Tag: science

Is Belief In A ‘Climate Crisis’ Rational?

The climate crisis, as it is called, has caused huge upheaval in the world, both practically and mentally.

It has created a state of stress in the times we live in, not least in children and young people.

It has led to a misanthropic outlook on life, which allows our welfare to be de-prioritised, and has major economic consequences.

The climate crisis is causing a deterioration in our energy supply, due to conversion to so-called renewable energy. But is the climate crisis even rational?

The atmosphere consists of approx. 400ppm CO2, i.e. approx. 0.04 percent of the total atmosphere. It is estimated by the IPCC that approx. one percent of the atmosphere’s CO2 content is emitted by humans, the rest is natural.

This means that people with CO2 emissions are responsible for approx. 0.0004 percent of the atmosphere’s total gas composition. It is hard to imagine that this can have any effect on the climate.

It is known that CO2 is not the primary reason why the atmosphere can retain heat. Water vapour is the main cause. The IPCC’s 102 CMIP-5 climate models, on average, exaggerate the warming in the 21st century by 250 percent.

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Woke Stars Shine: Colorado College Astrophysics Prof Claims the Study of Space Is Racist, Sexist

Colorado College astrophysics professor Natalie Gosnell says her field is engrossed in “white supremacy” and sexism, adding that language used to describe the cosmos is “very violent and hyper-masculine.”

Gosnell, who is dismayed over society separating “math” and “creativity” into two categories, says dichotomizing these two characteristics is rooted in systemic racism and sexism, according to a report by Colorado College News.

“As an astrophysicist, I’m a product of institutions that are steeped in systemic racism and white supremacy,” Gosnell told the student newspaper.

“The tenets of white supremacy that show up [in physics] of individualism and exceptionalism and perfectionism… it’s either-or thinking, and there’s no subtlety, there’s no gray area,” the professor added. “All of this manifests in the way that we think about our research, and what counts as good research, what counts as important research?”

Colorado College News concurred, adding that “most of Gosnell’s career has been dictated by the hyper-masculine world of astrophysics.”

When a star transfers its mass to an orbiting star, for example, this process is discussed “through a violent, hyper-masculine lens,” the student newspaper said, noting that the phenomenon has been referred to as a “Vampire star” or “Cannibal star,” with Gosnell adding that these stars are also viewed as the “bad boys” of the universe.

“I think because science and art have been so separated, and there’s — systemic issues within science, the metaphors that are often chosen [to discuss science] are very violent and hyper-masculine,” the professor said.

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Scientists Say They’re Now Actively Trying to Build Conscious Robots

2022 was a banner year for artificial intelligence, and particularly taking into account the launch of OpenAI’s incredibly impressive ChatGPT, the industry is showing no sign of stopping.

But for some industry leaders, chatbots and image-generators are far from the final robotic frontier. Next up? Consciousness.

“This topic was taboo,” Hod Lipson, the mechanical engineer in charge of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, told The New York Times. “We were almost forbidden from talking about it — ‘Don’t talk about the c-word; you won’t get tenure’ — so in the beginning I had to disguise it, like it was something else.”

Consciousness is one of the longest standing, and most divisive, questions in the field of artificial intelligence. And while to some it’s science fiction — and indeed has been the plot of countless sci-fi books, comics, and films — to others, like Lipson, it’s a goal, one that would undoubtedly change human life as we know it for good.

“This is not just another research question that we’re working on — this is the question,” the researcher continued. “This is bigger than curing cancer.”

“If we can create a machine that will have consciousness on par with a human, this will eclipse everything else we’ve done,” he added. “That machine itself can cure cancer.”

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‘Slowing Rates of Disruption,’ Decline in Scientific Breakthroughs, Researchers Stumped

The rate of scientific breakthroughs has been falling over the years, especially in the fields of physics and chemistry according to a recent study, with researchers unsure what is causing the phenomenon.

In recent decades, there has been an “exponential growth” in the volume of new technological and scientific knowledge, which created conditions necessary for major advances in those fields, states the study, published in Nature magazine on Jan. 4. But contrary to such expectations, the study found that progress is slowing down in several fields.

