The US government’s investigation of NVIDIA for alleged misconduct is justified | Max von Thun

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

circleWhen a company like computer chip maker Nvidia experiences a significant surge in value within a short period, it catches the attention of investors. However, regulators are also alert, knowing the risks of monopolies stifling competition and manipulating markets. The U.S. Department of Justice, along with other competition authorities and tech watchdogs, suspect Nvidia of employing such tactics to strengthen its chip monopoly. Recently, reports surfaced that the Justice Department would initiate an antitrust investigation. investigationIt's about time.

Before the pandemic, Nvidia was relatively unknown to those outside the realm of video game enthusiasts with high-end gaming computers and consoles featuring powerful Nvidia chips. However, in the era of generative AI, Nvidia has risen to prominence. The fastest growing The greatest companies and their chips of all time Powered Every significant AI milestone (including OpenAI's development of ChatGPT) Two thirds of the AI business tools market.

Generative AI necessitates massive computational power, with Nvidia's GPUs being a preferred choice for these calculations. This alignment between computational needs and Nvidia's chips has significantly contributed to the company's high market capitalization. 30 or more times In just five years, The world's most valuable companies It surpassed Microsoft and Apple earlier this year.

While Nvidia's success is beneficial for investors amid the AI boom, recent stock market fluctuations suggest that the enthusiasm may be excessive. Nvidia should not be faulted for capitalizing on favorable circumstances, but the manner in which a company like Nvidia expands is critical. Unfair practices like driving out competitors, inflating prices, and fortifying monopolies are detrimental to customers, fair competition, and the public interest.

Similar to other tech giants, NVIDIA aims to dominate every market it enters. 88% of the world It also leverages GPUs and holds an edge in AI. Some projections indicate that Nvidia could attain a Trillion Dollar Market within a few years, solidifying its dominance. 98% of the market For data center GPUs.

Despite serving as a vital infrastructure for the AI industry, Nvidia’s market power raises concerns. By amalgamating chips, software, and network services, the company holds a strong position in dictating AI development. This concentration can hinder competition, increase prices, and limit innovation, ultimately harming consumers and fair market practices.

To promote a healthy AI chip market, equitable accessibility to advanced semiconductors is essential. This fosters innovation, supports small businesses, and mitigates potential monopolistic control over the industry. Addressing these issues is crucial to safeguarding fair competition, consumer choice, and overall market resilience against disruptions.

The mounting concentration of the chip market, particularly controlled by Nvidia, warrants caution. As AI regulation initiatives emerge globally, Nvidia’s dominance in supplying high-demand chips places it in a quasi-regulatory role, influencing AI development access. This commercial influence over regulatory matters is concerning, highlighting the need for robust oversight to prevent monopolistic practices.

While Nvidia’s rapid growth is remarkable, it does not absolve the company from potential regulatory scrutiny for its monopoly practices. By leveraging its market power to exclude competitors and strengthen its position, Nvidia jeopardizes healthy competition and public interest. Regulators must act swiftly to prevent Nvidia from repeating the mistakes of past tech giants in dominating markets and stifling innovation.

Source: www.theguardian.com

What caused the spectacular flop of Sony’s big-budget hero shooter ‘Concorde’? | Games

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

aShortly after posting Pushing Buttons last week, big gaming news broke: Sony was pulling the plug on hero shooter Concord just two weeks after launch, citing reasons that no one was playing it. Refunds were being offered to everyone who purchased it on PlayStation 5 and PC, leaving the game’s future uncertain.

It’s a brutal series of events. Sony acquired Firewalk Studios, the makers of Concorde, in 2023. Concorde was an expensive game that was in development for eight years, with a custom cinematic and a long-term plan that cost over $100 million to develop. Estimates suggest that fewer than 25,000 copies were sold in the first two weeks of release. This is shocking compared to other bad news for developers and studios this year.

Many It is written The question remains as to why Concorde was such a huge flop. As Keith Stewart pointed out in his review of the game, it entered a crowded genre of hero shooters, where many players already had favorites (Overwatch, Valorant, Apex Legends, etc.). Sony’s marketing for the game also seemed to flop, with very few people knowing about Concorde before it came out (I almost didn’t, but it’s my job to know about these things). Criticism was also leveled at the characters and design, which were generic and lacked any particularly interesting gameplay ideas.

Concord’s failure is emblematic of an existential problem in modern game development: Games are expensive and take so long to make that moment they can be missed years before a game is released. This makes publishers risk-averse, but simply trying to recreate something popular means it will be outdated by the time it’s finished.

I don’t want to play a game that takes years to play…Black Myth: Wukong. Photo: undefined/Game Science

Concord isn’t the first high-profile multiplayer flop of the year. Warner Bros.’ Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League also disappointed publishers with poor sales and disappointed players by shoehorning a potentially fun game into a live-service multiplayer model. Sega’s Foamstars went completely unnoticed. And let’s not forget Sega’s live-service shooter Hyenas. Cancelled This was just a few months before the scheduled release.

My sense is that people just don’t have time to play games that last forever anymore. Destiny, one of the first of the current generation of permanent live-service games aimed at keeping players playing for years, celebrated its 10th anniversary this week. The game has become part of the lives and habits of millions of people. Overwatch, Fortnite, and even the decades-old World of Warcraft dominate in their genres. What will it take to get these players to abandon the game for a new one or add a new one to their spare time? And with these types of games, people aren’t just abandoning the game, they’re abandoning their friends.

The proliferation of live service games reminds me of the time in the 2000s when nearly every publisher was trying to make a massively multiplayer online game like World of Warcraft. Every day we got a press release saying someone had secured millions of dollars in funding for a new Warcraft killer. Some of the resulting games were good (Guild Wars, to name one), but most were only moderately successful at best. Online games are Success isn’t easy. It never was.

It’s surprising that this game is coming out so soon after the sales surge of Black Myth: Wukong, a single-player only game. As I wrote last week, many factors contributed to Wukong’s success, but still, there is a huge demand for this game, and by extension, single-player games in general. Personally, I don’t want a game that takes years to play. I want a game that wants to say something, to convey an experience, and that eventually ends. Games where the artistry is reflected in the game. in front That business model.

This is partly a matter of preference. There’s clearly a huge market for live-service multiplayer games; it’s just that most people are already playing them. There’s no way there’s an untapped market for millions of players who crave hero shooters and battle royale games but haven’t yet found the right fit. It’s time for publishers to try something new instead.

What to Play

It’s also great for kids… Photography: Good Feel Co.

My family is still crazy about Astro Bot. My youngest son wakes me up every morning telling me about his favorite power-up (his favorite is the “Frog Punch”). But I wanted a break, so I took a long train ride recently. Bakel It’s a Japanese-style action platform game in the vein of the forgotten 1990s series Ganbare Goemon, which means absolutely nothing to 98% of people – it means defeating beautifully animated enemies. Yokai Use your drumstick to run through a world of manga-style depictions of Japanese towns and landscapes.

The difficulty level is clearly geared towards kids, so I barely had any trouble playing through the first few levels, but it’s still a welcome time-warp platformer that reminded me of the screenshots of similar Japanese games I used to pore over in Nintendo magazines back in the ’90s.

Available: PC, Nintendo Switch
Estimated play time: 10 hr

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What to Read

An eternal conversation…Destiny 2. Photo: Activision

In more positive news for Sony, the long-awaited PS5 Pro It’s finally been announced, and for an extra £200 on top of the current system price you get an enhanced tech spec, a 2TB solid-state drive and more.
As mentioned above, Bungie’s space opera shooter destiny It turns 10 this week, and as Christian Donlan writes in his anniversary essay, the game is about everytime There’s something to be said for this, and it’s not just one of the first ever-lasting games, it’s an ever-lasting conversation.
The Mystery of Rubber Keysa new film about the development of ZX Spectrumwill be released early next month.

What to click on

Question Block

Baldur’s Gate 3 is best played on PC. Photo: Larian Studios

leader Maisie Question of the week:

After years of enjoying gaming on the Switch, I decided to broaden my horizons and bought a PS4 and a gaming laptop. The PS4 is great, but I’m having trouble getting Steam games to start. Working at a desk is different than lounging on the couch next to your husband. Do you have any tips for making PC gaming more fun and less like work?

I feel the exact same way about PC gaming. I hate sitting at a desk playing games. As a teenager I would play endless hours of Rollercoaster Tycoon, The Sims, and Age of Empires II after school, but now I sit at a desk all day. Not only is it the last thing I want to do after work, it’s also bad for my health. But I’ve been playing a lot of PC games lately, because I can play most games with a Bluetooth-enabled controller by connecting it to my TV with an HDMI cable.
PS4 Controller You can use any Xbox controller. I Xbox One Pad I use it for PC gaming now, but for many years I used an old, cheap, second-hand wired Xbox 360 one. Steam Deck It’s a game changer, so I highly recommend saving up and buying one.

For PC-exclusive games, that might seem like a worthwhile investment — almost all games are cross-platform these days — but… Baldur’s Gate 3 It really is great to play on PC, and if playing on PC doesn’t make you a fan of the keyboard and mouse, then nothing will.

If you have a question for Question Block, or anything else you’d like to say about the newsletter, please click “Reply” or email us at pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Scientists successfully recreate Martian “spiders” in laboratory for the first time

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Martian “spiders” are small, dark, spider-shaped formations up to 1 km (0.6 miles) in diameter. The leading theory is that they form when spring sunlight hits a layer of carbon dioxide that builds up during the dark winter months. In a new experiment, a team of NASA scientists has recreated these formation processes for the first time, simulating Martian temperatures and air pressure.

Examples of “Keefer Zoo” features proposed to have formed by seasonal CO2 sublimation dynamics on Mars: (a) a “skinny” spider within layered deposits in Antarctica, (b) a dark spot on a layer of translucent CO2 slab ice covering a group of “fat” spiders in an “Inca city” on Mars, (c) a “fried egg” showing a ring of dark dust surrounded by a bright halo, (d) patterned ground within high Antarctic latitudes with dark directional fans and some bright white fans indicating wind direction, (e) a bright halo surrounding a Swiss cheese depression, (f) a “lacey topography”, a type of patterned ground suggested to be polygonal patterned ground that was later scraped and eroded by surface-flowing CO2 gas from the Keefer model. Image credit: HiRISE/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/University of Arizona.

Today, Mars is a dynamic planet with a rich variety of surface changes, despite its thin atmosphere and cold climate.

In winter, most of Mars' mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere accumulates on the surface as frost.

In spring, it sublimates and takes on forms never seen on Earth.

These include dark Dalmatian spots, directional alluvial fans, “fried eggs”, grooves which may have dark finger-like flows or light “halos” in spring, dendritic “spiders”, sand grooves in active dunes and growing dendritic valleys.

These features have been detected in the loose material around the Antarctic and in the inter-dune material towards the mid-Antarctic latitudes, although some smaller phenomena have also been detected in the Arctic.

Many of these features make up the so-called “Kiefer zoo,” or collection of surface expressions. Explained It was first published in 2003 and was proposed to be produced by the solid-state greenhouse effect.

“In the Kiefer model, sunlight penetrates a translucent ice sheet in spring, trapping thermal radiation and heating the topsoil beneath the ice, causing the impermeable sheet to sublime from beneath,” explained Dr. Lauren McKeown of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and her colleagues.

“Through this process, the spiders are thought to be caused by high-velocity gases scraping away topsoil beneath the ice sheet, littering the ice surface with fan and patchy variations that are then deposited by dust and gas plumes.”

The study authors were able to create a complete cycle of the Kiefer model in the lab and confirm the formation of several types of Kiefer zookeeper features.

“The greatest challenge in conducting the experiment was replicating the conditions found on the polar surface of Mars, namely the extremely low air pressure and temperatures of minus 185 degrees Celsius (minus 301 degrees Fahrenheit),” the researchers said.

“To do this, we used a liquid nitrogen-cooled test chamber, the Dirty Under Vacuum Simulation Chamber for Icy Environments (DUSTIE).”

“In our experiments, we cooled a Martian soil simulant in a container submerged in a bath of liquid nitrogen.”

“We placed it in the Dusty Chamber, where the air pressure was lowered to the same as in the southern hemisphere of Mars.”

“Carbon dioxide gas was then released into the chamber, where it condensed from the gas into ice over a period of three to five hours.”

“It took a lot of trial and error before we found the right conditions to make the ice thick and clear enough for the experiment to work.”

“Once we have ice with the right properties, we place a heater in the chamber underneath the simulant to heat it up and crack the ice.”

“We were thrilled when we finally saw plumes of carbon dioxide gas coming out of the powdered simulant.”

a paper The explanation for these experiments is Planetary Science Journal.

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Lauren E. McKeon others2024. Laboratory-scale investigation of the Kiefer Model of Mars. Planet Science Journal 5, 195;doi:10.3847/PSJ/ad67c8

Source: www.sci.news

Blood test accurately detects ALS in 97% of cases

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Biomarkers in blood may indicate certain medical conditions

Evgeny Sarov/Alamy

Researchers have linked eight genetic markers to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which may one day be able to diagnose the disease with a blood test.

Patients with ALS, the most common motor neuron disease, suffer from problems walking, speaking, swallowing and breathing that worsen over time and ultimately lead to death. There is no cure, but treatments such as physical therapy can help reduce the impact of these symptoms.

Doctors typically diagnose ALS using an assessment of symptoms, tests that measure electrical activity of the nerves and brain scans. A lack of awareness about ALS means doctors have to track how a patient’s symptoms progress over time before making a diagnosis, which delays treatment, doctors say. Sandra Banack At Brain Chemistry Labs, a research institute in Wyoming.

To diagnose the disease earlier, Banach and his colleagues have been analyzing blood samples from small groups of ALS patients and non-patients, and have found eight genetic markers that appear to be present at different levels in the two groups.

To test this, the team looked at blood samples from 119 people with ALS and 150 people without ALS from a biobank called the National ALS Biorepository and found that the same eight markers remained different between the two groups. These markers are related to neuronal survival, brain inflammation, memory and learning, Banak says.

The researchers then trained a machine learning model to distinguish between people with and without ALS based on the marker levels of 214 participants, and when they subsequently tested it on the remaining 55 participants, found that it correctly identified 96 percent of ALS cases and 97 percent of non-ALS cases.

“This is a wonderful thing.” Ahmad Al Khlifat “The test is excellent at distinguishing between people with ALS and those without,” said researchers from King’s College London.

The researchers estimate that the test will cost less than $150 and hope to have it available within two years, Banach said. But it needs to be tested in different groups of people first. If the team partners with the right diagnostic labs, Banach said, the test could be available within a year.

topic:

Source: www.newscientist.com

Ancient coelacanth fossil from the Devonian era discovered in Australia

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Living Coelacanth Latimeria Coelacanths are iconic “living fossils,” one of the most conservative groups of vertebrates. Now, paleontologists have described a new species of primitive coelacanth from fossils discovered in the Late Devonian Gogo Formation of Western Australia. Ngamgawi WirungariThe 375-million-year-old fossil fish fills an important transitional period in the differentiation and evolution of coelacanths.

