Monkeypox (Mpox) is an infection transmitted by skin-to-skin contact and causes fever and painful skin blisters. It is in the Orthopoxvirus genus of viruses, which includes smallpox, so those vaccinated against it have cross-protection, smallpox vaccines also work for monkeypox.
There is populist rhetoric about Buy Local but what few in the public realize is that the definition is subjective. Restaurants in Manhattan often claim they buy local, but in the fine print it reads 'when available', and they don't tell you when it was not locally available, and local to them may be up to 500 miles away.
Yesterday I gladly attended a symposium in honor of Giorgio Bellettini, who just turned 90. The italian physicist, who had a very big impact in particle physics in his long and illustrious career, is still very active -e.g. he makes all the hard questions at the conferences he attends, as he has always done. The symposium included recollections of Giorgio's career and achievements by colleagues who collaborated with him and/or shared a part of his path. Among them there were talks by Samuel Ting, Paul Grannis, Michelangelo Mangano, Hans Grasmann, Mario Greco.
I also was allowed to give a short recollection of a couple of episodes, that underline the exceptional disposition of Giorgio with students. Here is a quick-and-dirty English translation of my speech (it was in Italian).
Only a few years ago, American colleges used a "secret sauce" of race in admissions that voided test scores and replaced those with
arbitrary demographic selection. Due to such clear racism, and despite being a minority with less than 5 percent of the population, Asians were least likely to be admitted to elite colleges if the alternatives were a more-favored minority with lower scores or qualifications. Asians were even less likely to be admitted than white students.
... if you are a researcher in physics or astrophysics and you are working with machine learning, that is.
Between September 23 and 25 - just when summer is over - we will meet in Valencia, Spain, to discuss the latest developments in deep learning applications to optimization of experiments in fundamental science. This is the
fourth workshop of the MODE Collaboration, which focuses on a new frontier of application of deep learning: co-design and high-level optimization, and the tools to pull it off.
Once upon a time, young Baby Boomers ridiculed television programs that showed married couples in separate beds. They used terms like 'prudish' and 'Victorian' and 'repressed.'
Actually, those shows were representative of culture for most of human history. Humans have rarely shared a bed with a spouse or relative if they had a choice. Only in the 1950s did sharing a bed in larger rooms in larger houses become common. By the 1980s, California took the concept of a King-Sized bed (invented in 1890 to sleep 15) and marketed it for wealthy elites on the coasts; a California King, 7 feet long.
Artificial Intelligence - AI - isn't really AI at all, which may be why it has been so disappointing to companies that aren't trying to sell you a new leaf blower. Instead of doing something practical, like the dishes or laundry so you have more time to do art or music, AI is doing music and art for you.
Basically, it's an over-hyped grift.
Is glyphosate damaging essential microbes in soil?
A multi-year study sought to answer the question using real-world conditions.
Glyphosate (e.g Roundup) is the most popular weedkiller in the world, and that has made it a target for some disreputable competitors, primarily those in the organic food segment, who promote their own chemicals as alternatives. Their chemicals, they claim, don't harm soil but glyphosate does.
The world is aging. After centuries of relentless growth, many advanced economies are getting older, and even in poorer nations, the share of elderly people is rising. Larger and older populations are creating historic pressures on health care systems across the world.
Brown adipose tissue is different from the white fat around human belly and thighs. Brown fat helps to turn calories into heat and it was once thought that only small animals like mice and newborns had brown fat but some adults retain it.
If some people have it, perhaps others can activate it also, and a study found a previously unknown built-in mechanism that switches it off shortly after being activated. Which means it doesn't help against obesity. A group discovered a protein responsible for this switching-off process called AC3-AT. Mice that genetically didn't have AC3-AT were protected from becoming obese, partly because their bodies were simply better at burning off calories and were able to increase their metabolic rates through activating brown fat.
