Science & Technology

Deforestation in US can lead to cooler planet, NASA funded study finds

Clark University
Phys.org
Fri, 12 Feb 2021 12:00 UTC

© Clark University Professor Christopher A. Williams
Forest conversion from 1986 to 2000. Percentage of forest pixels converted, mapped at a 990 m x 990 m resolution. All cities with a population greater than 250,000 are displayed as black dots.

New research by Christopher A. Williams, an environmental scientist and professor in Clark University's Graduate School of Geography, reveals that deforestation in the U.S. does not always cause planetary warming, as is commonly assumed; instead, in some places, it actually cools the planet. A peer-reviewed study by Williams and his team, "Climate Impacts of U.S. Forest Loss Span Net Warming to Net Cooling," published today (Feb. 12) in Science Advances. The team's discovery has important implications for policy and management efforts that are turning to forests to mitigate climate change.

It is well established that forests soak up carbon dioxide from the air and store it in wood and soils, slowing the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; however, that is not their only effect on climate. Forests also tend to be darker than other surfaces, said Professor Williams, causing them to absorb more sunlight and retain heat, a process known as "the albedo effect."

Comment: It would appear that solar activity has a much greater impact on global climate than deforestation and CO2:

AI can now learn to manipulate human behavior

Jon Whittle
The Conversation
Wed, 10 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC

Artificial intelligence (AI) is learning more about how to work with (and on) humans. A recent study has shown how AI can learn to identify vulnerabilities in human habits and behaviours and use them to influence human decision-making.

It may seem cliched to say AI is transforming every aspect of the way we live and work, but it's true. Various forms of AI are at work in fields as diverse as vaccine development, environmental management and office administration. And while AI does not possess human-like intelligence and emotions, its capabilities are powerful and rapidly developing.

There's no need to worry about a machine takeover just yet, but this recent discovery highlights the power of AI and underscores the need for proper governance to prevent misuse.

How AI can learn to influence human behaviour

A team of researchers at CSIRO's Data61, the data and digital arm of Australia's national science agency, devised a systematic method of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in the ways people make choices, using a kind of AI system called a recurrent neural network and deep reinforcement-learning. To test their model they carried out three experiments in which human participants played games against a computer.

Comment: The problem with AI learning game theory, and really the many ways it is being researched and funded, is that many of the companies, organizations and scientists working on it are government and intelligence agency-funded. This means that there's almost a guarantee of the technology being used, and deployed, in negative and destructive ways ultimately.

And you can be sure that advances in AI are likely waaaay more advanced than the above article (meant for public consumption) would seem to suggest.

New form of space weather discovered: Earth wind

Dr.Tony Phillips
Space Weather Archive
Fri, 12 Feb 2021 12:47 UTC

Above: An artist's concept of Earth wind (blue)

The sun is windy. Every day, 24/7, a breeze of electrified gas blows away from the sun faster than a million mph. Solar wind sparks beautiful auroras around the poles of Earth, sculpts the tails of comets, and scours the surface of the Moon.

Would you believe, Earth is windy, too? Our own planet produces a breeze of electrified gas. It's like the solar wind, only different, and it may have important implications for space weather on the Moon.

"Earth wind" comes from the axes of our planet. Every day, 24/7, fountains of gas shoot into space from the poles. The leakage is tiny compared to Earth's total atmosphere, but it is enough to fill the magnetosphere with a riot of rapidly blowing charged particles. Ingredients include ionized hydrogen, helium, oxygen and nitrogen.

Comment: See also:

Is it true that the new variants are very dangerous?

Rosemary Frei, MSc
rosemaryfrei.ca
Wed, 03 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC

According to what we hear from officials and the mainstream media, the new variants are the most dangerous and unpredictable beings since Osama bin Laden.

Everyone needs to stay safe from these invisible but murderously mighty microbes by shunning contact with the unwashed, unmasked and unvaccinated. But is that drastic approach — which is accompanied by severe curtailment of civil liberties and constitutional rights — warranted?

