Kakapo (Strigops habroptilus) is a species of flightless parrot endemic to New Zealand.
Kakapo (Strigops habroptilusImage courtesy of Jake Osborne.
“Our research has prompted us to rethink our native fauna,” said Dr Paul Schofield, from Canterbury Museum.
“Many species that were thought to be iconic natives of New Zealand – the classic example being the takahe – are now known to be relatively recent species that arrived from Australia only a few million years ago.”
In their study, Dr Schofield and his colleagues focused on the so-called St Bathans Fauna, a collection of more than 9,000 specimens from 33 palaeontological sites and individual deposits near the village of St Bathans in Central Otago, New Zealand’s South Island.
These sites, once the bed of a large prehistoric lake, provide the only significant insight into non-marine life in New Zealand from 20 million years ago (the Early Miocene).
Rare creatures in the St Bathans fauna include: Hercules’ Unexpected a giant parrot that scientists have named Squawkzilla, two mysterious mammals, flamingos, a three-metre crocodile, a giant horned turtle, and a giant bat.
“Twenty-three years of excavations at St Bathans have changed our ideas about the age of New Zealand’s fauna and the importance of some animals over others,” Dr Schofield said.
“For example, we previously thought that birds like kiwis and moas were the oldest representatives of New Zealand’s fauna.”
“We are now beginning to realise that the kakapo, New Zealand’s little wrens and bats, and even the odd freshwater limpet are the true ancient inhabitants of New Zealand.”
The authors conclude that this rare group of animals became extinct as a result of a dramatic drop in temperature over the past five million years or so.
“The work at St Bathans has transformed our understanding of the non-marine vertebrate fauna of New Zealand during the Early Miocene, around 20 million years ago,” Dr Trevor Worthy, from Flinders University, said.
“It’s incredibly exciting to be part of a project that continues to discover brand new things about what animals lived in New Zealand’s lakes, rivers, and surrounding forests at such a pivotal time in history.”
“Every year we find new specimens – amazing discoveries of new species that we never could have imagined when we first started working there.”
“The animals that lived in New Zealand 20 million years ago were very different to those found today,” said Dr Vanessa De Pietri, from the University of Canterbury.
“For example, there was another giant eagle that was not related to Haast’s eagle (Hieraethus Moulay)”
“We had a lot of pretty unusual songbirds, we had alligators and maybe even some small mammals that we call waddling mice.”
“Research is still ongoing to understand what it was exactly.”
This study paper Published in the journal Geobios.
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Trevor H. Worthy othersSummary of the Early Miocene St Bathans fauna of New Zealand. GeobiosPublished online August 6, 2024; doi: 10.1016/j.geobios.2024.03.002
This article has been adapted from an original release by Canterbury Museum.
The Hubble team has released a striking new photo taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of NGC 346, an open star cluster in one of our Milky Way galaxy’s closest neighbors.
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the open star cluster NGC 346, located about 210,000 light-years away in the constellation Sigurd. Image courtesy of NASA/ESA/C. Murray, Space Telescope Science Institute/Gladys Kober, NASA, and The Catholic University of America.
NGC 346 is located in the constellation Tucana and is about 210,000 light-years away.
Also known as ESO 51-10, Kron 39, and Lindsay 60, the star cluster was discovered on August 1, 1826, by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop.
NGC 346 is part of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is a satellite of the Milky Way galaxy.
The cluster was formed approximately 3 million years ago, has a diameter of 150 light years, and a mass 50,000 times that of the Sun.
“NGC 346’s hot stars are unleashing torrents of radiation and energy outflows that are eating away at the dense gas and dust of the surrounding nebula N66,” Hubble astronomers said in a statement.
“Dozens of hot, blue, high-mass stars shine within NGC 346, and the cluster is thought to contain more than half of the known high-mass stars in the entire Small Magellanic Cloud.”
The Hubble Space Telescope has previously observed NGC 346, but this new image shows the cluster in ultraviolet light, along with visible light data.
“Ultraviolet light helps us understand star formation and evolution, and Hubble is the only telescope capable of sensitive ultraviolet observations thanks to its sharp resolution and its location above the ultraviolet-blocking atmosphere,” the astronomers write.
“These particular observations were collected to learn more about how star formation shapes the interstellar medium – the gas distributed throughout seemingly empty space – in metal-poor galaxies like the Small Magellanic Cloud.”
“Elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are called ‘metals’, and the Small Magellanic Cloud has a lower metal content than most of the Milky Way.”
“This situation serves as an excellent example of a galaxy similar to those that existed in the early universe when there were few heavy elements to take up.”
Sony has made an announcement regarding its new PlayStation 5 shooter game “Concord,” which was released on August 23. The game will be taken offline just two weeks later, and refunds will be offered to all players who purchased it.
Concord, a team-based hero shooter similar to Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch, puts teams of five against each other in intense combat arenas. However, it turned out to be one of the year’s most high-profile launch failures with only a few hundred players on Steam and fewer than 25,000 copies sold, as reported by GameDiscoverCo Analyst.
In a statement on the PlayStation blog, Sony expressed gratitude towards Concorde fans and acknowledged the mixed feedback received. As a result, the decision was made to explore options, including taking the game offline from September 6, 2024, and halting sales while providing full refunds to players who bought the game on PS5 or PC.
Warner Bros. also faced a similar situation with their game Suicide Squad: Defeat the Justice League, which failed to meet player expectations. On the other hand, the squad shooter Helldivers II has been a huge success for Sony since its release, boasting over 12 million copies sold in the first three months.
It’s uncommon for a struggling multiplayer game like Concord to be pulled off shelves so quickly, as failed games like Evolve, Lawbreakers, and Paragon typically lasted around a year. The future of Concord remains uncertain, with no indication in the statement of whether the game will be permanently canceled or potentially resurrected at a later date.
Concord is a game that has been in development for around 8 years. Sony acquired the developer Firewalk Studios in 2023, along with other live service game developers, as part of their strategy to focus on long-tail multiplayer games for the PlayStation 5 platform.
Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is home to an ancient impact structure called the Groove System, the largest impact structure in the outer Solar System, whose impact would have had a major impact on Ganymede’s early history.
The distribution of grooves and the location of the center of the groove system are always shown on the hemisphere away from Jupiter (top) and on a cylindrical projection of Ganymede (bottom). Grey areas represent geologically new terrains that are devoid of grooves. Gutters (green lines) are only present in geologically older terrains (black areas). Image courtesy of Naoyuki Hirata, doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-69914-2.
Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system and has many unique features, including tectonic valleys known as grooves.
The grooves are the oldest surface features identified on Ganymede, as they are crossed by impact craters over 10 km in diameter. The grooves provide clues to the moon’s early history.
The trench is thought to be a fragment of a multi-ring impact basin structure similar to the Valhalla basin on Callisto and the Asgard basin.
The largest trench system lies across the Galileo-Marius region, the so-called Galileo-Marius trench system, which is the remnant of an ancient giant impact that radiates in concentric circles from a single point on Ganymede.
“Jupiter’s moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto each have interesting features, but what caught my attention were the grooves on Ganymede,” said planetary scientist from Kobe University. paper Published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“We know that this feature was created by an asteroid impact about 4 billion years ago, but we didn’t know how large that impact was or how it affected the Moon.”
First, Dr. Hirata noticed that the estimated location of the impact was almost exactly on the meridian farthest from Jupiter.
“Similarities with the Pluto impact that shifted the dwarf planet’s rotation axis, as seen through NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, suggest that Ganymede underwent a similar reorientation,” he said.
The asteroid that struck Ganymede was probably about 300 kilometers (180 miles) in diameter, roughly 20 times larger than the Chicxulub asteroid that smashed into Earth 65 million years ago, ending the age of the dinosaurs, leaving a temporary crater 800 to 1,000 miles (1,400 to 1,600 kilometers) across, according to the study.
Only an impact of this magnitude would be likely to shift the Moon’s rotation axis to its current position due to the change in mass distribution, regardless of where on the surface the impact occurred.
“We want to understand the origin and evolution of Ganymede and other Jupiter moons,” Dr. Hirata said.
“The giant impact must have had a major impact on Ganymede’s early evolution, but the thermal and structural effects of the impact on Ganymede’s interior remain largely unexplored.”
“We think that further research into the application of the internal evolution of icy moons could be done next.”
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N. Hirata. 2024. Giant impact on early Ganymede and subsequent reorientation. Scientific Reports 14, 19982. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-69914-2
The so-called i-motif is a knot-like DNA structure that forms in the nuclei of human cells and is thought to provide important genome control. Garvan Institute of Medical Research Other studies have used immunoprecipitation and next-generation sequencing to identify i-motif structures in human DNA.
Peña Martinez othersIn total, we observed 53,000 i-motifs across three human cell lines (MCF7, U2OS, and HEK293T). Image courtesy of Peña Martínez. others., doi: 10.1038/s44318-024-00210-5.
The I motif is a DNA structure that differs from the iconic double helix shape.
These form when runs of cytosine letters on the same DNA strand pair up with each other to form a four-stranded twisted structure that juts out from the double helix.
In 2018, scientists at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research were the first to successfully directly visualize i-motifs inside living human cells, using new antibody tools they developed to recognise and bind to the i-motifs.
The new study expands on these findings by using the antibody to identify the location of i-motifs throughout the genome.
“In this study, we have mapped more than 50,000 i-motif sites in the human genome that are found in all three cell types we looked at,” said Professor Daniel Crist from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, lead author of the study.
“This is a surprisingly high number for a DNA structure whose presence in cells was once a matter of debate.”
“Our findings confirm that the i-motif is not just an object of laboratory study, but is widespread and likely plays an important role in genome function.”
The researchers found that i-motifs are not scattered randomly, but are concentrated in important functional regions of the genome, including those that control gene activity.
“We found that the i-motif is associated with genes that are highly active at specific times in the cell cycle,” said lead author Cristian David Peña Martinez, PhD, also of the Garvan Medical Institute.
“This suggests that it plays a dynamic role in regulating gene activity.”
“We also discovered that i-motifs are formed in the promoter regions of cancer genes. For example, MYC Oncogenes encode one of cancer’s most notoriously ‘untreatable’ targets.”
“This opens up exciting opportunities to target disease-related genes through i-motif structures.”
“The widespread presence of the i-motif near these 'holy grail' sequences implicated in hard-to-treat cancers opens up new possibilities for novel diagnostic and therapeutic approaches,” said study co-author Sarah Kummerfeld, PhD, a researcher at the Garvan Medical Institute.
“It may be possible to design drugs that target the i-motif to affect gene expression, potentially expanding current treatment options.”
