
Laser technology called lidar is helping archaeologists complete years of fieldwork sometimes in the span of a single afternoon
Archaeology is facing a time crunch. Thousands of years of human history risk imminent erasure, from tiny hamlets to entire cities – temples, walls and roads under grave threat of destruction. Urban sprawl and industrial agriculture are but two culprits, smothering ancient settlements beneath car parks and cattle pastures. International conflict and climate change are also damaging vulnerable sites, with warfare and water shortages destroying pockets of history across the world.
The endless excavations of yesteryear are no longer the best solution. Big digs aren’t the big idea they once were: mapping the human archaeological record is now moving upward, into the sky.
Continue reading…

TODAY




Nature Communications, Published online: 24 February 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36811-7
The authors introduce and demonstrate cross-comb spectroscopy in the mid-infrared as a variant of dual-comb spectroscopy. It provides enhanced performance and allows mid-infrared spectral information to be obtained by near-infrared detection.
Nature Communications, Published online: 24 February 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36610-0
Temperature shapes the adaptation and composition of microbiomes, but whether their enzymes drive the thermal response remains unknown. Using an analysis of seven enzyme classes from worldwide marine microbiome data, this study shows that enzyme thermal properties explain microbial thermal plasticity and they are both finely tuned by the thermal variability of the environment.
Are you a doctor who has written multiple articles saying “now is the time to stop living in fear?” Did you say cautious people were not “truly not actually living right now“, months before anyone had been vaccinated? Are you engulfed with white hot rage by the handful of people who still wear masks in crowds? Have you relentlessly mocked them on […]
The post Do You Have Coronaphobiaphobia? Ask Your Doctor if Notmybizumab is Right for You. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
A grim anniversary of war in Ukraine, icicles in Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, livestreamers on a bridge in China, cherry blossoms in Japan, deadly mudslides in Brazil, a Carnival parade in Bolivia, another earthquake in Turkey, flooding in South Africa, and much more
- In 2021, I accepted the position as the Founding Executive Board Director of the International Orthodontics Foundation [ www.iofglobal.org ] – one of the largest non-profit orthodontic foundations globally.




So I’ve seen a lot of posts regarding back to office. This is probably “no shit Sherlock” but here’s my experience.
Pre-Covid working in the Technology industry I enabled (before the business) my team to work from home 2-3 days a week for a solid 2 years or so. During this time it then slipped into (as I trusted the process more and more) 3-4 days a week.
We killed it, seriously. We were so engaged, happy, working extensive hours, collaborating, and even doing things like playing games during break times or post work. Worth mentioned we are also split across 3 states. (Won’t give away the country, let’s just say it’s Kangaroo Land)
Then covid hit – we went full time for 2 years.
Now post Covid – the business said they’re “welcoming us back” for “3 days a week” because “together we collaborate and blah blah blah.”
We rolled our eyes.
Over the last 6 months we have challenged management, and no one can ever provide a reason “why” to return that isn’t business fluff and buzz words.
Nothing.
I even asked where is the measurable benefit and outcomes from being together for 3 days a week and I’m only told it’s just the belief of our CEO and that’s that.
Then, one manager I’m close with slipped with me.
He said that our government, the treasury, has been and did engage with our company and other major companies to get people back to get the economy going.
I then said to my manager this is the case and he denied. I then said isn’t it odd that every other CEO has this same “belief” even world wide where its 3 days. He didn’t like that comment.
We as the lower end of the work force, the grunts, the ants, will continue to keep the rich rich and ensure we are spending on useless shit like travel to keep our wages low enough to be too scared to move or protest.
We will continue to give in and even when proven that at home has better people and financial results, be screwed by the government and big corps.
Give it 6-12 months and we will be in for 4-5 days to return everyone top end douche bag back to their lovely million dollar holidays.
People say to stop winging about going back in and how entitled you are – it’s not about going in, it’s about being controlled every Fucken moment of your life to keep every other fucker well fed.
That’s my rant. That’s my belief in what’s happening, and again maybe it’s obvious.
Oh and 4 days a week that’s sparking up, yeah right.
TLDR: Keep the poor poor and the rich rich, fat cats need us to spend and in the office we do.
[link] [comments]

Nature Communications, Published online: 24 February 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36756-x
Detoxification enzymes are crucial for the survival of animals in new environments. Here, the authors study the molecular mechanism behind the catalytic diversification of a major family of tetrapod detoxification enzymes—the FMOs—during evolution.
Nature Communications, Published online: 24 February 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36657-z
Learning analytical models from noisy data remains challenging and depends essentially on the noise level. The authors analyze the transition of the model-learning problem from a low-noise phase to a phase where noise is too high for the underlying model to be learned by any method, and estimate upper bounds for the transition noise.
If I can answer my own questions instantaneously without any external output required, what would happen to schools?
How do you see things changing when that happens?
[link] [comments]
Second question: Where can I subscribe or what person can I follow online so I'm among the first to hear about innovations and things such as ChatGPT?
[link] [comments]



The war in Ukraine is the final shovel of dirt on the grave of any optimism about the world order that was born with the fall of Soviet Communism. Now we are faced with the long grind of defeating Moscow’s armies and eventually rebuilding a better world.
Before we turn to Ukraine, here are a few of today’s stories from The Atlantic.
- The puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are
- When a Christian revival goes viral
- The invisible victims of American anti-Semitism
Today I Grieve
Today marks a year since Russian President Vladimir Putin embarked on his mad quest to capture Ukraine and conjure into existence some sort of mutant Soviet-Christian-Slavic empire in Europe. On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century.
The first half of my life was dominated by the Cold War. I grew up next to a nuclear bomber base in Massachusetts. I studied Russian and Soviet affairs in college and graduate school. I first visited the Soviet Union when I was 22. I was 28 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. I turned 31 a few weeks before the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time.
When I visited Moscow on that initial trip in 1983, I sat on a curb on a summer night in Red Square, staring at the Soviet stars on top of the Kremlin. I had the sensation of being in the belly of the beast, right next to the beating heart of the enemy. I knew that hundreds of American nuclear warheads were aimed where I was sitting, and I was convinced that everything I knew was more than likely destined to end in flames. Peace seemed impossible; war felt imminent.
And then, within a few years, it was over. If you did not live through this time, it is difficult to explain the amazement and sense of optimism that came with the raspad, as Russians call the Soviet collapse, especially if you had spent any time in the former U.S.S.R. I have some fond memories of my trips to the pre-collapse Soviet Union (I made four from 1983 to 1991). It was a weird and fascinating place. But it was also every inch the “evil empire” that President Ronald Reagan described, a place of fear and daily low-grade paranoia where any form of social attachment, whether religion or simple hobbies, was discouraged if it fell outside the control of the party-state.
Perhaps one story can explain the disorienting sense of wonder I felt in those days after the Soviet collapse.
If you visited the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, Western music was forbidden. Soviet kids would trade almost anything they had to get their hands on rock records. I could play a little guitar in those days, and I and other Americans would catch Soviet acquaintances up on whatever was big in the U.S. at the time. But once the wine and vodka bottles were empty and the playing was over, the music was gone.
Fast-forward to the early 1990s. I was in a Russian gift shop, and as I browsed, the store piped in the song “Hero” by the late David Crosby. I was absentmindedly singing along, and I looked up to see the store clerk, a Russian woman perhaps a few years younger than me, also singing along. She smiled and nodded. I smiled back. “Great song,” I said to her in Russian. “One of my favorites,” she answered.
This might seem like a small thing, even trivial. But it would have been nearly unthinkable five or six years earlier. And at such moments in my later travels in Russia—including in 2004, when I walked into a Moscow courtroom to adopt my daughter—I thought: No one would willingly go backward. No one would choose to return to the hell they just escaped.
In fact, I was more concerned about places such as Ukraine. Russia, although a mess, had at least inherited the infrastructure of the Soviet government, but the new republics were starting from scratch, and, like Russia, they were still hip-deep in corrupt Soviet elites who were looking for new jobs. Nonetheless, the idea that anyone in Moscow would be stupid or deranged enough to want to reassemble the Soviet Union seemed to me a laughable fantasy. Even Putin himself—at least in public—often dismissed the idea.
I was wrong. I underestimated the power of Soviet imperial nostalgia. And so today, I grieve.
I grieve for the innocent people of Ukraine, for the dead and for the survivors, for the mutilated men and women, for the orphans and the kidnapped children. I grieve for the elderly who have had to live through the brutality of the Nazis and the Soviets and, now, the Russians. I grieve for a nation whose history will be forever changed by Putin’s crimes against humanity.
And yes, I grieve, too, for the Russians. I care not one bit for Putin or his criminal accomplices, who might never face justice in this world but who I am certain will one day stand before an inescapable and far more terrifying seat of judgment. But I grieve for the young men who have been used as “cannon meat,” for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.
Finally, I grieve for the end of a world I knew for most of my adult life. I have lived through two eras, one an age of undeclared war between two ideological foes that threatened instant destruction, the next a time of increasing freedom and global integration. This second world was full of chaos, but it was also grounded in hope. The Soviet collapse did not mean the end of war or of dictatorships, but after 1991, time seemed to be on the side of peace and democracy, if only we could summon the will and find the leadership to build on our heroic triumphs over Nazism and Communism.
Now I live in a new era, one in which the world order created in 1945 is collapsing. The United Nations, as I once wrote, is a squalid and dysfunctional organization, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity. It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state, and so today the front line of freedom is in Ukraine. But democracy is under attack everywhere, including here in the United States, and so I will celebrate the courage of Ukraine, the wisdom of NATO, and the steadfastness of the world’s democracies. But I also hear the quiet rustling of a shroud that is settling over the dreams—and perhaps, illusions—of a better world that for a moment seemed only inches from our grasp.
I do not know how this third era of my life will end, or if I will be alive to see it end. All I know is that I feel now as I did that night in Red Square, when I knew that democracy was in the fight of its life, that we might be facing a catastrophe, and that we must never waver.
Related:
Today’s News
- The prominent South Carolina former lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who is being tried for the murders of his wife and son, testified in court; he has pleaded not guilty on both charges.
- The musician R. Kelly was sentenced to 20 years in prison after his conviction last year on charges of child pornography and enticement of a minor. Kelly is already serving a different 30-year prison term for a 2021 conviction.
- Authorities said that a man in Orange County, Florida, shot and killed a fellow passenger in the car he was riding in, and then returned to the same neighborhood to shoot four more people, including a journalist who was covering the original shooting.
Dispatches
- Unsettled Territory: Reading banned books and studying verboten topics are ways to defeat the forces of exclusion, Imani Perry writes.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read

