05 Sci-Tech

AI ethicists Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska have posited a theory based on a method of analysis called “design fiction” that has led them to conclude loved ones lost in the future, if they leave a digital footprint, including audio and video, can be recreated as an AI friend.

Nowaczyk-Basińska stated, “Rapid advancements in generative AI mean that nearly anyone with internet access and some basic know-how can revive a deceased loved one. At the same time, a person may leave an AI simulation as a farewell gift for loved ones who are not prepared to process their grief in this manner. The rights of both data donors and those who interact with AI afterlife services should be equally safeguarded.”

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Excerpt from www.popsci.com

AI ethicists and science-fiction authors have explored and anticipated these potential situations for decades. But for researchers at Cambridge University’s Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence, this unregulated, uncharted “ethical minefield” is already here. And to drive the point home, they envisioned three, fictional scenarios that could easily occur any day now.

In a new study published in Philosophy and Technology, AI ethicists Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska relied on a strategy called “design fiction.” First coined by sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, design fiction refers to “a suspension of disbelief about change achieved through the use of diegetic prototypes.” Basically, researchers pen plausible events alongside fabricated visual aids.

For their research, Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska imagined three hyperreal scenarios of fictional individuals running into issues with various “postmortem presence” companies, and then made digital props like fake websites and phone screenshots. The researchers focused on three distinct demographics—data donors, data recipients, and service interactants. “Data donors” are the people upon whom an AI program is based, while “data recipients” are defined as the companies or entities that may possess the digital information. “Service interactants,” meanwhile, are the relatives, friends, and anyone else who may utilize a “deadbot” or “ghostbot.”

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Excerpt from www.hindustantimes.com

Despite his ongoing legal woes, Donald Trump is not shying away from social media rants. As Stormy Daniels gives her very explicit bombshell testimony in the hush money trial, Trump is directing his focus to Joe Biden. Taking to his social media platform, Truth Social, the former US president said that Biden is “leading the world straight into World War III.” Trump’s scathing remarks come amid Biden’s declaration that the US will not be providing weapons to Israel for attacking Rafah, Hamas’ last major stronghold in Gaza.

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Excerpt from newscenter.lbl.gov

The spin of the electron is nature’s perfect quantum bit, capable of extending the range of information storage beyond “one” or “zero.” Exploiting the electron’s spin degree of freedom (possible spin states) is a central goal of quantum information science.

Recent progress by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers Joseph Orenstein, Yue Sun, Jie Yao, and Fanghao Meng has shown the potential of magnon wave packets – collective excitations of electron spins – to transport quantum information over substantial distances in a class of materials known as antiferromagnets. Their work upends conventional understanding about how such excitations propagate in antiferromagnets. The coming age of quantum technologies – computers, sensors, and other devices – depends on transmitting quantum information with fidelity, over distance.

With their discovery, reported in a paper published in Nature Physics, Orenstein and coworkers hope to have moved a step closer to these goals. Their research is part of broader efforts at Berkeley Lab to advance quantum information by working across the quantum research ecosystem, from theory to application, to fabricate and test quantum-based devices and develop software and algorithms.

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Excerpt from www.newscientist.com

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Excerpt from arstechnica.com

The United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) is currently evaluating a new generation of robotic “dogs” developed by Ghost Robotics, with the potential to be equipped with gun systems from defense tech company Onyx Industries, reports The War Zone.

While MARSOC is testing Ghost Robotics’ quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicles (called “Q-UGVs” for short) for various applications, including reconnaissance and surveillance, it’s the possibility of arming them with weapons for remote engagement that may draw the most attention. But it’s not unprecedented: The US Marine Corps has also tested robotic dogs armed with rocket launchers in the past.