Reconstructing your life Ngamgawi WirungariImage courtesy of Katrina Kenny.

coelacanth It is an evolutionarily unique lobe-finned fish that first appeared in the fossil record during the Early Devonian period, approximately 419 million years ago.

More than 175 species of coelacanth fossils are known from the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras.

During the Mesozoic era, they diversified greatly, with some species developing unusual body shapes.

But at the end of the Cretaceous period, about 66 million years ago, they mysteriously disappeared from the fossil record.

The end-Cretaceous extinction, caused by a giant asteroid impact, wiped out about 75% of all life on Earth, including the non-avian dinosaurs.

It was therefore assumed that the coelacanth was also a victim of the same mass extinction.

However, in 1938, the first specimen of this species was discovered. Latimeria chalumnae It was caught by chance in South Africa.

The second known species, Latimeria menadoensisIt lives off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Specimen Ngamgawi WirungariImage courtesy of John A. Long.

“Our study calls into question the idea that extant coelacanths are the oldest 'living fossils,'” said Professor Richard Cloutier, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Quebec.

“It first appeared in the geological record more than 410 million years ago, with fragmentary fossils found in places such as China and Australia.”

“But most of the early forms are poorly known. Ngamgawi Wirungari It is the best known of the Devonian coelacanths.

“As we slowly fill in the gaps, we can see how extant coelacanth species are LatimeriaAlthough they are commonly thought of as “living fossils,” they are in fact constantly evolving and may not deserve this enigmatic title.”

Specimen Ngamgawi Wirungari It was discovered in the Late Devonian Go Go Formation Gooniyandi Country in the Kimberley region of northern Western Australia.

Although now covered by a dry rock outcrop, around 380 million years ago the formation was part of an ancient tropical coral reef teeming with more than 50 species of fish.

Coelacanth phylogenetic relationships and divergence dates. Image courtesy of Clement others., doi:10.1038/s41467-024-51238-4.

“Ngamgawi Wirungari “This discovery gives us great insight into the early anatomy of the lineage that ultimately led to humans,” said Professor John Long, from Flinders University.

“Over 35 years, the Gogo site has yielded some perfectly preserved 3D fish fossils and many other important discoveries, including petrified soft tissue and the origin of complex sexual reproduction in vertebrates.”

“The study of this new species has allowed us to analyse the evolutionary history of all known coelacanths.”

“We calculated evolutionary rates over 410 million years of history,” they said.

“This study reveals that the evolution of coelacanths has slowed significantly since the time of the dinosaurs, with some intriguing exceptions.”

of Survey results Published in a journal Nature Communications.

_____

Alice M. Clement othersLate Devonian coelacanths reconstruct phylogeny, differentiation and evolutionary dynamics of Actinobacteria. Nature Communicationsin press; doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-51238-4

Source: www.sci.news

The Unexpected Winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes: Uncovering the Surprising Science of the Year

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

The 34th Ig Nobel Prize was awarded today for 10 unexpected things – all so surprising that, in keeping with the Prize's long tradition, it makes people laugh and makes them think.

of Award Ceremony The event took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the lecture hall was filled with paper airplanes thrown by audience members honoring the Ig Nobel tradition of bringing in pieces of paper to be transformed into disposable aircraft.

Peaceful Dove

This year's Ig Award winners cover a wide range of subjects, including humans, plants and other behaviours, including some birds.

Before deciding to use live pigeons to guide the flight path of a missile, you might want to conduct an experiment to see if it's feasible to house a pigeon at the nose of a missile. Such an experiment was conducted in the 1940s by psychologist B.F. Skinner, who was posthumously awarded this year's Ig Nobel Peace Prize.

Skinner's daughter Julie attended the ceremony and accepted the award on his behalf. B.F. Skinner was a giant in the field of behaviorism. A few years after his experiment with putting pigeons on missiles, he Written“Something happened in the short time frame of the Pigeon project that took a long time to be understood. The practical challenges before us have led to new ways of thinking about organismic behavior.”

A botanical sense of style

A similar rethinking of attitudes could come from the work of Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, two 2024 Ig Nobel Prize laureates in Botany. They found evidence that some real plants mimic the shapes of their artificial plastic neighbors. For more information, see their study,Bochyra trifoliata Mimicking the leaves of an artificial plastic host plant“

Marjolaine Willems and her colleagues won the anatomy prize for investigating whether the hair of most people in the Northern Hemisphere curls in the same direction (clockwise or counterclockwise) as the hair of most people in the Southern Hemisphere.

For details, see their paper “Genetic determinism and hemispheric influence in hair formation“

The wind blows

Countless metaphors and phrases are associated with the work that earned Takebe Takanori and his colleagues the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Found Many mammals can breathe through their anus.

The tenacity of the Probability Prize winners František Bartos, Erik Jan Wagenmakers, Aleksandra Sarafoglu and Henrik Godman, along with around 50 colleagues, many of them students, has paid off. ShowedWe know, both in theory and from 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as you started with.

Painful placebo

Lieven Schenk, Tahmin Fadai and Christian Büchel won the medicine prize for demonstrating that a placebo that causes painful side effects can be more effective than a placebo that does not cause painful side effects.

(Their study It reminds me of the prize-winning paper by Dan Ariely and his colleagues, but doesn't explicitly cite it. 2008 Medicine Award They demonstrated that expensive counterfeit medicines are more effective than cheaper counterfeit medicines.

Jimmy Liao won the Physics Prize for demonstrating and describing the swimming ability of dead trout. series of paper He writes about his discovery of this unexpected aspect of fluid mechanics.

Drunken Bug

Earthworms can stay drunk and can become drunk when they consume alcohol. Tess Heremans, Antoine Debray, Daniel Bon and Sander Woutersen method Chromatography is used to separate drunk and non-drunk bugs.

The research award for demography (the statistical study of population) went to Saul Justin Newman for his research exploring whether demographers notice important details: Newman found that many of the people famous for having lived the longest lived in places where birth and death records were poorly kept.

Newman wrote two papers on the subject, each with a title that succinctly explained how his conclusions leaped.The oldest old and the oldest old are concentrated in areas without birth certificates and where life expectancy is shortThe other one is “Records of super-longevity and noteworthy ages show patterns that suggest clerical errors and pension fraud“

This year's gathering of Ig laureates ended with a flourish: Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen were posthumously awarded the biology prize. experiment That's just what they did in the 1940s: They exploded a paper bag next to a cat standing on a cow's back to see when and how the cow would spill milk.

Eli's daughter Jane and grandson Matt were also in attendance to accept the award and watch demonstrations including a toy cat, a man in a cow costume and five Nobel Prize winners making an exploding paper bag.

Marc Abrahams is the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founder of the journal Annals of Improbable Research. He previously worked on unusual uses of computers. His website is Impossible.

Do you have a story for feedback?

You can submit articles for Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week's and past Feedback can be found on our website.

Source: www.newscientist.com

Newly discovered fossils show that trilobites possessed five pairs of head appendages

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Based on multiple analytical techniques applied to two well-preserved soft-bodied specimens of trilobites, the Late Ordovician species Triarturus Eatonii and Middle Cambrian species Polygonum gracilis, paleontologists claim that there was an additional pair of cephalopods just behind the antennae, indicating that the trilobite had five pairs of cephalopods and six segments.

Triarturus Eatonii Image credit: Jin-bo Hou and Melanie J. Hopkins, doi: 10.1111/pala.12723.

Trilobites are extinct arthropods that dominated the marine fauna of the Paleozoic Era.

During their lifetime on Earth, which lasted much longer than the dinosaurs, they survived two major extinctions and dominated undersea ecosystems.

They appeared in the ancient oceans of the Early Cambrian period about 540 million years ago, long before life appeared on land, and disappeared during the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period about 252 million years ago.

They are incredibly diverse, with around 20,000 species, and fossils of their exoskeletons have been found all over the world.

Like other arthropods, trilobites have a body made up of many segments and a head made up of several fused segments.

Like the rest of the trilobite’s body (the thorax and tail), these segments are associated with appendages whose functions range from sensing to feeding to locomotion.

“The number of these segments and how it relates to other important features, such as eyes and legs, is important for understanding how arthropods relate to each other and how they evolved,” said Dr. Melanie Hopkins, curator and head of the Department of Palaeontology at the American Museum of Natural History.

The segments on a trilobite’s head can be counted in two different ways: by looking at the grooves (called sulci) on the top of the trilobite fossil’s hard exoskeleton, and by counting the pairs of antennae and legs preserved on the underside of the fossil.

However, trilobites’ soft appendages are rarely preserved, and when looking at trilobite head segments, researchers frequently find a mismatch between these two methods.

In the new study, Dr. Hopkins and Dr. Hou Jinbo of Nanjing University studied Triarturus Eatonii.

These fossils are known for their golden glow from well-preserved pyrite replacements, and show that there are additional, previously undescribed legs beneath the head.

“This incredible preservation method allows us to view the 3D appendages of hundreds of specimens directly from the ventral side of the animals, just like grabbing an appendage from a horseshoe crab on the beach and turning it upside down to view it,” Dr. Hou said.

Exceptionally well preserved compared to other trilobite species, Polygonum gracilis based on the fossil, which was discovered in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia, the authors propose a model for how the appendages may have been attached to the head in relation to grooves in the exoskeleton.

“This model resolves apparent inconsistencies and shows that the trilobite head contained six segments: the anterior segment associated with the origin of eye development, and five additional segments each associated with a pair of antennae and four pairs of walking legs,” the researchers explained.

Their paper published in the journal Paleontology.

_____

Jin-bo Hou & Melanie J. Hopkins. 2024. New evidence for five cephalopods in trilobites and its implications for trilobite head segmentation. Paleontology 67(5):e12723; doi:10.1111/pala.12723

Source: www.sci.news

After days of observation, scientists confirm a 650-foot-high tsunami formed in Greenland.

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

summary

Seismologists detected unusual vibrations and determined that a 650-foot-high tsunami had occurred in Greenland.
The tsunami was caused by melting glacial ice that triggered landslides and washed away water in Greenland's fjords.
The waves it created continued to travel back and forth across the fjord for nine days.

Last September, seismologists around the world detected vibrations never before observed.

The monotony seemed to come from Greenland and continued for nine days.

“We saw some very strange signals at some stations in the north that we'd never seen before,” said Karl Ebeling, a seismologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

Shortly after the vibrations began, a cruise ship sailing near a Greenland fjord noticed that a key landmark on the remote island of Ella, a scientific research and Danish military dog sled patrol base, had been destroyed.

The event drew an international group of seismologists, the Danish military and oceanographers into the mystery: what struck the island, and where did it come from?

On Thursday, the researchers They published their findings in the journal Science.The island was hit by one of the largest tsunamis on record, leaving a scar about 650 feet high.

It was the result of a rare series of cascading events caused by climate change.

The researchers traced the initial trigger to the collapse of a glacier tongue that had been thinned by rising temperatures. This destabilized the steep mountainside, sending an avalanche of rock and ice into Greenland's deep Dikson Fjord. Massive amounts of water were displaced, causing towering waves to move across the narrow fjord, about a mile and a half wide.

The tsunami, at least as high as the Statue of Liberty, surged up the steep rock faces along the fjord and, because the landslide struck the waterway at a nearly 90-degree angle, sent waves circling the channel for nine days — a phenomenon scientists call a seiche.

“No one has ever seen anything like this,” said Christian Svennevig, lead author of the study and a geologist and senior research scientist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

The findings are the result of a complex year-long investigation. The team determined that Ella Island, about 45 miles from the landslide site, was hit by a tsunami at least 13 feet high.

Tourists visit the island from time to time.

“The cruise ship had been docked off the coast just a few days before,” Svennevig said. “We were really lucky that no one was there when it happened.”

The seiche was the longest scientists had ever observed: Until now, tsunamis generated by landslides have typically produced waves that dissipate within a few hours.

“This is really a cascade of events that has never been observed before,” said Alice Gabriel, co-author of the study. “The Earth is a very dynamic system, and we're currently at a stage where this very delicate balance is being disrupted pretty dramatically by climate change.”

Tsunamis triggered by landslides occur more frequently than many people realize and are a danger to people living and working in some Arctic and sub-Arctic regions.

In 2017, a landslide triggered a tsunami that killed four people and destroyed 11 homes. Attacked the village of Ngaatsiaq in West GreenlandThe tsunami was estimated to be at least 300 feet high. Two villages were abandoned in the aftermath of the tsunami due to fears of further landslides, and Svennevig said hundreds of people remain evacuated.

Bretwood “Higg” Higman, an Alaska geologist who studies landslide tsunamis but was not involved in the new study, said evidence suggests landslide tsunamis are a growing problem, but more research is needed.

“I'm pretty confident that these events are becoming more and more frequent,” he said. “Exactly how frequent these events are and can we predict the future? We're not there yet.”

Higman said he thought the Greenland study's researchers were “spot on” and that the research was an important example of how dangerous landslide-induced tsunamis could be.

The Arctic and sub-Arctic regions are warming two to three times faster than the rest of the Earth. As the ice melts, the exposed, dark surface absorbs more sunlight. Warming is triggering three dynamics that could make landslides more frequent in glacial regions, Higman said.

First, rising temperatures are eroding the permafrost within rock formations, weakening slopes and making them more susceptible to collapse. Second, warming is thinning the glaciers that support the rock slopes. Without the ice, sudden collapses could occur. Third, climate change is increasing the likelihood of heavy rains, which are the biggest risk factor for landslides because saturated rocks and soils become more slippery.

Higman has compiled a list of Alaska's slopes that are at risk for landslides that could trigger tsunamis. He said there are dozens of sites of concern that need further study, some of which are near populated areas where a landslide could be catastrophic.

“We're in an awkward position: Scientists know something, but they don't know enough to provide certainty to take action,” Higman said.

Last month, the U.S. Geological Survey reported a 56-foot-high landslide tsunami in Alaska's Pedersen Lagoon. Higman visited the site and believes the tsunami was larger than initially predicted.

Globally, risks are growing due to expanding development in some polar regions and increased visitation by miners, shippers and tourists, Svennevig said.

“At the same time as the population increases, the risk of landslides, geological hazards also increases,” he said. “It's an unfortunate combination.”

Source: www.nbcnews.com

Greenland landslide triggers unprecedented waves that reverberated across the globe for over a week

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Part of a mountain and glacier along Greenland’s Dikson Fjord in August 2023 (left), and the same location after a landslide in September 2023

Soren Lisgaard/Danish Army

On September 16, 2023, earthquake monitoring stations around the world picked up a strange signal that weakened over time but remained detectable for nine days.

“We thought, ‘Oh, this signal is still coming. This is definitely not an earthquake.'” Stephen Hicks Researchers at University College London have dubbed the object an “Unidentified Seismic Object,” or USO.

Hicks and his colleagues found that the signal was caused by water moving across the 1.7-mile-wide Dikson Fjord in eastern Greenland. The wave was triggered by a massive landslide, which produced a 360-foot-high tsunami.

