Material Moving Faster Than Light

New research suggests that the universe is filled with particles capable of traveling faster than light, LiveScience reports — and that this scenario holds up as a potentially "viable alternative" to our current cosmological model.

The idea is a little far-fetched, sure, but it's worth hearing out. These hypothetical particles, known as tachyons, aren't likely to be real — but they're not some hokey bit of sci-fi, either. The potential for their existence is something physicists have been giving serious thought for decades, raising fundamental questions about the nature of causality.

As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, the researchers posit that tachyons are what make up dark matter, an unobservable — and despite being widely considered to exist by scientists, technically hypothetical — substance that is thought to account for around 85 percent of all matter in the universe.  READ MORE...

Before Homo Sapiens Existed

Archaeologists from Europe and Africa have uncovered the oldest wood structure ever discovered, dating back almost half a million years — meaning an unknown species of hominins, predating us homo sapiens, was presumably responsible for its creation.

The researchers laid out their findings in a recent paper in the science journal Nature, where they reported that they had found the wood structure of "two interlocking logs joined transversely by an intentionally cut notch" at a site in Kalambo Falls, Zambia, and dated it to a distant 476,000 years ago. 

At the same location, which the scientists say was likely the foundation for a dwelling or platform, they also found four tools fashioned from wood: a digging stick, a cut log, a wedge, and notched branch, each also dating to before the time of modern humans.

"This find has changed how I think about our early ancestors," said University of Liverpool archaeology professor and the paper's lead author Larry Barham in a statement. "Forget the label ‘Stone Age,’ look at what these people were doing: they made something new, and large, from wood. 

They used their intelligence, imagination, and skills to create something they’d never seen before, something that had never previously existed."

Handy Man
The wood was preserved because Kalambo Falls kept the pieces permanently waterlogged, hence sealing them away from oxygen and oxygen-dependant bacteria that would degrade them. 

The finding is particularly significantbecause wood has rarely been preserved from the Early Stone Age — offering an ultra-rare peek into the lives of our distant ancestors.  READ MORE...

China Doubles Size of its Space Station

In a matter of less than two years, China assembled three modules of its space station dubbed Tiangong, an orbital habitat that can accommodate a crew of three astronauts.

And while it's still significantly smaller than the International Space Station — which took well over a decade to complete — that could soon change.


China is now planning to expand the station with an additional three modules, Reuters reports, offering the country and its international partners an important alternative to the ISS, which is set to be retired by the end of the decade.


Even with the additional three modules, Tiangong will still be only about 40 percent of the mass of the ISS, per the report — but a growing space for research in orbit is still arguably a lot better than not having one at all.

Heavenly Palace
Space contractor the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) announced this week that the station's lifespan will also be 15 — not the previously announced ten — years, according to Reuters, meaning that it'll outlive the ISS by several years if things go according to plan.  READ MORE...

Microplastics Found in Sealed Cave

A cave that's been closed off to human visitors for 30 years has been found to contain high concentrations of microplastics — and that should worry you.

Such were the findings of a pair of new studies, the most recent of which was published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, that used the cave's hermetic seclusion as a way of gauging just how far microplastics have penetrated the environment, and more specifically, subsurface water systems.

"A lot of research has been focused on surface water settings," Elizabeth Hasenmueller, a geochemist and associate director of the WATER Institute at Saint Louis University who authored both studies, said in a statement. "However, one of the most understudied areas in this field relates to what's happening to the subsurface in terms of microplastic contamination."

Inescapable Waste
Scientists continue to find new places where these tiny shards of plastic waste — five millimeters and smaller — end up, and none of them are reassuring. Recent notable studies have discovered it everywhere from polluting clouds to the inside of human hearts.

The locale selected by the researchers is Cliff Cave, located in Missouri, and while it has been closed to the public since 1993, it is located near a residential area. As such, it's not totally sequestered from civilization, but serves as a good case study on how human settlements impact nearby ecosystems.  READ MORE...

Publishing House Replaces Jobs with AI

Bild, the German tabloid owned and operated by major European publishing house Axel Springer, is expected to replace over a hundred human editorial jobs with artificial intelligence, a leaked email first obtained by the German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ) has revealed.

The tabloid will "unfortunately be parting ways with colleagues who have tasks that in the digital world are performed by AI and/or automated processes," the email reads, as reported by FAZ and translated by The Guardian.

According to the report, the email detailed that those who will be replaced by AI include "editors, print production staff, subeditors, proofreaders and photo editors," and that these time-honored human careers "will no longer exist as they do today."

The decision appears to be part of broader cost-cutting efforts across Axel Springer brands, including Insider, which also cut a large chunk of employees amid its own AI pivot earlier this year.

Though several publications across the media industry have experimented with incorporating AI into their workflows, the choice to fully automate hundreds of essential editorial roles with AI feels like a significant escalation. Bild might be a messy, politicized tabloid, but Axel Springer is the biggest publisher in Europe and others could be following suit soon.  READ MORE...

AI on the Dark Web

OpenAI's large language models (LLMs) are trained on a vast array of datasets, pulling information from the internet's dustiest and cobweb-covered corners.

But what if such a model were to crawl through the dark web — the internet's seedy underbelly where you can host a site without your identity being public or even available to law enforcement — instead? A team of South Korean researchers did just that, creating an AI model dubbed DarkBERT to index some of the sketchiest domains on the internet.

It's a fascinating glimpse into some of the murkiest corners of the World Wide Web, which have become synonymous with illegal and malicious activities from the sharing of leaked data to the sale of hard drugs.

