05 Sci-Tech
News Source
EXCERPT:
FDA Officials have blocked publication of several studies supporting the safety of widely used vaccines against Covid-19 and shingles in recent months, a DHS spokesman confirmed.
The studies, which cost millions of dollars in public funds, were conducted by scientists at the agency, who worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records. They found serious side effects to be very rare.
In October, the scientists were directed to withdraw two Covid-19 vaccine studies that had been accepted for publication in medical journals. In February, top F.D.A. officials did not sign off on submitting abstracts about studies of Shingrix, a shingles vaccine, to a major drug safety conference.
The withdrawal of the studies is the latest step by the administration to try to limit access to vaccines. It has sharply cut research funding for vaccine development, released unvetted information casting doubt on vaccines, and blocked other information supporting their safety, most recently a paper on Covid vaccine effectiveness by career scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
News Source
EXCERPT:
… Why scientists blamed oxygen in the first placeInsects don’t breathe as we do. No lungs are involved. Instead, they have a system of tiny branching tubes, called tracheoles, which carry oxygen directly to the muscles by diffusion. The efficiency of diffusion decreases over longer distances, so scientists thought there was a hard limit to how big an insect could get, and that limit increased with more oxygen in the air.In 2010, a study Atmospheric oxygen level and the evolution of insect body size, identified several plausible mechanisms linking tracheal oxygen delivery to insect body size, and the case for high oxygen levels enabling prehistoric gigantism seemed well supported. It was a clean story: more oxygen, bigger bugs. Everybody moved on. However, the new research published in Nature suggests the clean story may have been wrong.
Scientists have studied griffinfly for decades, but the mystery of what made them so enormous just got deeper. Image Credits: Google Gemini
What researchers found when they looked closer, actuallyA team led by Edward Snelling of the University of Pretoria used high-powered electron microscopy to examine exactly how much space tracheoles actually occupy within insect flight muscles. The answer? Hardly any. Tracheoles make up about 1 per cent or less of the flight muscle in most insect species, and that pattern holds true for the ancient griffinflies.
That’s a surprisingly low footprint. In contrast, the capillaries in the heart muscle of birds and mammals occupy about ten times more relative space than the tracheoles in insect flight muscle. If oxygen transport really was the bottleneck limiting insect size, you’d expect evolution to have packed in far more tracheoles, especially during a period when giant insects were thriving. It didn’t.So, what actually made them so huge?Now here is where it gets really mysterious. No one knows for sure. The oxygen theory has been called into question, but nothing has come along to cleanly replace it.
News Source
EXCERPT:
Residents of different countries don’t age the same. This should be pretty obvious. Some countries are vastly more developed than others.
News Source
EXCERPT:
There is a worm living in water-filled cracks in ancient rock in a South African gold mine that has no business being there. It’s smaller than a grain of rice. It has no eyes, and it exists in conditions that most animals, even some of the toughest on Earth, simply could not cope with. Meet Halicephalobus mephisto, or the devil worm, as it’s more commonly known. This little worm blew scientists’ previous understanding of life on Earth.
A discovery that no one saw comingIn 2011, scientists announced they’d found a living nematode worm 1.3 kilometres (0.8 miles) below the Earth’s surface, about as deep as four Empire State Buildings on top of each other. The discovery, announced in the study Nematoda from the terrestrial deep subsurface of South Africa, was instantly significant. Not that nematodes were especially glamorous, but because there had never been a nematode found so far underground. Bacteria and microbes, sure. However, a multicellular animal? That was meant to be impossible.
Harvard has created a digital open-source wallet that keeps your private data from being shared online. The digital wallet keeps your personal data on your phone, validating your purchases without relying on a third-party source to do so.
News Source
EXCERPT:
The Trump administration, which took a noninterventionist approach to artificial intelligence, is now discussing imposing oversight on A.I. models before they are made publicly available.
News Source
EXCERPT:
The debate over regulating artificial intelligence usually focuses on two competing visions. In Europe, lawmakers are writing detailed rules that govern how AI can be developed and used. In the United States, policymakers are taking a lighter touch, allowing companies, investors and consumers to shape the technology’s future.
But a new analysis from students at the University of Florida identifies a third force quietly shaping the future of AI in America: the courts.
As AI spreads faster than any previous technology, judges and juries are being asked to resolve disputes. In doing so, they are not simply applying existing laws—they are, case by case, defining what responsible AI use looks like. The result is a distinctly American form of AI governance: one built through the give and take of negotiations and legal processes rather than legislation.
So far, courts have mostly resisted treating AI as something fundamentally new. Instead, they have folded AI into existing legal doctrines, focusing on the humans and institutions behind the technology.
News Source
EXCERPT:
Nature has retracted a paper that claimed AI had a positive impact on student learning.