MARSOC is currently in possession of two armed Q-UGVs undergoing testing, as confirmed by Onyx Industries staff, and their gun systems are based on Onyx’s SENTRY remote weapon system (RWS), which features an AI-enabled digital imaging system and can automatically detect and track people, drones, or vehicles, reporting potential targets to a remote human operator that could be located anywhere in the world. The system maintains a human-in-the-loop control for fire decisions, and it cannot decide to fire autonomously.

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Excerpt from www.newscientist.com

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Excerpt from globalnews.ca

Ultra-processed foods, such as processed meat, fizzy drinks, ice cream and sugary cereals are linked to a higher risk of early death, according to a recent study.

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Excerpt from eandt.theiet.org

A new report has found that for the first time 30% of electricity produced worldwide came from renewable energy sources, predominantly solar and wind.

UK climate think tank Ember has published a report – Global Electricity Review 2024 – that analysed electricity data from 215 countries, as well as examining data from the highest carbon emitting countries and regions of the world.

It finds that renewables generated a record 30% of global electricity in 2023. From the analysis, 2023 saw a 23% growth in solar generation, 10% growth in wind generation and only a 0.8% growth in fossil generation.

“The renewables future has arrived. Solar, in particular, is accelerating faster than anyone thought possible,” said Dave Jones, Ember’s director of global insights.

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Excerpt from phys.org

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Excerpt from www.science20.com

After Chris Wild took over the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a UN-funded body in France that looks for statistical links between food/chemicals and cancer, they made a switch in their policies regarding participation; an epidemiologist who had ever consulted for industry could no longer vote on what to label a carcinogen.Even though it was hypocritical – epidemiologists working for trial lawyers or environmental groups were recruited – few inside IARC objected. Nor did anyone think they might. Environmental groups have manufactured an ethical halo so well that even their lawyers look like better people than other lawyers. They are, they assure us, poorly paid evangelists for health and safety against Evil Corporations.

Except none of that is true. For that ethical halo to be punctured even slightly, someone like Tom Girardi, who turned the “Erin Brockovich” case, trace levels of hexavalent chromium in Hinckley, California, into hundreds of millions of dollars for himself, has to engage in such spectacular fraud it gets attention. And even then his environmental shakedowns are minimized, though they were the same tactics he used against Pacific Gas  &  Electric.

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Excerpt from techxplore.com

Engineers at Princeton and North Carolina State University have combined ancient paper-folding and modern materials science to create a soft robot that bends and twists through mazes with ease.

Soft robots can be challenging to guide because steering equipment often increases the robot’s rigidity and cuts its flexibility. The new design overcomes those problems by building the steering system directly into the robot’s body, said Tuo Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton.

In an article, titled “Modular Multi-degree-of-freedom Soft Origami Robots with Reprogrammable Electrothermal Actuation” published May 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe how they created the robot out of modular, cylindrical segments. The segments, which can operate independently or join to form a longer unit, all contribute to the robot’s ability to move and steer. The new system allows the flexible robot to crawl forward and reverse, pick up cargo and assemble into longer formations.

“The concept of modular soft robots can provide insight into future soft robots that can grow, repair, and develop new functions,” the authors write in their article.

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Excerpt from www.indiatvnews.com

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Excerpt from www.popsci.com

Hamish Spencer, zoologist and distinguished professor at the University of Otago, was vacationing in Colombia when ornithologist John Murillo pointed out an interesting bird perched on a feeding station. The bird in question was a green honeycreeper, but it didn’t look quite like any honeycreeper they’d seen before. The right half of the bird was blue, resembling males of the species, and the left half was green—the hue typically seen in females.

This special honeycreeper is one of many animals that display bilateral gynandromorphism, a trait where animals present both male and female characteristics even though their species usually have distinct sexes.

Other birds have displayed bilateral gynandromorphism. In 2019, a cardinal with male and female plumage was spotted in Erie, Pennsylvania. In 2020, researchers in Pennsylvania found a gynandromorphic rose-breasted grosbeak that displayed male plumage on the right and female plumage on the left.