The Secret Ingredient That Could Save Fake Meat
By Yasmin Tayag
Last month, at a dining table in a sunny New York City hotel suite, I found myself thrown completely off guard by a strip of fake bacon. I was there to taste a new kind of plant-based meat, which, like most Americans, I’ve tried before but never truly craved in the way that I’ve craved real meat. But even before I tried the bacon, or even saw it, I could tell it was different. The aroma of salt, smoke, and sizzling fat rising from the nearby kitchen seemed unmistakably real. The crispy bacon strips looked the part too—tiger-striped with golden fat and presented on a miniature BLT. Then crunch gave way to satisfying chew, followed by a burst of hickory and the incomparable juiciness of animal fat.
I knew it wasn’t real bacon, but for a moment, it fooled me. The bacon was indeed made from plants, just like the burger patties you can buy from companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. But it had been mixed with real pork fat. Well, kind of. What marbled the meat had not come from a butchered pig but a living hog whose fat cells had been sampled and grown in a vat.
More From The Atlantic
- Happiness is a warm coffee.
- Never mind Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “national divorce.”
- Why this Democratic strategist walked away
Culture Break

Read. “The Body’s River,” a new poem by Jan Beatty.
“When my mother left me in the orphanage, / I invented love with strangers. / And if it wasn’t there, I made it be there.”
Watch. Revisit Titanic. Twenty-five years later, it feels different.
P.S.
Today I’ll leave aside any recommendations for something to do over the weekend. Instead, I hope we Americans can all take a moment to reflect with gratitude on the fact that we are citizens of a great and good democracy, and that we are fortunate to be far from the horror of a battle that rages on even as we go about our lives here in safety every day.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.


YESTERDAY



Doom Brick
YouTuber and Weta Workshop graphics engineer James Brown has turned a tiny Lego brick into a device that can play the 1993 hit video game "Doom."
It's an impressive escalation — and miniaturization — longstanding trend: we've already seen "Doom" being played on a candy bar, a John Deer tractor — and even within "Doom" itself.
Tilt to Win
The controls of Brown's "Doom" Lego brick are more intuitive than you might think. The engineer added a small accelerometer to his minuscule computer system, allowing him to move around inside the game by simply tilting it.
"I hooked up the accelerometer, so Doom is now 'playable' entirely on the brick," Brown told Hackster. "The capacitive touch wasn't tuned very well, so it's a bit shooty."
Neatly tucked inside, the tiny brick features an even tinier microcontroller, a Raspberry Pi RP2040, and a barely visible 0.42-inch OLED single-color panel.
Brown even managed to squeeze touch-sensitive buttons and a battery pack into the brick.
The tinkerer also managed to stuff all of these components into a simple ring earlier this year, just in time for Valentine's Day.
It's a playful demonstration of just how tiny and accessible off-the-shelf computer components have become — but at the same time, most gamers probably wouldn't want to spend hours staring at a half-an-inch across screen.
READ MORE: Your Lego Minifigures Can Play Doom by Moving This Motion-Sensing Lego Computer Brick Around [Gizmodo]
More on Doom: Rejoice, Gamers! You Can Now Run DOOM Inside DOOM
The post Rejoice! You Can Finally Play Doom on a Lego Brick appeared first on Futurism.

Ballooning Budget
Remember those "unidentified flying objects" the military recently shot down? The government is now admitting that it spent millions of taxpayer dollars getting them out of the sky — even though they were, per the intelligence community's assessment, probably just balloons.
Government officials told the Wall Street Journal that there was a $1.5 million price tag for the four AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles the Pentagon authorized to shoot down the three objects, which President Joe Biden admitted last week may have been easy to identify after all.
"The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research," Biden said of the headline-grabbing unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).
Cost Correction
The WSJ notes that the $1.5 million figure only covers the cost of the missiles themselves, which run about $400,000 apiece, and not the costs for the American and Canadian military and civilian personnel used to investigate the debris from the objects in Alaska, Luke Huron, and Canada's Yukon territory (one of the missiles missed, requiring the use of a fourth.)
The officials who spoke with the newspaper on condition of anonymity said the total price for downing those three not-UFOs will likely be hundreds of thousands of dollars more thanks to those investigative efforts.
That figure notably also excludes the amount of money it cost the American taxpayer to down to the suspected Chinese "spy balloon," which was shot down by an F-22 Raptor fighter jet.
While we obviously don't want there to be random unidentified things floating above America — or Canada, we guess? — these outrageous price tags beg an obvious question: is this what our ever-growing defense budget is used for?
More on actual UFOs: The Pentagon Just Quietly Released a Report About Hundreds of New UFO Sightings
The post The Military Spent $1.5 Million Shooting Down Those Three Unidentified Objects appeared first on Futurism.






Pretty early into Cocaine Bear’s running time, I started searching desperately for the metaphor. Elizabeth Banks’s action-comedy-horror is, as you might have heard, about a black bear in 1980s Georgia who eats a lot of cocaine that fell out of an airplane. The cocaine makes her angry and hungry for more cocaine, and given that she’s already a big bear with sharp claws, the combination is quite distressing for the people in the forest around her. But is there something deeper going on here? I wondered as the bear mauled yet another victim on-screen. Perhaps a critique of selfish 1980s individualism: No amount of money or expensive products can protect you from a coked-up bear! Or maybe it’s a statement about the dangers of our modern world encroaching on nature?
No. Hard as I tried, I could not settle on a deeper thesis for Cocaine Bear. It is 95 minutes of Hollywood storytelling about what would happen if a bear did drugs. I’m probably the fool for trying to summon some profundity from these bloodstained reels; Banks has promised her viewers no more than a cocaine bear, and a cocaine bear is what they get, all growly and crazed and rendered with very expensive-looking CGI. This project does not skimp on its main attraction, but it does seem unsure of what to put around it, throwing a variety of hapless characters in the mix and arming them mostly with indifferent comedy in the face of some truly gnarly violence.
If blockbuster-level gore is what you’re after, Cocaine Bear delivers—I was impressed with how gleefully gross Banks gets at times, dropping severed limbs from the sky and strewing plenty of intestines on the ground. And though the personality of the titular bear mostly manifests as annoyed grunting and mighty roars, she’s a solid visual-effects creation, glaring at every human with the beady-eyed intensity of someone looking for her next fix.
The true story of the cocaine bear is relatively mundane—after drug smugglers dropped their latest shipment from Colombia in the woods, a dead black bear was found with some 75 pounds of cocaine in its system, and was eventually stuffed and mounted. What that poor creature did before keeling over is a mystery, but Jimmy Warden’s script imagines a bacchanal of carnage around that event, retaining only the location (a national park in Georgia) and the name of the drug runner who caused the incident, Andrew C. Thornton (played briefly but with plenty of, uh, entrepreneurial energy by Matthew Rhys). Everything else is pure fiction.
The film’s ensemble is quite large and impressive. A dozen or so (mostly unwitting) characters come across the ursine terror in the woods. There’s the drug lord Syd Dentwood (the late, great Ray Liotta), who bids his bedraggled son, Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), and underling Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to recover his lost product. Two plucky 12-year-olds (Christian Convery and Brooklynn Prince) skip school to go hiking and get tangled up in the chaos, as do their worried mom (Keri Russell), a salty park ranger (Margo Martindale), a self-satisfied environmentalist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), and a dogged detective (Isaiah Whitlock Jr.).
This Robert Altman–esque assemblage of talent largely goes to waste, because pretty much everyone is required to act out the same basic sequence of events. It goes like this: Character peers over the horizon, spots a furry beast approaching, and realizes something’s amiss. Wait, is that a bear? Is something up with the bear? Wait, is that cocaine on the bear’s nose? Wait, is that bear about to eat us? Repeat ad nauseam, with slight variations in dialogue but the same ensuing cacophony of screams and flying viscera. Banks changes up the action as she can, and a particularly energetic ambulance chase crunches people’s bones in unexpected ways. As one of the 12-year-olds yells quite concisely, “It’s fucked!”
Cocaine Bear could’ve been a triumph if the jokes landed, but the zingers just aren’t up to the mayhem. And though the character actors are all capable of sterling work, there’s nobody to root for here; Ehrenreich comes the closest, giving his coke-hunting dirtbag character just enough humanity that you aren’t instantly hoping for his limbs to be torn off. But the main event is the cocaine bear, and the meager humans only distract from her might.

