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Le télescope James-Webb a détecté par hasard des « bébés quasars » aux confins de l’Univers

Avant de devenir des trous noirs supermassifs monstrueux que les astronomes connaissent, les quasars ont été plus petits. Et ce sont vraisemblablement quelques-uns de ces bébés trous noirs qui viennent d’être découverts par hasard dans des données renvoyées par le télescope spatial James-Webb.

Deux trous noirs de 28 milliards de masses solaires sont bloqués depuis des milliards d'années, pourquoi ?

Une des théories pour expliquer la formation des trous noirs supermassifs au cœur des grandes galaxies fait intervenir des fusions de trous noirs plus petits accompagnant des fusions de galaxies. Mais ce processus est problématique, conduisant à ce qui a été appelé le « problème du parsec final...

Des scientifiques ont créé des testicules artificiels en laboratoire !

Les testicules artificiels produits en laboratoire permettront d’étudier le développement des organes et les maladies associées. Ils devraient faciliter la production éventuelle de spermatozoïdes pour lutter contre l’infertilité.

On a créé des testicules en laboratoire !

Comme tous les organoïdes, les testicules artificiels produits en laboratoire permettront d’étudier le développement des organes et les maladies associées. Ils devraient faciliter la production éventuelle de spermatozoïdes pour lutter contre l’infertilité.

Une nouvelle cause d'infertilité masculine identifiée ?

Cette découverte pourrait faire des émules dans le milieu de la biologie de la reproduction : dans sa thèse, le doctorant Kexin Zhang fait état d’une nouvelle protéine jouant un rôle crucial dans la formation de spermatozoïdes chez la souris.  !function (e, t) { ...

Le terrifiant secret que cache cette momie égyptienne !

En 1908, des archéologues retrouvent le corps momifié d’une jeune femme égyptienne, visiblement morte en couche. Mais une analyse récente a permis d’identifier les causes exactes de sa mort. Un accouchement qui aurait très, très mal tourné.

Use These Different Ice Packs on Every Part of Your Body

If you’ve ever had an injury or ailment that requires ice, you probably know that not all ice packs are the same. Trying to find one that’s the right shape and size can be a challenge, and keeping it in place while you’re using it can be frustrating. Finding the right fit to get some relief from the pain can be tough,…

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Google Lens et recherche se mettent aux sciences

Google vient d’annoncer une mise à jour de son moteur de recherche et de Google Lens avec de nouvelles fonctionnalités pour les sciences. Désormais, le service pourra résoudre les équations et les problèmes, et affichera des modèles en 3D.

On sait enfin pourquoi la Covid-19 provoque des crises cardiaques et des AVC

Après une infection par la Covid-19, le risque de problèmes cardiaques est augmenté pendant un an. Une étude récente révèle que le virus infecte directement les artères du cœur, intensifiant l'inflammation. Ce phénomène pourrait expliquer la survenue accrue d'AVC et d'infarctus chez les patients...

Approach a Potential Career Change As If You Were Designing a New Product

Feeling unhappy and unfulfilled at work is one thing: Knowing what to do instead is something else completely. At this point, most people probably realize that there’s no such thing as a “dream job,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the only other option is sticking with a job you hate. The hard part (well, one…

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Une étude révèle les possibles atteintes multiples du Covid long sur nos organes

Une étude britannique met en évidence le risque de défaillances d'organes chez des patients hospitalisés pour Covid-19. Elle révèle un risque accru d'anomalies pulmonaires, cérébrales et rénales, nécessitant une surveillance étroite post-hospitalisation. Ces découvertes alertent sur les impacts...

In Case You Missed It: Highlights from TED2019

Twelve mainstage sessions, two rocking sessions of talks from TED Fellows, a special session of TED Unplugged, a live podcast recording and much more amounted to an unforgettable week at TED2019. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

If we learned anything at TED2019, it’s that life doesn’t fit into simple narratives, and that there are no simple answers to the big problems we’re facing. But we can use those problems, our discomfort and even our anger to find the energy to make change.