The original paper, titled “The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysis,” was originally published in May of last year by Jin Wang and Wenxiang Fan of the Hangzhou Normal University in China. It is a meta-analysis, meaning it combines data from 51 research studies published between November 2022 and February 2025 on the effectiveness of ChatGPT in education. The paper claimed it found that ChatGPT had a large or moderately positive impact on “students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking.”
News Source
EXCERPT:
Scientists involved in planetary formation studies, meteorites, and early solar system investigations have been wondering about the origins of the ingredients that made up the planet Earth. Studies on carbonaceous chondrites, isotopic compositions, and planetary accretion have shown that the elements needed for life on Earth, such as carbon, water, and volatiles, could have come from primitive meteorites that developed in the outer solar system. These studies have contributed to the understanding of how terrestrial planets acquired their life-giving ingredients. Scientists are finding clues to the chemical makeup of Earth through studies of isotope ratios of certain elements like molybdenum and hydrogen.
News Source
EXCERPT:
Mars has lots of glaciers located along its mid-latitudes. We’ve known this for years thanks to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO’s) SHARAD sounder. But, despite all of the excellent data it’s managed to gather, SHARAD doesn’t have high enough resolution to accurately measure the boundary between the glacier itself and the rocky material that has been deposited on top of it over the course of billions of years. A new study, published in the journal JGR Planets, details a potential method of finding that boundary—by using a drone.
So what exactly does that boundary matter? Debris-covered glaciers (or DCGs) are a common feature on Mars. The debris that rests on top of them stops the sublimation that would otherwise cause the entire glacier to disappear into Mars’ thin atmosphere. But, we aren’t entirely sure how deeply buried these glaciers are. And if we’re to utilize the water they hold, either for direct astrobiological study or in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), we need a better idea of how much rock and dirt we have to dig through in order to access them.
SHARAD is great for tracking big macro features over the surface of the planet. But it’s not great for the nitty-gritty details of how much regolith actually covers a specific glacier. This is largely due to the fact that it’s around 300 kilometers away. In order to get that fine level of detail, we need something closer.
News Source
EXCERPT:
Start with what might be called the epistemic layer—how we come to know things. People are increasingly relying on AI to know what is true, what is happening, and whom to trust. Search is already substantially AI-mediated. The next generation of AI assistants will synthesize information, frame it, and present it with authority. For a growing number of people, asking an AI will become the default way to form views on a candidate, a policy, or a public figure. Whoever controls what these models say therefore has increasing influence over what people believe.
Technology has always shaped the way citizens interact with information. But a new problem will soon arise in the form of personal AI agents, which can change not only how people receive information but how they act on it. These systems will conduct research, draft communications, highlight causes, and lobby on a user’s behalf. They will inform decisions such as how to vote on a ballot measure, which organizations are worth supporting, or how to respond to a government notice. They will, in a meaningful sense, begin to mediate the relationship between individuals and the institutions that govern them.
News Source
EXCERPT:
America’s war on student smartphones is intensifying. Roughly two-thirds of US states have moved to restrict phone use in schools. The educational logic is straightforward enough. If these devices distract our kids, lock the gadgets away and learning will naturally improve—a strong prima facie case, to be sure. Yet new nationwide evidence suggests the story is more complicated than this basic common parental and teacher intuition.
A fresh NBER working paper by Stanford University’s Hunt Allcott and co-authors, “The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches,” examines one of the most stringent approaches—lockable phone pouches that physically prevent access during the school day. Using a dataset spanning thousands of schools, the researchers take advantage of a kind of natural experiment by comparing outcomes before and after adoption against similar schools that didn’t adopt the policy.
If the goal is to keep kids off their phones while at school, mission accomplished. On those terms, the policy works. Phone use plunges with pouches—fewer GPS pings on campus and far less in-class use, according to teachers.
News Source
EXCERPT:
Researchers at the University of Oregon have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can read genetic code the way large language models like ChatGPT read text. Scanning the genome for biological mutation patterns, the computer model traces pairs of genes back in time to their last common ancestor.
News Source
EXCERPT:
So far, America has remained ahead in the new space race. But its biggest rival is making continual steps to catch up. China announced another step in that direction with the unveiling of its first ever reusable five-meter-wide composite propulsion module, announced in a press release on April 11th.
The module was designed by the China Aerospace and Technology Corporation (CASC), the primary state contractor for the Chinese space program. Specifically, it was developed at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), which is also known as the First Academy of the CASC. It marks the largest integrated composite structure ever manufactured domestically for China’s aerospace sector. The first prototype was completed in just seven months, from initial design to delivery, underscoring the rapid development timeline.
Composites are becoming a critical feature of modern launch systems. Traditional metal components simply weigh too much. The more structural weight a launch vehicle has to carry into orbit, the less cargo or fuel it is able to carry due to the tyranny of the rocket equation. Composites are significantly lighter while still having the physical properties of metal, allowing for more payloads, or, crucially, more fuel for reentry burns.