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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Despite an extremely low unemployment rate in first half of 2022, job seekers are bracing for conditions to worsen in light of growing concerns about inflation, gas prices, and a potential recession, according to a new survey by job search platform Joblist.

The survey showed 80% of those seeking jobs expect the US to enter a recession in the next year and 49% anticipate that the job market will get worse over the next six months. As a result, 60% of job seekers feel more urgency to find a job now before market conditions change.

Notably, one in four (26%) who quit their previous job during the Great Resignation now say they regret the decision, and 42% say their new job has not lived up to their expectations.

As regret sets in, 17% of respondents indicated they would go back to their old job and another 24% said they’re at least open to returning. And 23% indicated their former employer has reached out to them about coming back, according the Q2 US Job Market Report from Joblist. (The company conducted five surveys in April, May, and June involving 15,158 US respondents.)

Chemists Just Rearranged Atomic Bonds in a Single Molecule for the First Time

upstart writes:

Chemists Just Rearranged Atomic Bonds in a Single Molecule for the First Time:

Chemical engineering has taken a step forward, with researchers from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the University of Regensburg in Germany, and IBM Research Europe forcing a single molecule to undergo a series of transformations with a tiny nudge of voltage.

Ordinarily, chemists gain precision over reactions by tweaking parameters such as the pH, adding or removing available proton donors to manage the way molecules might share or swap electrons to form their bonds.

"By these means, however, the reaction conditions are altered to such a degree that the basic mechanisms governing selectivity often remain elusive," the researchers note in their report, published in the journal Science.

In other words, the complexity of forces at work pushing and pulling across a large organic molecule can make it hard to get a precise measure on what's occurring at each and every bond.

The team started with a substance called 5,6,11,12-tetrachlorotetracene (with the formula C18H8Cl4) – a carbon-based molecule that looks like a row of four honeycomb cells flanked by four chlorine atoms hovering around like hungry bees.

Sticking a thin layer of the material to a cold, salt-crusted piece of copper, the researchers drove the chlorine-bees away, leaving a handful of excitable carbon atoms holding onto unpaired electrons in a range of related structures.

Two of those electrons in some of the structures happily reconnected with each other, reconfiguring the molecule's general honeycomb shape. The second pair were also keen to pair up not just with each other, but with any other available electron that might buzz their way.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Air pollution remains a silent killer in Massachusetts, responsible for an estimated 2,780 deaths a year and for measurable cognitive loss in Bay State children exposed to fine particulate pollutants in the air they breathe, according to a new study by researchers at Boston College's Global Observatory on Planetary Health.

The study was supported by the Barr Foundation and is the first to examine far-reaching public health consequences of air pollution in the state on a town-by-town basis. The study found air-pollution-related disease, death and IQ loss occur in every city and town regardless of demographics or income level. Highest rates were in the most economically disadvantaged and socially underserved cities and towns.

The Boston College team estimates the cumulative impact on childhood cognitive development in Massachusetts in 2019 was a loss of almost 2 million Performance IQ points, or more than 2 IQ points for the average child, according to the report, published today in the journal Environmental Health. IQ loss impairs children's school performance and reduces graduation rates, the team noted.

"We are talking about the impacts of air pollution at a very local level in Massachusetts—not just statewide," said lead author Boston College Professor of Biology Philip J. Landrigan, MD, director of the Observatory. "This report gives the people in every city and town the opportunity to see for themselves the quality of the air they and their families are breathing and the dangerous health implications for both adults and children as a consequence of air pollution."

Thanks c0lo! Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The pressure is rising at ESA’s mission control. A European Space Agency (ESA) satellite dodges out of the way of a mystery piece of space junk that was spotted just hours before a potential collision.

This means a vital step in the spacecraft’s ongoing journey to safer skies now has to be quickly rescheduled, as violent solar activity related to the ramping up of the solar cycle warps Earth’s atmosphere and threatens to drag the satellite down out of orbit…

[...] Swarm is actually ESA’s mission to unravel the mysteries of Earth’s magnetic field. It’s comprised of three satellites, A, B, and C – affectionately known as Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie.

A small piece of human-made junk circling our planet – known as space debris – was detected hurtling towards Alpha at 16:00 CEST (10:00 a.m. EDT), on June 30. From the trajectory, a potential collision was predicted just eight hours later, shortly after midnight. The chance of impact was great enough that Alpha needed to get out of the way – fast.

