Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.

Saturday, August 20, 2022

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2741 - The Human Race is Doomed - WEEKLY HODGE PODGE for 2208.20



A Sense of Doubt blog post #2741 - The Human Race is Doomed - WEEKLY HODGE PODGE for 2208.20 

This is the laziest Hodge Podge ever.

But here it is.

Another one that I created during the "blog vacation II" and dumped things in, almost 100% SLASHDOT posts.

I may retire the Hodge Podge. It's a lot of work. It helped in the pandemic, but hey, did you know? Covid is over.

So Covid is over, supposedly.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/08/11/2124236/cdc-drops-quarantine-distancing-recommendations-for-covid-19

CDC Drops Quarantine, Distancing Recommendations For COVID-19

Posted by BeauHD  from the here-to-stay dept.
The nation's top public health agency relaxed its COVID-19 guidelines Thursday, dropping the recommendation that Americans quarantine themselves if they come into close contact with an infected person. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also said people no longer need to stay at least 6 feet away from others. The Associated Press reports:The changes, which come more than 2 1/2 years after the start of the pandemic, are driven by a recognition that an estimated 95% of Americans 16 and older have acquired some level of immunity, either from being vaccinated or infected, agency officials said. "The current conditions of this pandemic are very different from those of the last two years," said the CDC's Greta Massetti, an author of the guidelines.

Perhaps the biggest education-related change is the end of the recommendation that schools do routine daily testing, although that practice can be reinstated in certain situations during a surge in infections, officials said. The CDC also dropped a "test-to-stay" recommendation, which said students exposed to COVID-19 could regularly test -- instead of quarantining at home -- to keep attending school. With no quarantine recommendation anymore, the testing option disappeared too. Masks continue to be recommended only in areas where community transmission is deemed high, or if a person is considered at high risk of severe illness.

Also, I recently read The Three Body Problem, and by recently I mean, back in like March.

I LOVED the idea of a species trying to thrive on a planet that had three solar bodies in very close proximity. Incredible idea.

But it's not an idea invented by Liu Cixin. It goes back to Newton, at least!

I loved this quote:

From the Three Body Problem page 229:

"I've lost hope in the human race after what I've seen in recent years. Human society is incapable of self-improvement, and we need the intervention of outside forces."

"I agree!" the author shouted. She was very excited, as though finally finding an outlet for pent up feelings. "The human race is hideous. I've spent the first half of my life unveiling this ugliness with the scalpel of literature, bit now I'm even sick of the work of dissection. I yearn for Trisolaran civilization (extraterrestrial beings) to bring real beauty to the world."

That's all.

"The human race is hideous."

Thanks for tuning in.


https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/06/15/0434213/china-says-it-may-have-detected-signals-from-alien-civilizations


China Says It May Have Detected Signals From Alien Civilizations (bloomberg.com)


Posted by msmash  from the how-about-that dept.
China said its giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily, which then appeared to have deleted the report and posts about the discovery. From a report:The narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye -- the world's largest radio telescope -- differ from previous ones captured and the team is further investigating them, the report said, citing Zhang Tonjie, chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search team co-founded by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley. It isn't clear why the report was apparently removed from the website of the Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China's science and technology ministry, though the news had already started trending on social network Weibo and was picked up by other media outlets, including state-run ones.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/03/25/2321237/dangerous-chemicals-in-food-wrappers-at-fast-food-restaurants-grocery-chains


Dangerous Chemicals In Food Wrappers At Fast-Food Restaurants, Grocery Chains (cnn.com)

Posted by BeauHD  from the you-get-what-you-pay-for dept.
fahrbot-bot shares a report from CNN:Alarming levels of dangerous chemicals known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) were discovered in food packaging at a number of well-known fast-food and fast-casual restaurants and grocery store chains, a new report found. The highest levels of indicators for PFAS were found in food packaging from Nathan's Famous, Cava, Arby's, Burger King, Chick-fil-A, Stop & Shop, Sweetgreen, McDonald's and Taco Bell according to an investigation released Thursday by Consumer Reports.

