moon again — the first time in over half a century. "And one potential surprise could be detecting life on the moon," reports Space.com: New research suggests that future visitors to the lunar south pole region should be on the lookout for evidence of life in super-cold permanently shadowed craters — organisms that could have made the trek from Earth. Microbial life could potentially survive in the harsh conditions near the lunar south pole, suggested Prabal Saxena, a planetary researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "One of the most striking things our team has found is that, given recent research on the ranges in which certain microbial life can survive, there may be potentially habitable niches for such life in relatively protected areas on some airless bodies," Saxena told Space.com.

Indeed, the lunar south pole may possess the properties that can enable survival and potentially even episodic growth of certain microbial life, Saxena said. "We're currently working on understanding which specific organisms may be most suited for surviving in such regions and what areas of the lunar polar regions, including places of interest relevant to exploration, may be most amenable to supporting life," he said. In work presented at a recent science workshop on the potential Artemis 3 landing sites, Saxena and study members reported that the lunar south pole may contain substantial surface niches that could be potentially habitable for a number of microorganisms.
While it's possible organic molecules from earth might have been hurled to the moon after a meteor impact, there's a much more likely possibility. A NASA organic geochemist on the study views humans as "the most likely vector, given the extensive data that we have about our history of exploration..." Especially if humans start visiting these temperate radiation-protected sites...

The New York Times defines the solar wind as "a million-miles-per-hour stream of electrons, protons and other charged particles rushing outward into the solar system."

Now CNN reports that the Parker Solar Probe "has uncovered the source of solar wind." As the probe came within about 13 million miles (20.9 million kilometers) of the sun, its instruments detected fine structures of the solar wind where it generates near the photosphere, or the solar surface, and captured ephemeral details that disappear once the wind is blasted from the corona...A study detailing the solar findings was published Wednesday in the journal Nature...

There are two types of this wind. The faster solar wind streams from holes in the corona at the sun's poles at a peak speed of 497 miles per second (800 kilometers per second)... The spacecraft's data revealed that the coronal holes act like showerheads, where jets appear on the sun's surface in the form of bright spots, marking where the magnetic field passes in and out of the photosphere. As magnetic fields pass each other, moving in opposite directions within these funnels on the solar surface, they break and reconnect, which sends charged particles flying out of the sun.

"The photosphere is covered by convection cells, like in a boiling pot of water, and the larger scale convection flow is called supergranulation," said lead study author Stuart D. Bale, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement. "Where these supergranulation cells meet and go downward, they drag the magnetic field in their path into this downward kind of funnel. The magnetic field becomes very intensified there because it's just jammed. It's kind of a scoop of magnetic field going down into a drain. And the spatial separation of those little drains, those funnels, is what we're seeing now with solar probe data."

Parker Solar Probe detected highly energetic particles traveling between 10 and 100 times faster than the solar wind, leading the researchers to believe that the fast solar wind is created by the reconnection of magnetic fields. "The big conclusion is that it's magnetic reconnection within these funnel structures that's providing the energy source of the fast solar wind," Bale said. "It doesn't just come from everywhere in a coronal hole, it's substructured within coronal holes to these supergranulation cells. It comes from these little bundles of magnetic energy that are associated with the convection flows."

New research suggests that Arctic summer sea ice could melt almost completely by the 2030s, a decade earlier than previously projected, even with significant greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Smithsonian Magazine reports: "We are very quickly about to lose the Arctic summer sea-ice cover, basically independent of what we are doing," Dirk Notz, a climate scientist at the University of Hamburg in Germany tells the New York Times' Raymond Zhong. "We've been waiting too long now to do something about climate change to still protect the remaining ice." An ice-free summer, also called a "blue ocean event," will happen when the sea ice drops below one million square kilometers (386,102 square miles), writes Jonathan Bamber, a professor of physical geography at the University of Bristol, in the Conversation. This equates to just 15 percent of the Arctic's seasonal minimum ice cover of the late 1970s, per the Times.

Previous assessments using models have estimated an ice-free summer under high and intermediate emissions scenarios by 2050. But researchers noticed differences between what climate models predicted about what would happen to sea ice and what they've actually seen through observations, according to Bob Weber of the Canadian Press. "The models, on average, underestimate sea ice decline compared with observations," says Nathan Gillett, an environment and climate change Canada scientist, to Weber.

