The Guardian Weekly (November 3, 2023) – The new issue features Bletchley Park, the main center of allied second world war codebreakers,and it’s no coincidence that the English country house was chosen as the venue for this week’s landmark summit on safety in artificial intelligence. The age of AI brings opportunities but also significant risks, as a number of experts in the field outlined in an open letter last week.
Global technology editor Dan Milmo discusses the pros and cons with one of the technology’s leading thinkers, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, who says the rise of AI must be thought of as seriously as the climate crisis. Then, Observer columnist Sonia Sodha argues that calling for AI to be reined in is not simply a sign of luddism.
Science Magazine – October 27, 2023: The new issue features The Hypothalamus – Coordinating basic survival functions; High hopes for low-growing corn plants; A quantum process in a laser microchip….
If you pause for a second and think about the activities that occupy most of your day, presumably sleeping, eating, and engaging in social interactions are among the first that come to your mind. Perhaps surprisingly, a small area buried deep inside the brain, called the hypothalamus, is responsible for coordinating neuronal signals related to these activities. By controlling the homeostasis of the neuroendocrine, limbic, and autonomic nervous systems, the hypothalamus is a key brain region for many physiological and pathological processes. Despite its small size, the hypothalamus has a complex cellular organization and circuitry that determine its structural and functional organization. It is composed of 11 nuclei grouped by their location and has vast, mostly bidirectional connections with many neuronal and endocrine systems.
Plants bred or engineered to be short can stand up better to windstorms. They could also boost yields and benefit the environment
To an interstate traveler—or anyone lost in a corn maze—the most impressive feature of corn is its stature. Modern corn can grow twice as tall as a person, but height has drawbacks, making the plants vulnerable to wind and more difficult for farmers to tend. Plant scientists think corn can be improved by making it shorter, and leading seed companies are doing that through both conventional breeding and genetic engineering. Bayer has launched a short variety in Mexico, another company is selling its versions in the United States, and more are getting involved.
The Economist Magazine (October 28, 2023):The latest issue features America’s Test – How will it manage the Israel-Hamas war?; Argentina’s troubling election result; Should governments be ‘policing’ AI? and the ‘Art Rivalry’ between Paris and London….
Nothing in world politics is inevitable. The underlying elements of national power, such as demography, geography, and natural resources, matter, but history shows that these are not enough to determine which countries will shape the future. It is the strategic decisions countries make that matter most—how they organize themselves internally, what they invest in, whom they choose to align with and who wants to align with them, which wars they fight, which they deter, and which they avoid.
The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own. Not since the Korean War has the United States had to contend with powerful military rivals in both Europe and Asia. And no one alive can remember a time when an adversary had as much economic, scientific, technological, and military power as China does today.
nature Magazine – October 26, 2023:The latest issue cover features a map of Mexico based on data that reflect the nation’s genetic diversity, the initial results of the Mexican Biobank project.
MIT Technology Review – November/December 2023: The Hard Problems issue features the Intractable problem of plastics; Fixing the internet; Exploring what it would it take for AI to become conscious. Also, there are so many urgent issues facing the world—where do we begin? Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jennifer Doudna, and others offer their ideas.
Plastic is cheap to make and shockingly profitable. It’s everywhere. And we’re all paying the price.
Plastic, and the profusion of waste it creates, can hide in plain sight, a ubiquitous part of our lives we rarely question. But a closer examination of the situation can be shocking.
Indeed, the scale of the problem is hard to internalize. To date, humans have created around 11 billion metric tons of plastic. This amount surpasses the biomass of all animals, both terrestrial and marine, according to a 2020 study published in Nature.
Currently, about 430 million tons of plastic is produced yearly, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)—significantly more than the weight of all human beings combined. One-third of this total takes the form of single-use plastics, which humans interact with for seconds or minutes before discarding.
Philosophers, cognitive scientists, and engineers are grappling with what it would take for AI to become conscious.
David Chalmers was not expecting the invitation he received in September of last year. As a leading authority on consciousness, Chalmers regularly circles the world delivering talks at universities and academic meetings to rapt audiences of philosophers—the sort of people who might spend hours debating whether the world outside their own heads is real and then go blithely about the rest of their day. This latest request, though, came from a surprising source: the organizers of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), a yearly gathering of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence.
0:15 AI can predict your risk of Parkinson’s – RETFound was trained using 1.6 million retinal images which gave it a picture of a healthy retina. Then its creators added images of eyes from people with certain conditions. Our eyes are a window to our health. They’re the only place where doctors can directly observe capillaries, our smallest blood vessels, enabling detection of cardiovascular illnesses such as hypertension. Eyes are also linked to the central nervous system, giving an insight into neural tissue, too. The RETFound tool was best at picking up eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy. On Parkinson’s, stroke and heart disease, it performed not quite as well but still beat other AI models.
2:08These are the most detailed heat maps of our planet – They use imagery from a satellite called HotSat-1 which can detect heat and cold at a resolution of 3.5 metres. The satellite can precisely map the fronts of forest fires, detect and monitor heat islands in cities and measure the thermal efficiency of buildings. This information can drive more effective decision-making.
3:51AI designed this robot in 26 seconds – Researchers from Northwestern University gave an AI a simple prompt. ‘Design a robot that can walk across a flat surface’. By the 9th iteration, the AI had successfully met its brief. The robot could walk half its own body length per second. The entire iteration process took just 26 seconds and it ran on a laptop.
6:26 Norway completed it’s largest rewilding project – It’s centred around Sveagruva, a 100-year-old mining town on the Arctic island of Svalbard. Norway decided to close the town and its mining operations in 2017 and return the area to its natural state, restoring biodiversity and the local ecosystem.
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In August, the Sun rose behind the Extremely Large Telescope, under construction in Chile.
Past the halfway point, Extremely Large Telescope prepares to receive first mirrors
A web of steel girders is rising from the flattened summit of Cerro Armazones, 3000 meters above sea level in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The dome it will support will be vast—with a footprint as big as a soccer field and almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty— and unexpectedly nimble: It will smoothly rotate on rails as a giant telescope inside tracks stars through the night.
The Economist Magazine (October 21, 2023):The latest issue features ‘Where will this end?’ – Only America can pull the Middle East back from the brink; Are American CEO’s overpaid?; The holes in export controls; Argentina’s radical option, and more….
nature Magazine – October 19, 2023: The latest issue features how humans develop in the very early stages when a newly formed embryo is implanted in the wall of the uterus, largely because of the physical and ethical challenges that are presented by studying early human embryos.
The test 30 years ago of what remote sensing could tell us about our own planet shows the value of looking with unbiased eyes at what we think we already know.
Boomers Daily 