Neil deGrasse Tyson
Elon Musk
The most expert on the topic of all, Oxford technology philosopher Nick Bostrom
Quite a few others.
Gassho, J
STLah
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Well, it does seem a bit "woo hoo," except that it is actually a proposition that has some serious physicists, philosophers and thinkers behind it as an actual possibility. Have a listen:
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Elon Musk
The most expert on the topic of all, Oxford technology philosopher Nick Bostrom
Quite a few others.
Gassho, J
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLE -
Maybe just a Boltzmann brain?
The Boltzmann brain argument suggests that it is more likely for a single brain to spontaneously and briefly form in a void (complete with a false memory of having existed in our universe) than it is for the universe to have come about in the way modern science thinks it actually did. It was first proposed as a reductio ad absurdum response to Ludwig Boltzmann's early explanation for the low-entropy state of our universe.
Gassho,
Kotei sat/lah today.Last edited by Kotei; 12-19-2020, 08:07 AM.義道 冴庭 / Gidō Kotei.Comment
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Well, Boltzman brain or not ... simulation or not ... this is our life, dream or not. So, chop wood and fetch water (ever if just pixels on some future teenagers gameboy), because what else is there to do?
And besides the Boltzmann Brain, we all may be just the "Kotei Brain" who (although "he" does not realize it) is actually just a kind of slug on the bottom of a pond somewhere in a distant place (if "slug" and "pond" and "place" are even the right words to describe this) which somehow became sentient and imaginative enough to believe itself (quite delusional, in fact) a sewing and gardening Zen priest living in a dreamland called "Germany" ... and to dream all of us too ... all within Kotei's slug brain.
Fortunately, he's a pretty sleepy slug, so won't wake from his dream for awhile.
(Sorry to have run long, but don't blame me ... blame Kotei's brain which is the cause of everything).
Gassho, J
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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Talk about big "Mergers & Acquisitions" ...
And planetary storms like pinballs bouncing in a machine ...Dr. Diederik Kruijssen from the Center for Astronomy at Heidelberg University, believes that they have untangled what they call the family tree of the Milky Way galaxy. ... Kruijssen's group studied globular clusters in the Milky Way -- clusters of as many as a million stars. Each globular cluster is bound tightly together by gravity and they are found in all galaxies. The researchers created computer simulations, called E-MOSAICS, which were able to simulate the path of globular clusters as small galaxy after small galaxy was absorbed by the Milky Way. ... In total, their research shed light on five galactic merging events: Sagittarius, Sequoia, Kraken, the progenitor of the Helmi streams, and Gaia-Enceladus-Sausage. Each of these collisions between the Milky Way and smaller galaxies were crucial to the history of our galaxy.
While astronomers have long known that today's galaxies have been assembled from earlier and smaller ones, the new research has helped us better understand our galactic history. ... And the process isn't over. The giant spiral galaxy Andromeda is on a current collision course with our own Milky Way. Astronomers have long thought that the Andromeda galaxy is between three and five times more massive than our own Milky Way, although more recent research suggests that it may in fact be about the same size as the Milky Way. No matter their sizes, in about four billion years, the two of them will likely collide in a spectacular show of cosmic fireworks. Astronomers even already have a new name picked out for the combined galaxy -- Milkomeda.
... So, what does this realization of the ever-changing nature of the heavens mean for humanity? Day-to-day, perhaps not much. But it reminds us of a classic truth, which is that change is inevitable.
https://us.cnn.com/2020/12/18/opinio...oln/index.html
And the following does not really qualify as science ... but the "sea foam" is neat, and who doesn't like a good dog story?A dark vortex-like storm on Neptune discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in September 2018 has reversed course to avoid an untimely demise on the blue ice giant.
The storm is 4,600 miles across -- wider than the Atlantic Ocean -- and formed in Neptune's northern hemisphere. Hubble has kept an eye on the storm since its discovery more than two years ago, and astronomers watched the storm take a southern sojourn near the planet's equator. This is essentially the kill zone, where storms go to die on Neptune and vanish without a trace. The vortex unexpectedly shifted north again, however, heading back to its point of origin in August 2020.
