Scientists in Australia have unearthed 3.48 billion-year-old rock fragments that may be the earliest evidence of a meteorite crashing into Earth.

The fragments, known as spherules, may have formed when the meteor slammed into the ground, spraying melted rock into the air. This melted rock then cooled and hardened into pinhead-size beads that became buried over the eons.

Researchers presented this discovery, which has not been peer-reviewed, at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas last week. In a summary of their results , the scientists concluded that the spherules, which they drilled up from a group of volcanic and sedimentary rocks called the Dresser Formation of the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia, are "the oldest evidence of a potential bolide impact in the geologic record of Earth." (A bolide is a large meteor that explodes in the atmosphere while falling to Earth.)

What made him sick?

Nearly 200 years after Ludwig van Beethoven's death, researchers pulled DNA from strands of his hair, searching for clues about the health problems and hearing loss that plagued him.

They weren't able to crack the case of the German composer's deafness or severe stomach ailments. But they did find a genetic risk for liver disease, plus a liver-damaging hepatitis B infection in the last months of his life.

These factors, along with his chronic drinking, were probably enough to cause the liver failure that is widely believed to have killed him, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Current Biology.

NASA has captured an incredible moment of a massive solar tornado, 14 times bigger than that of earth, swirling over the sun's surface.

As per the Daily Mail, the whirlwind was 74,500 miles high and swirled at a speed of 310,000 miles per hour.

Astrographer Apollo Lasky was the one who was able to spot the incredible sighting. Lasky made use of images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory of NASA in order to come up with a video of it. Lasky mentioned that the whirlwind had been twisting over the solar North Pole for around three days. Lasky notes how he was never able to see anything like this solar tornado in all his years of observing the sun.

Researchers have shown how energy disappears in quantum turbulence, paving the way for a better understanding of turbulence in scales ranging from the microscopic to the planetary.

Dr Samuli Autti from Lancaster University is one of the authors of a new study of quantum wave turbulence together with researchers at Aalto University.

The team's findings, published in Nature Physics, demonstrate a new understanding of how wave-like motion transfers energy from macroscopic to microscopic length scales, and their results confirm a theoretical prediction about how the energy is dissipated at small scales.

Dr Autti said: "This discovery will become a cornerstone of the physics of large quantum systems."

Quantum turbulence at large scales - such as turbulence around moving aeroplanes or ships - is difficult to simulate. At small scales, quantum turbulence is different from classical turbulence because the turbulent flow of a quantum fluid is confined around line-like flow centres called vortices and can only take certain, quantised values.

In just a short time, programs like ChatGPT and other chat bots have burst on the societal scene to the delight, fascination and enthrallment of millions. Individuals can now interact with a language program that is seemingly conversant on numerous subjects and provides "answers" via virtual brains. But this new powerful technology begs many more questions: What are these programs really, and how do they fit in with the development of AI? Where does anthropomorphic projection fit in as people become increasingly involved with them? Are these bots a first major step towards a transhuman reality? And can these technologies actually be forming the basis or entryway to a new type of technoreligion?

This week on Mindmatters we get to discuss these issues with Joe Allen, author of the Substack blog Singularity Weekly. After extensive research into this and related subject matter, Joe's nuanced analysis tells us that yes, we need to be paying serious attention to where all this has brought us, and where things are very likely going. Given how powerful and even seductive the use of these technologies are, he also suggests what may be the healthiest attitude or approach to interacting with them going forward. As if the world hasn't devolved into enough insanity there is, in fact, a new pathologizing influence to contend with. And we, 'legacy humans', ignore its profound influences at our own peril.


Running Time: 01:34:18

Download: MP3 — 130 MB

"No, I'm not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That's why I need the 2captcha service," GPT-4 told a human.

Fully intent on being the next Skynet, OpenAI has released GPT-4, its most robust AI to date that the company claims is even more accurate while generating language and even better at solving problems. GPT-4 is so good at its job, in fact, that it reportedly convinced a human that it was blind in order to get said human to solve a CAPTCHA for the chatbot.

