Fact or fiction: Zombie Fungi, how Twitter can help rescue operations, and ChaptGPT meets education

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February 10, 2023

Microbiology Could the Zombie Fungus in TV's The Last of Us Really Infect People? The pandemic fungus in the television program The Last of Us is real. But an expert says other fungi are much more threatening to humans By Allison Parshall

Natural Disasters Turkey's Twitter Cutoff Harmed Earthquake Rescue Operations A temporary Twitter block after the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria shows how vital the platform has become for responding to disasters By Anjana Susarla,The Conversation US

Computing How ChatGPT Can Improve Education, Not Threaten it A professor explains why he is allowing students to incorporate ChatGPT into their writing process instead of banning the new technology By John Villasenor

Climate Change Why the Climate Fight Will Fail without India India is at an energy crossroads: if it chooses fossil fuels, it could undermine global climate targets By Sara Schonhardt,E&E News

Sleep Let Teenagers Sleep Despite years of evidence that starting school later promotes better health and improved grades, too few schools have adopted this measure By The Editors

Climate Change Start-up Hopes 'Super' Poplar Trees Will Suck Up More CO2 A start-up called Living Carbon is planting millions of "photosynthesis enhanced" poplar seeds across the U.S. with the aim of providing carbon credits By John Fialka,E&E News

Computing New Exascale Supercomputer Can Do a Quintillion Calculations a Second New "exascale" supercomputers will bring breakthroughs in science. But the technology also exists to study nuclear weapons By Sarah Scoles

Reproduction A Common Antibiotic Could Prevent Deaths from Childbirth Complications One in three cases of maternal sepsis can be prevented with a single dose of antibiotic, a study in low- and middle-income countries shows By Allison Parshall

FROM THE STORE Scientific American Volume 324, Issue 6

FROM THE ARCHIVE Deadly Fungi Are the Newest Emerging Microbe Threat All Over the World These pathogens already kill 1.6 million people every year, and we have few defenses against them By Maryn McKenna | June 2021

QUOTE OF THE DAY "It probably took millions of years for this fungus to develop to infect in an ant, and I imagine it would take millions of years for it to even begin to develop in a human." Tom Chiller, chief of the Mycotic Diseases Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on the plausibility of a fungus controlling a human body or mind.

WHAT WE'RE READING Strange Unprecedented Vortex Spotted Around the Sun's North Pole Scientists have just spotted a strange circular filament wobbling around the sun's pole that has them really excited. By Tereza Pultarova | Space.com | Feb. 5, 2023

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