Nature, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00549-5
‘Impressive’ fossil analysis reveals why some dinosaurs were massive but their cousins were tiny.
Nature, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00530-2
Data show most countries won’t meet this Sustainable Development Goal by 2030.



Safety Thirst
Residents of East Palestine, Ohio, have been justifiably concerned over their health and safety after the derailment of a Norfolk Southern train that spilled loads of deadly chemicals into the environment.
After a brief cleanup, the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as the state government and other agencies, have insisted that the air quality and drinking water is safe, despite reports of thousands of dead fish, dying animals, and illnesses in humans.
And now, to prove their point and supposed good faith, Ohio governor Mike DeWine and EPA administrator Michael Regan have visited a resident's home to personally drink her tap water — but something seems a little off about this photo op.
"Would someone want to drink the water?" the homeowner asks, and the officials all volunteer.
"We believe in science, so we don't feel like we're being your guinea pig, but we don't mind proving to you that we believe the water is safe," Regan assured.
After a toast, the two officials, along with congressman Bill Johnson, have a drink — or so it seems.
Although it's hard to tell given the video quality, it appears that both DeWine (front left) and Regan (back center) either barely or don't actually drink the water at all. At best, the Republican governor and the EPA chief chance a cowardly sip or two and nothing more; they certainly don't decisively quaff the whole cups. It's possible they drank more off camera, but we're only privy to what we can see in the footage.
Followup Needed
Asked about the sipping allegations, a spokesperson for DeWine replied "You’re joking, right?" Regan didn't respond to a request for comment.
Regardless, official and unofficial reuploads of the photo op have been relentlessly mocked online. On a Reddit thread, one popular comment lambasted the charade as "Oscar material," with many other users demanding the officials drink the entire glass.
"Chug it or we vote for the person that does," wrote another.
While the Ohio EPA (not the federal) has conducted testing that found the municipal drinking water to be safe, its veracity has been called into question because the water sampling was conducted by a firm contracted by Norfolk Southern.
Independent experts have decried the sampling methods as "sloppy" and "extremely concerning," and called for further testing before the water can be declared safe.
It's worth noting, though, that the Columbiana County Health District has separately sampled over 50 private wells so far, and says it's turned up nothing concerning.
But to further add to the general suspicion, governor DeWine received a $10,000 donation from Norfolk Southern just a month before the derailment, according to an investigation by the Columbus-based news station WYSX.
Regardless if the tests are bogus are not, many residents continue to feel unsafe — and it will take some more convincing leadership before they can be comfortable again in their own homes.
After the publication of this blog, DeWine's spokesperson sent this additional statement:
The Governor visited multiple houses with Congressman Johnson and EPA Administrator Regan that day. He drank tap water at each of them, as did the Congressman and the Administrator. The video clearly shows this.
I have watched the video you reference. Your analysis of water levels in the glass and goblet is off — way off.
Multiple water tests have confirmed no traces of any chemical concern levels. This includes tests independent of Norfolk Southern. The physical location of the municipal wells — far away geologically from the derailment and contamination site — made it highly unlikely, if not impossible, for chemicals to have travelled to the water supply. Multiple tests have confirmed this.
If any citizens have concerns about drinking water from the municipal system, bottled water is available if they wish to use that out of an abundance of caution. However, the Governor is firmly in the camp that the science has proven the village water is safe to drink.
For the sake of the citizens of East Palestine, I suggest you stop sipping the conspiratorial Kool-Aid.
More on the train derailment: There's a Super Bizarre Coincidence Surrounding the Ohio Train Disaster
The post Wait, Did Officials Just Pretend to Drink the Tap Water in East Palestine? appeared first on Futurism.

The Biden administration is eyeing a 70 percent cut in the cost of floating offshore wind power by 2035



And if so, how can we fight back?
Some issues I see:
Congestion, Resources on buildings and commuting
Negative impact on family life.
I believe strongly in working towards a (when possible) remote workforce who works 32 or less hours per week. Technology should imrove our lives.
This is the world's largest emoyer going back on their word (for all hires in the last 2 years, many of whom bought houses or moved) AND setting a terrible precedence for the rest of the corporate world to follow.
Boycott? Write letters to…? Thoughts?
[link] [comments]
Are there any exciting studies or something? I need some motivation to keep living lol.
[link] [comments]








Scientists have released one of the most precise measurements ever made of how matter is distributed across the universe today.
When the universe began, matter was flung outward and gradually formed the planets, stars, and galaxies that we know and love today. By carefully assembling a map of that matter, scientists can try to understand the forces that shaped the evolution of the universe.
Among other findings, the analysis indicates that matter is not as “clumpy” as we would expect based on our current best model of the universe, which adds to a body of evidence that there may be something missing from our existing standard model of the universe.
After the Big Bang created all the matter in the universe in a very hot, intense few moments about 13 billion years ago, this matter has been spreading outward, cooling and clumping as it goes. Scientists are very interested in tracing the path of this matter; by seeing where all the matter ended up, they can try to recreate what happened and what forces would have had to have been in play.
The first step is collecting enormous amounts of data with telescopes.
In this study, scientists combined data from two very different telescope surveys: The Dark Energy Survey, which surveyed the sky over six years from a mountaintop in Chile, and the South Pole Telescope, which looks for the faint traces of radiation that are still traveling across the sky from the first few moments of the universe.
Combining two different methods of looking at the sky reduces the chance that an error in one of the forms of measurement throws off the results.
“It functions like a cross-check, so it becomes a much more robust measurement than if you just used one or the other,” says University of Chicago astrophysicist Chihway Chang, one of the lead authors of the studies.
In both cases, the analysis looked at a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. As light travels across the universe, it can be slightly bent as it passes objects with lots of gravity, like galaxies.
This method catches both regular matter and dark matter—the mysterious form of matter that we have only detected due to its effects on regular matter—because both regular and dark matter exert gravity.
By rigorously analyzing these two sets of data, the scientists could infer where all the matter ended up in the universe. It is more precise than previous measurements—that is, it narrows down the possibilities for where this matter wound up—compared to previous analyses, the authors say.
The majority of the results fit perfectly with the currently accepted best theory of the universe.
But there are also signs of a crack—one that has been suggested in the past by other analyses, too.
“It seems like there are slightly less fluctuations in the current universe than we would predict assuming our standard cosmological model anchored to the early universe,” says analysis coauthor and University of Hawaii astrophysicist Eric Baxter.
That is, if you make a model incorporating all the currently accepted physical laws, then take the readings from the beginning of the universe and extrapolate it forward through time, the results look slightly different from what we actually measure around us today.
Specifically, today’s readings find the universe is less “clumpy”—clustering in certain areas rather than evenly spread out—than the model would predict.
If other studies continue to find the same results, the scientists say, it may mean there is something missing from our existing model of the universe, but the results are not yet to the statistical level that scientists consider to be ironclad. That will take further study.
However, the analysis is a landmark as it yielded useful information from two very different telescope surveys. This is a much-anticipated strategy for the future of astrophysics, as more large telescopes come online in the next decades, but few had actually been carried out yet.
“I think this exercise showed both the challenges and benefits of doing these kinds of analyses,” Chang says. “There’s a lot of new things you can do when you combine these different angles of looking at the universe.”
The studies can be found in three papers in the journal Physical Review D (one, two, three).
The South Pole Telescope is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy and is operated by a collaboration led by the University of Chicago. The Dark Energy Survey was an international collaboration coordinated through Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and funded by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and many institutions around the world.
Source: University of Chicago
The post New map covers all the matter in the universe appeared first on Futurity.