Earthquake signals typically last only a few minutes and are a mix of different frequencies, Hicks said. USO’s frequency is about 11 millihertz and repeats every 90 seconds. When it became clear that the signal started at the same time as the Greenland landslide, Hicks and his colleagues thought there was probably a connection.

Many objects, such as bells, vibrate at a particular resonant frequency when struck. The same is true for bodies of water, from swimming pools to oceans. Disturbances such as earthquakes or wind can cause a body of water to shake, setting off a kind of standing wave called a seiche.

Based on its width and depth, the researchers calculated that Dikson Fjord has a resonant frequency of 11 millihertz, which matches the signal. What took them longer to figure out was why the fjord continued to oscillate for so long.

Immediately after the tsunami, the seiche rose seven metres on both sides of the fjord. Within a few days it receded to a few centimetres, but this was so small that it went unnoticed by a Danish navy ship sailing up the fjord three days after the landslide.

But the seiche didn’t stop, likely continuing long after the nine days had passed and becoming undetectable by distant seismic stations, Hicks said. “No seiche has ever been reported before that lasted that long or that the energy dissipated that slowly.”

The team’s computer modelling suggests that the shape of the fjord was a crucial factor: The landslide occurred 200 kilometres inland, and the fjord is blocked by a glacier at one end and curves sharply at the other. The fjord’s rounded bottom acts like a rocking chair, allowing the water to flow through with little resistance.

All these factors caused the wave to have a high degree of energy trapped inside, rather than dissipating quickly as it normally would, Hicks said.

The slide itself was a direct result of climate change. A steep glacier supported the mountainside. As the glacier thinned, it collapsed, sending an estimated 25 million cubic meters of rock and ice into the fjord. It was the first landslide ever recorded in eastern Greenland.

No one was in the area at the time, but cruise ships were traveling up the fjord. The tsunami destroyed equipment used to monitor the area and two abandoned hunting lodges.

As the planet continues to warm, we’ll likely see more of these kinds of landslides, Hicks said, noting that the findings show that climate change is affecting not just the atmosphere and oceans, but also the ground beneath our feet. “For the first time, we’re looking down at our feet and seeing some of the devastating effects of climate change,” he said.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

The Permian mass extinction could have been influenced by the Mega El Niño event

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Diagram of the end-Permian extinction event, where extreme temperatures may have caused forests to die off.

Richard Jones/Science Photo Library

The end-Permian extinction, 250 million years ago, may have been amplified by an El Niño event that was much stronger and longer-lasting than anything we see today.

These giant El Niño events caused extreme changes in the climate, wiping out forests and many land animals. Alexander Farnsworth At the University of Bristol, UK.

The El Niño also set off a feedback process that helped make this mass extinction so bad, he said: “There's a knock-on effect that's making these kinds of El Niños stronger and lasting longer.”

The end-Permian extinction is thought to have wiped out about 90 percent of all species living at the time, making it the worst mass extinction in history, and is widely thought to have been caused by a massive volcanic eruption in what is now Siberia.

These eruptions heated rocks rich in fossil carbon, releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide, causing extreme global warming. Oceans became stagnant and oxygen-depleted, killing marine life.

But this doesn't explain the whole story: in particular, terrestrial species began to go extinct tens of thousands of years earlier than marine species.

A variety of ideas have been proposed to explain this, from volcanic winters to a disappearing ozone layer, but the idea that an extreme El Niño might be involved arose from studies of past ocean temperatures based on oxygen isotopes in fossils. Yadong Sun At China University of Geosciences in Wuhan.

Now, Farnsworth and his colleagues have run computer models to explore what might have happened at the end of the Permian period that could explain Sun's findings.

Currently, El Niño occurs when warm water in the western Pacific Ocean spreads eastward across the ocean surface, creating an area of anomalously warm water that heats the atmosphere and affects weather across the globe.

The researchers found that before the Permian extinction began, El Niño events were probably similar in strength and duration to today, meaning abnormally warm waters were about 0.5°C (0.9°F) hotter than average and the event lasted for several months.

But these events occurred in a huge ocean called the Panthalassa, which was 30 percent larger at the equator than the present-day Pacific Ocean. This means that the area of unusually warm water during El Niño was much larger than it is today, and its impact on the planet was much greater.

According to the team's model, rising carbon dioxide levels at the end of the Permian period caused El Niño events to become stronger and last longer. These events caused extreme weather changes on land and killed forests, which stopped absorbing carbon dioxide and started releasing it, leading to further warming and more extreme El Niño events.

In the ocean, the temperature changes would have been less drastic, and marine life would have had an easier time migrating to avoid them. This is why the marine extinctions occurred after more intense global warming. “The deadly extreme global warming that caused the marine extinctions was made worse by these El Niños because they stripped away carbon sinks,” says Farnsworth.

At the peak of the extinctions, El Niño temperature anomalies reached up to 4°C (7.2°F), and each event lasted for more than a decade, he says.

It's unclear whether a similar event will occur in the future — computer models vary in their predictions about how El Niño will change as the planet warms, Farnsworth said — but because El Niño occurs in a warmer world, it's already having big effects.

“The recent El Niño event has caused record temperatures and sparked a lot of wildfires,” he says, “and what worries me most is the signs of tree death in the Amazon during this El Niño event.”

Research shows that under certain climate conditions, El Niño could cause extinctions, Pedro Dinezio According to a team of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder, such giant El Niño events don't occur today because the Pacific Ocean is smaller than the Panthalassa.

“These results are really interesting for understanding the past, rather than the near future,” Dinezio says. “To understand what El Niño will bring, we need to look at past periods when the continents were positioned similarly to the present.”

“I think this is a compelling study.” Phil Jardine Researchers at the University of Münster in Germany have discovered the first direct evidence that the ozone layer disappeared during the Permian mass extinction.

“I don't think this event and other extinction drivers, including ozone depletion, are mutually exclusive,” he says. “The scary thing about the end-Permian extinction is that a lot of things were happening at the same time, and they seemed to feed off each other in cascading ways throughout the Earth system.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Boeing executives stay mum following Starliner spacecraft’s return

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

summary

Boeing executives have made few public comments about the company’s Starliner spacecraft in the past six weeks.
The capsule returned to Earth without any crew on Saturday, ending a trouble-plagued test flight.
Boeing representatives did not attend a scheduled post-landing briefing.

Just over an hour after Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft returned empty to Earth, NASA held its regular post-landing briefing to discuss the conclusion of the eventful test flight.

Conspicuous by the absence of any Boeing representatives at the event early Saturday morning.

In fact, the last time Boeing representatives attended a press conference about the Starliner program was in late July, when the capsule was experiencing hardware issues that caused it to stay a few weeks longer than planned at the International Space Station, and questions were swirling about whether the two NASA astronauts who had been sent into orbit aboard the Boeing-built spacecraft would be able to return home safely.

NASA officials say they are working closely with Boeing, but the company’s absence from the event and limited public statements have raised questions about its commitment to transparency and the future of the Starliner program.

Boeing did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the change in the company’s name recognition.

Ahead of a post-landing news conference held last week at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, NASA’s public advisory included the names of two Boeing executives who will be participating.

Eric Berger, a senior editor at Ars Technica, was there. Written About X Shortly before the press conference began, two chairs were removed from the podium, in what appeared to be a last-minute change in configuration.

Joel Montalbano, NASA’s associate administrator for Space Operations Mission Directorate, Asked about Boeing’s absence During the briefing

“We spoke to Boeing prior to this, and they gave NASA the concession to represent them on this mission,” he said.

A few days later, in response to a question from NBC News, a NASA spokesperson referred Montalbano to his response at the press conference.

Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager for Boeing’s commercial crew programs, instead attended the briefing. A statement on the company’s website.

“I commend the Starliner team for their hard work in ensuring a successful and safe undocking, deorbit, re-entry, and landing,” he wrote. “We will review the data and determine next steps for the program.”

Boeing said the capsule would be transported to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where engineers would analyze the flight data. No other details about the spacecraft’s status were released.

Starliner launched astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station in early June. The capsule’s first manned test flight was scheduled to last about eight days. However, a helium leak from the spacecraft’s propulsion system and a thruster failure while docking with the space station kept Starliner and its crew in space for months.

NASA held several media briefings over the summer to provide updates on the ongoing investigation into the thruster issue and how its findings might affect the remainder of the flight. Initially, NASA and Boeing officials attended the briefings jointly, but no Boeing representatives were present at the August press conference.

That month, NASA was considering how and when to return Wilmore and Williams safely. Asked why Boeing was absent from most of the briefings in August, NASA officials said the updates were for NASA consideration and therefore no company representatives were included.

On August 24, NASA announced it would ask SpaceX to return the astronauts and fly Boeing’s Starliner back to Earth without a crew member. The pair will stay on the space station until February, after which they will return with the next ISS crew.

in X Statement In response to NASA’s decision, Boeing wrote: “Our focus remains first and foremost on the safety of our crew and spacecraft. We are conducting the mission in accordance with NASA’s decision and are preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful uncrewed return.”

The Starliner spacecraft ultimately returned safely to Earth, landing at White Sands Spaceport in New Mexico just after midnight on Saturday.

The manned test flight was intended to demonstrate that Boeing could reliably transport astronauts to the space station and pave the way for NASA to approve regular flights to the orbital laboratory.

Boeing developed the Starliner spacecraft under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, an effort launched in 2011 to support privately built spacecraft to fill the gap left by NASA’s retired space shuttle fleet.

Even before its latest flight, the Starliner program was more than $1.5 billion over budget and years behind schedule: In 2019, an uncrewed test flight to the space station was canceled due to technical issues, forcing the company to wait until 2022 to try again.

Rival company SpaceX is developing its Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of the same program, with regular flights to the space station beginning in 2020. NASA has said it wants two private companies to certify such flights so it has redundant options for reaching low Earth orbit.

Source: www.nbcnews.com

Astronomers express worries over deployment of five new high-luminosity satellites

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

AST SpaceMobile satellite illustration

AST Space Mobile

Five more are due to join the unusually reflective prototype satellites later this week, which shine brighter than nearly any star in the sky. Astronomers warn that an increasing number of bright objects in the night sky could seriously hinder their research and even limit their ability to spot asteroids heading toward Earth.

Texas-based AST SpaceMobile launched the first Blue Walker 3 satellite in 2022, but it drew immediate criticism from astronomers who discovered that the satellite was brighter than all but seven stars in the night sky.

AST SpaceMobile plans to launch a total constellation of around 100 satellites to provide mobile phone connectivity around the world. The satellites’ unusual reflectivity — much higher than most communications satellites — comes from the fact that they are equipped with a 64-square-meter reflector antenna that inadvertently acts like a mirror for visible light.

The company press release The company was scheduled to launch its first five commercial satellites, called Bluebirds, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on September 12. The company said last year that it was exploring options to reduce its impact on astronomy, but did not respond to a request for an interview. New Scientist About the latest release.

Grant Tremblay The growing constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit “is really an existential issue for astronomy,” said the researcher at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, who is also vice president of the American Astronomical Society. AST SpaceMobile is a concern for astronomers because of its incredibly reflective design, but it’s by no means the only one, he said. Internet company Starlink is another company whose satellites are causing concern.

“In astronomy, things are clearly getting worse,” Tremblay said. “I worry that we’re in danger of losing the sky.”

Tremblay said projects such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, under construction in Chile and set to begin observing the sky in 2025, would see bright streaks marring images as the satellite crosses the field of view.

“If a frame is contaminated by, say, a Starlink flight, it becomes useless; it has to be thrown away,” he says. “The observatories will continue to function; great science will continue to be done. But as we start heading towards a regime with hundreds or thousands of reflective satellites of this size or larger in orbit, efficiency can fall off exponentially. We’re entering a completely unsustainable regime with no regulatory structure whatsoever.”

Tremblay sees this as a loss not just for science, but for the wider society: “We have got back this incredibly magical image of the universe on an unimaginable scale. There’s something about it that brings people together and inspires them. If we were to lose that, I think it would be a social catastrophe.”

To solve the problem, astronomers may need to place more telescopes in space beyond crowded orbits, but the cost and complexity of doing that makes that impossible in most cases, he says.

Some warn that losing our astronomical capabilities could put humanity at risk. Ian Carneri Researchers at the European Space Agency say that projects like NASA’s DART spacecraft have improved our ability over the decades to spot Earth-bound asteroids and divert them. “In the future, asteroids may become harder to find,” they say. [because of reflective satellite constellations]”That’s true,” he says.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

SpaceX Crew Makes History with First ‘Stand-Up’ Private Spacewalk During Polaris Dawn Mission

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Jared Isaacman looks out the hatch of the Dragon capsule.

SpaceX

SpaceX made history today when its private astronauts conducted the first-ever private spacewalk as part of the Polaris Dawn mission.

As SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft orbited Earth at an altitude of about 740 km at a speed of more than 25,000 km per hour, the two astronauts partially ejected from the spacecraft, one at a time.

The four-man crew began evacuating the cabin at 10:31 GMT, eventually manually opening the hatch at approximately 10:50 GMT. All crew members were wearing new SpaceX spacesuits that have been thoroughly tested on Earth but not in orbit.

Jared Isaacman, the mission commander, head of SpaceX's Polaris program and billionaire co-financier, was the first person to step out of the spacecraft and look down at Earth. “It certainly is a perfect world from up here,” Isaacman said, lifting his head and torso from the capsule.

Isaacman then went through a series of suit mobility and safety checks before returning to his seat in the spacecraft a few minutes later, after which Crew Dragon fired its thrusters to maintain an optimal orbit and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis performed a spacewalk.

Neither Isaacman nor Gillis fully exited the spacecraft, making the event technically a stand-up extravehicular activity (SEVA) rather than a full spacewalk. Previous SpaceX promotional materials for the mission stated: Astronauts completely exit the capsule.

While all previous spacewalks to date have been conducted by government-trained astronauts, the Polaris Dawn crew will be all civilians: along with Isaacman and Gillis are retired U.S. Air Force test pilot Scott Poteet and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon.

Isaacman also took part in SpaceX's groundbreaking flight in 2021, which was the first orbital spaceflight with only private citizens on board. That flight used the exact same Crew Dragon spacecraft as the latest mission.

SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission is reminiscent of earlier space programs of the 1960s and 1970s because the Crew Dragon capsule does not have an airlock, making it one of the most dangerous spacewalks ever attempted.

Once SEVA is complete, the remainder of the mission will see the crew spend up to two more days in orbit before returning to Earth.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

What you need to know about the serious heart condition affecting 10 million Americans

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

New research published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology reveals that Atrial fibrillation (A-Fib) is three times more common in the United States than previously known, affecting an estimated 10.5 million American adults. A-Fib is characterized by an irregular heartbeat and can lead to severe complications such as stroke, heart failure, heart attack, kidney disease, and dementia.

While individuals with atrial fibrillation have an increased risk of heart-related mortality, the condition is treatable and typically not life-threatening. The exact cause of A-Fib remains unknown, but it tends to occur more frequently with age and is prevalent in certain groups with existing cardiovascular conditions.

