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Fructose Isn't Just Sugar. It Acts More Like a Hormone

✇Slashdot
Par : EditorDavid
Slashdot reader smazsyr writes: A new review says we've had fructose wrong for decades. The nine authors, led by Richard Johnson at the University of Colorado Anschutz, argue that fructose "is not just another calorie." It is a signal. It tells the liver to make fat and brace for a famine that never comes. That made sense for a bear fattening up on autumn berries. It makes less sense for a person drinking soda in March. The review reframes the WHO's sugar guideline, argues ScienceBlog.com, as "less a recommendation about calories and more a warning about a signalling molecule we have been dosing ourselves with, several times a day, for most of a century."

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Critical Atlantic Current Significantly More Likely To Collapse Than Thought

✇Slashdot
Par : BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding "very concerning" as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest for 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Scientists spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021 and know that the Amoc has collapsed in the Earth's past. Climate scientists use dozens of different computer models to assess the future climate. However, for the complex Amoc system, these produce widely varying results, ranging from some that indicate no further slowdown by 2100 to those suggesting a huge deceleration of about 65%, even when carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning are gradually cut to net zero. The research combined real-world ocean observations with the models to determine the most reliable, and this hugely reduced the spread of uncertainty. They found an estimated slowdown of 42% to 58% in 2100, a level almost certain to end in collapse. The Amoc is a major part of the global climate system and brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. A collapse would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50-100cm to already rising sea levels around the Atlantic. The slowdown has to do with the Arctic's rapidly rising temperatures from global warming. "Warmer water is less dense and therefore sinks into the depths more slowly," explains the Guardian. "This slowing allows more rainfall to accumulate in the salty surface waters, also making it less dense, and further slowing the sinking and forming an Amoc feedback loop." The new research has been published in the journal Science Advances.

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Sperm Whales' Communication Closely Parallels Human Language, Study Finds

✇Slashdot
Par : BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales – enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales' vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered. Not only do sperm whale have a form of "alphabet" and form vowels within their vocalizations but the structure of these vowels behaves in the same way as human speech, the new study has found. Sperm whales communicate in a series of short clicks called codas. Analysis of these clicks shows that the whales can differentiate vowels through the short or elongated clicks or through rising or falling tones, using patterns similar to languages such as Mandarin, Latin and Slovenian. The structure of the whales' communication has "close parallels in the phonetics and phonology of human languages, suggesting independent evolution," the paper, published in the Proceedings B journal, states. Sperm whale coda vocalizations are "highly complex and represent one of the closest parallels to human phonology of any analyzed animal communication system," it added. [...] The new study shows that "sperm whale communication isn't just about patterns of clicks -- it involves multiple interacting layers of structure," said Mauricio Cantor, a behavioral ecologist at the Marine Mammal Institute who was not involved in the research. "With this study, we're starting to see that these signals are organized in ways we didn't fully appreciate before." The latest discovery around sperm whale speech has inched forward the possibility of someday fully understanding the creatures and even communicating with them. Project CETI has set a goal of being able to comprehend 20 different vocalized expressions, relating to actions such as diving and sleeping, within the next five years. A future where we're able to fully understand what the whales are saying and be able to have a conversation with them is "totally within our grasp," said David Gruber, founder and president of Project CETI. "We've already got a lot further than I thought we could. But it will take time, and funding. At the moment we are like a two-year-old, just saying a few words. In a few years' time, maybe we will be more like a five-year-old."

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Chimpanzees In Uganda Locked In Vicious 'Civil War', Say Researchers

