Meta maintains its stance against paying media companies for news in Australia, arguing that it does not address the issue of misinformation and disinformation on Facebook and Instagram.
In March, Meta announced that it would not engage in new agreements with media organizations to pay for news fees after the expiration of contracts signed in 2021 under the Morrison government’s media bargaining code.
Deputy Treasurer Stephen Jones is exploring the possibility of the Albanese government using powers under the News Media Bargaining Code Act to “designate” Meta under the code. If designated, the tech company would be compelled to negotiate payments with news providers or face a fine of 10% of its revenue in Australia.
The Treasury Department is also exploring other options, such as mandating the company to distribute news or leveraging taxation to influence the company. The government is concerned that designating Meta under the code could result in a ban in Australia, similar to what occurred in Canada since August last year.
Experts in Canada have noted that where news content has disappeared, it has been replaced by misleading viral content.
In a submission to a federal parliamentary inquiry on social media and Australian society, Meta stated that they are “unaware of any evidence” supporting claims that misinformation has increased on their Canadian platforms due to the news ban, and that they have never viewed news as a tool to combat misinformation and disinformation on their platform.
“We are committed to removing harmful misinformation and reducing the distribution of fact-checked misinformation, regardless of whether it is news content. By addressing this harmful content, we aim to maintain the integrity of information on our platform,” stated the submission.
“Canadians can still access trusted information from various sources using our services, including government agencies, political parties, and non-government organizations, which have always shared engaging information with their audiences, along with news content links.”
Microsoft Surface Pro 11 Review: Microsoft’s Bold Move into Arm Technology Shows Promise
The latest Surface tablet from Microsoft is expected to bring significant improvements, moving beyond just being faster, quieter, and more efficient. The key change is the switch to an Arm-based processor at its core.
This shift to Arm chips is not new for Microsoft, but this particular machine, the Surface Pro 11, has been touted as the most successful one yet, outperforming its predecessors like the Surface Pro X from 2020 and Surface Pro 9 5G from last year.
Powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chipset, the Surface Pro 11 offers improved performance and efficiency. While the new Arm chips offer advantages, there are still some compromises in terms of software and accessories.
Despite the new chip, the Surface Pro 11 retains key features that made its predecessor successful, including a robust built-in kickstand, high-quality aluminum frame, improved speakers, and faster Windows Hello facial recognition. The 13-inch OLED display on the high-end model is top-notch, offering an exceptional viewing experience.
However, the Surface Pro 11 comes at a premium price, starting at £1,049 (€1,199/$999/AU$1,899) without the keyboard. The higher-end model with an OLED screen and faster Snapdragon X Elite chip is even pricier, starting at £1,549 (€1,799/$1,499/AU$2,699).
The Surface Pro 11 works well as a tablet, but a detachable keyboard is essential for maximizing its potential as a laptop. Microsoft offers various keyboard options, including the high-end Flex keyboard priced at £340.
Specification
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Screen: 13″ LCD or OLED 2880×1920 (267 PPI) 120Hz
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Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus or X Elite
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RAM: 16 or 32 GB
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Storage: 256, 512GB or 1TB
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Graphics: Qualcomm Adreno
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Operating System: Windows 11 Home
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Camera: 10.5MP rear, 12.2MP front, Windows Hello
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Connectivity: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, 2 x USB-4, Surface Connect
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Size: 287 x 209 x 9.3mm
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Weight: 895g (without keyboard)
Snapdragon Power
The transition to the Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite chip offers improved efficiency and performance over traditional Intel chips. Performance comparisons have shown promising results, with the Surface Pro 11 performing on par with top Intel chips and Apple’s M1.
In everyday use, the Surface Pro 11 is fast and responsive, running quietly most of the time. Battery life is comparable to its Intel-powered predecessor, lasting around 8 hours. However, under heavy workloads, the Surface Pro 11 with Snapdragon X Elite chip offers better battery life.
While many apps have been updated to work well on the new chip, there are still compatibility issues for some legacy software, resulting in slower performance. Additionally, certain Windows apps and games may not work at all on the new system, highlighting the need for further updates from software developers.
The Surface Pro 11 also introduces new AI tools from Microsoft, such as Paint’s Cocreator system, offering unique creative capabilities. While these features add value, some AI functions may be limited by current implementation.
Sustainability
The Surface Pro 11 demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to sustainability, with 72% recycled materials incorporated into its design, including aluminum and rare earth metals. The company also offers repair services and recycling programs for old devices, contributing to a more environmentally-friendly approach.
Price
Starting prices for the Microsoft Surface Pro 11 range from £1,049 (€1,199/$999/AU$1,899) for the base model with Snapdragon X Plus and an LCD screen. The higher-end model with Snapdragon X Elite and an OLED screen starts at £1,549 (€1,799/$1,499/AU$2,699).
Keyboard options are available starting at £139.99 (€159.99 / $139.99 / AU$239.95), with the premium Flex keyboard priced at £340.
Verdict
The Surface Pro 11 raises the bar for Arm-based Windows tablets, offering a sleek, powerful, and quiet device. However, app compatibility remains a crucial factor in determining the overall user experience.
While the performance is commendable, the Surface Pro 11 falls short in delivering promised battery life improvements. The premium features like the OLED screen and Flex keyboard come at a steep price, which may deter some potential buyers.
Although Arm chips show promise for lightweight devices, issues with app compatibility and AI features indicate that there’s still work to be done to fully embrace this technology.
Strong Points: Great 120Hz OLED screen, impressive performance, quiet operation, USB4 connectivity, high-quality build, removable SSD, easy repairability.
Cons: High price, lack of included keyboard, app and accessory compatibility issues with Arm chips, absence of USB-A port, microSD card slot, or headphone jack, underwhelming AI features.
Source: www.theguardian.com
Fresh Off the Press: Latest Release on Supervolcanoes from BBC Science Focus Magazine
Michael Mosley
This avant-garde science communicator is a colleague BBC Science Focus Contributor, Professor Giles Yeo.
Cosmic String
Cosmic strings would be the Holy Grail of physics: if discovered, they would unify our theories and even make time travel possible. Now, astronomers may have found the first evidence that cosmic strings exist.
Back pain
Most common treatments for back pain don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny. Experts dispel myths about back pain, including common causes and treatments. Learn the best ways to reduce strain and relieve back pain.
Hedonic happiness
The everyday actions you take can make or break your happiness. Here are some less-talked-about lifestyle choices you can make to improve your baseline happiness and stop chasing elusive feelings.
plus
- Creatine: Every supplement claims to have positive effects on the body and brain. But research shows that these claims are false. actually When it comes to creatine, we’ll explore whether these claims are true and cover the potential side effects of the supplement.
- Question-and-answer session: Answers to all the questions you didn’t know you needed answers to.
- Doomsday Glacier: Thwaites Glacier is the world’s largest glacier, covering an area larger than Florida, but it may be on the verge of collapse… and that’s a big problem.
Issue 407 will be released on July 9, 2024
Please do not forget BBC Science Focus It is also available on major digital platforms.
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For iPad and iPhone.
Source: www.sciencefocus.com
Oldest Evidence of Storytelling in Art Found in 51,200-Year-Old Indonesian Cave Paintings
Archaeologists used a new technique called Laser Ablation U-series (LA-U-series) to re-date some of the oldest cave paintings in the Maros-Pangkep region of South Sulawesi and date stylistically similar motifs at other Maros-Pangkep sites. They found a minimum age of 50,200 years ago (± 2,200 years) for a hunting scene from the Leambur Sipong 4 cave site, first dated to a minimum of 43,900 years ago using a previous approach, meaning it is at least 4,040 years older than previously thought. They also assigned a minimum age of 53,500 years ago (± 2,300 years) to the newly described Leang Karampuang cave painting. Painted at least 51,200 years ago, the narrative work depicts human-like figures interacting with pigs and is now known as the world's oldest surviving example of figurative art and visual storytelling.
Prehistoric rock art provides important insights into past human cultures, but is typically difficult to date in an accurate and reliable way.
Over the past few decades, solution-based U-series methods have been used to determine early dates for rock art in several regions, including Western Europe, island Southeast Asia, and Siberia.
In Spain, a handprint stencil was dated to at least 64,800 years ago by solution U-series analysis of the overlying calcite and attributed to Neanderthals.
Until now, the oldest evidence of representational art is a naturalistic painting of a warthog at Reang Tedonggae in Maros-Pangkep, Sulawesi, which was dated to at least 45,500 years ago using the solution U series.
“We have previously used uranium-series methods to date very ancient rock art in two areas of Indonesia, Sulawesi and Borneo, but our new laser ablation U-series (LA-U-series) technique is more accurate,” said Professor Maxim Aubert from Griffith University, lead author of the study.
“This will allow us to date the oldest calcium carbonate layers that formed in the murals and get a more accurate idea of when the murals were created. This will revolutionize the dating of murals.”
“The innovative technique we developed allows us to create a detailed 'map' of the calcium carbonate layers,” added study co-author Professor Renaud-Joannes Boyau from Southern Cross University.
“This feature makes it possible to precisely identify and avoid areas affected by natural diagenesis resulting from complex growth histories.”
“As a result, dating of rock art becomes more certain and reliable.”
The discovery that the Leang Karampuang paintings are at least 51,200 years old has important implications for understanding the origins of early art.
“Our results are very surprising. Apart from some controversial finds in Spain, none of the famous Ice Age rock arts in Europe are this old. This is the first time that Indonesian rock art has been dated to more than 50,000 years,” said the study's lead author Adi Agus Octaviana, a rock art expert at Jakarta's National Research and Innovation Agency and a doctoral student at Griffith University.
The scientists also used the LA-U series technique to re-date calcium carbonate deposits that lie above cave paintings at the Leang Bru Sipon 4 cave site.
The paintings, which consist of narrative “scenes” depicting figures interpreted as therianthropes (half-human, half-animal) hunting warthogs and dwarf buffalo, were estimated by the team to be at least 43,900 years old.
Using new techniques, the authors prove that the artwork dates to a minimum of about 48,000 years ago, making it 4,040 years older than present.
“The cave paintings at Leang Karampuang and Leang Bul Siphon 4 shed new light on a great period and the vital role of storytelling in art history,” said Professor Adam Blum of Griffith University, co-author of the study.
“It is remarkable that the oldest cave paintings found so far in Sulawesi consist of recognizable scenes – pictures of humans interacting with animals – and we can infer that the artists were trying to tell some kind of story.”
“This was a new discovery because the academic consensus on early figurative cave art was that it consisted of panels with single figures, no clearly defined scenes, and that pictorial representations that conveyed a narrative emerged much later in European art.”
This discovery suggests that narrative storytelling has been an important part of human artistic culture in Indonesia from very early times.
“Humans have probably been telling stories for much longer than 51,200 years, but because words don't fossilize we have to rely on indirect evidence like depicted scenes in artwork, and the Sulawesi artworks are the oldest such evidence known to archaeology so far,” Octaviana said.
of Investigation result Published in a journal Nature.
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AA Octaviana and othersl. The story of Indonesian cave paintings from 51,200 years ago. NaturePublished online July 3, 2024; doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07541-7
Source: www.sci.news
Webb Observes Four Views of a Gravitationally Lensed Quasar
The quasar, called RX J1131-1231, lies about 6 billion light-years away in the constellation Crater.
This Webb image shows the galaxy RX J1131-1231 distorted by gravitational lensing into a dark ring. At the top of the ring are three very bright spots next to each other, emitting diffraction spikes. These are copies of a single quasar in the lensed galaxy, duplicated by gravitational lensing. In the center of the ring, the lensing elliptical galaxy appears as a small blue spot. Image credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / Webb / A. Nierenberg.
RXJ1131-1231 The galaxy is thought to be one of the best lensed quasars ever discovered, as the foreground lensing effect blurs the image of the background quasar into a bright arc, creating four celestial images.
“Gravitational lensing effect“This phenomenon, first predicted by Albert Einstein, acts as a natural telescope, magnifying the light from these sources and providing a rare opportunity to study the regions close to the black holes in distant quasars,” astronomer Webb said.
“All matter in the universe distorts the space around it, and the more mass there is, the more pronounced this effect.”
“Around very massive objects like galaxies, light passing nearby travels through this distorted space, appearing to bend visibly from its original path.”
“One of the inevitable effects of gravitational lensing is the magnification of distant objects, allowing astronomers to study objects that would otherwise be too faint or too far away.”
“Measuring the X-ray emission from a quasar can provide an indication of how fast the central black hole is rotating, which could give researchers important clues about how black holes grow over time,” the researchers added.
“For example, if black holes grow primarily through collisions and mergers between galaxies, then the accumulation of material in a stable disk and the steady supply of new material from the disk should cause the black hole to rotate rapidly.”
“On the other hand, if a black hole grows through many small accretion episodes, then material will accumulate from random directions.”
“Observations show that the black hole in RX J1131-1231 is rotating at more than half the speed of light, suggesting that the black hole grew by merging rather than by attracting matter from different directions.”
New images of RX J1131-1231 can be found at Webb's MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) As part of an observational program to study dark matter.
“Dark matter is an invisible substance that makes up most of the mass of the universe,” the researchers said.
“Webb's quasar observations allow us to probe the nature of dark matter on smaller scales than ever before.”
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This article is a version of a press release provided by NASA.
Source: www.sci.news
Ancient DNA unravels the evolutionary history of Australian dingoes
Dingoes are found across most of the Australian continent.
Dominique Jeanmaire/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Analysis of ancient dingo DNA suggests that Australia's native wild dogs arrived in two migration waves between 3,000 and 8,000 years ago, and show little evidence of interbreeding with domestic dogs.
Sally Wasef Researchers from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia looked at 42 ancient dingo specimens, ultimately obtaining nine complete genomes, including the oldest genome of any Australian species sequenced to date, as well as mitochondrial DNA from 16 animals.
The DNA recovered dates from 400 to 2,700 years ago and was collected from across the continent. The researchers compared this ancient data with DNA from 11 modern dingoes, six New Guinea singing dogs, and 372 domestic dogs, wolves, and other canines collected in previous studies.
The analysis confirmed that Australia's two main dingo populations – those concentrated on the east and west coasts – diverged at least 3,000 years ago, and because the east coast dingoes are more closely related to the singing dogs of New Guinea than are the west coast dingoes, it is possible that dingoes migrated to Australia in two waves.
Because no DNA from ancient New Guinea singing dogs was found, the researchers could not rule out the possibility that the singing dogs were descended from dingoes that migrated to New Guinea from Australia.
People have long known that dingoes descended from wolves, but “without ancient DNA we couldn't figure that out,” Wassef said.
Since Europeans arrived in Australia, dingoes have been hunted and killed as a threat to the livestock industry.
