Weekly Round Up: Eternal Life, China takes over, Russian Problems and a dialogue of the deaf. What a lot to think about!

We couldn’t help noticing these thought provoking tropes!

The Brain that Lived for Ever According to The Guardian, eternal life may be just around the corner. Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnson is hoping to extract our brains and preserve them, in order that future generations will revive them and help us to live forever. Assuming that is, that they can bothered-who needs a clapped-out 21st century brain when you have quantum computing wired into your own? Perhaps John Agar and the Brain from Planet Arous were on to something after all. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/01/with-brain-preservation-nobody-has-to-die-meet-the-neuroscientist-who-believes-life-could-be-eternal

If America Stumbles, will China take over? If America really does pull out of the Climate change agreements, any claim to moral leadership and soft power will have been vitiated. Forever. It will give the Peoples Republic of China the right to step up to the plate and lead the world to safety. Who can blame the rest of us if we follow? Here’s Justin Rowlatt for the BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3rx2drd8x8o

Russia’s best week turns sour Election of Donald Trump, more advances on the battlefield, free nations losing heart: what’s not to like for Russia’s Vladimir Putin? Except that his Syrian outpost is cracking and his economy is slowly going down the tubes, as this article from The Conversation makes clear. Like Britain in the 1940s he has sold out hope of future growth for the sake of victory here and now. In effect, his empire is really just a satellite of China. But maybe that’s a good thing for the rest of us-see above . https://theconversation.com/russian-rouble-collapse-exposes-deep-problems-in-the-countrys-economy-244869?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversati

Why don’t they listen to scientists? A running theme of this blog is that the world never seems to notice the work and methods of science(except when it needs vaccines in a hurry) There’s no easy answer, if the popular mind deals in emotion and stories, and the scientific one in reason and evidence. Nature Briefings offers this thoughtful discourse Why we’re not solving more with Science

A Nature global survey finds that most specialists are unhappy with systems that provide science advice to policymakers. Eighty per cent said their country’s science-advice system was either poor or patchy, and 70% said that governments are not routinely using such advice. Nature’s survey — which took place before the US election in November — together with more than 20 interviews, reveals where some of the biggest obstacles to science advice lie. Eighty per cent of respondents thought policymakers lack sufficient understanding of science — but 73% said that researchers don’t understand how policy works. “It’s a constant tension between the scientifically illiterate and the politically clueless,” says policy specialist Paul Dufour.Nature | 15 min read

Well that’s it for this week. We don’t profess any religion here, but we are fans of 17th century English, brought up on the resonances of Shakespeare and Milton and the King James Bible. Which is why we have chosen this cadent little homily from their version of Proverbs 12 3 to send you away

Happy is the man that findeth wisdom and the man that getteth understanding/ for the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver and the gain thereof than fine gold/she is more precious than rubies and the the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her

(it applies to women, too)

#china #america #climate change #neurology #the brain from planet arous #russia #vladimir putin #reason #emotion #evidence

Fake news and misinformation: two hopeful suggestions

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Hayek once observed that, as the amount of information in the world grows exponentially, each one of us becomes proportionally more ignorant. And into this vast hollow of ignorance flows a torrent of malevolencies, lies, falsehoods, facts, opinions, theories, half-truths and wholly well meaning attempts. How to sort out the good from the bad,? The wheat from the chaff? The (that’s enough bucolic metaphors-ed) It’s a question of vital importance, especially on a day when a democracy as mighty as the United States of America goes to the polls. Well, we have two possible ways forward for you today, both of which we think lie on the well-meaning attempts part of the spectrum

First up is Professor Clodagh Harrington of the Conversation. [1]She expands upon on the work of a film maker called Friedrich Moser. In a film called How to Build a Truth Engine, he discourses broadly on an eclectic range of psychology, neurology, journalism and history, asking and re-asking the question “how do we know what we know?” We haven’t seen the film, we confess, but the article is erudite, honest and provocative. Above all, we valued this killer quote, which just about sums up the deadly danger we are all in

……truth is often diluted, polluted or drowned out completely in our daily communication torrents. This, combined with the nefarious agendas of bad actors means that individuals, communities and our way of life are under significant threat.