A recent study conducted by scientists at the University of California analyzed medical records of 30 million adult patients in California from 2005 to 2019, revealing that 2 million individuals had atrial fibrillation. The study also observed an increasing incidence of A-Fib over the years, indicating a rise in prevalence due to factors such as obesity, hypertension, and diabetes.

Symptoms of atrial fibrillation may include irregular and rapid palpitations, chest pain, shortness of breath, and anxiety. Diagnosis can be made through an irregular heartbeat or an electrocardiogram (ECG). Technological advancements, such as smartwatches designed to monitor A-Fib, are aiding in the detection and management of the condition.

What are the signs of atrial fibrillation?

Dr. Hugh Calkins, a prominent cardiologist, emphasized the importance of recognizing symptoms of atrial fibrillation for early detection and treatment. Individuals experiencing symptoms are encouraged to seek medical advice for proper evaluation and management of the condition.

About our experts

Dr. Hugh Calkins is the Katherine Ellen Poindexter Professor of Cardiology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Maryland, USA. He has contributed extensively to cardiovascular research and is a renowned expert in electrophysiology and arrhythmia services.

Professor John Kamm holds the position of Professor of Clinical Cardiology at St George’s University Hospital, London. His research contributions in cardiology have been published in various prestigious medical journals.

Read more:

Source: www.sciencefocus.com

AI chatbot spreading false information about voting, election officials take action | US election 2024

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Following Joe Biden’s announcement of not seeking reelection, misinformation surfaced online regarding the potential for a new candidate to assume the presidency.

Screenshots claiming nine states couldn’t add new candidates to the ballot quickly went viral on Twitter (now X) and were widely viewed. The Minnesota Secretary of State’s office received requests to fact-check these posts which turned out to be completely false as the voting deadline had not passed and Kamala Harris had ample time to be added to the ballot.

The misinformation originated from Twitter’s chatbot Grok, which provided an incorrect response when asked if new candidates could still be added to the ballot.

This incident served as a test case for the interaction between election officials and artificial intelligence companies in the 2024 US presidential election, amid concerns that AI could mislead or distract voters. It also highlighted the potential role Grok could play as a chatbot lacking strict guardrails to prevent the generation of inflammatory content.

A group of secretaries of state and the National Association of Secretaries of State contacted Grok and X to report the misinformation. Initial attempts to correct it were ineffective, prompting Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon to express disappointment at the lack of action.

While the impact of the misinformation was relatively minor, prompting no hindrance to voting, the secretaries of state took a strong stance to prevent similar incidents in the future.

The secretaries launched a public effort by signing an open letter to Grok’s owner, Elon Musk, urging the chatbot to redirect election-related queries to trusted sources like CanIVote.org. Their efforts led to Grok now directing users to vote.gov when asked about the election.

Simon praised the company for eventually taking responsible action and emphasized the importance of early and consistent debunking of misinformation to maintain credibility and prompt corrective responses.

Despite initial setbacks, Grok’s redirection of users and Musk’s philosophy against centralized control offer hope for combating misinformation. It is critical to prevent AI tools like Grok from further exacerbating partisan divisions or spreading inaccurate information.

The potential for paid subscriptions and widespread usage of Grok integrated into social media platforms poses challenges in addressing the risk of deceptive content creation. Efforts to address and rectify misinformation are crucial in safeguarding the integrity of elections and ensuring responsible use of AI-based tools.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Exploring the Impact of Joni Mitchell on Music and America: Top Podcasts of the Week

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

This week’s picks

Joanne McNally investigates… Was Furby spying on us?
BBC Sounds, weekly episodes
Why was Furby, the cute talking toy from the ’90s, banned from the Pentagon? Could Furby be a secret listening device for the Chinese government? The comic’s latest fun, self-aware “investigation” finds her calling aviation authorities and heading to the home of a Furby collector who hangs Furby skins out to dry on a clothesline. It’s fun and silly. Alexi Duggins

Doubt everything
Widely available, with weekly episodes
Brian Reed, of S-Town and The Trojan Horse Affair, is launching a new show that explores journalism’s place in the modern world. The show was inspired by the reaction to S-Town, which saw Reed have to prove in court that his podcast was journalism. It’s an admirable and forthright take on an important issue, and the striking first episode sees Reed confront one of his biggest critics: advertisement

A visitor walks past the Furby exhibit at the Hasbro booth at the Tokyo Toy Show 2024. Photo: Franck Robichon/EPA

Night shift
Widely available, with weekly episodes
Jake Adelstein returns to his Missouri hometown in the 1990s, when patient deaths soared at his local hospital. This is a depressing story of a hospital that smelled of “soap and cigarettes” and provided solid medical care, only to be hit by a rise in “Code Blue” alarms. Adelstein tells the story without being exploitative. Hannah Verdier

The Road to Joni
Widely available, with weekly episodes
Carmel Holt travels the US to explore Joni Mitchell’s appeal across ages and generations. She meets Joni fans like Hozier, Esperanza Spalding, and Don Was to ask them how they got into Joni and where she’s taken them. Lovingly written and delightfully rambling, this is a wonderful tribute to an utterly unique artist. Phil Harrison

Dealcraft: Insights from Great Negotiators
Widely available, with weekly episodes
Ready for a raise? Join host Jim Sebenius for “Cool Deal” tips from negotiation gurus. Proving that negotiating is never boring, attorney John Branca shares how he helped Michael Jackson get access to his master recordings that were traditionally held by his record company. HV

There is a podcast

Cybertruck: Shaping the future of automobiles? Photo: Tesla/Reuters

this week, Charlie Lindler Top 5 podcasts selected futureFrom climate-conscious programming to policing tech excesses

How to save the planet
“What if there was an uplifting show about climate change?” asks Gimlet’s Climate Change Podcast, hosted by Alex Blumberg and his “geek gang.” The show focuses on solving environmental problems now and in the future. The podcast ended two years ago, but fortunately (or unfortunately), the topics Blumberg and company explore with a positive, optimistic attitude remain relevant. Should I get rid of my lawn? How can I buy less? Is fast fashion really that bad for the planet? Listen in and find out.

Managing the future of work
Hold on, come back! Yes, this podcast is as business-focused as you’d expect from a show produced by Harvard Business School. Sure, there are episodes on HR databases, supply chains, and AI in the workplace. But thanks to an engaging host and knowledgeable guests, there’s a rich back catalogue of real, usable, relevant research on how work is changing our lives, and vice versa. Start with computer scientist and author Cal Newport’s talk on “The Productivity Deficit” and you’ll be hooked.

Easy to understand English
This political and cultural podcast from journalist Derek Thompson, less tech-driven and more focused on humanity, quickly became a favorite of mine when it launched in 2021. The content delivered by not only Thompson’s guests but the host himself makes every episode rich with interaction and always leaves you smarter than before you started listening. Thompson has a talent for putting names to social phenomena you’ve felt but can’t quite pinpoint. Fittingly, the title of the first episode, about the metaverse, NFTs, and everything in between, is “The Future Is Going to Be Crazy Weird.”

Concentrate your full attention
Produced by the Center for Humane Technology, the show closely monitors the ever-expanding, unregulated tech industry and asks whether we are truly using our advancements for good. Host Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist, was a compelling commentator in Netflix’s excellent documentary The Social Dilemma, which explores how social media manipulates our minds. Here, he continues the sobering thought process with guests including authors Yuval Noah Harari, Kara Swisher, and Esther Perel, who comments on the impact of technology on intimate relationships.

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All the future
If you have any doubts, just listen to The Wall Street Journal’s all-encompassing podcast. From modern bookstore design to how the Tesla Cybertruck is impacting auto manufacturing to scientists developing artificial breast milk, this long-running, award-winning podcast covers cutting-edge technological advances. While the AI portion may be too much for many listeners, a quick browse through the show’s extensive archives will find enough to fill your commute, all in 15-minute, digestible episodes.

Give it a try…

From family group chat etiquette to helping your child get their first period, This is so awkward They’re there to hold the hands of nervous, sweaty parents.
Two indie rock drummers bring you a podcast about soccer fans. Outing with Woody and Piers.

Enjoy the summer of sports Rampod: Aiming for the gold medalFeaturing interviews with Tahnee Gray Thompson, Tessa Sanderson, and more.

If you’d like to read the full newsletter, sign up to receive Hear Here in your inbox every Thursday.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Is the world’s first battery-powered plane safe for landing?

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

The arrival of human flight’s future was uneventful during a time of minimal flying in June 2020 when COVID-19 was rampant all over the world. Despite the empty skies, a significant development was taking place on the ground in a small aircraft.

The Slovenian-built two-seater plane was certified safe to fly by EASA (European Union Aviation Safety Agency). In the following years, it obtained certifications from equivalent agencies in the UK, US, and other countries. The Pipistrel Velis Electro became the world’s first fully certified electric airplane, a title it still holds today.

“This achievement showcases the growing interest and trust in electric aircraft’s reliability.” Dr. Tine Tomajic“We recently completed production of our 100th Velis Electro, a significant milestone for Pipistrel and the industry,” saidTomajic, Director of Engineering and Programs at Pipistrel.

Tomajic believes the future is already here but not equally distributed, with a focus on the development of clean aircraft. However, challenges remain regarding the alternative fuels needed for aviation and the political will required to make significant changes.

With multiple groundings behind us, could this be the turning point for green air travel, or do we still have a long way to go before achieving zero-emission flights?

Climate impacts

“Currently, aviation has a minimal impact on climate change.” Dr. Guy GluttonGratton, an associate professor at Cranfield University, is an aeronautical engineer and test pilot for experimental electric aircraft. He states that aviation contributes about 2.5% of global CO2 emissions, with growing concerns about contrail emissions potentially reaching 7%.

The industry has made progress in reducing emissions per passenger mile, but the overall emissions are still rising at a rate of 5% annually. With global air travel demand expected to double by 2040, aviation risks becoming a significant polluter unless drastic measures are taken.

To address the challenges, various alternatives are being explored, including electric aircraft like the Velis Electro for short-haul flights and hydrogen fuel cells for larger planes.

More electric planes are set to take flight following the success of the Velis Electro. Companies like Israeli Aviation, Elysian Aircraft, and Wright Electric are working on developing larger electric aircraft to meet the future demands of air travel.

Gratton, who actively tests electric planes, remains cautious about considering battery-powered planes as a complete solution to reduce aviation’s carbon footprint. He emphasizes the importance of exploring various alternative fuels to address the industry’s growing emissions.

Alternative Fuel Test Flights

How will we power net-zero flights in the future using alternative fuels like biofuels, electric fuel, electric fuel cells, and hydrogen fuel cells?

Biofuels: Biofuels could be blended with traditional jet fuel to reduce emissions, but concerns about land use and deforestation remain.

Electric Fuel: Derived from atmospheric carbon and hydrogen, electric fuel is promising but requires significant renewable energy for production.

Electric Fuel Cell: Offers zero emissions during flight, but the technology needs further development and scalability.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell: Seen as a medium-term solution for decarbonizing aviation, but requires infrastructure redesign for effective implementation.

About our experts

Dr. Tine Tomajic: Director of Engineering and Programs at Pipistrel, an expert in electric flight.

Dr. Guy Glutton: Associate professor at Cranfield University, specializing in aviation environmental sciences and experimental electric aircraft testing.

Source: www.sciencefocus.com

Study finds Neanderthal populations were genetically and socially isolated for tens of thousands of years

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

In 2015, archaeologists discovered Neanderthal fossils. Grotte Mandolin is located on the Mediterranean coast of France, in the shadow of a rock overhanging directly into the Rhône River valley. Nicknamed Thorin, the fossil is one of the most similar Neanderthal remains found in France since its discovery in Saint-Césaire in 1979. Globe Institute researcher Martin Sikora and his colleagues combined archaeological, chronostratigraphic, isotopic, and genomic analyses to reveal that Thorin belonged to a Neanderthal population that remained genetically isolated for 50,000 years. Apart from Thorin’s lineage, they found evidence of gene flow in the genome of the Les Côtés Neanderthal from another lineage that diverged from the ancestral lineage of European Neanderthals more than 80,000 years ago. The findings suggest the existence of multiple isolated Neanderthal communities in Europe close to the time of extinction and shed light on their social organization. Despite the close geographical proximity of these populations, there was limited, if any, interaction between the different Neanderthal populations during the last millennium.

Neanderthal. Image courtesy of Abel Grau, CSIC Communication.

“When we look at the Neanderthal genome, we see that they were quite inbred and didn’t have a lot of genetic diversity,” Dr Sikora said.

“They’ve lived in small groups for generations.”

“Inbreeding is known to reduce the genetic diversity of populations, which if continued over long periods of time can have negative effects on the viability of the population.”

“The newly discovered Neanderthal genome is from a different lineage to other late Neanderthals studied so far.”

“This supports the idea that Neanderthal social organization was different from that of early modern humans, who appear to have been more connected.”

“In other words, compared to Neanderthals, early modern humans were more likely to connect with other groups, which was advantageous for their survival.”

“This is purely speculation, but the concept of being able to communicate more and exchange knowledge is something humans can do that Neanderthals, who were organized in small groups and lived isolated lives, may not have been able to do to some extent.”

“And that’s an important skill,” noted Dr Tarshika Vimala, a population geneticist at the University of Copenhagen.

“We see evidence that early modern humans in Siberia, living in small communities, formed so-called mating networks to avoid problems with inbreeding, something that wasn’t seen in Neanderthals.”

Thorin’s fossils were first discovered in Mandolin Cave in 2015. Mandolin Cave is a cave that is thought to have been the site of an early Homo sapiens But not at the same time, and he is still being slowly unearthed.

Based on Thorin’s location in the cave deposits, archaeologists have speculated that he may have lived approximately 45,000 to 40,000 years ago.

To determine his age and relationships to other Neanderthals, the team extracted DNA from his teeth and jaw and compared his entire genome sequence to previously sequenced Neanderthal genomes.

Surprisingly, initial genome analysis suggested that Thorin’s genome was very different from other late Neanderthals and very similar to the genomes of Neanderthals who lived more than 100,000 years ago, suggesting that Thorin is much older than archaeological estimates.

To solve the mystery, the researchers analyzed isotopes from Thorin’s bones and teeth to gain insight into the type of climate he lived in. Late Neanderthals lived during the Ice Age, while early Neanderthals enjoyed a much warmer climate.

Isotopic analysis showed that Thorin lived in a very cold climate and was identified as a late Neanderthal.

Compared to previously sequenced Neanderthal genomes, Thorin’s genome is most similar to the individual from Gibraltar, leading the authors to speculate that Thorin’s population may have migrated from Gibraltar to France.

“This means that a previously unknown Neanderthal population was present in the Mediterranean, stretching from the westernmost tip of Europe to the Rhône Valley in France,” said Dr Ludovic Slimac, researcher at Toulouse-Paul Sabatier University and CNRS.

Knowing that Neanderthal communities were small and isolated may hold the key to understanding their extinction, because isolation is generally thought to be detrimental to a population’s fitness.

