Los cosmólogos van llegado a la conclusión de que el universo es más homogéneo de lo que debería. ¿Tendrán una misma solución los dos grandes quebraderos de cabeza de la cosmología?
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En la Tierra, el compuesto está asociado a la actividad microbiana. Los científicos no consiguen explicar cómo puede haberse formado en Venus, pero la existencia de vida se antoja poco probable.
En ratones, ello incrementa la preferencia por alimentos poco saludables, así como el riesgo de padecer obesidad.
Un grupo de astrónomos italianos ha observado con detalle once cúmulos de galaxias. Los resultados, dicen, plantean dudas sobre uno de los fundamentos de la cosmología moderna.
El éxito del método en los cefalópodos indica que estos constituyen buenos organismos modelo en los que aplicar CRISPR para investigar el cerebro.
Six out of ten postdoctoral researchers they think the pandemic has worsened their career prospects, and one in four feel their supervisors have not done enough to support them during the pandemic.
Besides, 23% of respondents said they have sought help for anxiety or depression caused by their job, and another 26% would like that help but has not yet sought it.
Survey in 96 countries
These are the data that reflects a survey carried out by the magazine Nature to postdoc, already in a precarious and stressful situation.
Even, 51% of respondents in the latest survey have considered leaving active research due to work-related mental health issues.
The survey was conducted in June and July, and More than 7,600 people responded from 19 different disciplines. The sample, a self-selected group spread across 93 countries, is not completely representative globally, because the vast majority of respondents are in Europe and North America. All in all, the panorama that emerges is undoubtedly worrying.
Postdoctoral or postdoctoral research is academic or scientific research carried out by a person who has completed their doctoral studies, usually within the years following their degree, so, to cushion these effects, some institutions have carried out different strategies . For example, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has extended project deadlines and ordered universities to continue paying the salaries of NSF-funded postdocs,although the investigation had to be suspended.
However, this situation will not be sustainable for long, as the costs are high and overall student mobility will be much lower than usual in the next academic year, so some institutions will lose a good fraction of their fee income.
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The news
The professional and mental problems of postdoctoral researchers due to the pandemic
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
Since everything around us is governed by inflexible laws, where there is a complex (and sometimes inextricable) chain of causes and effects, introducing free will is, from a scientific point of view, almost a fantasy.
But we continue to do it because accepting that everything is written, that all the fish is sold, that we will never be able to decide what to do, is incompatible with our vision of the world. To the point that accepting such a thing, that free will is a cognitive illusion, Could it lead us to more erratic moral behavior?.
Determinism VS freedom
Eliminating the notion of free will could undermine moral behavior, increasing dishonest behavior. In it present study, several attempts to replicate this hypothesis are reported. In a series of five studies, the relationship between indications against free will and immoral behavior was tested..
The main purpose of the study was to closely replicate the findings of Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same manipulations and measures or very similar to those used in their original studies.
The efforts were largely unsuccessful, because manipulating beliefs about free will in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied in previous work, and the proposed link to immoral behavior may not be as consistent as the work suggests. former.
In other words: We are so programmed to believe in free will that pretending not to believe in it to see that immoral behavior increases is difficult..
For now, we can only speculate about it, as does the science fiction novelist Ted Chiang In one of the stories included in his new anthology, Exhalation, titled: What is expected of us. It describes how a large part of the population reacts when it is scientifically discovered, in an unquestionable way, that free will does not exist and everything is determined: adopting a akinetic mutism, a kind of deep apathy, because everything makes no sense.
That is to say, rather than acting badly, it seems that people simply do not act, which is why the text proposes perpetuating the collective deception of free will (although this is also somewhat determined):
And yet I know that since free will is an illusion, it is already predetermined who will fall into akinetic mutism and who will not. There is nothing to do about it; You cannot choose the effect that the Pronostic has on you. Some will succumb and others will not, and my sending this message will not change these proportions. So why am I sending it? Because I have no choice.
If you want to delve deeper into strong determinism, the possibility of free will, and the philosophical ramifications that all of this entails, you can do so in the following video:
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The news
We are in a deterministic universe where freedom does not exist: could accepting it be dangerous on a moral level?
