Telltale fragments Close examination of chips, labeled according to their blue, yellow, or red color, that once belonged to art on the Berlin Wall reveals brushstrokes, multiple layers, and the pigments used. Credit: Adapted from F. Armetta et al., 2024 Nondestructive techniques like Raman spectroscopy are often used to identify the molecular signatures of pigments, […]
December 12, 2024 | art conservation, Berlin Wall, chemistry, graffiti, neural networks, Raman spectroscopy, Science, street art | No comments
Adam Steensberg, the chief executive of Danish biotech Zealand Pharma, which is developing an alternative weight loss product based on a different hormone, says “there is a duopoly already” in the GLP-1 market. Combining different drugs could be a way of expanding the effects of GLP-1s further still. Doctors such as Perkovic envisage a possible […]
December 12, 2024 | Features, GLP-1, Health, Ozempic, Science, syndication, wegovy, weight loss, weight loss drugs | No comments
Meanwhile, over about the same time period, NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, Orion deep space crew capsule, and ground support system upgrades cost nearly $50 billion before the unpiloted Artemis I mission in 2022, according to an analysis by the Planetary Society. That sum has now risen to just shy of $60 billion. The core […]
December 12, 2024 | artemis, human spaceflight, jared isaacman, moon, NASA, Science, Space, starship | No comments
Eleven months after the Ingenuity helicopter made its final flight on Mars, engineers and scientists at NASA and a private company that helped build the flying vehicle said they have identified what probably caused it to crash on the surface of Mars. In short, the helicopter’s on-board navigation sensors were unable to discern enough features […]
December 11, 2024 | ingenuity, Mars, Science, Space | No comments
Reaching those conclusions, however, can be a bit of a challenge for two reasons. One, which we won’t really go into here, is that some policies that are now disfavored were put in place while Republicans were in charge of the national pandemic response. This leads to a number of awkward juxtapositions in the report: […]
December 11, 2024 | Covid, Lab leak, pandemic, Science, scientific evidence | No comments
Blue Origin said Tuesday that the test payload for the first launch of its new rocket, New Glenn, is ready for liftoff. The company published an image of the “Blue Ring” pathfinder nestled up against one half of the rocket’s payload fairing. “There is a growing demand to quickly move and position equipment and infrastructure […]
December 10, 2024 | blue origin, new glenn, Science, Space | No comments
Archaeologists excavating a paleolithic cave site in Galilee, Israel, have found evidence that a deep-cave compound at the site may have been used for ritualistic gatherings, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). That evidence includes the presence of a symbolically carved boulder in a prominent […]
December 9, 2024 | acoustics, anthropology, Archaeology, Science | No comments
(In addition to a standard surface code, Google includes a few qubits that handle a phenomenon called “leakage,” where a qubit ends up in a higher-energy state, instead of the two low-energy states defined as zero and one.) The key result is that going from a distance of three to a distance of five more […]
December 9, 2024 | Computer science, Google, logical qubits, Physics, quantum computing, quantum error correction, quantum mechanics, Science | No comments
Earlier this year, JWST researchers reported on measurements built on last year’s confirmation based on Webb data that Hubble’s measurements of the expansion rate were accurate, at least for the first few “rungs” of the “cosmic distance ladder.” But there was still the possibility of as-yet-undetected errors that might increase the deeper (and hence further […]
December 9, 2024 | astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, expansion of the universe, Hubble constant, Hubble tension, Physics, Science | No comments
“Every one of our conclusions, every one of our recommendations, was unanimously agreed to by our team,” Hill said. “We went through a lot of effort, arguing sentence by sentence, to make sure the entire team agreed. To get there we definitely had some robust and energetic discussions.” Hill did acknowledge that, at the outset […]
December 6, 2024 | heat shield, orion, Science, Space | No comments