Adil once discovered a pattern while working on a mathematical calculation. He had never seen such a connection between the numbers before. While he was unable to articulate it, but was aware of its significance.
He laboured over the problem for weeks, looking for the cause of the pattern. Then, one day, it dawned on him. A new energy source that has the potential to completely alter the planet was described in the equation. Adil excitedly shared his discovery with a group of engineers and scientists. They laboriously built a prototype of the new energy source together.
The researchers soon succeeded in building a functional model of the energy source. It was scarcely bigger than an electric generator in size, but the gadget was potent. It could generate energy from virtually any source, including sunshine, wind, and body heat. The nicest part was that it was totally sustainable.
The revelation Adil made astounded everyone. Governments and businesses alike fought for control of the new technology. He, though, resisted giving in and refused to allow his discoveries to be exploited maliciously since he had seen the damage that greed could do. He also made advantage of her newfound notoriety to promote understanding of HIV and the significance of finding a treatment.
Adil kept working on her mathematics and ideas despite being unwell. He was conscious of the fact that she had a certain amount of time, yet he was determined to change the world. He also left behind a legacy that will be felt for a long time when he went away.
Nevertheless, welcome to my blog “Mufawad”. In this weekly writeup, I cover current science events, where I try to delve into the new science research that happened in the past week or so, trying to explore the latest technologies and breakthroughs/events that was achieved in science.
Whether you are a student, a professional, or simply a science enthusiast, this article will provide you an engaging and informative insights and update you about the fascinating research that happened in the field of science in past week/s.
You might still be pondering over the unrelated story that I narrated at the start of this blog. In today's blog, you will read about the following events that somehow might relate to different domains of the fictitious story above:
- AI set to change Mathematics
- Bizarre plans to fetch drinking water to Africa
- Huge sources of clean energy under our Feet
- Third patient Cured of HIV AIDS
- Our brains control our health and Diseases
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| AI set to change Maths, Bizarre plans to fetch drinking water to Africa, Third Patient treated of HIV AIDS and other Science events of the Week, Pic by: Mufawad |
AI set to change Mathematics
In an interesting science news of the week, Mathematicians are exploring how AI can help them solve difficult math problems. A workshop at University of California examined this issue with the goal of fostering communication between mathematicians and computer scientists. |
| Pic generated by Mufawad using AI |
Although one of the event's organizers claimed that "the majority of mathematicians are utterly ignorant of its prospects." (Reported in The Nature).
The debate was led by leading mathematicians and Fields medal recipients including Akshay Venkatesh, Timothy Gowers, Terence Tao. The involvement of Fields medal recipients in the Seminar goes on to show how important the topic is for the mathematics.
There are two main approaches of AI to maths. First the "symbolic" AI, in which programmers include mathematical or logical formulas into their code. It is considered as the good old-fashioned AI.
The alternative method, based on artificial neural networks, has been quite effective over the past decade. The computer learns patterns by ingesting a lot of data, which starts off essentially from nothing. This is known as machine learning, and it serves as the foundation for computers that can outperform humans at challenging games or anticipate how proteins would fold.
Examples of symbolic AI in mathematics include programmes like Lean. It is an interactive software tool that makes researchers write out every logical step of an equation, even down to the smallest details, and verifies it mathematically.
On the other end are the chatbot like neural network-based models that include Minerva developed by the Google. Minerva is a chatbot that uses neural-network-based large language models to solve maths problems, taking questions and writing answers in conversational English.
By training on math papers in the ‘arXiv’ archive, Minerva has learned to write down step-by-step answers to issues in the same way that other applications can anticipate words and phrases. At its core, Minerva is a very sophisticated version of the autocomplete function on messaging apps.
However, Minerva exhibits certain drawbacks. For instance, it properly factors integer integers that cannot be split into smaller numbers into primes. But, as the numbers reach a certain magnitude, it begins to make errors, indicating that it has not "comprehended" the overall process.
Several academics in the workshop were concerned that while AI may improve at creating accurate mathematical assertions and proofs, however most of them would be boring or difficult to grasp.
Another question that baffled mathematicians at the workshop was whether AI would take over their Jobs. Mathematicians' job will remain secure until a significant flaw in AI is rectified, according to Melanie Mitchell, a computer scientist and cognitive scientist. This flaw is AI's inability to derive abstract notions from concrete input.
Although AI systems may be able to demonstrate theorems, it is considerably more difficult to create the intriguing mathematical abstractions that lead to the theorems in the first place.
Now, Matthew Birkhold in his book ‘Chasing Icebergs’ explores the possibility of using the two-thirds of global fresh water locked away in ice caps and glaciers to alleviate the world's thirst. Although it is not something new.