Twelve mainstage sessions, two rocking sessions of talks from TED Fellows, a special session of TED Unplugged, a live podcast recording and much more amounted to an unforgettable week. Any attempt to summarize it all will be woefully incomplete, but here’s a try.

What happened to the internet? Once a place of so much promise, now a source of so much division. Journalist Carole Cadwalldr opened the conference with an electrifying talk on Facebook’s role in Brexit — and how the same players were involved in 2016 US presidential election. She traced the contours of the growing threat social media poses to democracy and calls out the “gods of Silicon Valley,” naming names — one of whom, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, sat down to talk with TED’s Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers the following day. Dorsey acknowledged problems with harassment on the platform and explained some of the work his team is doing to make it better.

Hannah Gadsby broke comedy. Her words, and she makes a compelling case in one of the most talked-about moments of the conference. Look for her talk release on April 29.

Humanity strikes back! Eight huge Audacious Project–supported ideas launched at TED this year. From a groundbreaking project at the Center for Policing Equity to work with police and communities and to collect data on police behavior and set goals to make it more fair … to a new effort to sequester carbon in soil … and more, you can help support these projects and change the world for good.

10 years of TED Fellows. Celebrating a decade of the program in two sessions of exuberant talks, the TED Fellows showed some wow moments, including Brandon Clifford‘s discovery of how to make multi-ton stones “dance,” Arnav Kapur‘s wearable device that allows for silent speech and Skylar Tibbits‘s giant canvas bladders that might save sinking islands. At the same time, they reminded us some of the pain that can exist behind breakthroughs, with Brandon Anderson speaking poignantly about the loss of his life partner during a routine traffic stop — which inspired him to develop a first-of-its-kind platform to report police conduct — and Erika Hamden opening up about her team’s failures in building FIREBall, a UV telescope that can observe extremely faint light from huge clouds of hydrogen gas in and around galaxies.

Connection is a superpower. If you haven’t heard of the blockbuster megahit Crazy Rich Asians, then, well, it’s possible you’re living under a large rock. Whether or not you saw it, the film’s director, Jon M. Chu, has a TED Talk about connection — to his family, his culture, to film and technology — that goes far beyond the movie. The theme of connection rang throughout the conference: from Priya Parker’s three easy steps to turn our everyday get-togethers into meaningful and transformative gatherings to Barbara J. King’s heartbreaking examples of grief in the animal kingdom to Sarah Kay’s epic opening poem about the universe — and our place in it.

Meet DigiDoug. TED takes tech seriously, and Doug Roble took us up on it, debuting his team’s breakthrough motion capture tech, which renders a 3D likeness (known as Digital Doug) in real time — down to Roble’s facial expressions, pores and wrinkles. The demo felt like one of those shifts, where you see what the future’s going to look like. Outside the theater, attendees got a chance to interact with DigiDoug in VR, talking on a virtual TED stage with Roble (who is actually in another room close by, responding to the “digital you” in real time).

New hope for political leadership. There was no shortage of calls to fix the broken, leaderless systems at the top of world governments throughout the conference. The optimists in the room won out during Michael Tubbs’s epic talk about building new civic structures. The mayor of Stockton, California (and the youngest ever of a city with more than 100,000 people), Tubbs shared his vision for governing strategies that recognize systems that place people in compromised situations — and that view impoverished and violent communities with compassion. “When we see someone different from us, they should not reflect our fears, our anxieties, our insecurities, the prejudices we have been taught, our biases. We should see ourselves. We should see our common humanity.”

Exploring the final frontier. A surprise appearance from Sheperd Doeleman, head of the Event Horizon Telescope — whose work produced the historic, first-ever image of a black hole that made waves last week — sent the conference deep into space, and it never really came back. Astrophysicist Juna Kollmeier, head of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, shared her work mapping the observable universe — a feat, she says, that we’ll complete in just 40 years.  “Think about it. We’ve gone from arranging clamshells to general relativity in a few thousand years,” she says. “If we hang on 40 more, we can map all the galaxies.” And in the Fellows talks, Moriba Jah, a space environmentalist and inventor of the orbital garbage monitoring software AstriaGraph, showed how space has a garbage problem. Around half a million objects, some as small as a speck of paint, orbit the Earth — and there’s no consensus on what’s in orbit or where.

