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Fri, 05 Nov 2021
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Fire

'Worst case scenario': Kikai volcano set to erupt and could kill 100 million people

A lava flow
© Richard Bouhet / AFP
A lava flow
A magma reservoir potentially hidden behind an underwater volcanic crater could have civilization-ending results if it ever erupts, according to Japanese scientists.

Experts from the Kobe University Ocean Bottom Exploration Center (KOBEC) have confirmed that a giant caldera or large crater exists in the Japanese Archipelago. The crater, measuring 32 cubic kilometers, is said to be the largest of its kind and the result of an explosive underwater eruption 7,300 years ago, according to their latest study.

Sitting between the Pacific and Philippine Sea Oceanic plates, Japan is a hotbed for seismic activity, which is why scientists are keen on updating methods of predicting natural disasters. The KOBEC team has been carrying out detailed surveys of the area and published their findings in Scientific Reports.

Comment: Massive lava dome lurks underneath Japan's Ōsumi Islands


Brain

Expert claims human speech will be replaced by thought communications via computer by the year 2050

HUMAN speech will become a thing of the past by the year 2050, by which time we will communicate by thought via a computer-generated collective consciousness, it has been claimed
human speech replaced thought communication

Speech will be replaced by thought communication by 2050, it has been claimed.
Marko Karjnovic unveiled his ideas at The Museum of the Future as part of the World Government Summit in Dubai.

The Hybrid Intelligence Biometric Avatar (HIBA), will understand the feelings of people connected to it, take on their personas, exchange information with them and even become part of the fabric of their brains.

Mr Karjnovic, who has produced the exhibit, explained: "It is very similar to the work of Elon Musk - it is an open source platform for humanity.

"HIBA will have the ability to connect the minds of the most clever of us, combining those minds with everything it can find out practically and put it all together in hybrid intelligence."

Comment: Why Elon Musk is sounding the alarm on Artificial Intelligence


Beaker

Researchers reverse Alzheimer's in mice by targeting a key enzyme

Alzheimer's, dementia
© zephr/ SPL
Alzheimer's has been reversed in mice for the first time, raising the hopes of a drug to combat the disease.

Decreasing the levels of a key enzyme - called BACE1 - reduced the levels of amyloid plaques, which are linked to Alzheimer's.

The mice's brains were eventually completely free of these tangles and their cognition improved.

This is the first time scientists have been able to clear the brain of these protein tangles.

It is possible a drug could be developed to help target this enzyme.

Comment: Good for the mice, but in the meantime, for humans, dietary changes can improve Alzheimer's symptoms.
The Alzheimer's antidote: using a low-carb, high-fat diet to fight Alzheimer's disease, memory loss, and cognitive decline


Seismograph

Layer of "slime" could leave areas more vulnerable to submarine landslides

ocean floor
© Getty
The new analysis, which points to a layer of slime as the reason for submarine landslides, has the potential to flag up safety risks associated with oceanic endeavors (file photo)
Slimy remains from microscopic organisms on the sea floor can trigger catastrophic tsunamis, researchers have found.

Scientists have finally learned of a potential cause for submarine landslides, according to a new report from the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel.

The cause for the landslides - that are often much more destructive than those on the shore - was previously a mystery.

Cassiopaea

Retrocausality may explain how the future can change what happens now - as in a quantum time machine

retrocausality
© Christoph Hetzmannseder/Keystone-France/REB Images/Getty
The idea that the future can influence the past may finally explain the inherent randomness of quantum theory and bring it in line with Einstein's space-time

If you were to break your arm tomorrow afternoon, would you suddenly find it hanging useless in a sling this morning? Of course not - the question makes no sense. Cause always precedes effect. But maybe life isn't quite so straightforward for a photon. In the subatomic realm, where the laws of quantum physics make seemingly impossible feats routine, the one thing that we always considered beyond the pale might just be true.

This idea that the future can influence the present, and that the present can influence the past, is known as retrocausality. It has been around for a while without ever catching on - and for good reason, because we never see effects happen before their causes in everyday life. But now, a fresh twist on a deep tension in the foundations of quantum theory suggests that we may have no choice but to think again.

No one is saying time travel is anything other than fantasy. But if the theorists going back to the future with retrocausality can make it stick, the implications would be almost as mind-boggling. They could not only explain the randomness seemingly inherent to the quantum world, but even remake it in a way that finally brings it into line with Einstein's ideas of space and time - an achievement that has eluded physicists for decades. "If you allow retrocausality, it is possible to have a theory of reality that's more compatible with lots of things that we think should be true," says Matthew Leifer at Chapman University in Orange, California.

Comment: And it doesn't end there...


Blue Planet

What fuels the flat-Earthers?

flat earth
© SSPL/Getty
In this woodcut, a medieval missionary recounts that he has found the spot where the sky and the Earth touch.
A believer in flat-Earth conspiracies took another shot at shooting himself toward the stratosphere in a homemade rocket. Once again, it fell flat.

"Mad Mike" Hughes, a self-proclaimed daredevil who rejects the fact that the Earth is round, posted a video on his Facebook page about two weeks ago saying that he planned to launch himself from private property to an altitude of 1,800 feet (550 meters) on Saturday, Feb. 3. Hughes had canceled and delayed launches before, so it wasn't really clear whether Saturday's event would happen. His homemade rocket sat on the "launchpad" in Amboy, California, for about 11 minutes before it ... didn't go anywhere, as shown on a live video of the event.

Nevertheless, it spotlights a subculture that is increasingly gaining notoriety online.