... What makes this vortex-like storm a showstopper is that astronomers have never seen a storm on Neptune double back. Researchers also believe the storm actually sheered off a fragment of itself in the process. Hubble in January caught sight of a smaller dark spot, called "dark spot jr.," that showed up next to the larger dark spot. (Yes, it's all lowercase).
... The images of Neptune returned by Voyager 2 and Hubble revealed that the ice giant is a brilliant blue, due to its atmosphere of hydrogen, helium and methane. But it's a dark, frozen world with an average temperature of negative 392 degrees Fahrenheit and screaming winds that send frozen methane clouds across the planet at 1,200 miles per hour.
... These storms on Neptune behave differently than hurricanes on Earth. The dark spots are high-pressure systems that start out stable and rotate clockwise while hurricanes on Earth are low-pressure systems that rotate counterclockwise. But this stability breaks down when storms near Neptune's equator -- except for the latest dark spot. "It was really exciting to see this one act like it's supposed to act and then all of a sudden it just stops and swings back," Wong said. "That was surprising."
And all this ... inside Kotei's slug brain to boot!Sea foam forms when dissolved organic matter in the ocean is churned up. ... Algal blooms are one common source of thick sea foams. When large blooms of algae decay offshore, great amounts of decaying algal matter often wash ashore. Foam forms as this organic matter is churned up by the surf.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/...%20the%20surf.
Gassho, J
STLahLast edited by Jundo; 12-20-2020, 02:20 AM.ALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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Practically on top of us, as we speed along a little faster than we thought ...
(all as measured from here in Japan!!)
Our galaxy's supermassive black hole is closer to Earth than we thought
The supermassive black hole hiding in the center of our galaxy is much closer to Earth, about 2,000 light-years closer, than scientists thought, according to new research out of Japan.
Not only that but our solar system is moving faster than thought as it orbits this galactic center.
All this doesn't mean you need to worry that Earth is zooming toward the central behemoth or that we will get sucked up by the gravity monster, the researchers noted. We are still quite a ways from the black hole, dubbed Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*): 25,800 light-years, where one light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers).
To do this, the researchers with VERA used four Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) telescopes in Japan. These observatories work together to achieve results comparable to one telescope with a diameter about 1,400 miles (2,300 km) across. The resolution is so sharp that when compared to human eyesight, it would be like seeing a penny on the surface of the moon. However, VERA is designed to see things that are much farther away than the moon. For instance, VERA can distinguish the annual positional shift of a star within 10 micro-arcseconds, which is an angle 1/360,000,000 of the distance between two tick marks on a protractor.
https://www.livescience.com/milky-wa...-to-earth.html
(GC is "Galaxy Center")
Gassho, J
STLahLast edited by Jundo; 12-21-2020, 03:36 AM.ALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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Not only is the whole universe connected, we can see it too ...
Gassho, JGargantuan chunk of 'cosmic web' discovered. It's 50 million light-years long.
The map of our universe looks astonishingly like a road map of the United States. Big, bustling clusters of galaxies swell like brightly lit cities, while long, sparse highways of gas connect them in a giant molecular web. Beyond this web: dark, empty space. (Nowhere worth stopping for a selfie, anyway.)
Astronomers believe this cosmic web is a vestige of the early universe, when big clouds of gas grew denser and denser as their gravity drew more and more matter toward them. Today, these galaxy clusters are the largest known structures in the universe, each one containing hundreds or thousands of individual galaxies and billions of stars.
Those clusters are easy enough to see with good telescopes; but the long, wispy roads — or "filaments" — between them, however, are much harder to detect. Now, using a powerful X-ray telescope, astronomers believe they've taken one of the clearest images of a filament ever — or at least one of the longest.
In a study published Dec. 4 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, researchers studied an object called A3391/95 — a group of three galaxy clusters sitting some 700 million light-years from Earth. Using the eROSITA X-ray telescope, the team not only saw the three individual clusters, but also the enormous gas filament connecting them. According to the team's calculations, this filament stretches more than 50 million light-years across — the single largest ever captured in an image.
This finding is exciting, as filaments are thought to contain an enormous proportion of the universe’s missing baryonic matter (that is, matter made up of protons and neutrons).
"According to calculations, more than half of all baryonic matter in our universe is contained in these filaments," study author Thomas Reiprich, an astronomer at the University of Bonn in Germany, said in a statement.
