Last week’s best: Map of possible earthquakes, unique robot grows on its own, VA’s most efficient hospital system

It was a good week for geoscience research as a team led by the U.S. Geological Survey created a new map that shows where devastating earthquakes are most likely to occur in the United States. Among other things, it shows that almost 75% of the country could experience a devastating earthquake in the near future. Additionally, team members of the international IODP Hellenic Arc Volcanic Field expedition found evidence of one of the largest explosive eruptions ever recorded in the Aegean Sea, in the Greek archipelago of Santorini. And a global team of ocean and climate experts has discovered a new marine source of atmospheric carbon emissions: sediments disturbed by fishermen dragging their nets across the ocean floor.

In tech news, a trio of soft robotics researchers from the Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy, in collaboration with a colleague from the University of Montpellier, France, have developed a unique type of robot that prints in 3D your own body to grow longer. They think this could prove useful for placing sensors in hard-to-reach areas. And a team of MIT chemists, working with a colleague at the University of Bologna, discovered that bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone, a carbon-based cathode material abundant on Earth, could replace cobalt and other rare metals and toxic without sacrificing lithium-ion. battery performance. Additionally, a combined team from the University of Michigan and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart reports that a spongy, metal-free magnetic gel they developed could be used to power robots and guide medical implants. And a team of computer scientists from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Tsinghua University and Microsoft Research Asia developed a simple technique to defend ChatGPT against attacks jailbreak.

Separately, a team of medical researchers from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom has discovered that energy-starved breast cancer cells consume their environment for fuel – a finding that helps explain how they survive. Additionally, a combined team of physicists from the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research has discovered a property of water molecules that contradicts manual models. Molecules on the surface of salt water, they found, are organized differently than theory suggests. Finally, a study conducted by several institutions in the United States found that the most effective health care system in the United States is that run by the Veteran’s Administration.

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