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The Daily Dose: Hawking’s last paper, the red rose’s genome sequenced, and a short film about AMR in India

One final thought: The last paper submitted by the late Stephen Hawking was a collaboration with Prof. Thomas Hertog of KU Leuven. In it, Hawking takes one final stab at the Big Bang and addresses the notion of the existence of multiverses. While they don’t dispute the premise behind pockets of unique universes, they suggest that there are far fewer than is commonly proposed. http://bit.ly/2jnZdcl

M75
This beautiful image features the globular star cluster M75. Discovered in 1780 by Pierre Méchain, M75 was also observed by Charles Messier and added to his catalog later that year. M75 is the most centrally concentrated globular cluster in Messier’s catalog, with the majority of its stars located in a large nucleus. In total, there are about 400,000 stars in the globular cluster. M75 is believed to be around 13 billion years old and sits approximately 67,500 light-years away from Earth. Located in the western part of Sagittarius, M75 has a magnitude of 8.6. The cluster is surprisingly easy to see in binoculars and telescopes thanks to it being extremely condensed in the center. However, because of its compact nature, M75 can barely be distinguished from a star when viewed in binoculars. Telescopes that are 10 inches across or larger are needed to resolve some of the stars in the cluster. August is the best month to observe M75. This Hubble image of M75 is a composite of observations taken in near-infrared and visible light using the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 and the Wide Field Camera 3. The image features the bright central core of M75 and its surrounding stars. The Hubble observations were made to help astronomers better understand the stellar populations in globular clusters and to investigate the clusters’ potential for harboring central, intermediate-mass black holes (with approximately one hundred to one million times the mass of our Sun). Credits: NASA, ESA, STScI, and G. Piotto (Università degli Studi di Padova) and E. Noyola (Max Planck Institut für extraterrestrische Physik)

Who needs a crystal ball when there’s AI?: An artificial intelligence tool that predicts Dengue outbreaks has been rolled out in Penang, Malaysia and other Asian and Latin American cities. The machine learning tool parses through a variety of different parameters such as wind speed, weather, and even local architecture and then formulates a prediction for a three month period. Unfortunately, there are more than a few skeptics. http://bit.ly/2HNwhVz

A rose is a rose is a rose: The entire genome of the iconic red rose has been sequenced. It sheds light on the domestication process that took place long ago. According to the authors, “Diversity analyses highlighted the mosaic origin of ‘La France’, one of the first hybrids combining the growth vigor of European species and the recurrent blooming of Chinese species.” https://go.nature.com/2HQPeqL

AMR in India: Antibiotic resistance ranks among the most urgent crisis facing human beings today. While it’s all too easy to think of it as a local problem relative to where a person lives, the truth is that it’s a global problem in need of global solutions. Different countries have unique resistance profiles. This short film addresses AMR in India, one of the world’s hotspots. http://bit.ly/2HQVXRx

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