Astronomers have calculated that all the galaxies in the cosmos only account for about 40% of the universe’s baryonic matter. The remainder is thought to reside inside the filaments between galaxy clusters, although proving that with concrete evidence is difficult; the gas inside these filaments is so diluted (less than 10 particles per cubic meter, according to the researchers) that imaging them has been near-impossible.
With those filaments finally showing up in X-ray images of distant galaxy clusters, astronomers may finally be able to study their wispy depths and find out if they really do contain the universe’s missing matter.
https://www.livescience.com/longest-...osmic-web.html
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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All are migrating species in this world ...
World's oldest python fossil unearthed
The python fossils indicate these snakes evolved in Europe.
Scientists have discovered fossils of the oldest python on record, a slithery beast that lived 48 million years ago in what is now Germany.
Found near an ancient lake, the snake remains are helping researchers learn where pythons originated. Previously, it wasn't clear whether pythons came from continents in the Southern Hemisphere, where they live today, or the Northern Hemisphere, where their closest living relatives (the sunbeam snakes of Southeast Asia and the Mexican burrowing python) are found. But this newfound species — dubbed Messelopython freyi — suggests that pythons evolved in Europe.
"So far, there have been no early fossils that would help decide between a Northern and Southern Hemisphere origin," study co-researcher Krister Smith, vertebrate paleontologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, told Live Science in an email. "Our new fossils are by far the oldest records of pythons, and (being in Europe) they support an origin in the Northern Hemisphere."
https://www.livescience.com/oldest-p...on-record.html
But this other snake fossil takes the cake ...
Gassho, J
STLahLast edited by Jundo; 12-25-2020, 01:23 AM.ALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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I felt us speeding up!
Gassho, JEarth is whipping around quicker than it has in a half-century
It could mean a "negative" leap second.
The 28 fastest days on record (since 1960) all occurred in 2020, with Earth completing its revolutions around its axis milliseconds quicker than average. That's not particularly alarming — the planet's rotation varies slightly all the time, driven by variations in atmospheric pressure, winds, ocean currents and the movement of the core. But it is inconvenient for international timekeepers, who use ultra-accurate atomic clocks to meter out the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by which everyone sets their clocks. When astronomical time, set by the time it takes the Earth to make one full rotation, deviates from UTC by more than 0.4 seconds, UTC gets an adjustment.
Until now, these adjustments have consisted of adding a "leap second" to the year at the end of June or December, bringing astronomical time and atomic time back in line. These leap seconds were tacked on because the overall trend of Earth's rotation has been slowing since accurate satellite measurement began in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
https://www.livescience.com/earth-sp...ap-second.html
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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Have you seen our missing squarks and gluinos?
(this one takes a little 'splaining) ...
I feel sorry for a bunch of physicists ...The future of supersymmetry is in serious doubt.
Supersymmetry is the idea that the fundamental particles of nature are connected through a deep relationship. This theory predicts the existence of brand-new particles in the world's largest collider experiments.
But according to a recent report, there have been no signs of supersymmetry, and the theory is looking a little shaky.Supersymmetry is the idea that the fundamental particles of nature are connected through a deep relationship. This theory predicts the existence of brand-new particles in the world's largest collider experiments.
But according to a recent report, there have been no signs of supersymmetry, and the theory is looking a little shaky.
The subatomic universe is composed of two fundamental kinds of particles, called the fermions (in honor of Enrico Fermi) and bosons (named for Satyendra Nath Bose). In essence, fermions are the building blocks of the natural world: the quarks, the electrons, the neutrinos. If you zoomed into your own cells and molecules and atoms, you would find a bunch of fermions buzzing around, doing their thing.
In contrast, the bosons are the carriers of the fundamental forces of nature. The electromagnetic force is carried by the photon, a type of boson. The weak nuclear force has a trio of bosons to carry it around, and eight different bosons conspire to make the strong nuclear force happen. Gravity has a hypothetical boson associated with it, called the graviton, but we don't have an understanding of that particle yet.
We also don't have an understanding as to why the universe is split into these two major camps. Why aren't there more "families" of particles? Why do the fermions have the properties they do? Why are the bosons connected with the forces? And are there any connections at all between those two worlds?
