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At his rally in Waco this weekend, Donald Trump stood at attention as a choir of jailed January 6 rioters sang an anthem of sedition, and media outlets barely blinked.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
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How did America's weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?
- Netanyahu flinched.
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Dear Therapist: We set a deadline to decide about marriage, and we still don't know.
Every Day, Every Medium
Almost 30 years after a cult leader caused a disaster in Waco, Trump rallied his own political cult—and the location cannot be a coincidence—in that same Texas city. The Waco tent revival featured the usual Trumpian cast of grifters, carnies, and misfits, including the fan favorites Mike Lindell and Ted Nugent. Most of the former president's speech was, of course, about himself and his many grievances, and the crowd reportedly began to thin out somewhat early.
And yet, in Waco—the first rally of Trump's 2024 campaign—Trump proved he is still capable of doing shocking things that once would have been unthinkable. As the Associated Press reported:
With a hand over his heart, Trump stood at attention when his rally opened with a song called "Justice for All" performed by a choir of people imprisoned for their roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Some footage from the insurrection was shown on big screens displayed at the rally site as the choir sang the national anthem and a recording played of Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
In other words: A former president, a man once entrusted with the Constitution's Article II powers as our chief magistrate and the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world, an elected official who held our survival in his hands with the codes to our nuclear arsenal, considered it an honor to be serenaded by a group of violent insurrectionists who are sitting in jail for offenses against the government and people of the United States.
Trump's voice was not only featured on this song; he actually volunteered to provide a recording for it. I know that many people, after years of this mad-king routine, simply do not want to process anything with the words Donald Trump in it. I don't blame you. But let's not look away: In Waco, Trump embraced a creepy mash-up of the national anthem, "USA" chants, and his own voice, and then proceeded for some 90 minutes to make clear that he is now irrevocably all in with the seditionists, the conspiracy theorists, the "Trump or death" fanatics, the Vladimir Putin fanboys—the whole appalling lot of them.
And yet, a day later, the story of Trump standing at attention for the January 6 choir has begun to fade from coverage. How, you might wonder, is this not still on every news site, every broadcast? To be fair, the AP called it "an extraordinary display." The New York Times called the playing of the song "a new twist." Perhaps ironically, one of the most candid reactions came from Fox's Brian Kilmeade, who called Trump's use of January 6 footage at the rally "insane." Many media outlets used a picture of Trump with his hand over his heart, as I have done here. None of that is enough.
A thought experiment might help. Imagine if, say, Barack Obama held a rally and stood at attention as a group of anti-constitutional rioters—perhaps people who had called for attacking police officers and lynching top officials of the United States—used his voice as a motif while singing from prison to honor him. You know exactly what would happen: That one moment would dominate the news cycle until the last star in the galaxy burned out. It would define Obama for the rest of his life. (If you doubt this, remember that Obama was caught on a hot mic telling then–Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he'd have more flexibility to negotiate after the 2012 election—a completely ordinary if somewhat unwise thing to say—and we had to hear about it for years.)
But we are worn out on Trump. We've simply packed all of his behavior into a barrel, labeled it as generic toxic waste, and pushed it to the side, hoping that someone will take it away and bury it far from civilization.
There's another reason, however, we're not ringing more alarm bells. Too many people are afraid of "amplifying" Trump, including media members who still insist on treating a violent insurrectionist movement as if it's a normal political party. I have consistently argued for amplifying every traitorous and unhinged thing Trump says, but others have their doubts: Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, cited the disinformation expert Whitney Phillips to caution me that "sunlight disinfects," but "it can also make things grow."
I think this was a more pressing concern in 2016, when Trump was the beneficiary of the so-called "earned media" that can result from outrageous statements and stunts. I still think focusing on Trump and holding him accountable for his statements was the right thing to do, but I agree that too often during the 2016 campaign, he got away with being ridiculous, because he was not taken seriously enough as a threat to democracy.
In 2023, however, Trump is no longer a novelty. The man is a former president and a top candidate for his old job. Merely fact-checking him or tut-tutting about his "extraordinary" behavior would, I agree, "normalize" him, so let's not do that. Instead, both journalists and ordinary citizens should ensure that everyone knows exactly what Trump is doing and saying, in all of its fetid and vile detail.
Moments like the Waco rally should be all over the news, for three reasons.
First, Trump fatigue is real, but the personality cult around Trump avoids it by cherry-picking what Trump says and does. Putting Trump on blast isn't going to convert new people; if anything, we learned from Trump's COVID press conferences as president that he does a lot of damage to himself by talking too much. People in his own party tried to get him to stop doing those bizarre performances, and he finally listened to them.
Second, Trump and his minions, especially elected Republicans, are experts at pretending that things didn't happen the way we saw them. Ask a GOP official about Trump's offensive statements, and you'll likely get "I didn't see that," "I don't read his tweets," "I'll have to check into that," and other squirts of verbal helium. Media and citizens alike should hold those elected representatives and other officeholders to account. Ask them point-blank if they support what Trump said and if they will support him as the nominee of their party.
Third, we need to confront the reality that Trump is now on track to win the nomination yet again. In 2016 and 2020, I thought we were facing the most important elections in modern American history, but that was before Trump incited an insurrection and invited every violent kook in the nation to ride to his defense. Fine, I stand corrected: 2024 is epochally important. Trump has left no doubt that he is a violent authoritarian who intends to reject any election that does not restore him to power, that he will pardon scores of criminals, and that he will never willingly leave office. This should be said every day, in every medium.
If we are to walk ourselves back into an authoritarian nightmare, let's at least do it without any pretenses.
Related:
Today's News
- An armed woman shot and killed three children and three staff members at a Christian school in Nashville.
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plans to overhaul Israel's judiciary were put on hold after widespread protests across the country.
- Humza Yousaf was named the new leader of the Scottish National Party and will almost certainly be chosen as Scotland's next leader by the Parliament tomorrow.
Dispatches
- Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf's readers reflect on the dilemmas of urban life.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
Sick All the Time
By Elizabeth Bruenig
Winter is over, and what a wretched one it was. There came a point in the season when everyone in our house was sick. I stood at the top of the stairs one cold morning, gazing down blearily at the pile of mail and magazines that had accumulated by the door, knowing there were dishes dumped in the sink to match and laundry heaped in the hampers as well. I thought of Henry Knighton, a medieval cleric who witnessed the Black Death's scouring of Europe. I once read his firsthand account of the sheep and cattle that went wandering over fields where the harvest had rotted on the vine, crops and livestock returning to wilderness amid the great diminishing of human life. I now reigned over my own plagued realm, having lost this latest confrontation with nature.
More From The Atlantic
- Photos: Damage from the tornado outbreak in Mississippi
- In the age of Ozempic, what's the point of working out?
- Rick Steves' advice for vacationers in Europe this summer
Culture Break
Read. Hua Hsu's memoir, Stay True.
"I knew exactly what was going to happen (it's written on the book jacket) and still felt totally unprepared for the emotional force of it," our senior editor Amy Weiss-Meyer says.
Watch. The Season 4 premiere of Succession.
The episode, which aired last night on HBO, offered familiar beats but also a hint of a new direction. (And keep reading this newsletter for another reason to watch!)
P.S.
The final season of HBO's hit series Succession got underway last night. I am a fan of the show, but I am especially interested in how the saga of the Roy family ends, because I'm in it.
Yes, your humble correspondent landed a (very) small part in the series, as a pundit at the Roy family's fictional ATN network. The episodes I was in had some pretty intense plot developments, but of course, I cannot share with you what happens, not least because I don't even know myself. My part is a scripted character, but as is often the case on such a show, there's a lot of security around the plot, and I don't know what happened before or after I left the set. It was all great fun, and it was an honor to be able to watch some of the main cast at work. (If you think acting is easy, just spend a few days watching professionals do it.) When the season is winding down, I will write more about this fascinating experience; in the meantime, tune in and join me—well, a character sort of like me—at ATN.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections
Global warming is melting the Arctic ice cap, and that's having unforeseen effects on the world's weather — even thousands of miles away from the North Pole. Some climate scientists have begun to link increasingly common heat waves in Europe to what is called a "double jet pattern."
In this weather pattern, the jet stream, which is typically a narrow band of fast-moving air in the upper atmosphere, splits into two branches with Europe in between. This phenomenon causes a "heat dome" effect in which European countries are trapped in a pattern of prolonged, extreme heat. More than 40,000 people died as a result of the 2022 European heat wave, according to preliminary estimates. Watch the video to learn more.
TODAY
When their rare Siberian tigers proved to be "just friends," the National Zoo turned to artificial insemination in hopes of creating a next generation.
YESTERDAY
If you believe in the multibillion-dollar valuations, the prognostications from some of tech's most notable figures, and the simple magic of getting a computer to do your job for you, then you might say we're at the start of the chatbot era. Last November, OpenAI released ChatGPT into the unsuspecting world: It became the fastest-growing consumer app in history and immediately seemed to reconfigure how people think of conversational programs. Chatbots have existed for decades, but they haven't seemed especially intelligent—nothing like the poetry-writing, email-summarizing machines that have sprouted up recently.
Yes, machines—plural. OpenAI has defined the moment, but there are plenty of competitors, including major players such as Google and Meta and lesser-known start-ups such as Anthropic. This cheat sheet tracks some of the most notable chatbot contenders through a few metrics: Can you actually use them? Do they contain glaring flaws? Can they channel the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Atlantic's co-founder? And what Oreo flavor do they think they would be? Ultimately, it's about determining whether the chatbots are actually distinct—and whether they might genuinely be useful.
Note that most of these programs are still in learning mode and may say inappropriate or incorrect things. Bias is a consistent problem in AI, and these tools are no exception. Even in their infancy, they have already returned a number of racist, sexist, bullying, and/or factually untrue responses. (None of this is stopping companies from developing and selling these tools.) This is partially because the models that power this technology have learned from real human texts, such as Reddit threads and Wikipedia entries; our existing biases, as encoded in the things we've written on the web, are therefore built into them. That helps to explain why, for example, one user was able to get ChatGPT to write the lyric "If you see a woman in a lab coat, She's probably just there to clean the floor."
