Best of Last Week: Reversing the climate clock, impact of screen time on children, and how red meat impacts gut bacteria
Bob Yirka
news contributor
It was a good week for space news as NASA announced that the Voyager 2 space probe entered interstellar space—the event marked the second time that a human-made object has left the solar system. And an international team of researchers reported on how Hubble found a far-away planet vanishing at record speed. They reported that the planet called GJ 3470b, is evaporating at a rate one hundred times faster than other planets of similar size. Also, a team at the University of Texas reported that they had found evidence of dark matter dominating across cosmic time—a very distant galaxy that appears rich with dark matter, behaving as theory predicted.
It was also an important week for climate news as a team at the University of Wisconsin reported on how they had found evidence that showed humans may be reversing the climate clock by 50 million years—by pumping greenhouses gases into the atmosphere. Also, a team of researchers from several institutions in the U.K. and one in South Africa suggested that the lowly broiler chicken may be the hallmark of the Anthropocene—the age of man-made impacts on the planet.
In technology news, Panida Songram, a researcher at Mahasarakham University, in Thailand, outlined her study that involved using machine learning to detect unreliable Facebook pages. And a team of engineers at MIT announced that they had developed a sun-soaking device that turns water into superheated steam.
In other news, a team at the Francis Crick Institute announced that they had cracked the CRISPR code for precise human genome editing which could lead to improving the efficiency of the gene-editing technique. Also, a team at the National Institute of Health found that heavy screen time appears to impact childrens' brains—and not in a good way.
And finally, if you are one of the billions still eating red meat there was some bad news—a team at the Cleveland Clinic conducted concurrent studies which revealed the role of red meat in gut bacteria and heart disease development. They uncovered the role that red meat plays in impacting bacteria in ways that can lead to heart disease.