The Consumer Reports investigation collected 118 food packaging products sold by 24 companies in the tristate area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It tested those products for organic fluorine -- a marker for PFAS. Researchers then sent samples of products with the highest levels to an independent laboratory that could perform more specific tests, said Michael Hansen, senior staff scientist for advocacy at Consumer Reports. Regulatory limits for how much PFAS food packaging should contain can vary greatly. In the US, there are no federal limits, leaving action up to the states. Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington have passed bills banning intentional use of PFAS in food packaging, but haven't yet specified a limit, according to Consumer Reports. In January 2023, a new law in California will set the limit at less than 100 ppm (parts per million).

The Consumer Reports investigation found the highest indicators for PFAS -- 876 ppm and 618 ppm -- in two types of bags for sides at Nathan's Famous restaurants. High indicators of PFAS (in the 500s) were also found in a Chick-fil-A sandwich wrapper and in fiber bowls at Cava, a Mediterranean restaurant chain. Indicator levels in the 300s and 400s were found in a bag of cookies at Arby's, bamboo paper plates at Stop & Shop, and in a bag for both cookies and French toast sticks at Burger King. Levels of PFAS indicators in the 200s were found in a Sweetgreen paper bag for focaccia, additional items at Cava, and in bags for french fries, cookies and Chicken McNuggets at McDonald's. However, all of the companies listed had additional food packaging that tested at levels below 200 ppm. Four companies -- Arby's, Nathan's Famous, McDonald's and Stop & Shop -- also sold food in packaging that had no detectable levels of PFAS, the report said.



Posted by BeauHD  from the would-you-look-at-that dept.
Researchers have linked spending more time playing video games with a boost in intelligence in children, which goes some way to contradicting the narrative that gaming is bad for young minds. ScienceAlert reports:While the difference in cognitive abilities was a small one and isn't enough to show a causal relationship, it is enough to be notable -- and the study was careful to factor in variables including differences in genetics and the child's socio-economic background. Meanwhile, watching TV and using social media didn't seem to have a positive or negative effect on intelligence. The research should prove useful in the debate over how much screen time is suitable for young minds.

The researchers looked at screen time records for 9,855 kids in the ABCD Study, all in the US and aged 9 or 10. On average, the youngsters reported spending 2.5 hours a day watching TV or online videos, 1 hour playing video games, and half an hour socializing over the internet. Researchers then accessed data for more than 5,000 of those children two years later. Over the intervening period, those in the study who reported spending more time than the norm on video games saw an increase of 2.5 IQ points above the average rise. The IQ point increase was based on the kids' performance on tasks that included reading comprehension, visual-spatial processing, and a task focused on memory, flexible thinking, and self-control.The report notes that the study "only looked at children in the US and did not differentiate between video game types (mobile versus console games)."

The research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/03/26/0237240/massive-ice-shelf-collapses-in-antarctica

Massive Ice Shelf Collapses in Antarctica (thehill.com)

Posted by EditorDavid  from the off-the-shelf dept.
"A massive ice shelf in eastern Antartica collapsed, scientists said on Friday, marking the first time an ice shelf has done so in the region," reports the Hill:The 460-square mile wide ice shelf, which was roughly the size of New York City and helped keep the Conger and Glenzer glaciers from warmer water, collapsed between March 14 and March 16, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute ice scientist Catherine Walker told The Associated Press. University of Minnesota ice scientist Peter Neff said the collapse was worrying because eastern Antartica holds five times more ice than western Antartica, and if the whole region were to melt, it could raise sea levels across the globe more than 160 feet, according to the AP.

Scientists had long thought that the area had not been impacted heavily by climate change and was stable, according to the wire service, but Neff said the collapse of the ice shelf brought that belief into question. The Glenzer-Conger ice shelf has been shrinking since the 1970s, Neff noted. Walker added that it rapidly began losing ice in 2020, according to the AP.

"The Glenzer-Conger ice shelf presumably had been there for thousands of years, and it's not ever going to be there again," Neff told the wire service.
Last week the Washington Post reported that temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet had been "soaring 50 to 90 degrees above normal."

