Новости за 01.07.2017

Nick Hughes, Aeon
Humanity occupies a very small place in an unfathomably vast Universe. Travelling at the speed of light 671 million miles per hour it would take us 100,000 years to cross the Milky Way. But we still wouldn't have gone very far. By recent estimates, the Milky Way is just one of 2 trillion galaxies in the observable Universe, and the region of space that they occupy spans at least 90 billion light-years. If you imagine Earth shrunk down to the size of a single grain of sand,... Читать дальше...

Science 2.0
What will cost $400 billion, a giant leap over California's total health care budget for 2018 of $179.5 billion, yet is not mentioned by California lawmakers? California's free "single-payer" healthcare proposal.Clearly providing greater health care access to American poor people, at giant cost, has been a failure. A few million people not already eligible for Medicaid did get access, but they were primarily young people forced into plans they neither wanted nor needed in their early earning years. Читать дальше...

Kendall & Alam, Conversation
The year is 2030. You're in a business school lecture hall, where just a handful of students are attending a finance class.The dismal turnout has nothing to with professorial style, school ranking or subject matter. Students simply aren't enrolled, because there are no jobs out there for finance majors.Today, finance, accounting, management and economics are among universities' most popular subjects worldwide, particularly at graduate level, due to high employability. Читать дальше...

Erik Stokstad, Science Mag
Europe's largest field trial of controversial insecticides called neonicotinoids has delivered a split verdict on the danger they pose to bees. The 2.8 million, 2-year-long study of 33 sites in the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Germany, described this week in Science, provides the first real-world demonstration that agricultural use of these common pesticides can hurt both domesticated honey bees and wild bees. But on German farms, the honey bees did just fine, suggesting... Читать дальше...

Prachi Patel, Anthropocene
Around one-third of the food produced around the world today is wasted. That includes everything from produce that rots in trucks during transit to meat that doesn't sell in stores to leftovers at home and in restaurants. This wasted food is an untapped energy resource.Engineers at Cornell University have now come up with a fast, effective way to convert foodstuff into fuel. Their two-step process, detailed in the journal Bioresource Technology, extracts nearly all the energy present in trashed food.

Irene Klotz, Space.com
As NASA makes plans to one day send humans to Mars, one of the key technical gaps the agency is working to fill is how to provide enough power on the Red Planet's surface for fuel production, habitats and other equipment. One option: small nuclear fission reactors, which work by splitting uranium atoms to generate heat, which is then converted into electric power. NASA's technology development branch has been funding a project called Kilopower for three years, with the aim... Читать дальше...

Alex Berezow, ACSH
Depression is something of a black box. Its underlying causes aren't completely understood, nor why particular medications work for some people but not others. Even worse, treatments are not fully successful in up to 60% of patients. Learning more about the molecular details of mental illness will go a long way toward designing better drugs.With these ends in mind, a team of Portuguese researchers examined the effects of two antipsychotic medications (which can also be used... Читать дальше...

Andrew Joseph, Stat
President Trump has nominated Indiana's health commissioner, Dr. Jerome Adams, to be the next surgeon general, the White House announced Thursday.If confirmed, Adams would replace Dr. Vivek Murthy, who was ousted by the Trump administration in April.Adams was appointed to his current post in Indiana by Vice President Mike Pence when he was governor. Adams would be at least the second top health official in the Trump administration who had previous connections to Pence. Seema Verma... Читать дальше...

Stephen Skolnick, PC
Nothing, not even light, can come out of a black hole. At least, that's the conventional wisdom, and it's certainly true thatonce the event horizon is crossedthere's no going back. But for rotating black holes, there's a region outside the event horizon where strange and extraordinary things can happen, and these extraordinary possibilities are the focus of a new paper in the American Physical Society journal Physical Review Letters.The study reports simulations of a phenomenon called superradiance... Читать дальше...

Glenn McDonald, Seeker
Heads up, humanity. Artificial intelligence may be about to get a lot smarter.An international team of scientists has developed a new kind of synthetic synapse for artificial intelligence systems using the neural network model. In artificial neural networks, computing systems are designed to emulate the function of the human brain, with digital neurons and synapses replicating the function of their biological counterparts.