By Tom Garry, in Salford

In a new report, KPMG has broken down the provincial adoption rate of generative AI across Canada, and found that Quebec led with 26 per cent, ahead of Alberta (23 per cent), British Columbia (22 per cent) and Ontario (20.5 per cent), which nearly tied with Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Atlantic Canada saw the lowest adoption […]

Facing an unprecedented crisis, IT World Canada, a beacon of technology journalism, is on the brink of closure. This poses a critical question: Without IT World Canada, who will narrate Canada’s tech story? After decades of serving the Canadian tech industry, IT World Canada needs help to survive. As of midnight tonight, the company is […]

The annual Perseid meteor shower is set to peak on Sunday night into early Monday morning, giving stargazers the chance to see hundreds of meteors.

The Orionids meteor shower peaks on Monday, but will continue to light up the sky through Nov. 22, as debris from Halley's Comet enters Earth's atmosphere.

Scientists from the Leibniz Zentrum für Archäologie and Durham University have examined a collection of 406 engraved schist plaquettes found at the Magdalenian site of Gönnersdorf in Germany.

The post 15,800-Year-Old Engraved Plaquettes Shed Light on Paleolithic Fishing Techniques appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

DNA from mitochondria, the energy powerhouses inside cells, sometimes gets added to our genome – and the number of these mutations in the brain could be linked to ageing

Stem cells made in the lab may one day aid cancer treatment by reducing our reliance on donors

Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have unexpected effects on the brain, opening up potential new ways to treat depression, anxiety, addiction and Alzheimer’s

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Rubbing a common yellow food dye onto a mouse's skin turns it temporarily transparent, so we can monitor its insides without harming the animal

A monkey that performed poorly on vision tests did much better after having a stem cell transplant to patch up holes in its retina

Two more people in the US have tested positive for the H5N1 bird flu virus, highlighting the need for expanded influenza surveillance to prevent a potential pandemic

Popular weight-loss medications including Ozempic and Wegovy contain a drug that seems to decrease cravings for food and drugs – and now there’s evidence that it might make exercise less rewarding, too

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Computer simulations of how influenza A moves through human mucus found it is ideally configured to slide through the sticky stuff on its way to infecting cells

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Israeli President Isaac Herzog says hostages are "going through hell in the dungeons of Gaza" during meeting with President Biden at White House.

Despite his own isolationist musings, the first picks of President-elect Donald Trump's incoming administration hail from a decidedly more traditionalist wing of the Republican Party.

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have uncovered critical links between socioeconomic factors — such as income, education level, and poverty — and an increased risk of Salmonella infections linked to ground beef consumption.  In a study published in the Journal of Food Protection, CDC researchers reported... Continue Reading

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Jesse Watters takes a look at the administration that President-elect Trump is assembling and how they're planning on changing Washington on “Jesse Watters Primetime.”

House Republicans are once again at odds with one another after conservatives threatened to protest Speaker Johnson's bid to lead the conference again.

Australia’s leading media agencies have ducked questions about cash kickbacks.

Research expeditions conducted at sea using a rotating gravity machine and microscope found that the Earth’s oceans may not be absorbing as much carbon as researchers have long thought.

Oceans are believed to absorb roughly 26 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions by drawing down CO₂ from the atmosphere and locking it away. In this system, CO₂ enters the ocean, where phytoplankton and other organisms consume about 70 percent of it. When these organisms eventually die, their soft, small structures sink to the bottom of the ocean in what looks like an underwater snowfall.

This “marine snow” pulls carbon away from the surface of the ocean and sequesters it in the depths for millennia, which enables the surface waters to draw down more CO₂ from the air. It’s one of Earth’s best natural carbon-removal systems. It’s so effective at keeping atmospheric CO₂ levels in check that many research groups are trying to enhance the process with geoengineering techniques.

But the new study, published on 11 October in Science, found that the sinking particles don’t fall to the ocean floor as quickly as researchers thought. Using a custom gravity machine that simulated marine snow’s native environment, the study’s authors observed that the particles produce mucus tails that act like parachutes, putting the brakes on their descent—sometimes even bringing them to a standstill.

The physical drag leaves carbon lingering in the upper hydrosphere, rather than being safely sequestered in deeper waters. Living organisms can then consume the marine snow particles and respire their carbon back into the sea. Ultimately, this impedes the rate at which the ocean draws down and sequesters additional CO₂ from the air.

