Science

Technology is changing healthcare in ways we couldn’t imagine a decade ago. AI is helping doctors analyze scans faster, predict patient risks, and even suggest treatment options based on data. At the same time, wearable devices and health apps let patients track their own heart rate, sleep, and activity levels in real time.

But it’s not all simple. How much should we rely on AI? Can it really understand the nuances of human health, or will it always need a doctor’s judgment to make sense of the data?

I’m curious—how do you see AI shaping the future of healthcare? Will it make care smarter and more accessible, or are there risks we need to watch closely?

Scientists have, "found a scaling law that connects population size to transport networks and economic activity and CO2 emissions. The relationship between these variables follows the same curve for all cities, large and small, they found, and echoes Kleiber’s Law, a principle that emerges in biology when the sizes of animals are viewed in relation to their metabolic rates.

"In the 1930s, Max Kleiber found that the energy that animals required daily to sustain their bodies (their metabolic rate) scaled in proportion to their size. Mice have a lower metabolic rate than elephants, and tiny microscopic creatures require less energy still. The law has proven a useful tool.

A rare nurse shark with a bright orange hue and white eyes was caught off the coast of Costa Rica last year, but the animal's unusual coloring has only just been explained. irishstar.com/news/world-news/…

In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in queens giving birth to males of TWO DIFFERENT SPECIES!

Researchers conducting the world’s largest DNA study of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) today revealed “genetic signals” that might help explain how the condition arises. The poorly understood illness, which is estimated to affect many millions of people worldwide, is associated with debilitating symptoms including extreme exhaustion and difficulty thinking clearly.

Using DNA from more than 15,000 people diagnosed with the disorder, scientists identified eight genomic regions associated with ME/CFS, including some overlapping with or near genes linked to immune responses to infection. The findings, which were posted in a preprint by the University of Edinburgh and have not undergone peer review, provide valuable data on the condition, even if diagnostics and treatments remain far away, say researchers not involved in the work.

The study provides “validation of ME/CFS as a biomedical condition and an important corrective to psychologizing ‘all in the mind’ perspectives on the disease,” says Jos Bosch, a biopsychologist and epidemiologist at the University of Amsterdam who provided some consulting for the project but was not involved in the research. Although this kind of genetic study can’t conclusively pinpoint causes of the condition, the areas of the genome identified are worth further study, he adds.

Science has always driven progress in medicine, but AI is taking it to the next level. From smart wearables that track our daily health to AI tools that read scans and detect diseases early, technology is making healthcare faster, more accurate, and more personalized.

Doctors now get AI support in diagnosing patients, predicting risks, and even recommending treatments. At the same time, patients can use apps and devices to monitor their own health in real-time.

But there are big questions too: Can AI truly replace human judgment? Will it make healthcare more accessible, or create a bigger gap?

What do you think—are AI and science making healthcare better for everyone, or do we still have a long way to go?

Excerpts:

Gopaulchan and colleagues selected three women-owned farms in Colombia that grow similar strains of cocoa. Two of the farms produced fine chocolate while the third made bulk chocolate. The researchers measured temperature and pH changes in the fermenting beans and took molecular snapshots of microbes present at each stage of the process.

The researchers put together combinations of bacteria and yeasts and fermented small batches of beans in the lab. Ali and a panel of other expert tasters confirmed that the lab-fermented beans had notes of orange blossom, citrus, berry, tropical fruit and flowers characteristic of fine chocolates from the two Colombian farms and a sample from Madagascar. The lab mix was missing caramel, nut and light wood flavors, and had more grassy notes than the fine chocolates did.

Artificially constructed microbe communities might make too much of the aromatic compounds that flavor the fine chocolates, Dudley says. “Humans have a very sharp boundary for what tastes really good and what tastes awful. And the yeast make the amount of those compounds at exactly that boundary of what humans think is palatable.” Messing with the mixes could cross the line.

In early June, shortly after the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season, Google unveiled a new model designed specifically to forecast the tracks and intensity of tropical cyclones.

Part of the Google DeepMind suite of AI-based weather research models, the "Weather Lab" model for cyclones was a bit of an unknown for meteorologists at its launch. In a blog post at the time, Google said its new model, trained on a vast dataset that reconstructed past weather and a specialized database containing key information about hurricanes tracks, intensity, and size, had performed well during pre-launch testing.