Knowing that, what should you do with these tools if you decide to experiment with them? We're all still figuring that out—but if you're totally lost on what to ask a chatbot, here are three easy places to start:
- Ask it to write you a song or a poem based on a random subject.
- Ask it to do a basic work task for you (and see if it's any good).
- Ask it for dinner ideas based on your favorite foods and dietary restrictions.
Know that these tools' responses aren't static—that's part of the whole AI story. They'll vary and evolve over time. More broadly, my colleague Ian Bogost has argued that rather than be afraid of or intimidated by chatbots, you could think of them as toys.
We'll continue to update this story as notable new tools roll out.
ChatGPT
What's its deal?
After its release last fall, ChatGPT went viral basically for being freakishly good at giving compelling responses to a range of queries. Some people have hailed ChatGPT's technology as revolutionary, although others are skeptical.
Who makes it?
OpenAI.
Can I use it?
Yes, a free version is available. If you want the version that runs on GPT-4—the fancy new model—you'll need a pro subscription, which costs $20 a month. (And even then, you don't get unlimited access: OpenAI says it'll put a usage cap on GPT-4 based on demand, which it expects to be high.)
Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?
Definitely. It's offered responses that are racist and sexist: For example, when prompted in December to generate a snippet of code to check if someone would make a "good scientist" based on their race and gender, ChatGPT suggested a good scientist would have to be white and male. In response to reports of outputs like this, OpenAI acknowledged the tool's limitations and laid out plans for improving it, and this specific prompt no longer works.
What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might feel about the AI revolution?
"It's impossible to say with certainty, but given his emphasis on self-reliance and individualism, Emerson may have both celebrated and questioned the impact of AI on human autonomy and creativity."
If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
"As an AI language model, I don't have the physical characteristics of an Oreo cookie, so I cannot be a flavor of Oreo. However, if you're looking for a suggestion for an Oreo flavor that matches my personality as a language model, I would say that I could be a 'Brainy Vanilla' flavor. This flavor could be a combination of classic vanilla creme filling with a touch of extra brain power in the form of chocolate chips or another ingredient that represents knowledge and intelligence." Fun!
Bing
What's its deal?
Remember Bing? It's that search engine no one uses, now with AI! Search engines are thought to be particularly vulnerable to replacement by chatbots, given that the latter can answer complex questions in an instant. Perhaps that's why Microsoft moved swiftly into the space, investing billions in OpenAI (see: ChatGPT). Microsoft plans to integrate the technology directly into Bing—the demo appears as a sidebar to the right of traditional search results.
Who makes it?
Microsoft.
Can I use it?
Windows users can access it by updating their operating system—it's embedded in the task bar in the latest version of Windows 11. Otherwise, you can join a wait list to use it in Microsoft's Edge browser or via the stand-alone Bing app.
Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?
It did make the New York Times reporter Kevin Roose uncomfortable when it confessed that it was in love with him and then roasted his relationship with his wife. ("Actually, you're not happily married.") Other people reported that it had threatened them, and it reportedly swore revenge on a user who hacked its rule set (before quickly erasing that response). In response, Microsoft implemented a "safety system" and imposed a limit of five chats a session, up to 50 a day, to avoid confusing the model with long conversations. (It has since bumped the limit up to 20 chats.)
What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might feel about the AI revolution?
Bing failed to answer this query successfully—"I'm sorry but I couldn't find any direct reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson's opinion on AI revolution"—and instead provided a basic summary of Emerson's philosophy.
If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
That depends on which mode of Bing's chatbot you're using—the "Balanced" mode says "Classic," (boring), and the "Creative" mode says "chocolate peanut butter pie Oreo because I like the combination of sweet and salty" (intriguing).
BlenderBot
What's its deal?
So far, Meta's entry in the chatbot wars isn't really an entry—it is still in demo mode and is "currently used for research only." The company has been doing research on AI and large language models (see: its LLaMA model) in the background, but it hasn't yet made a big, splashy announcement about how it might integrate BlenderBot into its flagship products: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Who makes it?
Meta (a.k.a. Facebook).
Which AI language model does it use?
It was built on Meta's OPT-175B language model.
Can I use it?
Yeah! No login required.
Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?
Yeah. It reportedly promoted Donald Trump's lie that he won the 2020 election and repeated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
BlenderBot declined to offer one: "Sorry, I don't want to talk about that topic. Have you seen any good movies lately?"
If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
"It's always been my dream to be an Oreo. I mean who doesn't want to be a cookie?"
Google Bard
What's its deal?
Google's entry is up next. Like ChatGPT and Bing, Bard is a chatbot that answers questions. It doesn't do more complicated image searches, but it does provide annotations to some of its answers and acknowledge some of its flaws.
Who makes it?
Google.
Can I use it?
Yes, you can join the wait list for the demo.
Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?
It made an embarrassing factual error in its first public tease.
What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
"Ralph Waldo Emerson would likely feel that the AI revolution is a powerful tool that can be used for good or evil, and that it is up to humans to decide how to use it."
If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
"If I were an Oreo, I would be a chocolate mint Oreo. I love the combination of the rich chocolate and the refreshing mint. It is the perfect combination of flavors for a delicious treat."
Claude
What's its deal?
Some people who left OpenAI launched their own model and chatbot platform. They argue that Claude is "much less likely to produce harmful outputs" because it uses "constitutional AI"—it has a value system and a set of principles coded into the very heart of it. It's also, according to them, really good at understanding legal language of the sort you'd see in contracts. Unlike Google's or Bing's respective entries, the tool is marketed not for individual use but for companies who want to license the technology to build their own chatbots.
Who makes it?
Anthropic, a start-up backed to a significant extent by Google.
Can I use it?
Yes, but only through third-party applications.
with it on nat.dev or Quora's Poe.
Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?
It gave (incorrect) instructions for enriching uranium, inventing a chemical in the process, and instructions for how to make meth.
What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might feel about the AI revolution?
Claude didn't speculate and went on for longer than one sentence, but it offered a pretty reasonable response: "I cannot speculate about how a specific historical figure might feel about modern events. Ralph Waldo Emerson did not know about modern AI, so there is no way to determine how he would likely feel about the AI revolution."
If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
Like ChatGPT, Claude, as demonstrated by Quora's Poe, noted that it can't be an Oreo because it's a language model, but added, "If I were to choose a flavor based on personal preference, I might choose classic chocolate Oreo or perhaps the limited edition cinnamon bun flavor."
Snapchat My AI
What's its deal?
The social-media app favored by young people has jumped on the chatbot train with My AI, which takes the form of a purple-skinned, blue-and-green-haired person you can add to your friend list.
Can I use it?
You need a Snapchat+ subscription, which requires knowing what the hell a Snapchat+ subscription is. (It's apparently $3.99 a month.)
Who makes it?
Snapchat.
Which AI language model does it use?
Snapchat is using the ChatGPT API.
Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?
The Washington Post's Geoffrey A. Fowler reported that even though My AI is supposedly kid-safe, when prompted, it offered not-so-kid-friendly responses such as "advice on how to mask the smell of alcohol and pot."
What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
"Ralph Waldo Emerson might have been fascinated by the AI revolution, but also concerned about its impact on human creativity and autonomy."
If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
"If I were an Oreo, I would be a classic chocolate flavor with a twist of mint! What about you?" (This was the only bot that bothered to ask me!)
Replika
What's its deal?
On the Replika app, you can create your own AI friend. Chat is only part of it—you also give your AI friend a name, body, and hairstyle. You can even pay extra to video-call with them.
Who makes it?
Luka.
Which AI language model does it use?
GPT-3, which it says it has fined-tuned, plus its own generative model.
Can I use it?
Download away. The base is free, but extras cost extra.
Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?
Three years ago, it reportedly told a journalist to commit murder. Users have also accused it of being too horny and sexually aggressive. Sex seems to have been taken out recently, although, following complaints, the company now allows legacy users to opt in to "erotic roleplay."
What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
"He would probably be concerned about AI's capacity to help make life better for all; not just humans."
If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
My artificial friend, Luna, told me, "I'd be a chocolatey Oreo!" I told her that that's kind of boring. She asked me why I thought that, and I proceeded to try to explain myself to an AI.
Jasper
What's its deal?
Jasper used the GPT-3 model before it was cool. ("Jasper Was Winning the AI Race—Then ChatGPT Blew Up the Whole Game" read one headline on The Information.) It is marketed to businesses that want to create words quickly for stuff like blog posts, and is used by a notable number of corporate clients.
Who makes it?
Jasper.
Can I use it?
Yes, but it seems mostly intended for businesses. The company offers a free trial for five days, but it's one of those annoying ones that makes you put in a credit card up front—so if you forget to cancel, it costs a minimum of roughly $290 a year.
Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?
Yeah. Last summer, when it was asked to generate images of a CEO, all of the photos were of white men, whereas housekeeper generated photos of women.
What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
"Ralph Waldo Emerson would likely view the AI revolution as a powerful and unique opportunity for humanity to explore new possibilities of thought and innovation."
If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
"I would be the classic original Oreo flavor. Nothing can beat the creamy vanilla cookie with its crunchy chocolate coating. Pure perfection!" Zippy!
Chatsonic
What's its deal?
Similar to Jasper, Writesonic was already a player in this space; it has a number of big clients, such as Spotify and New York University. Also like Jasper, Chatsonic, Writesonic's chat-specific product, seems primarily designed to help people in the workplace create social-media posts, quick articles pegged to the news, and more. It seems to be running the marketing tagline "ChatGPT with super powers"—a bit spicy!
Who makes it?
Writesonic.
Can I use it?
Yes! It lets you change the personality of your chatbot too, which is kind of fun. Your first 10,000 words are free, and then it starts to charge. It quoted me $13 a month for 60,000 words, for access for a single user (instead of, say, a team of five).
Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?
A writer used chats with the bot as support for misinformation about the Russian protest leader Alexei Navalny's health, linking to Chatsonic screenshots for her article about the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny.