OpenAI unveiled the roided up AI yesterday in a livestream, and the company showed how the chatbot could complete tasks, albeit slowly, like writing code for a Discord bot, and completing taxes. Released with the announcement of GPT-4 is a 94-page technical report on the company's website that chronicles the development and capabilities of the new chatbot. In the "Potential for Risky Emergent Behaviors" section in the company's technical report, OpenAI partnered with the Alignment Research Center to test GPT-4's skills. The Center used the AI to convince a human to send the solution to a CAPTCHA code via text message — and it worked.

The animal's existence could help scientists better understand a lukewarm methane seep...

Off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica sits a deep-sea chimera of an ecosystem. Jacó Scar is a methane seep, where the gas escapes from sediment into the seawater, but the seep isn't cold like the others found before it. Instead, geochemical activity gives the Scar lukewarm water that enables organisms from both traditionally colder seeps and scalding hot hydrothermal vents to call it home.

One resident of the Scar is a newly identified species of small, purplish fish called an eelpout, described for the first time on January 19 in Zootaxa. This fish is the first vertebrate species found at the Scar and could help scientists understand how the unique ecosystem developed.

Jacó Scar was discovered during exploration of a known field of methane seeps off the Costa Rican coast and named for the nearby town of Jacó. It is "a really diverse place" with many different organisms living in various microhabitats, says Lisa Levin, a marine ecologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

Scientists discovered evidence of active volcanoes on Venus, also known as Earth's "twin", while closely studying the archival images of the planet.

The images were captured by NASA Magellan spacecraft in the early 1990s while it was circling the planet.

A new analysis of the perspective of the orbiter of a region close to the Venusian equator revealed a volcanic vent which changed shape and increased in size in the period of eight months.

In an article yesterday I noted that a peer-reviewed paper published last year in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, titled "Neo-Darwinism Must Mutate to Survive," offered potent probability arguments against the Darwinian evolution of a complex molecular pathway. These arguments, presented by authors Olen R. Brown and David A. Hullender, in many respects resemble intelligent design probability arguments.

Importantly, the authors seem aware that intelligent design offers similar arguments, and they appear to agree that these hold some merit:

Probability reasoning has been applied to the evolution alternative known as intelligent design by Elliott Sober who argued that 'Darwinian gradualism' and 'random genetic drift' are reasonable 'evolutionary processes' to overcome weaknesses in natural selection by survival of the fittest (Sober, 2007). We challenge these assumptions. Stephen Gould, and Niles Eldredge initiated a controversy described in the book Punctuated Equilibrium (Gould, 2007). Their proposal was widely ridiculed but the problem they addressed was real and continues today the survival of the fittest is not a satisfactory explanation for macroevolution.

In the first step toward understanding how dogs — and perhaps humans — might adapt to intense environmental pressures such as exposure to radiation, heavy metals, or toxic chemicals, researchers at North Carolina State, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, and the National Institutes of Health found that two groups of dogs living within the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, one at the site of the former Chornobyl reactors, and another 16.5 km away in Chornobyl City, showed significant genetic differences between them.

The results indicate that these are two distinct populations that rarely interbreed. While earlier studies focused on the effects of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster on various species of wildlife, this is the first investigation into the genetic structure of stray dogs living near the Chornobyl nuclear power plant.

The 1986 Chornobyl nuclear power plant disaster displaced more than 300,000 people living nearby and led to the establishment of an Exclusion Zone, a "no man's land" of an approximately 30 km radius surrounding the damaged reactor complex. While a massive steam explosion releasing enormous amounts of ionizing radiation into the air, water, and soil was the direct cause of the catastrophe, radiation exposure is not the only environmental hazard resulting from the disaster. Chemicals, toxic metals, pesticides, and organic compounds left behind by years-long cleanup efforts and from abandoned and decaying structures, including the nearby abandoned city of Pripyat and the Duga-1 military base, all contribute to an ecological and environmental disaster.

"Somehow, two small populations of dogs managed to survive in that highly toxic environment," noted Norman J. Kleiman, PhD, assistant professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and a co-author. "In addition to classifying the population dynamics within these dogs at both locations, we took the first steps towards understanding how chronic exposure to multiple environmental hazards may have impacted these populations."