Now, in a new study published in Nature Communications, Notz, Gillett and their colleagues tweaked these models to more closely fit satellite data collected over the past 40 years. Using these modified models, the researchers projected ice changes under different possible levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Their paper suggests that regardless of emissions scenario, "we may experience an unprecedented ice-free Arctic climate in the next decade or two." Under a high emissions scenario, the Arctic could see a sustained loss of sea ice from August until as late as October before the 2080s, lead author Seung-Ki Min, a climate scientist at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, tells CNN's Rachel Ramirez.

China is planning to deploy a constellation of satellites in orbit around the moon to create a radio telescope that would enable the study of radio waves longer than 33 feet, providing insights into the "Dark Ages" of the universe. Space.com reports: The array would consist of one "mother" satellite and eight mini "daughter" craft. The mother would process data and communicate with Earth, and the daughters would detect radio signals from the farthest reaches of the cosmos, Xuelei Chen, an astronomer at the China National Space Administration (CNSA), said at the Astronomy From the Moon conference held earlier this year in London. Putting such an array in orbit around the moon would be technically more feasible than building a telescope directly on the lunar surface, a venture that NASA and other space agencies are currently considering as one of the next big steps in astronomy.

"There are a number of advantages in doing this in orbit instead of on the surface because it's engineeringly much simpler," Chen said during the conference. "There is no need for landing and a deployment, and also because the lunar orbital period is two hours, we can use solar power, which is much simpler than doing it on the lunar surface, which, if you want to observe during the lunar night, then you have to provide the energy for almost 14 days." He added that this proposed "Discovering Sky at the Longest Wavelength," or Hongmeng Project, could orbit the moon as early as 2026.

A telescope on the moon, astronomers say, would allow them to finally see cosmic radiation in a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is impossible to study from Earth's surface: radio waves longer than 33 feet (10 meters), or, in other words, those with frequencies below 30 megahertz (MHz). "If you are looking into the low-frequency part of the electromagnetic spectrum, you'll find that, due to strong absorption [by Earth's atmosphere], we know very little about [the region] below 30 megahertz," Chen said. "It's almost a blank part of the electromagnetic spectrum. So we want to open this last electromagnetic window of the universe."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Octopuses have found an incredible way to protect the more delicate features of their nervous system against radically changing temperatures. When conditions fluctuate, they can rapidly recode key proteins in their nerve cells, ensuring critical neurological activities remain functional when temperatures drop dramatically. How do they do it? By deploying a rare superpower -- editing their RNA on the fly, an ability found in some species of octopuses, squids and cuttlefish. It's an unusual strategy, but it appears to be an effective one, and scientists believe that it may be widely adopted throughout the world of cephalopods. [...]

Their subjects were California two-spot octopuses (Octopus bimaculoides), whose entire genome was first sequenced in 2005, making it a useful animal for understanding genetic changes. The researchers acclimated these octopuses to warm water at 22 degrees Celsius (71.6 Fahrenheit) or much chillier water at 13 degrees Celsius (55.4 Fahrenheit), then compared their genetic information against the database genome. They specifically looked at over 60,000 known editing sites, and what they found was astonishing. "Temperature-sensitive editing occurred at about one third of our sites -- over 20,000 individual places -- so this is not something that happens here or there; this is a global phenomenon," says physicist Eli Eisenberg of Tel-Aviv University, co-senior author of the paper. "But that being said, it does not happen equally: proteins that are edited tend to be neural proteins, and almost all sites that are temperature sensitive are more highly edited in the cold."

So the editing seemed to be in response to acclimating to cold, rather than warm water, affecting neural proteins that, specifically, are sensitive to cold temperatures. And tests of structural proteins critical for the function of the octopus nervous system -- kinesin and synaptotagmin -- found that the changes wrought would have an impact on their function. It was possible that what the team observed was the result of being in a lab, so they caught wild California two-spot octopuses and Verrill's two-spot octopuses (Octopus bimaculatus) in Summer and Winter and checked their genomes, too. These octopuses had similar patterns of RNA editing that suggested they were optimizing their function for the current temperature conditions.