“It’s always a good thing for one group to have contact with another,” Dr Vimala said.

“Prolonged isolation limits genetic diversity and reduces the ability to adapt to changes in climate and pathogens. It’s also socially limiting, as they don’t share knowledge or evolve as a group.”

But to truly understand how Neanderthal populations were structured and why they became extinct, researchers say many more Neanderthal genomes need to be sequenced.

“If we had had more genomes from other regions over the same time period, we probably would have found other deeply structured populations,” Dr Sikora said.

A paper on the results of this study was published today. journal Cell Genomics.

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Ludovic Slimak others2024. The long genetic and social isolation of Neanderthals before their extinction. Cell Genomics 4(9):100593;doi: 10.1016/j.xgen.2024.100593

Source: www.sci.news

Genetic study uncovers ancient Easter Islander’s resilience and connections to pre-European contact in the Americas

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, is one of the most isolated inhabited places in the world. Its archaeological record, including megalithic statues, has captured the imagination of many. Two major controversies have emerged from extensive study of the island. First, its history is presented as a cautionary tale of overexploitation of resources leading to a large-scale population decline – the “ecocide” theory. Second, the possibility of a voyage across the Pacific Ocean to the Americas before European contact is still debated. To answer these questions, a team of scientists from the Globe Institute and elsewhere sequenced and analyzed the genomes of 15 Rapa Nui people who lived between 1670 and 1950.

Rapa Nui people. Image courtesy of © Santiago Caruso.

Rapa Nui is one of the most isolated inhabited islands in the world.

It lies at the easternmost tip of the Polynesian Triangle in the Pacific Ocean, 3,700 km west of South America and over 1,900 km east of the nearest inhabited island.

Despite Rapa Nui's remote location, archaeological and genetic evidence indicates that Polynesians from the west had already arrived on the island around 1250 AD.

Over the next five centuries, Rapa Nui's inhabitants, the Rapanui, developed a culture characterized by iconic colossal stone statues (moai) and monumental stone platforms (ahu).

Due to Rapa Nui's isolation, Europeans did not reach the island until 1722 AD.

Over the years, European visitors have had a devastating impact on Rapa Nui, killing locals and introducing deadly pathogens the islanders had never encountered before.

Moreover, a third of the population was kidnapped by Peruvian slave raiders in the 1860s, and only a small proportion were repatriated following international condemnation of slavery.

A smallpox epidemic subsequently decimated Rapanui's population, down to an estimated 110 people.

“It is well known that Rapa Nui's environment was affected by human activities such as deforestation, but it was unknown whether and how these changes led to a dramatic population decline,” said Dr Anna Saffo Malaspinas, a researcher at the University of Lausanne and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.

The Tahitian warrior's shelter from Giulio Ferrario's Le Costume Ancien et Moderne, Milan, 1816-1827.

The authors studied the genomes of 15 ancient inhabitants who lived on the island over the past 500 years.

They found no evidence of a genetic bottleneck corresponding to the 17th century collapse.

The analysis suggests that the island was originally inhabited by a small number of people, but its population grew steadily until Peruvian slave raids in the 1860s forced a third of the island's population to relocate.

Furthermore, the analysis showed that, like modern-day Rapa Nui people, the ancient islanders also carried Native American DNA.

This mixing probably occurred sometime between 1250 and 1430 AD.

Taken together with archaeological evidence and oral history, the find suggests that Polynesians may have been crossing the Pacific long before Europeans arrived on Rapa Nui and long before Columbus reached the Americas.

“Our genetic analysis shows that there was a steady population growth from the 13th century until contact with Europeans in the 18th century,” said Dr Barbara Souza da Mota, a researcher at the University of Lausanne.

“This stability is extremely important because it directly contradicts the idea of a dramatic pre-contact population decline.”

“We investigated how Native American DNA is distributed in the genetic background of Rapa Nui Polynesians,” said Dr Victor Moreno Mayar, a researcher at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

“This distribution is consistent with contact occurring between the 13th and 15th centuries.”

“Our study doesn't tell us where this contact occurred, but it may mean that the ancestors of the Rapanui reached the Americas before Christopher Columbus,” Dr Malaspinas said.

of Survey results Published in a journal Nature.

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JV Moreno Mayal others2024. Ancient Rapanui genome reveals resilience and pre-European contact with the Americas. Nature 633, 389-397;doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07881-4

Source: www.sci.news

One Smallpox Vaccine Dose Offers Continued Protection against Smallpox.

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

There are few high-quality studies on the effectiveness of the smallpox vaccine against smallpox.

Emanuele Contini/Nuru Photo via Getty Images

One dose of one type of smallpox vaccine appears to reduce the risk of getting smallpox by about 60 percent, although this can vary depending on mutations of the virus.

Cases of MPOX, formerly known as monkeypox, are rapidly increasing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, driven by a variant called lineage Ib. The vaccine used to prevent MPOX was originally developed for smallpox, and although the two viruses are related, it is unclear whether it is specifically effective against MPOX.

For more information, Sharmistha Mishra Researchers at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto, Canada, in collaboration with colleagues, focused on a vaccine called MVA-BN, also known as JYNNEOS, Imvanex, and Imvamune, which was the most widely used smallpox vaccine in Western countries during the 2022 smallpox outbreak caused by the clade IIb variant.

Studies have shown that the effectiveness of MVA-BN for mpox varies widely, from 36% to 86%. This range is likely because the studies are observational and compare results in people of different ages, locations, and health conditions.

A randomized controlled trial is being conducted among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men, who made up the majority of infections in Western countries during the 2022 outbreak.

Meanwhile, Mishra's team tried to mimic a randomized controlled trial using existing medical data. The researchers studied more than 6,000 Canadian men who were deemed to be at high risk for infection in 2022. About half received one dose of MVA-BN, and the rest did not receive the mpox vaccine. The two groups of men were matched by factors such as age and location, Mishra said.

While the official MVA-BN vaccination schedule calls for two doses administered at least 28 days apart, Mishra said the Canadian government initially opted for a one-dose vaccination protocol to spread the shots among as many at-risk people as possible.

During a follow-up period of approximately 80 days, 50 men in the unvaccinated group were diagnosed with MPOX compared to 21 in the vaccinated group, suggesting that MVA-BN reduced the risk by 58 percent.

This suggests that one dose is enough to provide protection. Adam Hacker At the London Coalition for Infectious Disease Preparedness Innovations Corinne Goertz van Kessel “Scientifically, we know that two doses are more effective,” Hacker told Erasmus MC in the Netherlands.

Geerts van Kessel says the team's approach was a good way to mimic a randomized controlled trial, but it is unclear whether some of the men, who are older than their mid-50s, were vaccinated when smallpox was a threat, which could have influenced their immune response to the 2022 MVA-BN.

Studying how the vaccine affects the severity of disease after infection with MPOX will also help assess the vaccine's overall effectiveness, she says.

It's also unclear how effective the drug is specifically against lineage Ib, Goertz van Kessel says, but both she and Hacker expect MVA-BN to be at least somewhat effective against that variant as well as it is against lineage IIb, which continues to circulate in West and Central Africa.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Fresh Insights into OCD Will Lead to Innovative Treatments

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

When my daughter was little, she would wash her hands a lot. We might have lightly teased her, saying she was a bit OCD. Then she started to reveal “bad thoughts” that I thought were typical of a child's imagination. I told her that everyone has these thoughts and that they will go away if she ignores them.

That wasn't the case with her. At 21, her emotions were out of control and completely out of proportion to reality. She was diagnosed with OCD, and I finally realized there was nothing “a little” about this condition.

OCD is complex, widely misunderstood, and treatment options are limited. But in recent years, the brain and body mechanisms that cause OCD have finally been uncovered, revealing a complex picture that involves genetics, various brain networks, the immune system, and even gut bacteria. The resulting improved understanding is opening up new possibilities for tackling this life-destroying condition.

Around the world, It is estimated that 1-3% of people suffer from OCD.Obsessional thoughts typically begin during adolescence or early adulthood. As its name suggests, it is characterized by obsessions, or intrusive thoughts, and compulsions, which are habits that cannot be stopped. “Obsessive thoughts capture and dominate our attention because they have become obsessive habits,” says Barbara Sahakian At Cambridge University…

Source: www.newscientist.com

Gas bubble on another star found to be 75 times larger than the Sun

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

The movement of bubbling gas on the surface of R Doradus

ALMA (ESO/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan/NRAO)/W. Breming

A giant bubble of hot gas more than 75 times the size of our sun has been observed on the surface of a nearby star, and researchers say this could lead to improved computer simulations of the sun.

Wouter Flemings He and his colleagues from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, were looking at R Doradus, a star 178 light-years away from Earth and 350 times the mass of the Sun, in hopes of better understanding how material is ejected from old stars.

Vlemmings says they booked time at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in Chile — which only gets one in seven applications — and there they collected a single snapshot observation.

The first two attempts were hampered by weather conditions on Earth, and only the third met the stringent quality standards set out in the researchers' Observatory Time application, but this led to the accumulation of multiple images that Vlemmings says were in fact all usable, allowing the team to plot movement over time.

Not only was this the first time such a bubble had been observed in detail outside the solar system, but the image was shaped like a kind of flip-book, allowing the researchers to measure not only its size but also its speed. “That was a bonus,” Flemings says. “We hadn't planned for it, and certainly didn't expect it to all work out that way. [this way].”

They also discovered that giant gas bubbles, more than 100 million kilometres wide, were rising to the surface and then sinking back into the star's interior at a faster rate than expected.

Nuclear fusion reactions inside the star create convection currents, which cause bubbles of hot gas to rise to the surface, then cool and sink back to the core. This process is thought to eject material that escapes the star's gravity and spreads out into space to form new stars and planets. At least in R Doradus, this process appears to be happening three to four times faster than expected, with bubbles forming and disappearing over the course of about a month.

Areas around R Doradas

ESO/Digital Sky Survey 2

Stellar convection has been modeled in computers before, but those models appear to be a bit flawed because the motion isn't nearly as fast as observed in the real world, Vlemings said.

“These bubbles are moving a little faster than expected, so it seems like we're missing something,” he says. “For a long time in our field, the models have basically been ahead of the observations, but we've never really had the observations to test whether those models are correct.”

Doradus R has not been the subject of much study because it's only visible from the Southern Hemisphere, and historically most of the large radio telescopes have been in the Northern Hemisphere. But that's changed with ALMA, Vlemmings says. Because ALMA produces such comprehensive data, he hopes to find even more remnants. Researchers hope to observe similar stars next year to see if the phenomenon can be found in other places.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

The ancient inhabitants of Easter Island journeyed to South America

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

The famous Moai statues of Easter Island

Tero Hakala/Shutterstock

SEI 221095699 — The famous Moai statues of Easter Island

Tero Hakala/Shutterstock

DNA analysis of ancient ruins on Easter Island has revealed that the population was actually growing when Europeans arrived, rather than plummeting as some history books have reported.

The findings also indicate that there was contact between the inhabitants of this island and those of South America long before the arrival of Europeans. This island and its people are also known as Rapa Nui.

Located in the Pacific Ocean 3,500 km from South America, Rapa Nui is one of the most isolated inhabited islands on Earth. Polynesians first settled here around 1200 AD, when palm forests covered 164 square kilometers of the island.

By the time Europeans arrived in 1722, rats and excessive logging had almost completely destroyed the vegetation, and the island’s history has often been portrayed as an example of the unsustainable exploitation of ecosystems and their subsequent collapse after human population growth.

The researchers worked closely with representatives of the Rapa Nui community, and one of their aims was to verify that the people on display at the museum were in fact from the island, as efforts to repatriate remains are underway, led by modern residents.

The findings showed that 15 people who died in the past 500 years were from Rapa Nui.

Populations that are experiencing bottlenecks due to population decline will show signals in their DNA that indicate reduced genetic diversity, Moreno-Mayer said.

“We use statistical methods that allow us to reconstruct the genetic diversity of the Rapa Nui population over the past few thousand years,” he says, “and intriguingly, we find no evidence of the dramatic population decline around 1600 that would be predicted by collapse theory.”

Instead, the findings suggest that Rapa Nui’s population grew steadily until the 1860s, when slave traders abducted hundreds of islanders and many more died in a smallpox epidemic.

The study also identified regions of DNA in the ancient Rapa Nui genome that were of Native American origin, and the analysis suggests that mixing between these populations occurred around the 1300s.

“Our interpretation is that the ancestors of Rapa Nui first settled on the island and then returned to the Americas shortly thereafter,” Moreno-Mayer says.

Previous studies have also cast doubt on the idea of population decline. Carl Lipo The researcher, from New York’s Binghamton University, said it was
“fantastic” to see that a completely independent body of evidence points to the same conclusion his team reached in a paper published earlier this year using radiocarbon and archaeological evidence.

He said the research confirmed that the island was inhabited by people who lived resilient and successful lives before Europeans arrived.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Neanderthal fossil genome uncovers ancient tribe isolated for centuries

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

The jawbone of a Neanderthal known as Thorin, thought to have belonged to an isolated group

Xavier Mus

Genetic analysis of Neanderthal fossils found in France has revealed that they are the remnants of a previously unknown lineage of ancient people that remained extremely isolated for more than 50,000 years, shedding new light on the final stages of the species' existence.

The fossil has been named Thorin, after a character from J.R.R. Tolkien's novels. The HobbitIt was discovered in 2015 in the Mandolin Cave in the Rhône Valley in southern France. Ludovic Slimak Researchers from the Centre for Human Biology and Genomics in Toulouse discovered a few teeth in the soil of the cave, and after nine years of painstaking excavation, they uncovered 31 teeth, a jawbone, part of a skull, and thousands of other bone fragments.

The discovery of so many fossils of Neanderthals, who lived in Eurasia from about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago and are now extinct, is extremely rare and a surprising find in itself.

Even more surprising, even though DNA doesn't normally preserve in warm climates, a fragment of Thorin's tooth yielded his genome, revealing that the fossil was male but solving a mystery that will take years to unravel.

Srimak and his colleagues compared Thorin's genome with those of other Neanderthals and estimated that he lived about 105,000 years ago, but archaeological evidence and isotope analysis of his bones clearly show that Thorin lived no more than 50,000 years ago, making him a “late Neanderthal” from the final stage of Neanderthal existence.

“We have been together for a long time [geneticists] “We were confident that Thorin was indeed an early Neanderthal precisely because his genetic lineage is very distantly related to modern Neanderthals from the same region,” the team said. Tarshika Vimala “On the one hand, archaeologists were convinced he was a late Neanderthal. It took years of work on both sides to arrive at the answer,” said a researcher from the University of Copenhagen.

Eventually, the researchers realized they must have discovered a previously unknown Neanderthal lineage: Thorin was part of a small group that lived between 42,000 and 50,000 years ago. This group was likely a remnant of a much older Neanderthal population that split off from the main Neanderthal population about 105,000 years ago and remained genetically isolated for more than 50,000 years afterwards.

