Finishing | Zhou Shuyi, Wangxiang
The UK plans to introduce the world's strictest smoking ban, and young people under the age of 15 may become a "smoke-free generation"
On April 16, the Tobacco and Vapes Bill passed its second reading in the House of Commons of the British Parliament with 383 votes in favor and 67 votes against. The bill is a key policy announced by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last October to stop young people from smoking and ban the sale of tobacco products to people born in 2009 and later. If passed, the UK will have the world's most smoke-free legislation.
Current UK law prohibits the sale of cigarettes to people under the age of 18. It is expected that if the new law is officially implemented in 2027, the legal age of cigarette purchase will be raised by one year per year, which means that young people aged 15 and under will be protected by the tobacco ban for life this year. The government hopes that by 2040 at the earliest, there will be a "smoke-free generation" (less than 5% of the population smokes) among the young population, and the ban will gradually cover the entire population. In addition, the bill will strengthen the control of e-cigarettes, including banning the sale of cheap disposable e-cigarettes, restricting e-cigarette flavors and advertising to reduce their appeal to young people.
The Office for National Statistics estimates that as of 2022, there were around 6.4 million smokers in the UK, representing 13% of the adult population, and smoking rates are much lower than in other European countries such as Italy, Germany and France (18%-23%). CNN reported that smoking costs the NHS 2.5 billion pounds (about 22.1 billion yuan) a year, equivalent to 2% of the UK's healthcare budget. A 2023 poll of 4,107 UK adults showed that 71% of adults supported a total ban on smoking, while only 12% were against.
New Zealand announced a similar anti-smoking bill in 2021, but it was eventually repealed due to factors such as uncontrolled black market circulation and tax pressure.
Is it legal to write essays with AI?Interdisciplinary consensus guidelines will be released soon
Generative AI empowers essay writing, but it also raises concerns about academic ethics in the industry. According to Science News, an interdisdiscentric, global initiative called CANGARU is underway to delineate the academic use of generative AI and develop a set of consensus guidelines that are universally inclusive in scholarly publishing.
Based on the Delphi consensus model, CANGARU has been developed by researchers, publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley), journal representatives (eLife, Cell, The BMJ) and the International Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and has attracted more than 4,000 scholars. ACCORDING TO REPORTS, CANGARU IS CURRENTLY CONDUCTING A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF THE RELEVANT LITERATURE, AND A DIVERSE TEAM WILL EVALUATE THE RESULTS, AND THE FINAL GUIDELINES ARE EXPECTED TO BE PUBLISHED BY AUGUST AND UPDATED ANNUALLY. The guidelines will outline which uses of large language models are prohibited and how they should be disclosed for permitted uses.
A number of journals and institutions, including Science, Nature, the International Association of Publishers of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM), and the European Commission, have previously developed relevant guidelines. But these guidelines come from different sources and have different standards, which can be confusing and confusing for researchers. In addition, with the increasing application of artificial intelligence in scientific research, standardized guidelines are conducive to improving the reliability and transparency of the literature. HOWEVER, SOME RESEARCHERS ARE CONCERNED THAT CANGARU'S PROGRESS MAY STRUGGLE TO KEEP UP WITH THE RAPID PROGRESS OF AI.
Llama 3, the most powerful open-source model, was released
On April 19, Meta officially released the open-source large language model Llama 3, providing pre-training and instruction fine-tuning versions with 8 billion and 70 billion parameters (another 405 billion parameter versions are still being trained). According to Meta, Llama 3 is currently the most powerful open-source large language model.
According to reports, Llama 3 supports 8k context windows, adopts a relatively standard decoder-only Transformer architecture, uses a tokenizer containing a 128K token vocabulary, can encode the language more effectively, and also uses technologies such as group query attention and masking.
The training efficiency of Llama 3 is about 3 times that of Llama 2, and Meta uses a variety of methods to improve the quality and scale of pre-training data. The pre-trained data of Llama 3 has a scale of 15T tokens, which is more than 7 times that of Llama 2, of which the amount of code data is more than 4 times that of Llama 2, and in order to cope with multilingual scenarios, more than 5% of the pre-trained datasets of Llama 3 contain high-quality non-English data, covering more than 30 languages.
