Nature
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Tackling ‘wicked’ problems calls for engineers with social responsibility
In the nineteenth century, steamboat explosions were common — until they weren’t.Credit: Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World Guru Madhavan W. W. Norton & Company (2024) Society relies on engineers to deliver almost everything it uses, from food and water to buildings, transport and telecommunications. But new technologies are often rushed into service, for market…
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AI now beats humans at basic tasks — new benchmarks are needed, says major report
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as the chatbot ChatGPT, have become so advanced that they now very nearly match or exceed human performance in tasks including reading comprehension, image classification and competition-level mathematics, according to a new report (see ‘Speedy advances’). Rapid progress in the development of these systems also means that many common benchmarks and tests for assessing them…
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How two PhD students overcame the odds to snag tenure-track jobs
Researching the institutions you’re applying for can help you personalize your application.Credit: Getty Academic careers are meant to follow a set trajectory: PhD student, postdoctoral researcher, tenure-track job. But when we were thinking about what to do after our PhDs, we decided to skip the postdoc stage and go straight for tenure-track jobs owing to visa restrictions (Q.L., an international…
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How synthetic biologists are building better biofactories
Scientists have used microorganisms to produce beneficial chemicals for decades. By providing the microbes with enzymes and metabolic pathways, researchers can coax cells to churn out everything from food additives to biofuels. One advantage of biomanufacturing is ecological: the processes are generally more environmentally friendly than are chemical manufacturing methods. But it’s expensive, mainly because cells won’t create something simply…
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Weird new electron behaviour in stacked graphene thrills physicists
Electrons in stacked sheets of staggered graphene collectively act as though they have fractional charges at ultra-low temperatures.Credit: Ramon Andrade 3DCiencia/Science Photo Library Minneapolis, Minnesota Last May, a team led by physicists at the University of Washington in Seattle observed something peculiar. When the scientists ran an electrical current across two atom-thin sheets of molybdenum ditelluride (MoTe2), the electrons acted…
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‘Bandit’ algorithms help chemists to discover generally applicable conditions for reactions
RESEARCH BRIEFINGS 18 March 2024 In organic chemistry, finding conditions that enable a broad range of compounds to undergo a particular type of reaction is highly desirable. However, conventional methods for doing so consume a lot of time and reagents. A machine-learning method has been developed that overcomes these problems. Source link
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Indigenous Australian fire-stick farming began at least 11,000 years ago
Northern Australian elder George Milpurrurr shows the next generation how to do a cultural burn.Credit: Penny Tweedie/Alamy Indigenous Australians have been using fire to shape the country’s northern ecosystems for at least 11,000 years, according to charcoal preserved in the sediment of a sinkhole. The study was published on 11 March in Nature Geoscience1. The practice of cultural burning, also…
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Big science in Latin America: accelerate particles and progress
Large scientific facilities do more than just deliver breakthroughs — they build capacity. Regions that host them benefit from the creation of jobs and skills as well as infrastructures, from computing to electricity and transport. The benefits can be especially great for advanced light sources, which generate intense beams of light for a range of uses in academia and industry.…
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To unravel the origin of life, treat findings as pieces of a bigger puzzle
The origin of life is one of the greatest challenges in science. It transcends conventional disciplinary boundaries, yet has been approached from within those confines for generations. Not surprisingly, these traditions have emphasized different aspects of the question. Or rather, questions. The origin of life is really an extended continuum from the simplest prebiotic chemistry to the first reproducing cells,…
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Ambitious survey of human diversity yields millions of undiscovered genetic variants
The All of Us programme aims to recruit one million people from ethnic and socio-economic groups that are typically under-represented in biomedical studies.Credit: Barbara Alper/Getty A massive US programme that aims to improve health care by focusing on the genomes and health profiles of historically underrepresented groups has begun to yield results. Analyses of up to 245,000 genomes gathered by…
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