The team also tested to see how quickly the changes take place. They tweaked the temperature of an octopus's tank from 14 degrees Celsius to 24 degrees Celsius or vice versa, tuning the temperature up or down by 0.5 degrees increments over the course of 20 hours. They tested the extent of RNA editing in each octopus just before starting the temperature change, just after, and four days later. It happens very quickly, the researchers found. "We had no real idea how quickly this can occur: whether it takes weeks or hours," explains [marine biologist Matthew Birk of the Marine Biological Laboratory and Saint Francis University]. "We could see significant changes in less than a day, and within four days, they were at the new steady-state levels that you find them in after a month." The research has been published in the journal Cell.

A new study suggests that long missions and frequent voyages to space may have an impact on astronaut brains. Space.com reports: The most enduring spaceflight-related changes in the brain yet detected are the way cavities in the brain known as ventricles can enlarge by up to 25%. Ventricles are filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which helps protect, nourish and remove waste from the brain. The absence of a gravitational pull leads the brain to shift upward in the skull and causes the ventricles to expand. It remains uncertain what the long-term consequences of this ventricle expansion might be. "How this impacts performance and long-term health is an open question," study senior author Rachael Seidler, a space health researcher at the University of Florida in Gainesville, told Space.com.

One mystery regarding this ventricle expansion is whether it differs with factors such as varying mission length, the number of previous missions flown, or time between missions. To find out, Seidler and her colleagues scanned the brains of 30 astronauts using MRI before and after spaceflight. They looked at eight astronauts who went on two-week missions, 18 on six-month missions, and four who went on longer missions of up to one year. The scientists found that longer spaceflight missions resulted in greater ventricle swelling, most of which happened during the first six months in space. "The biggest jump comes when you go from two weeks to six months in space," Seidler said in a statement. "There is no measurable change in the ventricles' volume after only two weeks."

Given the rise in space tourism in recent years, these findings may prove welcome, as shorter space trips appear to cause little physical change to the brain. In addition, the rate of ventricle enlargement tapered off after six months in space, which may also be good news â" these changes don't continue to increase over time, Seidler said. "This is important to know for future longer duration missions, such as to Mars," she noted. The scientists also found that less than three years between spaceflights may not provide enough time to give the ventricles enough time to fully recover to how they were before spaceflight. "This is a surprisingly long time," Seidler said. The researchers plan to examine long-term health in astronauts, "including testing crewmembers out to five years post-flight," said Seidler. "This will help enormously in terms of understanding the potential implications of the current results. But the work is expected to take 10 years."

The research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Scientists are calling for a major clinical trial to investigate the potential benefits of taurine supplementation, a substance commonly found in energy drinks. Animal studies have shown that replenishing taurine levels to more youthful levels can slow down the aging process, improve health, and even extend lifespans in mice. The Guardian reports: Prof Henning Wackerhage, a molecular exercise physiologist on the team at the Technical University of Munich, said a trial would compare how humans fared after taking daily taurine or placebo supplements. "It will probably be very difficult to look at whether they live longer, but at least we can check if they live healthier for longer, and that of course is the goal for medicine."

Yadav's team homed in on taurine as a potential driver of the ageing process in 2012 when an analysis of blood compounds found that levels of the amino acid dropped dramatically with age in mice, monkeys and humans. By the age of 60, taurine levels in a typical person slumped to one-third of that seen in five-year-olds, they found. The discovery prompted the team to test the impact of extra taurine on middle-aged mice. "Whatever we checked, taurine-supplemented mice were healthier and appeared younger than the control mice," Yadav said, noting they had denser bones, stronger muscles, better memory and younger looking immune systems. "Taurine made animals live healthier and longer lives by affecting all the major hallmarks of ageing." Beyond improving health, mice on taurine lived longer -- on average an extra 10% for males and 12% for females, amounting to an additional three to four months, the equivalent of seven or eight human years. A comparable dose for humans would be three to six grams a day.