These birds, and other binary-breaking animals like clownfish and leaping lesbian lizards, are proof that nature is less into simple labels than you think. For more on the way the natural world consistently shatters our idea of how things like sex should work, check out these gene-stealing salamanders, this super-sexy slime mold, and Rachel’s book about the weird and wonderful evolution of sex.

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Excerpt from www.army-technology.com

China stands accused of hacking the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) in a major cyberattack on armed forces’ SSCL payroll data system.

The data breach compromised the names and bank details of current military personnel and veterans, Sky News reported.

When addressing the House of Commons today (7 May), UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said a “malign actor” was responsible for the attack, but that the government “cannot rule out state involvement”. He added that there was “no evidence that any data has been removed”.

Shapps has announced a “multi-point plan to support and protect personnel”, an MoD spokesperson told Army Technology.

The MoD has been working urgently to grasp the scale of the cyberattack over the last three days since discovering the data breach.

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Excerpt from www.independent.co.uk

A new vaccine could be effective against coronaviruses which have yet to emerge, with hopes it could be used to battle future pandemics, research suggests.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and Caltech in the US are developing a novel approach called “proactive vaccinology”, which aims to train the body’s immune system to recognise several different coronaviruses.

The vaccine used antigens – a substance that triggers an immune response in the body – found in eight different coronaviruses, including those circulating in bats. This trains the immune system to go after the parts of the antigens that are shared across the viruses and other similar ones, including those not included in the vaccine.

The vaccine, for instance, does not include the Sars-CoV-1 virus, which led to the 2003 SARs outbreak, but can produce an immune response to it.

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Excerpt from www.technologyreview.com

But bovines may not be far behind. There’s a large assisted-reproduction industry in cattle, with more than a million IVF attempts a year, half of them in North America. Many other beef and dairy cattle are artificially inseminated with semen from top-rated bulls. “Cattle is harder,” says Jiang. “But we have all the technology.”

ANTONIO REGALADO

The thing that came out of cow #307 turned out to be damaged, just a fragment. But later that day, in Jiang’s main laboratory, students were speed-walking across the linoleum holding something in a petri dish. They’d retrieved intact embryonic structures from some of the other cows. These looked long and stringy, like worms, or the skin shed by a miniature snake.

That’s precisely what a two-week-old cattle embryo should look like. But the outer appearance is deceiving, Jiang says. After staining chemicals are added, the specimens are put under a microscope. Then the disorder inside them is apparent. These “elongated structures,” as Jiang calls them, have the right parts—cells of the embryonic disc and placenta—but nothing is in quite the right place.

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Excerpt from www.mining.com

Additionally, the researchers emphasized the safety advantages of their aqueous battery over non-aqueous lithium batteries, notorious for their high flammability.

As reported by the South China Morning Post, the water-based battery “shows promising potential for the development of next-generation high-energy-density and safe rechargeable aqueous batteries,” as quoted by the researchers.

One of the authors, Li Xianfeng, a professor at the CAS Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, stated that their findings “may expand aqueous battery applications in the power battery field.”

Currently, most electric vehicles rely on lithium-ion batteries to operate.

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Excerpt from www.forbes.com

The United States military has invested tens of billions of dollars over a half-century in the research and development of directed energy weapons. Now, it’s actually using them in battle.

The Army has used lasers to take down hostile drones in the Middle East, Doug Bush, the Army’s head of acquisitions, recently told Forbes. It’s the first time the Defense Department has acknowledged that such weapons have been used in combat.

“They’ve worked in some cases,” Bush said. “In the right conditions they’re highly effective against certain threats.”

He declined to detail the weapons used, but one appears to be a system called P-HEL. It’s based on the defense contractor BlueHalo’s Locust laser, a boxy pallet-mounted device for fixed-site defense that’s commanded with an Xbox gaming controller. The weapon is designed to discharge a relatively low-powered 20-kilowatt laser beam that melts a critical point on a drone in seconds, knocking it from the sky.