Swarm constellation. Swarm is ESA’s first Earth observation constellation of satellites. Its mission is to unravel one of the most mysterious aspects of our planet: the magnetic field.

[...] Each one of ESA’s satellites has to perform on average two evasive maneuvers every year – and that’s not including all the alerts they get that don’t end up needing evasive action.

[...] Carrying out evasive action – known as a ‘collision avoidance maneuver’ – requires a lot of planning. You have to check that you’re not moving the satellite into a new orbit that puts it at risk of other collisions and you have to calculate how to get back to your original orbit using as little fuel and losing as little science data as possible.

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upstart writes:

It was thought that spongy bone in woodpeckers' heads cushioned their brains from hard knocks, but in fact their skulls are stiff like a hammer:

Woodpeckers' skulls aren't built to absorb shock, but rather to deliver a harder and more efficient hit into wood.

Woodpeckers hammer their beaks onto tree trunks to communicate, to look for food or to create a cavity for nesting. Spongy bone between the birds' brains and beaks was once thought to cushion their brains from the repetitive blows. But the tissue actually helps their heads tap swiftly and deeply with minimal energy use, much like a well-designed hammer, says Sam Van Wassenbergh at the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

"We had a feeling that this didn't make any sense, this shock absorption [theory]," he says. "A hammer with shock absorption built into it is simply a bad hammer."

[...] Despite the lack of shock absorption, the team found that the birds' brains aren't at risk of a concussion because the impact isn't strong enough. Given the size and weight of woodpecker brains, situated inside fluid-filled cases in their skulls, they would only sustain brain damage if they pecked twice as fast as they naturally do, or if they hit surfaces four times harder than their natural wood targets.

"It's just normal that a smaller organism can withstand these higher [forces]," says Van Wassenbergh, drawing a parallel with flies hitting windows at even higher forces: "They just take off and fly again."

The term "spongy bone" doesn't mean that the bone is soft or can compress, he says. Rather, it indicates that the bone is porous and lightweight – which is critical for flying birds. "The bone is just strong enough for the function that it needs to do," he says.

Video abstract

Journal Reference:
Sam Van Wassenbergh, Erica J. Ortlieb, Maja Mielke, et al. Woodpeckers minimize cranial absorption of shocks [open], Current Biology, 2022. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.05.052

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Conditions projected to resemble those in famous growing regions of France and Germany:

Over the last 20 years, climate change has contributed to a growth in UK vineyard area – with more than 800 vineyards now - and award-winning wine production, as well as a transition in wine style towards sparkling wines.

Now a team of researchers from the University of East Anglia (UEA), the London School of Economics, Vinescapes Ltd and Weatherquest Ltd have charted the potential for the sector over the next 20 years. Drawing on the latest detailed climate projections, they have developed cutting-edge capability to model and map the best opportunities for grape growing and winemaking in the UK.

Their findings, published today in the journal OENO One, show how the climate of a larger area of England and Wales is projected to become suitable for reliably growing sparkling wine grape varieties, and how the potential for high quality still wine production is rapidly emerging.

[...] "We found that significant areas within England and Wales are projected to become warmer by 2040 by up to a further 1.4°C during the growing season. This expands the area of suitability for Pinot Noir for sparkling wine production, but also new areas will open up within the growing season temperature suitability range for still Pinot Noir production and for growing varieties such as Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, Semillon and more disease-resistant varieties, which are hardly grown in the UK at present.

"Furthermore, anyone thinking of investing in a vineyard in the UK can now benefit from this knowledge through advice on the best locations, both now and under future climate change conditions."

[...] However, the researchers warn significant challenges remain, arguing that the rapidly changing UK climate requires the industry to remain agile and not 'lock-in' to production which cannot adapt to the changing growing conditions.

Journal Reference:
Alistair Nesbitt, Stephen Dorling, Richard Jones, et al., Climate change projections for UK viticulture to 2040: a focus on improving suitability for Pinot noir [open], Oeno One, 56, 3, 2022. DOI: 10.20870/oeno-one.2022.56.3.5398

Original Submission

hubie writes:

New research has found that high levels of physical activity does not counteract the detrimental effects of a poor diet on mortality risk:

The University of Sydney led study found participants who had both high levels of physical activity and a high-quality diet had the lowest risk of death, showing that you cannot "outrun" a poor diet.