The scientists next looked at whether boosting taurine benefited animals that were much closer biologically to humans. A six-month trial in middle-aged macaques found that a daily taurine pill appeared to boost health by preventing weight gain, lowering blood glucose and improving bone density and the immune system. Other evidence suggests taurine supplementation may have some effect in humans. Yadav and his team analysed medical data from 12,000 Europeans aged 60 and over. Those with higher taurine levels had less obesity, type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, and lower levels of inflammation. Strenuous sessions on an exercise bike were found to boost taurine levels, the researchers report in Science.

Without a major trial to demonstrate the safety or any benefits of taurine supplements, the scientists are not recommending people boost their intake through pills, energy drinks or dietary changes. Taurine is made naturally in the body and is found in meat and shellfish diets, but the healthiest diets are largely plant-based. Some energy drinks contain taurine, but the scientists warn they also contain other substances that may not be safe to consume at high levels.

Academics have apparently trained a machine learning algorithm to detect scientific papers generated by ChatGPT and claim the software has over 99 percent accuracy. From a report: Generative AI models have dramatically improved at mimicking human writing over a short period of time, making it difficult for people to tell whether text was produced by a machine or human. Teachers and lecturers have raised concerns that students using the tools are committing plagiarism, or apparently cheating using machine-generated code. Software designed to detect AI-generated text, however, is often unreliable. Experts have warned against using these tools to assess work.

A team of researchers led by the University of Kansas thought it would be useful to develop a way to detect AI-generated science writing -- specifically written in the style of research papers typically accepted and published by academic journals. "Right now, there are some pretty glaring problems with AI writing," said Heather Desaire, first author of a paper published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, and a chemistry professor at the University of Kansas, in a statement. "One of the biggest problems is that it assembles text from many sources and there isn't any kind of accuracy check -- it's kind of like the game Two Truths and a Lie."

Artificial photosynthesis, inspired by the natural process that enables plants to convert sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into oxygen and energy, could be crucial for space exploration and colonization. By using semiconductor materials and metallic catalysts, these devices could efficiently produce oxygen and recycle carbon dioxide, reducing reliance on heavy and unreliable systems currently used on the International Space Station. ScienceAlert reports: As my colleagues and I have investigated in a new paper, published in Nature Communications, recent advances in making artificial photosynthesis may well be key to surviving and thriving away from Earth. [...] We produced a theoretical framework to analyze and predict the performance of such integrated "artificial photosynthesis" devices for applications on Moon and Mars. Instead of chlorophyll, which is responsible for light absorption in plants and algae, these devices use semiconductor materials which can be coated directly with simple metallic catalysts supporting the desired chemical reaction. Our analysis shows that these devices would indeed be viable to complement existing life support technologies, such as the oxygen generator assembly employed on the ISS. This is particularly the case when combined with devices which concentrate solar energy in order to power the reactions (essentially large mirrors which focus the incoming sunlight).

There are other approaches too. For example, we can produce oxygen directly from lunar soil (regolith). But this requires high temperatures to work. Artificial photosynthesis devices, on the other hand, could operate at room temperature at pressures found on Mars and the Moon. That means they could be used directly in habitats and using water as the main resource. This is particularly interesting given the stipulated presence of ice water in the lunar Shackleton crater, which is an anticipated landing site in future lunar missions.

On Mars, the atmosphere composes of nearly 96% carbon dioxide - seemingly ideal for an artificial photosynthesis device. But the light intensity on the red planet is weaker than on Earth due to the larger distance from the Sun. So would this pose a problem? We actually calculated the sunlight intensity available on Mars. We showed that we can indeed use these devices there, although solar mirrors become even more important. [...] The returns would be huge. For example, we could actually create artificial atmospheres in space and produce chemicals we require on long-term missions, such as fertilizers, polymers, or pharmaceuticals. Additionally, the insights we gain from designing and fabricating these devices could help us meet the green energy challenge on Earth.

Google's cloud business is expanding its use of new artificial intelligence technologies in health care, giving medical professionals at Mayo Clinic the ability to quickly find patient information using the types of tools powering the latest chatbots. From a report: On Wednesday, Google Cloud said Mayo Clinic is testing a new service called Enterprise Search on Generative AI App Builder, which was introduced Tuesday. The tool effectively lets clients create their own chatbots using Google's technology to scour mounds of disparate internal data. In health care, that means workers can interpret data such as a patient's medical history, imaging records, genomics or labs more quickly and with a simple query, even if the information is stored across different formats and locations. Mayo Clinic, one of the top hospital systems in the U.S. with dozens of locations, is an early adopter of the technology for Google, which is trying to bolster the use of generative AI in the medical system.