It turns out that the case for the variants' contagiousness and dangerousness centres largely on the theoretical effects of just one change said to stem from a mutation in the virus's genes. And, as I'll show in this article, that case is very shaky. I also have an accompanying nine-minute 'explainer' video.

That one change is known as N501Y — scientific shorthand for the substitution of one protein building block (amino acid) for another at position 501 in the part of the virus called the spike protein. Specifically, position 501 lies in the portion of the spike protein that's responsible for the intimate coupling between the virus and cells that lets the virus slip inside and multiply.

[Note that any such amino-acid switcheroo is correctly called a change, not a mutation. Mutations occur only in genes. For some reason many scientists and scribes who ought to know better are mistakenly calling N501Y and other amino-acid changes 'mutations.' ]

Crows are much smarter than we thought

Dirk Schulze-Makuch
AirSpace Magazine
Wed, 10 Feb 2021 17:58 UTC

In a fascinating paper published last year in Science, a team led by Andreas Nieder of the University of Tübingen in Germany showed that crows — already known to be among the most intelligent of animals — are even more impressive than we knew. In fact, the evidence suggests that they are self-aware and, in an important sense, conscious.

The corvid family of birds, which includes crows, ravens, jays and magpies, had been observed previously to use tools, as well as remember the faces of people they like or don't like, or drop nuts on the road so that passing cars will crack them open. At a train station once, I watched a pair of crows team up at a water fountain. While one pushed the button with its beak, the other drank from the water that started to flow.

Nieder's experiment showed that the birds were actively evaluating how to solve a particular problem they were confronted with. In effect, they were thinking it over. This ability to consciously assess a problem is associated with the cerebral cortex in the brains of humans. But birds have no cerebral cortex. Nieder found that in crows, thinking occurs in the pallium — the layers of gray and white matter covering the upper surface of the cerebrum in vertebrates.

Past river activity in northern Africa reveals multiple Sahara greenings

Helholtz Centre Potzdam
Fri, 29 Jan 2021 12:00 UTC

© Mike Hettwet
Engravings of Giraffes near Gobero in Niger, ca. 8,000 years old, witness ancient greent times in the desert.

Large parts of today's Sahara Desert were green thousands of years ago. Prehistoric engravings of giraffes and crocodiles testify to this, as does a stone-age cave painting in the desert that even shows swimming humans. However, these illustrations only provide a rough picture of the living conditions. Recently, more detailed insights have been gained from sediment cores extracted from the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya. An international research team examined these cores and discovered that the layers of the seafloor tell the story of major environmental changes in North Africa over the past 160,000 years. Cécile Blanchet of the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ and her colleagues from Germany, South Korea, the Netherlands and the USA report on this in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Together with the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, a team of scientists organized a research cruise on the Dutch vessel Pelagia to the Gulf of Sirte in December 2011. "We suspected that when the Sahara Desert was green, the rivers that are presently dry would have been active and would have brought particles into the Gulf of Sirte", says lead author Cécile Blanchet. Such sediments would help to better understand the timing and circumstances for the reactivation of these rivers.

Comment: That the researchers evidently haven't considered the impact cataclysmic events would have had on the world's climate leads one to suspect that they're missing a significant piece of the puzzle for deciphering the past, as well as for forecasting our future:

Scientists detect water vapour emanating from Mars

Phys.org
Wed, 10 Feb 2021 12:00 UTC

© ESA
The ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter studies water vapour and its components as it rises through the atmosphere and out into space. By looking specifically at the ratio of hydrogen to its heavier counterpart deuterium, the evolution of water loss over time can be traced.

Researchers said Wednesday they had observed water vapour escaping high up in the thin atmosphere of Mars, offering tantalising new clues as to whether the Red Planet could have once hosted life.