“You don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once had,” said Russell Funk, co-author of the study.

The research team looked at 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents. They used a new quantitative metric called the “CD index” to identify how papers and patents “change networks of citations in science and technology.”

The team found that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to push science and technology into newer directions, a trend that is breaking away from the past.

“We link this decline in disruptiveness to a narrowing in the use of previous knowledge, allowing us to reconcile the patterns we observe with the ‘shoulders of giants’ view,” the study said.

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USDA approves first ever vaccine for HONEYBEES – it makes them immune to a deadly bacteria that was only contained by burning the hive

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has approved the world’s first vaccine for honeybees to protect the endangered insects from a deadly disease caused by spore-forming bacteria, Paenibacillus larva.

The disease, known as American Foulbrood, was only contained by burning the colony and hive.

The vaccine is developed with killed whole-cell Paenibacillus larva bacteria that is mixed with food fed to the queen and passed on to her offspring, which will then be immune to the disease. 

The treatment has been approved under a conditional license, which is issued to meet an emergency condition.

And for the case of honeybees, these creatures are a critical component of agriculture – one-third of the global food supply relies on pollination.

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What’s Inside the Budget for the Secretive DARPA?

The Economist has called DARPA the agency “that shaped the modern world,” and listed weather satellites, GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the internet on the list of innovations for which “DARPA can claim at least partial credit.” These technologies were originally invented for the military aims of the Pentagon. 

DARPA was providing funding and technical support to Moderna’s mRNA vaccine technology since at least 2013. DARPA also had long-time associates and partners at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

A look at their new budget provides a glimpse at what the U.S. Military sees as part of the future of warfare. 

Using machine-learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to manipulate information or human behavior seems to be a priority for DARPA judging by the budget. 

A project named AAI aims to further the “facilitation of operator-machine interface, knowledge management and dissemination, and social context-informed AI forecasting.” The project also aims to include a “focus on measuring and aggregating preconscious signals and how these can be used to determine what people believe to be true.” 

Project SemaFor is being earmarked for hundreds of millions of dollars and will use AI “to identify false information, its origin, and its intent [emphasis added]. A project named ASED is developing “counter-social engineering bots.” A little description of this project is given. 

Once thought to be a thing of only movies and television shows, DARPA plans to further its development of a type of “ray gun.” Project Warden is being earmarked millions of dollars to “amplify the range and lethality of high-power microwave systems and weapons.” 

The World Economic Forum idea of Fourth Industrial Revolution technology, which is partly defined as the merging of the digital, technical and biological systems is also highlighted in the DARPA budget. 

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Could a zombie virus frozen in the remains of a woolly mammoth leak from a Russian lab and spark a new pandemic? Scientists aim to extract cellular material containing the viruses that killed Siberian beasts for testing

The majestic creature had lain silently in the permafrost for more than a million years. But all it took was a curious scientist, tinkering with its long-dead body, to unleash a terrible new pandemic on the world.

No, it’s not the plot of a woolly mammoth sequel to Jurassic Park, nor another theory on the origins of Covid-19 — though the result of this scientific investigation could be horribly similar.

It’s the story of how, right now, Russian researchers are unearthing the bodies of long-dead mammals in an attempt to ‘reawaken’ Stone Age viruses.

Such viruses are thought to have remained dormant for millennia in the frozen remains of mammoths, woolly rhinoceros and other extinct species in northeast Siberia.

Like the virus that caused Covid-19, these prehistoric ‘paleoviruses’ are unfamiliar to the human body and, were they ever to find their way across the species barrier, catastrophe could follow. We would, after all, have no natural defence.

The woolly mammoths that roamed the Siberian steppes — until the last one died some 10,000 years ago — were fearsome creatures. The size of an elephant, they had sharp tusks that could spear a human unwise enough to get near.