Christian David Peña Martinez othersi-motif structures are widely distributed in human genomic DNA. Embo JPublished online August 29, 2024, doi: 10.1038/s44318-024-00210-5
aAfter three years, over 100 issues, two parental leaves, two AI summits and a cycle of cryptocurrency booms and busts, this will be my last newsletter. It also marks the end of 11 years at The Guardian. My first day was the launch of the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 16 launches on September 9th. It’s been an eventful time.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been asking readers for questions and I’ve been bombarded with them. I apologize if I wasn’t able to answer all of your questions, but I’m so grateful to everyone who asked.
What was the most shocking thing you discovered in the TechScape study/report? – Alexandria Weber
In 2019, I received leaked internal TikTok moderation documents that revealed for the first time that the company had a written, global policy to enforce Chinese foreign policy on its platform. According to the leaks, the company censored videos that mentioned Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, and the banned religious group Falun Gong.
TikTok argued that the document was outdated at the time and had been revoked several months ago, replaced with new, more locally sensitive guidelines. As a sign of the direction the company was heading, it was a good sign. But the leak remains grounds for concern to this day that the company may not be all that independent from the Chinese government.
Computer Scientist Ray Kurzweil He says that within 20 years, we will have the ability to replicate the human mind with a computer.including all memories, Their personalities and Consciousness. Do you think this claim is credible? – David
Kurzweil’s “singularity” has been around 20 years into the future for the past 30 years, so I don’t see much reason to attach much importance to his predicted date, but my bigger issue with his predictions is that the order has changed somewhat over the last few years.
The traditional singularity theory holds that computers will continue to get faster and faster until they are finally fast enough to mimic the brain, at which point uploading will become possible. This is because AI will continue to become more and more powerful, eventually AI Solving the problem of uploading human brains.
In that vision of the future, brain uploading will only be possible after a superintelligent AI has already been created and remade the world. That seems like an odd thing to focus on.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a U.S. Senate hearing. Photo: Brendan Smiarowski/AFP/Getty Images
Do you think Facebook and Google have peaked?and slowly but inevitably slide towards relative insignificance? – Bernie
Never say never. Companies are constantly reinventing themselves. Of course, the tech industry is the best example of this. Apple almost lost its leading position in the 1990s, but has since made a remarkable comeback, from the iMac to the iPhone. Meta and Google are both competing to assume leadership positions in AI, which could once again make them some of the most important companies on the planet.
But I agree with the premise of the question: excitement and attention around technology is shifting, and Google and Meta’s existing businesses are on the downside of that shift. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Google Search will continue to make money for the foreseeable future, but none of them are at the exciting forefront of their industries anymore.
And, of course, it’s hard not to peak when your company is the fourth or sixth largest in the world – there’s only so much room to “rise” further.
Where is the smartphone going from here? How can new smartphone models differentiate themselves from other models? – John Brown
The boring but true answer is that foldable phones will steadily fall in price and improve in quality until hardware design creativity suddenly blossoms again. Samsung has led the way with two approaches: the clamshell-style Flip, popular around the time of the Olympics, and the folio-style Fold. The screen technology is still not perfect—there’s a noticeable bump in the middle of the unfolded phone—and prices range from high to eye-wateringly expensive, but the devices are the only truly novel design the industry has seen in the past decade.
Then, in a year or two, Apple will release a foldable phone and everyone will know it exists.
The atmosphere surrounding technology seems to have changed dramatically over the last five years or so. There seems to be more anxiety about how technology will develop. Society is deteriorating, and few people are optimisticDo you think the industry can overcome it? – Ido Vock
I think the tech industry is in a very similar place to where the finance industry was 15 years ago. It will continue to attract smart, talented people because the work is interesting and the pay is good, but the atmosphere has clearly changed. I don’t think the industry can turn back the clock, but I wonder how much it needs to. Money solves a lot of problems, and it’s better to be rich than to be optimistic.
The real question for me is whether these changes in technology threaten to spill over into widespread skepticism about the whole notion of science and technology improving the world. I hope not. I remain fundamentally optimistic about human progress and think some of the upcoming breakthroughs in areas like health, green energy, and even space flight will be exciting.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Photo: Nintendo
The Greatest Game of All Time (And Why It’s the Best) Soulsborne)? – Chris M
For those unfamiliar, Soulsborne games are a genre created by developer FromSoftware and its director Hidetaka Miyazaki, characterized by a punishing difficulty curve, an indirect narrative structure, and a tone that can be memorably summed up as “a goddamn little man snickering at you from behind a locked door.” I personally have a soft spot for the series’ Bloodborne, which released on PlayStation 4 in 2015, but I’ve just spent 50 hours playing the latest Soulsborne entry, Elden Ring, and it’s fantastic.
But the greatest game of all time is still The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Six years on from the release of the Switch and the console’s defining launch title, nothing has yet surpassed that game, not even its perfect sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. That said, Elden Ring is a great game for adults who feel embarrassed about playing an all-ages title, but it does have a bit of a goth Zelda about it.
If I continue any more I’ll have to co-brand my last newsletter with Pushing Buttons, so I’d like to stop here.
During the time you’ve worked in this role, what’s the best example of where technology has made a real, valuable, positive difference to the world? – Steve Parks
In my professional life, the answer is undoubtedly machine transcription. It’s not flashy, but being able to generate imperfect real-time transcripts from recorded interviews is truly transformative for reporting, speeding up the process of turning an idea into a published news story by hours.
More broadly, I think the rise of machine translation is a similar answer. These tools have improved slowly and steadily over the past 20 years, to the point where a significant portion of humanity is now able to communicate with one another in a basically intelligible way, in near real time. One of the most interesting consequences of this is that, at least in the short term, nothing has actually changed: language ability is still valuable, people still consume content primarily in their own language or that has been professionally translated, and online communities have not consolidated into one giant global conglomerate.
Maybe it will be. Or maybe this science fiction-turned-reality technology will continue to be useful mainly for making my holidays more comfortable and for reading funny Bluesky posts from Japan.
What’s next? Thank you to all 17 readers
After 11 years at The Guardian, I’m not jumping right into another job and will be taking six weeks off. In the meantime, you can keep in touch with me on these unconventional social networks: Blue Sky or Backlog; I don’t plan on returning to writing a weekly newsletter anytime soon, but I do plan to post occasional round-up articles if you’re interested in occasional updates on where I’ve posted articles. My dormant Substack.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting so many of you TechScape readers over the years, and thank you for reading, emailing, sharing your stories, and continuing to support me. I have some great writers who will be taking over for me.
circleNow that summer is over and the skies are starting to turn grey in preparation for six months of rain, you might be thinking more seriously about video games. September and October are when we see some of the biggest releases of the year, so you’ll likely be spending a lot of evenings hiding from the world while playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 or Mario Party Jamboree. If your gaming setup is starting to get a little stale and you’re looking to give it a serious seasonal upgrade, here are some suggestions.
tv set
If you have a PS5 or Xbox Series X, you’ll need at least a 4K TV, but also a model that supports a 120Hz refresh rate, which provides super smooth and fluid picture quality in compatible games. Your TV will need at least one HDMI 2.1 port, and you’ll need a 2.1 HDMI compatible cable to connect your console.
Support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting is also a must. This is a technology that produces more detail and color in both high and low brightness. Confusingly, there are multiple versions. HDR10 is the basic version supported by both PS5 and Xbox. However, if you have a Microsoft machine, you’ll also get Dolby Vision, which is basically an improved version of HDR. These days, almost all TVs have a special game mode or game optimizer that turns off unnecessary image processing effects to reduce input lag and improve response times, but it’s still worth checking exactly what the TV you’re thinking of buying offers in this regard.
Recommended: LG C4 Series
LG C4 Series OLED TV Photo: LG
I recently tested one of these for a month and really liked it. The C4 is LG’s latest mid-range OLED set, with amazingly sharp images, vibrant colors, and support for Dolby Vision, HDR, and a 120Hz refresh rate. I tested it with a variety of titles, from Elden Ring to Helldivers 2, and they all looked beautiful. The Game mode is particularly good, allowing users to tweak the settings depending on the type of game they’re playing. You can even connect your PC and use it as a monitor, with a 144Hz option and support for Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync technologies that help maintain smooth frame rates when playing demanding action games. If it’s a bit too expensive, the Samsung Q80D series is a very good alternative, but it’s hard to beat the LG C4.
monitor
If you play on PC instead of console and want to update your monitor, you need to think about the three R’s: refresh rate (the number of frames the display can show per second, measured in Hz), resolution (the detail of the image, measured in pixels), and response time (the time it takes each pixel to react to a change in the image, measured in milliseconds). What you need depends on the type of games you play. If you like fast-paced shooters, refresh rate and response time are the most important factors. If you like graphically rich adventure games, resolution is a key consideration. For general play, look for a model with at least a 144Hz refresh rate, 1440p resolution, and a response time of around 5ms.
You should also think about what type of panel your new monitor uses (VA, TN, IPS, OLED, etc., each with their own pros and cons – here’s a good guide. here), HDR, Nvidia G-Sync, AMD FreeSync, and other technologies.
Recommended: This one is tough. I still have my 5 year old Acer Predator and it still performs great, but I also have the much newer Samsung Odyssey, LG UltraGear and Gigabyte Aorus and they’re all great. Acer, Dell and MSI all make very capable low cost displays.
Headset
What you’re looking for here is comfort and quality, especially if you’re going to play for long periods of time. We also recommend noise cancellation (if you’re playing in a noisy living room) and support for virtual surround sound technologies such as Dolby Atmos. This not only enhances the atmosphere of the game, but also helps if you’re playing an online shooter and want to hear where your enemies are coming from. A good, clear microphone is also essential if you want to chat with friends while you play. You should also consider whether you want a wired or wireless headset and whether the model is compatible with your console.
Prior to giving birth, the pregnant porbeagle shark was expected to give birth soon, when one of the two tracking tags attached to the shark by marine scientists resurfaced near Bermuda.
Surprisingly, the tag emerged much earlier than anticipated. It had been affixed to the 7-foot-long shark only 158 days prior, after conducting an ultrasound scan off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in October 2020. The tag was supposed to remain attached for about a year.
“Something seemed amiss,” stated Brooke Anderson, a shark researcher at Arizona State University during that time.
The second tag, which was designed to transmit a signal when the shark’s fin breached the surface, never sent a signal again.
Data collected from the retrieved “pop-off” tag revealed an unusual pattern: for the initial five months, the depth and temperature information appeared normal for this species, but then deviations started to occur.
