Our ancestors may have kept foxes as pets long before domestic dogs came on the scene (www.bbc.com)
Archaeological evidence suggests ancient human societies in South America revered foxes to such an extent that they were buried next to them....
Peter Higgs, physicist who discovered Higgs boson, dies aged 94 (www.theguardian.com)
Higgs, 94, who was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2013 for his work in 1964 showing how the boson helped bind the universe together by giving particles their mass, died at home in Edinburgh on Monday....
I Thought About Making Travel Plans for the Eclipse—Then I Had a Realization. (slate.com)
AI assists clinicians in responding to patient messages at Stanford Medicine (med.stanford.edu)
Relevant quote:...
The most recent XKCD, which is the best periodic table ever made (www.xkcd.com)
This is about exactly how I remember it, although the lanthanides and actinides got shortchanged.
Viagra linked to 50 percent reduction of Alzheimer's risks in new study (www.the-express.com)
Persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time (www.nature.com)
Abstract...
Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests (medicalxpress.com)
Scientists say they can cut HIV out of cells [CRISPR, proof-of-concept] (www.bbc.com)
The health impacts of red meat - reviewing a recent study and current recommendations (massresearchreview.com)
Urban Diets Lead to Decline in Gut Bacteria That Digest Plants (arstechnica.com)
This article discusses a new study on the link between gut bacteria and diet, particularly the ability to digest cellulose, a major component of plants....
Happy Pi Day!
It’s March 14th! An excellent day to eat pie and do maths. I might brush up on my geometry and try the NASA Pi Day Challenge.
Transgenic cows boost human insulin production by 10X (newatlas.com)
Our bacteria are more personal than we thought, study shows (med.stanford.edu)
Physicists Finally Find a Problem Only Quantum Computers Can Do | Quanta Magazine (www.quantamagazine.org)
Unfortunately not the best headline. No, quantum supremacy has not been proven, exactly. What this is is another kind of candidate problem, but one that’s universal, in the sense that a classical algorithm for it could be used to solve all other BQP problems (so BQP=P). That would include Shor’s algorithm, and would make...
Doctors Receptive to AI Collaboration in Simulated Clinical Case without Introducing Bias (hai.stanford.edu)
The infrastructural conditions of (de-)growth: The case of the internet (www.sciencedirect.com)
Infrastructure studies represent a domain that remains significantly uncharted among degrowth scholars. This is paradoxical considering that infrastructures constitute a fundamental prerequisite for the equitable distribution of many aspects of human well-being that degrowth proponents emphasize. Nonetheless, the substantial...
Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture (www.nature.com)
Urban agriculture (UA) is a widely proposed strategy to make cities and urban food systems more sustainable. Until now, we have lacked a comprehensive assessment of the environmental performance of UA relative to conventional agriculture, and results from earlier studies have been mixed. This is the first large-scale study to...
Why Do So Many Mental Illnesses Overlap? (www.scientificamerican.com)
Boiling tap water can remove 90 percent of microplastics (www.livescience.com)
For those with an alcohol problem, are non-alcoholic beverages a wise choice? (scopeblog.stanford.edu)
Network structure and influence of climate change counter movement (cssn.org)
This is a science paper from 2015 that shows the corporate control over contrarian discourse around efforts to stop climate change.