Alphabet’s Google on Friday fired scientist Margaret Mitchell, she said in a Twitter post, after weeks of being under investigation for moving thousands of files outside the company amid a battle over research freedom and diversity. From a report: Google’s ethics in artificial intelligence research unit has been under scrutiny since December’s dismissal of scientist Timnit Gebru, which prompted protest from…
Tag: Research
A speed limit also applies in the quantum world
Even in the world of the smallest particles with their own special rules, things cannot proceed infinitely fast. Physicists at the University of Bonn have now shown what the speed limit is for complex quantum operations. The study also involved scientists from MIT, the universities of Hamburg, Cologne and Padua, and the Jülich Research Center. The results are important for the…
Mars rovers safe from lightning strikes, research finds
If experiments done in small bottles in a University of Oregon lab are accurate, the friction of colliding Martian dust particles are unlikely to generate big electrical storms or threaten the newly arrived exploration vehicles or, eventually, human visitors. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-02-mars-rovers-safe-lightning.html…
Research Linking Violent Entertainment To Aggression Retracted After Scrutiny
Science magazine: As Samuel West combed through a paper that found a link between watching cartoon violence and aggression in children, he noticed something odd about the study participants. There were more than 3000 — an unusually large number — and they were all 10 years old. “It was just too perfect,” says West, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at…
Apple Hiring Engineers To Develop 6G Wireless
Apple launched its first iPhones with 5G wireless speeds a few months ago. Now it’s looking to start work on sixth-generation cellular connectivity, or 6G, indicating it wants to be a leader in the technology rather than relying on other companies. From a report: The Cupertino, California-based company this week posted job ads seeking wireless system research engineers for current and…
Juno just saw a spacerock crash into Jupiter
Timing is extraordinarily important in many aspects of astronomy. If an astronomer or their instrument is looking the wrong way at the wrong time, they could miss something spectacular. Alternatively, there are moments when our instruments capture something unexpected in regions of space that we were searching for something else. That is exactly what happened recently when a team of scientists,…
Hundreds of fish species, including many we eat, are consuming plastic
As more and more plastic trash permeates the oceans, microplastics are making their way into fish and shellfish, and potentially into humans. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/hundreds-fish-species-consume-microplastics-including-human-food…
How To Fall 35,000 Feet and Survive
Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page — an online database of nearly every imaginable human plummet, documents one case of a sky diver who, upon total parachute failure, was saved by bouncing off high-tension wires. Contrary to popular belief, water is an awful choice. Like concrete, liquid doesn’t compress. Hitting the ocean is essentially the…
Quantum collaboration gives new gravity to the mysteries of the universe
Scientists have used cutting-edge research in quantum computation and quantum technology to pioneer a radical new approach to determining how our Universe works at its most fundamental level. …
In search of super-Earths: Spectrograph CRIRES+ at ESO’s Very Large Telescope
The astronomy research instrument CRIRES+ is designed to study planets outside our solar system. It is now in operation at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The Institute of Astrophysics at the University of Göttingen is part of the international research consortium that built the high-resolution infrared spectrograph at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-02-super-earths-spectrograph-crires-eso-large.html…