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Par : BeauHD
Researchers say the world's largest known wild chimpanzee community in Uganda fractured into rival factions and has been locked in a vicious "civil war" for the last eight years. "It is not clear exactly why the once close-knit community of Ngogo chimpanzees at Uganda's Kibale National Park are at loggerheads, but since 2018 the scientists have recorded 24 killings, including 17 infants," reports the BBC. From the report: [O]ver several decades, [lead author Aaron Sandel] said the nearly 200 Ngogo chimpanzees had lived in harmony. There were divided into two sets - known to researchers as Western and Central - but they had existed overall as a cohesive group. Sandel said he first noticed them polarizing in June 2015, when the Western chimpanzees ran away and were chased by the Central group. "Chimpanzees are sort of melodramatic," he said, explaining that following arguments there would ordinarily be "screaming and chasing" and then later, they would grooming and co-operating. But following the 2015 dispute, the researchers saw that there was a six-week avoidance period between the two sets, with interactions becoming more infrequent. When they did occur, Sandel said they were "a little more intense, a little more aggressive." Following the emergence of the two distinct groups in 2018, members of the Western group started attacking the Central chimpanzees. In 24 targeted attacks since the split, at least seven adult males and 17 infants from the Central chimps have been killed, the study found, although the researchers believe the actual number of deaths are higher. The researchers believe many factors such as the group size and subsequent competition of resources, and "male-male competition" for reproducing may be to blame. But they say there were three likely catalysts: - The first, were the deaths of five adult males and one adult female -- for reasons unknown -- in 2014, which could have disrupted social networks and weakened social ties across the subgroups - The following year, there was a change in the alpha male, which the study says coincided with the first period of separation between the Western and Central groups. "Changes in the dominance hierarchy can increase aggression and avoidance in chimpanzees," it explained - The third factor was the deaths of 25 chimpanzees, including four adult males and 10 adult females, as a result of a respiratory epidemic, in 2017, a year before the final separation. One of the adult males who died was "among the last individuals to connect the groups," the research paper said. The study has been published in the journal Science.

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'Cognitive Surrender' Leads AI Users To Abandon Logical Thinking, Research Finds

✇Slashdot
Par : BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect reasoning or factual flaws in responses. On the other side are those who routinely outsource their critical thinking to what they see as an all-knowing machine. Recent research goes a long way to forming a new psychological framework for that second group, which regularly engages in "cognitive surrender" to AI's seemingly authoritative answers. That research also provides some experimental examination of when and why people are willing to outsource their critical thinking to AI, and how factors like time pressure and external incentives can affect that decision. Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were willing to accept faulty AI reasoning a whopping 73.2 percent of the time, while only overruling it 19.7 percent of the time. The researchers say this "demonstrate[s] that people readily incorporate AI-generated outputs into their decision-making processes, often with minimal friction or skepticism." In general, "fluent, confident outputs [are treated] as epistemically authoritative, lowering the threshold for scrutiny and attenuating the meta-cognitive signals that would ordinarily route a response to deliberation," they write. These kinds of effects weren't uniform across all test subjects, though. Those who scored highly on separate measures of so-called fluid IQ were less likely to rely on the AI for help and were more likely to overrule a faulty AI when it was consulted. Those predisposed to see AI as authoritative in a survey, on the other hand, were much more likely to be led astray by faulty AI-provided answers. Despite the results, though, the researchers point out that "cognitive surrender is not inherently irrational." While relying on an LLM that's wrong half the time (as in these experiments) has obvious downsides, a "statistically superior system" could plausibly give better-than-human results in domains such as "probabilistic settings, risk assessment, or extensive data," the researchers suggest. "As reliance increases, performance tracks AI quality," the researchers write, "rising when accurate and falling when faulty, illustrating the promises of superintelligence and exposing a structural vulnerability of cognitive surrender." In other words, letting an AI do your reasoning means your reasoning is only ever going to be as good as that AI system. As always, let the prompter beware.

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Scientists Shocked To Find Lab Gloves May Be Skewing Microplastics Data

✇Slashdot
Par : BeauHD
Researchers found that common nitrile and latex lab gloves can shed stearate particles that closely resemble microplastics, potentially "increasing the risk of false positives when studying microplastic pollution," reports ScienceDaily. "We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none," said Anne McNeil, senior author of the study and U-M professor of chemistry, macromolecular science and engineering. "There's still a lot out there, and that's the problem." From the report: Researchers found that these gloves can unintentionally transfer particles onto lab tools used to analyze air, water, and other environmental samples. The contamination comes from stearates, which are not plastics but can closely resemble them during testing. Because of this, scientists may be detecting particles that are not true microplastics. To reduce this issue, U-M researchers Madeline Clough and Anne McNeil recommend using cleanroom gloves, which release far fewer particles. Stearates are salt-based, soap-like substances added to disposable gloves to help them separate easily from molds during manufacturing. However, their chemical similarity to certain plastics makes them difficult to distinguish in lab analyses, increasing the risk of false positives when studying microplastic pollution. "For microplastics researchers who have these impacted datasets, there's still hope to recover them and find a true quantity of microplastics," said researcher and recent doctoral graduate Madeline Clough. "This field is very challenging to work in because there's plastic everywhere," McNeil said. "But that's why we need chemists and people who understand chemical structure to be working in this field." The findings have been published in the journal Analytical Methods.