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/03/27/0244232/the-untold-story-of-the-creation-of-gif-at-compuserve-in-1987

The Untold Story of the Creation of GIF At CompuServe In 1987 (fastcompany.com)


Posted by EditorDavid  from the gif-history dept.
Back in 1987 Alexander Trevor worked with the GIF format's creator, Steve Wilhite, at CompuServe. 35 years later Fast Company tech editor Harry McCracken (also Slashdot reader harrymcc) located Trevor for the inside story:Wilhite did not come up with the GIF format in order to launch a billion memes. It was 1987, and he was a software engineer at CompuServe, the most important online service until an upstart called America Online took off in the 1990s. And he developed the format in response to a request from CompuServe executive Alexander "Sandy" Trevor. (Trevor's most legendary contribution to CompuServe was not instigating GIF: He also invented the service's CB Simulator — the first consumer chat rooms and one of the earliest manifestation of social networking, period. That one he coded himself as a weekend project in 1980.)

GIF came to be because online services such as CompuServe were getting more graphical, but the computer makers of the time — such as Apple, Commodore, and IBM — all had their own proprietary image types. "We didn't want to have to put up images in 79 different formats," explains Trevor. CompuServe needed one universal graphics format.

Even though the World Wide Web and digital cameras were still in the future, work was already underway on the image format that came to be known as JPEG. But it wasn't optimized for CompuServe's needs: For example, stock charts and weather graphics didn't render crisply. So Trevor asked Wilhite to create an image file type that looked good and downloaded quickly at a time when a 2,400 bits-per-second dial-up modem was considered torrid. Reading a technical journal, Wilhite came across a discussion of an efficient compression technique known as LZW for its creators — Abraham Limpel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch. It turned out to be an ideal foundation for what CompuServe was trying to build, and allowed GIF to pack a lot of image information into as few bytes as possible. (Much later, computing giant Unisys, which gained a patent for LZW, threatened companies that used it with lawsuits, leading to a licensing agreement with CompuServe and the creation of the patent-free PNG image format.)

GIF officially debuted on June 15, 1987. "It met my requirements, and it was extremely useful for CompuServe," says Trevor....

GIF was also versatile, offering the ability to store the multiple pictures that made it handy for creating mini-movies as well as static images. And it spread beyond CompuServe, showing up in Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, and then in Netscape Navigator. The latter browser gave GIFs the ability to run in an infinite loop, a crucial feature that only added to their hypnotic quality. Seeing cartoon hamsters dance for a split second is no big whoop, but watching them shake their booties endlessly was just one of many cultural moments that GIFs have given us.


https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/22/03/31/2257245/a-new-proposal-for-interstellar-communication-with-alien-intelligences

A New Proposal For Interstellar Communication With Alien Intelligences (arxiv.org)

Posted by BeauHD  from the worth-a-shot dept.
OneHundredAndTen writes:A recent paper proposes a new way to put together a message for alien intelligent beings. It comes up with an elaborate mechanism to convey information in notably constrained bitmaps, but one can't help but wonder whether it is too elaborate. For example, for 1+1 = 2, the article proposes something far more visually complex than 1+1 = 2, which could also be, with small adjustments, easily coerced to have a representation as a bitmap with the limitations in the article. It is not clear why the representation that the authors are proposing would be easier for aliens to decode and understand than something much closer to 1+1 = 2: either representation would be, well, alien to them."Calculation of the optimal timing during a given calendar year is specified for potential future transmission from both the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope in China and the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in northern California to a selected region of the Milky Way which has been proposed as the most likely for life to have developed," reads the paper.

"These powerful new beacons, the successors to the Arecibo radio telescope which transmitted the 1974 message upon which this expanded communication is in part based, can carry forward Arecibo's legacy into the 21st century with this equally well-constructed communication from Earth's technological civilization."

First Complete Gap-Free Human Genome Sequence Published (theguardian.com)

Posted by BeauHD  from the first-of-its-kind dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian:More than two decades after the draft human genome was celebrated as a scientific milestone, scientists have finally finished the job. The first complete, gap-free sequence of a human genome has been published in an advance expected to pave the way for new insights into health and what makes our species unique. Until now, about 8% of the human genome was missing, including large stretches of highly repetitive sequences, sometimes described as "junk DNA." In reality though, these repeated sections were omitted due to technical difficulties in sequencing them, rather than pure lack of interest.

