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#3241 |
Live free or die hard
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Durango, CO
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Scientists accidentally create super-vicious HAMSTERS in lab after gene editing test goes wrong
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-accident.html 28 Days Later - here we come!!! ![]() |
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#3242 |
Banned
Join Date: Apr 2019
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#3243 |
New and Improved
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: Springfield, Mo.
Casino cash: $198590
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That Kicks Ass!
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“As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution”
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#3244 | |
Supporter
Join Date: Aug 2000
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Quote:
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We need the kind of courage that can withstand the subtle corruption of the cynics - E.W. |
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#3245 |
Immanentize The Eschaton
Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: In Partibus Infidelium
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#3246 |
Banned
Join Date: Apr 2019
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#3247 |
Ain't no relax!
Join Date: Sep 2005
Casino cash: $1008919
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We'll have the first images from the JWST within a matter of days. They already got one preview image from the fine guidance sensor. This is currently the deepest image ever taken of our universe. Kinda cool.
![]() This Fine Guidance Sensor test image was acquired in parallel with NIRCam imaging of the star HD147980 over a period of eight days at the beginning of May. This engineering image represents a total of 32 hours of exposure time at several overlapping pointings of the Guider 2 channel. The observations were not optimized for detection of faint objects, but nevertheless the image captures extremely faint objects and is, for now, the deepest image of the infrared sky. The unfiltered wavelength response of the guider, from 0.6 to 5 micrometers, helps provide this extreme sensitivity. The image is mono-chromatic and is displayed in false color with white-yellow-orange-red representing the progression from brightest to dimmest. The bright star (at 9.3 magnitude) on the right hand edge is 2MASS 16235798+2826079. There are only a handful of stars in this image – distinguished by their diffraction spikes. The rest of the objects are thousands of faint galaxies, some in the nearby universe, but many, many more in the distant universe. Credit: NASA, CSA, and FGS team. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/07/...des-a-preview/
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#3248 |
Ain't no relax!
Join Date: Sep 2005
Casino cash: $1008919
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#3249 |
Ain't no relax!
Join Date: Sep 2005
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Robot semis...
Cabless autonomous electric truck approved for US public roads ![]() Freight technology company Einride first introduced its cabless autonomous electric T-pod truck back in 2017, which rolled on Swedish roads for the first time a couple of years later. Now the company has been given the green light for operation on public roads in the US. A number of autonomous trucks have already rolled along public roads in US pilots, with these test vehicles either having a safety driver in the cab to take over should issues arise or being accompanied by a mobile support team. In what Einride claims is a first, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has approved its purpose-built autonomous electric vehicle to operate on public roads in the US, and there'll be no driver in the cab as the Einride Pod doesn't have a cab. The battery-electric Pod makes use of an onboard sensor suite comprising cameras, radars and LiDARs and will be monitored remotely by a human operator – which the company notes is "critical in safely scaling autonomous vehicles by keeping humans in the loop and creating jobs to fulfill a future way of shipping." The public road pilot is due to start in Q3 of this year, where the vehicle will merge with existing fleet operations at a GE Appliances manufacturing facility and is expected to move goods between warehouses and operate on public roads in mixed traffic. "We are creating a more sustainable and efficient supply chain through increased electrification and automation in our manufacturing and distribution operations," said GE Appliances' VP of Supply Chain, Bill Good. "We’ve appreciated working with Einride in demonstrating how their Pod technology can help us accelerate achievement of that goal."
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#3250 |
Grand champ
Join Date: Sep 2007
Casino cash: $782369
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Videos showing scale on a planetary+ scale are always interesting to me.
Something I've often read but can't verify: if you were to scale the Earth down to the size of a cue ball, the Earth would actually be even smoother than the cue ball. That makes no sense to me, but incredible if true. Also, I had never heard of Derinkuyu. I've heard of Gobekli Tepe, but never that one. I did some light Googling and everything keeps saying the underground city was "forged in volcanic rock" or something to that effect. I can't find any mention of whether it was man-made or if it was natural tunnels/cave system that people just made use of. |
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#3251 |
Ain't no relax!
Join Date: Sep 2005
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#3252 |
Ain't no relax!