In recent years, there have been a number of dingo attacks on humans on K'gari Island, also known as Fraser Island, off the coast of Queensland, leading to the animals being euthanized.
Analysis of ancient DNA found no evidence that the K'gari dingoes interbred with domestic dogs. “It's been suggested that dingoes interbred with domestic dogs to provide an excuse to kill them,” Wassef said. “Our results don't show evidence of widespread interbreeding.”
To protect K'gari dingoes' gene pool, Wassef said the practice of euthanizing dingoes may need to be reconsidered: “K'gari dingoes already suffer from inbreeding and killing individuals would significantly reduce their DNA.”
“This study is exciting because it provides some of the data we need to investigate the evolutionary relationships between dingoes, New Guinea singing dogs, dog populations around the world and wolves,” Kylie Cairns At the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
topic:
Source: www.newscientist.com
145 million years ago in Thailand, a distant relative of T. rex roamed the land
A team of paleontologists from Kasetsart University, Mahasarakham University and Sirindhorn Museum have unearthed three fossilized teeth from a previously unknown non-tyrannosaurid tyrannosauroid dinosaur in northeastern Thailand.
Paleoenvironmental reconstruction of the Late Jurassic Phu Kradung Formation, northeastern Thailand. Image courtesy of Chacharin Somboon.
“Tyrannosauroidea is a lineage of theropods, which includes some of the best-known carnivorous dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurus Rex “From the Late Cretaceous of North America.” Dr. Chacharam Ketwetulya Kasetsart University and colleagues.
“They lived primarily on the supercontinent of Laurasia from the Middle Jurassic to the Late Cretaceous.”
“The oldest known species of tyrannosauroids are found in the Middle Jurassic of Europe and Asia, suggesting that this group of theropods originated within Eurasia.”
“Tyrannosauroidea ranged across Asia from the Late Jurassic to the Late Cretaceous, with most Asian tyrannosaurids found in China and Mongolia.”
The three tyrannosauroid teeth examined by the research team were discovered in the Phu Noi area of Khammuang district, Kalasin province, northeastern Thailand.
The specimen dates back to the Tithonian stage of the Jurassic period, approximately 145 million years ago.
A basal tyrannosauroid tooth from the Phu Noi region of Thailand. Image courtesy of Chowchuvech others.
“The Phu Noi area is known to be one of the richest sources of Mesozoic vertebrate fossils in Southeast Asia,” the paleontologists said.
“Many species have been unearthed from the site, including freshwater sharks, ray-finned fish, lungfish, amphibians, turtles, crocodylomorphs, pterosaurs and dinosaurs.”
“Three species of dinosaurs have been identified in the Phu Noi area: a metriacanthosaurid theropod, a mamenchisaurid sauropod and a basal neoornithischian. Minimo Cursor.”
“Three of the theropod teeth from the Phu Noi area display unique dental features that distinguish them from previously discovered metriacanthosaurid theropods, including lateral teeth with twisted mesial ridges on the proximal lingual side that extend above the cervical line and interwoven enamel surface textures,” the researchers added.
“Morphological examination and systematic and morphometric analyses reveal that these isolated teeth indicate basal tyrannosauroid relationships, Five colors of the dragon and Proceratosaurus bradleyi From the Jurassic Period.”
“This discovery marks the first report of a tyrannosauroid from the Jurassic of Southeast Asia and contributes to our knowledge of the paleoecology of the lower continent.” Phu Kradung Formation“Our results shed light on the morphological and morphological distribution of tyrannosauroids during the Late Jurassic, and on the paleobiogeographic distribution of tyrannosauroids during the Late Jurassic,” the researchers concluded.
“Furthermore, this study sheds light on the possibility that future excavations and research may uncover new species of dinosaurs in Thailand.”
of study Published in the journal Tropical Natural History.
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W. Chochubek others2024. First discovery of a basal tyrannosauroid in Southeast Asia: dental evidence from the Late Jurassic of northeastern Thailand. Tropical Natural History 24（1） : 84-95
Source: www.sci.news
Webb’s revelation of hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere of a hot Jupiter
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have detected trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere of the Jupiter-sized exoplanet HD 189733b.
Artist's impression of hot Jupiter exoplanet HD 189733b. Image courtesy of Roberto Molar Candanosa / Johns Hopkins University.
HD 189733b is a hot gas giant with a hazy atmosphere composed mostly of hydrogen that lies about 63 light-years away in the constellation Vulpecula.
The planet is discovered It was discovered in 2005 by astronomers using two telescopes at the Observatory of Haute-Provence.
HD 189733b is just 1.2 times the size of Jupiter, but it orbits its parent star, HD 189733, very closely, completing one revolution around the star every 2.2 days.
“Hydrogen sulfide is a major molecule that we didn't know existed. We predicted it would be there, and we know it's on Jupiter, but we'd never actually detected it outside the solar system,” said Dr Guangwei Hu, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University.
“Although we're not looking for life on this planet because it's too hot, the discovery of hydrogen sulfide is a stepping stone to finding this molecule on other planets and improving our understanding of how different types of planets form.”
“In addition to detecting hydrogen sulfide and measuring the total amount of sulfur in HD 189733b's atmosphere, we also precisely measured the main sources of oxygen and carbon on the planet: water, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide.”
“Sulfur is an essential element for building more complex molecules, and like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphate, scientists need to study it further to fully understand how planets are built and what they're made of.”
The Webb probe will give scientists new tools to track hydrogen sulfide and measure sulfur on gas giants outside our solar system, just as they have detected water, carbon dioxide, methane and other important molecules on other exoplanets.
“Let's say we study another 100 hot Jupiters and they're all enriched with sulphur. What does that say about how they came into being and how they formed differently compared to our Jupiter?” Dr Fu said.
The new data, delivered by the Webb Telescope at unprecedented precision and in infrared wavelengths, also rule out the presence of methane in HD 189733b's atmosphere, refuting previous claims that the molecule is abundant in the atmosphere.
“We thought the planet would be too hot for high concentrations of methane to exist, but it turns out that's not the case,” Dr Fu said.
Astronomers also measured Jupiter-like levels of heavy metals, a discovery that could help scientists answer questions about the correlation between a planet's metallicity and its mass.
“Low-mass ice giants like Neptune and Uranus contain more metals than gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, the largest planets in the solar system,” Dr Fu said.
“High metallicity suggests that Neptune and Uranus accumulated more ice, rock and other heavy elements compared to gases such as hydrogen and helium early in their formation. Scientists are testing whether this correlation also holds true for exoplanets.”
“This Jupiter-mass planet is very close to Earth and has been very well studied. Now, our new measurements show that this planet's metal concentrations provide a very important anchor point for studies of how a planet's composition varies with its mass and radius.”
“This discovery supports our understanding of how planets form after the initial core is formed, creating more solid material that is then naturally enriched with heavy metals.”
Team result Published in the journal Nature.
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G. Hu othersA hydrogen sulfide and metal-rich atmosphere on a Jupiter-mass exoplanet. NaturePublished online July 8, 2024; doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07760-y
Source: www.sci.news
The Evolution of Human Brains: The Potential Consequences for Our Future
No one doubts that Albert Einstein had a brilliant mind, but the Nobel Prize winner famous for his theories of special and general relativity wasn’t blessed with a big brain. “Jeremy DeSilva at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.”
This seems surprising. Big brains are a defining feature of human anatomy, something we are proud of. Other species may be faster or stronger, but we thrive using the ingenuity that comes from our big brains. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves. Einstein’s brain suggests that the story is not so simple. And recent fossil discoveries bear this out. In the past two decades, we’ve learned that small-brained hominin species persisted on Earth long after species with larger brains emerged. Moreover, there is growing evidence that they were behaviorally sophisticated. For example, some of them made complex stone tools that could only have been made by humans with language.
These findings turn questions about the evolution of the human brain upside down: “Why would large brains be selected for when humans with small brains can survive in nature?” says DeSilva. Nervous tissue consumes a lot of energy, so large brains must have undoubtedly provided an advantage to the few species that evolved them. But what was the benefit?
The answer to this mystery is beginning to emerge. It appears that brain expansion began as an evolutionary accident that then led to changes that accelerated brain growth. Amazingly, the changes that drove this expansion also explain the recent 10 percent shrinkage of the human brain. What’s more, this suggests that our brains could shrink even further, potentially causing our demise.
There’s no denying that…
Source: www.newscientist.com
New Hubble Space Telescope Images Reveal Classic Spiral Structure in NGC 3810
Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to create a stunningly detailed image of NGC 3810, a spiral galaxy hosting a supernova.
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows NGC 3810, a spiral galaxy about 50 million light-years away in the constellation Leo. The color image is composed of infrared, visible, and ultraviolet observations from both the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instruments. Nine filters were used to sample different wavelengths. Color is achieved by assigning a different hue to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / D. Sand / RJ Foley.
NGC 3810 It is located in the constellation Leo, about 50 million light years from Earth.
Also known as IRAS 11383+1144, LEDA 36243 and UGC 6644, the galaxy has a diameter of 60,000 light years.
NGC 3810 discovered It was discovered on March 15, 1784 by German-born British astronomer William Herschel.
The galaxy belongs to a small group of galaxies called the NGC 3810 group.
The bright central region of NGC 3810 thought Many new stars are forming and outshining the outer regions of the galaxy by a significant amount.
Even more distant galaxies show surprisingly abundant dust clouds along their spiral arms.
Far from the center, hot, young blue stars appear in huge clusters, with bright red giants scattered throughout the arms.
In 2022, a Type Ia supernova event called SN 2022zut was observed in NGC 3810.
“In early 2023, the Hubble Space Telescope will focus on this and several other galaxies to take a closer look at recent Type Ia supernovae,” Hubble astronomers said in a statement.
“These types of supernovae are produced by the explosion of a white dwarf star, and all of them maintain a very stable brightness.”
“This allows us to measure distances. We know how bright a Type Ia supernova is, so we can tell from how faint it appears how far away it is.”
“One uncertainty with this method is that intergalactic dust between Earth and the supernova will block some of the light.”
“How do we know how much of the light reduction is due to distance and how much is due to dust?”
“With the help of Hubble, we have a clever workaround: we can image the same Type Ia supernova in ultraviolet light, which is almost completely blocked by the dust, and in infrared light, which passes through the dust almost unaffected.”
“By carefully recording how much light is transmitted at each wavelength, we can calibrate the relationship between the supernova's brightness and distance, and take dust into account.”
“Hubble can observe both of these wavelengths of light in incredible detail with the same instrument.”
“That makes it the perfect tool for this experiment. In fact, some of the data used to create this beautiful image of NGC 3810 was focused on the SN 2022zut supernova, which you can see as a point of light just below the galactic nucleus.”
Source: www.sci.news
The impact of historical discrimination on heat waves in minority and low-income communities
Today, the South Bronx has the least amount of green space per capita in the city and is crisscrossed by power plants, waste dumps and freeways, causing significant noise and air pollution. Residents face high rates of infant mortality, cognitive impairment, heart disease, and asthma, and Mott Haven is known as ‘ Asthma Alley.’ These conditions increase vulnerability to heat.
“Environmental racism in the South Bronx is clear,” said Arif Ullah, executive director of the environmental justice group South Bronx Unite.
Similar inequities have been identified across the country. Analysis of 115 metropolitan areas from San Jose, California, to Louisville, Kentucky, to Hartford, Connecticut, neighborhoods with larger numbers of residents who identify as black, African American, Hispanic, or Latino were found to be less likely to have air conditioning.
To combat rising temperatures, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has implemented heatstroke measures. For one week, starting June 18, hundreds of locations were designated as air-conditioned facilities where residents could stay cool during the day.
New York City Emergency Management Director Zach Iscol said the city is distributing “cool kits” and indoor thermometers. He said: There is a program to help low-income residents who need heating and cooling. This year, 21,000 applications have already been received.
Installing air conditioning for people with mobility impairments is actually essential as outdoor temperatures rise — or these individuals may never be able to reach a cooling center. In areas like Brownsville, the South Bronx, and East Harlem, residents also report being exposed to crime and drug dealing when they go outside to cool off.
Celine Olivarius, who has lived in the South Bronx for nine years, brought her two grandsons, ages 9 and 4, to cool off in the fountains at Willis Playground. She expresses concern about the opioid epidemic, as drug users are injecting in the bathroom, and she worries that children might pick up needles.
Environmentalists say one solution to beat the heat in sprawling cities is to plant more trees, create green spaces like parks and meadows, and cover rooftops with vegetation.
“We need to focus on low-income communities, people of color, and immigrant communities,” Uhlfelder said. Areas with a 33 percent reduction in tree canopy area are likely to experience a 13-degree increase (7 degrees Celsius) in temperature compared to predominantly white areas just two miles away.
The New York City Council passed laws last fall to add trees to the City Charter Sustainability Plan and mandate the development of urban forest plans to increase tree cover from 22 percent to 30 percent by 2035.
“I’ve never felt anything like it,” said Howard Shillingford, a 58-year-old janitor who grew up in the South Bronx, on a recent sweltering day. It’s especially bad when he’s cleaning school staircases, where the windows often don’t open.
“Oh my goodness, those stairs look like an oven,” Shillingford said as he read the news on a computer at Mott Haven Public Library, another cooling center.
Residents in heat-stricken areas are getting resourceful. Berrios holds a wet towel to the back of her neck. Olivarria squirts her grandchildren with a toy water gun. Jorge Morales, a 54-year-old graffiti artist from the South Bronx, showers twice a day and washes his Chihuahua, Bugsy, in the sink. Residents sometimes unscrew fire hydrants, allowing water to spill off the sidewalk and onto the street.
“I don’t like wasting water, but people here do it. It’s a way of survival,” Morales, who is half Puerto Rican and half Cuban, said as he charged his phone in the same library.
Experts say extreme heat will likely become the new normal and should not be underestimated. Heat waves have become more frequent since 1936.
“If we continue on this path, the heat wave in 2044 will be much worse than the one we’re experiencing now,” said Jones, the science historian. “This is not an unusual heat wave. It is a sign of things to come.”
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Source: www.nbcnews.com
The Influence of Chemistry on the Flavor of Alcohol
Animals have been consuming alcohol for millions of years, and primates and humans have been digesting it for about 7 to 21 million years. Throughout human history, alcohol consumption and production has been a part of many different cultures. Experts on human societies, including anthropologists and indigenous peoples, have long known about the origins of rice wine (Miju) and beer (Lao Lee) has been part of ancient Chinese culture for 7,000 to 13,000 years. Similarly, people in the Andes region of South America have been brewing beer made from corn. Chicha It spans approximately 5,000 years.