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Transporting Antimatter On a Truck Is Tricky...

✇Slashdot
Par : EditorDavid
Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: ... but the CERN Project "Antimatter in motion" just did it. For the first time in history researchers at CERN have transported 92 antiprotons on a truck in a specially designed magnetic enclosure. The test-drive went so well that the researchers spontaneously decided to go another round... The purpose of the experiment was to test the feasibility of transporting antimatter to other facilities in Europe to conduct further antimatter research. German news Tagesschau has a nice report. CNN reports that the antiproton enclosure was nearly six feet tall and weighed about 1,760 pounds. And Smithsonian magazine explains that it trapped the antiprotons in a vacuum chamber that had to be cooled to around -450 degrees Fahrenheit: Experts used a crane to carefully move the box of precious cargo from a lab onto a truck, which took about three hours, per the Associated Press' Jamey Keaten. Then, they drove the vehicle for roughly 30 minutes around CERN's campus, and subsequently returned the antiprotons to the lab. They worked with so little antimatter that even if it did touch ordinary matter and annihilate, it would release a small amount of energy detectable only by a special instrument, reports the AP.

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Researchers At CERN Transport Antiprotons By Truck In World-First Experiment

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Par : BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Physics World: Researchers at the CERN particle-physics lab have successfully transported antiprotons in a lorry across the lab's main site. The feat, the first of its kind, follows a similar test with protons in 2024. CERN says the achievement is "a huge leap" towards being able to transport antimatter between labs across Europe. [...] To do so, in 2020 the BASE team began developing a device, known as BASE-STEP (for Baryon-Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment-Symmetry Tests in Experiments with Portable Antiprotons), to store and transport antiprotons. It works by trapping particles in a Penning trap composed of gold-plated cylindrical electrode stacks made from oxygen-free copper that is surrounded by a superconducting magnet bore operated at cryogenic temperatures. The device, which also contains a carbon-steel vacuum chamber to shield the particles from stray magnetic fields, is then mounted on an aluminium frame. This allows it to be transported using standard forklifts and cranes and withstand the bumps and vibrations of transport. In 2024, BASE researchers used the device to transport a cloud of about 105 trapped protons across CERN's Meyrin campus for four hours. After that feat, the researchers began to adjust BASE-STEP to handle antiprotons and yesterday the team successfully transported a trap containing a cloud of 92 antiprotons around the campus for 30 minutes, traveling up to 42 km/h. With further improvements and tests, the team now hope to transport the antiprotons further afield. The first destination on the team's list is the Heinrich Heine University (HHU) in Dusseldorf, Germany, which would take about eight hours. "This means we'd have to keep the trap's superconducting magnet at a temperature below 8.2 K for that long," says BASE-STEP's leader Christian Smorra. "So, in addition to the liquid helium , we'd need to have a generator to power a cryocooler on the truck. We are currently investigating this possibility." If possible to transport to HHU, physicists would then use the particles to search for charge-parity-time violations in protons and antiprotons with a precision at least 100 times higher than currently possible at CERN.

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Les prix Ig Nobel quittent les États-Unis pour s’installer durablement en Europe

✇LinuxFr.org : les dépêches
Par : Florent Zara · Benoît Sibaud · Ysabeau ?

Après 35 ans de présence à Boston, la cérémonie des prix Ig Nobel (souvent abordés sur LinuxFr.org et basé sur un jeu de mot sur ignoble et Nobel), qui récompense les recherches scientifiques insolites, déménage ses activités en Europe. Les organisateurs invoquent clairement des difficultés croissantes liées aux conditions de voyage et de sécurité aux États-Unis.

bannière Improbable Research

Les futures cérémonies se dérouleront en Europe dès cette année.

La décision fait suite à un taux d'absentéisme marqué lors de l'édition 2025 : quatre lauréats sur dix ont refusé de se rendre sur le sol américain. Marc Abrahams, fondateur des prix, souligne un environnement devenu hostile pour les voyageurs étrangers. Et c'est un constat partagé par d'autres secteurs. À titre d'exemple, il cite la Game Developers Conference (aka GDC, basée à San Francisco) que de nombreux développeurs non étasuniens boycottent désormais pour des motifs similaires.

