Science
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” ― Albert Einstein
Quenching the Thirst of the Arid World: Compact Fuel-Powered Atmospheric Water Harvesters
As the global population continues to surge and climate change disrupts traditional water sources, the need for innovative approaches to freshwater production has never been more pressing. Now a promising solution has emerged in the form of sorption-based atmospheric water harvesting (SAWH) devices
A Single Therapy for Asthma: Engineering Long-Lived T Cells with Multi-Targeting Abilities
Researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing may have found an alternative approach that could push severe asthma into long-term remission with just a single treatment: engineering long-lived T cells with the unique ability to target multiple drivers of the condition simultaneously.
Hidden Dangers Under Antarctic Ice
Satellite Radar Reveals Extensive Seawater Intrusions Beneath Thwaites Glacier. This may explain why the rate of glacial loss has been greater than expected from modelling
Gene Editing Gives Hope for Inherited Blindness
A landmark small safety study of a promising new gene therapy approach provides early evidence that directly editing the defective gene may restore some vision loss in people with CEP290-associated retinal degeneration.
A Wild Orangutan’s Self-Medication Secret
Deep in the forests of Sumatra, scientists made an unexpected discovery - a wild orangutan was treating its own wound using plants in a way that provided the first evidence of active wound medication in great apes. Researchers observed a male Sumatran orangutan...
Measuring the Thickness of Water’s Airy Interface
Aqueous interfaces are ubiquitous in many natural and artificial processes and their significance arises from the unique properties of water molecules within the interfacial region, with a crucial parameter being the thickness of its structural anisotropy or 'healing depthg'
The Mystery of the Disappearing Fireflies
Fireflies have illuminated summer evenings with their magical glow as long as humanity has observed the night sky, but now anecdotal reports from across North America have suggested that firefly populations have been declining.
Fighting the Nanoplastics
Most people are familiar with the scourge of microplastics pollution - the microscopic pieces of plastic debris that are pervasive in our waters. But an even smaller and more insidious form of plastic pollution is gaining attention from scientists - nanoplastics.
AI | Hallucinations and Illusions of AI in Science
A new perspective paper published in Nature warns that an overreliance on AI comes with epistemic risks that could undermine the very goals of increased productivity and objectivity that AI promises. See the April DarkDrug Editorial based on this paper
AI | Can AI Assist in Peer Review?
The constant growth in research output has placed tremendous strain on this system as the number of papers requiring expert evaluation increases each year. Could artificial intelligence (AI) offer a solution by assisting reviewers or automating certain tasks?
AI | Will AI Diminish the Rigor of Peer Review?
As the use of AI by researchers to aid them write abstracts and journal submissions grows, this research looks at the use of AI in reviewing them
- New understanding of fly behavior has potential...on July, 2024 at 3:34 pm
Scientists have identified an automatic behavior in flies that helps them assess wind conditions -- its presence and direction -- before deploying a strategy to follow a scent to its source. The fact that they can do this is surprising -- can you tell if there's a gentle breeze if you stick your […]
- A rare form of ice at the center of a cool new...on July, 2024 at 3:33 pm
Researchers explain a new mechanism for ice formation. Ice can form near the free surface of a water droplet via small precursors with a structure resembling ice 0. These are readily formed by negative pressure effects due to surface tension, creating ring-like structures with the same […]
- Researchers develop state-of-the-art device to...on July, 2024 at 3:33 pm
Engineering researchers have demonstrated a state-of-the-art hardware device that could reduce energy consumption for artificial intelligent (AI) computing applications by a factor of at least 1,000.
- Folded peptides are more electrically conductive...on July, 2024 at 11:39 pm
What puts the electronic pep in peptides? A folded structure, according to a new study. Researchers combined single-molecule experiments, molecular dynamics simulations and quantum mechanics to validate the findings.
- 'Kink state' control may provide pathway to...on July, 2024 at 11:39 pm
The key to developing quantum electronics may have a few kinks. According to researchers, that's not a bad thing when it comes to the precise control needed to fabricate and operate such devices, including advanced sensors and lasers. The researchers fabricated a switch to turn on and off the […]
Astronomers have uncovered a massive stellar black hole in the Milky Way, just 2,000 light-years from Earth. This black hole was discovered “by chance” from data collected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. The black hole has been dubbed Gaia BH3, or BH3 in short. It is the second-closest known black hole to Earth. Discovery of a dormant 33 solar-mass black hole in pre-release Gaia astrometry. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2024; DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202449763
Header Banner: On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced they had each observed a new particle in the mass region around 126 GeV. This particle is consistent with the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. The Higgs boson, as proposed within the Standard Model, is the simplest manifestation of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. Other types of Higgs bosons are predicted by other theories that go beyond the Standard Model. On 8 October 2013 the Nobel prize in physics (link is external) was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”. The DarkDrug logo shows the Milky Way, the galaxy we call home and yet only explored a fraction of.
