Science & TechnologyS


Biohazard

Genetically-modified mosquito apocalypse plan backfires spectacularly in Brazil


RT
Tue, 17 Sep 2019 09:53 UTC
mosquito
© Pexels
An experimental trial to reduce the mosquito population in Brazil through the deliberate release of 450,000 genetically modified mosquitoes has failed miserably and may have even created a genetic hybrid super species.

British biotech company Oxitec conducted a 27-month long experiment in 2013 Jacobina, Brazil, aimed at reducing the local mosquito population by 90 percent while preserving the genetic integrity of the local insect population.

The overall goal was to curb the spread of mosquito-borne diseases, such as yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, and Zika, by releasing half a million OX513A mosquitoes. The insects are a genetically-modified version of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which combined a breed from Mexico with a breed from Cuba.

Comment: See also:

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Clock

Physics explains why time passes faster as we age

Ephrat Livni
Quartz
Tue, 08 Jan 2019 00:00 UTC
watch face
© Reuters/Sergei KarpukhinMind cannot be measured on a watch.
Mind time and clock time are two totally different things. They flow at varying rates.

The chronological passage of the hours, days, and years on clocks and calendars is a steady, measurable phenomenon. Yet our perception of time shifts constantly, depending on the activities we're engaged in, our age, and even how much rest we get. An upcoming paper in the journal European Review by Duke University mechanical engineering professor Adrian Bejan, explains the physics behind changing senses of time and reveals why the years seem to fly by the older we get.

Bejan is obsessed with flow and, basically, believes physics principles can explain everything. He has written extensively about how the principles of flow in physics dictate and explain the movement of abstract concepts, like economics. Last year, he won the Franklin Institute's Benjamin Franklin Medal for "his pioneering interdisciplinary contributions...and for constructal theory, which predicts natural design and its evolution in engineering, scientific, and social systems."

In his latest paper, he examines the mechanics of the human mind and how these relate to our understanding of time, providing a physical explanation for our changing mental perception as we age.
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HAL9000

'Unpredictable and dangerous': US Navy says it's trying to avoid 'Terminator' scenario as experts warn of AI battlefield technology development

Elias Marat
The Mind Unleashed
Mon, 16 Sep 2019 18:49 UTC
The Terminator
According to a U.S. Navy official, the nightmare scenario of wars entrusted to machines could become a reality.

It's long been an image restricted to popular culture: unstoppable robot killers firing their high-powered rifles at clusters of helpless human soldiers with no choice but to flee the battlefield or risk sustaining tremendous losses.

The scenario of military robots and the artificial intelligence (AI) network "Skynet" spinning free from human control forms the basis of the Terminator series starring Arnold Schwarzenegger that has captivated moviegoers around the world. But now, according to a U.S. Navy official, the science fiction nightmare of wars entrusted to machines that "can't be reasoned with [and] doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear," — as one character in the original film says — could become a reality.


Comment: And if all that isn't bad enough: US military experts say that 'America needs' AI to control its nuclear missiles

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Bulb

'I'm with stupid': Another philosopher comes out against Darwin

J. Budziszewski
Underground Thomist
Mon, 09 Sep 2019 16:02 UTC
i'm with stupid t-shirt
I am not one of those (actually there are very few) who believe that natural selection does not explain anything. Yet the godlike properties attributed to this mechanism are more than a little bit difficult to credit.

Geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously wrote, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." Did you get that? Nothing.

Yet after urging that "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved," molecular biologist and Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick remarked, "It might be thought, therefore, that evolutionary arguments would play a large role in guiding biological research, but that is far from the case. It is difficult enough to study what is happening now."

The contradiction between these two scientists is rather odd. If it is enough to study living things without paying attention to natural selection, as Crick thought, then why did Dobzhansky say that natural selection is the one and only key to the study of living things?

I wonder whether part of the explanation might lie in the fact that Dobzhansky was writing not in a journal for biologists, but in a journal for K through 12 biology instructors, American Biology Teacher.

Comment: It's good to see some honesty about the lying that necessarily accompanies Darwinism. The theory is so stupid that the only way to defend it is through lies - whether to others or to oneself. See also:

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Galaxy

Study findings: Our universe may be 2B years younger

Seth Borenstein
AP
Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:00 UTC
Galaxies in space
© NASA, ESA, R. Ellis (Caltech), HUDF 2012 Team via APThis image made available by the European Space agency shows galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2012, an improved version of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image. A study from the Max Planck Institute in Germany published Thursday, Sept. 12, 2019, in the journal Science uses a new technique to come up with a rate that the universe is expanding that is nearly 18% higher than the number scientists had been using since the year 2000.
The universe is looking younger every day, it seems.

New calculations suggest the universe could be a couple billion years younger than scientists now estimate, and even younger than suggested by two other calculations published this year that trimmed hundreds of millions of years from the age of the cosmos.

The huge swings in scientists' estimates — even this new calculation could be off by billions of years — reflect different approaches to the tricky problem of figuring the universe's real age. "We have large uncertainty for how the stars are moving in the galaxy," said Inh Jee, of the Max Plank Institute in Germany, lead author of the study in Thursday's journal Science .

Scientists estimate the age of the universe by using the movement of stars to measure how fast it is expanding. If the universe is expanding faster, that means it got to its current size more quickly, and therefore must be relatively younger.

The expansion rate, called the Hubble constant, is one of the most important numbers in cosmology. A larger Hubble Constant makes for a faster moving — and younger — universe.