Mayo Clinic will test out different use cases for the search tool in the coming months, and Vish Anantraman, chief technology officer at Mayo Clinic, said it has already been "very fulfilling" for helping clinicians with administrative tasks that often contribute to burnout. For instance, if a physician needs to see information about a cohort of female patients aged 45 through 55, including their mammograms and medical charts, they can enter that query into the search tool instead of seeking out each element separately. Similarly, if a physician needs to know which clinical trials a patient may match, they can search for that, too.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have successfully demonstrated the capability of steering power in a microwave beam from a satellite to targets in space, as well as transmitting some of that power to a detector on Earth. Science Magazine reports: The Caltech mission, funded by the Donald Bren Foundation and Northrop Grumman Corporation, aimed to go a step further with lightweight, inexpensive, and flexible components. The microwave transmitter was an array of 32 flat antennas packed onto a surface slightly larger than a dinner plate. By varying the timing of signals sent to the different antennas, the researchers could steer the array's beam. They pointed it at a pair of microwave receivers about a forearm's distance away and switched the beam from one receiver to the other at will, lighting up an LED on each.

The transmitted power was small, just 200 milliwatts, less than that of a cellphone camera light. But the team was still able to steer the beam toward Earth and detect it with a receiver at Caltech. "It was a proof of concept," says Caltech electrical engineer Ali Hajimiri. "It indicates what an overall system can do."

The Caltech spacecraft still has two more planned experiments. One is now testing 32 different varieties of solar cell to see which best survives the rigors of space. The second is a folded piece of ultralight composite material that will unfurl into a sail-like structure 2 meters across. Although the sail will not hold any solar cells, it is meant to test the kind of thin, flexible, and large deployments required for a future power station.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: A biotechnology company selling a $949 blood test that it bills as a "first of its kind" to detect cancer said it incorrectly informed about 400 customers that they might have the disease. The Menlo Park, California, company, called Grail, said it sent a form letter to some customers who had bought its Galleri test, which detects a marker for more than 50 types of cancer, "stating incorrectly that a cancer signal was detected," a company spokeswoman told CBS MoneyWatch in a statement. The company blamed a vendor, PWN Health, for the error, citing a "software configuration issue."

In a statement, PWN Health said it said the problem was due to "a misconfiguration of our patient engagement platform used to send templated communications to individuals." It added that it has added processes to make sure such a mistake doesn't occur again, and started contacting the people who received the erroneous letters within 36 hours. The error comes amid an increased demand for health care screening tests, especially for chronic diseases such as cancer.

Grail is billing its service as a complement to routine single-cancer tests for diseases such as colon or breast cancer, and said that the blood test can detect forms of the disease that aren't routinely screened for, such as in the gallbladder and pancreas. Grail said it hasn't received reports of patient harm or "adverse events" due to the erroneous letters. "After being notified of the incident, Grail immediately began outreach by phone or email to all individuals who received the PWNHealth letter, and we continued our efforts until we confirmed we successfully reached each individual via phone, email or letter," the spokeswoman said. "The issue was in no way related to or caused by an incorrect Galleri laboratory test result."

More than half the erroneous letters were sent to customers who hadn't had their blood drawn yet for the Galleri test, the spokeswoman added.

On Monday, Illumina filed an appeal against a FTC order, "demanding that it divest cancer diagnostic test maker Grail over competition concerns in the U.S. market for cancer tests," reports Reuters. According to the filing, Illumina is arguing that the FTC "violated due process by depriving Illumina and Grail of a fair proceeding before an impartial tribunal."

US healthcare chain Carbon Health has implemented an AI tool named Carby, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 language model, to automatically generate medical records from conversations between physicians and patients. The Register reports: If a patient consents to having their meeting recorded and transcribed, the audio recording is passed to Amazon's AWS Transcribe Medical cloud service, which converts the speech to text. The transcript -- along with data from the patient's medical records, including recent test results -- is passed to an ML model that produces notes summarizing important information gathered in the consultation. The screenshot of an example medical chart below shows what type of text the software, nicknamed Carby, generates. The hypothetical patient's information and vital measurements are included, as well as a summaries of medical records and diagnoses.