The implications are grim: Scientists’ best estimates of how much CO₂ the Earth’s oceans sequester could be way off. “We’re talking roughly hundreds of gigatonnes of discrepancy if you don’t include these marine snow tails,” says Manu Prakash, a bioengineer at Stanford University and one of the paper’s authors. The work was conducted by researchers at Stanford, Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Oceans Absorb Less CO₂ Than Expected

Researchers for years have been developing numerical models to estimate marine carbon sequestration. Those models will need to be adjusted for the slower sinking speed of marine snow, Prakash says.

The findings also have implications for startups in the fledgling marine carbon geoengineering field. These companies use techniques such as ocean alkalinity enhancement to augment the ocean’s ability to sequester carbon. Their success depends, in part, on using numerical models to prove to investors and the public that their techniques work. But their estimates are only as good as the models they use, and the scientific community’s confidence in them.

“We’re talking roughly hundreds of gigatonnes of discrepancy if you don’t include these marine snow tails.” —Manu Prakash, Stanford University

The Stanford researchers made the discovery on an expedition off the coast of Maine. There, they collected marine samples by hanging traps from their boat 80 meters deep. After pulling up a sample, the researchers quickly analyzed the contents while still on board the ship using their wheel-shaped machine and microscope.

The researchers built a microscope with a spinning wheel that simulates marine snow falling through sea water over longer distances than would otherwise be practical.Prakash Lab/Stanford

The device simulates the organisms’ vertical travel over long distances. Samples go into a wheel about the size of a vintage film reel. The wheel spins constantly, allowing suspended marine-snow particles to sink while a camera captures their every move.

The apparatus adjusts for temperature, light, and pressure to emulate marine conditions. Computational tools assess flow around the sinking particles and custom software removes noise in the data from the ship’s vibrations. To accommodate for the tilt and roll of the ship, the researchers mounted the device on a two-axis gimbal.

Slower Marine Snow Reduces Carbon Sequestration

With this setup, the team observed that sinking marine snow generates an invisible halo-shaped comet tail made of viscoelastic transparent exopolymer—a mucus-like parachute. They discovered the invisible tail by adding small beads to the seawater sample in the wheel, and analyzing the way they flowed around the marine snow. “We found that the beads were stuck in something invisible trailing behind the sinking particles,” says Rahul Chajwa, a bioengineering postdoctoral fellow at Stanford.

The tail introduces drag and buoyancy, doubling the amount of time marine snow spends in the upper 100 meters of the ocean, the researchers concluded. “This is the sedimentation law we should be following,” says Prakash, who hopes to get the results into climate models.

The study will likely help models project carbon export—the process of transporting CO₂ from the atmosphere to the deep ocean, says Lennart Bach, a marine biochemist at the University of Tasmania in Australia, who was not involved with the research. “The methodology they developed is very exciting and it’s great to see new methods coming into this research field,” he says.

But Bach cautions against extrapolating the results too far. “I don’t think the study will change the numbers on carbon export as we know them right now,” because these numbers are derived from empirical methods that would have unknowingly included the effects of the mucus tail, he says.

Marine snow may be slowed by “parachutes” of mucus while sinking, potentially lowering the rate at which the global ocean can sequester carbon in the depths.Prakash Lab/Stanford

Prakash and his team came up with the idea for the microscope while conducting research on a human parasite that can travel dozens of meters. “We would make 5- to 10-meter-tall microscopes, and one day, while packing for a trip to Madagascar, I had this ‘aha’ moment,” says Prakash. “I was like: Why are we packing all these tubes? What if the two ends of these tubes were connected?”

The group turned their linear tube into a closed circular channel—a hamster wheel approach to observing microscopic particles. Over five expeditions at sea, the team further refined the microscope’s design and fluid mechanics to accommodate marine samples, often tackling the engineering while on the boat and adjusting for flooding and high seas.

In addition to the sedimentation physics of marine snow, the team also studies other plankton that may affect climate and carbon-cycle models. On a recent expedition off the coast of Northern California, the group discovered a cell with silica ballast that makes marine snow sink like a rock, Prakash says.

The crafty gravity machine is one of Prakash’s many frugal inventions, which include an origami-inspired paper microscope, or “foldscope,” that can be attached to a smartphone, and a paper-and-string biomedical centrifuge dubbed a “paperfuge.”