“Unexpectedly, temperatures suddenly spiked and remained high even at depths of 600 meters,” recounted Anderson.
The diving patterns of the creatures also became peculiar.
Of the 11 porbeagle sharks that researchers tagged, eight were pregnant, including this one. John Dodd
“All the data pointed in one direction: she had been consumed,” remarked Anderson.
The researchers ascertained that the irregular readings from the tag were due to it having been inside another animal’s stomach for several days.
Their conclusions were detailed in a study published in the Frontiers in Marine Science journal, shedding light on the fact that porbeagle sharks are being preyed upon by much bigger animals.
Naming a few possible predators, the researchers narrowed down their suspects based on biological characteristics – the data didn’t align with a mammal like a killer whale, leading them to focus on warm-blooded sharks with some heat-generating capacity.
“The predator needed to elevate its body temperature above the ambient water, have the size to inflict damage on the porbeagle, and reside in the area of the predation,” explained Anderson.
The researchers inferred that a great white shark or mako shark likely devoured the pregnant porbeagle, temporarily swallowing the tag.
“Our estimation is that it was a mature female great white shark, possibly exceeding 15 feet in length,” disclosed Anderson.
Previously, the notion that porbeagle sharks might fall prey to larger creatures had not been considered, she added.
Originally, their team aimed to track pregnant porbeagle sharks during their gestation period and pinpoint where they typically give birth.
Across two Atlantic seasons, they located and tagged a total of 11 porbeagle sharks, hauling each one onto the boat, treating them with aerated seawater, and concealing their eyes with wet towels.
“We operated like a NASCAR pit crew,” described Anderson. Eight of these sharks were pregnant.
Their expectations didn’t encompass uncovering a profound deep-sea mystery.
Matt Davis, a marine resources scientist from the Maine Department of Marine Resources not involved in the research, acknowledged that the study’s conclusions were plausible.
This incident underscores the continued need for scientific exploration of mid-depth ocean life and predator-prey interactions, added Davis.
The porbeagle shark is categorized as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Overfishing activities began in the 1960s, causing a population decline of 75 to 80 percent by 2001, as per Anderson.
While the species is recuperating due to fishing regulations, their longer lifespan and lower reproductive rate mean a protracted recovery process.
“We must continue tagging and monitoring these sharks to understand the frequency of such incidents,” emphasized Anderson regarding the predation. “In an instant, this critically endangered species lost not just its essential breeding females, but all its developing offspring as well. It is crucial to grasp both the frequency and impact of such events.”
Their research could play a pivotal role in restoring a healthy shark population in the Atlantic, where sharks prey on sharks.
Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem recorded the natural “phee call” conversations between pairs of marmosets. They found that the marmosets use these calls to vocally address each other. Moreover, these non-human primates respond more consistently and accurately to calls directed at them.
Humans, dolphins, elephants, and marmosets are the only species known to vocalize names for other animals of their own species. Image credit: Oren others., doi: 10.1126/science.adp3757.
In the study, Guy Oren, a graduate student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his colleagues recorded natural conversations between pairs of marmosets and interactions between the monkeys and a computer system.
The researchers discovered that these monkeys use a “fee” call to address specific individuals.
Even more interesting, the marmosets were able to discern calls directed at them and responded more accurately when called.
“This discovery highlights the complexity of social communication between marmosets,” Omer said.
“These calls are not simply used to locate themselves, as previously thought. Marmosets use these specific calls to label and call to specific individuals.”
The authors also found that family members within marmoset groups use similar phonetic labels when calling different individuals and use similar phonetic features when encoding different names, which is similar to human use of names and dialects.
This learning appears to occur even among unrelated adult marmosets, suggesting that they learn both phonetic labels and dialects from other members of their family group.
Scientists think that the acoustic signatures may have evolved to help marmosets stay connected in dense forest habitats where visibility is often limited.
These calls allow primates to maintain social bonds and keep their groups cohesive.
“Marmosets live in small, monogamous family groups and care for their young together, just like humans do,” Omer said.
“These similarities suggest that they faced similar evolutionary social challenges as their early ancestors before acquiring language, which may have led to the development of similar ways of communicating.”
This study provides new insights into how social communication and human language have evolved.
“Our findings shed light on the complexity of social vocalizations in non-human primates and suggest that marmoset vocalizations may serve as a model for understanding aspects of human language and provide new insights into the evolution of social communication,” the researchers said.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Subaru Telescope, astronomers have discovered a merging pair of gas-rich galaxies that existed 12.8 billion years ago and housed a faint central quasar that may be the ancestor of some of the brightest and most massive quasars in the early universe.
Artist's impression of the quasars HSC J121503.42-014858.7 and HSC J121503.55-014859.3. Image courtesy of Izumi others., doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ad57c6.
Quasars are luminous objects that gained energy from matter falling into supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies in the early universe.
The most accepted theory is that when two gas-rich galaxies merge to form one larger galaxy, the gravitational interaction between the two galaxies causes gas to fall towards a supermassive black hole in one or both of the galaxies, triggering quasar activity.
To test this theory, Dr. Takuma Izumi of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan used ALMA to study the oldest known pair of close quasars.
The quasars, named HSC J121503.42-014858.7 and HSC J121503.55-014859.3, were discovered by the Subaru Telescope's Hyper Suprime-Cam.
These objects are very faint, about 10 to 100 times fainter than highly luminous quasars at the same redshift.
“It is located approximately 12.8 billion light-years away, corresponding to the 'cosmic dawn' era when the universe was only 900 million years old, making it the farthest such quasar pair on record,” the astronomers said.
“Because of their faintness, we thought these objects were in the pre-merger stage, before the supermassive black holes rapidly grow.”
“However, observations with the Subaru Telescope only provide information about the central supermassive black hole, and it remains unclear whether the host galaxy is destined to merge and ultimately grow into a luminous quasar.”
“As a next step, we used the ALMA radio telescope to carry out observations of the host galaxies of these quasar pairs.”
“The results were surprising: the observed distribution of interstellar material and the nature of its motions indicated that these galaxies are interacting with each other.”
“They are definitely on a path to merge into one galaxy in the near future.”
“Furthermore, calculations from observational data reveal that the total gas mass of these galaxies – about 100 billion times the mass of the Sun – is comparable to or exceeds the gas mass in the host galaxies of most luminous quasars, which have extremely bright cores.”
“This enormous amount of matter should easily trigger and sustain the post-merger burst of star formation and fueling of the supermassive black hole.”
“These discoveries therefore represent a significant achievement in identifying the ancestors of luminous quasars and starburst galaxies, the most luminous objects in the early universe, from various perspectives, including galactic structure, motion and the amount of interstellar material.”
Takuma Izumi others2024. Gas-rich galaxy merger harboring a low-luminosity twin quasar at z = 6.05: a likely progenitor of the most luminous quasars. ApJ 972, 116;doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ad57c6
A new genus and species of non-hadrosaur hadrosauroid dinosaur, Chienjiangsaurus chanshengi was identified from a specimen discovered in southwestern China in 2022.
Chienjiangsaurus chanshengi Image credit: Hai Xing/Sci.News.
Chienjiangsaurus chanshengi lived in China during the Late Cretaceous period, about 70 million years ago.
The 8-metre (26-foot) long herbivore Hadrosauroidea is a superfamily of ornithischian dinosaurs that includes the so-called duck-billed dinosaurs and their relatives.
“Hadrosauroids are a diverse and highly specialized clade of ornithischian dinosaurs whose fossils have been found in Early to Late Cretaceous deposits in Asia, Europe, America, Africa and Antarctica,” said paleontologist Dr. Hai Xin from the National Museum of Natural History of China, the Canadian Museum of Nature and the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, and his colleagues.
“Phylogenically, it is defined as the most inclusive taxon, Parasaurolophus but, Iguanodon It is noted for its duck-billed snout and complex skull dentition.”
“Since the early 20th century, hadrosauroids have been considered an important component of the terrestrial vertebrate fauna of the entire Cretaceous.”
“The fossil record of this group contains a large amount of loose elements, dozens of heavily articulated skeletons, egg and fetal material, and bone bed assemblages that produce soft-tissue impressions and footprints.”
“Within the hadrosauroidea, non-hadrosaur species form a paraphyletic group that reveals a transitional morphology from early-diverging iguanodonts to hadrosaurids.”
“Most non-hadrosaur hadrosaurids are found in Cretaceous Asia, especially in northern and central China, and in the Early Cretaceous Exhibits, Xu Wulong and Probactrosaurus and the Late Cretaceous Tanius, Gilmoreosaurus and Zhang Henglong has been recovered.”
“However, comparable material from the Cretaceous of southwestern China is extremely scarce and fragmentary.”
Incomplete, partially articulated skeleton Chienjiangsaurus chanshengi Collected in 2022 Positive Yang Layer Chongqing, southwest China.
“Chienjiangsaurus chanshengi is the second officially named hadrosauroid dinosaur discovered in South China. Nanningosaurus dassiensis” the paleontologist said.
This specimen represents a transitional morphology between hadrosauroid and non-hadrosauroid dinosaurs and enhances our understanding of the diversity and evolution of non-hadrosauroid dinosaurs.
“The age distribution of eight hadrosaurids is Chienjiangsaurus chanshengi. Phylogenetically, it corresponds to the apex of the Zhengyang Formation during the Santonian to early Maastrichtian period. Chienjiangsaurus chanshengi “Fossils found are probably limited to the late Late Cretaceous,” the authors say.
“Hierarchical clustering of 12 hadrosauroid dinosaur assemblages from Late Cretaceous deposits in Asia revealed strong correlations between the Zhongyang Formation and the Djadokhta and Barungoyot Formations in Mongolia, supporting contemporaneous exchange of dinosaur faunas across East Asia.”
Team paper Published in the journal on August 27, 2024 Cretaceous Research.
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Huy Dai others A new late-divergent non-hadrosaur hadrosauroid species (Dinosauria: Ornithopoda) from southwestern China: supports Late Cretaceous dinosaur fauna exchange across East Asia. Cretaceous Research Published online August 27, 2024; doi: 10.1016/j.cretres.2024.105995
Eric S. Neitzel Fireground Communications LLC/AdobeStock
Central Park Reservoir is one of the few places in New York City to get a good view of the clouds. Looking north from the reservoir’s edge, there’s a large gap between the buildings that lets you see the clouds rolling in from the harbor. Meteorologist Kara Lamb suggested we try our hand at cloud watching here.