Even though ancient methods of making alcohol have spread all over the world, people all brew drinks that contain the same amount of alcohol, a standard known as the “alcohol content.” Alcohol degree or ABV. Beverages can be brewed at a range of ABVs, but beer is preferred to be brewed at around 4% alcohol by volume, wine at 11%-16%, and stronger spirits at around 43%, 52%, 68%, and 75% alcohol by volume. However, scientists are yet to figure out the reason behind these universal ranges of ABV.
A team of Chinese researchers studied why people choose different alcohol strengths by looking at how water and ethanol molecules interact at different alcohol strengths. Alcoholic drinks contain a variety of molecules that add flavor, color and aroma, but the main molecules are water and ethanol. ethanolThese molecules are made of atoms such as hydrogen and oxygen. The atoms of the molecules are held together by electric forces, like two magnets, but the atoms between the two molecules also attract each other. Water and ethanol molecules are attracted to each other through their hydrogen and oxygen atoms. This process is called Hydrogen Bonding.
The team demonstrated how hydrogen bonds can hold water and ethanol in different orientations and Interaction AngleThey are devices that determine the structure of molecules, Hydrogen Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer or H NMR. H NMR The machine can detect hydrogen atoms and determine what they are bonded to and what angle they form.
The research team created mixtures of water and ethanol ranging from 0% to 100% alcohol content and used H NMR to detect the change in the interaction angle between the two molecules. They found that as the alcohol content increased, the interaction angle decreased. It dropped from a 90° angle at 1% alcohol content to a 10° angle at 99% alcohol content. They noticed that this change was not smooth, but that the interaction angle decreased in stages. For example, the interaction angle was about 70° between 11% and 13% alcohol content, but suddenly dropped to 60° when the alcohol content reached 14% alcohol content. The research team noticed that these abrupt changes occurred across the preferred alcohol content ranges of alcoholic beverages around the world, as shown above.
The most common type of hydrogen bond that occurs between a hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom is Hydroxyl. Using 1 H NMR, the team found that these hydroxyl interactions produced a uniform 3D water molecular network at an interaction angle of 90°, forming tetrahedral structures. However, the hydroxyl interactions between ethanol molecules were nearly linear, and at an interaction angle of 0°, long chains were formed. As the alcohol content of the beverage increased, the tetrahedral structures and the long chain molecules competed with each other.
The team found that as the alcohol content increased, the number of hydroxyl interactions decreased stepwise, as did the interaction angle. The team concluded that alcoholic drinks with different alcohol content formed distinct mixtures of chain and tetrahedral interactions. Increasing the amount of ethanol molecules increased the number of chain interactions as the molecules found new preferred orientations.
Finally, the researchers investigated whether the amount of these chain and tetrahedral interactions altered the flavor when an alcoholic beverage was cooled or heated. When an 11% ABV beverage was cooled to 42°F (5°C), more hydroxyl interactions occurred. This cooling increased the number of chain interactions between water and ethanol molecules.
Next, the researchers hired professional and amateur beer tasters to test the flavor of cold and hot alcoholic beverages with 11% alcohol content. The tasters found that chilling low and high alcohol content beers produced even greater differences in the flavor of the alcohol, due to an increased number of chain reactions within these beverages.
On the other hand, when the researchers warmed the beverages to 104°F (40°C), the number of hydroxyl interactions remained consistently between 38% and 52% ABV. Professional and amateur beer tasters tasted the warmed alcoholic beverages at 38% and 52% ABV and could not detect any difference. The team concluded that warming these beverages resulted in similar amounts of chain interactions, so flavor was unaffected by the change in ABV. This difference in taste could explain why people prefer to drink warm sake and other alcoholic beverages at 38% ABV.
The team concluded that throughout human history, brewers and drinkers have relied on their tongues to find the right alcohol content and temperature needed to create beverages that involve water-ethanol polymer chain interactions. By learning the importance of hydrogen bonds and molecular interactions, the team hopes that future brewers and scientists will experiment with different ways to control these molecular interactions to create even more sophisticated and interesting flavors.
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Source: sciworthy.com
Testing Millions of UK homes for Energy Leaks in Effort to Achieve Net Zero Goal
Vehicles equipped with technology to collect data on building conditions
Madeleine Cuff
British city dwellers may have spotted a strange-looking vehicle driving around their neighborhood earlier this year. It looked just like a Google Street View vehicle, with a camera setup sticking out of the back to scan its surroundings. And like the Google car, it scanned city streets and took photos.
But these modified Teslas do more than just take pictures: they’re equipped with cutting-edge sensors and scanners that can report back the exact dimensions, heat loss, materials, age and state of disrepair of every building they drive over.
The car, equipped with what’s called the Built Environment Scanning System (BESS), has been on a spree to find out just how leaky and dilapidated Britain’s buildings really are. Between March and May, the car scanned thousands of roads and millions of buildings across London, Liverpool, Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds and South Yorkshire.
Data from BESS vehicles will be combined with thermal images taken by drones and planes in a £4 million government-funded project to build a huge digital database detailing the condition of buildings across the U.K. The aim is to help housing associations, local authorities and other property owners quickly plan renovation projects for hundreds of properties at once, says Ahsan Khan of xRI, the British nonprofit behind the project.
Decarbonising UK buildings is one of the toughest challenges on the journey to net-zero emissions. The UK’s 30 million buildings account for around a third of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions, with most of the pollution coming from the use of gas for heating and hot water.
Another problem is that many of the UK’s homes are old and drafty. Retrofitting these homes to make them more energy efficient is crucial, but knowing where to start is a huge challenge, as the age and condition of the buildings varies greatly. “We’re held back as a nation because we don’t really know what we have, where it is in terms of the built environment, and what we can do about it,” says Khan.
Currently, the only means of judging a building’s sustainability is the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), a mandatory document that rates every building on a scale of A to G and gives owners advice on how to improve the rating. But EPCs, which rely on the judgement of in-person assessors, are “expensive, time-consuming and inaccurate”, says Dr. Mike Pitts The project is part-funded by the government body Innovate UK, with other funding coming from the UK Space Agency and the Welsh Government.
For organisations such as housing associations and local authorities who want to renovate hundreds of properties at once, EPCs are of little use – instead they often have to send their own assessors to the properties and plan the works schedule, which is a costly and time-consuming undertaking.
Speeding up renovations
The new database is expected to digitise much of this process. If it works as planned, it will use machine learning to tell councils, for example, how many properties already have double glazing installed, or which homes need top-up cavity-wall insulation. In an instant, it will be able to pinpoint exactly which homes have the space and sunlight to install rooftop solar panels. Crucially, it will calculate projected savings on energy bills and provide return-on-investment information, helping organisations access green finance.
“The xRI project represents a major advance in our understanding of our existing stock,” says Mat Colmer of Innovate UK. “The validated data set will improve and automate the refurbishment process, speeding up the entire refurbishment process.”
About 7.5% of homes in England, Scotland, and Wales have already been scanned, and Khan says the framework is in place to build a beta version of the database, due to be released later this year. For now, xRI is focused on decarbonizing buildings, but the BESS vehicles are collecting data on everything they see, from tree cover to potholes, that could be put to use in the future. “The amount of data is just staggering,” Pitts says.
David Grew Researchers from Britain’s Leeds Beckett University call the project “exciting,” but warn that an in-home inspection is essential before any renovation work begins. “Homes have been tampered with many times, so the same home could be completely different,” he says. “This quick and agile method is great for accelerating progress and momentum, but it can’t and shouldn’t replace a really high-quality inspection before construction begins.”
Kate Simpson A researcher at Nottingham Trent University in the UK says neighbourhood data collected by BESS vehicles could help plan local power grid upgrades and climate resilience projects. But the data needs to be collected carefully, she says. “What’s the minimum amount of data we need to make the right decisions?” she says. “That way we can minimise the environmental impact of storing that data.”
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Source: www.newscientist.com
Overview of the Ariane 6 Rocket Launch: What to Expect and When to Watch
Artistic depiction of the Ariane 6 rocket
ESA-D. Duclos
What is Ariane 6?
Ariane 6 is the latest model in the Ariane series of European satellite launch vehicles. The project dates back to a proposal in 1973, with the first flight of the Ariane 1 rocket taking place just six years later in 1979.
The last to be launched was Ariane 5, which completed 112 successful missions out of 117 launches, including the James Webb Space Telescope and the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, but was retired last year to make way for Ariane 6, which was expected to have lower launch costs.
The loss of Ariane 5 and the European Space Agency's (ESA) decision to cut ties with the Russian space agency Roscosmos following Russia's invasion of Ukraine temporarily left Europe without a direct means of launching satellites and forced it to turn to the commercial sector.
The ultimate idea is to not just take on all of these government launches in the future, but also offer its own commercial launch services — it's already received a launch order from Amazon. Kuiper Internet Satellite.
How big is Ariane 6?
The Ariane 6 is 63 meters tall and 5.4 meters in diameter, and can launch up to 21,650 kilograms of cargo into low Earth orbit. While that's less than the payloads of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS), China's Long March 10, or SpaceX's Starship, it can still put a variety of satellites into orbit, including spy, weather, and global positioning satellites.
Ariane 6's main advantage isn't its payload, but its low cost and ease of construction: Aerospace company Arianegroup designed it to be easier and quicker to build and launch than its predecessor, allowing ESA to launch it once a month if necessary.
The rocket was originally scheduled to launch in 2020 but has been postponed multiple times. Those delays, along with the falling cost of reusable rockets operated by SpaceX, have led Europe to look elsewhere for launch capacity. The European Agency for the Exploration of Meteorological Satellites recently said: Launch contract awarded to SpaceX Rather than opting for Ariane 6, the European contract was signed last year. Galileo navigation satellite in orbit I also went to SpaceX.
When is the Ariane 6 launch and how can I watch it?
The launch from ESA's facility in French Guiana is scheduled for 7pm-11pm BST on July 9. ESA said Live broadcast of the launchThe event will begin 30 minutes before the launch and will be available to watch via streaming. News Scientist.
What happens during launch?
Ariane 6 will be launched using a Vulcan 2.1 main engine and two expendable boosters. These will drop in the same way as the first stage, after which the Vinci engines of the upper stage will launch it into an elliptical orbit measuring 300 by 700 kilometers above Earth. The Vinci engines will then reignite to put the upper stage into a circular orbit, after which Ariane will release its eight satellites and the upper stage will burn up in the atmosphere. Two small re-entry capsules will return it safely to Earth.
What comes next for Ariane 6?
A successor to Ariane 6 is already in development and will break the sequential rocket numbering system. Known as ArianeNext, it will be a reusable rocket similar to SpaceX's Starship and is scheduled to launch in the 2030s.
A major criticism of Ariane 6 is that it cannot be reused, a feature pioneered by SpaceX and already being developed by several other companies, and will likely not be resolved in Europe until Next begins operations.
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Source: www.newscientist.com
Tesla refuses to release batteries, denying owners full benefits
In Australia, Tesla battery owners may lose a profitable revenue stream due to restrictions placed by a U.S. energy company on local third-party transactions for their equipment. Additionally, there is uncertainty regarding the establishment and enforcement of standards by authorities.
Modern appliances like air conditioners, water heaters, and solar panels can now be remotely controlled, allowing consumers to engage in contracts that compensate them for adjusting their electricity usage, including supplying power back to the grid during peak times.
Although Tesla must achieve battery interoperability in various U.S. states, sources suggest that the company has disabled this feature on their flagship $15,000 Powerwall 2 battery sold in Australia.
To maximize benefits for consumers and the electric grid in the future, experts suggest that federal and state governments should enforce U.S. obligations on Tesla and other battery suppliers based on IEEE 1547-2018 Article 10 standards. Companies limiting utilities should not qualify for rebates. New South Wales offers subsidies of up to $2,400 per battery through their program.
Dean Spaccavento, CEO of Reposite Power, argues that batteries with closed control ports can restrict business models and harm owners. There are limitations to mitigating the battery issue through third-party providers who manage virtual power plants, where Tesla is a dominant player.
Government intervention is deemed necessary to mandate local control interfaces for batteries under rebate programs. Reposite Power avoids using Tesla batteries due to the company’s stance in the U.S.
Tesla has been contacted for comment by Guardian Australia.
The Australian Energy Market Operator emphasizes the potential of cooperative Consumer Energy Resource storage in their recent Grid Blueprint announcement.
Effective coordination and management of CERs are crucial for a cost-effective energy transition, as highlighted by Aemo. Home batteries with cloud control capabilities could be remotely activated with a software command, potentially causing conflicts and financial losses.
The adoption of interoperability standards in Australia’s energy products is expected to bring significant benefits, according to experts.
Source: www.theguardian.com
The Emergence of British Nerdcore in Video Games: Hacked Gameboys, Compliment Battles, and Mr Blobby
circleA live jazz band plays Mario Kart, Full Orchestra Sonic plays. But there's an entire subgenre of video game music artists, who are happy to describe their sound as even nerdier. “Nerdcore has been around for 25 years – it's hip hop with nerdy themes, mostly about video games,” says Nick Box, 41, from Blackpool. Box has been in all sorts of “weird, silly bands,” including an electronic horror punk band. Hot Pink Sewer“All I did was dress up as a disabled person and play some backing tracks.” Cliff Grichard And it's weirder than you might think.
“The setting is a ZX Spectrum run by an AI clone of '90s TV presenter Noel Edmonds,” he explains. “The show starts with a Spectrum loading screen, followed by a pixelated Edmonds telling the audience that he's responsible for every celebrity death, political decision and catastrophe of the last 40 years. I run around screaming about stupid celebrities and end up fucking Mr Blobby onstage.”
According to Box, they were a nerdcore rap band based in Sunderland in the 2000s. B Type are his main inspiration and are “probably the biggest nerdy rap band in the UK right now”.
“In the early 2000s, there was a music explosion that mixed video game soundscapes with punk rock, hip hop and rap,” says Steve Brunton, aka BType, 39. “Final Fantasy VII was the first game that got people hooked on music, which led to remixes and covers.”
BType have covered Pokémon, Final Fantasy, Mortal Kombat and Cannon Fodder. “Each track is a love letter to the original,” he adds. The band performs with modified Game Boys and live beatboxers. “I'd describe our sound as the Beastie Boys working for Nintendo,” he says. Their shows draw “a wide variety of fans, from metal fans to nerds and geeks who you can tell from their T-shirts. When we started it was a huge untapped reservoir. Now, because everyone plays video games, a lot of people self-identify as fans.”
“What we really need to talk about is Megaran“He's a former English teacher from the US who became popular rapping about Final Fantasy VII and Mega Man and will be opening for Wheatus on their UK tour. He's a really great guy,” he advises.
“Hip hop's second golden age came in the early '90s, when Snoop Dogg, Nas and Wu-Tang Clan were releasing their seminal records,” Philadelphia-born Raheem Jarboe, aka Mega Ran, 45, told me over Zoom from Los Angeles International Airport, where we were waiting for a delayed flight to London. “Some of us were like, 'Let's just write songs,' but we weren't the cool kids, so we just wrote about our lives playing video games.”
