discuss Science & Technology news & discussion

[CraigD]

Post and discuss interesting articles & videos about science and technology.

You don't need to be an expert - just interested in the wonders of modern science, technology, and the history of these fields.

Please keep it rational, and post articles from reputable sources.
Try not to editorialise headlines and keep the copy to just a paragraph with a link to the original source. When quoting excerpts from articles, I think the best method is to italicise the copy, and include a link to the source.

Have some fun with your comments and discussions... just keep the sources legitimate.

Other threads:
The Break Room has a number of other popular threads, so there is no need to post material here that is better suited to these other threads:

- Covid19-Coronavirus updates and news
- Conspiracy Thread Free For All
- The *religious* discussion thread

Please enjoy!

 

[Cal2]

A.I. is ‘seizing the master key of civilization’ and we ‘cannot afford to lose,’ warns ‘Sapiens’ author Yuval Harari​

Why A.I. is dangerous​

Hararia and his co-writers acknowledge that A.I. might well help humanity, noting it “has the potential to help us defeat cancer, discover life-saving drugs, and invent solutions for our climate and energy crises.” But in their view, A.I. is dangerous because it now has a mastery of language, which means it can “hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization.”

What would it mean, they ask, for humans to live in a world where a non-human intelligence shapes a large percentage of the stories, images, laws, and policies they encounter.

They add, “A.I. could rapidly eat the whole of human culture—everything we have produced over thousands of years—digest it, and begin to gush out a flood of new cultural artifacts.”

Artists can attest to A.I. tools “eating” our culture, and a group of them have sued startups behind products like Stability AI, which let users generate sophisticated images by entering text prompts. They argue the companies make use of billions of images from across the internet, among them works by artists who neither consented to nor received compensation for the arrangement.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/seizing-master-key-civilization-cannot-204917078.html

 

[J Sokol]

New York City is sinking due to its million-plus buildings, study says​

CNN —
New York City is sinking under the collective weight of all of its buildings, a new study has found.

This gradual process could spell trouble for a city around which the sea level has been rising more than twice as fast as the global rate — and is projected to rise between 8 inches and 30 inches by 2050.

What’s more, scientists expect more frequent and extreme rainfall events such as nor’easters and hurricanes due to the human-fueled climate crisis.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/world/nyc-sinking-sea-level-climate-scn/index.html

 

[koolishman]

Reduced Oxygen Intake Linked to Extended Lifespan​

Researchers revealed a correlation between reduced oxygen intake, or ‘oxygen restriction,’ and extended lifespan in lab mice.

The study found that mice in an oxygen-restricted environment lived about 50% longer than those in normal oxygen levels. The oxygen-restricted mice also experienced delayed onset of aging-associated neurological deficits.

The study, however, did not establish the exact mechanism through which oxygen restriction prolongs lifespan.

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002117

 

[J Sokol]

Supreme Court rolls back federal safeguards for wetlands under Clean Water Act​

WashingtonCNN —
The Supreme Court on Thursday cut back on the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate wetlands under the Clean Water Act, with a 5-4 majority continuing a trend in which the conservative-leaning court has narrowed the reach of environmental regulations.

The Clean Water Act extends only to those “wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are waters of the United States in their own rights,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/25/politics/supreme-court-wetlands-authority-epa/index.html

 

[koolishman]

Electricity prices in Finland flipped negative — a huge oversupply of clean, hydroelectric power meant suppliers were almost giving it away​

• Finland's renewable power strategy is paying off as its energy has fallen into negative prices.

• A new nuclear reactor, as well as unexpected floods, are leading to a glut of clean energy.

The country aims to become carbon neutral by 2035 and has been pushing to introduce renewable energy solutions. Ruusunen told the National that Finland wanted wind to become its primary power source by 2027.

 

[Cal2]

Coal's green potential: storing energy instead of being burned for it​

There's no doubt that hydrogen holds a lot of promise as the clean energy source of the future (even though it does bring up some potential issues). After all, when it is used as fuel, its only output is water. What remains an outstanding question about its use, though, is how to store it. Hydrogen is highly flammable and finding ways to contain it safely has proven to be quite a challenge for researchers.

It's been known that coal is good at storing methane gas as it sticks to the material through a process known as adsorption. This quality of coal, the researchers say, would translate to hydrogen as well. ......

In an analysis of eight different types of coal from across the United States, the researchers found that the material is, indeed, exceptionally good at storing hydrogen. The best of the bunch was low-volatile bituminous coal found in Virginia and anthracite coal from Pennsylvania. Coal's gas-trapping feature is based on its unique compostion.

“A lot of people define coal as a rock, but it’s really a polymer,” Liu said. “It has high carbon content with a lot of small pores that can store much more gas. So coal is like a sponge that can hold many more hydrogen molecules compared to other non-carbon materials.”