There just might be a connection between fermions and bosons, and the name for the theoretical connection is supersymmetry. Mathematical symmetry plays a central role in modern physics. It's through the discovery of deep mathematical relationships that physicists have been able to understand the forces of nature and other wondrous ideas like the conservation of energy.
In supersymmetry, there's a new kind of mathematical relationship that connects the fermions and the bosons. In fact, it's more than a mere connection: supersymmetry states that fermions and bosons are really two sides of the same (supersymmetric) coin. Every single fermion has a mirror-like particle in the boson family, and every boson has a twin over the fermion world.
In the jargon of supersymmetry, the mirror-like twins of particles get rather fanciful names. Every supersymmetric partner of a fermion gets an "s" attached to the front, so the partner of a quark is a squark, the partner of an electron is a selectron, and so on. For the bosons, their partners get "ino" attached at the end, so photons are paired with photinos and gluons (the carriers of the strong force) are paired with gluinos. So to find evidence for supersymmetry, all you have to do is find a stray gluino or selectron floating around.
This sounds cool, but it's not that easy. In a perfectly supersymmetric world, we would see these twinned particles everywhere we look. For every fermion we could find an associated boson, and vice versa.
But we don't.
The reason we don't see the symmetry made manifest in our universe is that it's a broken symmetry. A long time ago, when the universe was much hotter and denser, this symmetry could survive. But as the universe expanded, it cooled and broke the symmetry, dividing the fermions and bosons. The breaking of the symmetry caused all the supersymmetry twins to drastically inflate in mass, and in the world of particle physics, the more massive you are, the more unstable you are.
The only way to access the realm of supersymmetry to recreate the conditions of the early universe. Like, for example, in a giant particle collider.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is, like the name suggests, a giant particle collider. It's capable of accelerating particles to nearly the speed of light and then smashing them together, achieving the highest energies possible — conditions not found in the universe since the first moments of the Big Bang. The Large Hadron Collider was explicitly designed to hunt for signs of supersymmetry by finding evidence for supersymmetric particle partners in the collision debris.
One of the detectors at the LHC is called ATLAS, for "A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS" (yes, it's a little clumsy as acronyms go, but it's an awesome name). The ATLAS collaboration, made up of hundreds of scientists from around the world, have released their latest findings in their search for supersymmetry in a paper appearing in the preprint journal arXiv.
And their results? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero.
After years of searching and loads of accumulated data from countless collisions, there is no sign of any supersymmetric particle. In fact, many supersymmetry models are now completely ruled out, and very few theoretical ideas remain valid.
... And since physicists have invested so much time and energy into supersymmetry for years, there aren't a lot of compelling alternatives.
Where will physics go from here, in a universe without supersymmetry? Only time (and a lot of math) will tell.
https://www.livescience.com/no-signs...-collider.html
Gassho, J
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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That's an old pig ... and notice the hand prints nearby ...
A warty pig painted on a cave wall 45,500 years ago is the world's oldest depiction of an animal
Archaeologists working on the site on the island of Sulawesi [Indonesia] said the cave art was at least 45,500 years old. It is also thought to be the oldest surviving image of an animal. Painted using red ocher pigment, the animal appears to be observing a fight or social interaction between two other warty pigs.
This region is home to many intriguing limestone caves where other discoveries have been made. Cave art depicting a hunting scene dating to 43,900 years ago was also found in Sulawesi in late 2019. The same team of archaeologists in 2014 found human hand stencils, which were dated to 40,000 years ago.
... While abstract art has been found in Africa dating back to 77,000 years ago, no figurative art older than those found on sites in Europe and Indonesia has been discovered on the African continent, Aubert said.
https://us.cnn.com/style/article/cav...rnd/index.html
BUT ... we are running short of galaxies ...
Gassho, JThere may be fewer galaxies in the universe than we thought
The universe may be a little darker after a recent discovery has shown that there could be fewer galaxies populating it.
A previous measurement by Hubble Space Telescope suggested there were 2 trillion galaxies spread across the universe. Now, the latest research points to only hundreds of billions of galaxies instead.
... The previous estimate of galaxies was determined by astronomers counting every galaxy visible in Hubble's deep field and multiplying it based on the total area of the sky.