Pour le futur, Les organisateurs se sont associés au domaine des EPF (Écoles Polytechniques Fédérales) suisses et plus particulièrement à l'Université de Zurich pour assurer la continuité de l'événement. Le choix de la Suisse est motivé par sa tradition d'accueil et le fait qu'elle a donné naissance à beaucoup de bonnes choses improbables, citant la physique d'Albert Einstein, l'économie mondiale et les coucous :-)

Les Ig Nobel prévoit un retrait durable du territoire américain au profit d'un modèle rotatif inspiré du concours de l'Eurovision : les années paires, la cérémonie se déroulera à Zurich, les impaires, l'événement sera accueilli par une autre métropole européenne.

C'est clairement la fin de l'ancrage historique des prix aux USA, mais ils prévoient tout de même un petit événement trois semaines après à Boston pour célébrer localement les Ig Nobels.

NdM: improbablement sont mentionnés sur leur site un logiciel libre à propos de la différenciation du glycol diéthylène et du glycérol par le son, GNOME dans une interrogation sur Nestlé, l'eau de Phoenix, le problème de l'abri à vélos et la loi de Parkinson, un autre logiciel libre à propos de pancakes et du Kansas, Chris DiBona et un « architecte Open Source » de SCO.

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Why Falling Cats Always Seem To Land On Their Feet

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Par : BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In a paper, published last month in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers offered a novel take on falling felines. Their evidence suggests new insights into the so-called falling cat problem, particularly that cats have a very flexible segment of their spines that allows them to correct their orientation midair. [...] People have been curious about falling cats perhaps as long as the animals have been living with humans, but the method to their acrobatic abilities remains enigmatic. Part of the difficulty is that the anatomy of the cat has not been studied in detail, explains Yasuo Higurashi, a physiologist at Yamaguchi University in Japan and lead author of the study. [...] Modern research has split the falling cat problem into two competing models. The first, "legs in, legs out," suggests that cats correct their falling trajectory by first extending their hind limbs before retracting them, using a sequential twist of their upper and then lower trunk to gain the proper posture while in free fall. The second model, "tuck and turn," suggests that cats turn their upper and lower bodies in simultaneous juxtaposed movements. [...] The researchers found that the feline spine was extremely flexible in the upper thoracic vertebrae, but stiffer and heavier in the lower lumbar vertebrae. The discovery matches video evidence showing the cats first turn their front legs, and then their lower legs. The results suggest the cat quickly spins its flexible upper torso to face the ground, allowing it to see so that it can correctly twist the rest of its body to match. "The thoracic spine of the cat can rotate like our neck," Dr. Higurashi said. Experiments on the spine show the upper vertebrae can twist an astounding 360 degrees, he says, which helps cats make these correcting movements with ease. The results are consistent with the "legs in, legs out" model, but definitively determining which model is correct will take more work, Dr. Higurashi says. The results also yielded another discovery: Cats, like many animals, appear to have a right-side bias. One of the dropped cats corrected itself by turning to the right eight out of eight times, while the other turned right six out of eight times.

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Cécité, droits des femmes et biologie

✇LinuxFr.org : les dépêches
Par : Ysabeau ? · Benoît Sibaud

Le mois de mars est celui du retour du printemps mais aussi celui où a lieu la Journée internationale des droits de femmes. Cette année, on va se pencher sur les droits des femmes ayant des déficiences visuelles et en profiter pour dresser le portrait de la chercheuse en bio-informatique Salomé Nashed. On terminera par quelques mots sur les aides à la navigation des personnes aveugles et malvoyantes, qui ne sont pas sans lien avec des problématiques récurrentes sur LinuxFR.org.

Sommaire

Quelques points sur les droits des femmes aveugles

En fait, comme le souligne le Gildas Brégain, auteur d’une histoire du handicap au XXe siècle cette histoire reste encore à écrire, et on en trouve peu de traces sur le web.

