AI helps find missed meteorites
Antarctica is famously good at preserving meteorites, burying the rocks in snow and ice until they resurface. They often become concentrated in regions of compacted “blue” ice that make up about 1% of the Antarctic surface. But finding the meteorites within those tracts has been an ad hoc affair. Now, researchers have a new tool for the hunt: an artificial intelligence algorithm that predicts their location. A team of Belgian researchers announced last week that it employed the machine-learning software to help discover five meteorites, including a massive, 7-kilogram specimen, in a blue ice region of East Antarctica not previously known to harbor them. The software, described in a study published last year in Science Advances, uses satellite data about known, meteorite-producing regions, such as slope, blue ice content, and temperature, and is trained to predict locations that have similar characteristics. Scientists search an ice field in Antarctica for meteorites.
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In 2022, Earth set new records for warming
Temperatures continued to rise at an alarming pace in 2022, which became the fifth- or sixth-hottest year in modern history, U.S. and European science agencies reported last week. Earth’s average recorded surface temperatures were some 1.2°C warmer than preindustrial times. Nearly 30 countries set individual all-time heat records, and some 850 million people experienced the warmest temperatures of their lives last year. As in 2021, the warming was suppressed by a persistent, multiyear La Niña cooling pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean, the agencies said. But La Niña is expected to wane this year, setting the stage for even higher temperatures. Meanwhile, the world’s oceans, which capture 90% of the excess heat from global warming and are less prone to short-term temperature fluctuations, again had their hottest year on record in 2022—as they have nearly every year since the 1990s.
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Utah’s Great Salt Lake may dry up within 5 years
North America’s largest saline lake could be gone by 2028 if water inflows are not restored, researchers warned last week. The Great Salt Lake in Utah has lost nearly three-quarters of its water and 60% of its surface area since 1950, a report from 32 scientists at multiple institutions concludes, and a recent drought has accelerated the losses.
Read more: The Letten Prize - Funding opportunity for young researchers
A decade after Kyoto University biologist Shinya Yamanaka won a share of a Nobel Prize for discovering a cocktail of proteins that reprogram adult cells into versatile stem cells, two teams argue the proteins can turn back the clock for entire organisms—perhaps one day humans. One group at a biotech used gene therapy to deliver some of the so-called Yamanaka factors into old mice, and modestly extended their life span. And a separate team followed a similar strategy to reverse aging-like changes in genetically engineered mice.
Read more: Two research teams reverse signs of aging in mice
Call it the greenest of green energies. Scientists have long tried to use just Sun and water to generate energy, a bit like plants do when they photosynthesize. But the process—which involves using sunlight to split water molecules—has been too inefficient to be commercially viable. A new advance may change that.
Read more: Sun-powered water splitter produces unprecedented levels of green energy
Polish Institute of Advanced Studies PIASt is an independent centre of research located in Warsaw. It offers a base for an international community of high-level scholars willing to devote themselves entirely to their research work, while being freed from their usual teaching and administration constraints.
MSCA COFUND 2023. COFUND supports new or existing doctoral programmes and postdoctoral fellowship schemes. The aim of the action is to promote the best practices of the MSCA, including international, interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary scientific training, as well as international and interdisciplinary mobility of researchers at all stages of their careers.
Planned date of application submission: 10 October 2023.
Application deadline: 8 February 2024.
https://marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/calls/msca-cofund-2023