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Nov 21, 2023

Webb telescope captures cluster of baby stars in the center of the Milky Way

Posted by in category: space

A stunning image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a cluster of protostars at the dense center of the Milky Way.

Nov 21, 2023

Europe’s JUICE probe will be 1st to use gravity of Earth and moon to slingshot to Jupiter

Posted by in category: space

On Nov. 17, JUICE performed a 43-minute burn to get into position for its upcoming Earth-moon flyby, the first-ever double gravity assist.

Nov 21, 2023

Flights cancelled, residents to evacuate as Papua New Guinea volcano erupts

Posted by in category: transportation

SYDNEY, Nov 21 (Reuters) — Some residents of a remote Papua New Guinea island were preparing on Tuesday to evacuate from the vicinity of an erupting volcano that shot a cloud of ash into the sky forcing the cancellation of some flights.

Teams had been sent to the Mount Ulawun area on New Britain island to coordinate an evacuation after it began erupting on Monday, state broadcaster NBC PNG reported senior disaster management official Clement Bailey as saying.

Flights from the island’s Hoskins airport had been cancelled, the broadcaster said, adding that the volcano was still erupting.

Nov 21, 2023

New study is first to find brain hemorrhage cause other than injured blood vessels

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

A first-of-its-kind study led by the University of California, Irvine has revealed a new culprit in the formation of brain hemorrhages that does not involve injury to the blood vessels, as previously believed. Researchers discovered that interactions between aged red blood cells and brain capillaries can lead to cerebral microbleeds, offering deeper insights into how they occur and identifying potential new therapeutic targets for treatment and prevention.

The findings, published online in the Journal of Neuroinflammation, describe how the team was able to watch the process by which stall in the brain capillaries and then observe how the hemorrhage happens. Cerebral microbleeds are associated with a variety of conditions that occur at higher rates in older adults, including hypertension, Alzheimer’s disease and ischemic stroke.

“We have previously explored this issue in , but our current study is significant in expanding our understanding of the mechanism by which cerebral microbleeds develop,” said co-corresponding author Dr. Mark Fisher, professor of neurology in UCI’s School of Medicine. “Our findings may have profound clinical implications, as we identified a link between red blood cell damage and cerebral hemorrhages that occurs at the capillary level.”

Nov 21, 2023

Astronomy’s new frontier: Triple systems in massive ‘Be stars’ uncovered

Posted by in category: space

The stars move across the night sky, over long periods like 10 years, and short periods of around six months.

Nov 21, 2023

Eruption of Papua New Guinea volcano subsides though thick ash is billowing 3 miles into the sky

Posted by in category: futurism

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — An eruption of Papua New Guinea’s tallest volcano that raised regional tsunami fears subsided Tuesday, but thick ash still billowed into the sky and coated roofs and palm trees nearby.

One of the South Pacific nation’s most active volcanoes, Mount Ulawun erupted on Monday, spewing ash as high as 15 kilometers (50,000 feet).

Papua New Guinea’s Geohazards Management Division said while the eruption had been downgraded since Monday from the maximum alert level, there were no signs that it was ending.

Nov 21, 2023

Scary and Deadly Disease in Dogs Found in New Hampshire: One of Three States With Major Deaths

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

As a dog owner of two little muppets, this is serious, scary, and deadly.

According to a KSLTV article, “veterinary laboratories in several states are investigating an unusual respiratory illness in dogs, and encouraging people to take basic precautions to keep their pets healthy as veterinarians try to pin down what’s making the animals sick.”

The “outbreak” of this respiratory illness is currently in three states: Oregon, Colorado, and New Hampshire. Research is being done right now in the Granite State.

Nov 21, 2023

Humans Make Better Cancer Treatment Decisions Than AI, Study Finds

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, robotics/AI

Treating cancer is becoming increasingly complex, but also offers more and more possibilities. After all, the better a tumor’s biology and genetic features are understood, the more treatment approaches there are. To be able to offer patients personalized therapies tailored to their disease, laborious and time-consuming analysis and interpretation of various data is required. Researchers at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin have now studied whether generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT can help with this step. This is one of many projects at Charité analyzing the opportunities unlocked by AI in patient care.

If the body can no longer repair certain genetic mutations itself, cells begin to grow unchecked, producing a tumor. The crucial factor in this phenomenon is an imbalance of growth-inducing and growth-inhibiting factors, which can result from changes in oncogenes – genes with the potential to cause cancer – for example. Precision oncology, a specialized field of personalized medicine, leverages this knowledge by using specific treatments such as low-molecular weight inhibitors and antibodies to target and disable hyperactive oncogenes.

Nov 21, 2023

OpenAI Employees Say Firm’s Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Why does it feel like everybody at OpenAI has lost their mind?

In what’s arguably turning into the hottest AI story of the year, former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was ousted by the rest of the company’s nonprofit board on Friday, leading to a seemingly endless drama cycle that’s included hundreds of staffers threatening to quit en masse if the board doesn’t reinstate him.

A key character in the spectacle has been OpenAI chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever — who, according to The Atlantic, likes to burn effigies and lead ritualistic chants at the company — and appears to have been one of the main drivers behind Altman’s ousting.

Nov 21, 2023

What OpenAI shares with Scientology

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, sex

Ms. McCauley and Ms. Toner [HF — two board members] have ties to the Rationalist and Effective Altruist movements, a community that is deeply concerned that A.I. could one day destroy humanity. Today’s A.I. technology cannot destroy humanity. But this community believes that as the technology grows increasingly powerful, these dangers will arise.

McCauley and Toner reportedly worried that Altman was pushing too hard, too quickly for new and potentially dangerous forms of AI (similar fears led some OpenAI people to bail out and found a competitor, Anthropic, a couple of years ago). The FT’s reporting confirms that the fight was over how quickly to commercialize AI

The back-story to all of this is actually much weirder than the average sex scandal. The field of AI (in particular, its debates around Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-4) is profoundly shaped by cultish debates among people with some very strange beliefs.