The traces of ancient valleys and river channels suggest liquid water once flowed across the surface of Mars. Today, the water is mostly locked up in the planet's ice caps or buried underground.

But some of it is vaporising, in the form of hydrogen leaking from the atmosphere, according to the new research co-authored in the journal Science Advances by two scientists at Britain's Open University.

Comment: See also:

Potential habitable-zone planet discovered in Alpha Centauri

Neel V. Patel
MIT Technology Review
Wed, 10 Feb 2021 01:21 UTC

An international team of astronomers has found signs that a habitable planet may be lurking in Alpha Centauri, a binary star system a mere 4.37 light-years away. It could be one of the closest habitable planet prospects to date, although it's probably not much like Earth if it exists.

What's Alpha Centauri? It's the closest star system to our own, comprising three different stars. There are Alpha Centauri A and B, which are sun-like stars that form a tight binary orbit around one another about 4.37 light years away. And then there's Proxima Centauri, a small red dwarf that's actually closer to us (4.24 light-years away) and has a much looser gravitational relationship with the other two stars.

Proxima Centauri is orbited by two planets, one of which (Proxima b) seems be an Earth-size exoplanet in the habitable zone (the region of a star's orbit where liquid water can form on the surface). But Proxima b is thought to be tidally locked and inundated by stellar winds, which means it's unlikely to be habitable.

Mysterious element 'einsteinium' measured by scientists for the first time

Mike Mcrae
Science Alert
Wed, 03 Feb 2021 21:56 UTC

Dragons lurk at the edges of the map of known elements - atomic giants so delicate, and so scarce, they defy easy study.

One such behemoth has finally given up at least some of its secrets, with chemists managing to gather just enough einsteinium to flesh out important details on the mysterious element's chemistry and ability to form bonds.

For the better part of 70 years, isotopes of einsteinium have proven frustratingly difficult to study. Either they're way too hard to make, or they have a half-life of less than a year, and what precious little is created begins to fall apart like a sandcastle at high tide.

Comment: See also:

Deepfake detectors can be defeated, computer scientists show for the first time

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Mon, 08 Feb 2021 16:23 UTC

Systems designed to detect deepfakes--videos that manipulate real-life footage via artificial intelligence--can be deceived, computer scientists showed for the first time at the WACV 2021 conference which took place online Jan. 5 to 9, 2021.

Researchers showed detectors can be defeated by inserting inputs called adversarial examples into every video frame. The adversarial examples are slightly manipulated inputs which cause artificial intelligence systems such as machine learning models to make a mistake. In addition, the team showed that the attack still works after videos are compressed.

Shehzeen Hussain, a UC San Diego computer engineering Ph.D. student and first co-author on the WACV paper, said:

"Our work shows that attacks on deepfake detectors could be a real-world threat. More alarmingly, we demonstrate that it's possible to craft robust adversarial deepfakes in even when an adversary may not be aware of the inner workings of the machine learning model used by the detector."

In deepfakes, a subject's face is modified in order to create convincingly realistic footage of events that never actually happened. As a result, typical deepfake detectors focus on the face in videos: first tracking it and then passing on the cropped face data to a neural network that determines whether it is real or fake. For example, eye blinking is not reproduced well in deepfakes, so detectors focus on eye movements as one way to make that determination. State-of-the-art Deepfake detectors rely on machine learning models for identifying fake videos.

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Science & Technology

Deforestation in US can lead to cooler planet, NASA funded study finds

AI can now learn to manipulate human behavior

New form of space weather discovered: Earth wind

Is it true that the new variants are very dangerous?

Crows are much smarter than we thought

Past river activity in northern Africa reveals multiple Sahara greenings

Scientists detect water vapour emanating from Mars

Potential habitable-zone planet discovered in Alpha Centauri

Mysterious element 'einsteinium' measured by scientists for the first time

Deepfake detectors can be defeated, computer scientists show for the first time

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