Go to sleep. A lack of sleep can lead to more than drowsiness and irritability. Matt Walker shared how it can be deadly as well, leading to an increased risk of Parkinson’s, cancer, heart attacks and more. “Sleep is the Swiss army knife of health,” he says, “It’s not an optional lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity. It is your life support system, and it is mother nature’s best effort yet at immortality.”

The amazing group of speakers who shared their world-changing ideas on the mainstage at TED2019: Bigger Than Us, April 15 – 19, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)

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In Case You Missed It: Highlights from day 2 of TED2019

Head of TED Chris Anderson and TED current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers talk with Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, about the future of one of the world’s most important messaging platforms. They speak at TED2019: Bigger Than Us, April 16, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)

Here’s what happened on Tuesday of TED2019. A few news-making highlights first:

Jack Dorsey proposed a new way Twitter could work — by following topics and not individual people and brands. Hmm. Also, fun fact: If he had it to do over again, he would not have built the Like button. Watch for Jack Dorsey’s Q&A with Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers on TED.com today.

Digital Domain’s Doug Roble showed, for the first time outside his studio, a jaw-dropping digital animation tool mapped to a live human actor. This avatar-creating wonder tool could revolutionize filmmaking … and also your next video chat.

The Audacious Project unveiled eight ambitious projects to change the world — from a data-backed approach to fighting racist activity, to a sweeping global drive to breed plants that are better for the planet. Between them — and thanks to a good old-fashioned fund drive last night — they raised a collective $283 million, and each project now has enough seed funding to launch. But they’re only halfway to a collective goal of — wait for it — $567m.

And some larger themes emerged …

Changing, fast and slow: In Chris’s indelible image, Twitter is a ship, Jack Dorsey is the captain, and a few of the passengers have come up from steerage to ask if Dorsey might consider, perhaps, turning away from the path of the iceberg. As Chris says: “You’re showing this extraordinary calm, but we’re all standing outside saying, Jack, turn the f*cking wheel.” Jack’s response: “Quickness will not get this job done.” He’s looking for deeper, systemic change (including a few suggested moves that some Twitter users did not love). Rafael Casal had the same question — “How fast should change happen?” — after he touched off a Twitter firestorm around an issue of racial unfairness. He made one brief point on the platform; it gained traction over a weekend; and it got ugly real fast. Now, he asks: Is social media just too quick on the trigger to allow for nuanced discussion of social change? Working at another timescale altogether, Safeena Husain spoke about a deep investment in the far future — by educating young girls today, starting with the 1.4 million girls in India who never go to school. Investing now, today, in the potential of these girls could have a material effect on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, aimed at creating a better world by 2030. Why not start now?

Playing with personas: As Doug Roble demos his jaw-dropping tool to create detailed, real-time digital renderings of a person — in this case, Doug himself, plus an alternate personality named Elbor — a thought arises: Will this next-gen avatar lead to more deepfakes, more fraudulent online personalities? (The likely answer: Yes, but honestly, what won’t?) Meanwhile, from the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Roger Hanlon told us about shape-shifting cephalopods who change their skin color and texture in a blink, to hide, to mate, to blow human minds. Hanlon suggests their smart skin, and their ability to deploy it in sophisticated ways and in a flash, is an alternative form of intelligence, driven by their strange and wonderful and very, very large brains.

Service and meaning: Matt Cutts worked at Google for almost 17 years, and he took what he thought would be a six-month break to join the US government’s digital service. Three-plus years later, he’s still in government, finding deep meaning and satisfaction in solving problems that affect real people’s lives. At TED Unplugged, he makes the case to his fellow technologists that if you want to really make an impact, you should leave Silicon Valley, wave goodbye to those crazy perks and free meals, and enter a world where office furniture isn’t a given — but the impact is. Julius Maada Bio, the president of Sierra Leone, offered his own take on the meaning of service. He first took power in a military coup, but his goal, he says, was always to return the country to democratic rule. His other major goal: “Sierra Leone must be a secure, peaceful and just society where every person can thrive and contribute.” Over the past decades, he’s moved steadily toward that objective. Plant biologist Joanne Chory is committed to an equally large and far-seeing goal: developing plants that capture carbon better and for longer than common crops do now which will help mitigate our planet’s creeping carbon levels. Her vision, her sense of mission and her nothing-can-stop-me persistence are genuinely inspiring.