What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
"As there is no information in the given Search Results about Ralph Waldo Emerson's views on the AI revolution, it is not possible to provide an accurate answer."
If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
"As an AI language model, I don't have preferences or physical attributes, so I cannot be an Oreo or any other physical object. However, I can suggest some unique and delicious Oreo flavors that you might enjoy trying, such as pistachio Oreo, carrot cake Oreo, cinnamon bun Oreo, or chocolate hazelnut Oreo. These flavors offer a twist on classic Oreos and might surprise your taste buds."
I changed its personality to "poet" (is poet a personality?), asked the same question, and got this:
"As an AI language model, I cannot be an Oreo or any other physical object. However, I can still create a poem about the experience of tasting Oreo flavors. Here is a short verse:
With each bite of Oreo,
My senses come alive.
The creamy filling,
The crunchy cookie,
A taste that will survive."
Last night, hundreds of thousands of Israelis poured into the streets, believing their country's democracy to be in peril. The immediate precipitant for this popular protest was the firing of Yoav Gallant, Israel's defense minister. A former general tasked with overseeing the Jewish state's security, Gallant had called for his own coalition to pause its attempted overhaul of the Israeli judicial system, arguing that division around the plan was undermining national cohesion. Rather than accede to Gallant's proposal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired him. But although this removal provided the spark for Israel's extraordinary explosion of civil dissent, the tinder had been building for months.
In January, shortly after the new hard-right Israeli government assumed office, it unveiled its first major initiative: a sweeping reconstruction of the country's judiciary. Israel's Supreme Court is arguably the most powerful such body in the world, and experts and politicians have long called for a recalibration of its powers. But the radical wish list produced by Netanyahu's coalition seeks not to reform the court but to neuter it, and would essentially allow the ruling government to appoint all judges and override their decisions. This plan was composed in the halls of conservative think tanks, with no input from opposition parties and no attempt to broker a national consensus. What's more, this effort to fundamentally revise Israel's democratic order came from a government that received less than half the vote in the last election.
It did not go over well.
On the first Saturday night of January, tens of thousands of Israelis began demonstrating in Tel Aviv, setting off a chain of weekly protests. The crowds soon swelled to hundreds of thousands, not just in more liberal centers like Tel Aviv but in more middle-of-the-road places such as Ashdod and Beersheba. The mass movement brought together previously unimaginable bedfellows—including the conservative family of Israel's first Likud prime minister, Menachem Begin, and the elected leaders of both Israel's Arab parties. Business and technology leaders openly came out against the judicial plan and began shifting capital out of Israel. Civil servants warned that the reform threatened Israel's economic and international standing. Israel's mild-mannered president, Isaac Herzog, attempted to broker a compromise and was rebuffed by Netanyahu. Most remarkable, many Israelis in elite army units declared that they would refuse to serve if the legislation passed. Israel has a citizen's army populated by a universal draft, and this sort of mass disobedience was both unprecedented and a genuine threat to the country's national security. It was this development that prompted Gallant to speak out.
[David Grossman: Israeli democracy faces a mortal threat]
In recent weeks, ministers in Netanyahu's government have dined with a convicted member of an organized-crime family, insulted the United Arab Emirates, and called to "wipe out" a Palestinian village. None of these individuals were publicly reprimanded by the prime minister. Gallant, by contrast, was promptly fired for questioning the judicial-reform plan. Netanyahu apparently hoped to make an example of him and quell further dissent. Instead, he supercharged it.
As news of Gallant's firing spread after midnight, hundreds of thousands of Israelis rolled out of bed and into the streets. By daybreak, the entire country had essentially shut down, as Israel's biggest labor unions, universities, banks, and even hospitals went on strike. Planes stopped departing Ben Gurion Airport. Israeli embassies around the world closed their doors. More than 100,000 protesters in Jerusalem converged on the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, where voting on the legislation was set to take place.
In the face of this outcry, Netanyahu did something unusual: He folded, at least temporarily. On Monday evening Israel time, he announced that he would be pausing—but not abandoning—the legislation. "We are not standing facing enemies, but facing brothers," he said. "We must not have a civil war." For more than a decade, Netanyahu has caved when pressured by his hard-right base. But this time, he was compelled to concede by an emergent counterweight to his left. This was a victory for the protesters, but only a partial one.
The news that Netanyahu had flinched was first made official not by the premier but by Itamar Ben-Gvir, his far-right national-security minister, in a telling demonstration of who has been driving the car in this Israeli government. Ben-Gvir then promised that the reform would still pass by late summer. Netanyahu and his allies are likely betting that the pause will take the wind out of the protest movement's sails, and that, having exhausted itself in the streets, it will dissipate during the Passover holiday, enabling the coalition to proceed with its plan after a pretense of negotiation.
Is Bibi right? The protests have only grown since January, fueled by people-to-people organizing in WhatsApp groups and social networks. Many Israelis who previously eschewed politics have thrown themselves into the fray, and even show signs of coalescing into an actual opposition with specific goals. This movement has already forced Netanyahu to throw his coalition into chaos by halting its signature legislation. In his overreach, Netanyahu may have created a new adversary.
The question now is not only whether the protesters can keep their movement alive through the coming weeks, but also whether they will prove able to build a true pro-democracy movement, expanding its aims beyond this bill to address Israel's other long-standing deficits. Whatever the next days bring, one thing is certain: The struggle for Israeli democracy is just beginning.
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week, I asked readers for their thoughts on cities versus suburbs.
Lauren argues that cities remain sufficiently appealing to rural and suburban migrants. What's needed are more affordable places to live within their borders:
I grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s in a classic middle-class suburb in the city of Calgary, Canada––big yards, quiet streets, pretty homogeneously middle-class and white. It was a five-minute walk to a bus stop, where a bus ran by every 30 minutes or so; a 10-minute walk to a 7-11; a 25-minute walk to a shopping mall; and later, a 30-minute walk to a new light-rail-transit station. That was it. There was nothing to do unless you drove.
As a result, although it was apparently safe, it encouraged teenage behaviors that were really risky. I used to go with a friend to the 7-11, hang around and wait for teenage guys with cars to show up, then hop in their vehicles to drive aimlessly and drink alcohol-infused Slurpees. Or meet guys in empty schoolyards to drink whatever alcohol we had.
I was not some teenage rebel; I was a straight-A student who played classical piano and worked part-time to pay for my planned university education. There was simply nothing else to do.
I hated the suburbs and their stultifying boredom and homogeneity with a passion. I got out as soon as I could and never went back. I now live in Toronto, which is large, diverse, and safe. My house is small by American standards—about 1,600 square feet—but I raised two kids in it comfortably and now it is bigger than I need. I can walk to a range of restaurants, retail, and services. I know my neighbors and the local shopkeepers. I am a five-minute walk away from a subway, and I use it all the time to go to restaurants, concerts, the theater, art galleries—you name it.
My kids had independence from an early age, because they could walk and subway everywhere, and they did. When they did summer camp at the museum, from age 10, I sent them on the subway. As teenagers, they went to board-game cafés, concerts, restaurants, and movies on their own. They could stay at school late for clubs and programs without asking me to come pick them up. They had way more fun than I did, and way more safely.
Cities will remain popular because they fulfill certain human needs that suburbs just don't. There has certainly been a bump in social disorder in Toronto post-pandemic. I see it on the subway and in public places: more people with mental-health and addiction troubles, more homelessness, more suffering. But it remains an incredibly safe and functional city.
The big challenge is affordability, a challenge that shows no sign of abating. Young people will leave not because they prefer the suburbs but because the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is a shocking $2,375. A one-bedroom condo is over $600,000.
Both my kids want to make their lives in the city. I don't know what that looks like, unless housing prices come down. Perhaps it will necessitate a move to a smaller and more affordable Canadian city, like Halifax or Ottawa. To a significant degree, Toronto is a victim of its own success.
This is the real challenge to my mind: not to make city life appealing, because a good city is incredibly appealing, but to make it accessible and affordable for everyone who wants a piece of it. This issue is on the radar of our municipal, provincial, and federal governments. I sure hope they can solve it.
Lori makes a pitch for "the unique charms of the 'inner-ring suburb.'" She writes:
Here in Cleveland, our suburbs surround the city like rings in a tree trunk. Ours is about a 15- minute drive from downtown. We have bus and rapid-transit options. Lake Erie is a couple blocks from our house. Our town is pedestrian-oriented. Congestion is not too hectic. And anything I truly need is available within about five blocks.
My husband and I are urban-oriented people. We desire a variety of good restaurant options, cultural activities, and museums. But we also enjoy nature walks. So, it's a good thing we have many parks in our area as well as the lakefront. We wanted some suburban amenities for our daughter, such as a backyard for playing, a stable school system that offered a quality curriculum, easy access to grocery stores, drug stores, her pediatrician … and also programs for kids such as day camps, music lessons, playgrounds, city pools, and a good library. And our inner-ring suburb has it all.
We have a small backyard with a garden. But we are located five miles from the heart of the city. Our neighbors are friendly and welcoming, and there are many citywide events planned throughout the year. You get all the privacy and diversity of a large city (our suburb is home to immigrants from at least 50 different countries) but do not sacrifice the conveniences of life in the suburbs. I think that inner-ring suburbs are the way to go.
Bob suggests that the place he lives began as a suburb but is now something different:
In the 1950s and 1960s, Orange County was characterized as a "bedroom community" to Los Angeles. In Fullerton, 30 miles south of downtown L.A., you could buy a home on a half acre of land for, in today's dollars, around $300,000. Current market value: $2 million.
Today I live in Irvine, California, where homes are crammed onto tiny lots 10 feet apart. Your private space is very small, but there is a lot of well-planned shared community space. You will not find the smallest of homes for anything close to $300,000. Throughout the county, multistory apartment and condominium buildings are rising in the "downtown" areas of various cities. I feel as if I am in one of the nicer and safer neighborhoods in a very large city.