Thorin's bones unearthed in the Mandolin Cave in France

Ludovic Slimak

Thorin's DNA showed no evidence of interbreeding between his lineage and the main Neanderthal population, despite their close proximity. “Thorin was completely different from other Neanderthals,” Slimak says.

This isolation may have made this population particularly vulnerable: “Prolonged isolation and inbreeding can reduce genetic diversity over time, which is detrimental to a population's survival, which in turn can negatively affect its ability to adapt to a changing environment,” Vimala says.

Srimak, Vimala and their colleagues then reanalyzed the genome of another Neanderthal who lived about 43,000 years ago at Les Côtés in France, and found traces in its DNA of a “ghost population” that interbred with another, previously unknown, Neanderthal group about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.

“This means that there weren't just two populations among late Neanderthals, but possibly three,” says Slimak. Previously, it was thought that all Neanderthals before their extinction were part of a single genetically similar population.

“The evidence from Mandrin Cave is very exciting because it gives us fascinating insights into late Neanderthal populations and their movements.” Emma Pomeroy At Cambridge University.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Reasons to stop making light of having “a touch of OCD”

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

We’ve probably all heard people jokingly or proudly describe their habit of meticulously rearranging their bookshelves or taking an incredibly long time to clean their bathroom as “a bit OCD.”

Most people have a rough idea of what OCD is, but it tends to be thought of as a behavioral quirk. In fact, the condition is characterised by intrusive thoughts and compulsions that cannot be stopped, and it is debilitating for the 1-3% of the world’s population that are affected.

In this light, the “kind of OCD” joke risks trivializing illnesses as serious as schizophrenia or depression. This misuse of the phrase may reflect our ignorance about OCD. But as we explore in “New Understanding of OCD Paves the Way for New Treatments,” we are now discovering more about how OCD manifests in the brain, which is influencing how we think about the illness.

It’s true that obsessions and compulsions exist in all of us to some degree — maybe you run back into the house to make sure the front door is locked, or you can’t help but think about an upcoming stressful event. In fact, many of the symptoms of OCD seem to represent distortions of beneficial behavior. But imagine what it would be like if the intrusive thoughts and urges to act were unstoppable. That’s the hallmark of OCD.

It is becoming clear that OCD is a complex condition that involves the immune system.

Thanks to decades of research into the mechanisms underlying this disease, we now know that entire brain networks are affected, causing a significant imbalance in the neurotransmitters that transmit signals around them, and that the disease is more complex than we thought, with the immune system and gut bacteria also playing a role.

These insights into the body and brain causes of OCD are paving the way for much-needed new treatments for people who don’t respond to current first-line therapies. But what’s clear is that OCD is an incredibly distressing condition, and we’re only just beginning to address the problem. It’s time to stop kidding ourselves.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Research shows that specific genetic alterations could lead to premature menopause

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

New research has identified four genes that, if altered, could impact the age at which menopause occurs. These genes (ETAA1, ZNF518A, PNPLA8, and PALB2) were found to cause women to experience menopause two to 5.5 years earlier if they have only one functioning copy. The study, conducted by scientists from the Universities of Exeter, Cambridge, and Wellcome, was published in Nature.

Understanding these genetic changes is crucial for potential therapies to extend reproductive lifespan and plan for the impact of menopause on women’s career and life plans. The study also found links between these genetic changes and cancer risk, highlighting the importance of further research in this area.

These genetic changes can lead to the DNA damage of eggs, affecting the age at which menopause occurs. The study analyzed data from 106,973 postmenopausal women and found that rare genetic changes have a significant impact on the age at menopause. These changes not only shed light on menopause but also provide insight into disease risks.

Dr. Stasha Stankovic, Dr. Hilary Martin, and Professor John Perry, members of the research team, emphasized the importance of understanding ovarian function for reproductive health and disease prevention. They hope that further research in this area will lead to new treatments for ovarian-centered diseases and help predict age at menopause more accurately.

The study also revealed that changes in a mother’s DNA can impact the DNA passed on to her child, showing a link between genetic mutations and the rate of DNA changes. This discovery is significant in understanding the biological mechanisms behind infertility, reproductive disorders, and disease predisposition.

About our experts

Dr. Stasha Stankovic is a reproductive geneticist with a PhD in Reproductive Genomics from the University of Cambridge. Her research has been published in top scientific journals such as Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Genetics, and Cell Genomics.

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Source: www.sciencefocus.com

First Detailed Map of Solar Coronal Magnetic Field Created by Inouye Solar Telescope

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

This groundbreaking achievement will improve our understanding of the Sun’s atmosphere and shed light on how its changing conditions affect our technology-dependent society.

The Inouye Solar Telescope has released the first map of the magnetic field signal in the solar corona measured using the Zeeman effect. Image courtesy of NSF/NSO/AURA/NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

The Earth’s magnetic field protects us from the solar wind, protects our atmosphere and makes life possible.

But electromagnetic fields and high-energy particles from extreme solar activity could disrupt satellites, power grids, and other systems necessary for an increasingly technological society.

Understanding these dynamic interactions, which change on timescales ranging from days to centuries, is crucial to safeguarding our infrastructure and current ways of life.

Measuring the magnetic properties of the Sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, has long challenged astronomers and the limits of technology.

today, Daniel K. Inouye Solar TelescopeLocated near the summit of Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui, the facility is a state-of-the-art facility designed to study coronas.

The satellite has produced the first and most detailed map of the coronal magnetic field to date, taking an important first step in solving these mysteries.

“Inoue’s achievements in mapping the Sun’s coronal magnetic field are a testament to the innovative design and capabilities of this pioneering and unique observatory,” said Dr. Tom Shad, NSF National Solar Observatory investigator.

“This groundbreaking discovery is expected to greatly improve our understanding of the Sun’s atmosphere and its impact on the solar system.”

The researchers used the Zeeman effect, which measures magnetic properties by observing the splitting of spectral lines, to create a detailed map of the magnetic field of the solar corona.

“Spectral lines are distinct lines that appear at particular wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum and represent light absorbed or emitted by atoms and molecules,” they explained.

“These lines are unique to each atom and molecule and act like a fingerprint. By looking at the spectrum, scientists can determine the chemical composition and physical properties of an object.”

“When exposed to a magnetic field like the Sun’s, these lines split apart, giving us insight into the magnetic properties of the object.”

Previous attempts to detect such signals, last reported 20 years ago, have lacked the detail and regularity needed for widespread scientific investigation.

Now, Inouye’s unparalleled capabilities make it possible to study these important signals in detail and on a regular basis.

The solar corona can usually only be seen during a total solar eclipse, when most of the Sun’s light is blocked and Earth’s sky becomes dark.

But the Inouye Telescope uses a technique called coronagraphy to create an artificial eclipse that allows it to detect extremely faint polarized signals, highlighting its unparalleled sensitivity and cementing its status as a unique window into viewing our home star.

This telescope is Cryogenic near-infrared spectropolarimeter (Cryo-NIRSP) is one of the telescope’s main instruments used to study the corona and map its magnetic field.

“Just as detailed maps of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere have improved the accuracy of weather forecasts, this remarkably complete map of the magnetic field of the Sun’s corona will help us more accurately predict solar storms and space weather,” said Dr. Carrie Black, program director for NSF’s National Solar Observatory.

“The invisible yet incredibly powerful forces captured in this map will continue to drive solar physics for the next century and beyond.”

“Mapping the strength of the corona’s magnetic field is a fundamental scientific advance not only for solar research but for astronomy in general,” said Dr. Christoph Keller, director of the National Solar Observatory.

“This marks the beginning of a new era in understanding how stars’ magnetic fields affect planets in our solar system and the thousands of exoplanetary systems currently known.”

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This article has been edited from an original release by the National Solar Observatory.

Source: www.sci.news

Chemists show the existence of sulfurous acid in the gas phase in normal atmospheric conditions

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Chemists at the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research have discovered that sulfurous acid (H₂So₃), once formed in the gas phase, is kinetically stable enough to allow its characterization and subsequent reactions.

In the gas phase, sulfurous acid, once formed, exhibits some kinetic stability with a lifetime of at least 1 second in atmospheric water vapor conditions. Image courtesy of Berndt others., doi:10.1002/anie.202405572.

Sulfurous acid Having formula H₂So₃ The molecular weight is 82.075 g/mol.

This molecule, also known as sulfuric acid(IV) or thioic acid, is a difficult-to-reach acid that has never before been observed in aqueous solution.

However, sulfite Detected It was discovered in the gas phase in 1988 by dissociative ionization of diethyl sulfite.

“The only experimental detection of sulfurous acid to date was achieved in 1988 by the team of Helmut Schwarz at the Technical University of Berlin using in situ generation with a mass spectrometer,” said Dr. Torsten Berndt of the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research and colleagues.

“Under vacuum conditions, we estimated an extremely short lifetime of more than 10 microseconds.”

“Theoretical calculations show that H₂So₃ As a possible reaction product of the gas-phase reaction of OH radicals with dimethyl sulfide (DMS), which are produced from ozone and water molecules in the troposphere primarily in the presence of ultraviolet light.”

“DMS is produced primarily by biological processes in the ocean and is the largest source of biogenic sulfur in the atmosphere, producing approximately 30 million tonnes per year.”

The researchers experimentally investigated possible reaction pathways to H.₂So₃ It starts with DMS.

Formation of H₂So₃ Its formation in the gas phase was clearly demonstrated in a flow reactor under atmospheric conditions.

“Under our experimental conditions, sulfurous acid remained stable for 30 seconds, regardless of humidity,” the researchers said.

“With the existing experimental setup, longer residence times have not yet been explored.”

“Therefore, H₂So₃ It may persist in the atmosphere long enough to affect chemical reactions.”

“The observed yields were somewhat higher than theoretically expected.”

According to related model simulations, about 8 million tons of H₂So₃ They form every year all over the world.

“In this pathway, the mass of H increases by about 200 times.₂So₃ Sulfuric acid (H₂So₄“It produces carbon dioxide (CO2) from dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere,” said Dr Andreas Tilgner and Dr Eric Hofmann from the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research.

“The new results may contribute to a better understanding of the atmospheric sulfur cycle.”

Team paper Published in the journal Applied Chemistry.

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Torsten Berndt others2024. Gas-phase production of sulfurous acid (H)₂So₃) floats in the atmosphere. Applied Chemistry 63(30):e202405572;doi:10.1002/anie.202405572

Source: www.sci.news

Could novelists concerned about the rise of AI be deemed classist and ableist? | Alwa Mahdawi

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

P
Think about artificial intelligence (AI) for a second. AI may not have emotions yet, but if it did, you’d be devastated by all the bad things people say about it. All it’s going to do is take our jobs and potentially destroy the world, yet people can’t stop being mean to it.

Evidence 1: A recent dispute with the organization behind National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an annual challenge to write a manuscript in one month. In a recent statement, NaNoWriMo wrote that it does not explicitly endorse or condemn methods of writing “including the use of AI.” Furthermore, “a blanket condemnation of artificial intelligence carries classist and ableist overtones…Questions about the use of AI are linked to questions about privilege.”

Um… what is it? AI is Working class Or did someone in management create ChatGPT and use the rhetoric of social justice to encourage them to defend the technology? Accused The act of stealing from artists and writers (training yourself with their work without compensation) is now The rich are richerThis strange statement Full of anger Four members of NaNoWriMo’s writers committee resigned in protest. When she resigned, bestselling author Maureen Johnson Encouraged other writers “Be careful: your work on their platform will almost certainly be used to train an AI.”

NaNoWriMo attempts damage control. A statement was issued Last week, the group said that the original wording was unclear (not ideal for a writing group) and that the group “does not believe that people who have concerns about AI are classist or ableist.” But many writers still seem wary of both the group and AI.

That should be enough. I am by no means anti-AI. It is clearly inappropriate to categorically condemn anything (apart from things like genocide). I believe that, properly guided, AI can enhance human creativity and improve society for everyone. On the other hand, I think the future of AI is in the hands of sociopathic technocrats who put profit first. We are currently in a “choose your own adventure” scenario with AI, and now it seems we are choosing the dystopian ending.

Arwa Mahdawi is a columnist for the Guardian.

Do you have any comments on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to email your response of 300 words or less for possible publication in our Letters section, please click here.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Researchers map clouds on Mars

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

The image is Mars Cloud Map Captured High resolution stereo camera (HRSC) Equipment On ESA's Mars probe “Mars Express”.

Leech waves on Mars are created when wind encounters an obstacle and builds up on the “leeward” or leeward side. Image courtesy of ESA / DLR / FU Berlin.

Mars Express's elliptical orbit allows the HRSC camera to observe the surface from a low altitude to map the planet at the highest possible resolution, but also to capture observations at a lower resolution from a higher altitude, covering a much larger portion of the surface in a typical edge-to-edge field of view.

These high altitude observations are ideal for observing Martian atmospheric phenomena.

More than 20 years have passed since the launch of the Mars Express mission, and a vast amount of image data on Martian atmospheric phenomena has been accumulated, which has great potential for scientific applications.

“Martian clouds are as diverse and fascinating as those seen in Earth's skies, but they also have some features that are unique to the Red Planet,” said Dr Daniela Tyrsch, researcher at the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

“One of my favorite phenomena is the beautiful 'cloud street' – a linear line of fleecy clouds that form around the rise of the giant volcano Tharsis Mons and the lowlands of the Northern Hemisphere during the Northern Hemisphere spring and summer.”

“They are similar to cumulus clouds on Earth, but form under different atmospheric conditions.”

“Impressive dust clouds stretching hundreds of kilometres have also been observed, a phenomenon that is fortunately not experienced on Earth.”

Dust plays a major role in the Martian atmosphere and climate.

Rare upwelling events can cause beige, dusty clumps to drift through the planet's atmosphere.

Large differences in temperature and air pressure during certain seasons can create stronger than normal winds and kick up large amounts of dust from the Martian surface.

The dust cloud rising from the summit of the giant volcano resembles an eruptive cloud, even though it is no longer active.

Large, swirling dust storms and cyclones are also observed near the Martian north pole every year.

Studying these phenomena is crucial for scientists to understand the Martian atmosphere and air mass circulation.

Rolling “gravity clouds” are one of the most common formations on both Mars and Earth.

They are found in the mid-latitudes of both hemispheres in winter, as well as over the Tharsis volcanic plateau in the Southern Hemisphere winter.

Lee waves are a special type of gravity cloud that can accumulate on the lee side of ridges, mountains, and other obstacles, forming repeating ridges.

Some of the cloud types studied are specific to certain locations and seasons, but there are also clouds such as “crepuscular clouds” that appear in the early morning at any time and any place throughout the year.

The new atlas provides valuable insight into the physics of clouds and storms, their appearance, and when and where they form.

This knowledge will not only help us better understand the dynamics of Mars' atmosphere and climate cycles, but will also be useful in studying the climates of other planets, such as Earth and Venus.

“ESA has extended the Mars Express mission until at least 2026, which will allow us to continue to enrich the database and further our understanding of the Martian atmosphere,” Dr Tilsch said.