Carbon Health CEO Eren Bali said the software is directly integrated into the firm's electronic health records (EHR) system, and is powered by OpenAI's latest language model, GPT-4. Carbon Health said the tool produces consultation summaries in four minutes, compared to the 16 consumed by a flesh and blood doctor working alone. Clinics can therefore see more patients [...] Generative AI models aren't perfect, and often produce errors. Physicians therefore need to verify the AI-generated text. Carbon Health claims 88 percent of the verbiage can be accepted without edits. Carbon Health said the model is already supporting over 130 clinics, where over 600 staff have access to the tool. A clinic testing the tool in San Francisco reportedly saw a 30 percent increase in the number of patients it could treat.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Mycorrhizal fungi have been supporting life on land for at least 450 million years by helping to supply plants with soil nutrients essential for growth. In recent years, scientists have found that in addition to forming symbiotic relationships with nearly all land plants, these fungi are important conduits to transport carbon into soil ecosystems. In a meta-analysis published June 5 in the journal Current Biology, scientists estimate that as much as 13.12 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) fixed by terrestrial plants is allocated to mycorrhizal fungi annually -- roughly equivalent to 36% of yearly global fossil fuel emissions. Because 70% to 90% of land plants form symbiotic relationships with mycorrhizal fungi, researchers have long surmised that there must be a large amount of carbon moving into the soil through their networks.

Mycorrhizal fungi transfer mineral nutrients to and obtain carbon from their plant partners. These bi-directional exchanges are made possible by associations between fungal mycelium, the thread-like filamentous networks that make up the bulk of fungal biomass, and plant roots. Once transported underground, carbon is used by mycorrhizal fungi to grow a more extensive mycelium, helping them to explore the soil. It is also bound up in soil by the sticky compounds exuded by the fungi and can remain underground in the form of fungal necromass, which functions as a structural scaffold for soils. The scientists know that carbon is flowing through fungi, but how long it stays there remains unclear.

The paper is part of a global push to understand the role that fungi play in Earth's ecosystems. "We know that mycorrhizal fungi are vitally important ecosystem engineers, but they are invisible," says senior author Toby Kiers, a professor of evolutionary biology at Vrije University Amsterdam and co-founder of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN). "Mycorrhizal fungi lie at the base of the food webs that support much of life on Earth, but we are just starting to understand how they actually work. There's still so much to learn." But there's a race against time to understand and protect these fungi. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization warns that 90% of soils could be degraded by 2050, and fungi are left out of most conservation and environmental policy. Without the fertility and structure that soil provides, the productivity of both natural and crop plants will rapidly decline.

The Guardian reports: A pill taken once a day cuts the risk of dying from lung cancer by half, according to "thrilling" and "unprecedented" results from a decade-long global study. Taking the drug osimertinib after surgery dramatically reduced the risk of patients dying by 51%, results presented at the world's largest cancer conference showed...

Everyone in the trial had a mutation of the EGFR gene, which is found in about a quarter of global lung cancer cases, and accounts for as many as 40% of cases in Asia. An EGFR mutation is more common in women than men, and in people who have never smoked or have been light smokers. Speaking in Chicago, [Dr Roy Herbst, the deputy director of Yale Cancer Center and lead author of the study] said the "thrilling" results added huge weight to earlier findings from the same trial that showed the pill also halves the risk of a recurrence of the disease... Not everyone diagnosed with lung cancer is tested for the EGFR mutation, which needs to change, Herbst said, given the study's findings...

After five years, 88% of patients who took the daily pill after the removal of their tumour were still alive, compared with 78% of patients treated with a placebo. Overall, there was a 51% lower risk of death for those who received osimertinib compared with those who received placebo. The survival benefit "was observed consistently" in an analysis across all study subgroups, including those with stage one, stage two and stage three lung cancer. Chemotherapy had been given to 60% of those in the study, and the survival benefit of osimertinib was seen regardless of whether prior chemotherapy was received.