Best of the past week: Newborn great white shark, Avocado the robot, diets that can impair the immune system

It was a good week for biological sciences as an evolutionary ecologist from the University of California, Riverside, working with a filmmaker from Malibu Artists Inc., observed and reported the first-ever sighting of a newborn living great shark white – Phillip Sternes and Carlos Gauna were using a drone camera to capture images of sharks when they spotted the pure white shark off the coast of California. Additionally, a combined team of biologists from Aarhus University and the University of Oxford found evidence that killing animals that “don’t belong” may be a flawed conservation practice. nature: killing non-native animal species because they are thought to harm native plant species. , they argue, does not take into consideration the initial impact of native megafauna. And a team led by Yinan Zhang of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported that a 6-million-year-old ape inner ear fossil revealed clues to the evolution of human movement.

In tech news, a team of engineers from Zhejiang University’s USSLAB has developed CamPro, a new technique for achieving antifacial recognition at the camera sensor level. And a team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Switzerland and the Netherlands has developed a new type of mechanical sensor that can be used to monitor infrastructure, such as bridges or buildings, potentially saving millions of batteries. A combined effort by engineers at Princeton University’s ZERO Lab and EGS developer Fervo Energy has highlighted the potential of geothermal energy to decarbonize electricity. And a team of environmental roboticists from ETH Zurich has developed “Avocado,” an avocado-shaped robot that attaches to the tops of trees and moves autonomously through the canopy to collect data about this habitat difficult to access.

Separately, a team of medical researchers from the University of Michigan explored which COVID-19 vaccines are most protective against severe disease. They found that the main vaccines used and their boosters were equally effective. Their main takeaway is that vaccinated people should make sure they receive the latest booster update. Additionally, two climate scientists from the University of Bonn, Lasse Stoetzer and Florian Zimmermann, examined why there are so many climate change deniers and found that it was mainly because people were simply looking for ways to justify their own behavior. And finally, a team from the National Institutes of Health found that switching to a vegan or ketogenic diet had a rapid impact on the immune system, although they haven’t yet been able to determine whether it’s in the good or bad.

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