"Internal testing shows that our model's predictions for cyclone track and intensity are as accurate as, and often more accurate than, current physics-based methods," the company said.

Google said it would partner with the National Hurricane Center, an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Service that has provided credible forecasts for decades, to assess the performance of its Weather Lab model in the Atlantic and East Pacific basins.

For many beer lovers, a nice thick head of foam is one of life's pure pleasures, and the longer that foam lasts, the better the beer-drinking experience. A team of Swiss researchers spent seven years studying why some beer foams last longer than others and found that the degree of fermentation—i.e., whether a given beer has been singly, doubly, or triply fermented—is crucial, according to a new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

As previously reported, foams are ubiquitous in everyday life, found in foods (whipped cream), beverages (beer, cappuccino), shaving cream and hair-styling mousse, packing peanuts, building insulation, flame-retardant materials, and so forth. All foams are the result of air being beaten into a liquid formula that contains some kind of surfactant (active surface agent), usually fats or proteins in edible foams, or chemical additives in non-edible products. That surfactant strengthens the liquid film walls of the bubbles to keep them from collapsing.

Individual bubbles typically form a sphere because that's the shape with the minimum surface area for any volume and hence is the most energy-efficient. One reason for the minimizing principle when it comes to a bubble's shape is that many bubbles can then tightly pack together to form a foam. But bubbles "coarsen" over time, the result of gravity pulling down on the liquid and thinning out the walls. Eventually, they start to look more like soccer balls (polyhedrons). In a coarsening foam, smaller bubbles are gradually absorbed by larger ones. There is less and less liquid to separate the individual bubbles, so they press together to fill the space.

A Tale of Two Nebulae

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2508/M57/_LRGB/_1K.jpg

This colorful telescopic view towards the musical northern constellation Lyra reveals the faint outer halos and brighter central ring-shaped region of M57, popularly known as the Ring Nebula. To modern astronomers M57 is a well-known planetary nebula. With a central ring about one light-year across, M57 is definitely not a planet though, but the gaseous shroud of one of the Milky Way's dying sun-like stars. Roughly the same apparent size as M57, the fainter and more often overlooked barred spiral galaxy at the left is IC 1296. In fact, over 100 years ago IC 1296 would have been known as a spiral nebula. By chance the pair are in the same field of view, and while they appear to have similar sizes they are actually very far apart. At a distance of a mere 2,000 light-years M57 is well within our own Milky Way galaxy. Extragalactic IC 1296 (aka PGC62532) is more like 200,000,000 light-years distant. That's about 100,000 times farther away than M57 but since they appear roughly similar in size, former spiral nebula IC 1296 must also be about 100,000 times larger than planetary nebula M57. Look closely at the sharp 21st century astroimage to spot even more distant background galaxies scattered through the frame.

Attribution: Kent Biggs

@space@lemmy.science.social @science@lemmy.world @science@beehaw.org @space@beehaw.org @space@lemmy.world @science@lemmy.ml @science@newsmast.community @space@newsmast.community @space@lemmy.ml #space #science #nasa #astronomy

archive link

The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., says he wants to understand what causes autism. It’s a perfectly laudable goal and one that scientists have been pursuing for decades. But after announcing a large new federal study on the topic, he made a shocking choice by bringing in the vaccine critic David Geier as a researcher.

In the scientific community, Mr. Geier is infamous for the deeply flawed studies he conducted with his father, Mark Geier, claiming that vaccines cause autism. Researchers have long called attention to the serious methodological and ethical defects in their work.

The Geiers once created an illegitimate review board for their research, composed of themselves, family members and business associates. They also promoted the drug Lupron, used for chemical castration and prostate cancer, as a supposed treatment for autism, charging $5,000 to $6,000 monthly for unproven therapies. As a result, Mark Geier’s medical license was ultimately revoked or suspended by all 12 states in which he was licensed, and David Geier was fined for practicing medicine without a license.

Because of David Geier’s track record and the fact that Mr. Kennedy has said he believes that autism is caused by vaccines, many public health experts think that the upcoming study may echo the same flawed science. We’ve broken down the anti-vaccine research playbook to help you spot the telltale signs of shoddy studies and show why Mr. Geier is such a divisive choice.

