Best of Last Week: Evidence of Earth's inner core rotating, new super-capacitors and parents' brains responding to kids
Bob Yirka
news contributor
It was a good week for Earth science as a team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found the best evidence yet of the Earth's inner core rotating. The researchers compared seismic data from a range of locations and repeating earthquakes. Also, a team at Rutgers University found evidence that reaffirms the idea that modern sea-level rise can be linked to human activities by studying glaciation patterns of the past.
In technology news, a team at Tesla is set to debut a new battery that is poised to reshape the economics of the auto industry—a battery that will have longer performance and cost less than others currently available. Also, a team at the University of Surrey unveiled fast-charging super-capacitor technology that they claim will be a major step toward clean energy storage. And a team led by the University of Cambridge and Simon Fraser University found that AI techniques in medical imaging may lead to incorrect diagnoses—they found that machine learning and AI systems are highly unstable in medical image reconstruction efforts. Also, a team with members from Zhejiang University of Technology, Tianjin University, Nanjing Institute of Technology and Ritsumeikan University introduced a soft robotic finger they fabricated using multi-material 3-D printing.
In other news, a team at the University of Copenhagen's Natural History Museum of Denmark discovered a bizarre new species while browsing Twitter. They were looking at photos of a North American millipede that had been shared by Derek Hennen of Virginia Tech when they spotted an unknown type of fungus on its surface. Also, a team with members from USC and the IFOM Cancer Institute in Milan found that a combo of fasting plus vitamin C is effective for hard-to-treat cancers. And a team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences found an ancient sample of DNA that unveiled an important missing piece of human history—it showed that population movement played a major role in the early genetic history of East Asians.
And finally, if you are one of the millions of parents around the world teaching your children at home due to the pandemic, you may want to check out the results of a study conducted by a team at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore—they found that the physical presence of a spouse alters how parents' brains respond to stimuli from children.
