With hundreds of candidates in hand, both had to then filter the field: Webb created a sophisticated spreadsheet, and McKinlay went on 88 dates. Inspired by Webb, Aurora developed a spreadsheet for ranking candidates with positive and negative attributes, including flaws that were so bad they were “dealbreakers.” There is no perfect solution, but there is a reasonable formula: Figure out your parameters, like how soon you want to be in a relationship and how many dates you want to go on in search of the right person.

A few years ago, Peak began to wonder whether it would be possible to offer children and young people like Joseph bespoke tablets — sized to suit them and containing the exact dosage they require. And in July 2018, Peak’s team at Alder Hey became the first in the world to administer 3D-printed tablets to children as part of a research trial. This approach squeezes in more of the active ingredients than standard manufacturing, which compresses the drug and other components by stamping the preparation into a mold using a machine called a tablet press.

He and his colleagues gave antibiotics to mice prone to develop a version of Alzheimer’s disease, in order to kill off much of the gut bacteria in the mice. Young mice given antibiotics for a week had fewer clumps in their brains when they grew old, too. Following a string of similar experiments, he now suspects that just a few species in the gut — perhaps even one — influence the course of Alzheimer’s disease, perhaps by releasing chemical that alters how immune cells work in the brain.

A few years ago, Peak began to wonder whether it would be possible to offer children and young people like Joseph bespoke tablets — sized to suit them and containing the exact dosage they require. And in July 2018, Peak’s team at Alder Hey became the first in the world to administer 3D-printed tablets to children as part of a research trial. This approach squeezes in more of the active ingredients than standard manufacturing, which compresses the drug and other components by stamping the preparation into a mold using a machine called a tablet press.

The fertility tech firm is collaborating with the Institute of Life to conduct the first known human trial of the procedure, called mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), for treating infertility. Fertility doctors first started messing around with the idea for MRT in the late ’90s in clinics in New York and New Jersey on a hunch that some people struggle to get pregnant because of defects in the jelly-like cytoplasm of their eggs. In February, British authorities granted doctors at Newcastle University the go-ahead to begin a study assessing how well MRT could help two women affected by mitochondrial diseases conceive healthy children.

The discovery that the birds’ movements could be used to track the currents and tides came about when Cooper and his colleagues realized this valuable information was hiding in plain sight. When Cooper and his colleagues reviewed the RSPB’s data, they realized that the tracker-outfitted birds were indirectly measuring the tide and the surface currents. After filtering out tracking data of birds in flight, Cooper’s team compared the birds’ movements on the water to other tidal flow measurements, confirming that the two coincided closely.

Image: NASA
Earth’s magnetic field, which protects life from intense solar radiation, almost collapsed 565 million years ago, according to a study published Monday in Nature Geoscience. Now, a half-billion years later, Earth’s magnetic field is ten times stronger than it was in was during this early era. The inner core is slowly growing by “freezing” molten iron and nickel to its mass, a process that pumps heat into the outer core and bolsters Earth’s magnetic field.

The main actors of these scientific revolutions often fostered this way of thinking about science as an enquiry leading to the inevitable triumph of truth over past errors. For decades (without taking Wittgenstein as a direct target nor as an interlocutor in this specific debate on science), anti-realist trends in philosophy of science have called into question both the possibility of atomic facts and their ability to make scientific claims true or false. This decades-long, multi-pronged, disenchantment-with-truth trend in philosophy of science starts by rejecting the idea that there are facts about nature that make our scientific claims true or false.

Steinhardt’s new book, The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter (Simon Schuster) chronicles his 30-year obsession with a structure called the quasi-crystal, from proving that it could theoretically exist to traveling to remote parts of Russia to discover whether it might be found in nature. Those are quasi-crystals, and their existence means there’s a whole new world of forms of matter. In 1998, I started working with a geologist at Princeton to find quasi-crystals in some obscure places using crystal databases.

That’s why a team of scientists decided to drill a hole more than a mile into the ice to figure it out.Here are some things we know about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet: The sheet is held up by a collection of ice shelves, which are melting pretty quickly. “I have waited for this moment for a long time and am delighted that we’ve finally achieved our goal,” said lead scientist Andy Smith in a press release.With this giant hole finally drilled, the scientists can send instruments down to the bottom to study the sediment underneath the ice sheet, gaining a clear picture for the first time of what the underside of all that ice looks like. With that information, scientists can finally pin down just what’s going to happen to the ice sheet in the future, and (they hope) get rid of all that confusion.Source: British Antarctic Survey via Gizmodo