Join Date: Sep 2005
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SETI: Why extraterrestrial intelligence is more likely to be artificial than biological
Organic human-level intelligence may be just a brief interlude in human history before the machines take over. Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? It’s a question that has been debated for centuries, if not millenia. But it is only recently that we’ve had an actual chance of finding out, with initiatives such as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) using radio telescopes to actively listen for radio messages from alien civilizations. What should we expect to detect if these searches succeed? My suspicion is that it is very unlikely to be little green men – something I speculated about at a talk at a Breakthrough Listen (a SETI project) conference. Suppose there are other planets where life began and that it followed something like a Darwinian evolution (which needn’t be the case). Even then, it’s highly unlikely that the progression of intelligence and technology would happen at exactly the same pace as on Earth. If it lagged significantly behind, then that planet would plainly reveal no evidence of extraterrestrial life to our radio telescopes. But around a star older than the Sun, life could have had a head start of a billion years or more. Human technological civilization only dates back millennia (at most) – and it may be only one or two more centuries before humans, made up of organic materials such as carbon, are overtaken or transcended by inorganic intelligence, such as AI. Computer processing power is already increasing exponentially, meaning AI in the future may be able to use vastly more data than it does today. It seems to follow that it could then get exponentially smarter, surpassing human general intelligence. Perhaps a starting point would be to enhance ourselves with genetic modification in combination with technology – creating cyborgs with partly organic and partly inorganic parts. This could be a transition to fully artificial intelligences. AI may even be able to evolve, creating better and better versions of itself on a faster-than-Darwinian timescale for billions of years. Organic human-level intelligence would then be just a brief interlude in our “human history” before the machines take over. So if alien intelligence had evolved similarly, we’d be most unlikely to “catch” it in the brief sliver of time when it was still embodied in biological form. If we were to detect extraterrestrial life, it would be far more likely to be electronic than flesh and blood – and it may not even reside on planets. We must therefore reinterpret the Drake equation, which was established in 1960 to estimate the number of civilizations in the Milky Way with which we could potentially communicate. The equation includes various assumptions, such as how many planets there are, but also how long a civilization is able to release signals into space, estimated to be between 1,000 and 100 million years. But the lifetime of an organic civilization may be millennia at most, while its electronic diaspora could continue for billions of years. If we include this in the equation, it seems there may be more civilizations out there than we thought, but that the majority of them would be artificial. We may even want to rethink the term “alien civilizations”. A “civilization” connotes a society of individuals. In contrast, extraterrestrials might be a single integrated intelligence. Decoding messages If SETI succeeded, it would therefore be unlikely to record decodable messages. Instead, it may spot a byproduct (or even a malfunction) of some super complex machine far beyond our comprehension. SETI focuses on the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum. But as we have no idea of what’s out there, we should clearly explore all wavebands, including the optical and X-ray parts. Rather than just listening for radio transmission, we should also be alert to other evidence of non-natural phenomena or activity. These include artificial structures built around stars to absorb their energy (Dyson spheres) or artificially created molecules, such as chlorofluorocarbons – nontoxic, nonflammable chemicals containing carbon, chlorine, and fluorine – in planet atmospheres. These chemicals are greenhouse gasses that can’t be created by natural processes, meaning they could be a sign of “terraforming” (changing a planet to make it more habitable) or industrial pollution. I’d argue it would even be worth looking for traces of aliens in our own solar system. While we can probably rule out visits by human-like species, there are other possibilities. An extraterrestrial civilization that had mastered nanotechnology may have transferred its intelligence to tiny machines, for example. It could then invade other worlds, or even asteroid belts, with swarms of microscopic probes. And even if we did receive a decodable radio message, how could we know what the intention of the super-intelligent sender would be? We have absolutely zero idea – think of the variety of bizarre motives (ideological, financial and religious) that have driven human endeavors in the past. They may be peaceful and inquisitive. Even less obtrusively, they may realize that it’s easier to think at low temperatures – getting far away from any star, or even hibernating for billions of years until it’s cooler. But they could be expansionist – and this seems the expectation of most who’ve thought about the future trajectory of civilizations. The future of intelligence As the universe