Mega Run released his first album in 2006. He quit teaching in 2011 when he received a job offer from Capcom to write music for Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge. “The songs are still nerdy, but the lines are blurring. If you listen to a Kanye West song, you hear a reference to a video game. Before, you didn't think anyone would notice a reference to Marvel Comics. Now Marvel is one of the biggest franchises in the world.”
“Mega Run supported Wheatus on their UK tour in June this year, taking to the stage with the band and rapping during their set of Teenage Dirtbag. “It touches on Nintendo Power, AOL, Yahoo and all the stuff we did when we were kids in the early 2000s,” he says.
Have you heard of Mr B? [The Gentleman Rhymer] “They're British nerdcore artists, and instead of insulting each other, they're praising each other and battling each other. 'You're so cool, your fashion accessories are amazing.' Talk to them, they're fun.”
“It would be nice, especially if we get some positive press,” said the 49-year-old, from Brighton. Paul Alborough Also known as Professor Elemental. “Ten years ago, Michael Gove Mentioned He liked my music and it was in the Guardian. I had to contact him and tell him that if he came to my show, I would have the audience beat him with sticks.”
Alborough describes his character, Professor Elemental, as “a mad, optimistic but woefully incompetent eccentric British explorer and inventor”. He has been performing for over a decade and can be seen at Glastonbury this year in a rainbow suit and pith helmet, with chimpanzees and lions as backing dancers.
Like Mega Ran, Professor Elemental has written songs for Sega and Nintendo, and if you want him to write a personal song it will cost you £500 a song.
So what does he think of his nerdcore contemporaries? “Sometimes I hear people rapping about, say, Mr Blobby, and I think, 'I can't stand this newfangled rap, it's not proper hip-hop'. But then I remember what I do…”
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The Mr. Blobby-themed rap leads us to Dan Buckley, 39, the leader of a Mr. Blobby-themed grindcore band. Underline.
“I'm really interested in the blend of music, comedy, surrealism and a good, healthy dose of weirdness,” Buckley says of his two decades in the industry.
www.theguardian.com
General practitioner discusses the concealed health dangers of wearing shapewear
Shapewear, also known as body shaping underwear, has gained immense popularity in recent years. In a society that values appearance and self-image, shapewear is seen as a quick and affordable solution to boost self-confidence by enhancing the fit and look of various outfits.
Functioning like a modern corset, shapewear targets areas like the waist, hips, thighs, and buttocks to compress and shape them, aiming to improve the fit of clothes and provide a sleeker silhouette, as suggested by marketing claims.
With advancements in fabric technology, modern shapewear is now more comfortable and breathable than ever before, appealing to a wide range of individuals seeking aesthetic and functional support for various occasions. It has become increasingly popular, especially with the rise of social media influencing body image awareness.
Unlike traditional shapewear made from rigid materials like steel and whalebone, modern shapewear uses breathable and stretchy fabrics such as spandex, nylon, and lycra. It is now popular among both men and women for its comfort and effectiveness.
Available in different styles and compression levels, shapewear caters to various needs. Certain types, such as waist cinchers and tummy control panties, target specific body parts to provide support and shape.
In addition to these, there are thigh shapers, torso-compressing camisoles, butt lifters with padding, and leg and arm shapers. Some companies even offer full bodysuits with built-in bras for total body shaping.
Sports compression clothing, while similar, focuses on enhancing athletic performance and muscle support rather than aesthetic enhancement. Designed with advanced breathable fabrics and graduated compression, sports compression wear is intended for physical activity and recovery periods.
Although shapewear appears to offer a convenient way to enhance confidence and fit, it does come with certain drawbacks to consider. Issues like digestive problems, circulatory and neurological issues, breathing problems, and skin irritation can arise from wearing shapewear, particularly if it is too tight.
When choosing shapewear, it’s important to select a comfortable fit that doesn’t restrict movement and to avoid wearing it for extended periods. Opting for breathable fabrics and hypoallergenic materials can help reduce the risk of skin irritation.
In conclusion, while shapewear can provide temporary aesthetic benefits, it’s essential to prioritize comfort and health when using it. Remember, true confidence comes from within, and it’s crucial to listen to your body’s needs.
read more:
- What would happen if we forgot about fashion?
- Dopamine dressing: How the color of your clothes changes your brain
- Why do clothes darken when they get wet?
Source: www.sciencefocus.com
California is facing an unexpected energy challenge due to excessive solar power use
Solar panels have become a common sight in suburban neighborhoods in California. However, the state’s ambitious clean energy vision has led to a unique challenge – sometimes producing more solar energy than it can use effectively, resulting in wastage of clean energy.
This excess of solar energy has resulted in a phenomenon known as the “duck curve,” where solar generation surpasses demand. This issue is most pronounced on sunny spring days when demand for electricity is low.
The surplus energy is often exported to other parts of the Western U.S. due to California’s grid connectivity, but in some cases, it may need to be curtailed. Independent System Operator data shows that California has lost a significant amount of renewable energy this year, primarily solar power.
To address this challenge, proposals have been made to increase electricity supply through additional transmission lines and more battery installations to store excess power. However, recent changes in financial incentives for homeowners installing solar power have negatively impacted the rooftop solar industry in California.
Despite the setbacks, Governor Gavin Newsom remains optimistic about California’s clean energy progress, pointing out the state’s significant solar power generation and increasing battery installations. Critics of the incentive changes argue that it could lead to higher energy costs for non-solar customers and hinder the state’s transition to renewable energy.
As California navigates these challenges on its path to achieving 100% clean energy by 2045, the state’s decisions are closely watched by other states considering similar transitions. The rooftop solar industry plays a crucial role in this transition, as highlighted by industry experts.
Source: www.nbcnews.com
Transform your diet with this essential food pyramid
The food pyramid is a visual representation of a balanced diet, showing the types and proportions of foods that contribute to overall health.
Imagine a pyramid divided into sections, with each section representing a different food group. Specific designs vary, but a typical food pyramid usually includes the following categories from base to apex:
Base (grain)
At the bottom, widest part, are grains like bread, rice, and pasta. These provide complex carbohydrates, which are your primary source of energy. Whole grains are also a good source of added fiber.
Second layer (fruits and vegetables)
Next, fruits and vegetables are rich in vitamins, minerals, fiber, and antioxidants. To get a variety of nutrients, try to eat at least five servings of colorful vegetables each day.
3rd layer (protein)
This section includes proteins like meat, poultry, fish, eggs, beans, nuts, etc. Protein is essential for muscle maintenance, immune function, and growth, and helps you feel fuller for longer.
Top layer (dairy or alternative)
This section discusses fortified alternatives, such as dairy or soy milk, which provide calcium and other essential nutrients needed for bone health.
Outside the pyramid (sweets and fats)
Here are your fats and sweets: While fats are necessary for many bodily functions, choose healthy fats, such as those found in olive oil and avocado. Limit your intake of added sugars and sweets.
The food pyramid acts as a guide to creating a balanced diet by incorporating a variety of foods from different groups while avoiding relying too heavily on one category.
This concept was shaped into a plate in the UK, Eatwell Guide. It tells you how much of each food group you should eat based on the space it takes up on your plate.
According to the Eatwell Guide, eating healthy means making balanced choices from the five food groups over the course of a day or week: one-third fruits and vegetables, one-third grains and starches, and the remaining third a mix of dairy, proteins, and fats, both animal and plant-based.
This article is a response to the question “What is the food pyramid and can it help you eat healthily?” (asked by Diane Weeks from Glasgow).
If you have any questions, please send them to the email address below. For further information:or send us a message Facebook, Xor Instagram Page (be sure to include your name and location).
Ultimate Fun Facts For more amazing science, check out this page.
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Source: www.sciencefocus.com
Unraveling the origins of the universe’s first stars
Recently, the James Webb Telescope (JWST) made a groundbreaking observation of a distant galaxy. These early galaxies challenge our understanding of galaxy formation and the physics of the early universe, appearing as bright, massive, fuzzy red dots.
One of JWST’s latest discoveries is the presence of “Tyrannosaurus Rex” Stars in a distant galaxy. The spectrum of this galaxy indicates a significant amount of carbon, raising questions about the origin of these stars.
These early stars are believed to be massive, unknown entities, and the carbon could be a remnant from their existence.
Early stars are rare because they formed in a pristine environment before the universe was polluted with heavy elements. Star formation was more challenging in this simpler time.
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Stars typically begin as balls of hydrogen gas that undergo nuclear fusion reactions to convert hydrogen into other elements.
Star formation requires cooling and compressing gas to ignite nuclear fusion reactions. Dust plays a crucial role in cooling the gas by absorbing and releasing energy during collisions.
The lack of heavy elements like carbon in the early universe posed a challenge for star formation. The first stars were likely more massive and exploded as supernovae, dispersing heavy elements and enabling the formation of stars like our sun.
Through observations of distant galaxies, JWST is providing insights into the origins of the universe and our place in it.
While we may not see the “space dinosaurs,” studying their remnants helps us understand how their existence paved the way for life on Earth.
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Source: www.sciencefocus.com
Utilizing Chatbots to Combat Phone Scammers: Exposing Real Criminals and Supporting True Victims
A scammer calls and asks for a passcode, leaving Malcolm, an older man with a British accent, confused.
“What business are you talking about?” Malcolm asks.
Again, I received a scam call.
This time, Ibrahim, cooperative and polite with an Egyptian accent, answered the phone. “To be honest, I can’t really remember if I’ve bought anything recently,” he told the scammer. “Maybe one of my kids did,” Ibrahim continued, “but it’s not your fault, is it?”
Scammers are real, but Malcolm and Ibrahim aren’t. They’re just two of the conversational artificial intelligence bots created by Professor Dali Kaafar and his team, who founded Apate, named after the Greek goddess of deception, through his research at Macquarie University.
Apetto’s goal is to use conversational AI to eradicate phone fraud worldwide, leveraging existing systems that allow telecommunications companies to redirect calls when they identify them as coming from scammers.
Kafal was inspired to strike back at phone scammers after he told a “dad joke” to the caller in front of his two children as they enjoyed a picnic in the sun. His pointless chatter kept the scammer on the line. “The kids had a good laugh,” Kafal says. “I thought the goal was to trick them so they would waste their time and not talk to other people.
“In other words, we’re scamming the scammers.”
The next day, he called in his team from the university’s Cybersecurity Hub. He figured there had to be a better way than his dad joke approach — and something smarter than a popular existing technology: Lennybot.
Before Malcolm and Ibrahim, there was Lenny.
Lenny is a rambling, elderly Australian man who loves to chatter away. He’s a chatbot designed to poke fun at telemarketers.
Lenny’s anonymous creator posted this on Reddit. They say they created the chatbot as “a telemarketer’s worst nightmare… a lonely old man who wants to chat and is proud of his family, but can’t focus on the telemarketer’s purpose.” The act of tying up scammers is called scamming.
Apate bot to the rescue
Australian telecommunications companies have blocked almost 2 billion scam calls since December 2020.
Thanks to $720,000 in funding from the Office of National Intelligence, the “victim chatbots” could now number in the hundreds of thousands, too many to name individually. The bots are of different “ages,” speak English with different accents, and exhibit a range of emotions, personalities, and reactions; sometimes naive, sometimes skeptical, sometimes rude.
Once a carrier detects a fraudster and routes them to a system like Apate, bots go to work to keep them busy. The bots try different strategies and learn what works to keep fraudsters on the phone line longer. Through successes and failures, the machines fine-tune their patterns.
This way, they can collect information such as the length of calls, the times of day when scammers are likely to call, what information they are after, and the tactics they are using, and extract the information to detect new scams.
Kafal hopes Apate will disrupt the call fraud business model, which is often run by large, multi-billion-dollar criminal organizations. The next step will be to use the information it collects to proactively warn of scams and take action in real time.
“We’re talking about real criminals who are making our lives miserable,” Kafal said. “We’re talking about the risks to real people.”
“Sometimes people lose their life savings, have difficulty living due to debt, and sometimes suffer mental trauma. [by] shame.”
Richard Buckland, a cybercrime professor at the University of New South Wales, said techniques like Apate were different to other types of fraud, some of which were amateurish or amounted to vigilante fraud.
“Usually fraud is problematic,” he said, “but this is sophisticated.”
He says mistakes can happen when individuals go it alone.
“You can go after the wrong person,” he said. Many scams are perpetrated by people in near-slave-like conditions, “and they’re not bad people,” he said.
“[And] “Some of the fraudsters are going even further and trying to enforce the law themselves, either by hacking back or engaging with them. That’s a problem.”
But the Apate model appears to be using AI for good, as a kind of “honeypot” to lure criminals and learn from them, he says.
Buckland warns that false positives happen everywhere, so telcos need a high level of confidence that only fraudsters are directing AI bots, and that criminal organisations could use anti-fraud AI technology to train their own systems.
“The same techniques used to deceive scammers can be used to deceive people,” he says.
Scamwatch is run by the National Anti-Fraud Centre (NASC) under the auspices of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and an ACCC spokesman said scammers often impersonate well-known organisations and use fake legitimate phone numbers.
“Criminals create a sense of urgency to encourage their targeted victims to act quickly,” the spokesperson said, “often trying to convince victims to give up personal or bank details or provide remote access to their computers.”
“Criminals may already have detailed information about their targeted victims, such as names and addresses, obtained or purchased illegally through data breaches, phishing or other scams.”
This week Scamwatch had to issue a warning about what appears to be a meth scam.
Scammers claiming to be NASC officials were calling innocent people and saying they were under investigation for allegedly engaging in fraud.
The NASC says people should hang up the phone immediately if they are contacted by a scammer. The spokesperson said the company is aware of “technology initiatives to productize fraud prevention using AI voice personas,” including Apate, and is interested in considering evaluating the platform.
Meanwhile, there is a thriving community of scammers online, and Lenny remains one of their cult heroes.
One memorable recording shows Lenny asking a caller to wait a moment. Ducks start quacking in the background. “Sorry,” Lenny says. “What were you talking about?”
“Are you near the computer?” the caller asks impatiently. “Do you have a computer? Can you come by the computer right now?”
Lenny continues until the conman loses his mind. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”
“Can we wait a little longer?” Lennie asked, as the ducks began quacking again.
Source: www.theguardian.com
NASCAR Reveals Electric Race Car Prototype in Preparation for Chicago Street Race
NASCAR introduced a prototype electric race car over the weekend as part of their initiative to reduce emissions and electrify the sport.
This move represents a major step towards sustainability, which may seem contradictory to the traditional roots of stock car racing, but it is in line with NASCAR’s long-term goal of achieving net-zero operational emissions by 2035.