In human evaluation tests developed by Meta, Llama 3 (70B) outperformed Claude Sonnet, Mistral Medium, and GPT-3.5.
Source: Meta
In well-known test protocols such as MMLU, HumanEval, and GSM-8K, Llama 3 also surpasses other models of the same size, such as Mistral 7B, Gemma 7B, and Gemini Pro 1.5.
Source: Meta
At present, Llama 3 has been launched on Hugging Face for download, and cloud service platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, and NVIDIA NIM will also be launched one after another. Llama 3 will also be supported by hardware platforms from AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm, among others. In addition, Meta offers a web version built on Llama 3: https://meta.ai
The first synthesis of a single atomic layer of gold flakes
The discovery of graphene has led to the synthesis and application of a series of two-dimensional materials, but the synthesis of metal elemental two-dimensional materials is still very difficult. In a study published April 16 in Nature Synthesis, researchers have succeeded in preparing a two-dimensional gold sheet with a monoatomic layer thickness for the first time, which they call "Goldene."
Previous studies have theoretically predicted the existence of a stable two-dimensional gold film. The researchers plated the surface of a conductive ceramic called titanium carbide (Ti3SiC2) with gold, and then placed it at high temperatures, and the silicon layer inside the substrate was replaced by gold to produce titanium carbide, a phenomenon known as intercalation. For several years, researchers have tried to strip the gold layer from titanium carbide, but have been unsuccessful.
制备原理示意图 | 来源：Kashiwaya et al.
By chance, the researchers noticed a century-old forging technique that originated in Japan and used a chemical called "Murakami reagent" (alkaline potassium ferricyanide solution) that could etch residual carbon and change the color of the steel during the forging process. Further experiments have found that the Ti3C2 in the Murakami reagent can be peeled off by wet-etching titanium carbide for a long time in the dark (the "Murakami reagent" will produce cyanide and dissolve the gold under light) using a low concentration of Murakami's reagent, leaving an independent layer of gold atoms. Electron microscopy confirmed the success of the preparation.
According to the researchers, the two-dimensional gold layer has many new properties that are expected to be used in catalysis, synthesis, communication and other fields, and the next step will be to investigate whether similar treatments can be made to other precious metals and identify other applications for the new material.
Link to paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-024-00518-4
Symbiotic bacteria make mosquitoes no longer "toxic"
Summer is approaching, and the sound of mosquitoes is gradually rising. Mosquito-borne viruses transmit diseases to humans through mosquito bites, posing a huge threat to public health. There are currently no effective drugs and vaccines for most mosquito-borne viruses, and mosquito control measures are difficult to control mosquito-borne virus epidemics.
In a study published in Science on April 19, researchers discovered a key environmental symbiotic that determines mosquito susceptibility to the virus, and demonstrated that environmental interventions of this symbiotic bacteria can effectively block the transmission and transmission of viruses by mosquitoes in endemic areas.
In the mosquito-borne virus transmission cycle, the mosquito sucks the blood containing the virus from the infected person, and then the virus infects the mosquito's intestinal cells and spreads through the mosquito's body, giving it the ability to transmit the virus through bites. The researchers found that colonization of a bacterium of the genus Rosenbergiella (Rosenbergiella_YN46) in the gut of Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegypti significantly inhibited mosquito infection with dengue virus and Zika virus. This symbiotic bacterium secretes a glucose dehydrogenase (RyGDH) that rapidly acidifies the intestinal environment of blood-sucking mosquitoes (pH≈6.0) and directly inactivates mosquito-borne virus particles that enter the intestine, thereby greatly reducing the susceptibility of mosquitoes to viruses.