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
The company Gravitricity It's going to start manipulating massive weights on an axle to store and deploy energy as needed. The axles will rise almost 1.6 kilometers in height and the weights will range between 500 and 5,000 tons. Huge winches will raise and lower the weights, and the axles will be pressurized to increase power production.
As the company says on your website: 'Our patented technology is based on a simple principle: raising and lowering a heavy weight to store and release energy.'
Gravitricity
According to those responsible for Gravitricity, maximum energy generation can reach between 1 and 20 megawatts, with continuous production of up to eight hours.
Costs are lower than current energy storage systems, such as lithium-ion battery-based solutions. Those responsible for Gravitricity also point out that, unlike battery systems, its storage mechanism can be charged and discharged several times a day without loss of performance for more than two decades.
The system's efficiency rate is 80 to 90 percent, and the system should last half a century.
The prototype system being developed by Gravitricity in Scotland, which will be completed and tested next year, will be limited to a 15 meter high shaft and a capacity of 250 kilowatts. Large-scale implementation will follow, as Gravitricity envisions utilizing abandoned coal mining pits globally for such energy storage plants.
Gravitricity's lead engineer, Miles Franklin, explains how the prototype will work:
Our demonstrator will use two 25 ton weights suspended by steel cables. In a test we will release the weights together to generate maximum power and verify our response speed. We estimate that we can go from zero to full power in less than a second, which can be extremely valuable in the frequency response and backup power markets.
The founder of Gravitricity is Peter Fraenkel, who invented the world's first tidal energy turbine. 30 years ago, the Fraenkel created a turbine to use the power of a river's current to bring water to Sudan, where he worked for a charitable organization. The civil war and lack of financing truncated their plans.
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The news
Construction begins on gravity-driven energy storage system
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention points out a drastic decrease in cancer screenings since the pandemic began.
The collateral effects of COVID-19 in this sense are clear: the delay in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer reduces the expectation of survival, As you can see in the following table.
Survival
According to This studio focused on the UK, this is the reduction in 10-year net survival per 3-month delay for 20 most common tumors:
The study performed age-stratified and stage-stratified 10-year cancer survival estimates for patients in England, United Kingdom, for 20 common tumor types diagnosed in 2008-17 at age 30 or over from Public Health England.
Data were also used for cancer diagnoses made through the system's 2-week wait referral pathway in 2013-16. Cancer Waiting Times from NHS Digital. Hazard ratios (HRs) per day for cancer progression that were generated from observational studies of treatment delay were applied. The annual number of stage I-III cancers diagnosed through the 2-week wait pathway was quantified using age-specific and 2-week wait stage-specific breakdowns.
From these numbers, the total number of lives and life years lost in England due to delays per patient of 1 to 6 months was estimated.
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The news
This is how the prognosis of cancer patients is worsening due to COVID-19
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
As revealed A study published in Nature, the transmission of infectious agents through the air depends more on how loudly we speak than on coughs or sneezes. The effect is independent of language.
The researchers analyzed the broadcast in four languages: English, Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic.
Speech superspreaders
The hypotheses on the transmission of airborne infectious diseases have traditionally emphasized the role of coughs and sneezes, which are expiratory events that produce easily visible droplets and large quantities of particles too small to see with the naked eye.
However, it has long been known that normal speech also produces large quantities of particles that are too small to see with the naked eye, but large enough to carry a variety of transmissible respiratory pathogens.
The aforementioned study thus shows that the rate of particle emission during normal human speech is positively correlated with volume (amplitude) of vocalization, which varies from approximately 1 to 50 particles per second (0.06 to 3 particles per cm3) for low to high amplitudes, regardless of the language spoken (English, Spanish, Mandarin or Arabic). When you breathe, you are emitting particles from your saliva or respiratory fluid, from the trachea and from the lungs. If you talk, you emit 10 times more. If you scream or sing, 50 times more.
Furthermore, a small fraction of individuals behave as 'super-speech emitters', consistently releasing an order of magnitude more particles than their peers.
This can not only be explained by the phonic structures or the amplitude of speech, so the results also suggest that other unknown physiological factors, which vary dramatically between individuals, could affect the probability of transmission of respiratory infectious diseases and would also help explain the existence of superspreaders that are disproportionately responsible for outbreaks of airborne infectious diseases.
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The news
It doesn't matter what language you speak: if you speak louder, you are more likely to infect others than by coughing or sneezing
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.