evolves, intelligent species may get unfathomably clever. Just take our own future. Eventually, stellar births and deaths in our galaxy will proceed gradually more slowly, until it gets jolted as the Milky Way crashes with the Andromeda galaxy in about billion years. The debris of our galaxy, Andromeda and their smaller companions within our local group of galaxies will thereafter clump together into one amorphous galaxy, while distant ones move away from us and eventually disappear. But our remnant will continue for far longer – time enough, perhaps, for a civilization to emerge that could be in possession of huge amounts of energy, even harnessing the entire mass of a galaxy. This may be the culmination of the long-term trend for living systems to gain complexity. At this stage, all the atoms that were once in stars and gas could be transformed into a giant organism of galactic scale. Some science fiction authors envisage stellar-scale engineering to create black holes and wormholes – bridges connecting different points in spacetime, in theory providing shortcuts for space travelers. These concepts are far beyond any technological capability that we can envisage, but not in violation of basic physical laws. Are we artificial? Post-human intelligences may also be able to build computers with enormous processing power. Humans are already able to model some quite complex phenomenon, such as the climate. More intelligent civilizations, however, may be able to simulate living things – with actual consciousnesses – or even entire worlds or universes. How do we know that we aren’t living in such a simulation created by technologically superior aliens? Maybe we are no more than a bit of entertainment for some supreme being who is running such a model? Indeed, if life is destined to be able to create technologically advanced civilizations that can make computer programs, there may be more simulated universes our there than real ones out there – making it conceivable that we are in one of them. This conjecture may sound outlandish, but it is all based on our current understanding of physics and cosmology. We should, however, surely be open-minded about the possibility that there’s much we don’t understand. Perhaps the laws we see and the constants we measure are only “local” and differ in other parts of the universe? That would lead to even more jaw-dropping possibilities. Ultimately, physical reality could encompass complexities that neither our intellect nor our senses can grasp. Some electronic “brains” may simply have a quite different perception of reality. Nor can we predict or understand their motives. That’s why we can’t assess whether the current radio silence that SETI are experiencing signifies the absence of advanced alien civilizations, or simply their preference.
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#3253 |
Ain't no relax!
Join Date: Sep 2005
Casino cash: $1008919
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Your challenge, CP members.... It's science.....
Ejaculating at least 21 times a month may protect against prostate cancer, study shows Experts stressed that cutting out tobacco and fatty foods also helped in reducing the risk Researchers studying prostate cancer have concluded one way to keep your prostate healthy is through high levels of sexual activity. In a nutshell The study, published in the European Urology Journal by researchers at Harvard University, found that engaging in increased levels of sexual activity, both with a partner or solo, can help in reducing the risk of contracting prostate cancer. Researchers looked at the sexual habits of 32,000 men, finding that those who tended to ejaculate more had a lowered chance of contracting prostate tumours. READ NEXT - Good night's sleep means you are ‘less likely to have a stroke’ READ NEXT - Drinking coffee could lower your risk of dying young, study shows Overall it was determined that the number of times you should ejaculate during the month as a man is 21. It was found that males who ejaculated at least 21 times during the month had a 33 per cent lower risk of contracting prostate cancer than those who did not ejaculate that much. Although researchers failed to determine why it has been postulated that it may be due to the flushing of toxins out of the system. However, researchers stressed that ejaculation is not going to be the saviour of people’s prostate. Researchers put forward that other factors which may lead to prostate cancer include obesity, tobacco, and high-fat processed food. What has been said? The author of the study states: "We found that men reporting higher compared to the lower ejaculatory frequency in adulthood were less likely to be subsequently diagnosed with prostate cancer. “This large prospective study provides the strongest evidence to date of a beneficial role of ejaculation in the prevention of prostate cancer." Facts and figures Statistics show that over 32,500 men in Ireland are living with prostate cancer. Also, while testicular cancer is the most common cancer among young men, nearly half (48 per cent) of all men aged 18-24, have either never or rarely been examined for symptoms in the past six months. Overall, 47 per cent of males don’t know how to self-examine their testicles for signs of testicular cancer and nearly four of every ten males aged 18-34 don’t know how to properly self-examine.
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#3254 |
Live free or die hard
Join Date: Sep 2000
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And now for something completely different...