The debut of the vehicle is a result of a partnership with electrification and automation company ABB. NASCAR Chicago Street Race.
The ABB NASCAR EV Prototype, developed in collaboration with Chevrolet, Ford, and Toyota, is an electric stock car capable of generating a peak output of 1,000 kW (1,341 horsepower). Equipped with a regenerative braking system, the race car converts kinetic energy from braking into electricity, similar to many existing hybrid and fully electric vehicles.
Officials at ABB highlighted that NASCAR’s efforts to decarbonize and reduce carbon emissions align with the broader energy transition happening in the United States.
Chris Sigas, U.S. public affairs director for ABB, expressed, “This partnership provides us with a platform to address issues impacting our nation and the direction we are collectively moving towards.”
While there are no immediate plans to phase out internal combustion engines from stock car racing, there is potential to explore high-performance electric cars for racing, as per sources.
Both organizations will collaborate to identify areas within NASCAR racing, specific race tracks, office operations, and long-haul transportation that can transition to electrification.
Sigas added, “We will evaluate all aspects of their operations – from long-haul trucking to golf carts on the track to EV charging stations. This multi-year partnership serves as an opportunity to showcase not just NASCAR but companies nationwide on how they can enhance their sustainability efforts.”
In the previous year, NASCAR committed to achieving net-zero emissions from operations by 2035 This commitment includes prioritizing 100% renewable electricity at owned race tracks and NASCAR facilities, expanding on-site EV charging stations, and developing sustainable race fuels.
Eric Nyquist, NASCAR senior vice president, stated in a release that the collaboration with ABB will support their endeavors to decarbonize operations and work towards achieving net-zero emissions in the next decade.
Source: www.nbcnews.com
Heatwave strikes California and other areas along the West Coast
The West Coast is facing a dangerous heatwave that is expected to peak on Saturday, putting people at risk of health issues long after temperatures reach their highest point. According to a national update on Friday, forecasters anticipate that a wide range of temperature records will be broken or tied, with temperatures in California expected to reach the 110s on Saturday. The hot weather will persist well into the following week, raising concerns about health risks such as heart attacks and heat strokes, especially among older adults and individuals with chronic diseases.
The heatwave is expected to persist for more than a week, prompting warnings from the National Weather Service about record-breaking temperatures in California, Oregon, and Washington. Areas like the Sacramento Valley, at the heart of the heat wave, are under warning until at least next Tuesday. Meteorologists predict some relief early next week, but temperatures are still likely to exceed 100 degrees in certain regions.
Heat-related illnesses, including heat stroke, pose a significant risk during prolonged periods of extreme heat. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows a sharp increase in heatstroke-related emergency room visits, with the incidence more than doubling in recent days. In regions like the San Joaquin Valley in California, extreme weather conditions are expected daily next week, impacting medical facilities and infrastructure.
In Portland, Oregon, health officials are concerned about residents unaccustomed to hot weather, particularly those attending outdoor events this weekend. Temperatures in Death Valley may reach deadly limits, posing risks even to healthy individuals. Experts emphasize the importance of staying hydrated and cool to prevent heat-related illnesses.
Research on the physiological limits of heat exposure indicates that older adults may succumb to heatstroke within hours when exposed to extreme heat, even indoors or in the shade without air conditioning. As temperatures continue to rise, it’s crucial to take precautions and monitor vulnerable populations to prevent heat-related fatalities.
“Understanding the impact of heatwaves on our health is vital to mitigating the risks and protecting communities,” said Dr. Lisa Patel. Stay aware of local heat advisories and follow safety guidelines to stay safe during the ongoing heatwave.
Source: www.nbcnews.com
The Collaboration of James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Canto Enhances the Benefits of AI
JAmes Muldoon is a lecturer in management at the University of Essex, Mark Graham is a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and Callum Cantt is a senior lecturer at the Essex Business School. They Fair Worka project to evaluate working conditions in the digital workplace, of which they are co-authors. Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor that Powers AI.
Why did you write that book?
James Muldoon: The idea for the book came from field research that we did in Kenya and Uganda about the data annotation industry. We spoke to a lot of data annotators, and the working conditions were just horrible. And we thought this was a story that everyone needed to hear: people working for less than $2 an hour on precarious contracts, and work that’s largely outsourced to countries in the global south because of how hard and dangerous the work is.
Why East Africa?
Mark Graham: I started my research in East Africa in 2009, working on the first of many undersea fiber optic cables that would connect East Africa with the rest of the world. The focus of my research was what this new connectivity would mean for the lives of workers in East Africa.
How did you gain access to these workplaces?
Mark Graham: The basic idea of Fair Work is to establish fair labor principles and then rate companies on those principles. We give companies a score out of 10. Companies in Nairobi and Uganda opened up to us because we were trying to give them a score and they wanted a better score. We went to them with a zero out of 10 and said, “Here’s what we need to do to improve.”
Will the company accommodate me? Will they dispute your low score?
Mark Graham: We get a variety of responses. Some people will argue that what we’re asking for is simply not possible. They’ll say, “It’s not our responsibility to do these things,” and so on. The nice thing about the score is that we can point out other companies that are doing the same thing. We can say, “Look, this company is doing it. What’s wrong with your company? Why can’t you offer these terms to your employees?”
Can you talk about the reverberations of colonialism that you found in this data work?
Mark Graham: The East African Railway once ran from Uganda to the port of Mombasa. It was funded by the British government and was basically used to extract resources from East Africa. What’s interesting about the East African fiber optic connection is that it runs along a very similar route to the old railway, and again, it’s an extractive technology.
Could you please explain the concept of the “extractor”?
Callum Cant: When we look at AI products, we tend to think of them as something that is relatively organically created, and we don’t think about the human effort, the resource requirements, and all the other things that go on behind the scenes.
For us, the extractor is a metaphor that invites us to think more deeply about whose labor, whose resources, whose energy, whose time went into the process. This book is an attempt to look beyond the superficial appearance of sleek webpages and images of neural networks to really see the embodied reality of what AI looks like in the workplace and how it interacts with people.
James Muldoon: I think a lot of people would be surprised to know that 80% of the work behind AI products is actually data annotation, not machine learning engineering. If you take self-driving cars as an example, one hour of video data requires 800 hours of human data annotation. So it’s a very intensive form of work.
How does this concept differ from Shoshana Zuboff’s idea of surveillance capitalism?
James Muldoon: Surveillance capitalism best describes companies like Google and Facebook, which make their money primarily through targeted advertising. It’s an apt description of the data-to-ads pipeline, but it doesn’t really capture the broader infrastructural role that Big Tech now plays. The Extraction Machine is an idea we came up with to talk more broadly about how Big Tech profits from the physical and intellectual labor of humans, whether they’re Amazon employees, creatives, data annotators, or content moderators. It’s a much more visceral, political, and global concept of how all of our labor is exploited and extracted by these companies.
A lot of the concerns about AI have been about existential risks, or whether the technology could reinforce inequalities or biases that exist in the data it was trained on, but are you arguing that just introducing AI into the economy will create a whole range of other inequalities?
Callum Cant: You can see this very clearly in a workplace like Amazon. Amazon’s AI systems, the technology that orchestrates its supply chain, automate thought processes, and what humans have to do in Amazon’s warehouses is grueling, repetitive, high-stress labor processes. You get technology that is meant to automate menial tasks and create freedom and time, but in reality, the introduction of algorithmic management systems in the workplace means people are forced into more routine, boring, low-skilled jobs.
Callum Kant of Fair Work argues that Amazon’s system creates a “repetitive and burdensome” work process for employees. Photo: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images
In one chapter of the book, Irish actress Chloe discovers that someone is using an AI copy of her voice, similar to the recent dispute between Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI: She has the platform and the funds to challenge this situation, whereas most people do not.
Callum Cant: Many of the solutions actually rely on collective power, not individual power, because, like anyone else, we have no power to tell OpenAI what to do. OpenAI doesn’t care if some authors think they’re running an information extraction regime. These companies are funded by billions of pounds and shouldn’t care what we think about them.
But we have identified some ways that, collectively, we can begin to resist and try to change the way this technology is being deployed, because I think we all recognize that there is a potential for liberation here. But getting to it is going to require a huge amount of collaboration and conflict in a lot of places. Because while there are people who are getting enormously wealthy from this technology, the decisions made by a very small number of people in Silicon Valley are making all of us worse off. And I don’t think a better form of technology is going to come out of that unless we force them to change the way they do things.
Is there anything you would like to say to our readers? What actions can they take?
Callum Cant: It’s hard to give one universal piece of advice because people are all in very different positions. If you work in an Amazon warehouse, organize your coworkers and exert influence over your boss. If you work as a voice actor, you need to organize with other voice actors. But everyone has to deal with this in their own situation, so it’s impossible to make a diagnosis.
We are all customers of large tech companies: should we boycott Amazon, for example?
Callum Cant: I think organizing in the workplace is more powerful, but there is also a role for organizing as consumers. If there are clear differences and opportunities where you can make better use of consumption, especially if the workers involved are calling for it, then by all means, do so. For example, if Amazon workers call for a boycott on Black Friday, we would encourage people to listen. Absolutely. But no matter where people take action and what actions they take, they need a set of principles to guide them. One of the key principles is that collective action is the primary path forward.
Source: www.theguardian.com
Mark Aitken Captures Collie’s Struggle to Herd Lambs in Stunning Mobile Phone Photos
debtMark Aitken has been working on a photo series in Lapland for the past two years. The Presence of Absence“The work explores the delicate, sometimes eerie, boundary between life and death experienced by people living in this extreme climate and landscape,” he says.
Aitken, who was born in New Zealand, grew up in South Africa and has lived in London for many years, took the photo on a sheep farm this spring. “Kukkola is a small village on the Finnish-Lapland border on the Tornio River close to Sweden. The farm has been running for 20 years and this lamb is one of around 100 born in March and April,” Aitken says.
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The lamb doesn’t have a name, but the inquisitive collie does: “He’s a lively young male called Possu, which means piglet. I saw the two animals interacting when I went into the barn to find Jaana, one of the farm owners, and arrange a time to take her portrait.”
Aitken usually shoots on 35mm film and likes to take his time preparing to take a photograph, especially when working with people. “When the right atmosphere, light and mood is achieved, I press the shutter. I like this discipline. This process also applies to printing in the darkroom. Only then does the memory of that moment become associated with the photograph.”
That day, he didn’t have his camera with him, but he did have his iPhone SE, and before his eyes the theme of his series was playing out in a whole new way: “I was amazed and intrigued by the inter-species relationships. The possu were trying to herd the lambs, but they were failing. The lambs hadn’t yet learned fear.”
Source: www.theguardian.com
Have you met your future self who has traveled back in time?
If we think of the universe as a continuous chain of cause and effect and time as the sequence we experience moving forward along that chain, then there is no need for concern.
Under this interpretation, the past, present, and future are all determined by unchangeable physical laws.
Even events that appear random, such as radioactive decay, are predestined and impossible to predict, but should unfold in the same way every time.
Traveling back in time to meet your younger self implies that the event has already occurred in the past.
If you don’t recall, it’s possible you were incognito or had your memory erased afterward, but we have already established how this impacted your future.
Conversely, if you were to journey to the future and encounter your future self, you would need to return to your original time and continue living your life, or else there would be no one to meet in the future.
This means that the future version of you that you meet when traveling forward in time will already have memories of your encounter as a time traveler.
Or, if each cause-and-effect interaction generates parallel universes in an infinite branching series of potential timelines, then every version of reality already exists somewhere, and your actions may not matter in the grand scheme of things.
Fortunately, time travel remains purely theoretical, and all proposed methods require exotic matter or negative energy to operate on a large scale.
This is essentially explaining one impossible concept with another. The only form of time travel we are aware of involves progressing forward at a rate of one second per second.
This article is in response to a question from Andrew Robbins emailed to us: “If time travel were possible, could we actually avoid encountering our past selves?”
If you have any inquiries, please direct them to the email address provided below. For additional information:or send us a message Facebook, Xor Instagram Page (please include your name and location).
Ultimate Fun Facts For more amazing science, check out this page.
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Source: www.sciencefocus.com
NASA’s long-term plan to decommission the International Space Station
The International Space Station (ISS) has been operational since 2000 and is continuously manned by astronauts, orbiting Earth every 90 minutes.
Throughout its operation, the ISS has served as a hub for scientific experiments, space travel research, and international cooperation. Over 280 astronauts from more than 23 countries have visited the space station.
However, as the decade nears its end, the ISS is reaching the end of its functional lifespan, prompting the need to address its future once it’s no longer in use.
Abandoning the craft is not an option due to its size and potential risk to other satellites in orbit. NASA has explored various options, including pushing the ISS higher, but ultimately determined that salvaging parts for historical preservation or technical analysis would be too complex and costly.
Therefore, the only viable solution is to deorbit the ISS. SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, has been awarded an $843 million contract by NASA to develop and deliver a deorbit vehicle for the ISS.
Plans are still being finalized, but the general idea is for the deorbit vehicle to guide the ISS into the atmosphere, where most of it will burn up upon re-entry. Careful considerations will be made to ensure any remaining parts land in uninhabited areas.
With the ISS’s days numbered, the future of space habitation is shifting towards private sector initiatives, such as NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development program and the Lunar Gateway project.
Despite the end of the ISS era, experts like Dr. Darren Baskill emphasize the station’s contributions to science, exploration, and international collaboration, paving the way for future advancements in space.
About our experts
Darren Baskill is an Outreach Officer and Lecturer at the University of Sussex, with a background in astronomy and science outreach.
Source: www.sciencefocus.com
Carpenter ants possess the ability to perform life-saving amputation surgery on injured nestmates
Carpenter Ants (Camponotus) – Jumping spiders, a diverse genus of large ants that inhabit many forested areas around the world, are able to selectively treat the injured limbs of their nestmates by cleaning or amputating the wounds.
Injured (marked in yellow) Camponotus floridanus. His wounds are being treated by his nestmates. Image credit: Frank others., doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.06.021.
For animals, open wounds pose a significant risk of infection and death. To reduce these risks, many animal species apply antibacterial compounds to wounds.
In 2023, researchers discovered another ant species, Megaponera analis, uses special glands to inject antibacterial compounds into wounds, reducing the chance of infection.
Florida carpenter ant (Camponotus floridanus) and other species of the same genus Camponotus. Notably, they lack such glands and therefore appear to use only mechanical means to treat their nestmates.
Dr. Eric Frank from the University of Würzburg and his colleagues discovered that this mechanical care involves one of two pathways.
The ants either clean the wound using only their mouthparts, or clean it and then amputate the leg completely.
When choosing which route to take, Ali appears to be assessing the type of injury and tailoring the best treatment approach based on information.
The study analyzed two types of leg injuries: femur lacerations and ankle-like tibial lacerations.
