Welcome to Open Tab, a weekly roundup of the news, gossip, and stories that have been brewing for me all week. Last week we talked about cat murder rumors and various other horse scandals. When explorers in ancient times began to discover indebted to the new lands, they loaded their ships with hard metals, fried … Read more
In a white paper written on the same day as the Caltech paper, Gidney and his colleagues announced that they had developed a new method for breaking ECC that was at least 10 times more efficient than previous methods. They estimate that most cryptocurrencies would provide seconds to a machine with less than 500,000 qubits. … Read more
image: ©wildpixel | iStock UK researchers have discovered key changes in a cancer gene that drive tumor growth, shedding new light on cancer development and potential treatment. For the first time, scientists in Manchester and London have identified the full range of cancer genes that drive tumor growth. Their work could lead to more effective … Read more
For thousands of years after agriculture spread to Europe, hunter-gatherers quietly endured in the lowlands of what is now the Netherlands and Belgium. A new ancient DNA study reveals that in these wet, cross-river areas, about 50% of hunter-gatherer villages survived until about 2500 BCE. They did so when most of the continent had already … Read more
WASHINGTON, April 3 : A supernova – the explosive death of a star – is always violent, destroying material in space while normally leaving a compact stellar remnant like a neutron star or a black hole. But some supernovae that affect the most massive stars in the universe may be so powerful that they leave … Read more
We are getting closer to finding a true Earth-like exoplanet. But finding one is only half the battle. To know for sure if we are looking at an analogue of Earth somewhere in the galaxy, we also have to image it directly. That’s the job for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), a planned space-based telescope … Read more
New research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has shown that the rotation of the plasma core is a key factor in how particles are distributed within a fusion reactor system. The study shows why plasma particles hit some parts of the reactor more than others. This finding allows computer simulations to match experimental … Read more
At a time when genetic engineering is rapidly pushing the boundaries of agricultural technology, understanding the different levels of gene regulation in plants is emerging as an important frontier. Recently, an intensive study by Kim, Tian, Chaffee, and their colleagues revealed a previously unappreciated factor that could greatly influence the transfer and function of genes … Read more
image: Proactive genome assembly (PIGA) with pangenome knowledge vision Again Credit: Jian Yang Lab at Westlake University The research team led by Zhen-Xing He was Professor Jian Yang at the School of Life Sciences, Westlake University, together with colleagues, published their latest findings in Nature on April 1. This study introduced a new method of … Read more
An international team of researchers has found that Neanderthals were hit by a major population crisis that began about 75,000 years ago. Going back a while, almost all of the modern Neanderthals in Europe were like that descendants of one small group. This low genetic diversity may have contributed to their extinction, around 40,000 years … Read more