Curiosity makes us human: Educator Brittany Packnett meditates on confidence, the hidden skill that powers many of our other skills. Confidence is what helps you put plans into action, and what helps you keep moving even after you fail. What builds confidence? One key factor, she says, is curiosity, the desire to push beyond who you are and what you know. Mentalist Derren Brown taps into the curiosity of the audience by guessing our innermost questions (and even one guy’s password). How did he do it? He’ll never tell. Appearing via robot, David Deutsch meditates on another force that moves us: the drive for new “explanatory knowledge.” As humans, we desire to understand things and explain them and change them and make them new. As he says: “From the human perspective, the only alternative to that living hell of static societies is continual creation of new ideas, behaviors, new kinds of objects.”

Watch the first TED Talk released from TED2019: Carole Cadwalladr.

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Intelligence: Notes from Session 3 of TED2019

Live from Oxford via remote-controlled robot, David Deutsch explains how our ability to attain knowledge could take us across galaxies. He speaks at TED2019: Bigger Than Us on April 16, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

Session 3 featured a dazzling celebration of intelligence — from the knowledge coded in our DNA (and a new way we could rewrite it) to one of the most astonishing tech demos ever seen at TED. Let’s jump right in.

The event: Talks and performances from TED2019, Session 3: Intelligence, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson.

When and where: Tuesday, April 16, 2019, 11:15am, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC.

Speakers: David Deutsch, David R. Liu, Brittany Packnett, Roger Hanlon, Derren Brown and Doug Roble

The talks in brief:

Physicist, author, Oxford professor and father of quantum computing David Deutsch, who delivered his talk via a remote-controlled robot

  • Big idea: Within a few short centuries, humans have permanently transformed the Earth. Yet for billions of years, the rest of the cosmos has remained largely unchanged. Why is that? The answer lies in the one thing that fundamentally sets us apart: our ability to attain knowledge.
  • How? As humans, we can wrap our minds around just about any problem imaginable. (It’s why Einstein could predict the existence of black holes without ever seeing one, for instance.) Deutsch calls this unique skill of ours “explanatory knowledge,” and it’s driven the immense progress of the past few hundred years — inventions, new behaviors, novel ideas — along with the physical, large-scale changes we’ve left to the Earth. In other words: humans are small beings that can have a massive impact on big things. On the cosmic scale, however, it’s a different story: massive, powerful things strongly affect lesser things, and not vice versa. (A comet that hits the sun is vaporized, while the sun carries on as before.) The last 13 billion years have been dictated by this principle, leading to very few grand cosmological changes — i.e., little novelty — in the universe. Yet we have the power to buck that trend, Deutsch says: with our explanatory knowledge, we can push back against the “great monotony” of the universe, reshape the future of the galaxy — and start looking beyond.
  • Quote of the talk: “Humans are not playthings of cosmic forces. We are users of cosmic forces.”

David R. Liu, chemist, biologist, pioneer of genome editing

  • Big idea: We hear a lot about CRISPR, the chemical scissors with which we can cut genetic code. But what if we could use CRISPR to find flawed DNA sequences — and instead of snipping them out, simply correct them? Base editing could be that red editing pencil, and once fully developed, it could cure many genetically transmitted diseases.
  • How? Liu and his colleagues created chemically engineered proteins that correct sequence-scrambling mutations in DNA. Having made its corrections, this base editor then “tricks” the cell into building stable DNA out of the new sequence. For now, only a few editors exist, and have only been used in plants and animals. But once more are discovered — and scientists solve some formidable practical challenges — they could revolutionize genetic medicine.
  • Quote of the talk: “Thanks to a relentlessly dedicated group of students who were creative enough to engineer what we could design ourselves, and brave enough to evolve what we couldn’t, base editing has begun to transform that science fiction-like aspiration into an exciting new reality.”