The previous estimate of galaxies was determined by astronomers counting every galaxy visible in Hubble's deep field and multiplying it based on the total area of the sky.
"Deep field observations are long-lasting observations of a particular region of the sky intended to reveal faint objects by collecting the light from them for an appropriately long time," according to the European Space Agency's Hubble site.
However, that doesn't account for distant or faint galaxies that couldn't be seen. ... New Horizons found that distant galaxies are less plentiful than previously believed because the cosmic glow they cause is so weak. ... "We simply don't see the light from two trillion galaxies."
Previously, astronomers believed that 90% of the galaxies in the universe remained hidden from Hubble's view. But the new calculation is much less.
https://us.cnn.com/2021/01/13/world/...rnd/index.html
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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Maybe, but what about all the other galaxies in the other realities in the other infinites?
Gassho,
Jesse
ST理道弘志 | Ridō Koushi
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Please take this novice priest-in-training's words with a grain of salt.Comment
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Just because we live in a tiny galaxy, that's no reason for an inferiority complex!
Nor should this guy give you an inferiority complex ...Newly discovered giant galaxies dwarf the Milky Way
Our universe may be filled with unseen giants. Astronomers have discovered two giant radio galaxies, which are some of the largest-known objects in the universe. This revelation suggests that the enormous galaxies may be more common than previously believed.
The study published Monday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Astronomers found the two galaxies in new radio maps that were created using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa.
... "They are more than 2 Mega-parsecs across, which is around 6.5 million light years or about 62 times the size of the Milky Way. ...
https://us.cnn.com/2021/01/21/world/...scn/index.html
Even our butthole is tiny ...Massive new dinosaur might be the largest creature to ever roam Earth
The 98 million-year-old remains of what might be the largest animal to walk Earth — a long-necked titanosaur dinosaur — were recently unearthed in Argentina.
The remains of the unnamed dinosaur were first discovered in 2012 in Neuquén Province of northwest Patagonia, but have still not been fully excavated. However, the bones that have been unearthed so far suggest the ancient behemoth was likely a titanosaur, possibly the largest one on record. Titanosaurs were amongst the largest sauropods — long-necked, plant-eating giant dinos — and lived from the late Jurassic period (163.5 million to 145 million years ago) to the end of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago).
"Given the measurements of the new skeleton, it looks likely that this is a contender for one of the largest, if not the largest, sauropods that have ever been found," Paul Barrett, a paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.
https://www.livescience.com/largest-...argentina.html
And this is just cool ... snow in the sahara ...1st preserved dinosaur butthole is 'perfect' and 'unique,' paleontologist says
This was a multipurpose hole.
The first dinosaur butthole ever discovered is shedding light where the sun don't shine. The discovery reveals how dinosaurs used this multipurpose opening — scientifically known as a cloacal vent — for pooping, peeing, breeding and egg laying.
The dinosaur's derrière is so well preserved, researchers could see the remnants of two small bulges by its "back door," which might have housed musky scent glands that the reptile possibly used during courtship — an anatomical quirk also seen in living crocodilians, said scientists who studied the specimen.
Although this dinosaur's caboose shares some characteristics with the backsides of some living creatures, it's also a one-of-a-kind opening, the researchers found. "The anatomy is unique," study lead researcher Jakob Vinther, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, told Live Science. It doesn't quite look like the opening on birds, which are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs. It does look a bit like the back opening on a crocodile, he said, but it's different in some ways.
... None of the reproductive soft tissues (like a penis) were preserved. So the researchers can't say whether the dinosaur was male or female. Even so, this dinosaur likely had copulatory sex, unlike some birds that bump butts when they do a "cloacal kiss" during reproduction, Vinther said.
https://www.livescience.com/first-di...ole-found.html
Gassho, JIce covers the Sahara Desert for just 4th time in 50 years
The world's largest desert rarely sees snow like this.
On Tuesday (Jan. 19), one of the world's driest places awoke to an otherworldly dusting of frost.
In the Sahara Desert of northwestern Algeria, just outside the town of Ain Sefra, sand dunes were streaked with ice crystals as far as the eye could see. Local photographer Karim Bouchetata captured the unusual weather in pictures and videos that have since made headlines around the world.
