GoKawiilA single data point from a dark-matter detector could be the first discovery of the elusive particle. Plus, the grim progress of climate change and whether AI is homogenizing culture and cognition.
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An image captured with the Hubble Space Telescope shows the distribution of dark matter in the center of the giant galaxy cluster.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/IAA, University of Basque Country/JHU
A single data point from a dark-matter detector in the United States could be the first discovery of the elusive particle we call dark matter. The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota contains 10 tonnes of liquid xenon. It seeks evidence of a candidate particle called a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle) by looking for flashes created when such a particle collides with the nucleus of just one xenon atom. If the finding can be backed up with more data, it could mean that the material that seems to make up most of the mass of the Universe has finally been discovered.
Nature | 5 min read
Reference: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory preprint (not peer reviewed)
The United Nations Environment Programme has released a report acknowledging that the world will fail to meet the Paris climate agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 ℃ above the preindustrial average, with warming of at least 1.8 ℃ expected this century. “All of our pathways forward are overshoot pathways,” said climate scientist and co-author Debra Roberts. However, the report suggests that, with a huge expansion of CO 2 removal efforts, it might still be possible to return to below 1.5 ℃ by the end of the century. And every fraction of a degree counts. “The lower the peak warming reached, the lower the risks,” says the report.
Nature | 6 min read
Reference: Limiting Overshoot report
Researchers have created more than 44,000 variants of the well-studied bacteriophage virus ΦX174 to determine the effects of mutations at nearly every single one of its DNA letters and amino acids. Most mutations were detrimental to the virus’s survival, but a handful boosted its fitness, often for reasons that were unclear. Cutting-edge AI models trained to identify harmful mutations struggled to predict the consequences of each change, which underscores the need for more high-quality experimental data to power these models, the team says.
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