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Daniella Tirsch others2024. Clouds and storms captured by HRSC – a catalog of Martian atmospheric phenomena. EPSC Abstract 17, EPSC2024-44; doi: 10.5194/epsc2024-44

Source: www.sci.news

Research shows new medication similar to Ozempic results in 13% reduction in body weight

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Weight-loss medications like Ozempic and Wegovy have been under discussion for some time, but new research suggests there may be better alternatives. Enter Amicretin, a novel weight-loss treatment available in pill form rather than injection.

In the initial human trials of this new weight loss medication, the developer Novo Nordisk A/S (the company behind Ozempic) saw promising results: participants taking Amicretin lost an average of 13.1 percent of their body weight over a 12-week period.

So, how does this new weight loss pill function? Amicretin is a dual-acting drug that emulates the effects of two hormones crucial in weight loss: amylin and glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), which help curb hunger and regulate appetite.

Published in the journal Diabetology, the study compared average weight loss in three groups with BMIs between 25 and 39.9 who did not have diabetes.

By the end of the 12-week study, subjects taking two 50 mg tablets of Amicretin lost 13.1% of their body weight, compared to 10.4% in those taking one 50 mg tablet. In contrast, the placebo group only lost an average of 1.1% of their body weight throughout the study.

Compared to other weight loss drugs, a recent study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that patients taking another weight-loss drug, Maunjaro, lost 5.9% body fat in 3 months, while those on Ozempic saw a decrease of 3.6%.

“The difference from injectable treatments is significant,” states obesity expert Christopher Clemmensen. “The dual mode of action offers promise, making Amicretin a valuable advancement for Novo Nordisk.”

While weight-loss drugs show promise in combating obesity worldwide, further confirmation awaits larger trials on individuals with chronic conditions. Professor Navid Sattar emphasizes the importance of developing safe and accessible medications for the millions suffering from obesity.

Excitement surrounds this early-stage study of a novel oral weight-loss medication combination due to its rapid effects on body weight.

About our experts

Associate Professor Christopher Clemmensen leads the Clemmensen Group at the University of Copenhagen, studying biological weight regulation and developing obesity treatment strategies. His research appears in respected publications such as Natural Metabolism and Molecular Metabolism.

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Source: www.sciencefocus.com

Fish use mirrors to assess their size and determine their likelihood of winning a confrontation

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Bluestreak Cleaner checking himself out in the mirror

Osaka Metropolitan University

Before deciding whether to fight another fish, wrasse look at their own reflection in the mirror to gauge their size.

Blue Streak Cleaner Lass (Loveroid) are astonishingly bright. This finger-sized coral reef fish is the first to pass the mirror test, a common assessment of whether an animal can recognize its own body and not another animal in a mirror. Researchers discovered that these wrasses use their own reflection to build an image of their own body size and compare it to others.

beginning, Taiga Kobayashi Researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan conducted an experiment to see if fish were willing to attack. They held up images of different wrasses, each 10 percent larger or smaller than the real fish, against the glass wall of an aquarium. Regardless of the size of the model fish in the photo, the territorial wrasses put up a fight.

The researchers then repeated the test with additional mirrors, and the fish saw their own reflection in the mirror, but when the researchers held up pictures of larger or smaller wrasses on the glass plate, the fish chose to fight only the smaller rivals.

“This was unexpected, as this fish has always been known to be aggressive towards rivals, regardless of its size,” Kobayashi says.

Because the tanks are partitioned, the wrasses can't see both themselves and pictures of rival fish at the same time, so the scientists think the fish must be comparing the pictures to a mental approximation of their own size.

How did wrasses develop this ability, given that they evolved in an environment without mirrors? In both the lab and in the wild, it's advantageous for fish to know the size of their opponent before fighting, Kobayashi says. In other words, the fish were smart enough to use the mirror as a decision-making tool.

topic:

Source: www.newscientist.com

Review: I Am Your Beast – A Fast-Paced Gaming Experience Comparable to Rambo

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

H
arding and Birkin may sound like law firms, but these two have a long history in the battlefield. Harding was a brilliant special forces operative who could handle any job, no matter how bloody. Birkin was Harding’s handler, and now he’s trying to bring him back for one last job. Harding has long ago hidden away in the woods to start a new life, but can Birkin chase him out at gunpoint? How far will they go? And with the two lost in the wilderness together, who is really chasing who?

That’s the engrossingly sleazy premise of Strange Scaffold’s latest action game, I Am Your Beast. What follows is not so much Rambo as an exploration of the way he’s become ingrained in our memory – the trees, the traps, the body counts. Strange Scaffold is known for making hectic, unrelenting games at a hectic, unrelenting pace. I Am Your Beast is another masterpiece of agility and efficiency. Playable in three hours at a stretch, this first-person shooter finds you constantly outgunned with firearms, but with infinite wit. Even the longest of the game’s “micro-sandbox” missions is over in 90 seconds, and you’ll be done before you have time to acknowledge the fact that the level names all sound like Jack Reacher novels – Late Shift, Breakdown, On Your Six.

I am your beast. Photo: Strange scaffolding

It all works extremely well: the beautifully streamlined design allows for fast first-person movement, having you ducking through roots one moment and leaping between the branches of a treetop canopy the next, while the sandbox approach to action sees you grabbing an enemy’s weapon, using it until it runs out of ammo, and hurling it at a nearby target to deliver the final blow, without having to be slowed down by tedious reloads.

There are elements of seminal first-person action games like Mirror’s Edge and SuperHot echoing this, but I Am Your Beast remains entirely its own thing. It has a speedrunner-like pacing, but the idea is that the simplest of mission structures, when combined with feel-good generic fiction, can really pump up the action. Simply fire up three laptops, target five satellite dishes, and kill everyone you come across. The objectives loop, but they add up to infinite lives in the game’s compact, complex arenas. A short health bar and a repetitive structure of attacking then disappearing behind the trees always make you feel like you’ve made a good getaway.

What makes I Am Your Beast thrilling is the vivid, well-chosen details. Grab the nearest herb and heal yourself on the spot. Let your enemy’s invincible attack helicopter wipe out hordes of enemies while sparing collateral damage. Kick people into ravines or jump on their heads to kill them. Every encounter is a chance to keep up the rhythm of carnage as inventively as possible, while increasingly frantic radio chatter from your enemies narrates the bloody and gore-splattered scenes as if they were commentating on a gruesome Olympics.

In fact, that emotion is at the heart of it all: Beneath the smoke and spent shells, I Am Your Beast is a reimagining of playground warfare as sport. On this forest battlefield, you perform deeds that are frighteningly good, and if you don’t get it right the first time, you’re one step closer to perfection.

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Source: www.theguardian.com

Sony reveals new PlayStation 5 Pro console priced at £700

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Sony has officially announced the PlayStation 5 Pro console after months of speculation. This updated version of the current generation console boasts improved tech specs, a 2TB solid-state drive, and a price of £699/$699. The release date is set for November 7th, with pre-orders starting on September 26th.

Compared to the Digital Edition PlayStation 5 priced at £390, the PlayStation 5 Pro comes at a higher cost of £699. It’s a digital-only console, so if you want to utilize Blu-ray discs, you’ll need to purchase a separate Blu-ray player for an additional £100.

The PlayStation 5 Pro features an upgraded GPU with 67% more compute units, 28% more system memory, and enhanced graphics rendering for games. Sony claims these improvements result in a 45% boost in performance for games that support the updated machine, along with support for advanced ray tracing and 8K modes.

Games optimized for the upgraded hardware will be labeled “PS5 Pro Enhanced”, including first-party titles like Horizon Forbidden West and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. Third-party games such as Alan Wake 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Shadows will also offer Pro enhancements.

The PS5 Pro also promises AI-driven game upscaling for back catalog games and a feature called PS5 Pro Game Boost, enhancing visual performance for over 8,500 backward-compatible PS4 games.

Analysts are split on the PS5 Pro’s potential success, with some expressing concerns about its high price and the lack of new games or technology to accompany its release. It remains to be seen how Sony’s latest console update will perform in the market.

Sony PlayStation 5 Pro Photo: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Industry watchers are awaiting Microsoft’s response to the PS5 Pro and rumors of a portable Xbox console to compete in the handheld PC gaming market. With prices for these devices reaching £800, consumers may face tough decisions in the console market.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Britishcore: TikTok trend celebrates sausage rolls and Oasis, sparking interest in British culture!

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

When you think of British cultural exports in the 21st century, familiar examples like James Bond, Downton Abbey, and Adele might spring to mind.

But in the algorithm-driven world of TikTok, where a trend known as “Britishcore” has become one of the most sought-after movements right now, everyday aspects of British life are becoming a hot topic.

British Core is Cultural Terms At the turn of the decade it was used to depict rundown pubs, lonely traffic cones and other symbols of the bleakness of British life.

Today, it has expanded to include Trainspotting-inspired videos, lip-syncing from the stars of Twilight Nights, and a satirical celebration of the Oasis reunion.

TikTok points to growing interest in British fashion, comedy, and travel on the platform as evidence of a renewed interest in British culture and its typically satirical take on it.

The trend has proven so popular that even international content creators are joining in, eager to show just how Britishcore their content is.

One notable example is American DJ The Dare. A jokey video of himself At Paddington Station, Ewan McGregor’s opening monologue from Trainspotting plays, with Born Slippy from Underworld playing in the background.

The Dare posted the video, which has been viewed 245,000 times, with the slogan “British Max”.

The Dare filmed themselves in Paddington bearing the slogan “British Max”, set to Ewan McGregor’s opening monologue from the film Trainspotting and a soundtrack of Underworld’s “Born Slippy”.
Photo: Theo Wargo/Getty Images via NYFW: The Shows

Another video saw US cinema staff lip-synching to a clip of Gemma Collins from the film The Only Way is Essex, while an Australian radio host posted promoting an Oasis reunion, which has been viewed 3.7 million times.

In one TikTok US content creator @the_quivey10 has compiled a list of things he’d like to do if he were in the UK, including everyday activities made popular on Britishcore TikTok, like doing a “cheeky Tescoran” and getting a Greggs sausage roll.

TikTok said it has seen double-digit increases in posts using the hashtags #ukcomedy, #ukfashion, and #uktravel since January, and that the #OasisReunion video has been viewed more than 100 million times in the past two weeks.

“This summer, British pop culture exploded onto the global stage,” said Louisa McGillicuddy, TikTok’s UK trends expert. “From the Brat phenomenon to the excitement over the Oasis reunion… TikTok communities both in the UK and internationally have embraced all things Britcore.”

American content creator @the_quivey10 has a bucket list for when he visits the UK, which includes eating a Greggs sausage roll.
Photo: Newscast/UIG/Getty Images

TikTok, which has more than one billion users globally, said interest in Britishcore content was reflected in the popularity of The Killers’ videos. Performing Mr Brightside in front of a London audience Collins and Gary Barlow, regulars on the Love of Hands TikTok account, posted the meme following England’s victory in the Euro 2024 semi-final. TikTok said a video of the Take That singer in a vineyard saying “this is my idea of how to spend a pretty lovely day” has become a popular meme overseas.

Alwyn Turner, a senior lecturer at the University of Chichester and an expert on British popular culture, said a common thread among some of Britain’s most popular cultural exports was a sense of “cheekiness”.

Turner also pointed out how increased interest in British culture could benefit the national mood.

“As a citizen, when you achieve fame in America, it gives you a sense of optimism. It makes the country feel alive and vibrant. There’s a certain feel-good feeling in Britain when the world wants you,” he said.

More Fall Trends on TikTok

The British singer and her eponymous band, whose hits include “Smooth Operator” and “No Ordinary Love,” haven’t released an album since 2010. But TikTok has maintained interest in Sade’s music, with clips featuring her songs up 63%.

The singer’s looks have also become popular on the platform. 1 mood board clip The video has garnered nearly 5 million views, and the hashtag #sadegirl has also recently become popular on the platform.

A combination of travel trends and aesthetic sensibility has made the Northwestern United States popular on TikTok. Short slideshow And there are video edits capturing the region’s atmospheric woodland scenery. An account dedicated to the trend, @throughthepnw, has 1.6 million followers.

Food is a popular genre on TikTok, and Filipino cuisine has been gaining attention recently, in part due to interest in “boodle fights,” communal banquets in which participants eat with their bare hands at tables covered with banana leaves.

This trend supports playing easy, non-violent video games such as “Wild Flowers,” which features farming and magic, and “Moonstone Island,” a game where you collect creatures. There is also a rise in “deskscapes,” which create a relaxing gaming environment with plants and indirect lighting.

Educational influencers in fields such as history and science are becoming increasingly popular on TikTok. One example is Katie Kennedy (@thehistorygossip), a content creator who takes an unconventional approach to history education. One title is “Were people having sex during the plague?”, another is “Why did these royals enjoy pure body odor?”. Although she only started on TikTok in January 2024 while in her final year of university, Kennedy’s page has over 500,000 followers and 13.9 million likes. Her debut book, History Gossip: Was Anne of Cleves a Beggar? And 365 Other Historical Curiositieswill be released on October 7th.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Security guards share their views on body cameras: The value of my uniform surpasses my own worth

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

circleIf you work security, stopping thieves can be an uphill battle. Most would-be thieves know that they have the same legal powers as security guards, so it can be hard to know who can use “appropriate force” when a teenager is trying to cut your bike lock right in front of you.

My shift coworker and I recently witnessed a heroin addict walking through the parking lot, repeatedly typing a shopping list into her phone of shampoo, school uniforms, and other low-quality items. She was part of a growing number of heroin addicts. Steal for othersIt focuses on things that people need but don’t want to pay for.

Shoplifting by telephone (aka “deliverobbing”) seems like a natural thing to happen when you consider the overall number of reported shoplifting cases. Store theft increased 37%But nobody wants to be caught in the act, and while the UK lacks police patrols to catch shoplifters, we make up for it in another area: cameras.

The UK is one of the most surveilled countries in the Western world. 13.21 cameras per 1,000 people That may seem Orwellian until you compare it with the estimated percentage for Chinese cities: 439.07.

It’s crazy to think that one of those cameras is now me. As a security guard who wears a body-worn camera (BWC) on his protective vest, I’m part of a growing demographic. This year alone, Pret a Manger staff members, BP and Greggs They are the latest employees to be issued BWCs to protect against misuse and theft.

Essex County Council Librarian Apparently “please be quiet” signs are no longer of any use: Rochdale crossing officers start recording the lollipop lady immediately after she crosses the road. Beaten Trying to stop traffic.

There’s a part of me that’s still in awe of this technology: when I was a kid in London in the ’80s, the only way to get on a screen was to walk past Rumbelows, an electronics store that happened to be promoting camcorders.

When I started working in security, I watched surveillance hardware evolve from bulky CCTV monitors like furniture to slim smart screens. Perhaps if frontline workers like me were issued BWCs, the conviction rate for shoplifting cases would be 100% today. 14% – Grow.

