Best of Last Week: Moon ark, nanomaterial transistors, and an update for the Antikythera Mechanism

March 15, 2021 • by Bob Yirka

It was a good week for space exploration as Perseverance rover's SuperCam science instrument delivered its first results—three audio files recorded by the Mars rover just hours after landing. Also, a team at the University of Arizona made headlines when they proposed a solar-powered lunar ark as a "modern global insurance policy"—they suggested sending cryogenically frozen seed, spore, sperm and egg samples from 6.7 million people to the moon in case of a global disaster. And a team from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected a black hole on the move—a supermassive black hole wandering through space.

In technology news, a team affiliated with several institutions in China created a new transistor based on metal nanoparticles and ionic gradients. Also, a combined team from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and IBM Research Europe announced a hybrid technology that combines III-V tunnel FETs and MOSFETs. And Elon Musk company OpenAI discovered that their newly developed neural network, CLIP, mirrored human brain neurons when conducting image recognition. Also, a team from University College London recreated a mechanical cosmos for the world's first computer—the ancient Greek astronomical calculator known as the Antikythera Mechanism.

In other news, a team at Colorado State University found that the insatiable demand for cannabis has created a giant carbon footprint—mostly due to the electricity and natural gas used for cultivation. And a team at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden found that it may be possible to eliminate metabolic derangements caused by a high-fat diet—by lowering the levels of a key regulator of lipid metabolism.

And finally, people who have already received the first dose of one of the COVID-19 vaccines may want to check out a study by a team at Mount Sinai Hospital—they found that a second shot of COVID-19 vaccine may not be necessary in previously infected individuals. In their study testing the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, they found that those who had been infected with COVID-19 prior to vaccination developed antibodies 10 to 20 times higher than those who had not been vaccinated.