For biologists, they seem to hold an enduring fascination. Last year, a project called Colossal was launched, aiming to tweak the genetic code of the mammoth’s closest living relative, the Asian elephant, to create a hybrid animal that could survive in the Arctic Circle.

This latest project — carried out by Russia’s State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology, known as Vector — aims to extract cellular material containing the viruses that killed these frozen beasts, and take it back to the lab for experimentation.

What could possibly go wrong? To conjure up the all-too-real nightmare scenario, you only have to hear the history of Vector.

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Dartmouth College’s $100 Million STEM Program: White Men Need Not Apply?

Earlier this month, Dartmouth College announced a new $100 million STEM program.

According to a press release, the program will help “historically underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”

But it appears that white male students need not apply. The press release identifies those who will benefit from the initiative as “Black, Latinx, and Native Americans” as well as women.

The College Fix reports:

Several experts on Title IX sex discrimination and Title VI race discrimination law are concerned about the legality of the program, according to comments they made to The College Fix.

The program will be partially funded by a $25 million grant from Penny and James Coulter, a billionaire couple who made money through their private equity company TPG Capital. In addition to the Coulters’ grant, Dartmouth has raised $35 million to fund the program and seeks to raise an additional $40 million, bringing the total cost to $100 million.

The Fix reached out multiple times to Dartmouth’s media team and the Coulters through their company to ask about the specifics of the program and if they had any concerns about granting awards based on race rather than merit but did not receive a response to inquiries sent in the past week.

The initiative will include “an undergraduate scholarship program,” “curricular innovation,” and “enhanced career and graduate school advising,” all with the goal of “advanc[ing] STEM participation and leadership of underrepresented groups,” according to the university’s news release.

The program is a “three-year, cohesive diversity, equity, and inclusion strategic plan that cuts across both academic and administrative areas of the institution.”

Bion Bartning, the founder and president of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, a civil rights legal advocacy group, told The Fix in an email that a scholarship program which excludes individuals based on skin color would not be “lawful.”

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Feds funded study proving Thanos couldn’t snap his fingers while wearing Infinity Gauntlet

The U.S. federal government funded a study that determined the Marvel supervillain “Thanos” would not have been able to snap his fingers in the movie Avengers: Infinity War, a new report from Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky., revealed last week.

The study, spearheaded by researchers at Georgia Tech, focused on the speed at which humans can snap their fingers, ultimately reporting a finger snap “produces the highest rotational accelerations observed in humans, even faster than the arm of a professional baseball pitcher.”

For the past few years, I’ve been fascinated with how we can snap our fingers,” Saad Bhamla, one of the researchers involved in the study, said in a press release. “It’s really an extraordinary physics puzzle right at our fingertips that hasn’t been investigated closely.”

Prior to conducting the study, Bhamla and his fellow researchers developed a “framework” to explain “ultrafast motions” in living beings. Seeing Thanos snap his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet in Avengers: Infinity War inspired the researchers to apply their framework to the massively popular cinematic franchise.

Despite deriving inspiration from Thanos, the study focused more broadly on the human finger snap, raising questions about why humans snap their fingers in the first place and whether other primates have the ability to do so.

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Scientists Develop Gelatinous Robots to Crawl Through Human Body to Deliver Medical Payloads or Diagnose Illnesses

Scientists have developed miniature gelatinous robots that can crawl through the human body to deliver medicine or diagnose illnesses.

The “gelbot” is powered by little more than temperature changes, and its innovative design, which resembles an inchworm, is one of the most promising concepts in the field of soft robotics, according to Jill Rosen of John Hopkins University.

“It seems very simplistic, but this is an object moving without batteries, without wiring, without an external power supply of any kind—just on the swelling and shrinking of gel,” said David Gracias, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and a senior project leader.

“Our study shows how the manipulation of shape, dimensions, and patterning of gels can tune morphology to embody a kind of intelligence for locomotion.”

The 3D-printed robot, which is made out of gelatin, is intended to replace pills or intravenous injections, which could cause problematic side effects.

The prototype was announced in the journal Science Robotics, on Dec. 14.

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