Best of Last Week: Sea levels rising faster, a robot guide dog and inexpensive COVID-19 vaccine
It was a good week for earth science as a team of researchers at Harvard University found evidence suggesting that Antarctic ice sheet melting is likely to lift sea levels higher than previously thought—a new calculation for the water expulsion mechanism showed more water being pushed into the ocean due to rising bedrock. Also, a team with members from the U.S. and Canada discovered cave deposits that showed a surprising shift in permafrost over the last 400,000 years—they found it has been much more stable.
In technology news, a team of computer scientists at the University of Virginia School of Engineering discovered a new vulnerability that affects computers globally—a line of attack that can get past current Spectre defenses. Also, Scott Hardman and Gil Tal, a pair of researchers with the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis looked into why some electric car owners revert back to gasoline-powered vehicles. And a combined team from Northwestern University and the University of Hong Kong announced that they had developed a new brain-like computing device that simulates human learning. Also, a team with the University of California Berkeley's Hybrid Robotics Group developed a robotic guide dog to assist blind individuals.
In other news, a team of researchers from the Salk Institute and the University of California San Diego showed that the novel coronavirus spike protein plays an additional key role in the illness—also confirming that COVID-19 is a vascular disease and not a respiratory disease. Also, officials with NASA announced that the Mars helicopter Ingenuity made a successful fourth flight and because of that will get an extra month of flying. And a team in the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University determined which dogs more often establish eye contact with humans.
And finally, if you are among those who cannot be vaccinated for COVID-19 because of the cost, you might want to check out work done by a combined team from the University of Virginia and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University—they developed a new vaccine that could provide universal protection against all of the COVID variants and would cost less than US $1.
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