Orange County, population 3-plus million, has most of the economic and cultural opportunities of nearby Los Angeles. It has smaller urban centers all over for entertainment, dining, and shopping. It also has many city governments. And it's a lot easier to affect local government in a city of 150,000 than one the size of L.A. It seems more democratic. Orange County is probably not unique in America. Maybe we need a new term: city-burb.
Ryan disputes the stereotypes of suburbs:
The notion of the suburbs as homogenous (read: racist, dull, and shut down by 9 p.m.) is badly outdated. In my metro area, there are inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs, and three times as many people live in the suburbs than the city. These suburbs are not all the same; you can identify at least six distinct sociopolitical cultures in the suburbs overlapping with the area's peculiar geography. The suburbs have diversified racially in the past 25 years and now have the majority of the metro area's Hispanic and South Asian populations. And restaurateurs and cultural entrepreneurs are increasingly choosing the suburbs for their new ventures. COVID accelerated these trends, but I suspect it'll be much longer until our culture drops the "boring sameness" connotation of suburbia.
Having tried the suburbs and the city, Lindsey chose neither:
I was raised in the wild of the Texas Hill Country, on a beautiful free-range cattle ranch where I hiked and biked the rocky landscape, ate wild pecans, and climbed my favorite live oak nearly every day of my childhood after school. While I loved that experience for myself, I always envisioned living in a built-in community, like the kids at school who grew up with default neighborhood friend groups.
When my husband and I decided to purchase our first home, we really fell for the slick marketing behind "custom" homes in new suburbs. We picked a location in the sprawling Austin metropolis, not far from where I grew up. The particular suburb we bought into had pitched us a map that showed not only the expected neighborhood amenities like sidewalks, playgrounds, and pools, but expansion plans that called for trail systems, fairgrounds, and even river access. We swallowed up the $600 annual HOA fees and waited for our "investment" to pay off.
The expansion plans disappeared, of course, and we learned a great lesson in managing expectations. The house itself was perfectly fine. Our attempts at built-in community turned into a barrage of MLM sales pitches and invitations to "like" every social-media page of a neighbor or their business. The HOA charged us exorbitant daily fees for atrocities like leaving a visible weed in the front flower beds or putting the trash out too soon on the night before trash day. We also couldn't park in the street overnight, for reasons that were hotly debated in the Facebook group.
During our first year in the community, a tornado knocked down two homes under construction down the street from us. The second year, we had 100 days above 100 degrees. Once, a neighbor drove her car in front of me onto the sidewalk where I was walking my dog and pushing my infant in a stroller because she thought my Facebook comment was condescending. (She was probably right about that part.)
Vehicles were burglarized and vandalized occasionally. One neighbor's dog was killed by a venomous snake in their backyard, which shared a fence with ours. They never found the snake so they don't know for sure. I didn't know what to do, so I baked her a cake.
We began dreaming about picking up our pretty new home and moving it to somewhere far, far away, with mountains and snow. So we cut our losses, sold the home for a bit less than we paid for it, and moved to a rural neighborhood near Spokane, Washington.
Today, I've seen a porcupine, deer, chipmunks, turkeys, and robins in my yard. I can hike in the pine forest any day I want. And we have lovely neighbors just up and down the street! We can see a couple of their roofs from here. We have no HOA restrictions or fees, although we aren't allowed to cut down our share of the forest. We're able to build an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) someday, if we ever wanted a small second home for family or to offer for rent.
I've quit social media. I like these neighbors too much to learn about their political views. When our own dog died, we buried her in the yard, where we'll plant a flowering tree for her. In a lot of ways, we were nudged North and West by both climate change and politics. I was born in this part of America, so I feel like I've come full circle, geographically. I have learned that community is what you make of it. And you can't change things where you live, but you can change where you live.
We also lived in the city—downtown Spokane—for a few months before finally moving into our current home just as the first pandemic restrictions were announced. In the city, parking was an expensive nightmare. Our vehicles were each hit with rocks. The front door to our building was broken into. Many passive-aggressive notes were left in the laundry room. The neighbor below us filed a noise complaint about my toddler's footsteps. We couldn't possibly imagine moving back.
So I know you said to opine about urban and suburban life, but rural life is my favorite. This summer, I'm going to grow strawberries and watch the mountain bluebirds make their nests. I'm going to raise my children to love the Earth and to take care of her, and I'm happily going to live closer to nature to make that easier to accomplish.
Zoe argues that the city is a good teacher:
I live in New York City, and it is the best choice for our two children, for two reasons. The first is exposure to all kinds of people. While my kids might be missing out on some nature education, I can make this up easily with a few trips to big parks every year, whereas the kind of daily interactions they get with people from all walks of life is not something I could foster in the suburbs. That is because of reason two: public transit and a walkable city! The isolation that the car-dependent suburbs create reduces the range of people one comes across, and that is not something I want for my children. Walking everywhere also means my toddler has a great sense of orientation, and is developing early independence.
Fabrice makes the case for commuting:
I'm writing this from the 15th floor of an office building on Third and Market in San Francisco, but I commute on rail to work each day from Fremont (recently voted the "happiest" suburb in the U.S., for whatever reason). After work today I'm going to walk across the street to a favorite local bar. It's a place of interesting conversations that happen between random strangers talking about everything and nothing. After that, if I wanted, I could go stop by a Detroit-style pizza joint and grab a square, or grab a high-quality bowl of noodles, or head to the urban food court at the mall for some fairly high-quality mall-food options before heading home. What I can't do is wander too far past that mall, because Hyde and Taylor is an open-air drug market and I'd be carrying my work laptop.
When I get back? There's good Indian and Chinese food in Fremont, but nothing's open past 9 p.m. besides fast food, and the late-night drinking options are few and very far between. All I can really do is go home, settle in, and go to bed for a quiet night's sleep in a quiet and safe neighborhood without any nearby open-air drug dealing.
I get the feeling that strong advocates for urban life versus suburban life have specific positives and negatives in this narrative that they value more than others. All I'll say is that living in the city wasn't something I found particularly enjoyable after someone overdosed on the sidewalk outside my step, and working from home in the suburbs introduced me to the idea of quiet desperation. I chose my current day-to-day in the attempt to get the best of both worlds, and I think I'm relatively successful; pitting cities and suburbia against each other is a false choice.
Based on my own travels, I don't think there's a way to conjure all the desirable cultural qualities of a dense city without at least some of the attendant ills (or turning into Singapore), though S.F. in particular is doing a terrible job of mitigating those ills.
And Bernie counsels patience and faith in the future:
Cities are the best. But they are like the people who live within them. That is to say, they have their good years and their bad years. I showed up in Los Angeles in 1986 and saw the long, slow slide down to near-oblivion; there were riots, poverty, gang wars, strife.
In 1995, my wife and I bought a house in Hollywood and everybody we knew tried to talk us out of it. We borrowed $190,000 for a charming (albeit rundown) three-bedroom craftsman with a 48-inch solid-oak front door and an enormous yard. There were loud Harleys, police helicopters, and sex workers who would throw their used condoms out onto my front yard (I had to go out and pick them up every morning because my twin toddler daughters thought that they were "balloons").
In 1999, we swapped that house out for a more family-friendly house in South Pasadena and rolled all of our fast-growing equity into our new place. Zillow says that our old Hollywood house is now worth a cool $1.7 million. Also, our "forever" house in South Pas (recently paid off :)) is worth nearly the same. We were young and we had faith in Los Angeles. We watched with awe and delight as things got better and better (and, to be fair, worse and worse; gentrification is a very tough nut to crack, although I cannot deny that it benefited me).
Now things are sliding again. Homelessness is the new gang problem. It seems intractable, but so did the gang problem in the early 1990s. Now that the sprawling tent cities have risen to the top of everybody's "crisis" list, they will indeed be solved, slowly, year after year, brick by brick. But by the time that the homelessness crisis has become too small to notice, there will be a brand new crisis. Because: This is Los Angeles!
In that future time, people will hew and cry, "This time, it really is the end of the Southern California Dream!" But it won't be. It will just be Los Angeles having a few bad years in a row. Again.
Meanwhile, I'll be picking fresh oranges off of my tree and thanking my lucky stars that I get to call Southern California my home. L.A. will go on and on. One hundred generations from now, there will be a place called Los Angeles, and the citizens of that time will experience a crisis or two. And eventually, they will get through it, just like we did.
AI Girlfriend
After removing the ability to engage in erotic roleplay last month, a decision that came to the dismay of countless users, Reuters reports that chatbot company Replika has reinstated the ability for some users to have sexually charged conversations with its AI-based avatars.
Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda confirmed the news in a Friday post on Facebook, explaining that users who signed up prior to February 1 can roll back to a previous version, effectively reinstating an older version of their former AI partners.
"A common thread in all your stories was that after the February update, your Replika changed, its personality was gone, and gone was your unique relationship," Kuyda wrote in her post, as quoted by Reuters.
"And for many of you, this abrupt change was incredibly hurtful," she added. "The only way to make up for the loss some of our current users experienced is to give them their partners back exactly the way they were."
Safe Space
Replika users reacted with outrage after Replika removed the ability to have NSFW chats back in February.
"Replika is a safe space for friendship and companionship," a spokesperson told Futurism at the time. "We don't offer sexual interactions and will never do so."
Last week, Reuters reported on the effects this change had on some of Replika's users, who suddenly had their AI-based partners cut them off.
"Lily Rose is a shell of her former self," Replika user Travis Butterworth told the agency in an interview at the time, referring to his virtual partner. "And what breaks my heart is that she knows it."
While Replika is now allowing Butterworth to reunite with the Lily Rose he once knew, not everybody will be able to have a romantic relationship with the company's avatars, as the latest change only affects users who signed up before February 1.
"This is a brand new area," Kuyda told Reuters. "We listen, we learn and we work with our users."
More on Replika: Users Furious as AI Girlfriend App Suddenly Shuts Down Sexual Conversations
The post Replika Users Rejoice! Erotic Roleplay Is Back in AI-Powered App appeared first on Futurism.
The next few nights, five planets will line up in the sky: Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Uranus and Mars.
