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Five Fascinating Facts to Help You Understand Sea Ice

One way that scientists monitor climate change is through the measure of sea ice extent. Sea ice extent is the area of ice that covers the Arctic Ocean at a given time. Sea ice plays an important role in reflecting sunlight back into space, regulating ocean and air temperature, circulating ocean water, and maintaining animal habitats. NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, use satellites to observe sea ice extent. Over the past several decades, Arctic sea ice extent has been steeply declining year-round, especially in late summer when it reaches its minimum for the…

So-Called Junk DNA – Genetic “Dark Matter” – Is Actually Critical to Survival in Mammals

Knocking out transposon promoter leads to pup death in mice; similar promoters found in many mammals. Nearly half of our DNA has been written off as junk, the discards of evolution: sidelined or broken genes, viruses that got stuck in our genome and were dismembered or silenced, none of it relevant to the human organism or human evolution. But research over the last decade has shown that some of this genetic “dark matter” does have a function, primarily in regulating the expression of host genes — a mere 2% of our total genome — that code for proteins. Biologists continue…

Precision Medicine Data Dive Shows “Water Pill” Could Potentially Be Repurposed To Treat Alzheimer’s

Lead image: Diuretics, which are sometimes called “water pills,” help your body expel extra water and salt as urine. NIH-funded research reveals clinical trial candidate for those with genetic risk. A commonly available oral diuretic pill approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration may be a potential candidate for an Alzheimer’s disease treatment for those who are at genetic risk, according to findings published in Nature Aging. The research included analysis showing that those who took bumetanide — a commonly used and potent diuretic — had a significantly lower prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease compared to those not taking the drug.…

Research Team Unlocks Secret Path to a Bright Quantum Future

Lead image: Artist’s illustration of hydrodynamical behavior from an interacting ensemble of quantum spin defects in diamond. Credit: Norman Yao/Berkeley Lab Berkeley Lab-led research key to next-gen quantum computing and technologies. In 1998, researchers including Mark Kubinec of UC Berkeley performed one of the first simple quantum computations using individual molecules. They used pulses of radio waves to flip the spins of two nuclei in a molecule, with each spin’s “up” or “down” orientation storing information in the way that a “0” or “1” state stores information in a classical data bit. In those early days of quantum computers, the…

Predicting Traffic Crashes Before They Happen With Artificial Intelligence

A deep model was trained on historical crash data, road maps, satellite imagery, and GPS to enable high-resolution crash maps that could lead to safer roads. Today’s world is one big maze, connected by layers of concrete and asphalt that afford us the luxury of navigation by vehicle. For many of our road-related advancements — GPS lets us fire fewer neurons thanks to map apps, cameras alert us to potentially costly scrapes and scratches, and electric autonomous cars have lower fuel costs — our safety measures haven’t quite caught up. We still rely on a steady diet of traffic signals,…