Finished chips coming in from the foundry are subject to a battery of tests. For those destined for critical systems in cars, those tests are particularly extensive and can add 5 to 10 percent to the cost of a chip. But do you really need to do every single test?

Engineers at NXP have developed a machine-learning algorithm that learns the patterns of test results and figures out the subset of tests that are really needed and those that they could safely do without. The NXP engineers described the process at the IEEE International Test Conference in San Diego last week.

NXP makes a wide variety of chips with complex circuitry and advanced chip-making technology, including inverters for EV motors, audio chips for consumer electronics, and key-fob transponders to secure your car. These chips are tested with different signals at different voltages and at different temperatures in a test process called continue-on-fail. In that process, chips are tested in groups and are all subjected to the complete battery, even if some parts fail some of the tests along the way.

Chips were subject to between 41 and 164 tests, and the algorithm was able to recommend removing 42 to 74 percent of those tests.

“We have to ensure stringent quality requirements in the field, so we have to do a lot of testing,” says Mehul Shroff, an NXP Fellow who led the research. But with much of the actual production and packaging of chips outsourced to other companies, testing is one of the few knobs most chip companies can turn to control costs. “What we were trying to do here is come up with a way to reduce test cost in a way that was statistically rigorous and gave us good results without compromising field quality.”

A Test Recommender System

Shroff says the problem has certain similarities to the machine learning-based recommender systems used in e-commerce. “We took the concept from the retail world, where a data analyst can look at receipts and see what items people are buying together,” he says. “Instead of a transaction receipt, we have a unique part identifier and instead of the items that a consumer would purchase, we have a list of failing tests.”

The NXP algorithm then discovered which tests fail together. Of course, what’s at stake for whether a purchaser of bread will want to buy butter is quite different from whether a test of an automotive part at a particular temperature means other tests don’t need to be done. “We need to have 100 percent or near 100 percent certainty,” Shroff says. “We operate in a different space with respect to statistical rigor compared to the retail world, but it’s borrowing the same concept.”

As rigorous as the results are, Shroff says that they shouldn’t be relied upon on their own. You have to “make sure it makes sense from engineering perspective and that you can understand it in technical terms,” he says. “Only then, remove the test.”

Shroff and his colleagues analyzed data obtained from testing seven microcontrollers and applications processors built using advanced chipmaking processes. Depending on which chip was involved, they were subject to between 41 and 164 tests, and the algorithm was able to recommend removing 42 to 74 percent of those tests. Extending the analysis to data from other types of chips led to an even wider range of opportunities to trim testing.

The algorithm is a pilot project for now, and the NXP team is looking to expand it to a broader set of parts, reduce the computational overhead, and make it easier to use.

A ”once in a lifetime” comet is expected to light up the night sky as it passes by Earth.

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From the busy cities to ocean waters, our need to illuminate the world has had some strange and tragic consequences

The experts behind Beyoncé, Kerry Washington and Serena Williams' tresses reveal their all-time favorite products for natural hair.

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The actor is getting some support from his ex-wife, Lindsay Hartley, and daughter, Bella.

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Brianna Ghey's mother, Esther Ghey, is now campaigning to raise awareness about the dangers of social media and the "toxic" online world which her daughter came to inhabit. She wants tighter regulation on internet access and more parental controls.

We spoke to Reverend Doctor Stephen Cherry, Dean of Chapel at King's College, Cambridge.

Searching for the ideal platform to handle your used car auction needs? You’ve come to the right place. This guide is specifically designed for dealers and brokers who want to make the most out of their efforts in the used car market. Understanding the Market Dynamics of Used Car Auctions The first step in choosing […]

The post Maximize Your Profits With the Right Used Car Auction Platform ─ A Guide for Dealers and Brokers appeared first on Chart Attack.

From assembling delicate electronics to constructing safety-critical aerospace components, the margin for error has shrunk to almost nothing. To meet these rigorous standards, the manufacturing industry increasingly relies on robotic precision. Modern robotics, equipped with advanced sensors, grippers, and AI, allow manufacturers to complete intricate tasks with extraordinary accuracy. Technological Innovations Driving Robotic Precision Today’s […]

The post Robotic Precision in Manufacturing: Achieving High Accuracy for Complex Tasks appeared first on Chart Attack.

Integrating genetic data with historic and archaeological data can enrich or correct popular narratives.