[...] High quality diets included at least five portions of fruit and vegetables every day,two portions of fish per week and lower consumption of red meat, particularly processed meat.

The study revealed that for those who had high levels of physical activity and a high-quality diet, their mortality risk was reduced by 17 percent from all causes, 19 percent from cardiovascular disease and 27 percent from selected cancers, as compared with those with the worst diet who were physically inactive.

[...] "Both regular physical activity and a healthy diet play an important role in promoting health and longevity.

"Some people may think they could offset the impacts of a poor diet with high levels of exercise or offset the impacts of low physical activity with a high-quality diet, but the data shows that unfortunately this is not the case."

"Adhering to both a quality diet and sufficient physical activity is important for optimally reducing the risk of death from all causes, cardiovascular disease and cancers," says co-author Joe Van Buskirk, from the School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health.

Journal Reference:
Ding Ding, Joe Van Buskirk1, Binh Nguyen, et al., Physical activity, diet quality and all-cause cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality: a prospective study of 346 627 UK Biobank participants, Brit J Sport Med, 2022. DOI: 10.1136/bjsports-2021-105195

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Some people perceive robots that display emotions as intentional agents, study finds:

When robots appear to engage with people and display human-like emotions, people may perceive them as capable of "thinking," or acting on their own beliefs and desires rather than their programs, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

"The relationship between anthropomorphic shape, human-like behavior and the tendency to attribute independent thought and intentional behavior to robots is yet to be understood," said study author Agnieszka Wykowska, PhD, a principal investigator at the Italian Institute of Technology. "As artificial intelligence increasingly becomes a part of our lives, it is important to understand how interacting with a robot that displays human-like behaviors might induce higher likelihood of attribution of intentional agency to the robot."

[...] In the first two experiments, the researchers remotely controlled iCub's actions so it would behave gregariously, greeting participants, introducing itself and asking for the participants' names. Cameras in the robot's eyes were also able to recognize participants' faces and maintain eye contact.

In the third experiment, the researchers programmed iCub to behave more like a machine while it watched videos with the participants. The cameras in the robot's eyes were deactivated so it could not maintain eye contact and it only spoke recorded sentences to the participants about the calibration process it was undergoing. [...]

The researchers found that participants who watched videos with the human-like robot were more likely to rate the robot's actions as intentional, rather than programmed, while those who only interacted with the machine-like robot were not. This shows that mere exposure to a human-like robot is not enough to make people believe it is capable of thoughts and emotions. It is human-like behavior that might be crucial for being perceived as intentional agent.

According to Wykowska, these findings show that people might be more likely to believe artificial intelligence is capable of independent thought when it creates the impression that it can behave just like humans. This could inform the design of social robots of the future, she said.

Previously:
Google Engineer Suspended After Claiming AI Bot Sentient

Journal Reference:
Serena Marchesi, Davide De Tommaso, Jairo Perez-Osorio, and Agnieszka Wykowska, Belief in Sharing the Same Phenomenological Experience Increases the Likelihood of Adopting the Intentional Stance Towards a Humanoid Robot, Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2022. DOI: 10.1037/tmb0000072.supp

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The loss of the male sex chromosome as many men age causes the heart muscle to scar and can lead to deadly heart failure, new research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine shows. The finding may help explain why men die, on average, several years younger than women.

UVA researcher Kenneth Walsh, PhD, says the new discovery suggests that men who suffer Y chromosome loss -- estimated to include 40% of 70-year-olds -- may particularly benefit from an existing drug that targets dangerous tissue scarring. The drug, he suspects, may help counteract the harmful effects of the chromosome loss -- effects that may manifest not just in the heart but in other parts of the body as well.

[...] "Particularly past age 60, men die more rapidly than women. It's as if they biologically age more quickly," said Walsh, the director of UVA's Hematovascular Biology Center. "There are more than 160 million males in the United States alone. The years of life lost due to the survival disadvantage of maleness is staggering. This new research provides clues as to why men have shorter lifespans than women."

While women have two X chromosomes, men have an X and a Y. But many men begin to lose their Y chromosome in a fraction of their cells as they age. This appears to be particularly true for smokers. The loss occurs predominantly in cells that undergo rapid turnover, such as blood cells. [...]

upstart writes:

San Francisco reaches $58m opioid settlement with Teva, Allergan:

Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and AbbVie's Allergan unit on Tuesday reached a $58m settlement with the United States city of San Francisco just before completion of a trial over claims that they fuelled an opioid epidemic in the city.

