Episode #1060
News Items
- Therapeutic Nanoparticles
- What Killed Napoleon’s Forces
- Making Better Photosynthesis
- Second Generation Black Holes
- More on 3I/ATLAS
Question #1: Human Instinct
- Here is my paraphrase of what a psychologist said on a radio program many years ago: humans have reflexes, drives, and urges, but humans do not have (or act on) instinct. At the time I simply accepted the comment as accurate but what are your thoughts? I thought that this might be an interesting segment for the show. Norbert Alwast
Science or Fiction
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Item #1
Fiction
Engineers have created a form of gallium-doped germanium, materials already used in electronics, that is superconducting at ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-025-02042-8
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Item #2
Science
A new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses <1% of the energy of current methods, while achieving equal or better results. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925231225024129?via%3Dihub
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Item #3
Science
Researchers demonstrate that a liposomal delivery system can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable anticancer drug with 1000 times the toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug-resistant cancers. https://molecular-cancer.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12943-025-02444-1
Skeptical Quote of the Week.
‘All interpretations made by a scientist are hypotheses, and all hypotheses are tentative. They must forever be tested and they must be revised if found to be unsatisfactory. Hence, a change of mind in a scientist, and particularly in a great scientist, is not only not a sign of weakness but rather evidence for continuing attention to the respective problem and an ability to test the hypothesis again and again.’ — Ernst Mayr