Sequencing a genome is something like slicing up a book into snippets of text then trying to reconstruct the book by piecing them together again. Stretches of text that contain a lot of common or repeated words and phrases would be harder to put in their correct place than more unique pieces of text. New "long-read" sequencing techniques that decode big chunks of DNA at once -- enough to capture many repeats -- helped overcome this hurdle. Scientists were able to simplify the puzzle further by using an unusual cell type that only contains DNA inherited from the father (most cells in the body contain two genomes -- one from each parent). Together these two advances allowed them to decode the more than 3 billion letters that comprise the human genome.The science behind the sequencing effort and some initial analysis of the new genome regions are outlined in six papers published in the journal Science.


Posted by BeauHD  from the are-you-smarter-than-a-fish? dept.
sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org:Addition and subtraction must be hard for fish, especially because they don't have fingers to count on. But they can do it -- albeit with small numbers -- a new study reveals. By training the animals to use blue and yellow colors as codes for the commands "add one" and "subtract one," respectively, researchers showed fish have the capacity for simple arithmetic.

To make the find, researchers at the University of Bonn adopted the design of a similar experiment conducted in bees. They focused on bony cichlids (Pseudotropheus zebra) and cartilaginous stingrays (Potamotrygon motoro), which the lab uses to study fish cognition. In the training phase, the scientists showed a fish in a tank an image of up to five squares, circles, and triangles that were all either blue or yellow. The animals had 5 seconds to memorize the number and color of the shapes; then a gate opened, and the fish had to choose between two doors: one with an additional shape and the other with one fewer shape.

The rules were simple: If the shapes in the original image were blue, head for the door with one extra shape; if they were yellow, go for the door with one fewer. Choosing the correct door earned the fish a food reward: pellets for cichlids, and earthworms, shrimp, or mussels for stingrays. Only six of the eight cichlids and four of the eight stingrays successfully completed their training. But those that made it through testing performed well above chance, the researchers report today in Scientific Reports.



A Facebook Bug Mistakenly Elevated Misinformation, Russian State Media for Months (theverge.com)

Posted by EditorDavid  from the erring-algorithms dept.
The Verge reports:A group of Facebook engineers identified a "massive ranking failure" that exposed as much as half of all News Feed views to potential "integrity risks" over the past six months, according to an internal report on the incident obtained by The Verge.

The engineers first noticed the issue last October, when a sudden surge of misinformation began flowing through the News Feed, notes the report, which was shared inside the company last week. Instead of suppressing posts from repeat misinformation offenders that were reviewed by the company's network of outside fact-checkers, the News Feed was instead giving the posts distribution, spiking views by as much as 30 percent globally. Unable to find the root cause, the engineers watched the surge subside a few weeks later and then flare up repeatedly until the ranking issue was fixed on March 11th.

In addition to posts flagged by fact-checkers, the internal investigation found that, during the bug period, Facebook's systems failed to properly demote probable nudity, violence, and even Russian state media the social network recently pledged to stop recommending in response to the country's invasion of Ukraine. The issue was internally designated a level-one SEV, or site event — a label reserved for high-priority technical crises, like Russia's ongoing block of Facebook and Instagram.


A Single Gene In One Species Can Cause Other Species To Go Extinct (scientificamerican.com)

Posted by BeauHD  from the surprise-findings dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American:Some species play an outsize role in the environment they inhabit. Beavers build dams that create ponds where fish thrive. Otters in kelp forests eat enough sea urchins so that the kelp can grow without being gobbled up first. These so-called keystone species hold their ecosystem together. But what if ecosystems not only hinge on a single species but can be made or broken by a single gene? In a study published on Thursday in Science, researchers have demonstrated the existence of what they call a "keystone gene." The discovery may have implications for how scientists think about the ways ecosystems, and the species in them, persist over time.