All femur injuries involved a nestmate first cleaning the cut and then biting off the entire leg, in contrast to the tibia injuries, which involved only mouth cleaning.
In both cases, the intervention resulted in a significant increase in survival of ants with experimentally infected wounds.
“With femur injuries, we always end up amputating the leg, and we have about a 90 to 95 percent success rate. And with tibia injuries, where we don’t amputate, we achieve about a 75 percent survival rate,” Dr. Frank said.
“This is in contrast to the survival rates of untreated infected femoral and tibial abrasions, which are less than 40 percent and 15 percent, respectively.”
The scientists hypothesized that preferred methods of wound care may be related to the risk of infection from the wound site.
Micro-CT scans of the femur confirmed that it was mostly composed of muscle tissue, suggesting that it played a functional role in pumping blood, called hemolymph, from the leg to the trunk.
When the femur is damaged, the muscles are damaged and the ability to circulate blood that may be contaminated with bacteria is reduced.
The tibia, on the other hand, has very little musculature and little contribution to blood circulation.
“With a tibia injury, the hemolymph flow is less disrupted, allowing bacteria to enter the body more quickly, whereas a femur injury slows down the rate at which blood circulates in the leg,” Dr Frank said.
“If tibial injury would hasten infection, one might expect that amputation of the entire leg would be the most appropriate option, but in fact the opposite has been observed.”
“It turns out that the speed at which the ants can sever the legs makes a difference.”
“An amputation surgery using ants takes at least 40 minutes to complete.”
“Experiments have demonstrated that in the case of tibial injuries, the ants cannot survive unless the leg is removed soon after infection.”
“This means that the ants cannot cut their legs quickly enough to prevent the spread of harmful bacteria, so by taking their time cleaning the wound in their shins they try to reduce a potentially fatal infection,” says Dr Laurent Keller, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Lausanne.
“The fact that ants can diagnose wounds, determine whether they are infected or sterile, and then treat them accordingly over time with other individuals — the only medical system that could match that would be the human medical system.”
Given the sophisticated nature of these behaviors, the next question to ask is how these ants are able to perform such precise care.
“This is all innate behaviour; ants’ behaviour changes as individuals age, but there is little evidence of learning,” Dr Keller said.
of Investigation result Published in the journal Current Biology.
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Eric T. Frank othersIn order to combat infections in the ant community, they amputate legs depending on the injury. Current BiologyPublished online July 2, 2024; doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.06.021
This article is based on an original release by Cell Press.
Source: www.sci.news
Under Roman rule, Britain enjoyed centuries of economic prosperity.
A pile of Roman gold coins discovered beneath the floor of a Roman house in Corbridge, England
World History Archives/Alamy
After the Romans conquered Britain in AD 43, they brought with them technologies and laws that led to centuries of economic growth once thought to be limited to modern industrial societies, according to an analysis of thousands of archaeological finds from the period.
“In about 350 years, about two and a half years [fold] “Improved productivity per person.” Rob Weisman At Cambridge University.
Wiseman says the ancient world long believed that economic growth depended on increases in population and resources — for example, increasing food production required more land and more agricultural workers — a type of growth known as extensive growth.
In contrast, economic growth today is driven primarily by increases in productivity, or intensive growth: for example, mechanization and improved plant and animal breeding enable us to produce more food from the same amount of land with fewer workers.
Several recent studies have challenged the idea that rapid growth only occurred after the Industrial Revolution began, which led Wiseman and his colleagues to look at growth in Roman Britain from 43 to 400 AD.
Wiseman says the team’s research was made possible by British laws that require archaeological investigations when sites are developed. “As a result, tens of thousands of archaeological excavations have been carried out in this country, and the data is available to the public.”
By looking at how the number of buildings changed over time, the researchers were able to get a sense of how the population of Roman Britain grew — and there’s a strong relationship between the number of buildings and population size, Wiseman says.
To get a sense of economic growth, the team looked at three metrics: First, the size of buildings rather than the number of buildings: As people get wealthier, they build bigger homes, Wiseman said.
Another measure is the number of lost coins found at the excavation site: “That fell through the floorboards, that got lost in the bathroom, that sort of thing,” he says.
The idea is that the more coins there are in circulation, the more likely they are to be lost. The team didn’t count hidden hoards of coins because they reflect instability, not growth.
The third criterion is the ratio of cruder pottery, such as cooking and storing pots, to more ornate pottery, such as decorative plates. Economic growth requires people to interact more and socialize more, which means “showing off” when guests are present, Wiseman says.
Based on these indicators, the team found that economic growth exceeded what would be expected from population growth alone. They estimate that per capita growth was about 0.5% between 150 and 250 AD, slowing to about 0.3% between 250 and 400 AD.
“What we’ve been able to show is that there was indeed rapid growth after the Romans arrived,” Wiseman says. The rate of growth, rather than the type of growth, is likely what distinguishes the modern world from the ancient world, he says.
Researchers believe this growth was driven by factors such as roads and ports built by the Romans, laws they introduced that made trade safer, and technology such as more advanced flour mills and animal breeds suited to farming.
The period of rapid growth between AD 150 and 250 could have been the result of Britain catching up with the rest of the Roman world, Wiseman says: “It went from being a small, poorly-connected tribal society to a global economy.”
What’s not clear is whether this economic growth made people happier or healthier. “The fact that productivity rose doesn’t mean that invaded, colonized Britons were better off under the Roman Empire,” Wiseman says. “That’s an open question.”
To investigate this, researchers now plan to examine human remains to determine things like how long people lived.
“I believe they are right, and there was certainly intensive growth in Roman Britain.” Alain Bresson At the University of Chicago, Illinois.
“Many archaeologists have noted the compelling evidence of economic growth in Roman Britain, but this paper adds a welcome formal theoretical dimension to the debate.” Ian Morris At Stanford University, California.
But Morris suspects that the lower average growth rate from A.D. 250 to 400 actually reflected a period of higher growth that declined sharply as the Roman Empire began to collapse. Further research could help find the answer, he says.
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Source: www.newscientist.com
Scientists create brain-controlled robot, with no involvement from Futurama
Among the many strange robot designs in the past, a new contender has emerged as the world’s first robot powered by a real human brain, making it more human-like than ever.
Researchers from Tianjin University and Southern University of Science and Technology have managed to control the robot’s movements, such as tracking, grasping, and obstacle avoidance, using what they call “mini-brains.”
These miniature brains are not taken from human bodies but rather grown in labs for research purposes and then integrated into robots.
The researchers have utilized living organisms to create “brains on a chip,” which provide some intelligence to the robot’s brain but require assistance for full functionality.
Through the integration of these chips, scientists can debug the brain, send signals externally, and control specific functions like grasping in robots.
Professor Min Dong, Vice President of Tianjin University, explains that this brain-computer interface on a chip combines ex vivo cultured brains with electrode chips to interact with the outside world through encoding, decoding, and stimulation feedback.
With the brain chip, robots can perform tasks like tracking targets, avoiding obstacles, and learning to move their arms using electrical signals fed by the chips.
While robots do not have a human appearance, their brains process information through electrical signals from the chips. Training in simulated environments is possible, but understanding the real world remains a complex challenge.
The brain chip, known as MetaBOC, was developed as an open-source project and has been used in various experiments, including one where Neanderthal DNA was used to create mini-brains for robot control.
The latest research on robot-brain interaction focuses on utilizing ball-shaped organoids to create a more complex neural network for the brain-on-a-chip to function effectively.
Additionally, artificial intelligence algorithms have been integrated to enhance the robot’s capabilities through its mini-brain.
Although the advancements are groundbreaking, there is still progress to be made, with the current brain inside the robot being a model while the actual brain tissue is kept separate for testing purposes.
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Source: www.sciencefocus.com
Cats Manipulate Humans with Their Purring
Cats are fascinating creatures with many behaviors that can leave their owners wondering. Questions like “Why does my cat purr?”, “Why did my cat knock over my plants again?”, and “Why does my cat always knock over plants right after I vacuum?” are common among cat owners.
While the behavior of knocking over plants might make you think your cat is a criminal mastermind, the reasons behind why cats purr are still a bit of a mystery. Many people assume that cats purr when they’re happy, but research suggests that the vibrations from purring may serve a variety of purposes, including manipulating our emotions.
Here are some strange scientific insights into the phenomenon of purring in cats.
How do cats purr?
The mechanism behind a cat’s purring is not as straightforward as it may seem. There have been different theories about the biology behind purring, such as a blood disorder theory that has since been debunked. The current understanding is that cats produce the purring sound by contracting a part of their larynx that touches their vocal cords, creating vibrations during their breathing cycle.
Read more about cat behavior:
Why do cats purr?
The exact reasons why cats purr are still unknown, but studies suggest several possibilities. One reason may be to communicate with humans, as seen in a study that found differences in the quality of purring sounds when cats were asking for food compared to when they were relaxed or being petted. The high-frequency components in a hungry cat’s purr mimic sounds similar to those of crying infants, possibly triggering a response in humans.
Another theory is that cats purr to soothe themselves in stressful or painful situations. Some research indicates that the vibrations from purring may have healing effects on bone growth and tissue repair. However, further studies are needed to fully understand the functions of purring in domestic cats.
About our experts
Dr. Lauren Finca is a Cat Welfare Scientist at International Cat Care and a Visiting Research Fellow at Nottingham Trent University. Her research has been published in journals like PloS No. 1 and Feline Medical and Surgical Journal.
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Source: www.sciencefocus.com
Namibia was home to a massive salamander-like predator 280 million years ago
A newly described trunk tetrapod exceeding 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) in length Gaiacia geniae It was probably the largest organism of its kind.
Gaiacia geniae It lived in what is now Namibia during the Early Permian period, about 280 million years ago.
“Most of our ideas about the early evolution of tetrapods come from fossils found in the vast coal-producing ancient equatorial wetlands of what is now Europe and North America,” said paleontologist Claudia Marsicano of the University of Buenos Aires and her colleagues.
“but Gaiacia geniae They come from far south and live in the area of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, around 55 degrees south latitude.”
The structure of the skull and jaw Gaiacia geniae It had a powerful bite that allowed it to catch large prey.
“Gaiacia geniae “This dinosaur was significantly larger than a human and likely lived near the bottom of a swamp or lake,” said Dr Jason Pardo, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum of Natural History.
“It has a big, flat, toilet seat-shaped head with an open mouth so it can suck in prey. It has huge fangs, and the whole front of its mouth is made up of giant teeth.”
“It's a large predator, but it could also be a relatively slow-moving ambush predator.”
Nearly complete skeleton Gaiacia geniae After preparation. Image courtesy of Claudia Marsicano.
At least four fossils Gaiacia geniaeRemains were found, including skull fragments and an incomplete spinal column. Gaias Layer Northwestern Namibia.
“When we found this enormous specimen lying in the outcrop as a giant concretion, we were truly shocked,” Dr Marsicano said.
“As soon as we saw it we knew it was something completely different. Everyone was so excited,” he said.
“When I examined the skull, the structure at the front of the skull caught my attention.”
“That was the only part that was clearly visible at the time, and it showed large tusks that interlocked in a very unusual way, creating a biting technique that was so typical of early tetrapods.”
“We had some really amazing material, including a complete skull, which allowed us to compare it to other animals from this period and learn what kind of animal it was and what makes it unique. We could see there's a lot that's special about this creature,” Dr Pardo added.
Gaiacia geniae They are related to the extinct family of amphibian-like animals called colosteids. Colostacea) are thought to date back even further, having been replaced by more modern amphibians and reptiles during the Late Carboniferous period, about 307 million years ago.
“There are ancient animals that survived 300 million years ago, but they were rare, small and had unique behaviours,” Dr Pardo said.
“Gaiacia geniae They are large, they are numerous, and they appear to be the primary predators in their ecosystem.”
“This shows that what was happening in the far south was very different from what was happening at the equator.”
“This is really important because we don't really know where a lot of the animal groups that showed up during this time came from.”
“What we discovered is Gaiacia geniae “This tells us that there must have been a rich ecosystem in the oceans far to the south that could support these very large predators.”
“The more we look, the more answers we may find about the major animal groups that interest us, such as the ancestors of mammals and modern reptiles.”
Team Investigation result Published in the journal Nature.
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CA Marsicano othersGiant trunk tetrapods were apex predators during the Late Palaeozoic glacial stages of Gondwana. NaturePublished online July 3, 2024; doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07572-0
Source: www.sci.news
Wimbledon Incorporates AI Technology to Safeguard Players Against Online Harassment
The All England Lawn Tennis Club has become the first to use artificial intelligence to protect Wimbledon players from online abuse.
The AI-driven service monitors players’ public social media profiles and automatically flags death threats, racist and sexist comments in 35 languages.
High-profile athletes who have been targeted online, including former US Open champion Emma Raducanu and four-time Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka, have previously said they had to delete Instagram and Twitter (now named X) from their phones.
Britain’s number two, Harriet Dart, said she sometimes uses social media just because of the “hate” she sees online.
“I think there’s a lot of positives to take from this match,” Dart said after her win over British number one Katie Boulter on Thursday. [social media] But there was also a lot of negativity. If I opened the app today, I think I’d get a lot of hate, whether I won or not.”
Tournament director Jamie Baker said Wimbledon had deployed social media monitoring service Threat Matrix, developed by AI company Signify Group, which will also be rolled out to the US Open.
Baker said: “This is not something that would be found in the public domain. It’s not something that we would be shouting about, but we basically scroll through social media looking for this type of content and it means we have access to information that we wouldn’t have had access to before.”
“We’re not just going to rely on players to tell us what happened to them, but if there’s anything that we feel is of concern, then essentially our security team will step in and actually help address that.”
He said the AI-driven service is also supported by people monitoring accounts, and players can opt for a more robust service that scans for cheating and blackmail via private direct messages.
Baker, a former British number two, said Wimbledon would discuss the abuse with players and then report it to technology companies for removal or, if necessary, to police.
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Explaining how the service works, Baker said: “If there’s an issue that we feel is of concern or worth reporting, we’ll ultimately communicate with the player and then work through the next steps. The benefit of this service is that it allows us to officially register the situation with the appropriate personnel.”
“But we can’t take those steps without actually engaging with the players and their teams and finding out what’s going on.”
World Rugby also uses the service, and in April an Australian was charged after a referee and his wife received threatening and abusive messages via Facebook during the Rugby World Cup.
Wimbledon said Threat Matrix conducted an investigation, monitoring more than 1.6 million public posts from X and 19,000 Instagram comments sent to 454 players competing in various professional tennis tournaments in 2022, and found that one in four players had been the target of abuse. 546 offensive posts were identified from 438 accounts.