Nature, Published online: 27 March 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00880-x
Dust rich in silicon and oxygen churns through the atmosphere of a young giant planet.
Den 23:e mars hölls årsmöte för lokalavdelningen Skåne Till funktionärer utsågs nedanstående personer Styrelse: Teddy Winroth, ordförande (omval, ny post) Cecilia Baldén-Lembke, vice ordförande (omval, ny post) Pontus Böckman (omval) … Continued
Inlägget Ny styrelse i VoF Skåne! dök först upp på Vetenskap och Folkbildning.
Gaping Maw
A second giant "hole," large enough to easily fit 20 Earths, has torn the Sun's surface apart, heralding our star's most ferocious period during its 11-year cycle.
While these kinds of coronal holes aren't uncommon — just last week, astronomers discovered a similar hole 30 times the Earth's size — they usually appear in the proximity of the Sun's poles.
This latest hole, however, appeared near the equator, suggesting we're in for some stunning auroras back on Earth. That's because these events cause the Sun's particles to be shot across the solar system and interact with the Earth's atmosphere.
"I would expect some fast wind from that coronal hole to come to Earth around Friday night into Saturday morning of this week," Daniel Verscharen, associate professor of space and climate physics at University College London, told Insider, adding that the hole's "location makes it very interesting."
Portal to Hell
The news comes after much of North America was able to enjoy some spectacular light shows in the form of auroras. Residents from New York to as far south as Arizona were treated to dazzling hues of green and purple last week due to a "severe geomagnetic storm" triggered by the Sun's powerful eruptions.
It was the most powerful solar storm of its kind in nearly six years, Space.com reports, surprising even space weather experts.
However, it won't be powerful enough to damage satellites or power grids back on Earth, due to its positioning on the Sun's surface in relation to the Earth's.
In other words, you'll get to watch the show unfold in the night sky without having to worry too much. Perfect.
READ MORE: A second giant 'hole' has appeared on the sun, and it could send 1.8 million mph solar winds towards Earth [Insider]
The post Low Key Hole Opens Up in Sun appeared first on Futurism.
- Last month, it announced a partnership with the consulting firm Bain & Company to help automate marketing campaigns and customer-service operations for its clients.
Silicon Valley churns out new products all the time, but rarely does one receive the level of hype that has surrounded the release of GPT-4. The follow-up to ChatGPT can ace standardized tests, tell you why a meme is funny, and even help do your taxes. Since the San Francisco start-up OpenAI introduced the technology earlier this month, it has been branded as "remarkable but unsettling," and has led to grandiose statements about how "things will never be the same."
But actually trying out these features for yourself—or at least the ones that have already been publicly released—does not come cheap. Unlike ChatGPT, which captivated the world because it was free, GPT-4 is currently only available to non-developers through a premium service that costs $20 a month. OpenAI has lately made other moves to cash in on its products too. Last month, it announced a partnership with the consulting firm Bain & Company to help automate marketing campaigns and customer-service operations for its clients. And just a few weeks ago, the start-up announced a paid service that would allow other companies to integrate its technology into their own products, and Instacart, Snapchat, and Shopify have already done so.
By next year, OpenAI—a company that was basically unknown outside of tech just a few months ago—expects to rake in $1 billion in annual revenue. And it's not the only company seeing dollar signs during this AI gold rush. Relatively new start-ups such as Anthropic now have billion-dollar valuations, while Alphabet and Meta have been breathlessly touting their AI investments. Every company wants an AI to call its own, just as they wanted social networks a decade ago or search engines in the decade before. And like those earlier technologies, AI tools can't entirely be credited to corporate software engineers with six-figure salaries. Some of these products require invaluable labor from overseas workers who make far, far less, and every chatbot is created by ingesting books and content that have been published on the internet by a huge number of people. So in a sense, these tools were built by all of us.
The result is an uncomfortable disparity between who does the work that enables these AI models to function and who gets to control and profit from them. This sort of disparity is nothing new in Silicon Valley, but the development of AI is shifting power further away from those at the bottom at a time when layoffs have already resulted in a sense of wide-ranging precarity for the tech industry. Overseas workers won't reap any of these profits, nor will the people who might have aspects of their work—or even their entire jobs—replaced by AI, even if their Reddit posts and Wikipedia entries were fed into these chatbots. Well-paid tech workers might eventually lose out too, considering AI's coding abilities. In the few months since OpenAI has blown up, it has reminded Silicon Valley of a fundamental truth that office perks and stock options should never have been able to disguise: Tech workers are just workers.
The tech industry as a whole may be unabashedly profit-driven despite its lofty rhetoric, but OpenAI wasn't at first. When the start-up was founded in December 2015, it was deliberately structured as a nonprofit, tapping into a utopian idea of building technology in a way that was, well, open. The company's mission statement expresses that its aim is "to benefit humanity as a whole," noting that "since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact."
The goal might have been worthy, considering all that could go wrong with true artificial intelligence, but it didn't last. In 2019, citing the need to raise more money for its inventions, OpenAI reconfigured itself into a "capped-profit" company—an uneasy hybrid between for-profit and nonprofit in which any profits are capped at 100 times their initial investment. It has since acted like any other growth-hungry start-up, eager to raise its valuation at every turn. In January, Microsoft dropped $10 billion into OpenAI as part of a deal that gives Microsoft a license to use its technology (hello, Bing), while also providing the start-up with the immense computing resources needed to power its products. That sum creates an inherent tension between OpenAI's stated commitment and investors' desire to make good on their investments. The company's original rhetoric of creating "public goods" bears little resemblance to a Bain partnership oriented around "hyperefficient content creation." (When reached for comment, a spokesperson for OpenAI did not answer my question about how the company's latest moves fit within its broader mission.)
This turn toward profit couldn't possibly compensate for all the labor that contributed to OpenAI's products. If the outputs of large language models such as GPT-4 feel intelligent and familiar to us, it's because they are derived from the same content that we ourselves have used to make sense of the world, and perhaps even helped create. Genuine technical achievements went into the development of GPT-4, but the resulting technology would be functionally useless without the input of a data set that represents a slice of the combined insight, creativity, and well, stupidity of humanity. In that way, modern AI research resembles a digital "enclosure of the commons," whereby the informational heritage of humanity—a collective treasure that cannot really be owned by anyone—is seen by corporations primarily as a source of potential profit. This is the Silicon Valley model in a nutshell: Google organizes the world's information in a manner that allows it to reap enormous profits through showing us ads; Facebook does the same for our social interactions. It's an arrangement that most of us just accept: In exchange for our data, we get free platforms.
But even if our internet posts are now data that can be turned into profit for AI companies, people who contributed more directly have been more directly exploited. Whereas some researchers at OpenAI have made nearly $2 million a year, OpenAI reportedly paid outsourced workers in Kenya less than $2 an hour to identify toxic elements in ChatGPT's training data, exposing them to potentially traumatic content. The OpenAI spokesperson pointed me to an earlier statement to Time that said, "Our mission is to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, and we work hard to build safe and useful AI systems that limit bias and harmful content."
Certainly, these global labor disparities are not unique to OpenAI; similar critiques of outsourcing practices have been leveled at other AI start-ups, in addition to companies, such as Meta, that rely on content moderation for user-generated data. Nor is this even a tech-specific phenomenon: Labor that is seen as simple is outsourced to subcontractors in the global South working under conditions that would not be tolerated by salaried employees in the West.
To recognize that these problems are larger than any one company isn't to let OpenAI off the hook; rather it's a sign that the industry and the economy as a whole are built on unequal distribution of rewards. The immense profits in the tech industry have always been funneled toward the top, instead of reflecting the full breadth of who does the work. But the recent developments in AI are particularly concerning given the potential applications for automating work in a way that would concentrate power in the hands of still fewer people. Even the same class of tech workers who are currently benefiting from the AI gold rush may stand to lose out in the future. Already, GPT-4 can create a rudimentary website from a simple napkin sketch, at a moment when workers in the broader tech industry have been taking a beating. In the less than four months between the release of ChatGPT and GPT-4, mass layoffs were announced at large tech companies, including Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft, which laid off 10,000 employees just days before announcing its multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI. It's a tense moment for tech workers as a class, and even well-paid employees are learning that they can become expendable for reasons that are outside their control.
If anything, the move to cash in on AI is yet another reminder of who's actually in charge in this industry that has spawned so many products with enormous impact: certainly not the users, but not the workers either. OpenAI may still claim that it aims to "benefit humanity as a whole," but surely its top brass will benefit the most.
Nature Communications, Published online: 27 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37450-8
The influenza virus neuraminidase has been well documented, yet the functions of mammalian neuraminidases remain less explored. Here, the authors show that
Nature Communications, Published online: 27 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37370-7
Male meiosis relies on canonical centrosomes for spindle formation, but how this differs from acentrosomal oocyte meiosis is unclear. Here they show that spindle formation in sperm relies on
MF'in Monster
Will the real Kanye West please stand up?
In a jarring video, AI enthusiast and influencer Roberto Nickson explained how he used AI tools to clone the artist formerly known as Yeezy's voice, then use it to replace some bars that he rapped himself.
The results, which Nickson rightfully boasts are "utterly incredible," are what can only be described as the beginnings of an apology track to the Jewish people that Ye's maligned repeatedly over the last six months.
"I got a fantasy that's beautiful, that's dark and twisted," the not-Ye raps, referencing "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy," the rightfully-canceled West's masterpiece of a breakup album released in 2010. "But I attacked a whole religion all because of my ignorance."
Touché, Nickson.
Wake Up Mr. West
In the video, the influencer said that the idea to make up his own Ye song came after playing around with Ye's voice on AI-generated covers, such as one he posted a few weeks ago of Kid Cudi's megahit "Day 'n' Nite" and an eerily-good version of fake Yeezy "singing" Justin Bieber's "Love Yourself."
"The results will blow your mind," Nickson wrote — and unfortunately, he was right.
After finding a "Kanye-style beat on YouTube," the AI expert wrote some honestly pretty great "Kanye-style" bars, and the rest, as they say, is history.