Ed Kean aka ‘Iceberg’ cowboy wrangles the icebergs from the frigid sea and sells it to cosmetic firms etc, and in Qaanaaq, Greenland's northernmost town, has public supplied with filtered and treated iceberg melted water.
The debate was led by leading mathematicians and Fields medal recipients including Akshay Venkatesh, Timothy Gowers, Terence Tao. The involvement of Fields medal recipients in the Seminar goes on to show how important the topic is for the mathematics.
There are two main approaches of AI to maths. First the "symbolic" AI, in which programmers include mathematical or logical formulas into their code. It is considered as the good old-fashioned AI.
The alternative method, based on artificial neural networks, has been quite effective over the past decade. The computer learns patterns by ingesting a lot of data, which starts off essentially from nothing. This is known as machine learning, and it serves as the foundation for computers that can outperform humans at challenging games or anticipate how proteins would fold.
Examples of symbolic AI in mathematics include programmes like Lean. It is an interactive software tool that makes researchers write out every logical step of an equation, even down to the smallest details, and verifies it mathematically.
On the other end are the chatbot like neural network-based models that include Minerva developed by the Google. Minerva is a chatbot that uses neural-network-based large language models to solve maths problems, taking questions and writing answers in conversational English.
By training on math papers in the ‘arXiv’ archive, Minerva has learned to write down step-by-step answers to issues in the same way that other applications can anticipate words and phrases. At its core, Minerva is a very sophisticated version of the autocomplete function on messaging apps.
However, Minerva exhibits certain drawbacks. For instance, it properly factors integer integers that cannot be split into smaller numbers into primes. But, as the numbers reach a certain magnitude, it begins to make errors, indicating that it has not "comprehended" the overall process.
Several academics in the workshop were concerned that while AI may improve at creating accurate mathematical assertions and proofs, however most of them would be boring or difficult to grasp.
Another question that baffled mathematicians at the workshop was whether AI would take over their Jobs. Mathematicians' job will remain secure until a significant flaw in AI is rectified, according to Melanie Mitchell, a computer scientist and cognitive scientist. This flaw is AI's inability to derive abstract notions from concrete input.
Although AI systems may be able to demonstrate theorems, it is considerably more difficult to create the intriguing mathematical abstractions that lead to the theorems in the first place.
Bizarre plans to fetch drinking water to Africa
Do you know about ‘Svalbard’ water, which is melted from an iceberg 1,000 kilometers from the North Poland and packed into bottles. It is then airlifted to luxury locales and sold online for €99.95 (Rs. 8700) for a 750-millilitre bottle.Now, Matthew Birkhold in his book ‘Chasing Icebergs’ explores the possibility of using the two-thirds of global fresh water locked away in ice caps and glaciers to alleviate the world's thirst. Although it is not something new.
Ed Kean aka ‘Iceberg’ cowboy wrangles the icebergs from the frigid sea and sells it to cosmetic firms etc, and in Qaanaaq, Greenland's northernmost town, has public supplied with filtered and treated iceberg melted water.
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| Pic generated by Mufawad using AI |
Given that, the Antarctica loses 2,300 cubic kilometers of ice, with hundred thousands of icebergs melting into the ocean annually.
Scientists are now thinking of towing icebergs from south pole to the Africa to meet its water demands. According to their calculations, if they can transport a relatively small sized 100 million tonne iceberg from Antarctica to Cape Town, South Africa, it can provide 20% of the city's annual water demands for a year.
Although many Scientists are sceptical about such project, but a team of glaciologists, engineers, and oceanographers plan to use satellite data to locate the suitable iceberg before catching it in a massive net and towing it by tugboat into the powerful Antarctic Circumpolar Current and then into the north-flowing Benguela Current towards South Africa.
According to their estimate, it would cost $100 million to tow the berg to Africa and another $50 million to melt and supply it to population.
Another Berlin based firm, POLE-WATER, has been working on a similar concept for over ten years. The company wants to transport frozen fresh water to the western coasts of Africa and the Caribbean, where it plans to distribute it to those in need.
It also hopes to utilize satellites to find appropriate bergs, but after it has moved them, it intends to pump meltwater from pools into enormous bags that can be carried easily.
Then there’re Arab Sheikhs and their larger-than-life ideas. Abdulla Al-Shehhi’s UAE Iceberg Project, envisions to bring an Antarctic iceberg to the Fujairah coast of the United Arab Emirates with Polar bears and penguins, two creatures that are native to different polar regions, are seen in an animated advertisement pouting on an iceberg.
