A Special Place for Blog Lovers with a Touch of Science!

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As the European Union strives for climate neutrality by mid-century, a mother-and-son-team is helping to tackle a potential hurdle: the limited number of renewable-energy sources driving the EU's shift away from fossil fuels. Andriy Lyubchyk is a partner in the CATCHER project, which aims to expand a clean-energy mix by perfecting the conversion of atmospheric humidity into electricity.

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The year 2022 has brought with it a host of amazing scientific discoveries, with each one offering a unique insight into our world and the universe around us. From breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and medicine to new insights into the nature of the cosmos, there have been a number of incredible moments in science that have pushed the boundaries of what we can achieve. However, one of the greatest scientific discoveries of 2022 has been the detection of Proxima b, an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting the star Proxima Centauri, located just 4.2 light-years away from Earth.

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The Earth's climate has undergone big changes, from global volcanism to planet-cooling ice ages and dramatic shifts in solar radiation. And yet life, for the last 3.7 billion years, has kept on beating.

Now, a U.S. National Science Foundation-supported study by MIT researchers in Science Advances confirms that the planet harbors a "stabilizing feedback" mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to pull the climate back from the brink, keeping global temperatures within a steady, habitable range.

Just how does it accomplish this? A likely mechanism is "silicate weathering" — a geological process by which the slow and steady erosion of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that ultimately draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into ocean sediments, where the carbon dioxide is incorporated into sedimentary rocks.

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A research team led by the University of Tokyo won a €5 million European Union prize this month for coming up with a novel way to make abundant and cheap fuel from sunlight.

In the scramble to find alternatives to fossil fuels, the EU competition aimed to accelerate development of one of the most promising new technologies – artificial photosynthesis – in a spirit of fostering international collaboration over the most promising clean-energy paths.

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Today, I decided to ask our AI interlocutor one quite complicated question. "Which is the greatest scientific discovery?". At first, GPT-3 was reluctant to answer on the premise that this is a very subjective topic and would vary on each person asked. But I insisted. That was exactly what I wanted to know – the personal point of view of an AI algorithm. Below you can take a look at the answer that followed: