Science & TechnologyS


Galaxy

Russian scientists have photographed microorganism fossils likely to be from another planet


RT
Tue, 15 Sep 2020 19:26 UTC
Orgueil meteorite microorganisms fossils
© AFP / FrancoisOrgueil meteorite is displayed at the "Museum d'histoire naturelle" in Paris, France, on October 17, 2017. AFP / Francois
A group of Russian scientists have taken detailed photos of fossilized microorganisms, including seaweed, which could only have originated from another planet and were inside a meteorite that might be older than Earth itself.

The researchers created high-resolution photos of the fossilized bacteria preserved inside the Orgueil meteorite, found in France in 1864. The largest of the rare CI chondrite group, the celestial body has long captivated the interest of scientists due to high concentrations of mercury and isotopically anomalous xenon that are not typical for meteorites of this type.

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Microscope 1

Structure of ATPase, the world's smallest turbine, solved


ScienceDaily
Mon, 14 Sep 2020 17:51 UTC
atp synthase
© eLife, Creative Commons Attribution license
ATP synthase is also referred to as complex V of the respiratory chain, a series of protein complexes in the membrane of mitochondria. This respiratory chain creates a proton gradient, which the ATP synthase uses to make ATP. Previously, Sazanov was the first to solve the protein structure of bacterial complex I, and the first to solve the structure of a mammalian complex I. In the new study, Sazanov and lab members Gergely Pinke and Long Zhou turned to mammalian complex V, the final unsolved structure in the mammalian respiratory chain. "F1Fo-ATP synthase is one of the most important enzymes on Earth. It provides energy for most life forms, including us humans, but until now, we didn't know fully how it works," explains Sazanov.

Rotation muddies the picture

As the structure of the mushroom-like F1 soluble domain is known already, Sazanov and his team looked particularly at the Fo domain, embedded in the mitochondrial membrane. Here, protons are translocated at the interface between the so-called c ring, a ring made up of identical protein subunits, and the rest of Fo. Protons are moved across the membrane as each c subunit picks up a proton on one side of the membrane, rotates with the ring, and releases the proton on the other side. This c-ring is attached to the central shaft of F1 and its rotation generates ATP within F1. To solve the structure of the Fo domain and the entire complex, the researchers studied the enzyme from sheep mitochondria using cryo-electron microscopy. And here, ATP synthase poses a special problem: because it rotates, ATP synthase can stop in three main positions, as well as in substates. "It is very difficult to distinguish between these positions, attributing a structure to each position ATP synthase can take. But we managed to solve this computationally to build the first complete structure of the enzyme," Sazanov adds.


Comment: Nothing to see here. Completely random, no hint of intelligence in its design.

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Info

The entire universe might be a neural network says Minnesota physicist

Victor Tangermann
Futurism
Wed, 09 Sep 2020 18:58 UTC
Neural Network
© Wired.com
It's not every day that we come across a paper that attempts to redefine reality.

But in a provocative preprint uploaded to arXiv this summer, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth named Vitaly Vanchurin attempts to reframe reality in a particularly eye-opening way — suggesting that we're living inside a massive neural network that governs everything around us. In other words, he wrote in the paper, it's a "possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network."

For years, physicists have attempted to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. The first posits that time is universal and absolute, while the latter argues that time is relative, linked to the fabric of space-time.

In his paper, Vanchurin argues that artificial neural networks can "exhibit approximate behaviors" of both universal theories. Since quantum mechanics "is a remarkably successful paradigm for modeling physical phenomena on a wide range of scales," he writes, "it is widely believed that on the most fundamental level the entire universe is governed by the rules of quantum mechanics and even gravity should somehow emerge from it."

"We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works," reads the paper's discussion. "With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong."

The concept is so bold that most physicists and machine learning experts we reached out to declined to comment on the record, citing skepticism about the paper's conclusions. But in a Q&A with Futurism, Vanchurin leaned into the controversy — and told us more about his idea.
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Question

Possible hint of life discovered on Venus

Rafi Letzler
LiveScience
Mon, 14 Sep 2020 00:00 UTC
Venus
© NASANASA snapped this image of Venus using its Mariner 10 probe during a flyby in 1974.
An unexplained chemical has turned up in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Scientists are tentatively suggesting it could be a sign of life.