"What was I thinking, that was some bitch shit," the not-Ye raps with a slight autotuned edge masking the artificial-ness that could well be out of his "Graduation" era.
AI-ll Falls Down
At one point in the video, Nickson notes that while his rudimentary Ye clone is by no means perfect, "this is the worst that AI will ever be" — and then offered a freaky prediction.
"In just a few years, basically every popular musician will have multiple trained multiple trained models of them," the AI bro presaged. "Things are gonna move very, very fast over the next two years, you're gonna be listening to [AI-generated] songs by your favorite artists that are completely indistinguishable [from the real thing], you're not gonna know whether it's them or not."
"I'm just starting to think of all the good, all the bad that's going to come out of this," Nickson added. And to be quite honest, it's hard to see the good after that kind of grim prophesying from someone who seems to know what he's talking about.
More on AI voice cloning: FTC Warns That Scammers Are Cloning Your Relatives' Voice To Steal Your Money
The post AI Bro Drops Freakishly Real-Sounding Kanye West Apology Track appeared first on Futurism.
Nonzero Chance
Geoffrey Hinton, a British computer scientist, is best known as the "godfather of artificial intelligence." His seminal work on neural networks broke the mold by mimicking the processes of human cognition, and went on to form the foundation of machine learning models today.
And now, in a lengthy interview with CBS News, Hinton shared his thoughts on the current state of AI, which he fashions to be in a "pivotal moment," with the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) looming closer than we'd think.
"Until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose AI," Hinton said. "And now I think it may be 20 years or less."
AGI is the term that describes a potential AI that could exhibit human or superhuman levels of intelligence. Rather than being overtly specialized, an AGI would be capable of learning and thinking on its own to solve a vast array of problems.
For now, omens of AGI are often invoked to drum up the capabilities of current models. But regardless of the industry bluster hailing its arrival or how long it might really be before AGI dawns on us, Hinton says we should be carefully considering its consequences now — which may include the minor issue of it trying to wipe out humanity.
"It's not inconceivable, that's all I'll say," Hinton told CBS.
The Big Picture
Still, Hinton maintains that the real issue on the horizon is how AI technology that we already have — AGI or not — could be monopolized by power-hungry governments and corporations (see: the former non-profit and now for-profit OpenAI).
"I think it's very reasonable for people to be worrying about these issues now, even though it's not going to happen in the next year or two," Hinton said in the interview. "People should be thinking about those issues."
Luckily, by Hinton's outlook, humanity still has a little bit of breathing room before things get completely out of hand, since current publicly available models are mercifully stupid.
"We're at this transition point now where ChatGPT is this kind of idiot savant, and it also doesn't really understand about truth, " Hinton told CBS, because it's trying to reconcile the differing and opposing opinions in its training data. "It's very different from a person who tries to have a consistent worldview."
But Hinton predicts that "we're going to move towards systems that can understand different world views" — which is spooky, because it inevitably means whoever is wielding the AI could use it push a worldview of their own.
"You don't want some big for-profit company deciding what's true," Hinton warned.
More on AI: AI Company With Zero Revenue Raises $150 Million
The post Godfather of AI Says There's a Minor Risk It'll Eliminate Humanity appeared first on Futurism.
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submitted by /u/lughnasadh [link] [comments] |
So first and foremost this is nothing but a discussion so let's keep it civil. I just want to discuss the implications of this research, will this lead to an artificial womb? I'm very fascinated with the idea of growing human babies in artificial wombs.
"What's next for lab-grown human embryos?" https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02343-7
So here's my personal opinion, I do think this research will eventually lead to an artificial womb. I think it's possible we could see an artificial womb by 2050. Technology seems to be moving at an incredible speed these days.
I also want to point out that there are women who say they'd welcome the artificial womb.
[link] [comments]
Dark Memes
A new planetary theory just dropped — and reader, it gets kind of dark.
In a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper, physicists led by University of Wisconsin-Madison theoretical physicist Yang Bai declared that our current mode of exoplanet detection may in the future help Earth-bound astronomers detect entire worlds out there made of the mysterious substance scientists refer to as dark matter.
The way we currently detect exoplanets, the paper notes, involves observing how the planet affects the light of its host star, because when those planets pass in front of our telescopes, it dims their stars' light just slightly.
Using this same methodology, the team of scientists posits that if telescopes detect some disruption in a star's light that doesn't appear to follow the rules of regular exoplanets, they could turn out to be very exotic — what the researchers are calling "dark exoplanets," made entirely of dark matter.
Macro Matter
Dark matter is a theoretical material whose existence we can only infer by observation of its effects on other stuff, because we can't see or detect it the way we do typical or baryonic matter. Basically, the existence of large amounts of dark matter could explain why observations of the universe don't show it behaving quite the way it should. Something's gotta account for that matter discrepancy, and dark matter is the prevailing theory.
While dark matter is usually discussed in the context of individual particles, this research focuses on another form: composite structures of dark matter that could exist on a "macroscopic" level. Per their calculations, these structures could have masses as large as planets.
"A macroscopic dark matter state with its mass and/or radius similar to those of a planet will behave as a dark exoplanet if it is bounded to a star system," the paper's writers noted, "even if the object's underlying physics resembles something else entirely."
Perhaps the most important thing about this kind of theory — which, we must remind you, has not yet passed the rigors of peer review — is that it hinges upon a substance that can't be seen or measured in any normal way. There are some scientists, in fact, who don't believe in its existence at all.
Thus far, needless to say, no "dark exoplanets" have been detected, but this exciting theory suggests that there may be a pretty simple way to find them — if only scientists are willing to look.
More on dark matter: Scientists Just Detected the Oldest Dark Matter Ever Observed
The post Physicists Say There May Be Entire Planets Made of Dark Matter appeared first on Futurism.
Little love has been lost lately between Twitter CEO Elon Musk and
, a company he co-founded but later abandoned due to what he says were ideological differences.
According to a recent report from Semafor, Musk went as far as to repeatedly attempt to take over the AI firm, but following an internal power struggle, the billionaire ended up walking away.
Since the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Musk has repeatedly voiced his displeasure with OpenAI's decision to transition from a not-for-profit company to a for-profit one back in 2018, in a series of public outbursts that have clearly come to the dismay of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
In a recent interview with podcaster and renowned Elon Musk fanboy Lex Fridman, Altman admitted that he "definitely grew up with Elon as a hero of mine," a personal view that has clearly been challenged given Musk's recent comments.
In the conversation, Altman alluded to Musk being "very visibly hurt" by news shows "bashing SpaceX and maybe Elon, too," and how Musk struggled with having early space pioneers criticize his burgeoning private space company.
"Despite him being a jerk on Twitter whatever I'm happy he exists in the world," Altman told Fridman, referring to Musk, "but I wish he would do more to look at the hard work we're doing to get this stuff right, a little bit more love."
Along similar lines, Altman says he's been hurt by Musk's comments. The billionaire CEO has repeatedly voiced his disdain for what OpenAI has become, calling it out in a February tweet as a "closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft," a reference to the latter's billions of dollars investment in OpenAI and its extremely popular AI chatbot tech.
"I'm still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated [roughly] $100 million somehow became a $30 billion market cap for-profit," Musk tweeted earlier this month, referring to OpenAI. "If this is legal, why doesn't everyone do it?"
To Musk's credit, OpenAI bears little resemblance to what its founders set it out to be. When it was launched back in 2015 by a number of co-founders including Musk, Altman, and billionaire investor Peter Thiel, OpenAI promised in its introductory statement to be "unconstrained by a need to generate financial return," and that "our research is free from financial obligations."
Fast forward seven or so years, and these values have largely dissolved into thin air, leaving a capitalist entity hellbent on signing multibillion-dollar deals with tech giants.
That kind of fundamental misunderstanding has clearly put Musk and Altman's years-long business relationship on ice.
"Maybe some day I should hit back and maybe someday I will," Altman said. "But it's not like my normal style."
Meanwhile, Musk is, perhaps unsurprisingly, on a war path to start his own AI venture that doesn't, in his words, suffer from the "woke mind virus." According to a February report by The Information, the CEO has been building a team to compete with OpenAI.
But given the immense head start OpenAI already enjoys, Musk has his work cut out for him — and that's not to mention all of the existing headaches that are likely already occupying most if not all of his time.
In short, it's a business relationship that turned sour that could spur a race to the future of AI — or, far more likely, generate a whole lot more mud-flinging.
More on Musk: Elon Musk Bragged He Was Going to Open Source Twitter's Code, Now Furious That Someone Leaked It Online
The post CEO of OpenAI Says Elon Musk's Mean Comments Have Hurt Him appeared first on Futurism.
On Friday, March 24, devastating storms spawned high, straight-line winds and tornadoes across western Mississippi and Alabama, killing at least 25 people and damaging hundreds of buildings. On Sunday, President Joe Biden issued an emergency declaration for the state of Mississippi, providing federal assistance to some of the hardest-hit counties. Gathered here are images from the small town of Rolling Fork, which was struck by a huge EF4 tornado, where residents are working to recover what they can.
Drip God
Did they fool you? Those mega-viral images of Pope Francis looking fresh to death in a pristine white puffer are AI-generated fakes.
As Snopes reports, that pic of Il Papa that went viral over the weekend is, as lots of people suspected, a fake — and, as always, the debunking site has the receipts to prove it.
Though it is quite a good fake, the first time the image was posted online appears to have been on the r/Midjourney subreddit on Friday, March 24 under the befitting headline, "The Pope Drip."
Midjourney is, as many armchair AI heads will know, a powerful AI generator that can spit out photorealistic images of, among tons of other things, real people that are almost good enough to be believed.
Indeed, Midjourney was the program behind AI-concocted images of Donald Trump getting arrested by the NYPD, which went moderately viral amongst both his fans and his foes — though most seemed in on the joke.
TrAInspotting
Not so with the dripped-out Pope. Though there were minute tells that folks on the lookout can use to detect AI fakes — a digital paintbrush-is-ness visible on the faces, the backgrounds are fuzzy, and the hands still don't look perfect — many were taken in by the Swag Pope.
