Best of Last Week: Close-up of Ganymede, manipulated Twitter trends, protection for COVID-19 patients
Bob Yirka
news contributor
It was a good week for space science, as the team running NASA's Juno space probe announced it would soon get a close look at Jupiter's moon Ganymede—the group is hoping to learn more about the moon's ionosphere, composition, ice shell and magnetosphere. And a team at the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics wondered if the black hole at the center of the Milky Way could actually be a mass of dark matter. They found some evidence that suggested that might be the case.
In technology news, a team at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, discovered mass scale manipulation of Twitter Trends–they found that half of all the trending Twitter topics in Turkey were fake. And a combined team from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles announced the development of Text2App—a framework that creates Android apps from text descriptions. Also, a combined team from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California created a recurrent neural network that infers a global temporal structure based on local examples. And a team at MIT developed a programmable fiber that contains memory, temperature sensors and a trained neural network program.
In other news, a team of electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego announced that they had developed a light-shrinking material that lets ordinary microscopes see in super-resolution. And a team of researchers from Japan, the U.S., and the U.K. found a drug combination that may cure COVID-19—cepharanthine, an anti-inflammatory drug, and nelfinavir, which is used to treat HIV patients. And a team at the Neiker Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development found that a beer byproduct when mixed with manure proved to be an excellent pesticide.
And finally, if you have been previously infected by the SARS‑CoV‑2 virus, you might want to check out the results of work done by a team at Rockefeller University—they found that people who had COVID-19 and then got vaccinated are likely now protected against emerging variants of the virus.