Source: www.theguardian.com
Experience an excerpt from the science fiction novel “Rosewater” by Tade Thompson
Jane Komi/Moment RF/Getty Images
Rosewater: Opening Day 2066
now
Forty minutes into my job at Integrity Bank, anxiety hits me. This is how a normal day starts. This time, it's for a wedding and final exams, but it's neither a wedding nor an exam. From my window seat, I can see the city, but I can't hear any sounds. This high up in Rosewater, everything is orderly. Blocks, roads, streets, traffic slowly winding around the dome. From here, I can see the cathedral. The window is to my left, and I sit with four other contractors at the end of an oval table. We're on the top floor, 15th floor. A three-foot-by-three-foot skylight opens above us, and all that separates us from the morning sky is a security grid. The blue sky is dotted with white clouds. There's no scorching sun yet, but that will come later. Despite the skylight being open, the air conditioning in the room is controlled. It's a waste of energy, and Integrity Bank is fined every week. They're happy to cover the cost.
Bora, to my right, is yawning. She is pregnant and has been very tired lately. She also eats a lot, which I think is natural. I have known her for two years, and she has been pregnant the entire two years. I don't fully understand pregnancy. I am an only child and never grew up around pets or farm animals. My education was nomadic and I never had a strong interest in biology, except for microbiology, which I had to pick up later.
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I try to relax and focus on my bank customers, and the wedding anxiety kicks in again.
A holographic teleprompter rises from the center of the table. Right now it's made of random swirls of light, but within minutes it will project text. Next to ours is a room where the night shift is drawing to a close.
“I hear you read Dumas last night,” Bora says.
She's just having a conversation, it doesn't matter what the other shift people are reading, I just smile and say nothing.
The wedding is coming up in three months. The bride has gained some weight and is wondering if she should change her dress or get liposuction. Bora looks better during pregnancy.
“You've got 60 seconds,” a voice said over the loudspeaker.
I take a sip of water from the tumbler on the table. The other contractors are new. They're not dressed as formally as Bora and I are. They're wearing tank tops and T-shirts, with metal jewelry in their hair. They have implants in their phones.
I hate implants of any kind. I have one too. It's a standard locator with no extra features. It's really boring, but my employer requires it.
Exam anxiety fades away before you can identify and investigate its cause, and that's fine by me.
The metal pieces in the young men's hair are from plane crashes — planes have been shot down on every route in Nigeria since the early 2000s, in Lagos, Abuja, Jos, Kano and everywhere in between — and they wear pieces of the planes as talismans.
Bora noticed me staring, winked, and then she opened her snack. It was a packet of cold moin-moin, old-fashioned orange-colored tofu wrapped in a leaf. I looked away.
“Go,” the bullhorn says.
Plato's Republic Ghostly holographic shapes scroll slowly and steadily on the cylindrical display. I, like the others, begin to read, silently and then out loud. We enter the xenosphere, we configure the bank's firewall. I feel the usual momentary dizziness. Text swirls and becomes transparent.
With around 500 customers transacting financially at the facility every day and staff transacting all over the world every night, it’s a 24-hour job. Rough sensitives probe and push, and criminals try to pluck personal information out of the air. Dates of birth, pin numbers, mother’s maiden names, past transactions — it all lies dormant in each customer’s forebrain, in their working memory, waiting to be plucked out by hungry, untrained, predatory sensitives.
Contractors like me, Bora Martinez, and Metalfan are trained to fight these off. And we do. We read the classics and flood the alien sphere with irrelevant words and ideas. It’s a firewall of knowledge that reaches into the subconscious of our clients. A professor once did a study on this. He found a correlation between the material used for the firewall and the client’s activity for the rest of the year. Even people who have never read Shakespeare will suddenly find a piece of Shakespeare. King Lear It pops into my head for no apparent reason.
While it’s possible to track the intrusion, Integrity isn’t interested. Crimes committed on alien space are difficult and expensive to prosecute. If no lives are lost, the courts aren’t interested.
The queues at the cash machines, the crowds of people, the worries, desires, passions… I was tired of filtering other people’s lives through my own mind.
Yesterday I went to Piraeus with Glaucon, son of Ariston, to make a prayer to the goddess, and to see how they celebrated a festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants, but the Thracian procession was just as beautiful, if not more so. Having finished our prayers and admired the spectacle, we set out in the direction of the city.
When you enter the alien sphere, there is a projected self-image. Untrained wild sensitives project their true selves, but professionals like me are trained to create a controlled, selected self-image. Mine is a Gryphon.
The first attack today was from a middle-aged man who lives in a townhouse in Yola. He appeared to be thin and with very dark skin.
When I warned him, he backed away. A teenager quickly took his place, which made me wonder if they were in the same physical location as part of a hacker farm. Crime syndicates sometimes round up sensitive people into “Mumbai Combos,” a call-center model run by serial criminals.
I've seen it a lot before. There aren’t as many of those attacks now as there were when I started. I think they’re frustrated by how efficient we are at our work. Either way, I'm fed up.
Copyright Tade Thompson
This is the excerpt below Rose waterpublished by Orbit Books, is the latest selection from the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up here to read along with our members.
Is AI going to disrupt your favorite TV shows?
Justine Bateman won’t name names, but a TV showrunner friend once came to her with a dilemma: Their team was well into shooting the second season of their show, and a network executive had an idea: A character in the pilot wasn’t going over well with viewers, so they wanted to replace him with a different character, using a bit of AI. The showrunner, and actor-director Bateman, were understandably furious. “When you change the beginning of something, you change the creative trajectory,” Bateman says. “It takes away what was set up in the pilot, and it doesn’t make sense, so people are going to be shocked when they see episodes three or four.” Using AI may have seemed like an easy solution for executives, but it was disastrous for the showrunners.
But AI is increasingly becoming a part of the TV industry, with potentially huge costs for the industry. WGA and SAG-Aftra made a big fuss about AI potentially taking jobs during last year’s Hollywood walkouts, but Recent Reports According to CVL Economics, 203,800 entertainment jobs in the US are likely to be “disrupted” by AI by 2026, making the technology a terrifying game changer for television and the entertainment industry as a whole.
While the use of AI is still considered something of a landmine in Hollywood, with most carefully avoiding public skepticism and the (rightful) perception that they’re replacing humans with computers, that doesn’t mean AI is already ubiquitous. “A lot of what people are calling ‘AI’ has been around for the last decade,” says Emily St. James, a TV writer, podcaster, and cultural critic. Disney+ is Speaker He transformed the hoarse voice of Mark Hamill, who was 68 years old at the time, into the voice of 20-year-old Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian.
The B.B.C. Amazon-MGM Studios has admitted to using AI to create marketing materials (including some bizarrely inaccurate ones) for shows like Doctor Who and Fallout. AI image of Los AngelesAnd Banijay, the global conglomerate behind more than 200 reality TV shows, including Deal or No Deal and Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Just released AI Creative Fund Create a new program. Already released Fake Showis an Italian series in which celebrities improvise comedy scenes generated by AI.
“AI doesn’t do quality work, AI just does a good enough job”… Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Photo: Landmark Media/AlamyThat doesn’t mean AI can produce entire shows, though. Not yet. “There’s still a big gap between machine learning simplifying technical processes in ways humans can’t and ‘dominating TV,'” St. James says. “Maybe I’m whistling past my grave, but I haven’t seen anything quite as convincing as the hype yet.”
Others agree, with creative director Lauren Fisher saying, “From what I’ve seen, all the pure ‘let’s have an AI do it all’ stuff is awful, but it’s novelty so I just admire it.” TV producer Benjamin Field adds, “AI can’t make quality stuff, it can only be good enough.” One showrunner quips anonymously, “AI will never replace good stuff, for the same reason that sex robots will never replace the real thing.”
“I think AI can do the mundane work,” says Guy Branum, a writer and producer who has worked on shows like Hacks, The Other Two, and The Mindy Project. “I was once tasked with writing the VMAs bios, which basically consisted of copying old bios and updating them to include current talent. ChatGPT could do that with the right oversight, but all it can really do is steal from existing work and summarize it in the most formulaic way.” But if a show has an established blueprint, like Big Brother, for example, then it’s a lot harder to write. Or for a show like “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” it may not be a question of “if” we’ll get to see AI-generated challenges and scripts, but rather “when.”
It’s more a question of “when” than “if,” but formulaic shows like Ru Paul’s Drag Race could soon be subject to AI material. Photo: Gerard Gethings and Greg BaileyBeing so reflective, most experts say AI probably won’t write great comedy, or at least topical satire like we see in shows like “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.” Still, there are plenty of TV shows that aren’t sharp or timely, from Netflix dating shows to Hallmark Christmas movies, all of which could conceivably be influenced by AI material. Of course, more channels and streaming services mean more content, and it all has to be written by someone or something.
“In the next six to 12 months, you’re going to see FAST (free ad-supported TV) or social media channels develop AI content,” Field says. “It’s probably going to be made by minimal creators and there’s no real money being spent on it, but it’s going to be out there somewhere. It might do some funny stuff, but it’s not going to change the world. It’s just going to be cheaper and less good.”
But that doesn’t mean creators are grudgingly embracing the technology. Field himself Co-founded the company They’re dedicated to creating “ethical, policy-based” synthetic media. “We’re in a terrible situation where budgets are being cut and AI has the ability to create content cheaper and faster,” Field said. “I don’t necessarily see it as something that’s going to force us into a corner and take away all our jobs, but I do think that as an industry we need to do better and work towards the future in a more sustainable way. Let’s take all the tools that are available to us and use them to create something new.”
Other creators are trying to thwart the rise of AI. Voice Actors Guild of America Nava has taken an active stance against the mistreatment of the group by overzealous executives and producers, and they’re not only working to change the voice-over industry, but lobbying the U.S. Congress for legal protections. Anti-Counterfeiting Law And that AI Fraud Prevention ActBoth are currently in the legislative process.
Television shows that are neither crisp nor timely are perfect for AI processing… Love is Blind. Photo: NetflixUnder copyright law, unlike a person’s name, portrait, or likeness, Currently not covered A person’s voice is a “voiceprint” of just three seconds. Credible copy using AI(In 2020, it would have taken roughly six hours of audio to achieve the same results.) This has resulted in some high-profile upsets. Scarlett Johansson was “infuriated” after learning that ChatGPT had used a voice that was “eerily similar to mine, so similar that close friends and the press couldn’t tell the difference” without her consent. Amazing deepfakesSome of them used fake voiceovers of President Biden to discourage people from voting in state primaries.
In the entertainment world, these cheap and easy voiceprints have made it much faster to get a busy actor to re-record a few lines, but also allowed companies to create large volumes of dialogue using an actor’s existing work. Veteran BAFTA-winning voice actor Cissy Jones says that a few years ago she found her voice in multiple productions on multiple websites, despite never having contributed to a single project. Fans of her show, The Owl House, were editing videos using her voice, saying lines she never recorded, which “quickly became quite pornographic,” she says.
“This was done without my consent and of course with no control over how it was used and no compensation whatsoever,” Jones said, adding that even though he’s an adult, he would be particularly troubled if such AI creations used the voices of child actors. “You can imagine that this is happening soon.” Jones’ voice was fed into an AI engine, and Jones said he had heard the sound engineer was asked to do so by the client to save money on script changes. They want voice actors to be able to decide whether they want a digital replica of their voice, and whether they have control and compensation every time their voice is used. To this end, the group Etoboxit has its own database of actors’ voiceprints, all of which are available for creators to use.
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After newsletter promotionThough fan edits using Jones’ voice aren’t allowed, some are optimistic that AI might create alternate-universe versions of fan-favorite shows. While the idea of studios being able to churn out new episodes of “I Love Lucy” or “The Brady Bunch” may seem odd from an artistic standpoint, some are hopeful that animated series like “The Simpsons” and “South Park” will see the value (and revenue potential) in letting fans make their own “episodes.”
“Maybe you’ll say, ‘Please put me in that episode. I want to be friends with the main character’… You could be on The Simpsons in no time.” Edward Saatchi, CEO Fable Simulationhis company says. Showrunner The company wants to put TV production in the hands of viewers. “Maybe you’re at home and you finish watching a particular season of a TV show,” he said. “You click to watch the next episode and you say, ‘I want to be in that episode. I want to be friends with the main character,’ or, ‘I want it to be roughly like this.’ We want to make it easier for you to tell original stories and make a TV show about your life.”
The showrunners also produce their own original programming, including: Deguchi Valleyis a satirical animated series that “stars” Silicon Valley billionaires. It has already released two episodes and is calling on its 1,000 users (7,500 on a waiting list) to create more. Users can enter prompts of 10-15 words to create full-scale scenes that run from 2 to 16 minutes. A jury of filmmakers and creators will be selected to choose the 20 best episodes, and Saatchi said the episode creators will receive a cash prize and a cut of stream revenue.
“We want to create something that will stand the test of time,” Saatchi said. “It has to be plausible that you’d love to sit down with your friends and watch that episode of Exit Valley. It has to be believable that it’s actually cool, not just because it was made by an AI.”
So-called amateur creators also dominate other markets with 295 million subscribers. Netflix Being watched around the world Mr. BeastCheck out our YouTube channel every week. The most popular stars Presenting the latest work Unconventional In fact, YouTube is already the most popular streaming service on TV, accounting for roughly 10% of U.S. connected TV viewership, more than any other service, an estimated 4.95 billion active users World wide.
“Traditional TV is already being disrupted,” says cultural critic and media expert Doug Shapiro. “For years, the argument has been that YouTube isn’t competitive and isn’t professionally producing content. But that 10% doesn’t even reflect mobile or PC viewing; it’s the percentage of people turning on the TV in their living room and watching YouTube. Disruption from below is already happening. The real question now with AI is whether these tools will add fuel to the fire and drive the tens of millions of creators who are already making their own content even further up the quality and performance curve, increasingly competing with Hollywood for people’s time.”
“To use a Game of Thrones analogy, Netflix vs. Disney is like House Targaryen vs. House Lannister, except there’s an army of the dead at the wall: tens of millions of individual creators,” Shapiro added.
As professionally produced content becomes interchangeable with consumer and AI-produced content, this sea change could have far-reaching effects on Hollywood beyond the loss of 200,000 jobs. If DIY AI TV becomes widespread, it could turn the entire concept of television upside down, upending art and fame as we know it. Or, as Saatchi puts it, if AI continues to make its way into TV, “you won’t get your 15 minutes of fame. You’ll get seven seasons and a syndication deal.”
Source: www.theguardian.com
FarmVille Celebrates 15 Years: The Impact of the Beloved Facebook Game on the Digital Landscape
debtFacebook users of a certain age may remember a particularly lonely-looking farm animal that appeared in their feeds during the platform’s heyday. A lonely cow wandered into FarmVille players’ pastures with a frown on its face and tears in its eyes. “She’s very sad and needs a new home,” the caption read, urging players to adopt the cow or message a friend for help. Ignore the cow’s pleas and you’ll likely lose both your friend and your food. Message your friends about it and you’ll have fueled one of the biggest online crazes of the 2010s.