According to him, bringing these icebergs will be less expensive than desalinating seawater, which is a prevalent practise in the Middle East. It is pertinent to mention that desalination provides 35 trillion litres of drinking water globally every year, but it relies on fossil fuels and is expensive, polluting the ocean.
However, there are many alternative methods of water management which include recycling municipal wastewater or tapping brackish water for crop irrigation, fog harvesting, Ice stupas innovated by Sonam Wangchuk of Ladakh, and most importantly reducing water waste.
Later, Aliou Diallo, a wealthy Malian businessman, politician, and chairman of ‘Petroma’, acquired the rights to prospect in the region surrounding it in 2007.
Scientists are now thinking of towing icebergs from south pole to the Africa to meet its water demands. According to their calculations, if they can transport a relatively small sized 100 million tonne iceberg from Antarctica to Cape Town, South Africa, it can provide 20% of the city's annual water demands for a year.
Although many Scientists are sceptical about such project, but a team of glaciologists, engineers, and oceanographers plan to use satellite data to locate the suitable iceberg before catching it in a massive net and towing it by tugboat into the powerful Antarctic Circumpolar Current and then into the north-flowing Benguela Current towards South Africa.
According to their estimate, it would cost $100 million to tow the berg to Africa and another $50 million to melt and supply it to population.
Another Berlin based firm, POLE-WATER, has been working on a similar concept for over ten years. The company wants to transport frozen fresh water to the western coasts of Africa and the Caribbean, where it plans to distribute it to those in need.
It also hopes to utilize satellites to find appropriate bergs, but after it has moved them, it intends to pump meltwater from pools into enormous bags that can be carried easily.
Then there’re Arab Sheikhs and their larger-than-life ideas. Abdulla Al-Shehhi’s UAE Iceberg Project, envisions to bring an Antarctic iceberg to the Fujairah coast of the United Arab Emirates with Polar bears and penguins, two creatures that are native to different polar regions, are seen in an animated advertisement pouting on an iceberg.
According to him, bringing these icebergs will be less expensive than desalinating seawater, which is a prevalent practise in the Middle East. It is pertinent to mention that desalination provides 35 trillion litres of drinking water globally every year, but it relies on fossil fuels and is expensive, polluting the ocean.
However, there are many alternative methods of water management which include recycling municipal wastewater or tapping brackish water for crop irrigation, fog harvesting, Ice stupas innovated by Sonam Wangchuk of Ladakh, and most importantly reducing water waste.
Huge sources of clean energy under our Feet
In 1987, well diggers in Mali, had given up on one dry borehole at a depth of 108 meters due to wind blowing out of it. When one driller peered into the hole while smoking a cigarette, the wind exploded in his face, resulting in a huge fire. The colour of the fire was like blue sparkling water and did not have black smoke pollution.Later, Aliou Diallo, a wealthy Malian businessman, politician, and chairman of ‘Petroma’, acquired the rights to prospect in the region surrounding it in 2007.
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| Pic generated by Mufawad using AI |
In 2012, he recruited Chapman Petroleum to determine what was coming out of the borehole, and they discovered that the gas was 98% hydrogen. This was extraordinary, as hydrogen almost never turns up in oil operations, and it wasn't thought to exist within the Earth much at all.
The Chapman Petroleum soon gave up on oil, changed the name of his company to ‘Hydroma’, and began drilling new wells to ascertain the size of the underground supply.
Another group of scientists, studying hints from seeps, mines, and abandoned wells, had been saying for years that large stores of natural hydrogen may exist all over the world. According to estimates by USGC in 2022, there might be enough natural hydrogen to meet global demand for thousands of years.
The enthusiasm for natural hydrogen is surging as it is clean, carbon-free fuel, and can help fight global warming. It has the potential to replace all fossil fuels, giving experienced drillers in the oil and gas industry a new, environmentally friendly mission.
At the moment, all commercial hydrogen has to be manufactured in a polluting way, either by using fossil fuels or renewable electricity, but if it forms sizable reserves, it could be there for the taking. Natural hydrogen is not only clean, but also renewable, as it reacts with iron minerals at elevated temperatures and pressures.
In the decade since boreholes began to tap hydrogen in Mali, flows have not diminished. However, it is still early days for natural hydrogen, as scientists don't understand how it forms and migrates and whether it accumulates in a commercially exploitable way.
Hydrogen is a clean energy source, but at ambient pressures, it occupies much more space. Although, pressurized tanks can hold more, but it will add weight and costs. Moreover, liquefying hydrogen also requires chilling it to –253°C, making it a disqualifying expense.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees room for hydrogen to replace hydrocarbons in heavy-duty vehicles, trucks, ships, and perhaps even planes. Industries such as steel that require high-temperature combustion are another likely market, and today's primary markets for hydrogen will continue to grow from the current 90 million tons a year.