Human brain cells implanted in rats prompt excitement — and concern
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03238-x Miniature human-brain-like structures transplanted into rats can send signals and respond to environmental cues picked up by the rats’ whiskers, according to a study1. This demonstration that neurons grown from human stem cells can interface with nerve cells in live rodents could lead to a way to test therapies for human brain disorders. ![]() To give brain organoids this stimulation and support, neuroscientist Sergiu Pasca at Stanford University in California and his colleagues grew the structures from human stem cells and then injected them into the brains of newborn rat pups, with the expectation that the human cells would grow along with the rats’ own cells. The team placed the organoids in a brain region called the somatosensory cortex, which receives signals from the rats’ whiskers and other sensory organs and then passes them along to other brain regions that interpret the signals. ![]() Paola Arlotta, a molecular biologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is excited about the results. “It’s an important step in allowing organoids to tell us more complex properties of the brain,” she says, although she thinks that the transplantation procedure is probably still too expensive and complex to become a standard research tool. The next step, Arlotta adds, will be to work out how individual human neurons — not just fully developed organoids — are integrated into the rat brain. Behaviour trigger In their report, published in Nature on 12 October1, the researchers describe how they genetically engineered the neurons in the organoids to fire when stimulated with light from a fibre-optic cable embedded in the rats’ brains. The team trained the rats to lick a spout to receive water while the light was switched on. Afterwards, when the researchers shone the light on the hybrid brains, the rats were prompted to lick the spout, meaning that the human cells had become integrated well enough to help drive the animals’ behaviour. Furthermore, when the researchers prodded the rats’ whiskers, they found that the human cells in the sensory cortex fired in response, suggesting that the cells were able to pick up sensory information. ![]() Rusty Gage, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, is glad to see these results. In 2018, he and a team of researchers found that transplanted human brain organoids could be integrated into the brains of adult mice2. Mice don’t live as long as rats, and Pasca and his colleagues hoped that because newborn rat pups’ brains are more plastic than those of adult animals, they would be better able to receive the new cells. “We’ve got challenges out there for us,” Gage says. “But I do believe the transplantation procedure will be a valuable tool.” ![]() But Arlotta, a member of the National Academies panel, says that problems could arise as science advances. “We can’t just discuss it once and let it be,” she says. She adds that concerns about human organoids need to be weighed against the needs of people with neurological and psychiatric disorders. Brain organoids and human–animal hybrid brains could reveal the mechanisms underlying these illnesses, and allow researchers to test therapies for conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. “I think we have a responsibility as a society to do everything we can,” Arlotta says. |
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#3255 |
Ain't no relax!
Join Date: Sep 2005
Casino cash: $1008919
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Yes. Yess.
Scientists Create AI-Powered Laser Turret That Kills Cockroaches Everyone wants to be able to just zap a bug and have it go away. But now, thanks to a recent development from Ildar Rakhmatulin, a research associate at Heriot-Watt University interested in machine learning and engineering, this dream is now a reality. In the study—which was conducted last year but published in Oriental Insects last week—Rakhmatulin and his co-authors used a laser insect control device automated with machine vision to perform a series of experiments on domiciliary cockroaches. They were able to not only detect cockroaches at high accuracy but also neutralize and deter individual insects at a distance up to 1.2 meters. This is a follow-up of sorts to earlier projects, in which he used a Raspberry Pi and lasers to zap mosquitoes. However, for this project, Rakhmatulin used a different kind of computer which allowed for more precision in detecting the bug. “I started using a Jetson Nano that allowed me to use deep learning technologies with higher accuracy to detect an object,” Rakhmatulin explained. The Jetson Nano is a small computer that can run machine learning algorithms. The computer processes a digital signal from two cameras to determine the cockroach’s position. It transmits that information to a galvanometer (a machine that measures electric current), which changes the direction of the laser to shoot the target. ![]() According to the paper, Rakhmatulin tried this configuration at different power levels for the laser. At a lower power level, he found that he could influence the behavior of roaches by simply triggering their flight response with a laser; this way, they could potentially be trained to not shelter in a particular dark area. At a higher power level, the cockroaches were effectively "neutralised," in the paper's language—in other words, killed. Rakhmatulin has also made all the data and instructions freely available, noting that others can try as long as they take proper precautions. “I use very cheap hardware and cheap technology and it’s open source,” Rakhmatulin said. “All sources are uploaded in my GitHub and see how to do it and use it.” He mentioned that others have already started trying it out with other pests like hornets, which makes sense. “If it can damage cockroaches, it can also damage other pests in agriculture.” Aside from the open-sourced nature of the project, the possible widespread applications of the technology also makes it noteworthy. It could be a plausible alternative to mechanical traps, as well as chemicals that often damage the environment and target non-pest insect species. Not to mention, it’s cheaper (the paper notes that all devices cost not more than $250) and more compact than other current pest-controlling technologies. That being said, although the prototype is suitable for academic research, there’s a lot more to be done before it can be deployed on a larger scale. For example, the paper notes that a smaller laser point would be more effective at killing the roaches but is difficult to implement experimentally. The ability to precisely control which parts of the cockroach's bodies were hit would also be helpful, the paper says. It’s also sadly not quite ready for household use, at least not yet. “It’s not recommended because it’s a little dangerous,” Rakhmatulin said. “Lasers can damage not only cockroaches but your eyes.” Best to keep your cockroach traps for now.
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