Recorded footage undoubtedly helped accelerate convictions after this summer’s riots, as far-right looters were quickly charged and convicted for stealing bath bombs (among other violent crimes) and begged for sympathy in court.

Some reports suggest the recent increase in shoplifting is due to gangs, not prices. account They were the “exploited middle class” who steal in the name of revenge against multinational corporations, then boast about the “big smile” they would give to security guards like me when we came out of the stores with our stolen goods.

I haven’t encountered any middle-class robbers yet, but it’s probably just a matter of time. Like many facilities that require security guards, my workplace is privately owned, but the doors are wide open. The premises are used as a public thoroughfare, and frontline workers like me can encounter everyone from users of the brain-damaging synthetic cannabinoid Spice to violent drunks and even mentally ill dropouts.

The recent surge in shoplifting is Attack on store clerk Given the abuse and attacks against frontline NHS staff, it is understandable why ambulance staff are issued with BWCs. 3,500 attacks In one year. This is despite the maximum prison sentence for attacking emergency workers being doubled in a 2020 consultation.

As a uniformed intermediary, I often have to call 999, and my boss has made it very clear to me when to press the record button. I can only press record following a “dynamic risk assessment”, but that can be difficult to implement during sudden outbursts of violence.

When my boss explained to me how BWCs worked — that they would always record but the footage would be dumped unless the “capture” tab was pressed — I became nervous: I feared that coworkers who forgot to press “stop” after a confrontation would furtively scroll through their phones or archive something inappropriate, like a nasty comment about their team leader.

Knowing when to press the button isn’t the only thing I fear about BWCs. My starting pay for my job is £11.44 an hour, the current minimum wage. The retail price of the camera I’m wearing is £534. I don’t even want to think about what would happen if I broke it. Sometimes I feel like the uniform is worth more than I am.

One group that doesn’t seem to care much about prices or digital overexposure are teenagers: the gangs we encounter are more interested in smashing windows and tearing open manhole covers.

If we approach them and say we are being recorded, they will film us with their cell phones and broadcast it to their followers, or they will threaten to stab us.

Perhaps only once the current backlog in the courts is cleared will the wider impact of BWCs be seen. Another London memory of the last century is the installation of CCTV in football grounds. Millwall’s 96-strong camera system has been used to track down Bushwhacker hooligan hangouts. “A well managed venue.”

If they can do it at the Den, they can do it downtown, and I don’t mind being the referee in the meantime, which makes sense considering I already wear black for work.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Footprints of a polar dinosaur discovered in Australia dating back 120 million years

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

The newly discovered theropod and ornithopod dinosaur footprints date back to the Early Cretaceous period, more than 120 million years ago, when Australia was still connected to Antarctica.

Melissa Lawley and Anthony Martin examine dinosaur footprints. Image by Ruth Showalter.

Dinosaur footprints from the Early Cretaceous period have been discovered in the Wonthaggi Formation south of Melbourne, Australia.

These include 18 footprints of medium to large theropods (0.8-1.9 metres waist height) and four footprints of small ornithopod dinosaurs (40-48 centimetres waist height).

“These numerous footprints provide the best evidence yet that polar environments once supported large carnivores,” said Professor Anthony Martin of Emory University.

“Large theropods probably fed on prey such as smaller dinosaurs, fish and turtles.”

“The hip height of this theropod would have been roughly the same as the height of a tall modern human.”

“Rocky coastal strata in Victoria, Australia, mark the spot where the ancient supercontinent Gondwana began to break up about 100 million years ago, separating Australia from Antarctica.”

“The polar environment at that time was a rift valley with a network of rivers running through it.”

“Although the average annual temperature during the Cretaceous period was higher than today, ecosystems experienced freezing temperatures and months of darkness during polar winters.”

“The Wonthaggi Formation has produced one of the best assemblages of polar dinosaur fossils in the Southern Hemisphere, but most of these fossils are small fragments of bone and teeth.”

“These pieces may have been carried to the buried site by heavy spring rains.”

“However, the discovery of so many theropod footprints confirms that a wide variety of dinosaurs did in fact live and walk on the surface where the bones were found.”

“Dinosaur footprints are actually more common here than we previously thought.”

Theropod footprints in the Wonthaggi Formation range in length from 18 to 47 cm (7 to 18.5 in).

They have relatively thin toes and sharp claw tips.

Ornithopod tracks vary in size from 10 to 18 cm (4 to 7 in).

The range of footprint sizes suggests that they may represent a mixture of juvenile and adult ornithopods and theropods.

“This suggests that these dinosaurs may have been nesting and raising their young in polar environments,” Prof Martin said.

This discovery paper of Archealinga, Australian Journal of Palaeontology.

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Anthony J. Martin othersPolar dinosaur footprints from the Wonthaggi Formation (Lower Cretaceous), Victoria, Australia, and their palaeontological significance. Archealinga, Australian Journal of PalaeontologyPublished online September 8, 2024; doi: 10.1080/03115518.2024.2392498

Source: www.sci.news

Toothed birds in the Cretaceous era primarily consumed gymnosperm fruits, not fish.

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Paleontologists found fossilized seeds of gymnosperms, relatives of today’s conifers and ginkgo trees, in the stomachs of two of the specimens. Longipteryx caoyangensis One of the oldest known birds, and also one of the strangest. This discovery shows that these birds ate fruit, despite the long-held assumption that they were fish eaters, and the more recent hypothesis that they ate insects with their incredibly strong teeth.

Skull Longipteryx caoyangensis Image courtesy of Xiaoli Wang.

Longipteryx caoyangensis It lived in what is now northeastern China during the Cretaceous period, about 120 million years ago.

First described in 2000, this ancient bird had a long skull and teeth only at the tip of its beak.

“Tooth enamel is the hardest substance in the body. Longipteryx” Human tooth enamel is 50 microns thick,” says Alex Clark, a doctoral student at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago.

“That’s the same thickness as the enamel of a large carnivorous dinosaur. Allosaurus It weighed 4,000 pounds. Longipteryx It was about the size of a blue jay.”

Scientists have previously found that the elongated skull of a kingfisher Longipteryx caoyangensis This means they hunted fish, but this hypothesis has been called into question by a number of studies.

“There are other fossil birds. Janornis “We know they ate fish because specimens have been found with preserved stomach contents, and fish tend to preserve well,” said Dr. Jingmai O’Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum.

“In addition, these fish-eating birds had many teeth throughout their beaks. Longipteryx “It only has teeth at the tip of its beak. That doesn’t make sense.”

but, Longipteryx caoyangensis In some cases, animals have been found with fossilized food still in their stomachs, allowing scientists to determine what they had been eating.

In the new study, paleontologists examined two new specimens of this species.

They found that the small round structures in the bird’s stomach Gymnosperms seed.

Since Longipteryx caoyangensis Since they lived in a temperate climate, it is unlikely that they ate fruit all year round.

The authors speculate that when fruit was unavailable, they may have had a mixed diet that included insects.

Longipteryx caoyangensis Part of a larger group of prehistoric birds called enantiornithines, the discovery marks the first time that scientists have found the stomach contents of an enantiornithine in China’s Jehol Biota, despite the discovery of thousands of fossils.

“It’s always puzzling not to know what they were eating, but this study points to a larger problem in palaeontology, which is that the physical characteristics of fossils don’t always tell the whole story about what animals were eating or how they lived,” Dr O’Connor said.

Since Longipteryx caoyangensis It apparently did not hunt fish, which raises the question of what it used its long, pointed beak and unusually strong teeth for.

“The thick enamel seems to be overpowering and weaponized,” Clark said.

“One of the most common skeletal parts that birds use in aggressive displays is the proboscis, or beak.”

“Using the beak as a weapon makes sense because it keeps the weapon away from the rest of the body and helps prevent injury.”

“Modern birds don’t have teeth, but there are some really cool little hummingbirds that have keratinous projections near the tip of their snouts. Longipteryx And they are using it as a weapon to fight each other,” Dr O’Connor added.

“Hummingbird beaks have evolved at least seven times, allowing them to compete for limited resources.”

of Survey results Published in the journal today Current Biology.

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Jinmai O’Connor others Direct evidence for frugivory in Mesozoic birds Longipteryx This is inconsistent with morphological indicators of diet. Current Biology Published online September 10, 2024; doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.08.012

Source: www.sci.news

Evacuations and power outages as wildfires rage in California and Nevada

Posted on September 10, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

California wildfires spread rapidly on Tuesday as firefighters faced strong winds, dry conditions, and a heatwave that pushed temperatures into triple digits in the Los Angeles area. However, cooler temperatures are predicted, and the fires may soon be contained.

Firefighters were also contending with blazes in western Nevada, just south of Reno, in extremely windy conditions. The National Weather Service issued red flag warnings for most of Nevada and parts of Southern California. Vast tracts of land were at risk of ignition.

The fires have added pressure to what has already been a busy season for firefighters across the Western U.S., burning nearly 7 million acres, more than double last year’s total. Over 24,000 firefighters were mobilized as of Tuesday.

Rhine fire spreads in Southern California

The Line Fire, burning in the foothills of the San Bernardino National Forest, poses a threat to approximately 65,600 structures. The fire had expanded to 26,400 acres as of Tuesday morning and was only 5% contained, according to CalFire.

Firefighters clean up burned trees and branches as the Rhine Fire spreads in San Bernardino, California, on September 8.
Qian Weizhong/VCG via Getty Images

The fire, which started on Thursday night in East Los Angeles, triggered evacuation orders across the area with 9,200 buildings, primarily homes, at risk, said Fire Information Officer Arnold Menjivar.

Menjivar expressed concern about the fire’s proximity to homes in Running Springs, the gateway to Big Bear Lake and Bear Mountain ski resorts.

“We’re very close,” Menjivar said, noting that firefighters were employing an aggressive response strategy but were wary of gusty winds in the canyon. “This is very challenging terrain.”

The Rhine fire led to the formation of its own weather system on Saturday, creating a fire cloud resembling a thunderstorm. Fire clouds emerge when a fire generates its weather pattern. The cloud produced around 280 lightning strikes, which hit the ground. According to the National Weather Service.

Pyrocumulus has also been observed at two other sizable fires in Southern California: the Airport Fire in Orange County and the Bridge Fire in Angeles National Forest.

A red flag warning surrounding the Rhine Fire area is set to expire at 8 pm on Tuesday night, and the arrival of cooler temperatures starting Wednesday “may lead to reduced fire activity and increased fuel moisture,” as per Cal Fire.

Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on Saturday due to the Rhine Fire, with fire officials announcing on Monday that the California National Guard would deploy four Black Hawk helicopters, other aircraft, and 80 soldiers to support the Modular Aerial Firefighting System. Approximately 2,100 firefighters were battling the blaze.

Evacuation Order and fire alerts were issued for several towns in the foothills east of California Highlands, outside San Bernardino, and along the route to Big Bear Lake. The Bear Valley Unified and Redlands Unified school districts canceled classes on Monday and Tuesday due to the fires.

More fires rage in Southern California

Hot, dry weather has fueled additional fires in the Southern California hills, prompting further evacuations.

The Airport Fire erupted on Monday afternoon. A 7-acre forest fire broke out in Trabuco Canyon, Orange County, south of Los Angeles. Within hours, the fire had spread to an estimated 5,400 acres, as reported by the Orange County Fire Department. By Tuesday morning, the fire had expanded to 9,000 acres, stated the fire department.

The fire was initially believed to have originated near an airfield used by RC aircraft enthusiasts. The website for the local flying club, Trabuco Flyers, mentioned that Remotely The controlled aircraft was in flight when the fire broke out..

As a result of this fire, Evacuation warnings were issued for Robinson Ranch and Trabuco Plateau, along with other nearby communities.

Smoke rises from an airport fire in Rancho Santa Margarita, California, on Monday.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

Meanwhile, the Bridge Fire ignited on Saturday in Angeles National Forest east of Los Angeles. By Tuesday morning, the fire had grown to over 3,800 acres and remained 0% contained. Residents from north of San Antonio Dam to Mount Baldy Resort, Other communities.

Dangerous conditions in the Sierra Nevada foothills

Windy, dry conditions have put firefighters on high alert near Reno, Nevada. The Davis Fire has charred nearly 5,600 acres and is currently 0% contained. As stated in a status update on Tuesday.

The fire Davis Creek Regional Parkbroke out just south of Reno on Saturday, burning substantial timber and brush, causing damage to at least 14 structures, road closures, and evacuations for approximately 12,000 to 14,000 people.

The fire also resulted in power outages, leaving 17,000 customers without electricity on Saturday. About 3,000 customers in Washoe County, Nevada, were still without power as of Tuesday morning. Power outage.Us.

Over 400 personnel are actively combating the blaze. El Dorado County Fire Department video Footage shared on social media depicted intense flames engulfing the densely wooded mountains and thick smoke clouding the sky.

Actor Jeremy Renner is among the community members affected by the Davis fire, and on Sunday, he shared an Instagram Story showing a massive plume of smoke billowing from the mountain. People Magazine Reportedly, he posted additional photos on Tuesday showcasing firefighters in action and a plane releasing pink fire retardant.

Tuesday marks the final day of high temperatures for the most at-risk areas burning in Nevada and Southern California.

A cold front from the Pacific Ocean is expected to lower temperatures by 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit in Southern California on Wednesday.

A cold front is also anticipated to move into the Reno area on Wednesday, which may not necessarily benefit the fires as it could bring stronger winds.

In areas prone to gusts, mountaintop winds could reach 50 mph. As per the National Weather Service forecast:.

Source: www.nbcnews.com

Uncovering the Secrets of Dinosaurs: An Interview with David Horn on the Impact of New Technology

Posted on September 10, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

New Scientist. Website and magazine featuring science news and long-form articles covered by expert journalists on developments in science, technology, health and the environment. — Paul Riding/Joseph Woodhouse

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for around 180 million years. But fossils that are at least 65 million years old are incredibly hard to decipher, so we know very little about what these iconic prehistoric creatures lived. Finding out more has long seemed impossible, but not anymore.

Over the past few decades, new techniques and new specimens have provided previously unimaginable insights into the behavior and ecology of dinosaurs. Combined with insights from modern animals, this has finally enabled paleontologists to understand dinosaur biology, from parental care, migration, and hunting styles to communication, sociality, and combat.

David Horne is one of the researchers trying to find out more about life during the time of the dinosaurs: the paleontologist at Queen Mary, University of London, is soon to publish a book about his latest findings. Revealing dinosaur behavior: What they did and how we know. New Scientist From mobile herbivores and semi-aquatic predators to why ostriches are problematic for understanding which dinosaurs doted on their young, here’s some of what’s been discovered so far.

Collin Barrass: Some of the biggest dinosaurs were Diplodocus or BrachiosaurusFor example, dinosaurs were not at all similar to living animals, so how do we figure out how they behaved?

David Horne: One of the most important things we can do as paleontologists is to better utilize our knowledge of the biology and behavior of modern animals. Mouth shapes are a good example. People with small mouths usually target nutritious food, such as shoots and leaves, one by one. If…

Source: www.newscientist.com