Recent outbreaks involve less familiar strains of viruses such as Ebola and hantavirus, with different transmission patterns or genetic variations that complicate response efforts. Scientists call for expanded surveillance and genomic tools to track these evolving threats.
A new paper by Thomas Bloom, Will Sawin, Carl Schildkraut and Dmitrii Zhelezov disproves a well-known conjecture in additive combinatorics. The result shows there exist arbitrarily large finite sets A of real numbers where max(|A+A|,|AA|) ≤ |A|^{2-c}. The solution was achieved by humans using methods related to an earlier AI solution to the unit distance conjecture.
John Burn-Murdoch guest-hosted BBC's Radical podcast, speaking with geneticist Sir John Bell about recent and upcoming medical breakthroughs.