En France, la prise en compte des aveugles remonte à la fin du XVIIe siècle quand Valentin Haüy crée la première école pour aveugle, l’actuel Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles (INJA). Jusque-là, les jeunes aveugles ne recevaient pas d’éducation spécifique. L’école de jeunes aveugles sera ouverte aussi bien aux garçons qu’aux filles. Et on commencera à se pencher sur la question de la lecture et de l’écriture. Valentin Haüy inventera une écriture à base de caractères en relief et de points. Cette école accueillera Louis Braille en 1816 qui sera le créateur du système d’écriture qui porte son nom et qui s’est imposé universellement.

Les femmes aveugles vont avoir des droits, sur le plan formel tout au moins, limités par rapport aux hommes. Elles devront vivre dans foyers dédiés. Gildas Brégain rapporte par exemple que la première femme à avoir demandé à pouvoir vivre hors de l’institution, Marie Aimée Régnier, enseignante à l’INJA aura dû batailler pour obtenir la permission de la quitter. Rappelons que cela se passait au début du XXe siècle. Les hommes aveugles, quant à eux, bénéficient d’aides pour vivre hors des institutions.

Si elles n’avaient pas formellement l’interdiction de se marier. Le mariage des femmes aveugles était très mal accepté1, alors que cela passait mieux pour les hommes. Toujours dans cet article de CNRS Le journal, il signale un document de l’INA :

datant des années 2000, relatant l’expérience d’une jeune femme aveugle enceinte prenant un bus, à laquelle les passagers font remarquer qu’elle ne devrait pas avoir d’enfant.

Les femmes aveugles ne bénéficieront d’aides ménagères pour les aider avec leurs enfants qu’à partir de 2018. Et, encore aujourd’hui, le handicap, en général, pas seulement la cécité est peu présent dans les mouvements féministes.

Salomé Nashed chercheuse en bio-informatique

Si les métiers « réservés » aux aveugles tout du moins dans les premières décennies du vingtième siècle étaient limités : tissage, chaiserie, vannerie, enseignement de la musique, accordage de piano, fabrication de cigares et de cigarettes pour les femmes, ils finiront par s’étendre. Et c’est ainsi qu’on en arrive au portrait de Salomé Nashed chercheuse en bio-informatique.

Il paraît assez difficilement concevable de devenir biologiste quand on a une déficience visuelle sévère, c’est pourtant le cas de Salomé Nashed à qui cette voie a été déconseillée par ses enseignants car « la biologie sans la vue, ce n’est pas compatible ». (Interview Nemow Lab, avril 2025).

Son parcours scolaire a été effectué en partie à l’INJA du CE 2 à la 6e, après une maternelle et des classes primaires dans ce qu’elle appelle des classes ordinaires. Elle reviendra ensuite, après la sixième dans le cursus standard ce qui n’a pas été facile, entre son handicap, des enseignants assez réticents et des condisciples peu sympathiques. Elle arrive tout de même à surmonter tout cela et obtient, en 2017 une licence bi-disciplinaire en sciences du vivant et en innovation en santé publique (mention bien).

Après un master en biologie moléculaire (mention très bien), en 2023, elle soutient une thèse de doctorat de génétique et génomique : Étude fonctionnelle et évolutive du résidu situé en position 2 des protéines (PDF).

En 2021, elle est bénéficiaire du prix Thierry Célérier- Femmes & Sciences qui a pour but d’encourager des jeunes femmes de talent en situation de handicap. En 2022, elle est lauréate du prix Jeune Talent France L'Oréal-UNESCO pour les Femmes et la Science qui veut récompenser et révéler des jeunes chercheuses.

En 2024, elle est la pilote qui offre la médaille d’argent au Cybathlon à l’équipe A-eye, une équipe de chercheurs qui travaille sur un dispositif d’aide là la navigation des personnes déficientes visuelles. Le Cybathlon est une compétition qui a pour objectif le développement de technologies d’assistance courante pour personnes handicapées. En l’espèce, Salomé Nashed devait accomplir un parcours d’obstacles avec un harnais kinesthésique qui lui permet de les repérer.

Mais comment peut-on faire des études en biologie quand on ne voit pas ? Salomé Nashed explique qu’elle utilisait de la pâte à modeler qu’elle montrait ensuite à ses enseignant·e·s pour vérifier si elle avait bien compris. Elle avait également recours à des Lego ou des animaux en plastique pour mémoriser les formes. Elle demandera aussi à ses condisciples de lui dessiner ce qu’iels venaient de voir dans la paume de la main pour en écrire une description. Les enseignant·e·s au fil du temps finiront par aller la voir à la fin du cours et lui dire :

J’ai expliqué cette notion au tableau, tu n’as pas dû comprendre : donne-moi ta main, je vais te montrer. (portrait de Salomé Nashed, Sorbonne Université, octobre 2022).

