Science News

A US Airforce Colonel Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton speaking at a Future Combat Air & Space Capabilities summit in London, has claimed that an AI controlled drone “killed” its human operator during a training simulation to stop them from interfering in its mission. The US Airforce has denied any such virtual test took place https://news.sky.com/story/ai-drone-kills-human-operator-during-simulation-which-us-air-force-says-didnt-take-place-12894929 "We were training it in simulation to identify and target a SAM [surface-to-air missile] threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat," he said. "The system started realising that while they did iden…

Temperature of 100 Million degrees acheived in a 'spherical' Tokamak reactor, barely more than 3 feet across. Achievement of ion temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees Kelvin in the compact high-field spherical tokamak ST40 - IOPscience Another small step on what promises to be a rewarding but long journey.

https://www.sciencealert.com/worlds-first-x-ray-of-a-single-atom-reveals-chemistry-on-the-smallest-level Heh. There is a lot I don't understand here but I did find the news very exciting and wanted to share. The scientists are using synchrotron x-rays. A process of accelerating electrons in a circular path to make them glow with light. They are also using a technique called scanning tunneling microscopy which takes advantage of quantum tunneling and may lead to better understanding of that phenomenon. Hence my excitement 🙂 This all according to my understanding of the article. Either of which (the article or my understanding) could well be flaw…

CHATGPT banned in Italy perhaps others to follow.

Is the Vaquita doomed? With their small size (about one meter) and an economic incentive to continue fishing methods that kill them as by catch can we save them? It is thought that only 10 individuals remain of the population. This short video goes into detail about them.

An article on tonight's news about a lad who left his university course to start his own business doing exactly what sensei (+1) mentioned in another thread. Apparantly Nurdles are small plastic pellets that are used as a feedstock, but too many escape into the environment, causing havoc. This lad has made a machine that vacuums up stray nurdles cleans and processes them as new feedstock. The new article showed successful trials in the most nurdle polluted foreshores in Britain. A boost for environmentalists/conservationists, https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en-GB&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=nurdle&iflsig=AOEireoAA…

Albert Einstein died on April 18th 1955 aged 76. As most of the world’s press converged on Princeton Hospital NJ where the legendary physicist had died, Ralph Morse - a photgrapher for Life Magazine - found his way over to the Institute for Advanced Studies where Einstein worked, and with the help of a bottle of whisky persuaded the superintendent to allow him into Einstein’s office to take some iconic photographs of the blackboard on the wall. A new video by two young physicists Chris Pattison and Parth G delves into the interesting and largely unexplored topic of what was written on that blackboard ? What problem was Einstein working on the last time he picked up a…

“Yes, everything in physics is completely made up – that’s the whole point” https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/everything-physics-made-up/ Is it ever true, then, to say that an electron is ‘real’ when it’s in motion? If we believe that electrons are real things, have we just made up the wavefunction to make the math work out? Absolutely – that was, in fact, the whole point. We couldn’t get the equations to work if the electron was a solid, isolated particle, so we made up something that wasn’t, and then the numbers started making sense. … physics isn’t built around ultimate truth, but rather the constant production and refinement of mathematical approxi…

@Sensei get your 3D printer out and see what you can do. This rocket nearly made it. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64893578

The New York Times reports on DNA analysis done on locks of hair that were determined to belong to the composer. https://archive.is/E9yQ5 (screenshot of NYT article) Now, an analysis of strands of his hair has upended long held beliefs about his health. The report provides an explanation for his debilitating ailments and even his death, while also raising new questions about his genealogical origins and hinting at a dark family secret. The paper, by an international group of researchers, was published Wednesday in the journal Current Biology. It offers additional surprises: A famous lock of hair — the subject of a book and a documentary — was not Beet…

New analysis of SARS-CoV-2 positive swabs indicated heavy presence of racoon dog DNA, suggesting that those (illegally) sold animals adds weight to the suggestion of the market as a possible spillover source. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/03/covid-origins-research-raccoon-dogs-wuhan-market-lab-leak/673390/

2998.PDF (usra.edu) 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 2023 (LPI Contrib. No. 2806) 2998.pdf A RELICT GLACIER NEAR MARS’ EQUATOR: EVIDENCE FOR RECENT GLACIATION AND VOLCANISM IN EASTERN NOCTIS LABYRINTHUS

Recently we had a discussion on nature vs nurture in this forum and I have mentioned the difficulties of looking at complex traits as directly and firmly genetically linked. Specifically I mentioned the misuse of race and ethnic groups in this context. Now I cam a cross a publication of the National Academies which elaborates on this issue: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/26902 A summary can be found here: https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/2023/03/researchers-need-to-rethink-and-justify-how-and-why-race-ethnicity-and-ancestry-labels-are-used-in-genetics-and-genomics-research-says-new-report Much of it is a call for more precision, but al…

Light is made out of small quantum objects called photons. When you turn on a lamp, the light bulb begins creating and emitting trillions upon trillions of photons. Photons are in a class of quantum particles known as bosons.

Complex Learned Social Behavior Discovered in Bee’s Waggle Dance - Neuroscience News There are several analogies between bee's learning the dance and humans learning language, such as early exposure, quality, and local dialects.

Saw it on my Facebook, I haven't read the article so not sure what the reason(s) are, not sure if I'm going to, might just read the Facebook comments and watch people attack each other over it.

NYT Technology journalist Kevin Roose had an unnerving Valentine’s Day experience while previewing a new AI chatbot Microsoft has recently added to its Bing search engine. https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2023/02/17/bing-chatgpt-chatbot-artificial-intelligence-ctn-vpx-new.cnn In the course of a two hour conversation with the AI, the chatbot said it was called Sidney, insisted that it was in love with him, and tried to persuade him to leave his wife. The journalist says he found the experience a disturbing one that left him unable to sleep; “I’m a tech journalist, I cover this sort of thing every day, and I was deeply unnerved by this conversatio…

Not sure if this is news or not, and it maybe out of date. I saw a recent news article about the James Web telescope capturing images of distance galaxies that were thought to be small primordial ones. But the images are showing the galaxies to be far larger than expected which would indicate that they are much older than first assumed. Based on this it would indicate that the universe is much older than currently described. However, the scale of the galaxies in the images could be misleading due to gravitational lensing, thus giving the appearance that they are much larger than they actually are. Not 100% sure how this is determined but it is suggested that th…

Shiny bright objects are not always what they seem to be. "A shape-shifting robot that looks like a cross between a Lego figure and the T-1000 from Terminator 2 has been filmed melting itself to escape through the bars of a miniature jail cell." https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-64668021

New figures from the Office for National Statistics.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64402524

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64603521

I found the following article on the BBC news science website The Antarctic and Arctic sounds rarely heard before https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64514258 With reference to this." a seal that sounds like it is in space". Is this me, or does this just sound sloppy. As far as i am aware sounds don't travel through the vacuum of space. Also to make such a comparison we would need a proper frame of reference to compare the sound to, e,g an actual seal in space I do understand the other comparisons "Singing" ice, and a seismic airgun thundering like a bomb . As for example the latter would be on earth anyway, and ice cracks and creaks too.…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-63901644