Political scientists have answers for you about military developments in the war in Ukraine, the efficacy of sanctions, and how to end the war.
A year ago, on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, marking a major escalation in a long-smoldering armed conflict that began in 2014 with Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In the past year, several hundred thousand soldiers have been killed on both sides, and the conflict has created Europe’s largest refugee crisis since the Second World War.
On February 21, 2023, President Joe Biden marked the anniversary with a surprise visit to Ukraine. Hein Goemans, a professor of political science at the University of Rochester and the director of the Peter D. Watson Center for Conflict and Cooperation, called the visit “a loud and clear signal to [Russian president Vladimir] Putin, and to the rest of the West, that the US is in it for the long haul.”
So, what is happening in Ukraine now? And when will the war end? Not soon, according to Goemans, an expert on how international conflicts begin and end.
“If Putin left the stage, things could change quickly,” he says. “But we’re still in the informational stage of war, both sides are still trying new strategies.” For peace negotiations to start, “both sides must know, more or less, how the war would end for them.” And that could take from a year to a decade, he adds.
Randall Stone, a political science professor and the director of the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies, predicts the war will last at least another year.
Putin “is committed to continuing the fighting because ending the war without a victory is riskier to him politically than continuing,” says Stone. “He calculates that Russia’s immense resources will grind down Ukrainian resistance eventually, and presumably continues to hope that NATO will eventually tire of the conflict and pressure Ukraine to make concessions.”
The post War in Ukraine could last at least another year appeared first on Futurity.





Scientists are working on growing a glove made out of synthetic human skin in a lab — something that could revolutionize the field of skin grafts.
In early tests, researchers at the Columbia University Medical Center implanted lab-grown skin onto irregularly-shaped mice limbs — and with astonishing results, according to a recent interview with Wired.
Known as "skin constructs," these synthetic sheets of human cells are implanted on wounds that are too big for a traditional skin graft.
In the 40-odd years this procedure has existed, there hasn't been much in the way of progress for producing patches of fake skin that can be grafted onto parts of the body that aren't, well, flat.
In many cases, irregularly shaped wounds — or wounds on parts of the body that aren't flat like faces or fingers — require more patches of skin construct and often result in longer, more complex surgeries.
Now, a team of biomedical engineers at Columbia have created what they're calling "edgeless" or seamless patches to fit the body part they're made for.
And according to Alberto Pappalardo, a Columbia postdoctoral dermatologist who worked on the study, which was recently published in the journal Science Advances, early tests involving mice have been a resounding success.
"It was a perfect fit," Pappalardo said of the tiny pant leg-esque tissue that was slipped onto a mouse's hindlimb, which later integrated well into the animal's own skin.
The secret to the study's success lies, it seems, in one of its lead researcher's laser focus on geometry.
Hasan Erbil Abaci, a bioengineering expert who serves as Pappalardo's adviser at Columbia, told Wired that in order to create skin constructs that are close to the real thing, one must recreate the geometry of the appendage or body part that's wounded — a potentially huge upgrade over current skin constructs.
After doing a number of experiments in 3D printing small, synthetic tissues, the Columbia team made a breakthrough when they grew skin in a cylindrical shape.
"We thought, if we can make a cylinder, we can make any shape," Abaci told Wired.
While we're still many years away from clinical trials involving human subjects — the study's researchers told Wired that they're optimistic about the future.
For now, Abaci and his team are working on building enough skin to cover an adult male hand and are using small biopsies from a human subject's cells to do so. The goal is to create a piece of real or synthetic tissue that could be slipped on like a glove.
"You would only have to apply bandages around the wrist area," Abaci said, "and that would be the surgery."
More on weird skin: Scientists Found a Dinosaur's Face, Complete With Its Skin
The post Scientists Growing Skin That Can Be Slipped on Like a Glove appeared first on Futurism.

Leaked Design?
may have just accidentally leaked what its upcoming $25,000 car will look like.
In a new corporate video, the automaker showed off early sketches for a number of electric car designs that may — or may not — hint at the design of the company's upcoming budget hatchback, Electrek reports.
The low-tier option was first announced by CEO Elon Musk back in 2020.
"Tesla will make a compelling $25,000 electric vehicle that is also fully autonomous," he said during the company's Battery Day event in 2020. The next year, Musk promised that commercial production of the car would kick off in 2023.
As with everything to do with Musk and his EV company, we have to take that type of claim with a huge grain of salt.
The company has blown through countless of Musk's overly ambitious timelines in the past, so it wouldn't be a surprise if customers will have to wait several more years before they see a new design.
Tesla Hatchback
However, as Electrek points out, Tesla already started taking design submissions for a smaller car that would be built in China, releasing an early drawing of a sleek, wedge-shaped hatchback at the time.
Now, the company has released a new corporate video celebrating its new engineering headquarters in California. Eleven minutes and 38 seconds into the video, a table covered in sketches is easily visible.
As Electrek speculates, a white hatchback design, with a sloping, aerodynamic roofline and a much shorter wheelbase than Tesla's other vehicles just might be a glimpse of the future.
Keep Dreaming
To be clear, that's just a theory. Early sketches buried in a corporate video are far from a guarantee that Tesla is actually working on a cheaper hatchback, let alone what it will end up looking like. Another galaxy-brain possibility: Tesla might have included the sketch in the video as a very soft launch of the concept.
And that's not to mention the company's struggles to keep its prices low. In 2023, a $25,000 price point is a seriously aggressive target for Tesla, considering its current cheapest offering is the Model 3, which starts at well over $40,000.
But if the company does pull off a much smaller hatchback in the future, it could end up being a huge hit for Tesla — particularly in China, where smaller vehicles are the norm.
READ MORE: Did Tesla just leak the design of its new electric compact car? [Electrek]
More on Tesla: Tesla Cofounder Rails Against Elon Musk's "Crap" Autopilot Feature
The post Did Tesla Just Accidentally Leak What Its $25,000 Car Will Look Like? appeared first on Futurism.
For the past few weeks, my daily existence has been scored by the melodies of late winter: the drip of melting ice, the soft rustling of freshly sprouted leaves—and, of course, the nonstop racket of sneezes and coughs.
The lobby of my apartment building is alive with the sounds of sniffles and throats being cleared. Every time I walk down the street, I’m treated to the sight of watery eyes and red noses. Even my work Slack is rife with illness emoji, and the telltale pings of miserable colleagues asking each other why they feel like absolute garbage. “It’s not COVID,” they say. “I tested, like, a million times.” Something else, they insist, is making them feel like a stuffed and cooked goose.
That something else might be the once-overlooked common cold. After three years of largely being punted out of the limelight, a glut of airway pathogens—among them, adenovirus, RSV, metapneumovirus, parainfluenza, common-cold coronaviruses, and rhinoviruses galore—are awfully common again. And they’re really laying some people out. The good news is that there’s no evidence that colds are actually, objectively worse now than they were before the pandemic started. The less-good news is that after years of respite from a bunch of viral nuisances, a lot of us have forgotten that colds can be a real drag.
[Read: The pandemic broke the flu … again]
Once upon a time—before 2020, to be precise—most of us were very, very used to colds. Every year, adults, on average, catch two to three of the more than 200 viral strains that are known to cause the illnesses; young kids may contract half a dozen or more as they toddle in and out of the germ incubators that we call “day cares” and “schools.” The sicknesses are especially common during the winter months, when many viruses thrive amid cooler temps, and people tend to flock indoors to exchange gifts and breath. When the pandemic began, masks and distancing drove several of those microbes into hiding—but as mitigations have eased in the time since, they’ve begun their slow creep back.
For the majority of people, that’s not really a big deal. Common-cold symptoms tend to be pretty mild and usually resolve on their own after a few days of nuisance. The virus infiltrates the nose and throat, but isn’t able to do much damage and gets quickly swept out. Some people may not even notice they’re infected at all, or may mistake the illness for an allergy—snottiness, drippiness, and not much more. Most of us know the drill: “Sometimes, it’s just congestion for a few days and feeling a bit tired for a while, but otherwise you’ll be just fine,” says Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Chicago. As a culture, we’ve long been in the habit of dismissing these symptoms as just a cold, not enough of an inconvenience to skip work or school, or to put on a mask. (Spoiler: The experts I spoke with were adamant that we all really should be doing those things when we have a cold.)
The general infectious-disease dogma has always been that colds are a big nothing, at least compared with the flu. But gentler than the flu is not saying much. The flu is a legitimately dangerous disease that hospitalizes hundreds of thousands of Americans each year, and, like COVID, can sometimes saddle people with long-term symptoms. Even if colds are generally less severe, people can end up totally clobbered by headaches, exhaustion, and a burning sore throat; their eyes will tear up; their sinuses will clog; they’ll wake up feeling like they’ve swallowed serrated razor blades, or like their heads have been pumped full of fast-hardening concrete. It’s also common for cold symptoms to stretch out beyond a week, occasionally even two; coughs, especially, can linger long after the runny nose and headache resolve. At their worst, colds can lead to serious complications, especially in the very young, very old, and immunocompromised. Sometimes, cold sufferers end up catching a bacterial infection on top of their viral disease, a one-two punch that can warrant a trip to the ER. “The fact of the matter is, it’s pretty miserable to have a cold,” Landon told me. “And that’s how it’s always been.”
[Read: Don’t worry, it’s not COVID]
As far as experts can tell, the average severity of cold symptoms hasn’t changed. “It’s about perception,” says Jasmine Marcelin, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. After skipping colds for several years, “experiencing them now feels worse than usual,” she told me. Frankly, this was sort of a problem even before COVID came onto the scene. “Every year, I have patients who call me with ‘the worst cold they’ve ever had,’” Landon told me. “And it’s basically the same thing they had last year.” Now, though, the catastrophizing might be even worse, especially since pandemic-brain started prompting people to scrutinize every sniffle and cough.
There’s still a chance that some colds this season might be a shade more unpleasant than usual. Many people falling sick right now are just coming off of bouts with COVID, flu, or RSV, each of which infected Americans (especially kids) by the millions this past fall and winter. Their already damaged tissues may not fare as well against another onslaught from a cold-causing virus.
It’s also possible that immunity, or lack thereof, could be playing a small role. Many people are now getting their first colds in three-plus years, which means population-level vulnerability might be higher than it normally is this time of year, speeding the rate at which viruses spread and potentially making some infections more gnarly than they’d otherwise be. But higher-than-usual susceptibility seems unlikely to be driving uglier symptoms en masse, says Roby Bhattacharyya, an infectious-disease physician and microbiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Not all cold-causing viruses leave behind good immunity—but many of those that do are thought to prompt the body to mount relatively durable defenses against truly severe infections, lasting several years or more.
Plus, for a lot of viruses going around right now, the immunity question is largely moot, Landon told me. So many different pathogens cause colds that a recent exposure to one is unlikely to do much against the next. A person could catch half a dozen colds in a five-year time frame and not even encounter the same type of virus twice.
[Read: Maybe consider not kissing that baby]
It’s also worth noting that what some people are categorizing as the worst cold they’ve ever had might actually be a far more menacing virus, such as SARS-CoV-2 or a flu virus. At-home rapid tests for the coronavirus often churn out false-negative results in the early days of infection, even after symptoms start. And although the flu can sometimes be distinguished from a cold by its symptoms, they’re often pretty similar. The illnesses can only be definitively diagnosed with a test, which can be difficult to come by.
The pandemic has steered our perception of illness into a false binary: Oh no, it’s COVID or Phew, it’s not. COVID is undoubtedly still more serious than a run-of-the-mill cold—more likely to spark severe disease or chronic, debilitating symptoms that can last months or years. But the range of severity between them overlaps more than the binary implies. Plus, Marcelin points out, what truly is “just” a cold for one person might be an awful, weeks-long slog for someone else, or worse—which is why, no matter what’s turning your face into a snot factory, it’s still important to keep your germs to yourself. The current outbreak of colds may not be any more severe than usual. But there’s no need to make it bigger than it needs to be.





