Nuclear chemist Dawn Shaughnessy pushes against the limits of matter.
And then there were 118. In January, an international collaboration of scientists added four new elements to the periodic table: nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganesson. It took the scientists three months to make each atom using a particle accelerator in Dubna, Russia. For years, they smashed together lighter elements at ever-higher energies, hoping they’d fuse perfectly into one heavy, brand-new element. But ...read more
Ethics in a post-CRISPR-Cas9 society.
As the prospect of humans who have been genetically cut and pasted moves closer to reality, governments have begun to take notice of the need for regulation. Through the recently developed gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, scientists can now tweak DNA with unprecedented speed and precision. In 2015, Chinese scientists announced they had used CRISPR-Cas9 on human embryos for the first time. The project, though unsuccessful, took many researchers and governm ...read more
New insights brought to you by the Dawn spacecraft.
Dwarf planet Ceres, found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, sports a weirdly tall and lonely mountain: Ahuna Mons. After comparing it with domes on Earth, scientists now believe Ahuna Mons formed when a slushy mix of internal ice and natural antifreeze reached the surface along a duct — just as magma builds volcanoes on our planet. Once on Ceres’ surface, the Slurpee-like material couldn’t flow far, and it slo ...read more
The data came from personal genomics company 23andMe.
Depression affects some 350 million people worldwide, costing billions in health care expenses and decreased work productivity, yet the illness is poorly understood on a biological level. But we’re getting closer. Scientists have pinpointed 15 regions in DNA associated with depression. The study, published in August in Nature Genetics, analyzed the genetic variations of 75,607 individuals who reported having depression, and 231,747 ...read more
Google DeepMind researchers conquer the '"white whale" of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence experts said it wouldn’t happen in 2016 — even 2030 would be a stretch. But it did. In March, AlphaGo, a program from Google’s AI research company, DeepMind, defeated 18-time world champion Go player Lee Sedol, 4-1, in a historic showdown in South Korea. Go is an ancient Chinese board game that’s elegantly simple, yet wickedly difficult to master because of the ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