At the time, the sky is full of fluffy cumulus clouds beneath a ceiling of altostratus. One of them looks a lot like a whale. But Lam, who studies clouds at Columbia University in New York, doesn’t think they’re so strange. “Clouds are fascinating because they’re cool to look at,” he says. “But I think about clouds in terms of climate” – understanding how the sunlight they reflect and the heat they trap beneath them affect the Earth’s temperature.
What the casual cloud watcher might not know is that clouds are the biggest unknown in predicting future climate change to determine how this balance will change in a warming world. If we double carbon dioxide from pre-industrial levels, will the world get a manageable 1.5°C warming or a hellish 4.5°C warming? The biggest source of this uncertainty is our lack of understanding of clouds.
But researchers are making progress. Lamb is looking at ice crystals in the clouds, which play a surprisingly large role in influencing the climate. Some researchers are using cloud chambers, and are planning to set up cloud chambers…
Stem cells are produced in the bone marrow and develop into different types of blood cells.
Katerina Conn / SPL/ Alamy
Human blood stem cells have been grown in a laboratory for the first time, which could dramatically improve how certain types of cancer are treated.
The lab-grown cells have so far only been tested in mice, but when injected into the animals, they resulted in functional bone marrow similar to levels seen after umbilical cord blood cell transplants.
Treating cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma with radiation and chemotherapy can destroy blood-forming cells in the bone marrow. A stem cell transplant means new healthy bone marrow and blood cells can grow. The umbilical cord is a particularly rich source of stem cells, but there is a limited amount they can provide, and the transplant may be rejected by the body.
The new method allows researchers to create stem cells from actual patients, eliminating supply issues and reducing the risk that the patient's body will reject the stem cells.
First, they transformed human blood and skin cells into so-called pluripotent stem cells through a process called reprogramming. “This involves temporarily switching on four genes, so that the patient's cells revert to an earlier stage of development that can become any cell in the body,” he said. Andrew Elefanti At the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne.
The second step is to turn the pluripotent cells into blood stem cells. “You start by making thousands of tiny, free-floating balls of cells, each containing a few hundred cells, and then you induce them to turn from stem cells to blood vessels to blood cells,” Elefanti says. This process, called differentiation, takes about two weeks and produces millions of blood cells, he says.
When these cells were then injected into mice that lack immune systems, they produced functional bone marrow in up to 50 percent of cases. That means they made the same cells that carry oxygen and fight infection as healthy human bone marrow, Elefanti says. “This unique ability to make all blood cell types over an extended period of time defines them as blood stem cells,” he says.
Abbas Shafi A researcher from the University of Queensland in Brisbane said the work was an “exciting step forward” towards new treatments for blood cancers. “It's never been done before and has great potential for the future.” But even once animal testing is complete, he said a lot of human research still needs to be done before the technique can be used in the clinic.
Simon Cohn Researchers at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, say a key advantage of their approach is that it can be scaled up to produce “an essentially limitless supply” of blood stem cells, but they add that the work is based on blood or skin cells, and success rates and blood cell diversity depend on the starting cell type.
“This suggests that treatments are inconsistent even at the preclinical stage in mice, and will need to be addressed before clinical trials in human patients,” he says.
Gold nuggets reside primarily in quartz veins, and the current paradigm holds that gold precipitates from hydrothermal and carbon dioxide-rich fluids due to changes in temperature, pressure, and/or fluid chemistry. However, the widespread occurrence of large gold nuggets is inconsistent with the dilute nature of these fluids and the chemical inertness of quartz. Quartz is the only abundant piezoelectric mineral on Earth, and the cyclical nature of the seismic activity that drives the formation of gold deposits means that quartz crystals within veins are stressed thousands of times. New research by scientists from Monash University, CSIRO Mineral Resources and the Australian Neutron Scattering Centre suggests that stress on quartz crystals may generate enough voltage to not only electrochemically precipitate gold from solution, but also accumulate gold nanoparticles.
Energy dispersive spectroscopy map of the sample studied by Voysey othersImage courtesy of Chris Voisey.
“Prized for their rarity and beauty, gold nuggets have been at the heart of gold rushes for centuries,” says Monash University geologist Chris Voisey.
“The standard explanation is that gold precipitates from hot, water-rich fluids that flow through cracks in the Earth's crust.”
“As these fluids cool and undergo chemical changes, the gold separates and becomes trapped in the quartz veins.”
“Although this theory is widely accepted, it does not fully explain the formation of large gold nuggets, especially considering the extremely low concentrations of gold in these liquids.”
Dr. Voysey and his colleagues tested a new concept called piezoelectricity.
Quartz, the mineral that typically contains these gold deposits, has a unique property called piezoelectricity, which means it generates an electric charge when subjected to pressure.
This phenomenon is already well known in everyday items such as quartz watches and barbecue lighters, where small mechanical forces generate large voltages.
What if earthquake stresses caused something similar to happen within the Earth?
To test this hypothesis, the researchers conducted experiments designed to replicate conditions that quartz might experience during an earthquake.
They submerged the crystals in a gold-rich liquid and used a motor to apply pressure to it, replicating the shaking of an earthquake.
After the experiment, the quartz samples were examined under a microscope to see if any gold had been deposited.
“The results were surprising,” said Professor Andy Tomkins, from Monash University.
“The stressed quartz not only electrochemically deposited gold on its surface, but also formed and accumulated gold nanoparticles.”
“Surprisingly, the gold tended to deposit on top of existing gold grains rather than forming new gold grains.”
“This is because quartz is an electrical insulator, while gold is a conductor.”
“Once the gold is deposited, it becomes a focus for further growth, effectively attaching even more gold to the gold particle.”
“Our findings provide a plausible explanation for why large gold nuggets form in quartz veins,” Dr Voysey said.
When the quartz is repeatedly compressed by an earthquake, a piezoelectric voltage is generated, causing dissolved gold to be reduced and precipitated from the surrounding liquid.
Over time, this process can accumulate large amounts of gold, eventually producing giant gold nuggets that fascinate treasure hunters and geologists.
“Essentially, the quartz acts like a natural battery, with the gold as its electrodes, slowly accumulating gold with each earthquake,” Dr Voysey said.
“This process may explain why large gold nuggets are frequently associated with quartz veins that form in earthquake-related deposits.”
“This new understanding of the formation of gold nuggets not only solves a long-standing geological mystery, but also highlights the interrelationships between Earth's physical and chemical processes.”
a paper A paper describing the results was published today in the journal Nature Chemistry.
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CR Voysey othersThe formation of gold nuggets due to earthquake-induced piezoelectric effect in quartz. National GeographyPublished on September 2, 2024, doi: 10.1038/s41561-024-01514-1
A replica of the “Welcome Stranger,” a 100 kg gold nugget discovered in Australia in 1869.
Ian Dagnall/Alamy
Earthquakes can create electric fields that attract gold dissolved in liquids pushed up from deep within the earth, causing gold nuggets to form in the quartz.
Giant gold nuggets are often associated with quartz, a ubiquitous but chemically inert mineral. The world's largest gold nuggets can weigh nearly 100 kilograms, but until now no one has been able to explain how such masses of precious metal formed.
“The mystery was how someone could create such a large nugget of gold in one place without any obvious chemical or physical traps,” he said. Chris Voysey At Monash University, Melbourne.
Voysey and his colleagues discovered a possible mechanism: applying pressure to the quartz creates a voltage that attracts gold dissolved in water.
The secret lies in the structure of quartz, Voysey explains. Quartz is the only abundant mineral whose crystals have no center of symmetry. This means that when these crystals are strained or stressed by seismic activity, their internal electromagnetic makeup changes, generating electricity. Electricity generated in response to mechanical stress is known as piezoelectricity.
Gold-bearing hydrothermal fluids rise up through fissures during seismic activity from the mid-to-lower crust, 15-20 km below the surface, but gold is so dilute that it would take the equivalent of five Olympic swimming pools of hydrothermal fluid to produce 10 kg of gold.
Voysey and his colleagues hypothesized that the piezoelectric properties of quartz would cause the gold to concentrate in nodules within the veins during repeated earthquakes. To test this idea, the team performed experiments in which they placed quartz crystals in a gold-containing solution and applied moderate pressure from an actuator.
Quartz samples that were not subjected to pressure did not attract gold, but samples subjected to force generated a voltage and attracted the metal. Some of the samples were coated with iridium to accentuate the piezoelectric response of the quartz and artificially mimic the expansion of seismic activity. In these samples, large gold flakes grew, over 6000 nanometers, compared to 200-300 nanometers in uncoated quartz.
Once gold starts to deposit on the quartz, it quickly attracts other gold, Voysey says. “Gold is a conductor, so gold in solution tends to deposit on top of existing gold,” he says. “It becomes like a lightning rod that attracts more gold.”
Activists are urging Uber and other ride-hailing apps to disclose data on their drivers’ workload to combat exploitation and reduce carbon emissions.
Analysis by Worker Info Exchange suggests that drivers for Uber and its competitors may have missed out on over £1.2 billion in earnings and expenses last year due to payment structures.
The report argues that these platforms are built on an oversupply of vehicles and the exploitation of workers, leading to financial struggles and debt.
Uber collects anonymized trip data in several North American cities and claims this covers around 40% of drivers’ miles before picking up passengers.
Despite Uber’s response that drivers earn money on other platforms during idle times, Worker Info Exchange maintains that better compensation and expense coverage could have resulted in an additional £1.29 billion industry-wide in 2023.
The report also highlights issues with monitoring drivers’ mileage, leading to potential exhaustion and safety hazards.
Similar concerns are raised about food delivery apps, with calls for more transparency in journey data.
Efforts in New York to limit vehicle licenses to support taxi drivers and reduce congestion have been noted, although recent changes exempt electric vehicles.
Uber’s carbon emissions in the UK are projected to surpass those of Transport for London, prompting calls for stricter control and transparency from regulators.
The ongoing debate around worker classification and rights in the gig economy is also highlighted, with promises from lawmakers to address issues of “false self-employment”.
Worker Info Exchange, founded by a key figure in the Uber Supreme Court case, aims to empower gig workers by providing more control over their data and decision-making processes.
Alzheimer’s disease is, understandably, one of the most feared diseases of old age. It robs people of their memories, places a tremendous strain on caregivers, and imposes a huge economic burden on both individuals and society. Tens of millions of people have already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and if predictions are correct, that number will more than double by 2050.
Until recently, it seemed there was no hope of averting this catastrophe, but rapid advances in medical science have made it realistic prospects that Alzheimer’s may be treatable and eventually eradicated (see “A new kind of vaccine could lead to Alzheimer’s eradication”).
