Weekly recaps
Recap / Best of Last Week—SLIM enters moon orbit, smart devices running AI, neural correlates of mind wandering
The last week of 2023 was a good one for space research as officials at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, announced that its "Smart Lander for Investigating Moon" (SLIM) moon lander, had entered the moon's orbit—the craft ...
Recap / Best of Last Week–cause of large mammal decline, AI good imitator but not innovator, alcohol patterns and liver disease
It was a good week for research on environmental impacts on human history as a team of geologists, oceanographers and historians affiliated with several entities found evidence suggesting that North America's first people ...
Recap / Best of Last Week—entangling molecules, new way to collect solar energy, a brain device to treat TBI
It was a good week for physics research as two teams at University College London created quite a stir in the physics world when they announced via two papers, one published in Physical Review X, the other Nature Communications, ...
Recap / Best of Last Week—LK-99 not a superconductor, tricking ChatGPT into leaking data, behaviors guided by dopamine
It was an interesting week for physics research as a team at the Austrian Academy of Sciences unveiled a new approach to the study of entanglement that they claim could significantly improve the understanding of entanglement ...
Recap / Best of Last Week—Bronze Age megastructure found, Apple MacBook Pro hacked, the brain is not rewireable
It was an interesting week for human behavior and history as a team of climate scientists affiliated with several institutions in China, working with a colleague from the U.S., found evidence that human-produced aerosols ...
Recap / Best of Last Week—human evolutionary dead ends, AI forecasts weather in seconds, faces that are more real than real
It was a good week for human behavior research as a team of evolutionary anthropologists led by a group at Cambridge University found evidence that suggests young children may be psychologically wired to flourish with high ...
Recap / Best of Last Week—synthetic chromosome, computerized Othello solved, alcohol and caffeine impact on sleeping
It was a good week for biological research as a team of geneticists in the U.K. completed construction of a synthetic chromosome—their work was part of an international project aimed at building the world's first synthetic ...
Recap / Best of Last Week—starfish are all head, an all-analog photoelectronic chip, antibiotics no longer effective
It was a good week for biology research as a combined team of marine biologists from Stanford University and UC Berkeley discovered that starfish are all head—they found very little evidence of gene signatures associated ...
Recap / Best of Last Week—landscape hidden beneath ice, using AI to predict AI research, fasting is safe for diabetics
It was a good week for natural history research as a team of geologists from the U.K. and the U.S. found a hidden landscape of hills and valleys carved by ancient rivers and frozen in time beneath the ice of Antarctica. Also, ...
Recap / Best of Last Week: Missing law of nature, a solar-power tipping point and powerful signals in brain white matter
It was a good week for evolutionary and historical research, as a multi-institutional, international collaboration showed that Neanderthals inherited at least 6% of their genome from a now-extinct lineage of early modern ...
Recap / Best of Last Week—early cities were violent, using AI to advance science, common herbicide harms adolescent brain
It was an interesting week for human behavior studies, as a team of economists from several institutions in the U.S. found that for most people, hunting for the cheapest price for a plane ticket is a waste of time, mostly ...
Recap / Best of Last Week—new mammal organelle, AI that designs robots, Stonehenge 'Altar Stone' has different origin
It was a good week for biology research, as a team of cell biologists at ETH Zurich identified a new organelle in mammalian cells. Called the exclusome, it is made of DNA rings called plasmids. A team led by a group at USC ...