Further research will delve deeper into the idea of coal as a hydrogen container, as the researchers examine the permeability and diffusivity of the material. This will help them understand how quickly hydrogen could be pumped into and out of different kinds of coal, which in turn, could lead to efficient coal-based hydrogen "batteries."

https://newatlas.com/energy/coal-clean-energy-hydrogen-storage/

 

[koolishman]

Ancient humans may have paused in Arabia for 30,000 years on their way out of Africa​

Most scientists agree modern humans developed in Africa, more than 200,000 years ago, and that a great human diaspora across much of the rest of the world occurred between perhaps 60,000 and 50,000 years ago.

In new research published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, we have uncovered dozens of distinctive historical changes in the human genome to reveal a new chapter in this story.


Our work suggests there may have been a previously unknown phase of humanity’s great migration: an “Arabian standstill” of up to 30,000 years in which humans settled in and around the Arabian Peninsula. These humans slowly adapted to life in the region’s colder climate before venturing to Eurasia and beyond.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2213061120

 

[koolishman]

France bans short-haul flights to cut carbon emissions​

France has banned domestic short-haul flights where train alternatives exist, in a bid to cut carbon emissions.

The law came into force two years after lawmakers had voted to end routes where the same journey could be made by train in under two-and-a-half hours.

The ban all but rules out air travel between Paris and cities including Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux, while connecting flights are unaffected.

 

[Cal2]

AI means everyone can now be a programmer, Nvidia chief says​

Artificial intelligence means everyone can now be a computer programmer as all they need to do is speak to the computer, Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang said on Monday, hailing the end of the "digital divide". .........

"The rate of progress, because it's so easy to use, is the reason why it's growing so fast. This is going to touch literally every single industry." .........

Huang demonstrated what AI could do, including getting a programme to write a short pop song praising Nvidia with only a few words of instruction.

He unveiled several new applications, including a partnership with the world's largest advertising group WPP for generative AI-enabled content for digital advertising.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/top...1&cvid=28f943534ac44ec8bedc7eb2d37d717b&ei=14

 

[Cal2]

Stop Calling Everything A.I. It's Just Computers Doing Computer Stuff

For example, ChatGPT--which is arguably the most popular "A.I." product--isn't artificial intelligence, even though it's made by a company called OpenAI. It's very cool, yes, but it isn't a computer thinking for itself. It's just a model that parses your prompt, and then decides what the most likely combination of words should be based on the massive set of data that humans used to train it. That's not to say it isn't impressive. It's just not A.I.

 

[koolishman]

Could these air purification towers tackle India’s pollution problem? ​

​

At a park in one of the world’s most polluted cities, a sleek filtration “tower” has been quietly purifying the surrounding air since last summer. Dubbed Verto, the 5.5-meter-tall (18-foot) device reduces levels of nitrogen dioxide and dangerous fine particles in New Delhi’s Sunder Nursery by filtering 600,000 cubic meters of air a day — which is equivalent to the volume of 273 hot air balloons.


Now, having collected data from their prototype, the architects behind the invention believe their project can be scaled up to clean big public spaces, neighborhoods and even entire cities.



Designed by architecture firm Studio Symbiosis, which has offices in India and Germany, the towers contain five air filtration “cubes” stacked inside a geometric shell. The firm’s husband-and-wife co-founders, Amit and Britta Knobel Gupta, say their fan-powered devices can clean air within a radius of 200 to 500 meters (656 to 1,640 feet) in enclosed spaces, though outdoors this distance would be 100 to 350 meters (328 to 1,148 feet), depending on wind speed and how open the surroundings are.

 

[J Sokol]

Rock ‘flour’ from Greenland can capture significant CO2, study shows​

Rock “flour” produced by the grinding under Greenland’s glaciers can trap climate-heating carbon dioxide when spread on farm fields, research has shown for the first time.

Natural chemical reactions break down the rock powder and lead to CO2 from the air being fixed in new carbonate minerals. Scientists believe measures to speed up the process, called enhanced rock weathering (ERW), have global potential and could remove billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, helping to prevent extreme global heating.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...flour-greenland-capture-significant-co2-study

 

[Cal2]

Scientists generate 'electricity from thin air.' Humidity could be a boundless source of energy, they say.​

“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” said Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the paper’s senior author. “Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt – but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning.

"What we’ve done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it.”

The heart of the man-made cloud depends on what Yao and his colleagues refer to as an air-powered generator, or the "air-gen" effect for short. ....

.....energy was able to be pulled from humidity by material that came from bacteria; the new study finds that almost any material, like silicon or wood, could also be used.

The device that's mentioned in the study is the size of a fingernail and thinner than a single hair, and is dotted with tiny holes known as nanopores, the Washington Post reported. "The holes have a diameter smaller than 100 nanometers, or less than a thousandth of the width of a strand of human hair," the Post said....