The first of a new class of drugs is already creating buzz, but not necessarily for the right reasons. Last week, the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency approved the drug, called lecanemab. But NICE, the body that advises on whether new treatments are cost-effective, has made a provisional decision that taxpayers will not fund the drug in England. No decision has yet been made in the rest of the UK.
This is obviously a tough pill to swallow for Alzheimer’s patients and their families. But in the grand scheme of things, this is good news. Lecanemab is not a particularly effective drug. Its effects are modest, it has serious side effects, and it is expensive. But it does show that the causes of Alzheimer’s are now understood and treatable. This is further reinforced by the fact that the drug is also approved in the United States and Japan, but the European Medicines Agency has refused to approve it.
So the way is almost paved for the next wave of drugs to target the causes of Alzheimer’s, which could be ready around 2030. These are vaccines, not in the traditional sense of conferring immunity against an infection, but they work in essentially the same way, by stimulating an immune response against the misfolded proteins that cause the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. The first vaccines will be therapeutic, slowing or stopping the progression of Alzheimer’s, but the next generation will be preventative, preventing the onset of Alzheimer’s. Eventually, the only memory that will fade will be Alzheimer’s itself.
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft carried astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the International Space Station.
NASA/Johnson Space Center
update: A statement was sent to SpaceNews’ Jeff Faust.NASA said the sound had stopped and explained why: “The feedback from the speakers was the result of an audio configuration between the space station and Starliner,” NASA said. “The space station’s audio system is complex, with multiple interconnected spacecraft and modules, and it is common for noise and feedback to occur.” They added that the feedback had no technical impact to the crew or spacecraft operations.
The ill-fated mission to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has run into trouble once again. The two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, who only recently learned they would be staying on the ISS until at least February, began hearing strange noises coming from the Boeing spacecraft over the weekend.
“We’re hearing some strange noises coming from the speakers,” Wilmore told Mission Control in Houston, Texas, on August 31. Recorded by an enthusiast“We don’t know what caused it.”
Mission Control told Wilmore they would investigate the regular pulsating noise. New ScientistBoeing referred requests for comment to NASA, which did not immediately respond.
The Starliner spacecraft delivered Wilmore and Williams to the ISS on June 5, but a thruster failure and helium leak made the planned return trip with passengers deemed too risky.
The noise has puzzled space industry experts and mission control. “It’s very strange,” one person said. Martin Barstow Professor at the University of Leicester in the UK. “I’ve never been on a spacecraft, so I have no idea.”
Social media posts have speculated about the possibility of sonar interference, but say such interference couldn’t come from outside the capsule because sound waves cannot travel in space. Jonathan Aitken “I don’t think it’s a big deal,” said the researcher at the University of Sheffield in the UK. “The bigger question for me is whether it’s a single speaker that’s making the noise, or the whole communications system.”
To investigate the source of the noise, Barstow recommends a thorough inspection of the aircraft. “Find out where there are microphones that might be providing input and isolate them,” he says. “But the sound could also be coming from the audio system electronics.”
Barstow noted that the regular but occasionally erratic nature of the pulse may support the idea that this is a problem with electronic interference.
This hypothesis is Phil Metzger “Electromagnetic interference (EMI) is very common and difficult to eliminate,” said John F. Kennedy, a professor at the University of Central Florida who helped test the ISS intercom system as co-founder of NASA’s Swamp Works research facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He wrote to X.
Metzger said: New ScientistIn response to an interview request from SpaceX, astronaut John McClellan explained on social media that the interference could be coming from outside the Starliner: “During one test, we heard a noise that we tracked down to its source and found to be coming from a power inverter that is part of the test facility and not the spacecraft,” he wrote. “We believe that the noise on Starliner was due to electromagnetic interference leaking into something like an audio cable with a loose braid at the connector interface.”
What to do about it is another matter: Wilmore’s radio communications with Mission Control suggest that neither he nor Williams were overly concerned about the noise, but were confused as to its source.
There’s no rush to find out what the problem is, since Starliner is scheduled to return to Earth on its own on September 6. “I don’t think it’s significant since there won’t be a crew on board, but anything unusual should always be investigated,” Barstow said. “It might shed some light on an underlying problem.”
Forest bathing is an ancient Japanese therapeutic technique dating back to the 1980s. It involves spending restorative time in forests and natural environments to connect with nature and achieve sensory relaxation. Despite sounding like hippie nonsense, there is scientific evidence emerging that supports the benefits of forest bathing.
This practice does not involve any nudity or water activities; instead, it encourages mindfulness, disconnecting from technology, light exercise, and escaping the sensory overload of the modern world. Research has shown that spending time in nature can have a positive impact on mental and physical health, reducing blood pressure, cortisol levels, and heart rate.
Studies on green space exposure have demonstrated significant improvements in various health markers, such as lower rates of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and mortality. Forest bathing is taken seriously in Japan and South Korea, where doctors prescribe it as a therapeutic intervention for stress and hypertension.
A UK study on forest bathing led by Dr. Kirsten McEwan has shown promising results, including a 12% improvement in heart rate variability and enhanced mood. The mechanism behind these health benefits is believed to involve the stimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system and the release of chemicals by trees that boost the immune system.
Nature’s impact on long-term health outcomes is still being studied, but initial findings suggest that spending time in nature can have significant health benefits. Perhaps Western medicine is beginning to recognize and embrace the benefits of traditional practices like forest bathing, aligning with generations of knowledge that being outside in nature is good for overall well-being.
About our experts
Dr. Kirsten McEwan, Associate Professor of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Derby, is leading research on forest bathing through the Forest Therapy Hub.
yesIn front of your ears Star WarsVideo game designers began exploring intergalactic dogfights in 1962. spacewar!The first proper computer game, , was a rudimentary but influential attempt: two skinny triangles spiraling around a star's gravity well and firing torpedoes at each other. After establishing the medium's basic principles, hundreds of developers attempted to refine and perfect the genre, which has gone in and out of fashion but never completely disappeared. Cygnus It's probably the best production attempt to date. A small studio in Scotland Answering the Impossible Question: What if Steven Spielberg had directed it? Space Invaders?
As a lone warrior, you'll race across an alien planet, attacking UFOs and swirling swarms of purple space jellyfish that fly across the screen, in a style reminiscent of polarity-swapping arcade classics. Ikaruga, Cygnus is a master class in technology: a spaceship hurtles through a remote robot battlefield, rocked by the blasts of thousands of fireworks. The orchestra, frantic one moment, melancholic the next, complementarily backs up the action, which ebbs and flows, with moments of rest between the activity.
Enemies fly through the air or glide along the ground far below, forcing you to switch weapons to focus your attacks on either target. Every few minutes you'll be facing off against a much larger enemy, and you'll need to adjust your angle of attack while dodging their attacks and lunges. Enemies drop chunks of power-ups (you lose one every time you take damage), which can be swapped between a shield system or a weapon system, a slightly tedious complexity that adds an extra layer of strategy.
The game is a formidable challenge, and most players should start on the easiest difficulty level. Laser bullets fall like showers rather than hail, and lives are replenished at reasonable intervals between the seven long levels. It can get repetitive at times, Cygnus's innovative mechanics will no doubt be polarizing among the genre's most dedicated and old-school fans, but for those who approach it with an open mind and deft fingers, it remains a thrilling vision.
Astronomers have captured stunning photos of the lenticular spiral galaxy IC 4709 using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a beautiful picture of IC 4709's swirling disk, filled with stars and dust bands, and the faint halo that surrounds it. The color image is composed of observations in the near-infrared and visible parts of the spectrum by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The image is based on data obtained through two filters. The colors are obtained by assigning a different hue to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / M. Koss / A. Barth.
No. 4709 It is located in the Southern Telescope constellation and is about 240 million light years away from Earth.
Also known as ESO 182-14 or LEDA 61835, the galaxy has a diameter of 60,000 light years.
IC 4709 is Found It was discovered on September 14, 1901 by American astronomer DeLisle Stewart.
In the galaxy Active galactic nucleiIt is a compact region at the center, and the material inside it is being pulled towards the supermassive black hole.
“If IC 4709's core were simply filled with stars, it would not be as bright as it is,” Hubble astronomers said in a statement.
“Instead, we have a massive black hole with a mass 65 million times that of the Sun.”
“A disk of gas swirls around and eventually enters this black hole. As it spins, the gas collides with itself and heats up.”
“It reaches such high temperatures that it emits electromagnetic radiation ranging from infrared to visible light to ultraviolet light and beyond, including in this case x-rays.”
“The active galactic nucleus of IC 4709 is obscured by a dark dust belt that is barely visible in the galaxy's centre in Hubble Space Telescope images, blocking optical radiation from the nucleus itself,” the researchers added.
“But Hubble's incredible resolution gives us a detailed picture of very small active galactic nuclei and their interactions with their host galaxies.”
“This is essential for understanding supermassive black holes in galaxies much more distant than IC 4709, where it's impossible to resolve such fine detail.”
'I I remember visiting Ghostface Killah. [of the Wu-Tang Clan] “He was mad at us!” recalls Darryl Anselmo, a former EA employee and art director on 2004's groundbreaking hip-hop fusion fighting game Def Jam: Fight for NY. “Ghost Face was holding four pounds of solid gold. eagle bracelet And he claimed that his character's signature move would be for the bird to come to life and peck the other rappers out of their eyes. But the limitations of the PlayStation 2's technology and its violence restrictions meant that it couldn't happen. It wasn't possible.”
“When Ghost Face first asked about the eagle, Lauren… [Wirtzer Seawood, another one of the game’s producers] He told me to just nod and smile, and when I met him again at the studio for the sequel, I apologized. [for misleading him] He quickly moved on to recording extended insults for his character for the new game, one of which I remember: “Go home and cry to your mother. And tell her you're hungry!”
Whether or not Ghostface Killah transforms into a giant killer eagle, the resulting game, Def Jam: Fight for NY, celebrates its 20th anniversary this month and remains one of the fighting game genre's most vibrant spins. It's the rare '00s game that's still dominating social media conversation despite never being remade or re-released. The 67 characters include rap legends like Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Method Man, Ice-T, Scarface, Ludacris, Flavor Flav, Slick Rick, Warren G, and Mobb Deep, and it's an improvement over the slower-paced gameplay of its predecessor, Def Jam: Vendetta, in every respect.