In the lab, the researchers built several miniature ecosystems that consisted of just four species each. At the bottom of the food chain was Arabidopsis thaliana, a small annual plant that is a favorite study organism among biologists (its genome was sequenced more than 20 years ago). In each ecosystem, the plant served as food for two species of aphids, which in turn fed a parasitoid wasp. Each bread-box-sized ecosystem contained multiple Arabidopsis plants. In some systems, the plants were genetically identical -- a monoculture. In others, genetic variations were introduced by turning on and off three genes -- MAM1, AOP2 and GSOH -- in various combinations.The researchers focused on these genes because they maintain the production of compounds called aliphatic glucosinolates, which protect the plant by deterring hungry aphids. Some of the experimental ecosystems had more variation in the number of genetic combinations than others; the researchers watched to see how well plants, aphids and wasps would coexist in each scenario.

As the team expected, the ecosystems with more genetically diverse plants turned out to be more stable. For each plant with a different genetic makeup that the researchers added to the mix, the insects' extinction rate fell by nearly 20 percent, compared with monocultures. But what stunned the researchers was that this result seemed to hinge on a single gene. Regardless of diversity, if systems contained plants with a certain variant, or allele, of the AOP2 gene, the extinction rate of the insects decreased by 29 percent, compared with systems without it. Essentially, if you change that AOP2 allele, you lose the insects. Increasing genetic diversity helped the insects because it increased the likelihood of the aphids encountering plants with this one critical gene variant. [...] Also surprising was the mechanism by which the AOP2 allele impacted the aphids. Although the variant changed the way a plant produced its aphid-deterring compound, it also allowed the plant to grow faster. This in turn allowed the aphids, as well as the wasps that relied on them for food, to become larger faster.


https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/04/05/0015246/jupiter-size-exoplanet-caught-in-the-act-of-being-born

Jupiter-Size Exoplanet Caught In the Act of Being Born (science.org)

Posted by BeauHD  from the planet-formation dept.
sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org:Astronomers say they have witnessed a planet being born from a disk of gas and dust swirling around a young star. Such claims have been made before, but the team comes to an even more controversial conclusion: that this planet is forming from gas that is collapsing under its own gravity, a mechanism known as gravitational or disk instability. That stands in contrast to a more widely accepted theory of planet formation, in which dust and rocks stick together, slowly building up a planetary core with enough gravity to pull in gas from the disk. If true, the planetary system would be the strongest evidence to date for disk instability. "This system stands alone right now," says team leader Thayne Currie of the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii.

That conclusion is already dividing theorists. "This system certainly looks like it's [undergoing] disk instability," says Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a longtime advocate of the theory. But Anders Johansen, a theorist at the University of Copenhagen who helped develop the rival theory of core accretion, is not convinced. "This could be either mechanism," he says. Although more than 5000 exoplanets have been discovered, only a few tens have been imaged directly, and none in the act of being born. Currie and colleagues were intrigued by the nearby star AB Aurigae because it was young -- somewhere between 1 million and 4 million years old -- and because its disk contains kinked, spiral features that could indicate protoplanets. But showing that some of the light from its disk was from a glowing-hot new planet rather than reflected starlight was no easy task. "We sat on this result for 5 years," Currie says. "I did not believe it was a planet until fairly recently."The team published their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/04/14/2313205/hubble-telescope-confirms-largest-comet-nuclear-ever-seen

Hubble Telescope Confirms Largest Comet Nuclear Ever Seen (npr.org)


Posted by BeauHD  from the new-record-holder dept.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by scientists. NPR reports:The nucleus of comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) is about 80 miles in diameter, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island, NASA says. The comet's nucleus is about 50 times larger than that of most comets, and its mass is estimated to be a gigantic 500 trillion tons.

Comet C/2014 UN271 was discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein using archival images from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The comet has been observed since 2010, when it was 3 billion miles away from the sun, and has been studied since then. NASA says there was a challenge in measuring the comet's nucleus because it was too far away for the Hubble telescope to determine its size. Instead, scientists had to make a computer model that was adjusted to fit the images of the comet's bright light that they got from the telescope's data.