Successfully mitigating the impacts of climate change will rely heavily on innovation in science and technology.

Nature, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00544-w
Substance that transforms into a conductive polymer using the body’s own chemistry could improve implantable electronics.
The photo from aboard the Air Force's legendary U-2 spy plane shows the Chinese balloon. But where, exactly, was it taken? It's actually possible to answer that question using clues from the image.
(Image credit: Department of Defense)
















Fessing Up
has confirmed that it tested its bizarrely-behaved Bing AI chatbot for way longer than we realized — and somehow, it still managed to be totally unhinged upon wider launch.
In a statement provided to Futurism, Microsoft confirmed that it had indeed been quietly beta-testing the AI in India, and admitted that the tests went back further than just a few months ago.
"Sydney is an old code name for a chat feature based on earlier models that we began testing more than a year ago," the statement from a Microsoft spokesperson reads. "The insights we gathered as part of that have helped to inform our work with the new Bing preview."
Hard Lessons
It's unclear what, if anything, the tech giant has learned from its Sydney experiment given that prior to it being "lobotomized" over the past week, the AI was still trying to break up marriages, writing a hit list, and generally acting not entirely well.
In fact, it's hard to tell if Microsoft has learned anything from its last big foray into AI because at least with Tay, its Twitter chatbot that was swiftly goaded into racism, they put the kibosh on it in less than a day. Meanwhile, the Bing AI was allowed to continue pretty deranged for weeks before the company stepped in in a serious way.
Microsoft told us in its statement that the company will "continue to tune our techniques" and is "working on more advanced models to incorporate the learnings and feedback so that we can deliver the best user experience possible," but as we reported yesterday, the feedback from Indian beta testers about the AI "misbehaving" and spewing disinformation seemed to not be heeded in time for the chatbot to get a wider launch in the West.
Hopefully now that Microsoft has given its latest chatbot the AI version of brain surgery it'll start acting a bit more normal — and maybe, with any luck, the company will have learned some lessons, too.
More on AI insanity: OpenAI CEO Says AI Will Give Medical Advice to People Too Poor to Afford Doctors
The post Microsoft Admits to Testing Deranged Bing AI Long Before Officially Launching It appeared first on Futurism.


Nature Communications, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36583-0
How animals learn to generalize from one context to another remains unresolved. Here, the authors show that the abstract representations that are thought to underlie this form of generalization emerge naturally in neural networks trained to perform multiple tasks.

