Best of Last Week—Listening to gravitational waves, computer issues waste time, benefits of vitamin D in older people
Bob Yirka
news contributor
It was a good week for space exploration, as officials with NASA reported that the Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, had reestablished contact with mission controllers after going silent for 62 days. Also a team working on the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves project, announced that after 15 years of data collection, they had "heard" the clamor of gravitational waves coming from two distant merging supermassive black holes—the observation was the first of its kind and made international headlines. And a pair of astronomers, Kathryn Neugent and Philip Massey announced that they had discovered 19 new Wolf-Rayet stars in the Andromeda galaxy.
In technology news, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, working with colleagues Marco Lansiti and Greg Richards, announced that a study they commissioned found that Copilot, GitHub's programming tool, may lead to a boost in global GDP of $1.5 trillion—Copilot is an AI based tool that can be used to speed up software development. And a team at the University of Waterloo, announced that they had found a method of attack that can successfully bypass voice authentication security systems with up to a 99% success rate after only six tries—the machine learning approach used a deepfake approach to generate copies of a victim's voice that were real enough to fool most voice systems. Also, a combined team of computer engineers from the University of Copenhagen and Roskilde University found that most computer users endure a lot of wasted time due to malfunction issues. They found that average users spend 11% to 20% of their computer time dealing with hardware/software issues instead of getting work done. And a team of robotics engineers at the National University of Singapore, designed and built the first-ever wooden robotic gripper that is driven by moisture, temperature and lighting.
In other news, a team of psychologists from the U.K. and China found that children who read for pleasure in early childhood tend to exhibit better cognitive performance and mental well-being when they enter adolescence. Also, a team of paleobiologists from the University of Fribourg and the University of Bristol, found evidence in a fossil study that showed humans' ancestors survived the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. And finally, a team with members from institutions across Australia found evidence showing that vitamin D supplements may reduce the risk of serious cardiovascular events in older people.