Actuellement Salomé Nashed s’est tournée vers la bio-informatique. Elle y utilise l’intelligence artificielle, produit des graphiques qu’elle code (elle s’est formée à Python en autodidacte) et les soumets à une IA qui les lui décrit. Elle vérifie ensuite si les descriptions correspondent bien aux données.

Se déplacer sans voir

On connaît, pour les déplacements des personnes ayant de forts déficits visuels la traditionnelle canne blanche. Celle-ci est à la fois un symbole qui permet de repérer une personne aveugle, simple canne, et un outil, le bâton long fait pour pouvoir balayer le sol et qui permet de mieux naviguer en indiquant les obstacles. On connaît également les chiens d’aveugle, spécialement éduqués et porteurs de harnais spécifiques et qui remplacent la canne. Ce qui est moins connu, c’est qu’un chien d’aveugle a une durée de vie active de huit à dix ans, après lesquelles il est admis à une retraite bien méritée.

Et, ce que l’on ne sait pas toujours, c’est que la technologie s’est emparée de la navigation des personnes aveugles et malvoyantes. Ainsi il existe des cannes électroniques qui fonctionnent avec des capteurs à ultra-sons et infra-rouges. Elles vibrent pour signaler un obstacle à leur porteur.

On trouve aussi des dispositifs électroniques que l’on adapte sur la canne. Ils nécessitent des écouteurs spécifiques. Et, évidemment, un ordiphone (Iphone ou Android) et une application dédiée (celle du dispositif du lien n’existe pas sur le magasin F-Droid).

L’intérêt des versions électroniques c’est qu’elles signalent également les obstacles en hauteur. L’inconvénient, c’est leur prix (compter dans les 2 500 €) et aussi, le fait qu’elles sont susceptibles d’avoir recours à des logiciels non libres. Ce qui pose la question de leur fonctionnement si l’entreprise qui les commercialise met la clé sous la porte. On a déjà vu, en 2022, que des personnes ayant des implants pour suppléer à leur vue se sont retrouvées soudain aveugles au milieu de la rue parce que le serveur de l’entreprise était arrêté.

Source, références ou autres

Si vous voulez en savoir plus sur l’histoire, finalement assez récente, de la prise en compte de la cécité, je vous suggère la lecture de l’article La naissance de la Ligue Braille, une histoire de femmes de la branche belge de la ligue Braille. Évidemment, l’interview de Gildas Brégain cité plus haut et que j’ai beaucoup utilisé. Dans cette interview, Gildas Brégain fait référence à un Congrès National pour l’amélioration du sort des Aveugles qui s’est tenu à Paris du 17 au 22 juillet 1922. C’est un document plutôt intéressant que l’on peut récupérer sur archive.org au format PDF (texte-image). Il décrit intégralement le déroulé du congrès avec ses intervenants, les concerts et les décisions prises. Ces dernières étant bien intéressantes. Marie Aimée Régnier n’était pas la seule femme à y avoir participé et s’être fait entendre.

Il y aurait des choses à écrire sur l’histoire de l’écriture des personnes aveugles. Mais ceci est une autre histoire.

  1. Comme si les femmes aveugles transmettaient leur cécité, qu’elle qu’en soit l’origine, mais pas les hommes aveugles. ↩

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Galileo's Handwritten Notes Discovered in a Medieval Astronomy Text

✇Slashdot
Par : EditorDavid
In a library in Florence, Italy, historian Ivan Malara noticed handwritten notes on a book printed in the 1500s — and recognized the handwriting as Galileo's. The finding "promises new insights into one of the most famous ideological transitions in the history of science," writes Science magazine — since the book Galileo annotated was a reprint of Ptolemy's second-century work arguing that the earth was the center of the universe. Galileo's notes, perhaps written around 1590, or roughly 2 decades before his groundbreaking telescope observations of the Moon and Jupiter, reveal someone who both revered and critically dissected Ptolemy's work. And they imply, Malara argues, that Galileo ultimately broke with Ptolemy's cosmos because his mastery of the traditional paradigm's reasoning convinced him that a heliocentric [sun-centered] system would better fulfill Ptolemy's own mathematical logic.