Vendetta was essentially publisher EA's best take on an engine made for a defunct WCW wrestling game that was mired in development hell and causing executives to lose their heads. At one stage, in their desperation, they even suggested that it could be salvaged and remade into an intergalactic wrestling game full of alien characters. But because Holmes and Anselmo had helmed the 2001 success NBA Street (which added a faster, cartoony, hip-hop aesthetic to basketball multiplayer and far outsold that year's bigger-budget (and much more boring) NBA Live 2002), they were deemed the perfect duo to turn what began as a vague boardroom idea (what if rappers wrestled each other?) into a fleshed-out, retail game.
“It was a controversial concept”…Def Jam battles in NYC. Photo: EA
This meant traveling back and forth to Japan to work with development company AKI Corporation, while also touring the US to meet with rappers signed or affiliated with legendary label Def Jam, and ultimately winning their trust. They shaped the character's mannerisms, from moves to taunts. “It's been a dream life, to be honest,” Holmes adds. “I grew up obsessed with hip-hop. As a teenager, I worked in a music store and sold a bass guitar to Flavor Flav when Public Enemy played in Vancouver. Flavor actually remembered me! It was an amazing time. Who would have thought I'd end up recording with my idols and going to Snoop Dogg's family home?”
But he acknowledges that the core concept behind Def Jam: Vendetta and its sequel, Def Jam: Fight for NY, wasn't easily embraced: “Execs had a hard time understanding the concept of a fighting game about rappers. It was a controversial concept,” says the producer, who went on to work on Halo 4 at Microsoft and 343 Industries.
“Once I explained to them that to be the best lyricist in hip-hop, it's all about arguing, dissing, and competing for the throne, they finally got it,” Anselmo reveals. “Hip-hop is full of vibrant, competitive personalities, so the character roster could have a Street Fighter II or Tekken 3 vibe.”
Def Jam: Fight for NY's concept of rappers punching each other was a huge success, and critics loved it, too, with a score of 83 on Metacritic. “We rushed to make Vendetta, but it still sold well,” says Holmes. “That success gave us the opportunity to expand on the gameplay with Fight for NY and take our time to get it right.” AKI Corporation took the ever-changing, momentum-based combat from the legendary WWF: No Mercy game, released on Nintendo 64 in 2000, and sped everything up with hyper-active Blazin' Moves (my personal favorite is Busta's backbreaker, which is more destructive than Batman's spine-crushing Bane).
The art design is somewhere between The Wire and a comic book, with an ambitious range of dynamic fighting styles (kickboxing, street fighting, martial arts, wrestling, submission). There's a storyline, with Snoop Dogg playing the cunning vampire villain The Crow, who'll hit you with a cane and cleverly taunt you with, “Do you have dental insurance?” You can wear Roc-A-Wear or Ecko tracksuits, getting increasingly better dressed as you rise through the ranks of your boss D-Mob's underground fighting syndicate, slowly earning you respect. It's as if Fight Club had been directed by glossy rap music vid…
Rappers Joe Budden vs. Sticky Fingaz compete in Def Jam's New York Battle. Photo: EA
The key mission was to choose either 128-bit's Lil' Kim or Carmen Electra as his new girlfriend, and the next day Method Man would call and ask if they'd slept together. The latter was one part of the game that Anselmo now regrets: “Lil' Kim could beat any of the male MCs, but… [reduced to that]”In 2004,” he admits, “all of the rap music videos were about objectifying women, which in retrospect is a real shame. The reality is that there was a push to make the game more sex appealing and more culturally relevant.”
As I recalled after recently replaying my dusty GameCube copy, Fight for NY is still exhilaratingly challenging. The boss fight featuring Fat Joe's crack Zangief-esque character had me hurling my WaveBird controller against the wall as a teenager. You can't beat your opponent unless you take the time to figure out how to counter their attacks, and while this process can be brutal at times, it makes it all that much more satisfying when you finally triumph.
“This game is designed in such a way that you have to sweat and really learn something new to win!” Anselmo says with a smile. “AKI's Hiro Abe (programmer) and Hiroya Tamura (artist) were geniuses. To get good at Def Jam: Fight for NY, you had to master the gameplay and get used to losing. In modern games, fighting games are just too easy. I think that's why so many people still play our game over and over.”
“Fighting games are too easy in today's gaming world”…Def Jam Fight for NY. Photo: EA
And there are still a lot of people playing Fight for NY. Not a week goes by without someone playing. Nostalgic post A gameplay video that went viral on TikTok has gone viral to the point where people can't believe it even exists. Even rappers (Including Ice TThe actor who played the character in the game(?) is still responding to tweets from fans begging for an updated version.
A$AP Rocky has labelled modern rap the “new wrestling” due to the commercialisation of petty infighting and mainstream MCs treating rap personas like WWE bad-mouthing tough guys. Holmes agrees with my theory that Def Jam: Fight for NY, with its constant depictions of MCs embroiled in diss tracks and gang politics, now feels like a documentary, especially considering how much more public conflict there has become in rap. “Rap is becoming more and more dramatic,” he agrees. “You see a lot of social media videos of rappers fighting each other, and it's interesting that the violence of the game doesn't seem so ridiculous today.”
Some will argue that a game that trivializes the conflict in hip-hop is wrong and deserves more criticism, especially with so many rappers losing their lives to violence every year. Anselmo counters: “I get that, and I don't think we could make the game right now because of drill, the environment is too tough. But Def Jam: Fight for NY was just meant to be a fantasy, escapist experience. It was like a gangsta rap version of The Warriors. It was just a little fun. We trusted that the audience would know that in real life, throwing someone through a window is not cool. We were really trying to res…tement is too tough. But Def Jam: Fight for NY was just meant to be a fantasy, escapist experience. It was like a gangsta rap version of The Warriors. It was just a little fun. We trusted that the audience would know that in real life, throwing someone through a window is not cool. We were really trying to respect the culture of hip-hop.”
The original Xbox, PlayStation 2, and GameCube discs of Def Jam: Fight for NY are highly sought-after and command high prices on the second-hand market. But there hasn't been a Def Jam game released since 2007's disappointing Def Jam: Icon, and there hasn't been a remaster of Fight for NY. Why?
The sequel may be one of the most expensive games ever made…Def Jam Fight for NY. Photo: EA
Lauren Wurtzer Seawood, former vice president of marketing for the Def Jam label, played a pivotal role in the development of the first two games, serving as the liaison introducing the timid development team to the feisty MCs, and working hard to sort out complex licensing agreements ranging from image rights to music to in-game brand partnerships.
She says this complicated business mechanic is a big reason why it's highly unlikely the franchise will ever be revived. Def Jam: Fight for NY cost about $15 million to make, but with both hip-hop and video games now multi-billion dollar businesses worldwide, licensing fees would be astronomical. “If this game was re-released today, many
During evolution, new types of cells emerge and perform new functions, resulting in changes in animals. Scientists study the origin and development of these new cell types to understand how they affect the animal’s bodily functions, structure, or behavior.
Scientists previously Mammalian ancestors Mammals live solitary lives, and parental care of young has developed over time in some mammalian groups. A research team led by scientists from Columbia University in New York recently used two closely related mouse species to elucidate how parental care evolved in mammals. The first species, the Asian goshawk, is monogamous and displays strong parenting behaviors, including grooming, herding, and retrieving young that have strayed from their nests. The second species, the deer mouse, is promiscuous and does not display parenting behaviors. The researchers aimed to investigate the genetic drivers of parental care in Asian goshawks.
They performed their experiments on two small clusters of cells located in the top part of each kidney. Adrenal glands These glands produce fat hormones, Steroid hormones Once produced, it immediately affects bodily function. The researchers found that the adrenal glands of monogamous Oldfield mice were six times heavier than those of promiscuous deer mice, an unexpectedly large size difference for such closely related species. When the researchers examined the tissue composition of both glands, they realized that the larger adrenal glands of Oldfield mice were due to larger and more numerous adrenal cells.
To look for molecular differences between the adrenal glands of the two mouse strains, the team studied the RNA molecules in their glands. RNA molecules copy genetic instructions from DNA and carry out the functions of genes. By counting and comparing the types and amounts of RNA molecules in the adrenal glands, the scientists hoped to understand how the adrenal glands functioned differently. They took adrenal tissue from adult mice, broke it down to release the RNA, and counted that RNA. They looked for differences in the amount of RNA, called ribosomal RNA. Akrc18 This level was 3,200 times higher in Oldfield mice than in deer mice, a difference that led the researchers to wonder whether this RNA might be related to the parental behavior seen in Oldfield mice.
The researchers, Akrc18 It produces steroid hormones. Steroid hormones affect parental behavior, so the team tested whether the hormone had an effect on mice. They gave Oldfield mice a single dose of the hormone and measured their parental behavior 20 hours later. They observed that these mice groomed and cuddled their pups longer, brought them back to their nests more frequently, and built stronger nests. In deer mice, which don’t normally show parental behavior, 17% of the injected mice groomed and brought back their pups. From these results, the scientists concluded that the hormone shapes the parental behavior of Oldfield mice.
The researchers also explained that mate bonding is an important aspect of monogamy. To understand partner choice, the researchers measured how long mice huddled with their partners compared to opposite-sex mice of the same species. They found that monogamous Oldfield mice huddled three times longer with their partners than with new individuals, whereas promiscuous deer mice huddled neither with their partners nor with strangers. Injecting the Akrc18 steroid hormone did not change these preferences, suggesting that the hormone only affected parenting behavior and not pair bonding.
The research team found that Oldfield mice had larger adrenal glands and that Akrc18 RNA production was related. To test whether the adrenal glands of the two mouse species had different cell types, the researchers used the RNA from the adrenal glands of both mice that they had previously counted. They used computational methods to search for specific RNAs in the cells and identify what cell types were present. They found that nearly all cell types were shared between the two species, except for one type that was present in Oldfield mice but not in deer mice.
Also, Akrc18 RNA was the most abundant element in these new cells. The researchers examined the structure and composition of the tissue and observed these cells lining the adrenal glands of wolf mice, which are absent in deer mice. The researchers suggested that these cell types may have evolved from existing adrenal cells by increasing production of steroid hormones and related genes. The researchers concluded that the parenting behavior of wolf mice is linked to this new type of cell in the adrenal glands.
So far this year, hail — not hurricanes, floods or tornadoes — has caused the most costly weather damage in the United States.
Research suggests that large hailstorms will become more frequent due to climate change.
Next year, scientists are planning the first field study of hail in the United States since the 1970s, and will track hailstorms in the same way they track tornadoes.
Barb Berlin was standing in the garage of her farmhouse near Inman, Nebraska, when she heard a sudden crackling noise.
“I thought it was a gun,” she said.
Then a streak of white appeared, and she realized the sound wasn't a gunshot, but hail.
