Short Takes – 8-23-24

Five ways the brain can age: 50,000 scans reveal possible patterns of damage. Nature.com article. Pull quote: “For example, dementia and its precursor, mild cognitive impairment, had links to three of the five patterns. Intriguingly, the researchers also found evidence that the patterns they identified could potentially be used to reveal the likelihood of more brain degeneration in the future. “If you want to predict progression from cognitively normal status to mild cognitive impairment, one [pattern] was the most predictive by far,” says Davatzikos. “At later stages, the addition of a second [pattern] enriches your prediction, which makes sense because this kind of captures the propagation of the pathology.” Other patterns were linked to conditions including Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, and one combination of three patterns was highly predictive of mortality.”

Electrification of process heat stands to slash industry’s emissions. ChemistryWorld.com article. Pull quote: “‘When you electrify you replace your thermal load that you previously supplied with natural gas with electricity, but you need different infrastructure for that. You have the natural gas connection, but these are typically in the area of double-digit megawatts – and some industrial sites only have 5–10MW electricity connections, which they are already using, and so would have to extend the electricity grid connection. That’s something that takes a lot of time. I know that for Germany, it can take four, five years or longer to do this,’ says Rehfeldt. ‘And that means that your window of opportunity for reinvestment is long gone. If you have to wait four years to invest in your core business, then you just invest in the fossil installation and not in the electric one, even if you would have had a business case for it.’” Missing discussion of chemical process facility’s needs for both process heating and cooling.

The citation black market: schemes selling fake references alarm scientists. Nature.com article. Pull quote “The team then approached a company, which they found while analysing suspicious citations linked to one of the authors in their data set, that seemed to be selling citations to Google Scholar profiles. The study authors contacted the firm by e-mail and later communicated through WhatsApp. The company offered 50 citations for $300 or 100 citations for $500. The authors opted for the first option and 40 days later 50 citations from studies in 22 journals — 14 of which are indexed by scholarly database Scopus — were added to the fictional researcher’s Google Scholar profile.”

NASA will decide Saturday if Boeing's new capsule is safe enough to fly 2 astronauts back from space. Phys.org article. Pull quote: “Administrator Bill Nelson and other top officials will meet Saturday. An announcement is expected from Houston once the meeting ends.”

Europe delivers for Artemis III. Phys.org article. Pull quote: “ESA has already provided two European Service Modules for NASA: The first was used during the successful Artemis I uncrewed mission, and the second is currently at NASA's Kennedy Space Center for testing in the lead up to the Artemis II mission scheduled next year.”