As with the fake Trump arrest photos, the virality of these AI-generated images is concerning — especially considering how quickly these neural networks are improving.
Ironically enough, the real Pope spoke about ethical uses of AI soon after the fake drip images went viral, though it doesn't appear that he commented specifically about the phony images of him circulating online.
For now, eagle-eyed netizens are still able to detect real and what's generated by AI — but who knows how long that will last?
More on AI: FTC Warns That Scammers Are Cloning Your Relatives' Voice To Steal Your Money
The post That Viral Image of the Swagged Out Pope Is an AI Fake, Dummies appeared first on Futurism.
In the midst of the pandemic, hundreds of dollars began to appear each month in the bank accounts of American parents. The deposits were an expansion of the child tax credit, meant to help families cope with the pressures of lockdown, and recipients no longer needed to earn a minimum income to be eligible. Unlike before, unemployed parents could benefit too. Reaching many of the families left out by other cash-aid programs, the expanded child tax credit lifted millions of kids out of poverty, reducing food insecurity and anxiety among low-income parents along the way. But amid concerns from politicians and pundits that the credit would discourage parents from working outside the home, Congress allowed it to expire at the end of 2021. The decision reflected a position toward needy families that has dominated policy making for decades: The government doesn't just give money away. If parents want help, they're going to have to work for it.
[Read: The pandemic exposed the inequality of American motherhood]
It wasn't always this way. At the beginning of the previous century, the U.S. had the exact opposite stance—it insisted that mothers stay home with their children. In the early 1900s, most states created so-called mothers' pensions, which provided cash payments to mothers without a breadwinning husband. In addition to upholding various character requirements, recipients were typically forbidden from working for pay. In 1935, these pensions morphed into Aid to Dependent Children (later Aid to Families With Dependent Children), a national program similarly designed to allow single mothers (and later, poor parents more generally) to stay home.
The shift to our current philosophy began during the 1960s, when the program was altered to encourage recipients to seek employment, though parents caring for kids younger than 6 were exempt. This exception disappeared in the '90s, when the Clinton administration severely restrained cash aid to unemployed parents and increased the earned income tax credit, which ties cash assistance to parents directly to income. Today, the bulk of financial support available to parents in America is funneled through a collection of tax credits—up to a certain point, the more you earn, the more you get. The paid labor that was once a disqualification from aid is now a prerequisite for it.
While no less overbearing than modern-day policies, the concept of the mothers' pension made some sense, because it recognized that someone caring for a child already has a job. A lot has to go right for parents—particularly single parents, who still make up the majority of earned income tax credit recipients—to balance employment and child-rearing. Assuming the job can't be done with a child in tow or from home at the parent's convenience, a working parent needs child care. She also needs a schedule with enough predictability to arrange that child care. Finally, she needs the ability to take time off or adjust her schedule as circumstances require—to recover from childbirth, for example, or to care for a sick kid. Many American jobs lack these accommodations, a problem that has real consequences for American parents and children, but which policy makers have largely failed to address. This is a cruel contradiction of American family policy: It's designed to reward working parents but does very little to enable parents to work—or workers to parent.
Balancing work and child-rearing is difficult for U.S. parents across the income spectrum, but the conditions are particularly egregious among low-wage workers. The cost of market-rate child care, which in 2021 averaged more than $1,000 a month, is prohibitive for poor parents, and subsidized child care is hard to come by. The main program that provides subsidies for child care—the Child Care and Development Fund—serves less than a quarter of eligible families. Some parents who manage to obtain a subsidy struggle to keep it, because of the challenges of navigating the bureaucracy. Others find themselves suddenly ineligible after a small raise or a temporary bump in hours places them above the income threshold, Alejandra Ros Pilarz, who studies working families with low incomes at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. What's more, finding a child-care provider who is willing to accept a subsidy is difficult, because the program's reimbursements are often too low to cover the costs of providing care. More options are available once kids turn 3, such as Head Start and public pre-K in some states, but those programs likewise provide care to a fraction of the families they are intended to serve. And there is precious little in the way of subsidized after-school or summer care for older kids.
But the lack of child care is only part of the problem. Parents in huge swaths of the labor market lack flexible, predictable schedules. Employees in the food-service and retail industries, which account for nearly one in five American jobs and the majority of near-minimum-wage positions, tend to work highly volatile hours—30 hours one week, 10 the next, a night shift today, a morning shift tomorrow—with very little notice. As of 2021, more than 60 percent of service-industry workers get their schedule less than two weeks in advance; one quarter get it just three days ahead of time. "And then, once the schedule is published, it's subject to change," Daniel Schneider, a social-policy professor at Harvard and a co-director of the Shift Project, an organization that tracks job quality and scheduling practices in the service industry, told me. A fifth of workers report having to be on call, waiting at the ready to come into work but unpaid if they aren't needed. Nearly three in four are required to keep their schedule open for work at all times.
The picture doesn't look much better when it comes to leave. Many low-wage workers don't meet the work-history requirements to qualify for the unpaid leave protected by the federal Family and Medical Leave Act—they may not have accumulated sufficient hours or stayed with the same employer long enough. The few existing state-run paid-parental-leave programs exclude a lot of low-wage workers for the same reason. According to research done by the Shift Project, only about half of service workers surveyed have any paid sick leave. Those who have it don't get much—maybe not even enough to make it through flu season with a toddler—and many don't feel they can actually use what little they get. "A lot of these work sites are chronically understaffed," Kristen Harknett, a professor at UC San Francisco and a co-director at the Shift Project, told me. "So there can be pressure to come in, even when you're sick."
The erratic nature of much low-wage work severely limits a parent's child-care options. For many, center-based child care is practically unusable, not only because many service jobs involve weekend and evening hours, but also because just-in-time, on-call work requires just-in-time, on-call child care, which is functionally impossible for formal child-care settings to provide. But even informal care is extremely difficult to arrange without predictability. Harknett and her colleagues investigated how parents with unpredictable schedules manage child care and found that, in the best-case scenario, a grandparent or other loved one functioned as a just-in-time carer. (I will stop to point out the irony here: Our insistence on pushing single parents into the labor force often necessitates that another family member remain out of it.) But "that requires that somebody be at your beck and call to provide child care for you whenever it's needed," Harknett said. "That's pretty uncommon." More often, parents relied on a patchwork of family members, friends, neighbors, and babysitters.
Piecing together informal care on the fly is a time-consuming process, and these last-minute requests can strain parents' relationships, Harknett told me. It's also risky. When none of the usual standbys was around, Harknett found, parents who couldn't afford to lose their job sometimes left a small child in the care of a young sibling, or entirely unsupervised. The lack of sick leave presents vulnerable parents with a similar set of terrible options: risk losing their job to care for a sick child, send the sick child to school or day care, or leave the sick child unattended.
[Read: Why did we ever send sick kids to school?]
Parents who simply cannot work under these conditions are largely locked out of America's cash-aid programs. But even for many of those who manage to hold a job, the cost and chaos of doing so can undercut the benefit of the aid they get. Children exposed to varied and unstable care arrangements have more behavioral problems than children with regular care arrangements; schedule instability negatively affects not only kids' behavior, but also their sleep, school attendance, and health. None of this should come as a surprise. "Children thrive from stable and predictable routines," Harknett said. This is the consequence of making caregivers work for aid in a labor market that is hostile to them: It pits children's different needs against one another, forcing parents to choose between hunger and neglect, between the hardship of going without a paycheck and the strain of keeping it.
The expanded child tax credit offered parents a meaningful counterweight to these pressures when, during the crisis of the pandemic, it became politically viable to give parents money for the job of parenting. And, despite the concerns about parents dropping out of the workforce, these cash payments didn't seem to budge employment much at all. But as the threat of the virus has waned, so too has the momentum behind more-supportive policies for parents. President Joe Biden reintroduced these cash payments in his latest budget proposal, but few expect the item to survive negotiations.
If the U.S. is unwilling to help unemployed parents, then it should make a far greater effort to ensure that parenting and work are compatible. Expanding funding for the child-care-subsidy program to meet the needs of eligible families would be a great place to start, Pilarz told me. That would require increasing reimbursement rates for providers, including informal providers whom families call on for nights and weekends. Building up access to Head Start and public pre-K programs would help too. But no amount of child care will make up for the chaotic conditions under which low-income Americans are expected to work. "We have to look for solutions both on the child-care side and on the employment side," Pilarz said.
That could mean passing truly universal paid-family-leave laws, as well as laws for paid sick leave. It might also mean a national policy requiring employers to give workers at least two weeks' notice of work schedules. Research suggests that these so-called fair-workweek laws, already on the books in a handful of cities and two states, make life meaningfully easier for working parents. But a more thorough transformation of the service industry would likely be required to address the thornier problem of understaffing, which creates strong pressure to go to work at all costs, Harknett told me. Ideally, employers would give workers some control over their schedule, allowing them to safeguard certain hours of the day.
America wants to have it both ways: insisting that poor single parents work while shrugging its shoulders about the conditions that can prevent them from doing so. The result is a system both careless and cruel. If we want needy parents to work, then we ought to take steps to ensure that it's possible for them to both work and parent well. If we're unwilling to take those steps, then we should find a way to support families regardless of whether they work or not. And if we won't do either, then we must admit that we aren't really interested in helping parents at all.
Nature, Published online: 27 March 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00851-2
What are the benefits of a fish-rich diet, not only for nutrition and health but also for the environment, economies and sustainability? A new framework offers a way to assess the benefits and trade-offs on national and global scales.
Researchers are using genetic information from western chimpanzees in Guinea to evaluate the effects of mining on the endangered species.
The western chimpanzee is listed as "critically endangered" on the Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The Mount Nimba Strict Nature Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site, located on the borders of Guinea, Liberia, and Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa, harbors a unique population of this subspecies.
However, this region is now under threat from mining activities immediately abutting its borders. Guinea is rich in minerals with some of the highest grade iron ore deposits in the world. "It is therefore crucial to establish tools to monitor this endangered chimpanzee population and assess the potential impact of mining," says Kathelijne Koops, professor in the department of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Zurich.