Fist-sized hailstones pounded on the tin roof of Berlin's garage, and soon others began punching softball-shaped holes in the hood of her Ford Mustang parked outside.
“It was very loud and scary. I prayed a lot,” Berlin said, adding that she was worried about her livestock. “I've never seen hail like that before.”
Hail is a hidden danger: Despite the extreme weather this spring and summer, hail — not hurricanes, floods or tornadoes — caused the most losses in the U.S., according to Gallagher Re, a global reinsurance firm that tracks such data.
And as the planet warms, research suggests large hailstorms like the one observed in Berlin on Monday will become more frequent. A study published last monthThis suggests that the chances of smaller, less damaging hail will decrease.
A study by researchers at Northern Illinois University projects that the frequency of hailstones larger than about 1.5 inches could increase by 15% to 75%, depending on the amount of greenhouse gas pollution humans emit.
Hail occurs when thunderstorms circulate raindrops in the upper layers of the atmosphere, and typically occurs where temperatures are between -22°F and 14°F. Climate change affects hail because warmer temperatures create more energy to push air upwards.In a thunderstorm.
“We expect to see stronger updrafts in the future as the atmosphere becomes more unstable,” said Victor Gensini, a professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University and lead author of the study.
According to the study, these strong updrafts allow hail to remain in the right places in the storm longer, allowing more ice to accumulate before the hail becomes too heavy and falls to the ground.
“Imagine trying to balance a ping pong ball on an upside-down hair dryer pointing up into the sky,” Gensini said, explaining how updrafts lift hailstones. “Now try balancing a baseball or a grapefruit. You'll need a stronger updraft to…
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Many of the AI-generated images look realistic upon closer inspection.
On the road
Did you notice that the image above was created by artificial intelligence? It can be difficult to spot AI-generated images, videos, audio, and text as technological advances make them indistinguishable from human-created content and more susceptible to manipulation by disinformation. However, knowing the current state of AI technology being used to create disinformation and the various signs that indicate what you're seeing may be fake can help you avoid being fooled.
World leaders are concerned. World Economic Forum ReportMisinformation and disinformation “have the potential to fundamentally disrupt electoral processes in multiple economies over the next two years,” while easier access to AI tools “has already led to an explosion in counterfeit information and so-called 'synthetic' content, from sophisticated voice clones to fake websites.”
While the terms misinformation and disinformation both refer to false or inaccurate information, disinformation is information that is deliberately intended to deceive or mislead.
“The problem with AI-driven disinformation is the scale, speed and ease with which it can be deployed,” he said. Hany Farid “These attacks no longer require nation-state actors or well-funded organizations — any individual with modest computing power can generate large amounts of fake content,” the University of California, Berkeley researchers said.
He is a pioneer of generative AI (See glossary below“AI is polluting our entire information ecosystem, calling into question everything we read, see, and hear,” and his research shows that AI-generated images and sounds are often “almost indistinguishable from reality.”
However, Farid and his colleagues' research reveals that there are strategies people can follow to reduce the risk of falling for social media misinformation and AI-created disinformation.
How to spot fake AI images
Remember when we saw the photo of Pope Francis wearing a down jacket? Fake AI images like this are becoming more common as new tools based on viral models (See glossary below), now anyone can create images from simple text prompts. study Google's Nicolas Dufour and his colleagues found that since the beginning of 2023, the share of AI-generated images in fact-checked misinformation claims has risen sharply.
“Today, media literacy requires AI literacy.” Negar Kamali at Northwestern University in Illinois in 2024 studyShe and her colleagues identified five different categories of errors in AI-generated images (outlined below) and offered guidance on how people can spot them on their own. The good news is that their research shows that people are currently about 70% accurate at detecting fake AI images. Online Image Test To evaluate your detective skills.
5 common types of errors in AI-generated images:
Socio-cultural impossibilities: Does the scene depict behavior that is unusual, unusual, or surprising for a particular culture or historical figure?
Anatomical irregularities: Look closely. Do the hands or other body parts look unusual in shape or size? Do the eyes or mouth look strange? Are any body parts fused together?
Stylistic artifacts: Do the images look unnatural, too perfect, or too stylized? Does the background look odd or missing something? Is the lighting strange or variable?
Functionality Impossibility: Are there any objects that look odd, unreal or non-functional? For example, a button or belt buckle in an odd place?
Violation of Physics: Do the shadows point in different directions? Does the mirror's reflection match the world depicted in the image?
Strange objects or behaviors can be clues that an image was created by AI.
On the road
How to spot deepfakes in videos
An AI technology called generative adversarial networks (See glossary belowSince 2014, deepfakes have enabled tech-savvy individuals to create video deepfakes, which involve digitally manipulating existing videos of people to swap out different faces, create new facial expressions, and insert new audio with matching lip syncing. This has enabled a growing number of fraudsters, state-sponsored hackers, and internet users to produce video deepfakes, potentially allowing celebrities such as Taylor Swift and everyday people alike to unwillingly appear in deepfake porn, scams, and political misinformation and disinformation.
The AI techniques used to spot fake images (see above) can also be applied to suspicious videos. What's more, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northwestern University in Illinois have A few tips There has been a lot of research into how to spot these deepfakes, but it's acknowledged that there is no foolproof method that will always work.
6 tips to spot AI-generated videos:
Mouth and lip movements: Are there moments when the video and audio are not perfectly in sync?
Anatomical defects: Does your face or body look strange or move unnaturally?
face: Look for inconsistencies in facial smoothness, wrinkles around the forehead and cheeks, and facial moles.
Lights up: Is the lighting inconsistent? Do shadows behave the way you expect them to? Pay particular attention to the person's eyes, eyebrows, and glasses.
hair: Does your facial hair look or move oddly?
Blink: Blinking too much or too little can be a sign of a deepfake.
A new category of video deepfakes is based on the diffusion model (See glossary below), the same AI technology behind many image generators, can create entirely AI-generated video clips based on text prompts. Companies have already tested and released commercial versions of their AI video generators, potentially making them easy to create for anyone without requiring special technical knowledge. So far, the resulting videos tend to feature distorted faces and odd body movements.
“AI-generated videos are likely easier for humans to detect than images because they contain more motion and are much more likely to have AI-generated artifacts and impossibilities,” Kamali says.
How to spot an AI bot
Social media accounts controlled by computer bots have become commonplace across many social media and messaging platforms. Many of these bots also leverage generative AI techniques such as large-scale language models.See glossary below) will be launched in 2022, making it easier and cheaper to mass-produce grammatically correct, persuasive, customized, AI-written content through thousands of bots for a variety of situations.
“It's now much easier to customize these large language models for specific audiences with specific messages.” Paul Brenner At the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
Brenner and his colleagues found that volunteers were only able to distinguish between AI-powered bots and humans when About 42 percent Even though participants were told they might interact with a bot, they would still be able to test their bot-detection skills. here.
Brenner said some strategies could help identify less sophisticated AI bots.
5 ways to tell if a social media account is an AI bot:
Emojis and hashtags: Overusing these can be a sign.
Unusual phrases, word choices, and analogies: Unusual language can indicate an AI bot.
Repetition and Structure: Bots may repeat words that follow a similar or fixed format, or may overuse certain slang terms.
Ask a question: These may reveal the bot's lack of knowledge on a topic, especially when it comes to local locations and situations.
Assume the worst: If the social media account is not a personal contact and its identity has not been clearly verified or confirmed, it may be an AI bot.
How to detect audio duplication and audio deepfakes
Voice Clone (See glossary belowAI tools have made it easier to generate new voices that can imitate virtually anyone, which has led to a rise in audio deepfake scams replicating the voices of family members, business executives and political leaders such as US President Joe Biden. These are much harder to identify compared to AI-generated videos and images.
“Voice clones are particularly difficult to distinguish between real and fake because there are no visual cues to help the brain make that decision,” he said. Rachel TobackCo-founder of SocialProof Security, a white hat hacking organization.
Detecting these AI voice deepfakes can be difficult, especially when they're used in video or phone calls, but there are some common sense steps you can take to help distinguish between real human voices and AI-generated ones.
4 steps to use AI to recognize if audio has been duplicated or faked:
Public figures: If the audio clip is of an elected official or public figure, review whether what they say is consistent with what has already been publicly reported or shared about that person's views or actions.
Look for inconsistencies: Compare your audio clip to previously authenticated video or audio clips featuring the same person. Are there any inconsistencies in the tone or delivery of the voice?
Awkward Silence: If you're listening to a phone call or voicemail and notice that the speaker takes unusually long pauses while speaking, this could be due to the use of AI-powered voice duplication technology.
Weird and redundant: Robotic or unusually verbose speech may indicate that someone is using a combination of voice cloning to mimic a person's voice and large language models to generate accurate phrasing.
Out of character behaviour by public figures like Narendra Modi could be a sign of AI
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Technology will continue to improve
As it stands, there are no consistent rules that can consistently distinguish AI-generated content from authentic human content. AI models that can generate text, images, videos, and audio will surely continue to improve, allowing them to quickly generate content that looks authentic without obvious artifacts or mistakes. “Recognize that, to put it mildly, AI is manipulating and fabricating images, videos, and audio, and it happens in under 30 seconds,” Tobac says. “This makes it easy for bad actors looking to mislead people to quickly subvert AI-generated disinformation, which can be found on social media within minutes of breaking news.”
While it's important to hone our ability to spot AI-generated disinformation and learn to ask more questions about what we read, see and hear, ultimately this alone won't be enough to stop the damage, and the responsibility for spotting it can't be placed solely on individuals. Farid is among a number of researchers who argue that government regulators should hold accountable the big tech companies that have developed many of the tools that are flooding the internet with fake, AI-generated content, as well as startups backed by prominent Silicon Valley investors. “Technology is not neutral,” Farid says. “The tech industry is selling itself as not having to take on the responsibilities that other industries take on, and I totally reject that.”
Diffusion Model: An AI model that learns by first adding random noise to data (such as blurring an image) and then reversing the process to recover the original data.
Generative Adversarial Networks: A machine learning technique based on two neural networks that compete by modifying the original data and attempting to predict whether the generated data is genuine or not.
Generative AI: A broad class of AI models that can generate text, images, audio, and video after being trained on similar forms of content.
Large-scale language models: A subset of generative AI models that can generate different forms of written content in response to text prompts, and in some cases translate between different languages.
Voice CloneA potential way to use AI models to create a digital copy of a person's voice and generate new voice samples with that voice.
In late last year, Duan*, a Chinese university student, bypassed China’s Great Firewall using a virtual private network to access the social media platform Discord.
