Eat more fatty fish. That dietary advice has changed the way the world consumes salmon, pushing consumer demand ever upward and production to higher and higher levels. Most of that demand is being met with farmed salmon: Today, nearly 70 percent of the salmon consumed on the planet are raised in pens and cages. The ..
Tag : Science
Sheeppox is a highly contagious, often fatal viral disease that was largely eradicated from much of European livestock in the 20th century. But there is still the occasional regional outbreak, such as the one that afflicted many flocks of sheep in Greece last year. In order to reconstruct how the virus has evolved over the ..
On Friday, researchers announced the completion of a map of every neuron in the brain of a male fruit fly. The “connectome” provides a tool that can accelerate neurobiology research. But it also provides an opportunity to do some science on its own, as the connectome of a female Drosophila had been completed earlier this ..
It’s that time of year again, when we learn which lucky scientists are among the winners of the Ig Nobel Prizes. This year, the prizes honor research on designing the perfect splash-free urinal; using mosquito proboscises to “necroprint” tiny nozzles; studying composition rates of buried cotton underwear; and the aerodynamics of a healthy nose-blow, among ..
On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a stopgap measure that would continue funding the US government through early December. While the measure still requires the signature of President Trump, it’s widely expected that he will act to avoid a government shutdown immediately before the midterm elections. This is a normal part of how the ..
The same, yet different In some ways, these designed viruses were quite similar to the original ΦX174, but in other ways they were quite distinct. For the “the same” perspective, the most effective viruses in the group of 285 tended to look a lot like the original. The overall fraction of viable viruses was only ..
The parasitic fungi in the Cordyceps genus are a favorite subject of nature documentaries. They’ve also infiltrated popular culture via the zombie-apocalypse video game The Last of Us (2013) and its TV adaptation, in which a parasitic fungus mutates to infect humans. Scientists are keen to study Cordyceps to learn more about the origins and ..
One week ago, more than 200 miles above the Earth, a refrigerator-size satellite making its way toward an attempted rescue of NASA’s $500 million Swift gamma-ray observatory suddenly spun out of control. It didn’t look good. The spacecraft, named Link, was rotating on multiple axes, rendering it unable to maintain a reliable communications link with ..
In this case, the team made a couple of key variations. The first is that it mostly performed what are called Clifford gates, which are relatively easy to simulate on classical hardware. But it sprinkled in a few non-Clifford gates (specifically T gates) of a specific type chosen in part because they are less prone ..
For qubits, the traps are far smaller and serve to hold a single electron in place. Critically, they can be manufactured; with the right wiring, electromagnetic interactions can trap a single electron in a small patch of silicon. Once trapped, the electron’s spin, which can be up, down, or a superposition of the two, can ..
