Tag: science

NASA’s InSight probe reveals the first detailed look at the interior of Mars

NASA's InSight lander arrived on Mars in 2018 to learn about its interior by monitoring "marsquakes," and now the project is starting to really pay off. NASA has announced that researchers have mapped the red planet's interior and discovered some big surprises and major differences with Earth.  The map is…

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Pivot Bio rakes in $430M round D as modified microbes prove their worth in agriculture

Pivot Bio makes fertilizer — but not directly. Its modified microorganisms are added to soil and they produce nitrogen that would otherwise have to be trucked in and dumped there. This biotech-powered approach can save farmers money and time and ultimately may be easier on the environment — a huge…

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Hitting the Books: How NASA selected the first Lunar Rover to scoot across the moon

The concept of space travel was so new to us that when President Kennedy issued his famous moonshot speech, not even NASA's top scientists were completely sure we could actually land on the lunar surface. Some thought any craft that set down there would simply sink into the moon's regolith…

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UFOs, Lab Leaks, And Havana Syndrome: What US Intelligence Gets Wrong On Scientific Mysteries

Isabel Espanol for BuzzFeed News Welcome to 2021. Space aliens are roaming overhead. Russian spies are zapping American diplomats with microwave weapons. And the commies are covering up a viral bioweapon. This is the year shaky science and government intelligence reports have collided, turning the news into the stuff of…

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Deep Science: Keeping AI honest in medicine, climate science and vision

Research papers come out far too frequently for anyone to read them all. That’s especially true in the field of machine learning, which now affects (and produces papers in) practically every industry and company. This column aims to collect some of the more interesting recent discoveries and papers — particularly…

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A Scientist Tracked Down Chinese Coronavirus Sequences That Had Disappeared Online

Thirteen genetic sequences — isolated from people with COVID-19 infections in the early days of the pandemic in China — were mysteriously deleted from an online database last year but have now been recovered. Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist and specialist in viral evolution at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research…

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