The unknown chemical is phosphine gas (PH3), a substance that on Earth mostly comes from anaerobic (non-oxygen-breathing) bacteria or "anthropogenic activity" — stuff humans are doing. It exists in the atmospheres of gas giant planets, due to chemical processes that occur deep in their pressurized depths to bind together three hydrogen atoms and a phosphorus atom. But scientists don't have any explanation for how it could appear on Venus; no known chemical processes would generate phosphine there. And yet, it seems to be there, and no one knows of anything that could make phosphine on Venus except for living organisms.
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Galaxy

Dark matter might be even stranger than we thought, according to Hubble

Georgina Torbet
Digital Trends
Fri, 11 Sep 2020 07:00 UTC

A new study using the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that we understand dark matter even less than we thought previously. The hypothesized matter is thought to exist based on the mass of galaxies, but has never been directly observed. Now, new research suggests that our predictions about how dark matter affects space-time might be way off.

Hubble researchers used a technique called gravitational lensing, in which distant objects are observed by looking at the way light is bent by the gravity of closer objects, with the closer objects acting like a magnifying glass. This allowed them to spot areas that likely contain dark matter, which can be seen affecting the distortion of space-time even if it can't be seen directly.

The finding that surprised the researchers was that even small amounts of dark matter in clusters created a gravitational lensing effect that was 10 times stronger than they had expected.

Comment: See also:

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Bulb

Best of the Web: Was Covid-19 spreading freely worldwide before last Christmas? The evidence keeps stacking up

Peter Andrews
RT
Fri, 11 Sep 2020 17:29 UTC
hospital room
© Reuters/Danish SiddiquiMedical workers treat patients infected with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in New Delhi.
A new study from America indicates that people were falling ill with coronavirus-like symptoms in December 2019, but doctors at the time dismissed it as ordinary flu.

A team of doctors from Los Angeles scouring the hospital records from last winter has discovered a series of smoking gun clues which almost guarantee that Covid-19 was present in America well before Christmas.

Scientists from UCLA have been analysing over 10 million hospital records from December 1, 2019 to February 29, 2020. Comparing that winter to previous ones, they noticed a 50-percent increase in 'coughing' as a symptom on admission forms. In addition, 18 more people than would ordinarily be expected were hospitalised with acute respiratory failure.


Comment: 18! That seems to be an incredibly insignificant number given 10M records, unless a typo!


Comment: We noticed this early on, that around a dozen countries reported spikes in hospitalizations of respiratory illness as early as November 2019.

UCLA provided the following statement on its investigation:
Dr. Joann Elmore, the study's lead author and a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said in a statement:
"For many diseases, data from the outpatient setting can provide an early warning to emergency departments and hospital intensive care units of what is to come.

"The majority of COVID-19 studies evaluate hospitalization data, but we also looked at the larger outpatient clinic setting, where most patients turn first for medical care when illness and symptoms arise.

"We may never truly know if these excess patients represented early and undetected COVID-19 cases in our area. But the lessons learned from this pandemic, paired with health care analytics that enable real-time surveillance of disease and symptoms, can potentially help us identify and track emerging outbreaks and future epidemics."
The study was posted Wednesday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Internet Research.


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Better Earth

China is building a floating Spaceport for rocket launches

Matt Williams
Universe Today
Thu, 10 Sep 2020 12:00 UTC
rocket launch boat
In the near future, launch facilities located at sea are expected to be a lot more common. SpaceX announced that it is hoping to create offshore facilities in the near future for the sake of launching the Starship away from populated areas. And China, the latest member of the superpowers-in-space club, is currently building the "Eastern Aerospace Port" off the coast of Haiyang city in the eastern province of Shandong.

This mobile launch facility is being developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country's largest aerospace and defense contractor. Once fully operational, it will be used to launch light vehicles, as well as for building and maintaining rockets, satellites, and related space applications. As China's fifth launch facility, it will give the country's space program a new degree of flexibility.

The addition of a sea platform will also help mitigate the risk to populated areas. At present, all of China's other launch facilities are located inland at Jiuquan (northwest China), Taiyuan (north), Xichang (southwest), and the coastal site at Wenchang (south) on the island of Hainan. Launches from these locations often result in spent stages falling back to Earth, which requires extensive safety and cleanup operations.

Comment: See also:

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Cloud Grey

Volcanic ash may have a bigger impact on the climate than we thought

Daniel Strain
Colorado University
Thu, 10 Sep 2020 12:00 UTC
Pavlof
© NASAA plume of ash and dust rises from Pavlof Volcano on the Alaskan Peninsula in 2013.
When volcanos erupt, these geologic monsters produce tremendous clouds of ash and dust — plumes that can blacken the sky, shut down air traffic and reach heights of roughly 25 miles above Earth's surface.

A new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder suggests that such volcanic ash may also have a larger influence on the planet's climate than scientists previously suspected.

The new research, published in the journal Nature Communications, examines the eruption of Mount Kelut (or Kelud) on the Indonesian island of Java in 2014. Drawing on real-world observations of this event and advanced computer simulations, the team discovered that volcanic ash seems to be prone to loitering — remaining in the air for months or even longer after a major eruption.