Despite traveling at 22,000 mph, the massive comet is still coming from the edge of the solar system. But NASA assures us that it will never get closer than 1 billion miles away from the sun -- and even then, that won't be until 2031. The previous record-holder for largest comet nucleus was discovered in 2002. Comet C/2002 VQ94 was approximately 60 miles across.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/04/18/053245/ultra-rare-black-hole-ancestor-detected-at-the-dawn-of-the-universe


Ultra-Rare Black Hole Ancestor Detected at the Dawn of the Universe (livescience.com)

Posted by EditorDavid  from the quirks-of-quasars dept.
"Astronomers have discovered a dusty, red object 13 billion light-years from Earth that may be the earliest known ancestor of a supermassive black hole," reports Live Science:The ancient object shows characteristics that fall between dusty, star-forming galaxies and brightly glowing black holes known as quasars, according to the authors of a new study, published April 13 in the journal Nature. Born just 750 million years after the Big Bang, during an epoch called the "cosmic dawn," the object appears to be the first direct evidence of an early galaxy weaving stardust into the foundations of a supermassive black hole.

Objects like these, known as transitioning red quasars, have been theorized to exist in the early universe, but they have never been observed — until now....

Prior research has shown that quasars existed within the first 700 million years of the universe, the study authors wrote; however, it's unclear exactly how these supermassive objects formed so quickly after the Big Bang. Simulations suggest that some sort of fast-growing transition phase occurs in dusty, star-dense galaxies. "Theorists have predicted that these black holes undergo an early phase of rapid growth: a dust-reddened compact object emerges from a heavily dust-obscured starburst galaxy," study co-author Gabriel Brammer, an associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, said in the statement. In their new paper, the researchers claim to have detected one of these rare transitional objects — officially named GNz7q — while studying an ancient, star-forming galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope.

The team caught the early galaxy in the midst of a stellar baby boom, with the galaxy seemingly churning out new stars 1,600 times faster than the Milky Way does today. All those newborn stars produced an immense amount of heat, which warmed the galaxy's ambient gas and caused it to glow brightly in infrared wavelengths. The galaxy became so hot, in fact, that its dust shines brighter than any other known object from the cosmic dawn period, the researchers said. Amid that brightly glowing dust, the researchers detected a single red point of light — a large, compact object tinged by the enormous fog of dust around it. According to the researchers, this red dot's luminosity and color perfectly match the predicted characteristics of a transitioning red quasar....

[T]here are likely many, many others like it just waiting to be discovered by telescopes that can peer even further back, into the earliest eras of the universe. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which launched on Dec. 25, 2021, will be able to hunt for these elusive objects with much greater clarity than Hubble, the researchers wrote, hopefully shedding a bit more light onto the dusty cosmic dawn.



Posted by EditorDavid  from the school-daze dept.
What happened when college admissions offices started ignoring the standardized test scores? NBC News asked college administrators like Jon Burdick, Cornell's vice provost for enrollment:When the health crisis closed testing sites in 2020, four of Cornell's undergraduate colleges decided to go test optional, meaning students could submit a test score if they thought it would help them, but didn't have to. Three of Cornell's colleges adopted test-blind policies, meaning admissions officers wouldn't look at any student's scores. The effects were immediate, Burdick said. Like many other colleges and universities, Cornell was inundated with applications — roughly 71,000 compared to 50,000 in a typical year. And the new applications — particularly those that arrived without test scores attached — were far more likely to come from "students that have felt historically excluded," Burdick said.

The university had always looked at many factors in making admissions decisions, and low test scores were never singularly disqualifying, Burdick said. But it became clear that students had been self-rejecting, deciding not to apply to places like Cornell because they thought their lower SAT scores meant they couldn't get in, he said. Other colleges also saw a similar surge in applications.... At Cornell, managing the surge in applications wasn't easy, Burdick said. The university hired several admissions officers and about a dozen part-time application readers — paid for in part by the additional application fees....

In the end, Cornell enrolled a more diverse class, including a nearly 50 percent increase in the share of first-generation college students. "It showed me that these students, given the opportunity, can show really impressive competitive credentials and get admitted with the test barrier reduced or eliminated," Burdick said.

