Welcome to Sott.net
Fri, 15 Oct 2021
The World for People who Think

Science & Technology
Map

Robot

Stephen Hawking: AI will become a new life form and replace humans


RT
Fri, 03 Nov 2017 15:21 UTC
artificial intelligence
© Colin Anderson / Getty Images
One day robots could entirely edge out human beings and become a new life form that is even capable of replicating itself, Stephen Hawking has warned, once again predicting a rather grim future for humankind.

"I fear that AI may replace humans altogether," the renowned physicist told Wired magazine, as cited by the Cambridge News. "If people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that improves and replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that outperforms humans," Hawking added.

However, humanity itself has already reached "the point of no return"and may destroy itself first, the 75-year-old academic predicts. "Our earth is becoming too small for us, global population is increasing at an alarming rate and we are in danger of self-destructing."

Comment: See also:

      Read More...
Meteor

Research suggests rare metal found in meteors can be used to kill cancer cells


RT
Fri, 03 Nov 2017 12:11 UTC
Diagram showing iridium attacking a cancer cell by making it produce singlet oxygen
© University of Warwick
Diagram showing iridium attacking a cancer cell by making it produce singlet oxygen
Cancer cells can be destroyed using the same metal from the asteroid believed to have caused the dinosaurs' extinction.

Research by the University of Warwick in the UK and Sun Yat-Sen University in China found the dense metal, iridium, can be used to kill cancer cells by directly targeting them and filling them with a deadly 'version' of oxygen.

A rare metal that is found in meteoroids, iridium has been discovered in large amounts within the Earth's crust from 66 million years ago, prompting the theory that it came from the asteroid that caused the extinction of dinosaurs.
      Read More...
Info

Latest research concludes that animals make rational decisions

Jeannie Kever
University of Houston
Wed, 01 Nov 2017 18:09 UTC
Buckner with Raven
© University of Houston
Cameron Buckner, assistant professor of philosophy at UH, says empirical evidence suggests a variety of animal species are able to make rational decisions, despite the lack of a human-like language.
Previous research has shown that animals can remember specific events, use tools and solve problems. But exactly what that means - whether they are making rational decisions or simply reacting to their environment through mindless reflex - remains a matter of scientific dispute.

Cameron Buckner, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, argues in an article published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research that a wide range of animal species exhibit so-called "executive control" when it comes to making decisions, consciously considering their goals and ways to satisfy those goals before acting.

He acknowledges that language is required for some sophisticated forms of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. But bolstered by a review of previously published research, Buckner concludes that a wide variety of animals - elephants, chimpanzees, ravens and lions, among others - engage in rational decision-making.
      Read More...
X

More ideological censorship: Education NGO retracts essay citing intelligence research - because it was "wrong"

Andy Ngo
Quillette
Tue, 31 Oct 2017 17:47 UTC
london
A British education training nonprofit is being accused of censorship after it retracted an opinion essay challenging environmental determinism from its website.

The essay, titled "Are there any limits to what schools can achieve?" was published on the website of Teach First last Thursday to foster more dialogue following an education summit in Wembley a day earlier. The essay's author and summit panelist, Toby Young, says he was blindsided at the sudden retraction two days after its publication.

"The first I knew about it [the article's retraction] was when I heard about it on Twitter," said Mr. Young, director of the New Schools Network, a charter school advocacy charity based in London. "As it was, I found myself on a Saturday morning having to defend myself from an organisation I have always supported and which I had always thought of as on the same side as me in the education reform movement."

Mr. Young's opinion piece summarized some of the scientific literature on intelligence to cast doubt on the belief that environments alone can determine pupils' educational achievement. It was published alongside a rebuttal essay by Sonia Blandford, founder and C.E.O. of education charity, Achievement for All.

On Oct. 28, both essays were retracted by Teach First. "We made a mistake," the charity announced on Twitter. "We published two blogs with opposing views as part of a recent debate on education. One was wrong. We've removed it. Sorry."
      Read More...
Mars

Hot, rocky exoplanets are the scorched cores of former gas giants

Lisa Grossman
Science News
Mon, 02 Oct 2017 12:32 UTC
planet star
© Hubble, ESA and M. Kornmesser
The planets are nestled close to their stars, where stellar winds may have blown ancient atmospheres away By 1:58pm, October 31, 2017

Earth may not provide the best blueprint for how rocky planets are born.

An analysis of planets outside the solar system suggests that most hot, rocky exoplanets started out more like gassy Neptunes. Such planets are rocky now because their stars blew their thick atmospheres away, leaving nothing but an inhospitable core, researchers report in a paper posted online October 15 at arXiv.org. That could mean these planets are not as representative of Earth as scientists thought, and using them to estimate the frequency of potentially life-hosting worlds is misleading.