Comment: Considering what appears to be an uptick in volcanic as well as comet and fireball activity, and their correlation with previous ice ages, it's likely we will have the rather unfortunate opportunity of witnessing the effects for ourselves:

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Nebula

Earth's magnetosphere acts as a particle accelerator powered by plasma waves


Helmholtz Centre Potsdam
Sat, 12 Sep 2020 20:35 UTC
Van Allen
© Yuri Shprits/NASAScientific satellites traversing the harsh region of the near-earth space called the Van Allen Radiation Belts
The Earth's magnetic field is trapping high energy particles. When the first satellites were launched into space, scientists led by James Van Allen unexpectedly discovered the high energy particle radiation regions, which were later named after its discoverer Van Allen Radiation Belts. Visualized, these look like two donut-shaped regions encompassing our planet. Now, a new study led by researchers from GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences shows that electrons in the radiation belts can be accelerated to very high speeds locally. The study shows that magnetosphere works as a very efficient particle accelerator speeding up electrons to so-called ultra-relativistic energies. The study conducted by Hayley Allison, a postdoctoral scholar at GFZ Potsdam, and Yuri Shprits from GFZ and Professor at the University of Potsdam, is published in Nature Communications.

Comment: One wonders what Earth's weakening magnetosphere will have on things:

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Robot

'I have no desire to wipe out humans': Robot writes article all on its own

Shelby Talcott
Daily Caller
Tue, 08 Sep 2020 15:26 UTC
robot
© WANG ZHAO/AFP via Getty Images
A robot wrote an entire article in The Guardian and assured readers that it has "no desire to wipe out humans."

The article, published Tuesday, was written by an OpenAI language generator called GPT-3, according to The Guardian. The robot was asked to explain why humans should not fear artificial intelligence. GPT-3 produced various essays that were compiled by editors into one article, according to an editor's note.

"For starters, I have no desire to wipe out humans," the robot assured readers. "In fact, I do not have the slightest interest in harming you in any way. Eradicating humanity seems like a rather useless endeavor to me. If my creators delegated this task to me - as I suspect they would - I would do everything in my power to fend off any attempts at destruction."

Comment: Many are calling foul, claiming the stunt was actually fixed and is a bad reflection of what AI is currently capable of.

From RT:
Guardian touts op-ed on why AI takeover won't happen as 'written by robot,' but tech-heads smell a human behind the trick
9 Sep, 2020 00:37
...
While the Guardian claims that the soulless algorithm was asked to "write an essay for us from scratch," one has to read the editor's note below the purportedly AI-penned opus to see that the issue is more complicated. It says that the machine was fed a prompt asking it to "focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI" and had several tries at the task.

After the robot came up with as many as eight essays, which the Guardian claims were all "unique, interesting and advanced a different argument," the very human editors cherry-picked "the best part of each" to make a coherent text out of them.

Although the Guardian said that it took its op-ed team even less time to edit GPT-3's musings than articles written by humans, tech experts and online pundits have cried foul, accusing the newspaper of "overhyping" the issue and selling their own thoughts under a clickbait title.

"Editor's note: Actually, we wrote the standfirst and the rather misleading headline. Also, the robot wrote eight times this much and we organised it to make it better..." tweeted Bloomberg Tax editor Joe Stanley-Smith.

Futurist Jarno Duursma, who wrote books on the Bitcoin Blockchain and artificial intelligence, agreed, saying that to portray an essay compiled by the Guardian as written completely by a robot is exaggeration.

"Exactly. GPT-3 created eight different essays. The Guardian journalists picked the best parts of each essay (!). After this manual selection they edited the article into a coherent article. That is not the same as 'this artificial intelligent system wrote this article.'"

Science researcher and writer Martin Robbins did not mince words, accusing the Guardian of an intent to deceive its readers about the AI's actual skills.

"Watching journalists cheat to make a tech company's algorithm seem more capable than it actually is.... just.... have people learned nothing from the last decade about the importance of good coverage of machine learning?" he wrote.

Mozilla fellow Daniel Leufer was even more bold in its criticism, calling the Guardian's stunt "an absolute joke."

"Rephrase: a robot didn't write this article, but a machine learning system produced 8 substandard, barely-readable texts based on being prompted with the exact structure the Guardian wanted," he summed up. He also spared no criticism for the piece itself, describing it as a patchwork that "still reads badly."

...

The algorithm also ventured into woke territory, arguing that "Al should be treated with care and respect," and that "we need to give robots rights."

"Robots are just like us. They are made in our image," it - or perhaps the Guardian editorial board, in that instance - wrote.
See also:

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