- That’s when a bill is introduced in a state legislature calling for secession for the first time since the Civil War, in North Dakota.
Is it news that people are angry with Marjorie Taylor Greene?
This week, the Georgia Republican took advantage of Twitter’s newly liberalized character restrictions to do what she does best: suggest something unhinged, and sit back while her political opponents’ heads explode in white-hot rage.
“We need a national divorce,” she tweeted. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this.” The next day, she followed up by elaborating that she would like to see “a legal agreement” that would separate states to resolve ideological and political disagreements “while maintaining our legal union.” Rearranged this way, Americans can decide where and how to live, Greene concluded, and “we don’t have to argue with one another anymore.”
[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]
The Republican representative’s words prompted the outcry you’d expect from Democrats and columnists who questioned both her loyalty to the country and Republican leaders’ cowardice in refusing to rein her in. But Greene’s ideas are not as radical as some might be inclined to think. First, because what she’s calling for sounds not unlike Ronald Reagan’s idea of federalism. Second, because Greene is hardly the first person to suggest that the political party in power is making the United States wholly unlivable. I’m old enough to remember all the liberals who swore they’d move to Canada if Donald Trump won in 2016. (They didn’t!)
What’s interesting about Greene’s call for a “national divorce” is how it fits into a much longer history of similar calls for secession or disunion in American history—and what the growing frequency of such calls tells us about this particular modern political moment. “That it keeps coming up suggests there is something to it, and waving it away with reminders of Appomattox or quotes from Texas v. White probably isn’t going to cut it,” Richard Kreitner, the author of the 2020 book Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union, told me. This persistent theme in our politics, he added, “represents an impulse that cannot be simply wished away or ignored.”
This week, I talked with Kreitner about that constant theme—and whether it’s time for the people of the United States to reassess their 250-year union.
This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Elaine Godfrey: So Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that there should be a “national divorce” between red and blue states. Obviously, this is what Greene is good at—saying something wild, getting a reaction. What was yours?
Richard Kreitner: Calls for secession have been becoming more common, louder, and have come from more prominent figures in the 21st century. So it’s not too surprising to find somebody in House Republican leadership embracing the idea.
She’s calling for a legal agreement to separate our ideological and political disagreements by states while maintaining our legal union. That’s federalism. We can have arguments about what exactly that means, what the Founders thought it should mean, but she’s just arguing that the states should have more powers over things than the federal government. That’s the debate we’ve been having in American politics for decades.
So, to wrap it in this banner of “national divorce” seems to me to be taking advantage of all the talk of a second civil war, the boogaloo bois, and the secession talk that is growing in prominence. But each side has been talking about secession for many years—when they’re out of power. When they’re in power, they say, “Oh no, you can’t do that. That’s treasonous.”
Godfrey: When I think of secession, I think of the Civil War, and then I think of Texas. But you’ve written about how it goes back to the very beginning—how the United States has never been all that united.
Kreitner: My book starts by pointing out that the colonial period lasted 150 years—a very long time, about the same amount of time since our Civil War. And during that time, America was disunited. The colonies were, as Marjorie Taylor Greene would have them now, totally independent of one another. Their only relationship, their only political relationship, was with England itself, and that was a fairly loose relationship.
So this was the original state of things in America, one that the colonists themselves liked very much. They had control over their own affairs; there was very little meddling.
Occasionally, somebody—William Penn, Benjamin Franklin—would have the idea that it would be better to organize some kind of federation of the colonies, with Britain’s approval, to organize trade, land disputes, border issues, relationships with the Indians, and mutual defense. Every time somebody proposed that idea, they were laughed out of the room, because people considered the very idea of union to be antithetical to their cherished liberties.
Forming a union was kind of the last thing on their mind. Then we get to the Revolution. A lot of us are taught in school that the Revolution was fought to create a union, to create a nation. And it’s the exact opposite of that. The Union was created as a means to the end of securing independence from England. It was a last resort.
John Adams, when he goes to Philadelphia, is talking about how different Americans are from one another, how much they hate each other. George Washington in the Continental Army camp outside Boston in 1775 is talking about how much the New Englanders smell. Anytime these politicians meet in the Continental Congress, they’re described as a conclave of ambassadors from different nations. Many of them think a union will not survive after the war.
No golden age of American unity exists that you can point to and say, “That’s when we were united.” Even back then, people were issuing threats of secession when they were out of power, and then defending the Union as perpetual and inviolable once they had the power. Thomas Jefferson does this famous turnaround. In 1798, he mulls whether to threaten secession because he doesn’t like Adams’s administration. Then he wins the election of 1800, and says, “We must hold the Union together at any cost!” The people backing Adams now proposed secession.
Godfrey: Because of the Civil War, we think of secessionist calls as primarily reactionary. Are we right about that?
Kreitner: When I was researching, I was especially interested in whether there were any people whose values and ideals I shared—who had espoused the idea of secession not for white-supremacist reasons or to preserve slavery. I quickly landed on the abolitionists.
Many were in favor of northern secession from the Union in the years right before the Civil War. Their argument was gaining traction in the 1850s because they thought that participation in the Union was an important pillar in maintaining the institution of slavery. They thought that without the guarantee of the federal government’s aid to suppress an insurrection among the enslaved, slavery would be a much more insecure institution, the price of slaves would plummet, and the institution would die out.
John Quincy Adams, back in Congress after his presidency, introduced a petition from a group of citizens from a small town in Massachusetts demanding the dissolution of the United States, because they didn’t want their tax dollars to go toward the support of slavery anymore. These were ordinary American heroes, far from traitors.
Godfrey: Obviously the secession of the southern states was the big culmination of many years of those sentiments. When did we start hearing them again after the Civil War?
Kreitner: The Civil War was a national trauma; nearly a million people died. The fear of disunion persisted in American politics. The idea went underground for years.
In the 1890s, the populist movement and the rise of socialism in the United States were both opposed on the grounds that they were disunionist movements. Populism in the 1930s also dabbles in secessionism. That’s when a bill is introduced in a state legislature calling for secession for the first time since the Civil War, in North Dakota. Then in the ’60s, it starts to become an ethnic thing. There was the Republic of New Afrika, a movement of Black Americans in northern cities that called for the surrender of five southern states as a form of reparations for slavery. Then Hispanic Americans demanded the return of the Southwest that was lost in the Mexican-American War as a sovereign homeland. From a hippie newspaper published on the Lower East Side came a call for the creation of what was called the Underground States of America, which would be a kind of hippie confederacy. Lesbian separatist communes also envisioned themselves as secessionists.
Obviously, these were not order-shattering movements, but the idea lingered. Secession has always been available to malcontents of one kind or another. It defines American history.
Godfrey: So Marjorie Taylor Greene’s tweets are not representative of some new treasonous trend?
Kreitner: The trend is old in the sense that American politics is starting to look rather similar to the way it was in the beginning, which was extremely fractured, totally dysfunctional, with foreign enemies prowling around the perimeter to see what kind of discord they could scare up, and real questions about whether the Union could survive.
We didn’t get through because of some predestined outcome; there’s no guarantee that we’re going to stay together. In many cases, our staying together had to do with mere chance and fear of the unknown—particularly fear of the economic consequences of disunion.
Godfrey: You’re saying that the frequency of these calls is not surprising, but that we should pay attention to them.
Kreitner: We’re totally undecided on this fundamental question of “Do we want to be a multiracial democracy or not?” While we persist in having that fundamental argument, we’re going to see political tensions. And when you see that in American history, you see secessionist movements.
So the course of growing hatred, rancor, and constitutional paralysis continues. I charted quite exactly from 2004, when there were memes going around showing maps separating “Jesusland” from the United States of Canada, to 2012, when you saw all these petitions from every state in the country arguing for secession. Then, of course, in 2016, you have Calexit.
California Representative Zoe Lofgren talked about secession after the 2016 election. She said: “Rational people, not the fringe, are now talking about whether states could be separated from the U.S.” I don’t know if anybody’s quoted her in relation to Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I can’t imagine her response today would be: “Oh boy, I guess we both have this idea! Maybe let’s have a substantive conversation about the merits and the drawbacks of being in one country together.”
[Peter Wehner: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s civil war]
In the coming years, especially with the Supreme Court so heavily stacked in favor of the right, the left is going to have a lot more cause for talking about secession than the right. And I think that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s screed—insane and stupid as it is—is an invitation that should be accepted: to talk concretely about whether this thing is working or not.
Godfrey: What would the result of that conversation be?
Kreitner: I don’t know what the end of it is. But the beginning is—instead of piling on and saying, “This is treason. You can’t talk about that; it’s un-American”—that we actually are capable of not only having conversations but also making decisions about what kind of country and what kind of government we want to have.
After all, we’re not seeing any positive arguments for the union. You look at all the commentary, and you don’t see any soaring odes to our shared nationality, why it’s important for us to remain together as a people. My response to Greene is not “I must remain united with this person at any cost,” but “Why would I want to be part of a government where this person is a leading figure? Why would I want to remain loyal to a Constitution so patently broken that somebody like this ascends to the highest ranks of power?”
I don’t have a programmatic view of what should happen, no firm sense of where to draw the new borders or what to do with people stuck behind enemy lines, only an understanding, based on my reading of American history, that this is a persistent theme in our politics and represents an impulse that cannot simply be wished away or ignored.
Last week was the 12th anniversary of the arrival of Larry the Cat to 10 Downing Street, the London residence and home office of the United Kingdom’s prime minister, where he was bestowed with the official title of “Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office.” He was brought to Downing Street in 2011, at the age of four, and tasked with controlling rats that had been seen at the residence. Though cats had been employed as chief mousers for centuries, Larry was the first to be given the official title. As a permanent resident, his term in office has overlapped with five prime ministers to date.




Researchers say findings indicate quantity of sleep alone is not enough to benefit; quality is key
It is no mystery that a good night’s sleep and a lie-in can improve your day. But researchers are suggesting that, far from just being enjoyable, quality sleep may even add years to people’s lives.
Men who regularly sleep well could live almost five years longer than those who do not, while women could benefit by two years, research suggests. And they could also enjoy better health during their lives.
Continue reading…























- Canada moves to ban funding for ‘risky’ foreign collaborations





New Coke
is getting deep into the artificial intelligence game thanks to a newly-inked deal that will see it partnering with
.
The press release announcing the deal did not say how much the partnership between Coca-Cola, OpenAI, and the Bain consulting firm is worth, but given that the AI firm recently got a multi-billion-dollar contract with Microsoft, there's a good chance it's worth a pretty penny — and it seems particularly significant because of Coke's storied history in advertising, a domain that the release seems to hint could be a target for the AI tech.
In the statement, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincy said that the company is "excited to unleash the next generation of creativity offered by this rapidly emerging technology" using tech including
and
.
"We see opportunities to enhance our marketing through cutting-edge AI," Quincy said, "along with exploring ways to improve our business operations and capabilities."
Marketability
Coke is the first company to sign on to Bain and OpenAI's new partnership, and although there's no word yet on exactly what the deal will entail, the press release hints at marketing, sales, and human resources implementations, the latter two of which sound pretty dystopian, to be honest.
In a statement provided to The Grocer, a British food news site, Coke CFO and president John Murphy indicated that the marketing prospects were one of the biggest draws of the deal.
"We have a couple of really interesting cases with the marketing team to enhance the work that we’re already doing with our new marketing model," Murphy said, "and to be able to marry the ability to deliver creative content at speed and to do it with exponential efficiency."
Long Time Coming
New deal aside, this isn't the first time Coca-Cola has gotten into the AI game.
Back in 2017, the company announced that it was going to start using "AI-powered" vending machines as part of its artificial intelligence-centered business strategy that uses algorithms to determine which flavors are performing best and other key metrics.
What remains to be seen, however, is how well AI-generated marketing will perform, and if it will get us one step closer to normalizing the uncanny sensation that a lot of AI art instills in viewers.
More on AI: Samsung Now Cloning Users' Voices So an AI Can Answer Calls For Them
The post Coca-Cola Signs Deal With OpenAI's DALL-E and ChatGPT appeared first on Futurism.