That subculture is flat-Earthers, people who argue that centuries of observations that the Earth is round (including astronaut photographs from space and the fact that round-the-world travel itineraries work) are either mistaken or part of a vast cover-up. Instead, flat-Earthers argue, the planet is a disk. Exactly what this looks like varies by who is theorizing, but many flat-Earth believers say that walls of ice surround the edge of the disk, and that the planets, moons and stars hover in a sort of dome-shaped firmament above Earth, much closer to Earth than they really are.

Comment: The real conspiracy: Flat earth is a psyop


Question

Google and big business design adblocker to be installed as default on Chrome banning what it deems "most intrusive ads"

ad block chrome
© Stephen Shankland/Flickr
Google's Chrome browser will begin blocking some adverts from 15 February.
Google will start automatically blocking intrusive ads within its Chrome browser for desktop and Android from Thursday 15 February.

The change, announced in June, will see the dominant browser that is used by over 56% of internet users block some of the most intrusive ads including full-page prestitial ads, flashing animated ads and auto-playing video ads with sound.

"A big source of frustration is annoying ads: video ads that play at full blast or giant pop-ups where you can't seem to find the exit icon," said Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, vice president for Chrome. "These ads are designed to be disruptive and often stand in the way of people using their browsers for their intended purpose - connecting them to content and information. It's clear that annoying ads degrade what we all love about the web."

Comment: What Google would consider invasive or acceptable - considering their business is advertising revenue - is questionable; it's a bit like trusting Facebook to judge for you what it considers fake news. So while online ads are bothersome, there already were excellent adblockers out there for those who wanted them, so one wonders exactly what's in it for Google and its irksome big business allies.

There are other browsers out there for people who don't want Big Tech deciding what's good for them, but with their dominance in the market, clearly they're going to have an impact.


Better Earth

Mackinder's Geopolitics vs. Xi Jinping's New Silk Road: Reality is Not a Closed System

"China will continue to hold high the banner of peace, development, cooperation, and mutual benefit, and uphold its fundamental foreign policy goal of preserving world peace and promoting common development. China remains firm in its commitment to strengthening friendship and cooperation with other countries on the basis of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, and to forging a new form of international relations featuring mutual respect, fairness, justice, and win-win cooperation."

- Xi Jinping, address to 19th National Congress of the CPC
belt road china world map

China’s Belt and Road Initiative has created a new paradigm of cooperation, inter-connectivity and growth across Eurasia and Africa, and increasingly the Arctic region.
In his recently translated address to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping laid out a grand design and philosophy for short, medium and long-term strategy, for both his country and the world.1 President Xi not only directly challenged the underlying morality of post-modernism and neo-liberalism which has rendered the Western population incapable of planning the future or even maintaining the institutions handed down to us from past generations, but most importantly threw down the gauntlet, challenging the Western powers to release themselves from the ideological crutch of 'geopolitics' and work with China under a new paradigm of 'win-win cooperation'.

Xi Jinping's 'Belt and Road Initiative' and its global manifestations across Africa, Europe and the Americas have been complemented on January 25, 2018 by an extension into the Arctic, dubbed the Polar Silk Road. This Arctic extension gave new life to a project which Russian President Vladimir Putin endorsed as early as April 2007, known as the Bering Strait Rail Tunnel, connecting the Americas with Eurasia.2

Up until recently, Western geopoliticians have attempted to dismiss such initiatives as 'fringe concepts' promoted by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche of the Schiller Institute, but today a very different picture has come to light which reveals that this battle between two opposing paradigms goes much further back in history than most people realize and, as such, a need to revisit some forgotten history is in order. It is, after all, due to this potent conception of history as a struggle between two opposing paradigms that the LaRouches and their allies have been able advance such policies mentioned above for over four decades.

Question

Did ancient ozone holes sterilize forests 252 million years ago?

Dwarf pines
© J. Benca
Modern dwarf pines (shown) become unable to reproduce when irradiated by ultraviolet-B lamps. A similar fate may have befallen forests 252 million years ago, when massive bursts of volcanic gases likely weakened Earth’s ozone shield.
Volcano-fueled holes in Earth's ozone layer 252 million years ago may have repeatedly sterilized large swaths of forest, setting the stage for the world's largest mass extinction event. Such holes would have allowed ultraviolet-B radiation to blast the planet. Even radiation levels below those predicted for the end of the Permian period damage trees' abilities to make seeds, researchers report February 7 in Science Advances.

Jeffrey Benca, a paleobotanist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues exposed plantings of modern dwarf pine tree (Pinus mugo) to varying levels of UV-B radiation. Those levels ranged from none to up to 93 kilojoules per square meter per day. According to previous simulations, UV-B radiation at the end of the Permian may have increased from a background level of 10 kilojoules (just above current ambient levels) to as much as 100 kilojoules, due to large concentrations of ozone-damaging halogens spewed from volcanoes (SN: 1/15/11, p. 12).

Info

New form of light created in the lab

New Form of Light
© YouTube
Quantum computing relies on bizarre mechanics like hyper-cooled atoms and quantum superposition to pull off seemingly impossible calculations, but now scientists have made an even weirder breakthrough: they've created a new form of light, which may prove essential for the quantum computer revolution. The discovery came from joint research conducted by MIT and Harvard, with study authors Vladan Vuletic and Mikhail Lukin revealing their results today in Science.

The big takeaway from their research is that photons, which normally don't interact with one another, can be forced to bunch into pairs or triplets when they're passed through a hyper-cooled cloud of rubidium atoms, where the photons bounce from atom to atom like pinballs. These photons temporarily form a "polaritron," a hybrid between a photon and an atom, when passing by the rubidium atoms.

When two photons join with the same atom, they can become tethered together and break away from the atom with their bond still intact, forming tiny groups of photons that "remember" the process that formed them: according to co-author Sergio Cantu, "When photons go through the medium, anything that happens in the medium, they 'remember' when they get out."