Under the deal announced by City Attorney of San Francisco David Chiu, Israel-based Teva will pay $25m in cash and contribute a $20m supply of the overdose-reversal drug Narcan. AbbVie will pay $13m.

"This will bring significant resources to help with education, prevention and treatment, and the addition of tens of millions of dollars worth of overdose reversal medication will save lives in the Bay Area," said Paul Geller, a lawyer who represented the city in negotiating the settlement.

Teva's settlement also resolves the city's claims against drug distributor Anda Inc, which is owned by Teva.

San Francisco will receive $54m, while $4m will go toward attorneys' fees.

[...] San Francisco's lawsuit, filed in 2018, initially included claims against drugmakers Purdue Pharma LP, Johnson & Johnson and Endo International Plc, and the three largest US drug distributors – McKesson Corp, Cardinal Health Inc and AmerisourceBergen Corp.

The city settled with those defendants ahead of trial. It signed onto a $26bn nationwide settlement with Johnson & Johnson and the drug distributors, and agreed to support Purdue Pharma's bankruptcy plan. Teva has been attempting to reach a nationwide settlement of its opioid liability.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Traditional advertising is making a comeback

Recent studies show that marketers are increasingly turning from online advertising to traditional media such as TV, in part to exploit its high reach. In February 2022, marketers predicted that traditional advertising spending would increase by 2.9%.

However, effective TV advertising requires exposure, which is jeopardized when viewers deliberately avoid ads. For instance, when viewers resort to changing the channel (i.e., zapping) during ad breaks, advertisers lose the ability to communicate the brand message, leading to wasted investment. Zapping is also a problem for broadcasters because it diminishes the attractiveness of the channel for advertisers.

[...] Becker says that "Our results show that the content of ads does indeed influence consumers' zapping behavior. While a high level of creativity in the ads reduces zapping, highly informational content, strong brand presence, and early brand timing increase zapping. Thus, to discourage zapping behavior, managers should invest in creativity and refrain from too much information and branding cues. Furthermore, the brand should be placed more toward the end of the ad."

The researchers also conclude that the effects of advertising content on zapping vary significantly with category characteristics. As Scholdra explains, "We find, for example, that informativeness is more detrimental in terms of zapping for goods where consumers can only judge quality after consumption, or experiential goods like restaurants, than for goods where consumers can judge quality before consumption, or search goods like electronics." The effects of other content factors, are category dependent as well, thereby underscoring the need for managers to consider category characteristics when selecting advertising content.

[...] Results of the second study indicate that content drives zapping through irritation, but not through enjoyment. "For advertisers, it is more important to avoid psychological reactions reflecting irritation, such as annoyance or offense, than to elicit favorable reactions reflecting enjoyment, such as entertainment, or interest" says Berkmann. Informativeness, brand presence, and brand timing drive zapping by triggering irritation and creativity mitigates zapping by reducing it.

Journal Reference:
Maren Becker, Thomas P. Scholdra, Manuel Berkmann, The Effect of Content on Zapping in TV Advertising, J Marketing, 2022. DOI: 10.1177/00222429221105818

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The MIT Technology Review writes in a long form article about how DARPA has rediscovered Free and Open Source Software, or at least the latter, and how it is now found everywhere across the board. As far as the Internet and the World Wide Web goes, its ubiquity has been a given since they were founded on it, but nowadays even at least 70% of closed source, proprietary products also contain lots of it. DARPA is worried about the kernel Linux in particular and the vetting process for adding code to the project specifically.

Now DARPA, the US military's research arm, wants to understand the collision of code and community that makes these open-source projects work, in order to better understand the risks they face. The goal is to be able to effectively recognize malicious actors and prevent them from disrupting or corrupting crucially important open-source code before it's too late.

DARPA's "SocialCyber" program is an 18-month-long, multimillion-dollar project that will combine sociology with recent technological advances in artificial intelligence to map, understand, and protect these massive open-source communities and the code they create. It's different from most previous research because it combines automated analysis of both the code and the social dimensions of open-source software.

"The open-source ecosystem is one of the grandest enterprises in human history," says Sergey Bratus, the DARPA program manager behind the project.