He discovered a community within Discord where members discussed political ideologies like democracy, anarchism, and communism. Popular blogger Yang Minghao highlighted the importance of these discussions in a YouTube video.
Duan was drawn to this community after watching Yang’s videos. However, he and several others from the group were later interrogated by police in a different city.
The interrogation focused on Duan’s connection with Yang, his use of a VPN, and his Discord comments. Duan was released after 24 hours, but concerns remain for Yang, who has been silent online since then.
This incident reflects China’s strict censorship policies, where online comments can lead to serious consequences.
At an online conference in China, people stand in front of a screen showing a message from Chinese President Xi Jinping. Photo: Alex Prabevski/EPA
The situation highlights the expanding web of online surveillance in China. Authorities are cracking down on dissenting voices, even those operating outside the country.
The web of online surveillance is widening
Li Ying, a prominent social media figure, warned his followers in China about police interrogations, urging them to unfollow him to avoid trouble.
The crackdown on online dissent indicates a growing trend of repression, with even overseas influencers facing pressure from Chinese authorities.
Online censorship campaigns have become routine in China, targeting those who express opinions contrary to the government’s narrative.
Despite the challenges, activists and dissenters continue to resist censorship and uphold their beliefs, fostering common values across borders.
The Discord crackdown has sparked discussions in online forums, underscoring the ongoing struggle for freedom of expression in China.
ohOn September 1, 1974, two men made the fastest trip ever between New York and London. Traveling three times the speed of sound and taking less than two hours, this incredible journey set a record that still stands 50 years later.
Even the mighty Concorde, which set the record for the fastest commercial transatlantic flight in 1996, was almost an hour late.
The US Air Force Lockheed Blackbird SR-71 jet, with a crew of two – pilot James Sullivan and reconnaissance systems operator Noel Widdifield – completed the flight between the two cities in one hour, 54 minutes and 56 seconds, before landing in triumph to a great welcome at the Farnborough Air Show in Hampshire.
Widdifield, now 83, divides his time between Virginia and Florida in the US. “In some ways it was a normal flight for us,” he said, reflecting on that momentous day. “There was nothing unusual about the flight or the way we flew the plane, but in July 1974 we were told we were going to attempt the world record for flying from New York to London, which had previously been held by a Royal Navy pilot. There was a lot of media interest.”
It wasn’t just the Air Force’s prestige that was at stake. America was facing an international public relations crisis. Just three weeks earlier, disgraced President Richard Nixon had resigned after the Watergate scandal and Gerald Ford had taken over the White House. The country was still reeling from its disastrous involvement in the Vietnam War. The country needed something to cheer about.
There were other schemes as well. Widdifield observer“Although I didn’t know anything about it at the time, behind the scenes, negotiations were taking place between the US and the UK to deploy Blackbird SR-71s on British soil.
Widdifield flew B-52 bombers before joining the Blackbird SR-71 program. Photo: Noel Widdifield
“There were fears in the UK that this move might cause a lot of backlash, especially in the Middle East. But after we broke the record and flew into the Farnborough Air Show, that seemed to be the clincher and the UK allowed the SR-71 to be parked.”
Widdifield was 33 when he made this historic flight. He originally wanted to be a train driver, but after seeing U.S. Air Force jets flying low over his house at age 12, he decided to become a pilot.
After training and flying B-52 bombers, Widdifield served in the Blackbird SR-71 program at Beale Air Force Base in California from 1971 to 1975, after which he retired from flying to serve in the U.S. space program until 1982.
Piloting a Blackbird was akin to being an astronaut: The crew wore space suits and flew at an altitude of 80,000 feet (most commercial airliners top out at 42,000 feet). “It was pitch black up there,” Widdifield said. “You could see the stars and, depending on the time of day, the moon or the sun.”
Their plane took off from Beale and had to fly along the coast to New York to avoid creating a sonic boom over populated areas and causing significant damage to buildings. High above the city was an invisible “gate” where the journey would begin. Reaching a speed of Mach 3.2 (three times the speed of sound, about 2,455 miles per hour), the Blackbird crashed through the gate and the record attempt began.
The plane had to refuel twice: once upon takeoff, once when it docked with a tanker over California to top off, and once en route to near Greenland.
In one incident that looked terrifying from the outside but was handled with cool by the crew, the Blackbird suddenly began to “yaw,” or move quickly from side to side, after losing thrust.
Because the Blackbird took in air from the front to provide thrust for the engines, the air intake mechanisms would often become misaligned, causing a momentary, significant loss of power in one engine.
Widdifield and Sullivan stand in front of a Blackbird SR-71. Photo: Noel Widdifield
“The automatic restart system was activated, the misaligned cones were corrected and the engine was restarted,” Widdifield said. “We had no real concerns other than what this would do to our record speed run.”
The plane then flew through the London “gates” without incident, and the Blackbird landed at Farnborough, where a large crowd waited and a press conference was held, during which Widdifield and Sullivan were on the phone with the new president. “It got huge international coverage for the next year,” says Widdifield, who has six scrapbooks of the clippings. “But what Jim and I always tried to emphasize was that although it was just the two of us who got the glory, there was a huge team behind every flight.
“When you take into account the support staff, the administrative staff and all the people who work to get us flying, that’s 1,000 people. They deserve as much credit as Jim and I do.”
Widdifield, who has been married to his wife Ann for 63 years and has two children, five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, is mourning the loss of his co-pilot, Jim Sullivan, who died in 2021, and the Blackbird SR-71 itself, which was officially retired in 1998.
He said: “Jim and I kept in touch but then lived far apart so we only saw each other a few times at SR-71 reunions.
“Obviously I was sad when the SR-71 program ended. So am I surprised that no one has beaten our record in 50 years? No, because no aircraft has been built since then that could break that record.”
Increasingly frequent and intense heat waves in the Southwest are damaging some of the desert plants known to thrive in harsh conditions.
Saguaro cacti and agaves were damaged by the extreme heat this summer and last.
Ecologists are working to understand how different species respond to prolonged heatwaves and pinpoint how hot is too hot for them.
LAS VEGAS — On a sun-dappled stretch of West Charleston Boulevard, Norm Schilling parked his truck on the side of the road just to check out his favorite tree.
Schilling, a local horticulturist and owner of a landscape company and garden shop called Mojave Bloom Nursery, rescued the African sumac decades ago after its branches froze and died during an unusually frosty winter. Careful pruning helped the tree survive, but this summer, it faces a new danger: Months of intense heat have dried out the branches, causing the droopy leaves to die in clumps.
This is a seemingly counterintuitive question: the Southwest is accustomed to sweltering heat, and desert plants and trees are drought- and heat-tolerant. Dry, harsh environments are exactly where desert plants and trees thrive.
But as climate change makes heat waves more frequent, intense, and long-lasting, experts say increasingly harsh conditions are testing some iconic desert plants known for their resilience, including saguaro cacti and agaves.
“This summer we’ve seen damage to plants that previously didn’t show heat stress,” Schilling said.
Sun-bleached mock-orange shrub leaves, photographed Aug. 23. Brown spots indicate areas of damaged tissue. Dennis Chou/NBC
As we drove through Las Vegas, he pointed out the results.
A magnolia shrub in a quiet residential neighborhood was sunburned, its shiny leaf tissue bleached and damaged in places by the sun. On another street, two mulberry trees were dying, likely because they weren’t getting enough water to survive the heat. Around the corner, a large juniper tree was showing signs of “severe decline,” Schilling said, with brown, dead leaves still hanging from its dead branches, evidence that the heat damage was recent.
“That juniper is probably close to 40 or 50 years old. It’s a magnificent tree, but it will soon die,” he said, patting and kissing its rough trunk.
Norm Schilling surveys the deaths of juniper trees in Las Vegas on August 23. Dennis Chou/NBC
Then, a few blocks away, there was a row of succulents known as gopher spurge, parts of which looked burnt, branches yellowed with dried sap splayed out in all directions.
“This species is very dependable and very common throughout the valley,” Schilling said, “and some of the plants here are getting to the point where they’re not likely to recover.”
Las Vegas has already broken several heat records this summer, including the hottest day on record when temperatures reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit on July 7. Then, seven consecutive days of temperatures above 115 degrees Fahrenheit were recorded. For most of June, July, and August, temperatures remained in the triple digits with little cooling at night.
“The heat we’re seeing right now is a new paradigm. It’s like the ground is shifting beneath our feet,” Schilling said.
Ecologists across the Southwest are studying how different species respond to the annual heatwaves, trying to understand how hot is too hot for desert plants and trees.
Kevin Hultin, director of research at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, studies the effects of heat stress on ecosystems in the Sonoran Desert. He and his colleagues have been tracking an uptick in saguaro cactus mortality that began in 2020 when the state was in the midst of its worst years-long drought and hasn’t slowed down.
“The summer of 2020 was the hottest on record until last year, and we saw a lot of deaths,” Hultin said. “We’ve been seeing deaths ever since, and we’ve seen an accelerated pace of deaths in 2023.”
The debate on whether cats or dogs are smarter has been ongoing for ages. Dogs typically have larger brains than cats, with more neurons in their cerebral cortex and brains overall. Golden Retrievers, for example, have been found to have 623 million neurons in their cortex compared to 429 million in small dogs and 250 million in cats.
It’s not just about the number of neurons, though. Dogs have been studied more extensively than cats, making their intelligence capabilities more well-known. Cats are harder to study due to their aversion to new environments like laboratories.
Researchers have categorized the intelligence of pets based on three main factors.
Social Intelligence
Social cognition, or an animal’s ability to understand the mental states of others, can be evaluated through unsolvable tasks. For example, when faced with a closed container, dogs are known to turn to humans for help, displaying referential signaling similar to pointing. Cats, on the other hand, are less likely to seek help but show some level of visual communication skills.
When it comes to “counting,” both cats and dogs can discriminate between quantities. Studies have shown that vision plays a crucial role in this ability, with neither species relying heavily on other senses.
Self-awareness
The mirror test, a common method for testing self-recognition, has shown that cats and dogs do not pass the visual test. However, studies have explored the olfactory version of the mirror test, with dogs showing the ability to recognize scents associated with themselves or other dogs.
Cats have also demonstrated the ability to distinguish their feces from others, indicating a level of self-awareness based on smell.
Final Verdict
Intelligence in pets is multifaceted and context-dependent. Cats and dogs exhibit intelligence in different ways, influenced by factors such as genetics, socialization, and training. While some dogs may excel in tasks like remembering toy names, each pet has its unique strengths.
Ultimately, both cats and dogs are intelligent creatures in their own right, deserving of love and appreciation for their individual characteristics.
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