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"The other way people change is just by being young.  Neoliberalism, shit that it is, worked for a lot of people. A lot of people got reasonably wealthy off it because it raised asset prices massively, both in the stock market and in housing, and if you were in place or able to take advantage of those things, you got a lot of money doing basically nothing."

Our crisis of inertia as revealed by our continuing reliance on cloth masks

One way to harness solar energy is by using solar electricity to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen produced by the process is stored as fuel, in a form that can be transferred from one place to another and used to generate power upon demand. To split water molecules into their component parts, a catalyst is necessary, but the catalytic materials currently used in the process, also known as the oxygen evolution reaction, are not efficient enough to make the process practical.

Human beings are naturally creative tool users. When we need to drive in a nail but don't have a hammer, we easily realize that we can use a heavy, flat object like a rock in its place. When our table is shaky, we quickly find that we can put a stack of paper under the table leg to stabilize it. But while these actions seem so natural to us, they are believed to be a hallmark of great intelligence-only a few other species use objects in novel ways to solve their problems, and none can do so as flexibly as people. What provides us with these powerful capabilities for using objects in this way?

A sweeping effort to map a hospital's microorganisms has found that infectious pathogens hide in a place that's all about cleaning: the sink. Niranjan Nagarajan at the Genome Institute of Singapore and his colleagues sampled bacteria from bed rails, sinks and other sites in a Singapore hospital. Microbes that tend to grow in slimy 'biofilms' and cause hospital-acquired infections were prevalent on sink traps and faucet aerators, whereas skin-dwelling bacteria were abundant on objects, such as door knobs and bed rails, that are often touched. Frequently touched sites harboured multidrug-resistant microbes such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which might persist in the hospital environment for more than eight years, the team suggested.

The property of water that enables a bug to skim the surface of a pond or keeps a carefully placed paperclip floating on the top of a cup of water is known as surface tension. Understanding the surface tension of water is important in a wide range of applications including heat transfer, desalination, and oceanography. Although much is known about the surface tension of fresh water, very little has been known about the surface tension of seawater-until recently.

For decades, scientists have been using a classical experimental search task-which involves placing a single rat in a complex maze to search for a reward-to deepen understanding of navigation, memory, and learning. However, rats are highly social animals that build and live in complex burrow systems in nature. Yet very little is known about how they explore as a group. In the new study, researchers from institutes in Germany and Hungary turned the classical experimental search task into the first experimental study on rodent group search behavior in a confined maze.

You probably interact with fifty to a hundred machine learning products every day, from your social media feeds and YouTube recommendations to your email spam filter and the updates that the New York Times, CNN, or Fox News decide to push, not to mention the hidden models that place ads on the websites you visit, and that redesign your 'experience' on the fly. Not all models are created equal, however: they operate on different principles, and impact us as individuals and communities in different ways. They differ fundamentally from each other along dimensions such as alignment of incentives between stakeholders, "creep factor", and the nature of how their feedback loops ope !L

Toothpaste, face creams, hair gel, mayonnaise and ketchup are household items that most people don't think twice about, but in terms of their flow behavior, they have unusual properties. They're all elasto-visco-plastic (EVP) materials, which behave like solids when at rest, but can yield to flow like liquids when placed under enough stress. Despite their ubiquity, the ability to model and predict their behavior relies on a theory that has only been shown to work under certain conditions.

]. "The narrow strip of soil around the plant's root teems with millions of microorganisms, making it one of the most complex ecosystems on earth. To determine whether the composition of this "root microbiome" triggers changes within the plant, postdoctoral fellow Dr. Elisa Korenblum and other members of a team headed by Prof. Asaph Aharoni of Weizmann's Plant and Environmental Sciences Department, created a hydroponic set-up in which they split the roots of tomato seedlings in two. In a series of experiments, the researchers placed one side of the split roots in vials, progressively diluting the soil suspensions several times. Each dilution altered the soil's microbial composition and reduced the diversity within the microbial community, so that the different suspensions ended up containing root microbiomes with high, medium and low diversity levels. The other side of the roots was submerged in a vial with a clean, soil-free solution. If the soil microbes communicate with the plant, one would expect to detect signs of their messages on both sides of the root system. That was exactly what the scientists found…. 'Our ultimate goal is to decipher the chemical language - one could call it 'Plantish' - used by plants and the soil to interact with one another,' Korenblum