Mediaboss Marketing

PLANETARY SCIENCEMarss moon may be its kin

Researchers have long believed that Marss two moons, Deimos and Phobos, are captured asteroids. But the first close-up images of Deimos, taken by the United Arab Emiratess $200 million Hope spacecraft, suggest the 12-kilometer-wide body instead formed from the same material as Mars, researchers revealed this week at the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union. The imagery, taken during a 10 March flyby, indicates that Deimoss surface is covered by volcanic basalts like those on Mars, with no signs of the carbon-rich rock more often found on asteroids. Hope began orbiting Mars in 2021 to study the martian atmosphere. When it completed its planned observations, controllers adjusted its orbit to take the images of the peach-shaped Deimos, the smaller of the two moons. Phoboss orbit is too low for Hope to have made similar observations.

A bid this week by a Japanese company to become the first to put a commercial lander on the Moon was unsuccessful. The company, called ispace, tracked the descent of its Hakuto-R Mission 1 lunar lander until seconds before the scheduled landing in Atlas crater, after which it lost contact. The craft carried small rovers supplied by the United Arab Emirates and by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Tomy Company, a Japanese toymaker. ispace plans to launch another lander in 2024. A previous commercial lander, sent by an Israeli company in 2019, crashed as it attempted to land.

Attempting to succeed where his predecessors have failed, President Joe Bidens administration this week was expected to formally propose cutting carbon emissions from new and existing U.S. power plants. Courts blocked a previous effort by the Obama administration to limit these emissions and a less ambitious proposal from the Trump administration to achieve reductions through increased efficiency. Bidens plan is expected to incentivize carbon capture and storage technologies and discourage the construction of plants that burn natural gas, media organizations reported based on confidential sources. The administration has said it wants 80% of U.S. electricity to come from sources that emit no greenhouse gases by 2030 and for the power sector to be emissions-free by 2035. The new plan is likely to face legal challenges from utilities and states that produce fossil fuels.

It sounds like insanity to take money from drug companies and then do reports related to opioids.

Belief in the importance of childhood vaccination declined in 52 of 55 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a UNICEF report released last week. In most countries, women were more likely than men to doubt vaccines worth after the pandemic, according to survey data gathered by the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. The number of people agreeing with the statement Vaccines are important for children to have plunged by more than 40% in South Korea and by up to 15% in most European countries, Canada, and the United States. Only China, India, and Mexico showed growth in this measure of confidence. Mostly because of the pandemics disruptions to health care, 67 million children missed routine childhood vaccinations between 2019 and 2021, and measles cases more than doubled from 2021 to 2022. Fear and disinformation about all types of vaccines circulated as widely as the [SARS-CoV-2] virus itself, UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said.

The worlds largest maker of batteries announced last week a major advance in the energy storage of its batteries, which the company claims could power electric aircraft and double the range of electric cars to 1000 kilometers between charges. China-based Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL) plans to begin mass-producing lithium-ion batteries this year that can store up to 500 watt-hours per kilogram, nearly twice as much as industry-leading cells produced by Tesla and other big batterymakers. The performance comes from improvements to the batterys electrodes and electrolyte, says Wu Kai, CATLs chief scientist. Last year, Amprius, a U.S. battery startup, announced it, too, is close to manufacturing such a battery.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York City is set to open the doors of a $431 million facility next week that showcases its vast collections in new ways. Visitors to the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation can watch conservators behind glass panels as they work with some of the 4 million specimens stored there. Other features include a room with 80 species of fluttering butterflies and an insectarium that hosts a live colony of a half-million leafcutter ants. The hockey rinksize Invisible Worlds exhibit offers an interactive, immersive experience about the connectedness of life at different scales, from DNA through ecosystems. The building is really emphasizing the process of research and where information comes from, so we are constantly communicating this message of evidence-based science, says evolutionary biologist Cheryl Hayashi, the museums provost of science.

An international group of researchers last week protested a bill approved by Ugandas Parliament that imposes the death penalty for some homosexual acts, telling Ugandas president that the science is crystal clear that homosexuality is a normal and natural variation of human sexuality. The public letter by 15 scientists from South Africa, Canada, and the United States came after Ugandas president, Yoweri Museveni, in March called for a medical opinion on whether homosexuality is deviant. Last week, Museveni asked lawmakers to amend the bill to provide amnesty for rehabilitated people who renounce their homosexuality. The U.S. Department of State and some international groups have criticized the bill as a violation of human rights. The scientists who signed the letter include Dean Hamer, a geneticist emeritus at the U.S. National Institutes of Health who discovered the first evidence that homosexuality probably has some genetic basis.

Ask the ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI) program a question about science or medicine, and it may spit out an answer that sounds plausible, even authoritative. But critics have knocked the output as containing errors and lacking references. Now, the software company Scite has developed an AI-powered remedy. When users type a question into its subscription-based tool Assistant, the software pulls an answer from ChatGPT and automatically annotates the text with references to relevant scholarly articles, choosing from millions in its database. Each reference provided by Assistant comes with an automatic fact-check in the form of a box listing how many newer papers cited the referenced article and how many provided evidence that supports, contrasts with, or is neutral about the relevant claim in that article.

The World Health Organization last week launched what it calls the largest and most detailed collection of data on population-level health and the factors that shape it. Half of countries do not report disaggregated health statistics; others categorize the figures only by sex, age, and place of residence. The new Health Inequality Data Repository includes nearly two dozen demographic and socioeconomic categories, including ethnicity and level of education. Sponsors hope to use the repositorys nearly 11 million data points, provided by 15 intergovernmental organizations, to identify and reduce disparities in immunizations and rates of HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria, for example.

See the original post:

News at a glance: U.S. rules on carbon emissions, better vehicle ... - Science