Crawlspace Crypto
Some people go to incredible lengths to make some extra bucks on the side.
A former high school employee in a small town in Massachusetts has been accused of running a secret cryptocurrency mining operation in the school's crawlspace, local ABC-affiliated news station WCVB reports, stealing nearly $18,000 in electricity from the district.
The unusual discovery prompted an investigation by law enforcement, and even the Department of Homeland Security showed up. After all, it's not every day you discover 11 mysterious computers running crypto-mining software tucked next to a public building's HVAC system.
Free Power
Following three months of investigating, law enforcement concluded that the racks had been running for eight months, costing the school district $17,492 in electricity.
The man accused of setting up the mining rig, a former assistant facilities director named Nadeam Nahas who resigned from the school in March 2022, has since been charged with fraudulent use of electricity and vandalizing a school, according to WCVB.
But whether Nahas was able to get much of a return is unclear. While major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have made some gains so far this year, they still have a long way to go to recover from the disastrous second half of 2022, which wiped out over half of Bitcoin's value in a matter of months.
When WCVB asked Babson College IT professor Steve Gordon if it makes sense to mine crypto anywhere in New England, he had a straightforward answer.
"Not really," Gordon told the station. "Not unless you make an arrangement at some point in time with an energy provider to provide it very cheaply."
READ MORE: Former Cohasset employee charged with stealing thousands from town to power cryptomine [WCVB]
The post Man Accused of Running Secret Crypto Mining Operation in High School Crawlspace appeared first on Futurism.


Nature, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00492-5
A water-filled gel has the strength and elasticity of natural tendon.












- The US Federal Railroad Administration, which creates and enforces US rail safety regulations, does not currently set standards for such detectors.


A new engineered wood traps carbon dioxide through a potentially scalable, energy-efficient process that also makes the material stronger for use in construction.
Structural materials like steel or cement come at a high cost both in dollars and carbon dioxide emissions; building construction and use accounts for an estimated 40% of emissions. Developing sustainable alternatives to existing materials could help mitigate climate change and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Working to address both issues at once, researchers found a way to incorporate molecules of a carbon dioxide-trapping crystalline porous material into wood.
“Wood is a sustainable, renewable structural material that we already use extensively,” says Muhammad Rahman, assistant research professor in materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University. “Our engineered wood did exhibit greater strength than normal, untreated wood.”
To achieve the feat, the network of cellulose fibers that gives wood its strength is first cleared out through a process known as delignification.
“Wood is made up of three essential components: cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin,” Rahman says. “Lignin is what gives wood its color, so when you take lignin out, the wood becomes colorless. Removing the lignin is a fairly simple process that involves a two-step chemical treatment using environmentally benign substances. After removing the lignin, we use bleach or hydrogen peroxide to remove the hemicellulose.”
Next, the delignified wood is soaked in a solution containing microparticles of a metal-organic framework, or MOF, known as Calgary framework 20 (CALF-20). MOFs are high-surface-area sorbent materials used for their ability to adsorb carbon dioxide molecules into their pores.
“The MOF particles easily fit into the cellulose channels and get attached to them through favorable surface interactions,” says Soumyabrata Roy, a research scientist and lead author of the study in Cell Reports Physical Science.
MOFs are among several nascent carbon capture technologies developed to address anthropogenic climate change.
“Right now, there is no biodegradable, sustainable substrate for deploying carbon dioxide-sorbent materials,” Rahman says. “Our MOF-enhanced wood is an adaptable support platform for deploying sorbent in different carbon dioxide applications.”
“Many of the existing MOFs are not very stable in varying environmental conditions,” Roy says. “Some are very susceptible to moisture, and you don’t want that in a structural material.”
CALF-20, however, developed by George Shimizu, a professor at the University of Calgary, and his collaborators, stands out in terms of both performance level and versatility under a variety of environmental conditions, Roy says.
“The manufacturing of structural materials such as metals or cement represents a significant source of industrial carbon emissions,” Rahman says. “Our process is simpler and ‘greener’ in terms of both substances used and processing byproducts.
“The next step would be to determine sequestration processes as well as a detailed economic analysis to understand the scalability and commercial viability of this material,” he adds.
Shell Technologies and the UES-Air Force Research Laboratory supported the research.
Source: Rice University
The post Engineered wood gets stronger while trapping CO2 appeared first on Futurity.

Blue foods—those that come from the ocean or freshwater environments—have tremendous potential to help address several global challenges, researchers say.
With careful implementation of policies that leverage these foods, nations could get a boost on efforts to reduce nutritional deficits, lower disease risk, decrease greenhouse gas emissions, and ensure resilience in the face of climate change.
Blue Food Assessment, an international collaboration of scientists, has been focused on the role of aquatic foods in global food systems. In a paper in the journal Nature, the scientists tease out the global-scale benefits of adding more blue food to the world’s diet.
“Even though people around the world depend on and enjoy seafood, the potential for these blue foods to benefit people and the environment remains underappreciated,” says Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, director of the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis, and a member of the team.
“With this work, we bring attention to these many possibilities and the transformative benefit that blue foods can have for people’s lives and the environments in which they live,” Halpern says.
Built on the landmark Blue Food Assessment, this study synthesizes the assessment’s findings and translates them across four policy objectives related to nutrition, health, environment, and livelihoods. The research team reports that aquatic foods are rich in many essential nutrients, particularly vitamin B12 and omega-3 fatty acids, deficiencies of which are relatively high globally, especially in African and South American nations. Increasing the intake of blue foods in those areas could diminish malnutrition, particularly for vulnerable populations such as young children and elders, pregnant women, and women of childbearing age.
Meanwhile, high incidences of cardiovascular disease—a condition associated with excessive red meat consumption—are mostly found in the rich, developed countries in North America and Europe. Promoting more freshwater or marine seafood here could displace some red and processed meat consumption and lower the risks and rates of developing heart disease.
More blue food can also result in a more environmentally friendly and sustainable food system. As aquatic food production exerts relatively lower environmental pressures than terrestrial meat production, a shift toward more blue foods could lower the toll that producing terrestrial livestock (particularly ruminants such as cows, sheep, and goats) takes on the earth.
Carefully developed, aquaculture, mariculture, and fishing also present opportunities for employment and can ensure the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people worldwide, according to the researchers.
With thoughtful implementation of blue food policies that lower the barriers to blue food production and access, countries could avail of multiple benefits simultaneously, resulting in healthier people and a sustainable food system, as well as a better ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions. But not all countries will benefit to a uniform degree.
“Blue foods can play important roles in our diets, societies, and economies, but what exactly this looks like will differ greatly from one country and local setting to another,” says lead author Beatrice Crona, a professor at the Stockholm Resilience Center at Stockholm University and co-chair of the Blue Food Assessment.
“Our goal is for policy makers to fully understand the diverse contributions that blue foods can make, but also for them to consider the tradeoffs that need to be negotiated to really make the most of the opportunities that blue foods provide.”
To that end, the team offers an online tool, where users can see the relevance of policy objectives around the world in the realms of nutrition, heart disease, environment, and climate resilience.
“By further customizing the different parameters in the online tool, decision-makers can explore the blue food policies most relevant for their national setting and use the paper to inspire blue food policies that can overcome existing environmental and nutritional challenges,” says Jim Leape, co-director of the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions, a key partner in the Blue Food Assessment.
This study is the latest in a series of peer-reviewed papers written by the Blue Food Assessment team in an effort to understand the potential for blue foods in the current and future global food system, and help inform and guide policies that will shape the future of food.
Source: UC Santa Barbara
The post ‘Blue foods’ benefit health and the planet appeared first on Futurity.