"It's now grown from enthusiasts to a global endeavor forming the basis of global infrastructure, of the internet itself, of critical industries and mission-critical systems pretty much everywhere," he says. "The systems that run our industry, power grids, shipping, transportation."

Recently, software appears to have been occupying a lot of attention over in Washington, DC. Unfortunately occasional lines in mainstream articles indicate that it is M$ and M$ lobbyists are steering the policy discussion there. It appears that they are spending an enormous amount of time in direct contact with politicians and policy makers, all the while log4j is still getting milked by them as a distraction from all the actively exploited vulnerabilities in their own products.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Organ transplant recipients take life-long immunosuppressive drugs to prevent their bodies from mounting an immune response against the donated organ, yet a substantial number of them still reject the organs. A new study by researchers from the University of Chicago shows that transplant recipients also mount an immune response against commensal bacteria in the organ graft, adding to the immune response against the genetic makeup of the tissue and reducing the effectiveness of immunosuppressive drugs.

The study, published today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, also shows that this anti-microbial immune response can be triggered by immune cell memory of previous encounters with bacteria, further complicating the body's ability to accept a lifesaving new organ.

"Before, we thought the reason why transplanted organs in humans are less easily accepted than in sheltered laboratory animals is that humans can have immune memory responses that cross-react on the cells of the organ, and memory responses are more difficult to suppress with drugs than naïve responses," said Maria-Luisa Alegre, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine at UChicago and senior author of the study. "Now, we see that it's not only memory cells that recognize the organ itself that are the problem, but also memory responses that recognize bacteria in the organ."

upstart writes:

DNA from ancient population in Southern China suggests Native Americans' East Asian roots:

For the first time, researchers successfully sequenced the genome of ancient human fossils from the Late Pleistocene in southern China. The data, published July 14 in the journal Current Biology, suggests that the mysterious hominin belonged to an extinct maternal branch of modern humans that might have contributed to the origin of Native Americans.

"Ancient DNA technique is a really powerful tool," Su says. "It tells us quite definitively that the Red Deer Cave people were modern humans instead of an archaic species, such as Neanderthals or Denisovans, despite their unusual morphological features," he says.

The researchers compared the genome of these fossils to that of people from around the world. They found that the bones belonged to an individual that was linked deeply to the East Asian ancestry of Native Americans. Combined with previous research data, this finding led the team to propose that some of the southern East Asia people had traveled north along the coastline of present-day eastern China through Japan and reached Siberia tens of thousands of years ago. They then crossed the Bering Strait between the continents of Asia and North America and became the first people to arrive in the New World.

[...] "Such data will not only help us paint a more complete picture of how our ancestors migrate but also contain important information about how humans change their physical appearance by adapting to local environments over time, such as the variations in skin color in response to changes in sunlight exposure," Su says.

Journal Reference:
Xiaoming Zhang, Xueping Ji, Chunmei Li, Tingyu Yang, et al., A Late Pleistocene human genome from Southwest China [open], Current Biology, 2022. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.06.016

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The liquid metal batteries invented by Donald Sadoway consist of three liquid layers of different densities, which naturally separate in the same way as oil and vinegar do in a salad dressing. The middle layer of molten liquid salt is surrounded by the top and bottom layers made from molten metals.

For his work on liquid metal batteries that could enable the long-term storage of renewable energy, MIT Professor Donald Sadoway has won the 2022 European Inventor Award, in the category for Non-European Patent Office Countries.

“By enabling the large-scale storage of renewable energy, Donald Sadoway’s invention is a huge step towards the deployment of carbon-free electricity generation,” says António Campinos, President of the European Patent Office. “He has spent his career studying electrochemistry and has transformed this expertise into an invention that represents a huge step forward in the transition to green energy.”

[...] Sadoway’s liquid metal batteries consist of three liquid layers of different densities, which naturally separate in the same way as oil and vinegar do in a salad dressing. The top and bottom layers are made from molten metals, with a middle layer of molten liquid salt.

To keep the metals liquid, the batteries need to operate at extremely high temperatures, so Sadoway designed a system that is self-heating and insulated, requiring no external heating or cooling. They have a lifespan of more than 20 years, can maintain 99 percent of their capacity over 5,000 charging cycles, and have no combustible materials, meaning there is no fire risk.

Original Submission