Hydrogen needs to be produced cleanly to be climate-friendly. Today's hydrogen is "gray" made by reacting methane with steam or using fossil fuels, but most hopes rest on "green" hydrogen, which uses renewable solar or wind power to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen with electrolyzers.
Governments ‘too’ have embraced the concept, with the US Department of Energy spending $7 billion on hydrogen "hubs" and the European Union also calling for 20 million tons a year of green hydrogen by 2030.
Hydrogen extraction could be as cheap as 50 cents per kilogram, according to some scientists. Ian Munro, CEO of Helios Aragon, believes his break-even costs could be between 50 and 70 cents, which could revolutionize energy production.
But why has the oil and gas industry overlooked hydrogen for so long. This is due to the fact that hydrogen is scarce in sedimentary rocks that yield oil and gas, such as organic-rich shales or mudstones. Hydrogen can also react with oxygen in rocks to form water or combine with carbon dioxide to form "abiotic" methane.
The first scientific discussion on ‘Hydrogen’ dates to 1888, when Dmitri Mendeleev reported hydrogen seeping from cracks in a coal mine in Ukraine. Soviet researchers held to a now discredited theory that would have required significant amounts of natural hydrogen to produce oil from non-living processes rather than from ancient life.
The University of Toronto geochemists, discovered hydrogen in mines in Canada and Finland in the 1980s. Post that hundreds of hydrogen seeps have now been documented around the world.
The main basis of natural hydrogen production is a set of high-temperature reactions between water and iron-rich minerals such as olivine, which dominate Earth's mantle. Scientists have seen this process up close at the volcanic Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where tectonic plates are tugged apart and mantle rocks rise up to create fresh slabs of ocean crust.
Researchers are also looking in cratons, the ancient cores of continents, for bands of iron-rich rock, called greenstone belts, which are the remnants of ocean crust that got squeezed between the cratons in ancient continental collisions. Scientists believe greenstone belts deep in the West African craton are driving the hydrogen production there.
Cratons hold a second major source of iron with hydrogen-producing potential, dating back to an evolutionary turning point about 2.4 billion years ago. Some scientists favour a more deep-seated source: primordial hydrogen, trapped soon after the planet's birth in its iron core, is seeping to the surface through thousands of kilometres of rock.
Back to the Mali, Diallo is one of Mali's wealthiest citizens and a former presidential candidate. He acquired the rights to the gas fields 15 years ago, but the path to commercialization has been difficult due to the pandemic and military coups.
Despite this, Hydroma is close to pumping commercial hydrogen, and the priority is to use it as a filling station for fuel cells that could help electrify Mali, where half the population still lacks access to power. Diallo wants to expand into hydrogen buses, trucks, and even trains, and Hydroma has created subsidiaries in Senegal, Mauritania, Niger, and Guinea-Bissau.
Third patient Cured of HIV AIDS
A 53-year-old man in Germany has become the third person with HIV to be declared clear of the virus after a procedure that replaced his bone marrow cells with HIV-resistant stem cells from a donor. |
| Pic credits: AP |
For years, antiretroviral therapy (ART) has been given to people with HIV to reduce the virus to undetectable levels and prevent it from being transmitted to other people. However, the immune system keeps the virus locked up in reservoirs in the body, and if an individual stops taking ART, the virus begins replicating and spreading again.
A true cure would eliminate this reservoir, and this is what has happened for the latest patient, whose name has not been released. The stem-cell technique involved was first used to treat Timothy Ray Brown, often referred to as the Berlin patient, in 2007.
In 2019, researchers revealed that the same procedure seemed to have cured the London patient, Adam Castillejo, and now in 2022, scientists announced that they thought a New York patient who had remained HIV-free for 14 months might have also be cured using this protocol.
The Düsseldorf (Germany) patient had extremely low levels of HIV, thanks to ART, when he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. The team of researchers led by Clay Janssen took tissue and blood samples from the patient and found immune cells that specifically reacted to HIV. They also found HIV DNA and RNA in the patient's body, but these never seemed to replicate.
Timothy Henrich, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, says the study is very thorough. Several patients have been successfully treated with ART and HIV-resistant donor cells, making the chances of achieving an HIV cure very high.