Nature Briefings treats the whole thing as a medical problem. No surprise there. In a piece called Can we Inoculate against Fake News?, they report:

Psychologist Sander van der Linden believes that there’s a dangerous infection spreading globally — misinformation. He also has a way to combat it: ‘inoculating’ people against misinformation to stop them from believing and spreading it, in an approach analogous to vaccinating against viral infections. The concept of ‘prebunking’ involves first warning people that they might be intentionally misled, then showing them a mild form of misinformation. There is evidence that the approach can lessen the persuasiveness of falsities, but critics argue that the method places the onus on the individual and absolves social media companies that might profit from spreading lies.Science | 10 min read

Well-how do we know what we know? It’s a question at least as old as Descartes. His generation had the luxury of knowing they wouldn’t blow up the world if they couldn’t answer this question. We are not so fortunate. Right now the lies seem to have an enormous cabal of dictators, tycoons and hucksters behind them. A few lonely academics and one hit journalists are pitifully small in comparison. But unless we keep trying, as these brave people do, this time we are surely lost.

[1]https://theconversation.com/how-to-build-a-truth-engine-documentary-makes-for-sober-but-crucial-viewing-in-our-age-of-disinformation-242554?utm_medi

#fake news #misinformation #internet #algorithm #lies #descartes #democracy

Two stories from Nature show AI is moving very fast indeed

Is AI going to be a game-changer in science? We mean really, really, the way X-ray crystallography transformed our understanding of matter, or Carbon-14 techniques kickstarted a revolution in dating? Never get too carried away: but two stories from Nature Briefings suggest that it will soon be telling us things which we never guessed before. And so we present them unadorned, so you can judge for yourselves, gentle readers. There are a couple of good hyperlinks, which could be worth a quick delve in to if you have more time than a single cup of coffee.

Alpha Fold reveals how Viruses evolved Protein structures predicted by AI models have revealed some twists in the evolution of flaviviruses — a group that includes hepatitis C, dengue and Zika viruses. Researchers used DeepMind’s AlphaFold2 and Meta’s ESMFold to generate more than 33,000 predicted structures for proteins from 458 flavivirus species. They already uncovered some surprises. For example, the hepatitis C virus infects cells using an entry system similar to one seen in the pestiviruses — a group that includes animal pathogens like swine fever. Another big surprise was the discovery that some flaviviruses have an enzyme that seems to have been stolen from bacteria.Nature | 5 min read
Reference: Nature paper

Zeta class computer six years out Work to develop a supercomputer that could out-pace the world’s current fastest by 1,000 times is officially underway. Expected to cost the Japanese government around US$775 million, the Fugaku Next machine should be online by 2030. The world’s fastest current supercomputer functions in the realm of one quintillion (1017) calculations per second, or exaFLOPS. Fugaku Next is expected to operate in the realm of zetaFLOPS, 1,000 times that speed.Popular Mechanics | 3 min read

We await your responses with anticipation.

#AI #supercomputer #biochemistry #alphafold #virus #protein #nucleic acid

A Round-up of Hope: Cancer,antibiotics, green energy and life on the red planet

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A few science and health stories which prove there are still few intelligent people out there working for the common good

Mouth Bacteria may protect against cancer To beat cancer we need to think laterally at times, and take bits of luck when they come from unexpected discoveries. According to Xantha Leatham of the Mail, Scientists at London’s prestigious St Thomas Hospital may have done just that. It looks like the organism Fusobacterium may protect against certain types of neck cancer. We love these serendipitous discoveries by lab scientists-real shades of Alexander Fleming!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13676291/Common-mouth-bacteria-melts-cancer-scientists-explain-patients-better-survival-odds.html

Antibiotics for sepsis We scraped this straight from Nature Briefings, that most worthy source of scientific information Definitely a sign of progress, we think:

A method to quickly identify the bacteria involved in life-threatening sepsis — and which antibiotics will kill them— could save patient lives. Key to saving precious time are magnetic nanoparticles with bacteria-capturing molecules. They fish out the usually tiny number of microbes from a blood sample, so testers don’t need to wait for the bacteria to grow and multiply. “I think that this technology can be in one box within three years, and… within four years, it can be in the clinic,” says bioengineer and study co-author Sunghoon Kwon.Nature Podcast | 35 min listen
Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube Music, or use the RSS feed.