......since humidity is ever-present, the harvester would run 24/7, rain or shine, at night and whether or not the wind blows, which solves one of the major problems of technologies like wind or solar, which only work under certain conditions....

Yao told the Washington Post that roughly 1 billion air-gens, stacked to be roughly the size of a refrigerator, could produce a kilowatt and partly power a home in ideal conditions.

“Imagine a future world in which clean electricity is available anywhere you go,” said Yao. “The generic air-gen effect means that this future world can become a reality.”

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/us/s...1&cvid=a125a57aa51c436bb4d31c57a693430a&ei=42

 

[Cannuck]

Statement on AI Risk​

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.​

A group of leading technology experts from across the world have warned that artificial intelligence technology should be considered a societal risk and prioritised in the same class as pandemics and nuclear wars.

The statement, signed by hundreds of executives and academics, was released by the Center for AI Safety on Tuesday amid growing concerns over regulation and risks the technology posed to humanity.

Sign the statement:

https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk

 

[J Sokol]

Winners of $1m prize for sustainable city transport announced​

The winning entries include everything from traditional bike lanes to innovative walk-to-school programmes. Plans were submitted by hundreds of cities across five continents for a new prize that aims to promote sustainable travel – and it seems the appetite for active transport has truly gone global.

Ten months after cities around the world were offered the chance to bid for up to $1m (£800,000) to build or expand new cycling and walking schemes, the money has been awarded to designs in Brazil, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, New Zealand and Albania, among others.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...rize-for-sustainable-city-transport-announced

 

[koolishman]

It's becoming clear that AI is going to whack the mediocre middle of office workers​

Mediocrity will be automated."

That was the verdict a top tech executive shared with me recently, describing the impact he predicted AI would have on the workforce. And while the phrasing might seem a bit harsh, there's growing evidence that he might be on to something.

More specifically, AI could disproportionately impact the middle class of white-collar workers — the folks who are mid-career, mid-ability, mid-level, and yes, in some cases, mediocre.

 

[NameInbox]

Gmail is using AI to make searching for emails and attachments on your phone faster and easier​

• Google is adding a new AI-powered "top results" section to Gmail searches on smartphones.
• The company said Friday it will be introduced to all mobile users in the coming weeks.
• It's the latest in a string of AI features announced for Google's range of products and services.

Searches in Gmail are set to become more accurate as Google rolls out a new AI-related feature for smartphone users.

Alphabet said in a Friday blog post that mobile Gmail users will soon see a "top results" section when searching for old messages or attachments in their Gmail app.

The top results section will be assisted by Google's machine learning algorithms, which the company said would use the search term, some recent emails, and other "relevant factors" with the aim of finding what a user is searching for.

In its blog post Google said the feature was "highly requested", and said it will be rolling out to all Gmail mobile users over the next two weeks.

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ai-make-searching-in-gmail-easier-faster-2023-6

 

[koolishman]

Scientists Target Human Stomach Cells for Diabetes Therapy​

Stem cells from the human stomach can be converted into cells that secrete insulin in response to rising blood sugar levels, offering a promising approach to treating diabetes, according to a preclinical study from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine.

In the study, which appeared April 27 in Nature Cell Biology, the researchers showed that they could take stem cells obtained from human stomach tissue and reprogram them directly—with strikingly high efficiency—into cells that closely resemble pancreatic insulin-secreting cells known as beta cells. Transplants of small groups of these cells reversed disease signs in a mouse model of diabetes.

 

[koolishman]

New psychology research reveals the “bullshit blind spot”​

New research has found that people who are the worst at detecting bullshit tend to overestimate their detection ability and believe they are better at it than others.

On the other hand, those who are best at detecting bullshit tend to underestimate their own performance and believe they are slightly worse at it than the average person.

The research aimed to understand why smart people sometimes believe in dumb things and what characteristics are common among people who fall for misinformation.
https://www.psypost.org/2023/05/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-bullshit-blind-spot-163943

 

[koolishman]

Scientists have found a way to make brain cancer cells die of stress​

"Cancer cells are stressed cells, they're not normal, they're fundamentally stressed and they end up using stress response mechanisms to gain advantages,” said Eric Chevet, head of a cancer research laboratory of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) since 2015.

“The advantage is that they are more resistant, stronger and able to migrate, so they are better able to withstand additional stresses such as chemotherapy," he told Euronews Next.

Despite these promising results, we are still far off from a new drug, let alone a miracle pill.

Chevet warns it likely won’t be another 15 years before these findings yield a new therapeutic option for patients - and he stresses that’s an optimistic prediction, barring any obstacles on the way.

The molecule needs to be modified in order to become more effective against cancer cells and to be tested on more animals before it can be trialled in humans.