Ain Sefra sits about 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) above sea level and is surrounded by the Atlas Mountains, near the Algerian-Moroccan border. While summer temperatures in the region regularly soar above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), January days average a much milder 57 F (14 C), according to Sky News. Tuesday's ethereal display of frost followed a rare night of 27-F (minus 3 C) temperatures.
https://www.livescience.com/sahara-d...ul-photos.html
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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And, last but not least, please know that discoveries about the universe happen in Tsukuba, Japan ... and not just at Treeleaf Zendo.
This is from the physicists at our local particle collider, KEK ...
Gassho, JTwisted light from the beginning of time could reveal brand-new physics
A twist in the universe's first light could hint that scientists need to rethink physics.
A pair of Japanese scientists looked at the polarization or orientation of light from the cosmic microwave background radiation, some of the earliest light emitted after the universe's birth. They found the polarization of photons, or light particles, might be slightly rotated from their original orientation when the light was first produced. And dark energy or dark matter may have been responsible for that rotation. (Dark energy is a hypothetical force that is flinging the universe apart, while proposed dark matter is a substance that exerts gravitational pull yet does not interact with light.)
... "Maybe there is some unknown particle, which contributes to dark energy, that perhaps rotates the photon polarization," said study lead author Yuto Minami, a physicist at the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies (IPNS) of High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in [Tsukuba] Japan.
... The authors reported their findings with 99.2% confidence, meaning there's an 8 in 1,000 chance of getting similar results by chance. However, this isn't quite as confident as physicists require for absolute proof. For that, they need five sigma, or 99.99995% confidence, which likely isn't possible with data from just one experiment. But future and existing experiments might be able to gather more accurate data, which could be calibrated with the new technique to reach a high-enough level of confidence.
"Our results do not mean a new discovery," Minami said. "Only that we found a hint of it."
https://www.kek.jp/en/press-en/pr20201124e/
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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I found this pretty amazing and very hopeful, especially as I have a couple of friends who have spinal injuries ...
German scientists make paralyzed mice walk again
erman researchers have enabled mice paralyzed after spinal cord injuries to walk again, re-establishing a neural link hitherto considered irreparable in mammals by using a designer protein injected into the brain.
“The special thing about our study is that the protein is not only used to stimulate those nerve cells that produce it themselves, but that it is also carried further (through the brain),” the team’s head Dietmar Fischer told Reuters in an interview.
“In this way, with a relatively small intervention, we stimulate a very large number of nerves to regenerate and that is ultimately the reason why the mice can walk again.”
The paralyzed rodents that received the treatment started walking after two to three weeks, he said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-s...V56nyppbxnMG3E
Gassho, J
STLahALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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Real life meets SF, and a whole new meaning to rebirth ...
Gassho, JMicrosoft patented a chatbot that would let you talk to dead people. It was too disturbing for production
A patent granted to Microsoft (MSFT) last month details a method for creating a conversational chatbot modeled after a specific person — a "past or present entity ... such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure," according to the filing with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
The technology is reminiscent of a fictional app in the dystopian TV series "Black Mirror" that allowed a character to continue chatting with her boyfriend after he dies in an accident, by pulling information from his social media. ... Want to talk music with David Bowie? Or get some words of wisdom from your late grandmother? This tool would theoretically make that possible.
Here's how the technology would work if it were in fact built into a product. According to the patent information, the tool would cull "social data" such as images, social media posts, messages, voice data and written letters from the chosen individual. That data would be used to train a chatbot to "converse and interact in the personality of the specific person." It could also rely on outside data sources, in case the user asked a question of the bot that couldn't be answered based on the person's social data.
"Conversing in the personality of a specific person may include determining and/or using conversational attributes of the specific person, such as style, diction, tone, voice, intent, sentence/dialogue length and complexity, topic and consistency," as well as using behavioral attributes such as interests and opinions and demographic information such as age, gender and profession, the patent states.
In some cases, the tool could even be used to apply voice and facial recognition algorithms to recordings, images and videos to create a voice and 2D or 3D model of the person to enhance the chatbot.
STLahLast edited by Jundo; 01-28-2021, 01:41 AM.ALL OF LIFE IS OUR TEMPLEComment
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