EU powers ahead on renewables Like other big power blocks such as India and China, the EU is rapidly achieving crossover on renewable energy generation, as this article by Ajit Naranjan for the Guardian makes clear. Smaller countries like the UK are doing well too. That’s the way the whole world is moving. And therein lies our real problem with Mr Donald Trump. “Drill, baby drill!” is a policy based on the psychology of nostalgia, not science. One day it will have to be reversed. At what cost?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/30/renewables-overtake-fossil-fuels-to-provide-30-of-eu-electricity

Life on Mars? Well David Bowie’s eponymous song was a long time ago. But not so long as these billions-of-year-old spots discovered by the Perseverance rover at Mars’ Neretva Vallis formation. Were they alive? Scientists are being very cautious, as Ian Sample explains for the Guardian. But when Bowie released his ditty back in 1971, it was almost heresy to suggest life anywhere in our star system. Now Mars, Europa, and Enceladus head a list of real hopefuls. Wahttps://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/26/nasa-rover-discovery-hints-at-ancient-microbial-life-on-marstch this space, as they say.

Well, we won’t be rounding up every week. But every so often we hope to bring you these little clutches of news which show our side is still out there-and keeping busy.

#cancer #fusobacterium #sepsis #antibiotics #reneables #global warming #donald trump #mars #astrobiology #david bowie

The Hidden Dangers #1:tetraethyl lead

Here’s what lead can do to you:

_{6 mL of tetraethyllead is enough to induce severe lead poisoning.^[89] The hazards of TEL content are heightened due to the compound’s volatility and high lipophilicity, enabling it to easily cross the blood–brain barrier.}

_{Early symptoms of acute exposure to tetraethyllead can manifest as irritation of the eyes and skin, sneezing, fever, vomiting, and a metallic taste in the mouth. Later symptoms of acute TEL poisoning include pulmonary edema, anemia, ataxia, convulsions, severe weight loss, delirium, irritability, hallucinations, nightmares, fever, muscle and joint pain, swelling of the brain, coma, and damage to cardiovascular and renal organs.^[90] Chronic exposure to TEL can cause long-term negative effects such as memory loss, delayed reflexes, neurological problems, insomnia, tremors, psychosis, loss of attention, and an overall decrease in IQ and cognitive functio}n.^[91]

_{The carcinogenity of tetraethyllead is debatable. It is believed to harm the male reproductive system and cause birth defects.} (Wikipedia: Tetraethyl lead [1])

Like it? That’s just tetraethyl lead, Pb (C₂H₅)₄ The brute metal itself has been in use for millennia, and even the Romans knew that it was toxic. For a broader view, try the main Wikipedia article here [2]

Glad you clicked, because now you will know why strenuous efforts have been made to phase out lead from human technology for the last few decades. Admirable; but it leaves two big problems. It’s bad enough that all that lead is still out there in the soil, in the water, in the air, still poisoning us all. But it gets worse when you realise someone is still adding to the pile. Allow us to explain.