Our brains control our health and Diseases
Researchers from the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa are investigating whether stimulating a region of the brain involved in positive emotion and motivation can influence how the heart heals. They have found that activation of this brain reward centre, called the ventral tegmental area (VTA) seems to trigger immune changes that contribute to the reduction of scar tissues in heart.This study has its roots in decades of research pointing to the contribution of a person's psychological state to their heart health, which can lead to better outcomes in those with cardiovascular disease. However, the mechanisms behind these links remain elusive.
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| Pic generated by Mufawad using AI |
Asya Rolls, a neuroimmunologist, and Lior Gepstein, a cardiologist, are trying to work out exactly how this happens. Caroline Rolls is part of a growing group of scientists who are mapping out the brain's control over the body's immune responses. She wants to provide an explanation for a phenomenon that many clinicians and researchers are aware of: mental states can have a profound impact on how sick we can get and how well we recover.
Understanding this could help to boost the placebo effect, destroy cancers, enhance responses to vaccination and even re-evaluate illnesses that have been dismissed as being psychologically driven. There are multiple lines of communication between the nervous and the immune systems, from small local circuits in organs such as the skin to longer-range routes beginning in the brain.
Some parts of the system have inspired treatments for several autoimmune diseases, while other studies are still nascent. Rolls has just begun examining whether the pathways that her team had found in “mice” are also present in humans and has launched a start-up company to try to develop treatments based on her findings. However, much is still a mystery.
Hedva Haykin, a doctoral student at the ‘Technion’ an Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, wants to understand how stimulating a region of the brain involved in positive emotion and motivation can influence how the heart heals.
Her experiments have revealed that activation of this brain reward centre triggers immune changes that contribute to the reduction of scar tissue. This study has its roots in decades of research pointing to the contribution of a person's psychological state to their heart health, which can lead to better outcomes in those with cardiovascular disease. However, the mechanisms behind these links remain elusive.
A growing group of scientists are mapping out the brain's control over the body's immune responses. This field has exploded over the last several years, and some parts of the system, such as the vagus nerve, have inspired treatments for autoimmune diseases. However, much is still a mystery, and researchers need to understand the mechanism to use it in the therapeutic context.
For more than a century, scientists have been finding hints of a close-knit relationship between the nervous and the immune systems. In the late 1990s, researchers began drawing connections to the body's master conductor, the brain. Neurosurgeon Kevin Tracey and his colleagues found something unexpected while investigating whether an experimental anti-inflammatory drug could help to tame brain inflammation caused by stroke. The drug had the expected effect: it reduced neuroinflammation.
To determine the path of the drug from brain to body, the researchers decided to cut the vagus nerve, a bundle of some 100,000 nerve fibres that runs from the brain to the heart, lungs, gastrointestinal tract and other major organs. The anti-inflammatory effect of the brain-administered drug disappeared, inspiring Tracey's group and others to explore other ways in which the nervous system directs immune responses.
A driving force for these developments has been the advent of scientific tools that enable scientists to begin to chart the interactions between nervous and immune systems in an unprecedented way.
Some researchers are focusing on particular body systems. Neuroscientists have discovered that the interaction between immune cells and nerves in the outermost layer of artery walls modulated the progression of atherosclerosis, an inflammatory disease.
Veiga Fernandes and his group have documented clusters of neuronal and immune cells in various tissues and discovered how they work together to sense damage and mobilize immune reactions.
Neuroscientist at Harvard University have pinpointed neurons in an area called the hypothalamus that control symptoms including fever, warmth-seeking and loss of appetite in response to infection.
In a 2021 study, it was found that neurons in the insula store memories of past bouts of gut inflammation and that stimulating those brain cells reactivated the immune response. Researchers suspect that such a reaction might prime the body to fight potential threats, but these reactions could also backfire and start up in the absence of the original trigger.
A 1989 study reported that those who underwent supportive group therapy and self-hypnosis in addition to routine cancer care survived longer than those who received only the latter. To test the link, a team of researchers zoomed in on the VTA, the same region they targeted in the heart-attack study and in a previous experiment looking at bacterial infection.
Activating neurons in the VTA noticeably shrank the cancers, and it turned out that VTA activation subdued cells in the bone marrow that would usually repress immune activity, freeing the immune system to fight the cancer.
Negative mental states can also influence the body's immune response, with specific brain circuits that mobilize immune cells in the bodies of mice during acute stress. Neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York have also found that activating neurons in the mouse hypothalamus can generate an immune response.
Some groups are hoping to replicate their findings in humans, using tools such as virtual reality to manipulate people's stress levels and see how that changes the immune response such as neuroscientists and psychiatrists at Tel Aviv University in Israel are working to see if boosting the reward system in people's brains before they receive a vaccine can improve their immune response. They are using a method called neurofeedback, which is measured using methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging.