"One of the big discoveries is that Earth-sized, likely rocky planets are incredibly common, at least on hotter orbits," says planetary scientist Eric Lopez of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who wasn't involved in the study. "The big question is, are those hot exoplanets telling us anything about the frequency of Earthlike planets? This suggests that they might not be."
      Read More...
Comet 2

Scientists: 'Chicxulub impact event produced huge sulfur cloud that plunged world into ice age'

Laurel Hamers
Science News
Thu, 02 Nov 2017 12:12 UTC
asteroid impact

When a massive meteorite slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, it vaporized rocks, sending up enough climate-changing gases to spark mass extinction, say scientists
New, more precise calculations help re-create how the collision affected Earth's climate

The asteroid collision that may have doomed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago really stank. A new analysis of gases released from vaporized rocks at the impact site in modern-day Mexico suggests that the smashup released up to three times more smelly, climate-cooling sulfur than previously believed.

The Chicxulub impact spewed about 325 billion tons of sulfur and 425 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air, researchers report October 31 in Geophysical Research Letters.

This relatively modest release of CO₂ might have contributed to long-term planetary warming. But the massive cloud of sulfurous gas would have more immediately blocked out the sun, the researchers suggest, plunging the planet into a dark Narnia-style winter that was colder and longer than previously thought. That could help explain why so many of Earth's plants and animals went extinct around this time, even those living nowhere near the impact crater (SN: 2/4/17, p. 16).
      Read More...
Clipboard

'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

Paul Lewis
The Guardian
Fri, 06 Oct 2017 15:17 UTC
Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks alarmed by a race for human attention
smartphone zombies

Electrophonic cocaine junkies
Justin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop's operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn't enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of social media and other addictive technologies.

Rosenstein purchased a new iPhone and instructed his assistant to set up a parental-control feature to prevent him from downloading any apps.

He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook "likes", which he describes as "bright dings of pseudo-pleasure" that can be as hollow as they are seductive. And Rosenstein should know: he was the Facebook engineer who created the "like" button in the first place.

A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an "awesome" button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called "attention economy": an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.

Comment: See also: Facebook abusing monopoly of power for profit and working with US Deep State to censor news

      Read More...
Comet 2

Newly discovered Comet Heinze (C/2017 T1) to zip past Earth in January

Bob King
Sky and Telescope
Wed, 01 Nov 2017 17:32 UTC
Just discovered, Comet Heinze (C/2017 T) will zoom by Earth in January and may just show up in your binoculars.

Comet Heinze (C/2017 T1)
© Mike Olason
Comet Heinze (C/2017 T1) was only a tiny, 17th-magnitude patch of fuzz with a short, fan-shaped tail on October 22nd.
Ah, 2017. A year busy with binocular-bright comets has been on the quiet side lately. But the recent discovery of Comet Heinze (C/2017 T1) by the University of Hawaiʻi's Ari Heinze gives comet watchers hope for a bright and fuzzy start to the new year.

Heinze searches for near-Earth asteroids with the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) project, and came across the comet in images taken on October 2nd. The survey uses two telescopes, one at Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaiʻi Island, and a second on the summit of Haleakala on Maui, about 100 miles to the northwest. Among other benefits, two widely-spaced "eyes" allow for distance determination using parallax, which also helps in calculating a new object's orbit.
      Read More...
Cassiopaea

Thunderbolts Project: Big science and the impossibility of gravitational waves (VIDEO)

Wal Thornhill
Thunderbolts Project
Wed, 01 Nov 2017 17:10 UTC
Gravitational waves
© PBS
In Part 1 of this presentation, physicist Wal Thornhill began his analysis of the recent award of the Nobel Prize in Physics to scientists for their contributions to the so-called detection of gravitational waves. While science media has shown exactly zero skepticism of the gravitational waves pronouncements, Thornhill discussed some of the foundational mathematical problems that preclude the claimed detection of "two black holes colliding a billion years ago, and producing ripples in the fabric of space-time."

Today, in Part 2, Thornhill explores another fundamental cosmological question, and that is the existence of the required medium for the communication of waves in a vacuum - a medium called the aether.

Comment: See also:

      Read More...
Bulb

New research looks into the body instead of the brain for Alzheimer's treatment


RT
Wed, 01 Nov 2017 16:53 UTC
lab mice
© The University of British Columbia ubc.ca
New research suggests that the key to combatting Alzheimer's may be to catch one of its toxic proteins where it originates in our bodies before it reaches and destroys our brains.

The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ on which to operate for surgeons. However, the international team of researchers from the University of British Columbia in Canada, along with colleagues in China's Third Military Medical University in Chongqing, believes that future therapies for Alzheimer's, a major precursor to dementia, may instead target other organs such as the liver or kidneys to provide a more effective treatment.
      Read More...
Amazon Smile
Revolt! T-shirts