Month: March 2022
-
We finally have a fully complete human genome
Researchers have finally deciphered a complete human genetic instruction book from cover to cover. The completion of the human genome has been announced a couple of times in the past, but those were actually incomplete drafts. “We really mean it this time,” says Evan Eichler, a human geneticist and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at…
-
“Yulia’s Dream” to support young, at-risk Ukrainian students of mathematics | MIT News
Millions have fled the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and for those who are staying, schools are closed. While refugee-supporting programs focus on immediate needs, the Department of Mathematics’ MIT PRIMES program plans to use its resources to support the mathematics education of Ukrainian high school students. In honor of Yulia Zdanovska, a 21-year-old Ukrainian mathematician…
-
Why did the Vikings abandon Greenland? | HeritageDaily
A study led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published recently in Science Advances, upends the previously accepted theory on why the Vikings abandoned Greenland. Greenland, or Grœnland in Old Norse, was settled by Norwegian and Icelandic explorers during the 10th century AD, where two major Viking settlements emerged until their unexplained abandonment in…
-
How to make your Instagram feed chronological
After years of Instagram users pining for the return of chronological feeds, the app has finally made a change that lets you put the most recent posts at the top. There is a catch, though: your choice to sort your homepage chronologically is temporary, and there’s nothing you can do about it. How to see…
-
MIT graduate engineering, business, science programs ranked highly by U.S. News for 2023 | MIT News
MIT’s graduate program in engineering has again topped the list of U.S. News and World Report’s annual rankings, released today. The program has held the No. 1 spot since 1990, when the magazine first published these rankings. The MIT Sloan School of Management also placed highly, landing in the No. 5 spot for the best…
-
Quantum complexity grows linearly for an exponentially long time — ScienceDaily
Physicists know about the huge chasm between quantum physics and the theory of gravity. However, in recent decades, theoretical physics has provided some plausible conjecture to bridge this gap and to describe the behaviour of complex quantum many-body systems, for example black holes and wormholes in the universe. Now, a theory group at Freie Universität…
-
Researchers open lunar time capsule from Apollo 17 mission | HeritageDaily
Scientists from NASA have opened a lunar time capsule from the Apollo 17 mission conducted in 1972. The Apollo mission was the final mission of NASA’s Apollo program, in which Commander Eugene Cernan and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt walked on the Moon. The primary goals of the mission were to sample lunar highland material…
-
Chaos theory provides hints for controlling the weather — ScienceDaily
Under a project led by the RIKEN Center for Computational Science, researchers have used computer simulations to show that weather phenomena such as sudden downpours could potentially be modified by making small adjustments to certain variables in the weather system. They did this by taking advantage of a system known as a “butterfly attractor” in…
-
Can garbage be turned into renewable energy?
OUR ENTIRE SOCIETY runs on garbage, at least in a manner of speaking. Eons-old junk—coal and oil that began as ancient plants and dinosaur remains, among other dreck—has powered our electric grid since the beginning of the industrial age. Of the 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity the United States used in 2020, most came…
-
Scientists solve solar secret | HeritageDaily
The further we move away from a heat source, the cooler the air gets. Bizarrely, the same can’t be said for the Sun, but University of Otago scientists may have just explained a key part of why. Study lead Dr Jonathan Squire, of the Department of Physics, says the surface of the Sun starts at…