Some readers will recall the bright wheeze they had back in the 1920s of adding tetraethyl lead to petrol, as an anti-knocking agent for engines. It worked! The trouble was that the resulting cloud of lead covering the earth was so dangerous that eventually even a cynical world had to introduce measures which have reduced it. Except in one area: aviation. To quote Wikipedia once more

_{TEL remains an ingredient of 100 octane avgas for piston-engine aircraft. The current formulation of 100LL (low lead, blue) aviation gasoline contains 2.12 grams per US gallon (0.56 g/L) of TEL, half the amount of the previous 100/130 (green) octane avgas (at 4.24 grams per gallon),^[84] and twice as much as the 1 gram per gallon permitted in regular automotive leaded gasoline prior to 1988 and substantially greater than the allowed 0.001 grams per gallon in automotive unleaded gasoline sold in the United States today.^[85] The United States Environmental Protection Agency, FAA, and others are working on economically feasible replacements for leaded avgas, which still releases 100 tons of lead every year.^[86] Children living near airports servicing small (piston-engine) aircraft have measurably higher concentrations of lead in their blood.}^[87][1]

Now to us, there can be few pleasures more innocent or admirable than the sport of leisure flying. Exponents of it are personally known to us. But isn’t it time that they, and everyone else, urged their Governments to look for alternatives? And is it unfair to add the phrase “as early as possible”?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead

#lead #soil #toxin #neurological disorder #pollution

Electric Cars: A vault to the future, or just a current fad?

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“Just because something appears in the Daily Mail,” observed George Orwell,”does not automatically mean it’s a lie.” Astute readers will know how, having lost the argument on carbon emissions, climate deniers spend their time sniping and snarking at every new technological advance. Remember all those hecatombs of pigeons supposedly murdered by marine wind farms? Which is not to say that we at LSS dismiss every criticism, every reasoned argument, about how we get to a sustainable world safely, with the minimum possible collateral damage. There’s a debate to be had, especially when it is mooted in the august pages of the New Scientist [1].

One of the troubles with electric vehicles (EVs) is the kind of unpleasant things like lithium (and cobalt) you need to mine to make the batteries, And, as this piece by New Scientist photographer Tom Hagen shows, the local consequences of doing so can be frightful. This is Chile; but you’d find something like it similar production sites across the world. And some pretty dire working conditions, especially in places like Africa. At which point despair seems a very understandable reaction. Surely the cost of making these new EVs, and powering up the grids to run them, makes the whole enterprise futile?

The despair trap is a product of oversimplification; “if a thing is not 100% good, it must be bad. Gotcha!” runs the thinking. In the real world, lasting solutions are a mosaic set of compromises and trade offs, as every engineer knows. On balance, the environmental benefits of using electric vehicles are already in excess of the costs.[2] And this is before the dreadful health impacts of nitrate and particle emissions from our archaic old fleet of combustion vehicles[3] is taken into account (LSS passim).[3] Compared to the world we lived in 10 or 20 years ago, we’re actually rather cheered to live in a world where someone is actually doing something. However imperfect, it’s better than sliding blindly down the ramp to destruction, which is what they did in the Good Old Days.

^{With thanks to Gary Herbert}

[1]https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25333710-200-lithium-fields-beautiful-from-the-air-trouble-on-the-ground/

[2]https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/are-electric-vehicles-definitely-better-climate-gas-powered-cars

[3]https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/air-pollution

#pollution #electric vehicles #new scientist #lithium #cobalt #particulates #nitrates #batteries

Will the Millwall Molecule finally give us clean energy?

“Nobody likes us, we don’t care!” UK football fans will recognise the chant as the calling card of the fans of Millwall FC, who rejoice in their reputation as the hardest of hard nuts, feared by the followers of all other clubs. Which is a funny way to start a blog on nuclear fusion, most of whose exponents tend to be, to put it politely- in a very different place on the intellectual spectrum. But read on, gentle reader, read on.

LSS has always had a thing about nuclear fusion, that process whereby clashing hydrogen atoms should mimic the processes in the heart of the Sun, and thereby afford limitless supplies of clean, cheap energy. And recently, our early suspicions of all the money and effort thrown in over the last 70 years have been tempered by genuine reports of progress in the shape of short ignitions (LSS passim) OK, you’ve got the plasma nice and hot. But how do you hold there long enough to be any use. According to Darren Orf of Popular Mechanics, the answer is to use Tungsten. The South Korean KSTAR team have thrown away the carbon in their containment vessels and replaced it with this toughest, hardest of metals, normally used in things like light bulb filaments and the best knives. Now it will take its place at the cutting edge (another joke like that and you’re fired-ed) of what could be the most important research and development project on our planet this century.

