your science briefing for 02.17.2025

Can geoengineering save us from climate change, what will happen if we replace all programmers with AI, the bizarre endpoint of the carnivore diet, and more...

With countries blowing past climate goals and temperatures continuing to soar, some frustrated scientists and environmentalists think the only way to prevent the collapse of ice sheets and runaway effects of global warming is with extreme geoengineering. But like any desperate measure in desperate times, these efforts aren’t without global side-effects we probably don’t fully understand and can’t predict… (Science News)

As researchers predict a sharp increase in cases of dementia in the near future, they also found ways to stave it off. And one of the most effective and easiest to delay the onset of symptoms? Having friends and staying social. That’s right, if you just keep in touch with your friends and meet up on a regular basis to do something fun, you can postpone a diagnosis by an average of five years. Which is why it’s probably a pretty bad idea to do what a lot of older people do these days and stay home while blasting fear-mongering news channels and scrolling through rage bait… (ScienceAlert)

At this point, it’s getting exhausting to explain why programming isn’t dead thanks to chatbots that can generate snippets of code to those who have fallen hook, line, and sinker for marketing hype from AI startups. So, let’s take a different tack and take an unflinching look at what would happen if executives follow through on firing virtually every programmer they can and replace them with an LLM. The market would love it until customers start noticing things breaking left and right and staying broken since there is pretty much no one left to properly fix them… (Defrag Zone)

One of the most important ways we’ve been able to tremendously boost our ability to do complex computation at unprecedented scale is by distributing the work through a network of computing devices. We can do it pretty easily with normal computing, but quantum computers are far more complicated because they rely on very fragile and short lived states to do their job. Now, scientists think they found a way to entangle a pair of quantum computing processors, allowing them to distribute tasks across two or more quantum devices… (Futurism)

An awful lot of wellness influencers and gurus preach the so-called carnivore diet in defiance of history and science, and with the worst possible choice to lead the HHS being confirmed to this post — also in defiance of all science and logic — we may be about to see their recommendations being approved by government officials. Which is a bit of a problem. Why? Just ask a Florida man who followed their instructions to end up very literally dripping cholesterol from his hands… (Ars Technica)