When FarmVille was released 15 years ago, it was a smash hit. Over 18,000 players played on the first day, and by the fourth day that number had risen to 1 million. At its peak in 2010, over 80 million users were logging in each month to plant crops, care for animals, and harvest to earn coins to spend on decorations. They made their obsession public.McDonald’s created farms for promotions long before artists were releasing music on Fortnite. Lady Gaga performs new song From her second album to a cartoon farm sim. Not bad for a game made in five weeks.
By 2009, developer Zynga had established itself as a pioneer in social media gaming, when four friends from the University of Illinois presented plans for a farming sim. It was a hastily reworked version of a failed browser game they’d made that copied The Sims, but Zynga was impressed enough to buy the technology, hire the four people, and pair them with some in-house developers. Zynga quickly released FarmVille.
The world of FarmVille… Photo: PhotoEdit/Alamy
“Facebook was exploding in popularity and engagement in a way that was novel at the time,” says John Tien, a former director of product at Zynga. Farm Town, a farming simulation game with a similar cartoony look and design made earlier by another studio, was already attracting 1 million daily active users on Facebook’s platform. Facebook had previously courted game studios and told Zynga it would soon give third-party developers access to user data, friends lists, and news feeds.
“By opening up its platform to app developers like Zynga, Facebook has been able to create an almost symbiotic relationship,” Tien says. “Facebook has given Zynga access to a large, engaged user base, and Zynga has given Facebook users more to do on the platform.”
Features like the lonely cow, which gently nudged players by requesting their friends to help grow their farm, became central to the experience, and Facebook was flooded with posts and notifications promoting FarmVille to the masses. These viral mechanics gave the game a “meme-like buzz,” says former Zynga vice president and general manager Roy Segal. “It’s this water cooler effect: you see your friends playing and you want to join in.”
And once you were in, it was hard to get out. For each crop you planted, you had to return at a set time, a few hours later, to harvest it. If you left it for too long, it would wither and die. “The idea is that the player makes their own schedule,” says Amitt Mahajan, co-creator and lead developer of FarmVille. “That’s what keeps people coming back every day.”
The result, Tien says, is a game that players feel they have to accomplish. “We all have growing lists of things we need to do and we’re struggling to get them done in the time we want,” Tien says. “Checking things off a list is viscerally satisfying, and playing FarmVille was a way for players to experience that satisfaction.”
New features and content were added several times a week to keep players interested, but the real magic happened behind the scenes with Zynga’s in-house data analytics tool, ZTrack. The tool could monitor the most detailed player behaviors, from what features players used to how long they spent on them to where they clicked on the screen, with the goal of building an ever-evolving, data-driven picture of player interests.
“At any given time, we had hundreds, maybe thousands, of dashboards and experiments running,” says Tien. “We could see core metrics every five minutes. We could see immediately after a new feature was released whether it was having an effective impact.”
Metrics-based design is standard today across social media platforms, apps, online retailers and digital services. Reliance on big data to predict consumer behavior is the foundation of everything from Google’s advertising empire to Cambridge Analytica’s political consulting. But back in 2009, no one was doing it quite like FarmVille.
“Zynga’s approach to game analytics inspired the entire digital analytics industry,” says Jeffrey Wang, co-founder and chief architect of analytics platform Amplitude. “One of Amplitude’s earliest customers was a former Zynga product manager who had started his own company and was looking for a tool comparable to ZTrack. There was nothing even close at the time.”
ZTrack became the backbone of FarmVille – features were repeatedly tested, analyzed and optimized, and the results determined what to deploy, monetization options and how to integrate to maximize player retention.
“Zynga’s dirty secret is that none of our five company values are more important than our metrics,” the Zynga co-founder said. Andrew Trader Ken Rudin, former vice president of growth, analytics and platform technology at Zynga, went a step further: Quoted In 2010:[Zynga is] An analytics company disguised as a gaming company.”
Like most Facebook apps at the time, users could not play FarmVille without giving Zynga permission to collect their personal Facebook data. But the details of what data would be shared were written in small print on click-through screens that most users habitually ignored. “We as citizens, and government policymakers, didn’t really know the extent of it. [online data harvesting]”We’ve seen the harm that can come from unrestricted data extraction,” says Florence Chi, an associate professor of communication at Loyola University Chicago. But since then, she says, “we’ve seen the harm that can come from unrestricted data extraction.” Discovered in 2010 They share players’ personal data with advertisers and online data brokers.
FarmVille’s success, driven by data-driven design, was short-lived. Over the next few years, players abandoned the game, Zynga turned to unpopular sequels, and Facebook eventually revoked access to developers the game relied on for its early virality. In 2020, Adobe dropped support for Flash, the software that powers FarmVille. The game suddenly went offline.
But Zynga’s success continued. Words with friendsmobile racing game CSR Racing, Draw Something and a suite of slot machine games all use player data to maximise engagement. Zynga still makes data-driven, aggressively monetised games for mobile phones under Take-Two Interactive, which acquired the company in 2022 for $12.7bn (£9.4bn).
For Chee, FarmVille was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur’s dream, and very much a product of its time. “If you look at today, there’s not really a Facebook social phenomenon like there was in 2009,” she says. “It was a very special time for a game like FarmVille to come out, and the recommendation systems and algorithms were just in the right place.”
Source: www.theguardian.com
The mystery of life’s origins on Earth: Unraveling the puzzle baffling scientists
Life is abundant on Earth, from pigeons in the park to invisible microorganisms covering every surface. However, when Earth first formed 4.5 billion years ago, it was devoid of life. The question remains: how did the first life form emerge?
The answer is still unknown. If we understood the process, we could recreate it in a controlled environment. Scientists could replicate the right conditions with the right chemicals and potentially observe living organisms forming. Yet, this has never been accomplished before.
Although the exact origin of life remains a mystery, there are several clues that provide insight. Living organisms consist of various chemicals, including proteins and nucleic acids that carry genetic information. While these chemicals are complex, their basic building blocks are simple to create.
One of the first demonstrations of this concept came from chemist Stanley Miller in 1953. By simulating the early Earth’s conditions with water and gases, Miller produced amino acids, the fundamental components of proteins, through heating and electrical shocks resembling lightning.
Subsequent studies, such as one conducted by Sarah Simkuch, have shown how complex chemicals can arise from basic compounds. By starting with everyday chemicals like water and methane, researchers have generated thousands of substances found in living organisms.
While this abundance of chemical building blocks suggests a fertile environment for life to emerge, the transition from chemicals to life is not automatic. Several key factors contribute to the formation of life, including structure, sustenance, and reproduction.
Research into the origin of life has focused on creating systems that encompass these essentials, such as genetic molecules capable of self-replication. However, the interdependence of these systems suggests a simultaneous emergence may be more plausible, possibly within confined spaces like deep-sea hydrothermal vents or terrestrial pools.
While the exact beginning of life remains uncertain, advancements in understanding have made the origin of life seem less inexplicable than before.
read more:
Source: www.sciencefocus.com
Debatable: Speed Limiters Becoming Mandatory in EU and Northern Ireland
I
Traffic laws and courts leave no doubt as to what the big numbers in red circles mean, but as any quick drive on any city road or highway without enforcement cameras will show, many drivers still see speed signs as targets rather than limits.
Technology that becomes mandatory across Europe from this weekend could change that culture, because from July 7 all new cars sold in the EU and Northern Ireland must come standard with a suite of technological safety features, most notable of which is intelligent speed assistance, colloquially known as a speed limiter.
While the rest of the UK can theoretically enjoy the fullest range of post-Brexit freedoms, as ministers used to be fond of saying, the integrated nature of car manufacturing means that new cars here will also tell drivers to take their foot off the accelerator, combining satellite-navigation maps with a forward-facing camera that reads road signs and automatically sounds an alarm if you're going too fast in the zone you're in.
Drivers of newer cars will be accustomed to similar features already installed, but for now they can be easily disabled. As a representative for one major manufacturer said, “You have to balance whether it makes the car safer, but it's upsetting people. We've found that a lot of people actually have everything turned off.”
But as cars of the future are designed with systems that can never be turned off, restarting the engine every time it shuts off, will car enthusiasts see this as genuine progress?
“This is one of those things that's very hard to argue against,” says Steve Fowler, an automotive consultant and former editor of Autocar. “Observing the speed limit will not only save you in countless ways, it could potentially save your life.”
Safety is the biggest reason to slow down and, as charities such as Brake and Rospa highlight, even a small increase in speed of just over 30mph can make a big difference to outcomes, especially for people who are not driving.
Yousif Al Ani, lead engineer for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) at Thatcham Research, said: “Modern cars are very good at protecting occupants in the event of a crash, thanks to passive safety features such as airbags and crush zones, but the benefit to vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists is limited.”
In the UK, the number of road fatalities caused by speeding vehicles has increased at a faster rate than the overall number of fatalities since the spread of COVID-19, rising 20% to 303 out of 1,695 in 2022.
A significant minority of drivers admit to breaking the speed limit on all kinds of roads, but when you observe that traffic flows smoothly,
By the Ministry of Transport
This suggests that the percentage is much higher.
RAC's 2023 Automotive Report57% of drivers said they broke the 70 mph speed limit on freeways. In most urban areas a 30 mph speed limit was most likely to be observed, with only 40% breaking it. A Department of Transport study found that on free-flowing 20 mph roads, rather than residential areas with speed bumps, 80-90% of vehicles ignored the speed limit.
One of the most common arguments speeders make to the RAC is: “I drive at the same speed as other road users”. This kind of peer pressure may not be surprising to those struggling to stick to the 20mph speed limit on, say, London or Wales' major roads, where they are met with looks of infuriated incredulity from drivers behind, and on the M6 toll many seem to think that paying the £9.70 toll gives them the right to blaze past at 80mph as well as avoid Birmingham.
But with computers replacing erratic speedometer needles with more accurate readings and a new generation of speed cameras providing increased enforcement, denying liability may become harder. Lawyers say people who turned off their speed limiters when they started driving could find themselves in a difficult position if they end up in court.
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Not only will limiters be mandatory, but also other ADAS features such as automatic lane keeping and automatic emergency braking. Questions remain about whether the technology will work well enough in all real-world situations, and how comfortable people will be with a car telling them what to do, let alone controlling the steering, braking and acceleration, which can cause anxiety and disorientation.
“Balancing safety, performance and integration, and building a system that works with the driver, is a real challenge for manufacturers,” Al Ani says.
But most agree that the benefits far outweigh the risks. More and more drivers are willing to go slower and rely more on technology, Fowler said. “I think driving is changing, and drivers are changing, and I hate to say it, but they don't necessarily like the stuff that enthusiasts of the past liked, the engineering that's been put into it.”
“People are more aware that speeding increases fuel consumption. If you're going 80 miles per hour on the highway, your fuel consumption increases exponentially.”
With the rising cost of living putting as much emphasis on miles per gallon as speed, Fowler says that driving well may be more enjoyable than going fast. “We need to develop a new generation of drivers who realize that more relaxed driving can be just as rewarding. If you drive well without losing momentum, you won't have to stop and start as often, which saves fuel, saves money and saves on emissions. Maybe mpg will become the new mph.”
Source: www.theguardian.com
Michael Mosley’s innovative methods in science have improved lives and promoted health
My first encounter with Michael Mosley was at the BBC Summer Party. A recent documentary I had presented had just aired on horizon, making me eligible to attend the event. Feeling overwhelmed amongst the many celebrities present, I found solace at the bar, quietly observing the crowd, until Michael approached me.
“Hello, I’m Michael Mosley,” he introduced himself. I was well aware of who he was, and we ended up spending the evening conversing. Although I first worked with Michael at an event, that initial meeting at the party left a lasting impression on me. Despite not knowing me, he warmly welcomed me as a newcomer.
Michael’s extensive career as a producer, presenter, and writer at the BBC spanned over 40 years, establishing a unique style of ‘self-experimenting presenter’ in science presentations. He famously delved into self-experimentation, including infesting himself with tapeworms and popularizing the 5:2 intermittent fasting diet to manage his type 2 diabetes.
While Michael faced criticism for his methods, he aimed to communicate science rather than conduct formal experiments. His talent for simplifying complex concepts and making science accessible led to widespread education among audiences.
Personally, Michael served as a valuable mentor, offering practical advice and sharing techniques for effective communication in broadcasting. His influence extended to shaping my approach to interviews and on-camera presentations, guiding my work in academia and beyond.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of clear science communication has been highlighted, emphasizing the impact of effectively disseminating information on health issues. Michael’s contributions in this realm have greatly improved public health outcomes and potentially saved lives.
As a close colleague, respected mentor, and cherished friend, Michael Mosley will be deeply missed.
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Source: www.sciencefocus.com
Meeting the wind-powered sea monster with 30-metre tentacles: Nature’s most bizarre phenomenon
The Portuguese man-of-war (Physalia physalis) is named after an 18th-century sailing ship due to its resemblance to a ship under full sail.
In the open ocean, they appear as floating pink party balloons with long trailing blue ribbons.
The balloon part is a life buoy filled with carbon monoxide gas, which acts like a sail, rising above the water and catching the wind.
This is how Portuguese man-of-war travel across the ocean, sometimes in groups numbering in the thousands. They rely entirely on wind power and are not active swimmers.
Depending on which way the sail is facing in relation to the wind, it can be right-handed or left-handed.
They share some similarities with jellyfish, such as their appearance up close and the fact that they have a painful sting.
If you come across a deflated pale balloon with a blue string on the beach, be cautious – it’s likely a deceased Portuguese man-of-war, which loses its color when it dies but retains its ability to sting.
The Portuguese man-of-war is a tubular animal related to jellyfish, sea anemones, and corals.
There are about 175 species of cetaceans. Some live on the ocean floor, others swim in the depths, but the Portuguese man-of-war is the only one that floats on the surface.
What sets weevils apart is their unique construction. Unlike other animals that grow larger and develop specialized tissues and organs, tubular algae replicate themselves to create genetically identical zooids that form colonies and tubular bodies.
These zooids come together in specific arrangements to carry out tasks like feeding, digestion, reproduction, and defense.
Portuguese man-of-war play a crucial role in the Pulston ecosystem, which exists at the boundary between sea and air. As they drift, they capture fish and larvae with their tentacles, which can extend up to 30 meters and paralyze prey with venomous spines.
Other creatures that prey on Portuguese man-of-war include the blue dragon sea slug, which eats the tentacles and uses its stingers for defense, and the Blanketed Octopus, which waves its tentacles to find food and deter threats.
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Source: www.sciencefocus.com