Rosenbergiella_YN46 bacteria remodel the mosquito intestinal microenvironment by secreting RyGDH factor, inhibiting blood-sucking mosquito infection and spreading the virus Source: School of Basic Medical Sciences, Tsinghua University
Further experiments have shown that Rosenbergiella_YN46 intervention in the water body in the epidemic area can effectively inhibit the ability of mosquitoes to carry and spread the virus in the epidemic area. In addition, this strategy only specifically inhibits the transmission of viruses by mosquito infections, and does not make mosquitoes resistant to pesticides, nor does it affect the survival adaptability of mosquitoes in nature. Experts commented that this will be an environmentally friendly mosquito virus infectious disease prevention and control program with great application potential.
Link to paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adn9524
Nearly half of the mainland's urban land is facing the problem of subsidence
Land subsidence is a global problem and has been called a "chronic disease of cities". Over the past 100 years, Houston has subsided more than 8,000 square kilometers, with some areas accumulating subsidence of more than 3.5 meters, while about 25% of the Netherlands has sunk below sea level. According to the National Land Subsidence Prevention and Control Plan 2011-2020 issued by the Ministry of Water Resources in 2012, 79,000 square kilometers of land subsidence have accumulated more than 0.2 meters in mainland China.
In a study published April 18 in Science, researchers used interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) technology to quantify for the first time the rate and pattern of land subsidence in 82 large and medium-sized cities in China between 2015 and 2022. The results show that 45% of the mainland's urban land subsidence rate exceeds 3 mm per year, and 16% of the urban land subsidence rate exceeds 1 cm per year, which carry 29% and 7% of the urban population, respectively. In addition, 5% of cities have land subsidence rates higher than 2 cm per year. The cities with rapid subsidence are concentrated in five regions of Northeast China, North China, Central China, Southwest China, and Southeast China, and typical subsidence cities include Tianjin and Changhua.
There are many influencing factors of land subsidence, among which groundwater exploitation and urban expansion are more prominent. Scientific and long-term groundwater exploitation control may be the key to mitigating land subsidence. In addition, coastal cities are additionally at risk of sea level rise, with the study projecting the land area and population of coastal cities with relative elevations below sea level over the next 100 years. The results show that about 26 per cent of coastal areas and 11 per cent of the population are potentially threatened.
Paper link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.adl4366
Drinking alcohol makes it easy to blush, beware of accelerated aging
Some East Asian populations are prone to redness after drinking, mainly due to the defect of their ALDH2 gene, which makes it difficult to effectively convert acetaldehyde, an intermediate product of alcohol metabolism, into non-toxic acetic acid, resulting in the accumulation of the toxic substance acetaldehyde and causing skin redness.
However, blushing is only a minor problem caused by aldehydes, which can react with DNA and proteins within cells when they are not effectively removed, causing multiple forms of DNA damage. A recent study published in Nature Cell Biology showed a strong relationship between DNA damage caused by endogenous aldehydes and aging.
The researchers focused on the damage caused to cells by aldehyde-induced DNA-histone cross-linking (DPCs). In a series of experiments, the researchers found that aldehyde-induced DPC occurs intensively in active transcriptional regions, and that rapid and effective removal of DPC requires a previously unknown repair pathway, involving the conventional transcription-coupled repair (TCR) pathway, as well as VCP/p97 and the proteasome. Mouse models lacking aldehyde clearance processes and TCR pathways showed more severe symptoms of Progeria, suggesting a link between Progeria disease and aldehyde accumulation.
Aldehyde-induced DNA-histone cross-linking (DPC) can lead to disruptions in cellular physiological processes such as transcription Reiko Matsushita
In addition to insufficient alcohol metabolism, toxic aldehydes may also come from smoking, environmental pollution and other ways. The researchers speculate that endogenous aldehyde-induced DNA damage may also play a role in the cellular senescence process in healthy individuals. (WuXi AppTec)
Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41556-024-01401-2
This article is supported by the Science China Star Program
Producer: Science Popularization Department of China Association for Science and Technology
Producer: China Science and Technology Press Co., Ltd., Beijing Zhongke Xinghe Culture Media Co., Ltd
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