An interesting look at chirality and possible outcomes of mucking about too much with life itself.

Globally, human excreta are a huge untapped source of nutrients. Now, a new perspective paper makes the case that biochar could help to unlock it.

The PNAS paper shows that human waste contains over 20 billion kilograms of nitrogen, almost 3 billion kilograms of phosphorus, and 6 billion kilograms of potassium annually. Urine alone contains the equivalent to 17% of global annual nitrogen needs, and up to 25% of potassium demand as well.

Extracting these valuable agricultural nutrients from waste products could help to build a powerful circular nutrient bioeconomy, the researchers believe: food becomes waste, which helps to grow food again, instead of being discarded and lost.

One can't help but wonder if the process could also use condensers to turn the water vapor back into grey water perfect for irrigation.

Or, you know, golf courses in the desert.

Seems the answer is no.

But as much as anything else, this is a shitpost because the vaccine names could not get any more Amazon dropshipper.

There are, however, two effective and Food and Drug Administration–approved vaccines that get the body to produce antibodies against chikungunya, Jones says, and these lower the risk of infection. One, called IXCHIQ, uses a weakened, noninfective form of the virus. The other vaccine, VIMKUNYA, is based on viruslike particles.

Buy two vaccines, get 5% off. Click here for coupon.

Live Science: Tardigrades Apparently Do Huge Poops.
Because as requested by YoiksAndAway: “This deserves its own post.”

Imgur mirror.

https://archive.is/Bydus

When Bonnie hears the opening bars of the Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony, she is transported back to 1997. But it isn’t a joyful memory that comes to mind; it is the painful recollection of driving home from school and seeing the sheriff changing a lock on her house.

Then a teenager, Bonnie and her family were about to be evicted. And the Verve’s song was everywhere.

“It was a big hit at the time, and it just seemed to be playing all the time, in takeaway shops and shopping centres, on the radio in the car. I just couldn’t get away from this song,” she says.

To this day the 46-year-old who lives in Canberra, Australia, says she will change the radio or leave the location where the song is playing to avoid hearing it. “The lyrics of this song too closely described our situation,” she says.

Bitter Sweet Symphony was the recessional at my first wedding. I'm pretty certain neither of us (both trancewhore ravers) had bothered listening to the lyrics when we made that selection.

Archive link: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/A4sq8

YES! It's a click-bait title. Read the article to understand the breakthrough.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/YfM1N

There’s a new record holder for the most accurate clock in the world. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have improved their atomic clock based on a trapped aluminum ion. Part of the latest wave of optical atomic clocks, it can perform timekeeping with 19 decimal places of accuracy.

Optical clocks are typically evaluated on two levels — accuracy (how close a clock comes to measuring the ideal “true” time, also known as systematic uncertainty) and stability (how efficiently a clock can measure time, related to statistical uncertainty). This new record in accuracy comes out of 20 years of continuous improvement of the aluminum ion clock. Beyond its world-best accuracy, 41% greater than the previous record, this new clock is also 2.6 times more stable than any other ion clock. Reaching these levels has meant carefully improving every aspect of the clock, from the laser to the trap and the vacuum chamber.

The team published its results in Physical Review Letters.

“It’s exciting to work on the most accurate clock ever,” said Mason Marshall, NIST researcher and first author on the paper. “At NIST we get to carry out these long-term plans in precision measurement that can push the field of physics and our understanding of the world around us.”

Indulge me in a rant. If we're going to redefine the second because of advancements in measuring sensitivity, doesn't this become a good time to reconsider the SI structure?

Bad approximations of distances in the 18th century brought us the metric system. With the sort of precision we now have, not to mention the need for nongeocentric units as space increasing becomes a field of research, why are we using a flawed system based on guesses from a few guys in France during The Enlightenment?

I've no issue with shorthand like AUs or light-years for large distances, but it feels we should have the basic tenets of the universe as the basis. Like, the light-nanosecond for distance on the human scale (it's about 11.8 inches or 29.98cm) and then reconfigure the system from first principles.

I'm not saying we should throw out measuring systems each time they get more precise, but a lot of cruft is grandfathered in to what we currently use. We can't just go for further precision and then shrug and say "well, nothing we can do about it."