 

[koolishman]

Scientists' report world's first X-ray of a single atom​

"The technique used, and concept proven in this study, broke new ground in X-ray science and nanoscale studies," said Tolulope Michael Ajayi, who is the first author of the paper and doing this work as part of his Ph.D. thesis. "More so, using X-rays to detect and characterize individual atoms could revolutionize research and give birth to new technologies in areas such as quantum information and the detection of trace elements in environmental and medical research, to name a few. This achievement also opens the road for advanced materials science instrumentation."

 

[koolishman]

Scientists generate 'electricity from thin air.' Humidity could be a boundless source of energy, they say.​

“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” said Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the paper’s senior author. “Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt – but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning.

"What we’ve done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it.”

The heart of the man-made cloud depends on what Yao and his colleagues refer to as an air-powered generator, or the "air-gen" effect for short. ....

.....energy was able to be pulled from humidity by material that came from bacteria; the new study finds that almost any material, like silicon or wood, could also be used.

The device that's mentioned in the study is the size of a fingernail and thinner than a single hair, and is dotted with tiny holes known as nanopores, the Washington Post reported. "The holes have a diameter smaller than 100 nanometers, or less than a thousandth of the width of a strand of human hair," the Post said....

......since humidity is ever-present, the harvester would run 24/7, rain or shine, at night and whether or not the wind blows, which solves one of the major problems of technologies like wind or solar, which only work under certain conditions....

Yao told the Washington Post that roughly 1 billion air-gens, stacked to be roughly the size of a refrigerator, could produce a kilowatt and partly power a home in ideal conditions.

“Imagine a future world in which clean electricity is available anywhere you go,” said Yao. “The generic air-gen effect means that this future world can become a reality.”

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/us/s...1&cvid=a125a57aa51c436bb4d31c57a693430a&ei=42

Yao told the Washington Post that roughly 1 billion air-gens, stacked to be roughly the size of a refrigerator, could produce a kilowatt and partly power a home in ideal conditions.

This could be the issue with practical applications.

 

[Cal2]

New psychology research reveals the “bullshit blind spot”​

New research has found that people who are the worst at detecting bullshit tend to overestimate their detection ability and believe they are better at it than others.

On the other hand, those who are best at detecting bullshit tend to underestimate their own performance and believe they are slightly worse at it than the average person.

The research aimed to understand why smart people sometimes believe in dumb things and what characteristics are common among people who fall for misinformation.
https://www.psypost.org/2023/05/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-bullshit-blind-spot-163943

New psychology research reveals the “bullshit blind spot”​

New research has found that people who are the worst at detecting bullshit tend to overestimate their detection ability and believe they are better at it than others.

On the other hand, those who are best at detecting bullshit tend to underestimate their own performance and believe they are slightly worse at it than the average person.

The research aimed to understand why smart people sometimes believe in dumb things and what characteristics are common among people who fall for misinformation.
https://www.psypost.org/2023/05/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-bullshit-blind-spot-163943

"“My co-authors and I recently published a study examining whether people who spread misinformation are also more likely to fall for it – that is, whether one can ‘bullshit a bullshitter’ (open-access version) – and one of the main implications of that work suggests that people who intentionally spread misinformation in some situations can also unintentionally spread it without realizing it in other situations. To me, this seemed to suggest that some people who knowingly spread bullshit are unaware of the fact that they often fall for it themselves, possibly because they think they’re better at detecting it than everyone else.”

Adding to that, something I've posted a couple times in the past on other threads:

The More BS You Spread, the More BS You Fall For, New Study Shows

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/psychology-truthfulness-research-university-waterloo.html

 

[Cal2]

This could be the issue with practical applications.

Could be. Could take some 'radical making', maybe using new technologies, to make it practical enough for some applications. Eg., from 2020:

World's smallest boat is thinner than a human hair​

The microboat was 3D printed, but not with the usual extrusion method you’d use to print a plastic object at the macro scale. It’s made using what’s known as two-photon polymerization – essentially, a laser “carves” complex shapes and patterns into a material designed to react to the light.

https://newatlas.com/3d-printing/worlds-smallest-boat-3d-printed/

 

[koolishman]

Robot chef can learn recipes by watching food videos​

Fast forward to the present day, and researchers at the University of Cambridge are showing off a robotic "chef" that can learn how to recreate a particular recipe by analyzing food videos. After being shown eight different salad recipes explained in video format, the new robot was able to correctly identify the recipes being prepared 93 percent of the time and was able to determine 83 percent of the actions required to prepare them.

The researchers fed the system a total of 16 video demonstrations with slight variations in the recipes and employed several publicly available neural networks to convert them into a series of tasks the robot can execute. Each video frame was analyzed with OpenPose and YOLOv5m networks to detect the cook's hands, the ingredients, and the utensils involved. The researchers then used a statistical approach called a hidden Markov model (HMM) to discern the sequence of actions along with their length as well as the ingredient proportions.