discovers giant, mature galaxies that seem to have filled the universe shortly after the Big Bang, and astronomers are puzzled
- Last November, cultivated chicken from the California start-up Upside Foods received FDA clearance ; now it’s waiting on additional clearance from the Department of Agriculture.
Last month, at a dining table in a sunny New York City hotel suite, I found myself thrown completely off guard by a strip of fake bacon. I was there to taste a new kind of plant-based meat, which, like most Americans, I’ve tried before but never truly craved in the way that I’ve craved real meat. But even before I tried the bacon, or even saw it, I could tell it was different. The aroma of salt, smoke, and sizzling fat rising from the nearby kitchen seemed unmistakably real. The crispy bacon strips looked the part too—tiger-striped with golden fat and presented on a miniature BLT. Then crunch gave way to satisfying chew, followed by a burst of hickory and the incomparable juiciness of animal fat.
I knew it wasn’t real bacon, but for a moment, it fooled me. The bacon was indeed made from plants, just like the burger patties you can buy from companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. But it had been mixed with real pork fat. Well, kind of. What marbled the meat had not come from a butchered pig but a living hog whose fat cells had been sampled and grown in a vat.
This lab-grown fat, or “cultivated fat,” was made by Mission Barns, a San Francisco start-up, with one purpose: to win people over to plant-based meat. And a lot of people need to be won over, it seems. The plant-based-meat industry, which a few years ago seemed destined for mainstream success, is now struggling. Once the novelty of seeing plant protein “bleed” wore off, the high price, middling nutrition, and just-okay flavor of plant-based meat has become harder for consumers to overlook, food analysts told me. In 2021 and 2022, many of the fast-food chains that had once given plant-based meat a national platform—Burger King, Dunkin’, McDonald’s—lost interest in selling it. In the past four months, the two most visible plant-based-meat companies, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, have each announced layoffs.
Meanwhile, the future of meat alternatives—lab-grown meat that is molecularly identical to the real deal—is at least several years away, lodged between science fiction and reality. But we can’t wait until then to eat less meat; it’s one of the single best things that regular people can do for the climate, and also helps address concerns about animal suffering and health. Lab-grown fat might be the bridge. It is created using the same approach as lab-grown meat, but it’s far simpler to make and can be mixed into existing plant-based foods, Elysabeth Alfano, the CEO of the investment firm VegTech Invest, told me. As such, it’s likely to become commercially available far sooner—maybe even within the next few years. Maybe all it will take to save fake meat is a little animal fat.
Animal fat is culinary magic. It creates the juiciness of a burger, and leaves a buttery coat on the tongue. Its absence is the reason that chicken breasts taste so bland. Fat, the chef Samin Nosrat wrote in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, is “a source of both rich flavor and of a particular desired texture.” The fake meat on the market now is definitely lacking in the flavor and texture departments. Most products approximate meatiness using a concoction of plant oils, flavorings, binders, and salt, which is certainly meatier than the bean burgers that came before it, but is far from perfect: The food blog Serious Eats, for instance, has pointed out off-putting flavor notes, at least prior to cooking, including coconut and cat food. On a molecular level, plant fat is ill-equipped to mimic its animal counterpart. Coconut oil, common in plant-based meat, is solid at room temperature but melts under relatively low heat, so it spills out into the pan while cooking. As a result, the mouthfeel of plant-based meat tends to be more greasy than sumptuous.
Replacing those plant oils with cultivated animal fat, which keeps its structure when heated, would maintain the flavor and juiciness people expect of real meat, Audrey Gyr, the start-up innovation specialist at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for meat alternatives, told me. In a sense, the technique of using animal fat to flavor plants is hardly new. Chicken schmaltz has long lent rich nuttiness to potato latkes; rendered guanciale is what gives a classic amatriciana its succulence. Plant-based bacon enhanced with pork fat follows from the same culinary tradition, but it’s very high-tech. Fat cells sampled from a live animal are grown in huge bioreactors and fed with plant-derived sugars, proteins, and other growth components. In time, they multiply to form a mass of fat cells: a soft, pale solid with robust flavor, the same white substance you might see encircling a pork chop or marbling a steak.
Out of the bioreactor, the fat “looks a little bit like margarine,” Ed Steele, a co-founder of the London-based cultivated-fat company Hoxton Farms, told me. It is a complicated process, but far easier than engineering cultivated meat, which involves many cell types that must be coaxed into rigid muscle fibers. Fat involves one type of cell and is most useful as a formless blob. Just as in the human body, all it takes is time, space, and a steady drip of sugars, oils, and other fats, Eitan Fischer, CEO of Mission Barns, told me. The bacon I’d tried at the tasting had been constructed by layering cultivated fat with plant-based protein, curing and smoking the loaf, then slicing it into bacon-like strips. Mixing just 10 percent cultivated fat with plant-based protein by mass, Steele said, can make a product taste and feel like the real thing.
Already, cultivated-fat products are within sight. Mission Barns plans to incorporate its cultivated fat into its own plant-based products; Hoxton Farms hopes to sell its fat directly to existing plant-based-meat manufacturers. Other companies, such as the Belgian start-up Peace of Meat, the Berlin-based Cultimate Foods, and Singapore’s fish-focused ImpacFat, are also working on their own versions of cultivated fat. In theory, the fat can be mixed into virtually any type of plant-based meat—nuggets, sausages, paté. In the U.S., a path to market is already being cleared. Last November, cultivated chicken from the California start-up Upside Foods received FDA clearance; now it’s waiting on additional clearance from the Department of Agriculture. Pending its own regulatory approvals, Mission Barns says it is ready to launch its products in a few supermarkets and restaurants, which also include a convincingly porky plant-based meatball I also tried at the tasting. (Due to the pending approval, I had to sign a liability waiver before digging in.)
I left the tasting with animal fat on my lips and a new conviction in my mind: At the right price, I’d buy this bacon over the regular stuff. Because cultivated fat can be made without harming animals—the fat cells in the bacon I tasted came from a happily free-ranging pig named Dawn, a PR rep for Mission Barns told me—it may appeal to flexitarians like myself who just want to eat less meat.
Although there’s no guarantee it would taste as good at home as it did when prepared by Mission Barns’s private chef, with its realistic texture and flavor, cultivated fat could solve the main issue plaguing plant-based meat: It just doesn’t taste that good. Cultivated fat is “the next step in making environmentally friendly foods more palatable to the average consumer,” Jennifer Bartashus, a packaged-food analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, told me.
But cultivated fat still faces some of the same problems that have turned America off plant-based meat. The current products for sale are not particularly healthy, and cultivated fat would not change that fact. Building consumer trust and familiarity may also be an issue. Some people are leery of plant-based products because they’re confused about what they’re made of. The more complex notion of cultivated fat may be just as unappetizing, if not more so. “We still don’t know exactly how consumers are going to feel about cultivated fat,” Gyr said. Certainly, finding a catchy name for these products would help, but I have struggled to find a term less clunky than “plant-based meat flavored with cultivated animal fat” to describe what I ate. Unless cultivated-fat companies really nail their marketing, they could go the way of “blended meat”—mixtures of plant-based protein and real meat introduced by three meat companies in 2019, which was “a bit of a marketing failure,” Gyr said.
Above all, though, is the price relative to that of traditional meat. Plant-based meat’s higher cost has partly been blamed for the industry’s slump, and products containing cultivated fat, in all likelihood, will not be cheaper in the near future. Neither founder I spoke with shared specific numbers; Fischer, of Mission Barns, said only that the company’s small production scale makes it “fairly expensive” compared with traditional meat products, while Steele said his hope is that companies using Hoxton Farms’ cultivated fat in their plant-based-meat recipes won’t have to spend more than they do now.
Despite these obstacles, cultivated fat is promising for the flagging plant-based-meat industry because of the fact that it is absolutely delicious. Cultivated fat could “lead to a new round of innovation that will pull consumers back in,” Bartashus said. After all, plant-based and real meat could reach cost parity around 2026, at which point even more companies might want to get in on meat alternatives. Cultivated fat might warm us up to the future of fully cultivated meat. With enough time, lab-grown chicken breasts could become as boring as regular chicken breasts.
Enthusiasm about cultivated fat, and fake meat in general, has a distinctly techno-optimist flavor, as if persuading all meat eaters to embrace plants gussied up in bacon grease will be easy. “Eventually our goal is to outcompete current conventional meat prices, whether it’s meatballs or bacon,” Fischer said. But even as the problems with eating meat have only become clearer, meat consumption in the U.S. has continued to rise. Globally, meat consumption in countries such as India and China is expected to skyrocket in the coming years. At the very least, cultivated fat provides consumers with another option at a time when eating a steak for one meal and then opting for plant-based meat the next can count as a win.
Since the tasting, I’ve often thought about why eating the bacon left me feeling so perplexed. When I gnawed on the crispy golden edge of one of the strips, I knew I was eating real bacon fat, but my brain still wrestled with the idea that it had not come directly from a piece of pork. I’ve only ever known a world where animal fat comes from slaughtered animals. That is changing. If cultivated fat can tide the plant-based-meat industry over until lab-grown meat becomes a reality, these new products will have done their part. In the meantime, we may come to find that they’re already good enough.









- The US Federal Railroad Administration that creates and enforces US rail safety regulations does not currently set standards for such detectors.









Nature, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00493-4
Scientists develop the first system to record the brain activity of a freely swimming octopus.
Nature, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00491-6
The conflict is raising household fuel bills and the cost of goods and services.
Nature, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00494-3
An upgraded antibiotic holds promise for treating
Nature, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00529-9
Judge’s decision could ban mifepristone across the country, and weaken the Food and Drug Administration’s authority.
Nature, Published online: 23 February 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00546-8
Negotiations on Horizon Europe dragged on — and UK-based researchers came up short.