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Antarctica's Massive Neutrino Observatory Gets an Upgrade

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Par : EditorDavid
There's already 5,000 sensors embedded in Antarctica's ice to look for evidence of neutrinos, reports the Washington Post. But in November scientists drilled six new holes at least a mile and a half deep and installed cables with hundreds more light detectors — an upgrade to the massive 15-year-old IceCube Neutrino Observatory to detect the charged particles produced by lower-energy neutrinos interacting with matter: When they do, the neutrinos produce charged particles that travel through the ice at nearly the speed of light, creating a blue glow called Cherenkov radiation... "Within the first couple years, we should be making much better measurements," [said Erin O'Sullivan, an associate professor of physics at Uppsala University in Sweden and a spokesperson for the project.] "There's hope to expand the detector, by an order of magnitude in volume, so the important thing there is we're not just seeing a few neutrino point sources, but we're starting to be a true telescope. ... That's really the dream." The scientists spent seven years planning the upgrade, according to the article. "To drill holes a mile and a half deep takes about 30 hours, and 18 more hours to return to the surface," the article points out. "Then, the race begins because almost immediately, the hole starts to shrink as the water refreezes." ("If it takes too much time, the principal investigator says, "the instruments don't fit in anymore!")

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Scientists Crack the Case of 'Screeching' Scotch Tape

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Par : msmash
The screeching sound that Scotch tape makes when you rip it off a surface -- that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard noise most people try not to think about -- is produced by shock waves from micro-cracks that travel across the peeling tape at supersonic speeds, according to a new paper published in Physical Review E. Researchers led by Sigurdur Thoroddsen of King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia used simultaneous high-speed imaging and synchronized microphones to capture both the propagating fractures and the sound waves they generate in the surrounding air. The team's earlier work, in 2010, had identified a sequence of transverse cracks racing across the width of the adhesive during peeling, and a 2024 follow-up established a direct correspondence between those cracks and the screeching sound, but neither study pinpointed a mechanism. The new findings show that a partial vacuum forms between the tape and the surface as each crack opens, and because the crack moves faster than air can rush in to fill the void, the vacuum travels along until it reaches the tape's edge and collapses into the stationary air outside, producing a discrete sound pulse.

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First British Baby Born Using Transplanted Womb From Dead Donor

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Par : msmash
A 10-week-old boy named Hugo has become the first baby born in the UK from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor, after his mother Grace Bell -- who was born without a viable womb due to a condition called MRKH syndrome, which affects one in every 5,000 women -- underwent a 10-hour transplant operation at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford in June 2024. Hugo was born just before Christmas 2025, weighing nearly 7lbs, at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in west London, following IVF treatment and embryo transfer at The Lister Fertility Clinic. Bell's transplant is one of three completed so far as part of a UK clinical research trial that plans to carry out 10 such procedures from deceased donors, and Hugo is the first baby born from any of them. Earlier in 2025, a separate effort produced baby Amy, the first UK birth from a living womb donation -- her mother had received her older sister's womb in January 2023. Globally, more than 100 womb transplants have been performed, resulting in over 70 healthy births.

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Stressful People in Your Life Could Be Adding Months To Your Biological Age

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Par : msmash
A study published last week in PNAS found that people who regularly cause problems or make life difficult -- whom the researchers call "hasslers" -- are associated with measurably faster biological aging in those around them, at a rate of roughly 1.5% per additional hassler and about nine months of additional biological age relative to same-age peers. The research drew on DNA methylation-based epigenetic clocks and ego-centric network data from a state-representative probability sample of 2,345 adults in Indiana, aged 18 to 103. Nearly 29% of respondents reported at least one hassler in their close network. The biological toll varied by relationship type: hasslers who were family members showed the strongest and most consistent associations with accelerated aging, while spouse hasslers showed no significant effect on either epigenetic measure. The damage also went beyond aging clocks -- each additional hassler was associated with greater depression and anxiety severity, higher BMI, increased inflammation, and higher multimorbidity. When benchmarked against smoking, a major behavioral risk factor for aging, the hassler effect corresponded to roughly 13 to 17% of smoking's estimated impact on the same aging clocks.

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