The generally accepted age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, based on a Hubble Constant of 70. Jee's team came up with a Hubble Constant of 82.4, which would put the age of the universe at around 11.4 billion years.
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Bug

Hypersexual zombie cicadas infected with psychoactive fungus discovered

charles the moderator
Watts Up With That
Sun, 15 Sep 2019 11:40 UTC
Psychscape
© Terri Loewenthal The artist“Psychscape 493 (Lassen, CA), 2017,” “Psychscape 06 (Gold Lake, CA), 2017,” and “Psychscape 75 (White Rock Canyon, AZ), 2018,”
If cicadas made horror movies, they'd probably study the actions of their counterparts plagued by a certain psychedelic fungus.

West Virginia University researchers have discovered that a cicada fungus called Massopora contains chemicals similar to those found in hallucinogenic mushrooms.

The fungus causes cicadas to lose their limbs and eccentric behavior sets in: Males try to mate with everything they encounter, although the fungus has consumed their genitals and butts.

Despite the horrid physical state of infected cicadas, they continue to roam around freely as if nothing's wrong, dousing other cicadas with a dose of their disease.

Comment: The rise in unusual communicable infections, diseases and fungi of all kinds appear to be on the rise, both in humans and in the animal kingdom:

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Info

A new understanding of disease - the 'pathobiome'


University of Exeter
Thu, 12 Sep 2019 02:16 UTC
Pathogens
© Massage Magazine
Cefas and University of Exeter scientists have presented a novel concept describing the complex microbial interactions that lead to disease in plants, animals and humans.

Microbial organisms and viruses cause many diseases of plants and animals.

They can also help protect from disease, for example the complex communities of microbes in the human gut, which are very important for our health.

However, very little is known about these microbes and how they cause and prevent disease.

The pathobiome concept opens a door on this unexplored world of microbial diversity and how it controls all other organisms on the planet.

It will change the way we approach health and disease control in animals, plants and humans.

Traditional approaches to describe infectious disease in plants, animals and in humans are based on the concept that single pathogens are responsible for the signs or symptoms of disease observed in those hosts.

The pathobiome concept explains that in reality, disease occurrence is much more complex.

Today sees the publication of a paper exploring the pathobiome concept, a novel way of seeking to understand diseases of plants and animals, including humans.
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Info

MIT engineers have developed the 'blackest black' material to date

Jennifer Chu
MIT News
Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:00 UTC
Diamond/Blacked out
© R. Capanna, A. Berlato, A. PinatoA 16.78-carat natural yellow diamond from LJ West Diamonds (left), is coated with a new carbon nanotube-based material that is the blackest material on record (the covered diamond, shown at right). The diamond is the subject of The Redemption of Vanity, a work of art created by MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology artist-in-residence Diemut Strebe, in collaboration with MIT engineer Brian Wardle and his lab, on view at the New York Stock Exchange.
With apologies to "Spinal Tap," it appears that black can, indeed, get more black.

MIT engineers report today that they have cooked up a material that is 10 times blacker than anything that has previously been reported. The material is made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, or CNTs — microscopic filaments of carbon, like a fuzzy forest of tiny trees, that the team grew on a surface of chlorine-etched aluminum foil. The foil captures at least 99.995 percent* of any incoming light, making it the blackest material on record.

The researchers have published their findings today in the journal ACS-Applied Materials and Interfaces. They are also showcasing the cloak-like material as part of a new exhibit today at the New York Stock Exchange, titled "The Redemption of Vanity."
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Biohazard

Failed GM mosquito control experiment may have strengthened wild bugs

Michael Irving
New Atlas
Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:01 UTC
mosquito
© Deposit PhotosA trial to control mosquito populations using genetic engineering has gone wrong.
Mosquitoes are more than just a pest - they can be downright dangerous carriers of disease. One of the most innovative ideas to control populations of the bugs has been to release genetically modified male mosquitoes that produce unviable offspring. But unfortunately a test of this in Brazil appears to have failed, with genes from the mutant mosquitoes now mixing with the native population.

The idea sounded solid. Male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were genetically engineered to have a dominant lethal gene. When they mated with wild female mozzies, this gene would drastically cut down the number of offspring they produced, and the few that were born should be too weak to survive long.

Ultimately, this program should cut down the population of mosquitoes in an area - up to 85 percent, in some early tests. This of course means fewer bug-borne diseases, such as dengue, yellow fever, zika, and malaria, in humans. And since the offspring don't live long enough to breed themselves, genes from the engineered bugs should stay neatly out of the gene pool of the wild population. The only visible effect should be the reduction of mosquito populations.

Comment: Yet another example that the biotechnology 'experts' really have no idea what they're doing, and we're all paying the price for their hubris.

See also:

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Comet 2

'Behaving like a comet': Astronomers discover enormous exoplanet with wild, slingshot-like orbit


RT
Sun, 01 Sep 2019 21:53 UTC
Exoplanet HR 5183-b
Exoplanet HR 5183-b's eccentric orbit has astronomers scratching their heads
Astronomers have discovered a gigantic exoplanet with a truly bizarre and extreme orbit that flings it around its star like a slingshot.

Exoplanet HR 5183-b doesn't have the usual circular orbit that most planets have. Instead, the planet, which has three times the mass of Jupiter, has a long, oval orbit and slingshots around in a manner that is more like a comet, exciting new research from Caltech astronomers has found.

"This planet is unlike the planets in our Solar System, but more than that, it is unlike any other exoplanets we have discovered so far," said study lead author Sarah Blunt.

Comment: Not only that, it means the planets in our solar system may not always have had their current, stable orbits.

They don't realize it but these astronomers have found supporting evidence for Velikovsky's theory that Venus was once a comet on an eccentric orbit around our Sun.

The inverse to their above scenario is also possible: HR 5183-b may be acting like a comet... because it is (or was) a comet, has been 'captured' by that solar system, and will likely make future dangerously close encounters with other planets in that system, the result of which could be to move it into a more stable, circular orbit.

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