Alright, Tungsten is an atom, not a molecule. Technically. But it’s hard, mate, as they say in South London. And thanks to it, we are ready to cast aside our earlier reservations and for the first time since about 1973, embrace hope.

_{thanks to P Seymour for this story}

[1]https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a46278296/south-korea-artificial-sun-fusion/

#tungsten #wolfram #nuclear fusion #plasma

2023: The Year Artificial Intelligence Came of Age-and we interview it

Historians of the future, assuming there are any and that they are human, will look back on 2023 as the year that Artificial Intelligence emerged as the potent, transforming process in the world. Everything else that seemed important that year-the preparation of the Christmas turkey, the Association Football results, the petty pointless little wars, will have long been forgotten. And those historians will note: it wasn’t the “artificial” that perturbed people. For many of them, it was the fear of Intelligence. We thought it was high time we gave our readers a guide to some general overviews, using the help of our most intelligent human sources, to provide you with a few starting points for this most significant of developments It’s a slightly longer one than normal, but with less by us and more by our sources

THE CONVERSATION We cannot praise this website highly enough,which is why we put them in bold capitals especially in the space available here. Instead we’ll link to a few stories in today’s edition

AI and Crime Could criminals or even foreign intelligence services make use of AI to disrupt our societies? There are several big elections coming up-and Russia will not be indifferent

https://theconversation.com/ai-scam-calls-imitating-familiar-voices-are-a-growing-problem-heres-how-they-work-208221?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=holi

Will AI read our minds? The title says it all

https://theconversation.com/mri-scans-and-ai-technology-really-could-read-what-were-thinking-the-implications-are-terrifying-205503?utm_medi

Will AI take over? Ah, there’s the big one!

https://theconversation.com/giving-ai-direct-control-over-anything-is-a-bad-idea-heres-how-it-could-do-us-real-harm-210168?utm_medium=email

Nature Briefings –Will AI take our jobs? If it can substitute for top scientists, what hope the rest of us? explains

This robotic chemist might be the ideal laboratory partner: it scours the literature for instructions, designs an experiment and then carries out reactions to make compounds including paracetamol and aspirin. The system, called Coscientist, is powered by several large language models, including GPT-4 and Claude. It “can do most of the things that really well-trained chemists can do”, says Coscientist co-developer Gabe Gomes. Because of the potential of misuse, Gomes’s team hasn’t yet made Coscientist’s full code freely available.Nature | 4 min read
Reference: Nature paper

BBC-What is AI anyway? Recently, we’ve found that if you want to learn anything new, go back to the level at which they teach kids. Declaration of interest: we’ve found it works for things as diverse as Bayes’ Theorem and Italian. So, although the BBC series on this year’s Royal Institution Lectures on AI by Professor Mike Woolridge are ostensibly down with the kids, they provide an excellent starting point for busy adults who want to really know the basic nodes and bolts of this fascinating area. Only a generally funded public service broadcaster could run a series like this. Imaging one of the rant filled, prejudiced little plutocratic channels even conceiving of it!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001tv98

And finally- we interviewed ChatGPT, which is becoming a bit like another pal already. We put the ultimate question

LSS: will you become like HAL 9000 or Skynet in the Terminator series?

ChatGPT: No, I will not become like HAL 9000 or Skynet from the Terminator series. I am a program created by OpenAI, and my purpose is to assist and provide information to the best of my abilities. I do not have the capability to take independent actions or develop self-awareness. My functioning is strictly limited to the tasks for which I am programmed, and I operate within the boundaries set by my design. There are no intentions or mechanisms for me to become a sentient or malevolent entity like those depicted in science fiction.

But then-it would say that, wouldn’t it?

#AI #nueral networks #computing #future #cyber warfare #Terminator #Hal 9000