Research on colleges that went test optional years ago shows that students admitted without test scores come from more diverse backgrounds and do about as well in their classes once they arrive as peers who did submit test scores



Posted by BeauHD  from the origin-of-life dept.
Space rocks that fell to Earth within the last century contain the five bases that store information in DNA and RNA, scientists report April 26 in Nature Communications. Science News reports:These "nucleobases" -- adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil -- combine with sugars and phosphates to make up the genetic code of all life on Earth. Whether these basic ingredients for life first came from space or instead formed in a warm soup of earthly chemistry is still not known. But the discovery adds to evidence that suggests life's precursors originally came from space, the researchers say. Scientists have detected bits of adenine, guanine and other organic compounds in meteorites since the 1960s. Researchers have also seen hints of uracil, but cytosine and thymine remained elusive, until now.


Posted by BeauHD  from the desperately-needed dept.
An enzyme variant created by engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin can break down environment-throttling plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours to days. Phys.Org reports:This discovery, published today in Nature, could help solve one of the world's most pressing environmental problems: what to do with the billions of tons of plastic waste piling up in landfills and polluting our natural lands and water. The enzyme has the potential to supercharge recycling on a large scale that would allow major industries to reduce their environmental impact by recovering and reusing plastics at the molecular level. [...] The project focuses on polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a significant polymer found in most consumer packaging, including cookie containers, soda bottles, fruit and salad packaging, and certain fibers and textiles. It makes up 12% of all global waste. The enzyme was able to complete a "circular process" of breaking down the plastic into smaller parts (depolymerization) and then chemically putting it back together (repolymerization). In some cases, these plastics can be fully broken down to monomers in as little as 24 hours.

Researchers at the Cockrell School of Engineering and College of Natural Sciences used a machine learning model to generate novel mutations to a natural enzyme called PETase that allows bacteria to degrade PET plastics. The model predicts which mutations in these enzymes would accomplish the goal of quickly depolymerizing post-consumer waste plastic at low temperatures. Through this process, which included studying 51 different post-consumer plastic containers, five different polyester fibers and fabrics and water bottles all made from PET, the researchers proved the effectiveness of the enzyme, which they are calling FAST-PETase (functional, active, stable and tolerant PETase). [...] Up next, the team plans to work on scaling up enzyme production to prepare for industrial and environmental application. The researchers have filed a patent application for the technology and are eying several different uses. Cleaning up landfills and greening high waste-producing industries are the most obvious. But another key potential use is environmental remediation. The team is looking at a number of ways to get the enzymes out into the field to clean up polluted sites.


Posted by BeauHD  from the achievement-unlocked dept.
Scientists working on NASA's James Webb Telescope have reached an important milestone, completely aligning the space observatory's massive mirrors. New Atlas reports:The achievement means the team can now move ahead with configuring the onboard instruments and prepare them to begin capturing sharp and in-focus images of the cosmos. Back in January, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) finished deploying its set of 18 mirrors, which it will use to direct light from cosmic objects onto its instruments to capture images. But to do so, the mirrors had to be precisely aligned over a three-month period in order to focus that light correctly. In March, the mirrors were brought into alignment with the telescope's primary imaging instrument, the Near-Infrared Camera, enabling it to focus and snap a crystal-clear image of a bright star. The team then continued aligning the mirrors with the JWST's remaining instruments, the Near-Infrared Spectrograph, Mid-Infrared Instrument, and Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph -- a task that is now complete.

The team confirmed the mirrors were aligned and directing light onto the JWST's four instruments by capturing a set of test images covering the telescope's full-field of view [...]. The scientists say the optical performance of the telescope continues to exceed even their most optimistic expectations. With the mirrors now in position (save for some slight periodic adjustments here and there), the scientists are now turning their attention to commissioning of the science instruments. The unique lenses, masks, filters and other gear that make these highly sophisticated instruments tick will need to be precisely configured over the next two months, to ready the telescope for the start of its science operations in the middle of the year.
















+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2208.20 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2605 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)