While injected GLP-1 drugs are incredibly effective at spurring weight loss, they also come with some downsides. There can be gastrointestinal side effects and loss of muscle mass. The drugs are also expensive, at $1,000 a month or more in the US before insurance. Drug companies are interested in developing anti-obesity pills because of their…
Touch both objects. They’re the same temperature, but the wood feels warmer, right? Why is that? It’s not about temperature but thermal energy. When your hand touches an object, there is a heat conduction interaction. Energy is transferred from your warmer hand to the cooler object until the two are the same temperature. However, with…
The China National Space Administration has shared the first image from its Tianwen-2 probe, which is en route to Kamo’oalewa, a near-Earth asteroid. The image was captured by a camera onboard the probe, which is currently more than 3 million kilometers from Earth, and shows one of its wings with its solar panels deployed. It…
There may not yet be telescopes capable of unlocking all the secrets of supermassive black holes, but AI is now on the case. Recently, an international team of astronomers successfully trained a neural network with millions of black hole simulations to allow it to interpret fuzzy data captured from these enigmatic space objects in real…
A new Covid variant is being kept under surveillance by the World Health Organization (WHO) as its emergence has led to an increase in infections in several regions of the world. First identified at the end of January, the variant—called NB.1.8.1 but known informally as “Nimbus”—is a descendant of the Omicron family of Covid sublineages,…
With the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers has broken the record for the oldest, most distant galaxy detected to date by humans. In a preprint study, still awaiting peer review and publication in a journal, astronomers describe this primitive galaxy, giving it the name MoM z14. According to the…
What exactly is AI Scientist—just a fancy kind of neural net? It’s not a single neural network, but rather an ensemble of computer programs that can help scientists make new discoveries. My group has already developed algorithms that can help with individual tasks, such as weather forecasting, identifying the drivers of global temperature rise, or…
Why is this conflict happening? The short version is that Trump and his advisers believe that tariffs will help the US economy by encouraging construction of factories here, reducing trade deficits and punishing barriers to entry of US products in other countries. “We will supercharge our domestic industrial base,” Trump said in an April 2…
Since the change in kinetic energy is still zero, this means that the positive change in gravitational potential energy is equal to the negative of the change in internal energy. Let’s say you have a mass of 75 kilograms (165 pounds). That means moving up 1 meter would reduce your internal energy by 735 joules….
Some species of hummingbird are adapting to urban life by undergoing evolutionary changes in their anatomy, influenced by the proliferation of artificial drinking fountains. According to some biologists, this might show that these birds are on their way to becoming commensal with humans—benefiting from living closely alongside them—like pigeons have in urban areas. A recent…
