Best of Last Week – Global temperatures unprecedented, fusion ignition, older people have more COVID antibodies

November 15, 2021 • by Bob Yirka

It was a good week for earth science, as a trio of researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Yale University and The University of Texas at Austin revealed the fate of sinking tectonic plates. Some are significantly weakened as they sink, T. V. Gerya, D. Bercovici and T. W. Becker noted, but not so much that they break apart entirely. Also, a team with members from several institutions in the U.S. found that global temperatures over the last 24,000 years show today's warming is "unprecedented." And an international team found clues on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean that help explain why glacial cycles intensified 1 million years ago.

In technology news, a team at South China University of Technology announced a compound that may enable sustainable, cost-effective, large-scale energy storage. And a team with members from Vector Institute, the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics developed a neural-network-based optimization technique inspired by the principle of annealing. A team with members from the Polytechnic Institute of Paris and the University of Lyon developed a self-supervised strategy to train deep despeckling networks, which they have named MERLIN. Researchers from Franklin & Marshall College demonstrated a technique that allows robots to detect when humans need help by processing social cues.

In other news, a team of researchers from several institutions in the U.S. and New Zealand revealed surprising findings on how salt affects blood flow in the brain—it is reduced in the hypothalamus when sodium levels are high. And scientists working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility announced that they were at the brink of fusion ignition.

And finally, if you have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, you may want to check out the results of work done by a team with members affiliated with a host of institutions in Canada. They found that for those who have been infected by the virus, the older they are the more antibodies they have.