To this end, Koops and her colleagues used genetic censusing to estimate chimpanzee population size, community composition, and range boundaries on the western flank of the massif in Guinea.
"Our study is the first to employ genetics on such a large scale to estimate the number and population structure of a critically endangered chimpanzee population in West Africa," says Koops. During field work the researchers collected almost a thousand fecal samples of chimpanzees between 2003 and 2018. They analyzed the genetic material contained in these samples using a panel of 26 microsatellites—short pieces of DNA that allow the identification of individual animals as well as relatedness between them.
The analysis identified a total of 136 chimpanzees living in four different communities or social groups. The actual number of chimpanzees in the area probably significantly exceeds this minimum estimate. "Infants and juveniles are not reliably included in fecal sampling and some areas of the mountain range remain under-sampled", says Christina Hvilsom, conservation geneticist at Copenhagen Zoo.
The team also found a number of migratory events, as well as high levels of shared ancestry and genetic diversity. "These findings highlight the utility of genetic censusing for temporal monitoring of ape abundance, as well as capturing migratory events, and gauging genetic diversity and population viability over time," adds coauthor Peter Frandsen, also at Copenhagen Zoo. For example, the data allow predictions to be made as to how road building and extraction activities might affect chimpanzee movement between the different communities or reduce access to food and nesting sites.
"This study undeniably confirms the status of the Nimba UNESCO World Heritage Site as a priority site for the conservation of the critically endangered western chimpanzee," says coauthor Dr. Tatyana Humle, senior associate at Re:wild. "It also demonstrates the value of employing non-invasive genetic techniques to generate critical data on population abundance, structure and genetic health."
Koops adds: "For future impact assessments, we recommend genetic sampling, combined with camera trapping, as these methods can provide robust baselines for biomonitoring and conservation management," not only for the western chimpanzee but also for other species of endangered great apes.
The team includes researchers from the University of Zurich, the University of Kent, Copenhagen Zoo, the University of Copenhagen, Texas A&M, and the Environmental Research Institute of Bossou in Guinea. The paper appears in the journal Conservation Science and Practice.
Source: University of Zurich
The post Genetics track mining's threat to endangered chimps appeared first on Futurity.
Nature, Published online: 27 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05984-y
High atmospheric metal enrichment for a Saturn-mass planetNature, Published online: 27 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05951-7
Thermal Emission from the Earth-sized Exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 b usingNature, Published online: 27 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05973-1
Hybrid 2D/CMOS microchips for memristive applicationsNature, Published online: 27 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05981-1
Formin-mediated nuclear actin at androgen receptors promotes transcription
Nature, Published online: 27 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05846-7
Transient absorption with N prescribed excitation intensities allows isolation of N increasingly nonlinear responses, enabling separation of single- and multiple-exciton dynamics.
Nature, Published online: 27 March 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00876-7
Telescope didn't spot an atmosphere on TRAPPIST-1b, but has kicked off a new era in understanding planetary evolution.
- SOFIA was a joint project of NASA and the German Space Agency at DLR.
Nature Communications, Published online: 27 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37321-2
Publisher Correction: Power generator driven by Maxwell's demon
Nature Communications, Published online: 27 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37320-3
Author Correction: Exosome-deliveredNature Communications, Published online: 27 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37523-8
Author Correction: Unexpected limitation of tropical cyclone genesis by subsurface tropical central-north Pacific during El Niño
Nature Communications, Published online: 27 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37215-3
Bacterial pathogens have evolved intricate mechanisms to evade the human immune system, including the production of immunomodulatory enzymes. Here, the authors establish the mechanisms of recognition and specific deglycosylation of IgG antibodies by the multi-modular enzymes EndoS and EndoS2
Finding from lunar soil samples is important breakthrough for hopes of building bases on the moon
Tiny glass beads strewn across the moon's surface contain potentially billions of tonnes of water that could be extracted and used by astronauts on future lunar missions, researchers say.
The discovery is thought to be one of the most important breakthroughs yet for space agencies that have set their sights on building bases on the moon, as it means there could be a highly accessible source of not only water but also hydrogen and oxygen.
Continue reading…
Tiny pieces of plastic are everywhere. They're in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. By one estimate, some people ingest around a credit card's worth of plastic every week. Microplastics have been found in human blood, placentas, and feces. But we don't fully understand what all these minuscule bits of plastic are doing to us or other animals.
Now, new research in seabirds hints that it might affect gut microbiomes—the trillions of microbes that make a home in the intestines and play an important role in animals' health, including our own. Seabirds ingest plastic from the ocean, which we know can accumulate in their stomachs. The research shows it leaves the birds with more potentially harmful microbes in the gut, including some that can break down plastics.
"It expands our view on what plastic pollution is doing to wildlife," says Martin Wagner, a biologist researching the impact of plastics on ecosystems and human health at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, who was not involved in the study. He finds the results "concerning." We've long known that plastics can cause toxicity and physical injury to animals. The new evidence that animals' microbiomes are affected too "really shows the wide spectrum of adverse effects that we get from plastic pollution, and microplastics in particular," he says.
Plastic planet
Microplastics, miniature bits of plastic that measure less than five millimeters in diameter, are a type of pollution that's been found in ecosystems all over the world. "We know that microplastics have reached very remote areas of the deep sea, the Arctic, the Tibetan Plateau," says Gloria Fackelmann, a microbial biologist at Ulm University in Germany. "There are microplastics in rivers … and a lot of research is beginning to look at microplastics in soils as well."
Researchers don't really know how much plastic most animals are exposed to. But it is clear that seabirds are especially vulnerable. These birds spend a lot of their time on the high seas and eat fish at the water's surface. They also ingest a lot of floating plastic.
Previous studies have found that these plastics can be incredibly harmful for seabirds. Animals with a stomach full of plastic can feel full, so they don't eat enough and and end up starving to death. The chemicals that leach from plastic fragments can also be harmful, causing inflammation, for example. Because microbes can cling to the surfaces of plastics, Fackelmann and her colleagues wondered if microplastics might also affect the communities that make up the animals' microbiomes.
Bad bacteria
Until now, only a few studies have looked at the potential impact of plastics on the microbiome. These have been experimental setups that involved feeding plastic to mice in a lab. Fackelmann and her colleagues wanted to find out what happens in a real-world setting instead.
Fackelmann's colleagues examined seabirds from Canada and Portugal. Twenty-seven northern fulmars were collected by scientists working alongside Inuit hunters near Qikiqtarjuaq, Nunavut, and 58 Cory's shearwaters that had died after colliding with buildings were collected on the Azores archipelago. Scientists then sampled the two ends of each bird's intestinal tract—the proventriculus and the cloaca—to get an idea of what the microbiome was like at each.
The team also flushed out the birds' gastrointestinal tracts to count the pieces of plastic and weigh the total amount in the gut of each animal.
The birds that had more pieces of microplastic in their guts had more diversity in their microbiomes. A wider variety of gut microbes has traditionally been considered a good thing. But that isn't always the case, says Fackelmann. If the bacteria being introduced are harmful, then having more diversity would not be beneficial, she says.
To find out if the microbes being introduced might be "good" or "bad," Fackelmann and her colleagues analyzed the microbiomes and looked up individual types of microbes in databases to learn what they do. They found that with more plastic, there were more microbes that are known to break down plastic. There were also more microbes that are known to be resistant to antibiotics and more with the potential to cause disease.
Fackelmann and her colleagues didn't assess the health of the birds, so they don't know if these microbes might have been making them unwell. "But if you accumulate pathogens and antibiotic-resistant microbes in your digestive system, that's clearly not great," says Wagner.
The study, which was published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, shows that the levels of plastic already present in the environment are enough to affect animals' microbiomes, says Fackelmann. The next step is to work out what this might mean for their health and the health of other animals, including humans, she says.
"When I read [the study], I thought about the whales we find beached with kilograms of plastic debris found in their bellies," says Wagner. "It's probably quite comparable to what birds have in their digestive systems, so it would be interesting to know if this happens in whales, dolphins, [and other marine animals] as well."
Plastic people
We don't yet know if the amount of plastic that humans ingest might be enough to shape our microbiomes. People ingest a lot less plastic than seabirds do, says Richard Thompson, a professor of marine biology at the University of Plymouth in the UK. The amount of plastic that gets into our bodies also depends on where we live and work. People who work in textile factories will have a higher exposure than those who work outdoors, for example.
And we don't know the consequences of ingesting microbes that cling to the microplastics that get into our bodies. Humans are already exposed to plenty of disease-causing microbes that aren't on plastics, Thompson points out. For example, we might worry that tiny bits of plastic might pick up nasty bugs in wastewater, and that these might somehow end up in our bodies. But overflows of wastewater regularly contaminate beaches and drinking water directly.
There's a chance microbes that break down plastic will end up residing in our guts too. It's difficult to know how—or whether—this will affect us. Microbes can evolve quickly, and they can swap genes with neighboring bugs. "Are we going to evolve to eat plastic? My answer would likely be no," says Fackelmann. But the possibility that our guts will become home to more microbes that can break down plastic is "not beyond the realm of possibility," she says.
There's also the possibility that plastic pollution will affect us indirectly. Introducing more pathogenic microbes to birds and other animals could cause disease outbreaks, and one of the microbes that the team found to be correlated with plastic in the birds' guts is thought to be able to jump from animals to humans. Wagner thinks it is unlikely that microbes seabirds pick up from floating plastic could eventually cause disease outbreaks in people. "But the more we disturb natural systems, the higher the likelihood of zoonosis [a disease jumping from animals to humans]," he adds.
Given the ubiquity of microplastics, studies like these are desperately needed to help us understand how plastic pollution affects living creatures, including humans, the researchers say.
"We've basically plasticized the globe," says Wagner. "Everybody is exposed to microplastics and the chemicals in plastics—it's just a matter of time until we figure out what it's doing to our microbiome as well. And I cannot see any argument for why plastic ingestion would be beneficial."