Confidence invites us to perform with certainty, to operate differently when we’re sure we can win. Brittany Packnett lays out the three things you need to grow your confidence as she speaks at TED2019: Bigger Than Us on April 16, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)

Brittany Packnett, educator and activist

  • Big idea: Confidence is key to pursuing our goals. How can we develop and maintain it — especially in the students who most need it as they grow? Prioritize three things — permission, community and curiosity.
  • How? As a teacher of low-income students of color, Packnett noticed that her students weren’t developing the confidence they needed to navigate the world. She realized that to build the muscles of confidence, you need three things: the permission to grow, a community to lean on and support you, and the curiosity to explore and grow in confidence. When we create environments that fulfill these three needs, Packnett says, we can boost our confidence — and accomplish our dreams.
  • Quote of the talk: “Confidence is the difference between being inspired and actually getting started, between trying and doing until it’s done. Confidence helps us keep going, even when we’ve failed.”

Roger Hanlon, marine biologist and expert on camouflaged deep-sea creatures

  • Big idea: Cephalopods, like squid, octopus and cuttlefish, evolved without vertebrae in the murky mystery of the deep. Their remarkable neurological systems may be evidence of an entirely new type of evolutionary intelligence.
  • How? These creatures have astonishing intellect and cognitive skills: decision-making, dynamic camouflaging, memorization — they even experience REM sleep (and potentially dream) — much of which is made possible by their advanced RNA. Cephalopods, they’re sort of like us! Hanlon and his team see huge potential in studying their big brains and marvelous, morphing skin (an octopus’s brain, for example, contains 35 lobes and 80 million neurons, while its skin is home to 300 million neurons). These evolutionary tricks might just lead to breakthroughs in AI, fabrics, cosmetics and beyond.
  • Fun fact: While on the hunt for prey, cephalopods can make more than 200 complex camouflaging decisions in the scope of two hours. And they do this multiple times a day.

Derren Brown, illusionist and mentalist

  • Big idea: Magic is a great analogy for how we dream up reality in our own heads, forming a story and then mistaking that story for the truth.
  • How? Brown’s talk includes a performance that … well, you’ll have to see it to believe it. He describes the practice of mentalism as “the dubious art of getting inside your head.” Humans are, he says, story-forming creatures: we live by the stories we tell ourselves, or the ones we inherit — that we need to be successful to be loved, perhaps, or that we have a terrible secret we must keep. They are, to us, utterly convincing. Brown’s job is also to tell us a story that we’ll believe, but performing reminds him to avoid reducing people to neat characters in the actual world and “to be more alive and alert to the complexity and subtlety of what’s real.”
  • Quote of the talk: “We’d worry a lot less about what other people think about us if we realized how seldom they do.”

Doug Roble debuts his team’s breakthrough motion capture tech, which renders a 3D likeness in real time — down to Roble’s facial expressions, pores and wrinkles. He speaks at TED2019: Bigger Than Us on April 16, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)

Doug Roble, senior director of software R&D at Digital Domain, the Academy Award–winning visual effects studio in Los Angeles, California

  • Big idea: The future of motion capture is here and it looks … just like us.
  • How? The usual suspects: machine learning, deep neural networks and gargantuan amounts of data. Over a year of intense video recording, Roble offered all the facial expressions he could muster to create an exact digital rendering of himself. In an astonishing demo, he debuts the software in real time — for the first time ever outside his team’s LA studio — with a complete 3D character of his likeness, accurate down to his pores and wrinkles. The implications of this technology are, he admits, as far-reaching as they are fearsome. By transposing 3D fantastical film characters onto the big screen, the future of film could grow even brighter — but there’s also the threat of designing deepfakes indistinguishable from their real-life counterparts.
  • Fun fact: Roble’s team had to collect an immense of data — like, really, an immense amount. Learn more about part of that data-gathering process (the sphere of bright lights) as it was presented in Paul Debevec’s 2009 TED Talk, “Animating a photo-real digital face.”
  • Quote of the talk: “Why did we do this? First of all, it is just crazy cool.”

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