The Science Newswise — Biological molecules called peptides play a key role in many biological activities, including the transport of oxygen and electrons. Peptides consist of short chains of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. They are also the inspiration for new kinds of biotechnology. Researchers are developing a synthetic form of a peptide…

Wetlands Protect the Coast and Clean Water  My parents always told me that it takes time to do a project the right way. And the bigger the project, the more time it takes.  So, it’s probably no surprise that it took the North Carolina Coastal Federation almost 20 years to create the North River Wetlands…

Abstract Exhaled SARS-CoV-2-containing aerosols contributed significantly to the rapid and vast spread of covid-19. However, quantitative experimental data on the infectivity of such aerosols is missing. Here, we quantified emission rates of infectious viruses in exhaled aerosol from individuals within their first days after symptom onset from covid-19. Six aerosol samples from three individuals were…

Abstract The analysis of data over space and time is a core part of descriptive epidemiology, but the complexity of spatiotemporal data makes this challenging. There is a need for methods that simplify the exploration of such data for tasks such as surveillance and hypothesis generation. In this paper, we use combined clustering and dimensionality…

Symbols Richard Sproat Springer (2023) Linguists differ on what counts as writing. Inclusivists use the term to cover mathematical symbols and emoji, whereas exclusivists accept only symbol systems with a phonetic element, such as European alphabets and Chinese characters. Computational linguist Richard Sproat is an exclusivist. His ambitious, in-depth book is the first systematic study…

The world is already more than 1 °C warmer on average than it was before industrial times, owing to greenhouse gases released from human activities. And that value is rising. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that there is at least a 50% chance that long-term global warming will overshoot 1.5 °C in…

The largest black-hole merger ever detected seemed to produce a black hole 150 times the mass of the Sun, in defiance of some accepted theories. Researchers now say they’ve found, for the first time, evidence of the long-sought vibrations produced by the resulting black hole as it settled into a spherical shape. The findings provide…

The machine is dead. I will watch over it until it isn’t. I no longer remember when I started waiting for the tiny red bulb of the machine to light up. I do, however, remember thinking that it was a noble assignment. I cringe at the pride and the sense of urgency I assigned to…