Science & TechnologyS


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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Mars

Martian ground 'deforms' when Phobos eclipses the Sun - study

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Mon, 07 Sep 2020 12:00 UTC
Phobos
© (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)A transit of Phobos as seen by Curiosity in 2019.
The moons of Mars are not quite like our Earth's Moon. Phobos, the larger of the two, is much closer to its planet; compared to the Moon's 27-day orbit, Phobos swings around Mars in line with the planet's equator thrice every Martian day (sol).

Solar eclipses, therefore, are much more frequent than those here on Earth. Phobos passes in front of - but never entirely covers - the Sun for an annular or partial eclipse somewhere on Mars most sols. Because Phobos is moving so fast, it never transits for more than 30 seconds.

But, even during this brief time, the Mars InSight lander has recorded something peculiar happening.

To the surprise of Mars scientists, during Phobos eclipses, the lander's seismometer - the instrument that records ground motions to monitor possible quake activity - tilts, just an infinitesimal little bit, towards one side.

Comment: See also:

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Butterfly

Fossil upends "overly simplistic" theory of how sharks evolved, evolution of vertebrates now in question

Nicola Davis
The Guardian
Wed, 09 Sep 2020 20:57 UTC
shark
© Ullstein Bild/Getty ImagesGalapagos sharks off the coast of Hawaii. The skeletons of sharks are made from cartilage rather than bone, but new evidence suggests they may have bony ancestors.
The partial skull of an armoured fish that swam in the oceans over 400m years ago could turn the evolutionary history of sharks on its head, researchers have said.

Bony fish, such as salmon and tuna, as well as almost all terrestrial vertebrates, from birds to humans, have skeletons that end up made of bone. However, the skeletons of sharks are made from a softer material called cartilage - even in adults.

Researchers have long explained the difference by suggesting that the last common ancestor of all jawed vertebrates had an internal skeleton of cartilage, with bony skeletons emerging after sharks had already evolved. The development was thought so important that living vertebrates are divided into "bony vertebrates" and "cartilaginous vertebrates" as a result.


Comment: Biologists call to overhaul flawed taxonomic categories


Comment: Could it be that so many of the theories of how particular creatures evolved are being overturned because the mainstream theory of evolution is fundamentally flawed? And check out SOTT radio's:

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Info

Matter from light created in the LHC


Sci-Tech Daily
Sun, 06 Sep 2020 19:36 UTC
Matter from Light
© Sci-Tech Daily

Scientists on an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider see massive W particles emerging from collisions with electromagnetic fields. How can this happen?

The Large Hadron Collider plays with Albert Einstein's famous equation, E = mc², to transform matter into energy and then back into different forms of matter. But on rare occasions, it can skip the first step and collide pure energy — in the form of electromagnetic waves.

Last year, the ATLAS experiment at the LHC observed two photons, particles of light, ricocheting off one another and producing two new photons. This year, they've taken that research a step further and discovered photons merging and transforming into something even more interesting: W bosons, particles that carry the weak force, which governs nuclear decay.

This research doesn't just illustrate the central concept governing processes inside the LHC: that energy and matter are two sides of the same coin. It also confirms that at high enough energies, forces that seem separate in our everyday lives — electromagnetism and the weak force — are united.
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Info

New detections suggests Jupiter could have 600 moons

Govert Schilling
Sky & Telescope
Tue, 08 Sep 2020 16:20 UTC
New detections of candidate moons suggest that the king of planets could have hundreds of smaller satellites.
Jupiter's Moons
© Damian PeachGanymede and Europa, the largest and smallest of Jupiter's four Galilean moons, cast their shadows on Jupiter. The newly discovered detections reported here are evidence of much smaller moons in farther-out orbits.
Jupiter could have some 600 moons measuring at least 800 meters (2,600 feet) in diameter, according to a team of Canadian astronomers. They will present their findings on September 25th at the virtual Europlanet Science Congress 2020. Most of the moons are in wide, irregular, and retrograde orbits.

Over the past 20 years, astronomers have found dozens of small Jovian moons thanks to the advance of large digital cameras. Back in 2003, Scott Sheppard (Carnegie Institution of Science) already estimated that the number of irregular moons larger than a kilometer would probably be around one hundred.

Now, Edward Ashton, Matthew Beaudoin, and Brett Gladman (University of British Columbia, Vancouver) have detected about four dozen possible new Jovian moons that are even smaller. Extrapolating from the sky area they have searched (about one square degree), they conclude that there could be some 600 of these tiny objects orbiting the giant planet.

The team studied 60 archival 140-second exposures of a field close to Jupiter, all of them taken within a 3-hour period on September 8, 2010, with the 340-megapixel MegaPrime camera at the Canada-France-Hawai'i Telescope on Mauna Kea. The astronomers digitally combined the images in 126 different ways, one for every possible combination of speed and direction at which a potential Jovian moon might move across the sky.
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Nebula

NASA's Hubble captures stunning image of Veil Nebula supernova blast wave

Ryan Morrison
The Daily Mail
Wed, 02 Sep 2020 21:25 UTC
supernova cygnas hubble
© NASA/ESAAppearing like a light veil across the sky, it is actually the outer edge of a supernova remnant from an explosion that blasted apart a dying star up to 20,000 years ago
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captures a stunning image of powerful blast wave from a dying star 2,400 light-years from Earth

An image of a 'delicate supernova blast wave' seen draped across the sky 2,400 light years from Earth, has been captured by the NASA Hubble Space Telescope.

Appearing like a light veil across the sky, it is actually the outer edge of a supernova remnant from an explosion that blasted apart a dying star up to 20,000 years ago.

The European Space Agency (ESA), a partner in the Hubble telescope, said the exploding star would have been about 20 times more massive than our Sun.
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