It sounds like a nightmare, but the researchers say DarkBERT has noble intentions: trying to shed light on new ways of fighting cybercrime, a field that has made increasing use of natural language processing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, making sense of the parts of the web that aren't indexed by search engines like Google and often can only be accessed via specific software wasn't an easy task.

As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper titled "DarkBERT: A language model for the dark side of the internet," the team hooked their model up to the Tor network, a system for accessing parts of the dark web. It then got to work, creating a database of the raw data it found.

The team says their new LLM was far better at making sense of the dark web than other models that were trained to complete similar tasks, including RoBERTa, which Facebook researchers designed back in 2019 to "predict intentionally hidden sections of text within otherwise unannotated language examples," according to an official description.

"Our evaluation results show that DarkBERT-based classification model outperforms that of known pretrained language models," the researchers wrote in their paper.  READ MORE...

Artificial Intellilgence Warning

A serial artificial intelligence investor is raising alarm bells about the dogged pursuit of increasingly-smart machines, which he believes may soon advance to the degree of divinity.

In an op-ed for the Financial Times, AI mega-investor Ian Hogarth recalled a recent anecdote in which a machine learning researcher with whom he was acquainted told him that "from now onwards," we are on the brink of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) — an admission that came as something of a shock.

"This is not a universal view," Hogarth wrote, noting that "estimates range from a decade to half a century or more" before AGI comes to fruition.

All the same, there exists a tension between the explicitly AGI-seeking goals of AI companies and the fears of machine learning experts — not to mention the public — who understand the concept.

"'If you think we could be close to something potentially so dangerous,' I said to the researcher, 'shouldn’t you warn people about what’s happening?'" the investor recounted. "He was clearly grappling with the responsibility he faced but, like many in the field, seemed pulled along by the rapidity of progress."

Like many other parents, Hogarth said that after this encounter, his mind drifted to his four-year-old son.

"As I considered the world he might grow up in, I gradually shifted from shock to anger," he wrote. "It felt deeply wrong that consequential decisions potentially affecting every life on Earth could be made by a small group of private companies without democratic oversight."  READ MORE...

Article Referenced in Newspaper Never Published

OpenAI's ChatGPT is flooding the internet with a tsunami of made-up facts and disinformation — and that's rapidly becoming a very real problem for the journalism industry.

Reporters at The Guardian noticed that the AI chatbot had made up entire articles and bylines that it never actually published, a worrying side effect of democratizing tech that can't reliably distinguish truth from fiction.

Worse yet, letting these chatbots "hallucinate" — itself now a disputed euphemism — sources could serve to undermine legitimate news sources.

"Huge amounts have been written about generative AI’s tendency to manufacture facts and events," The Guardian's head of editorial innovation Chris Moran wrote. "But this specific wrinkle — the invention of sources — is particularly troubling for trusted news organizations and journalists whose inclusion adds legitimacy and weight to a persuasively written fantasy."

"And for readers and the wider information ecosystem, it opens up whole new questions about whether citations can be trusted in any way," he added, "and could well feed conspiracy theories about the mysterious removal of articles on sensitive issues that never existed in the first place."

It's not just journalists at The Guardian. Many other writers have found that their names were attached to sources that ChatGPT had drawn out of thin air.

Kate Crawford, an AI researcher and author of "Atlas of AI," was contacted by an Insider journalist who had been told by ChatGPT that Crawford was one of the top critics of podcaster Lex Fridman. The AI tool offered up a number of links and citations linking Crawford to Fridman — which were entirely fabricated, according to the author.  READ MORE...

Alien Spacecrafts in our Solar System

This might be a little out there.

Alien-hunting Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is back again, armed with new, not-yet-peer-reviewed research. This time, Loeb ups the ante by claiming it's possible that there's — get this — four quintillion alien spacecraft lurking in our solar system. That'd be, uh, a lot of flying saucers.

The study, spotted by the Daily Beast, is a follow up on the first discovery of an interstellar object to visit our solar system, dubbed 'Oumuamua, back in 2017. By all accounts, 'Oumuamua was a very weird object, the nature of which scientists are still hotly debating. Speculated to be cigar-shaped, it sparked tons of debate on whether it was an extraterrestrial visitor.

Loeb isn't outright saying 'Oumuamua was aliens per se, but he is saying we should be open to that possibility. In light of that outlook, he's basically asking what "respectable" scientists would never deign to: how many possible 'Oumuamuas could there be in our solar system that go unnoticed?  READ MORE...

Filled With Invisible Walls

Scientists’ current best theories about the arrangement of the cosmos suggest that small galaxies should be distributed around their host galaxies in seemingly random orbits.

But observations have found that these smaller galaxies arrange themselves in thin disks around their hosts, Vice reports, not unlike Saturn’s rings. Needless to say, that represents a puzzling gap between knowledge and theory.

Researchers are now trying to reconcile this gap by suggesting smaller galaxies may be conforming to invisible “walls” created by a new class of particles called symmetrons — a fascinating proposal that could rewrite the laws of astrophysics.

The standard theory, known as the Lambda cold dark matter (Lambda-CDM) model suggests that the universe is made up of three key elements: the cosmological constant, which is a coefficient added by Einstein to explain his equations of general relativity, cold dark matter which are slow moving theoretical particles that don’t emit radiation, and the conventional matter we interact with every day.

That theory suggests that smaller galaxies should be captured by the gravitational pull of larger host galaxies and forced into chaotic orbits, something that has not been reflected in real world observations.

Now, two researchers from the University of Nottingham may have come up with an explanation, as detailed in a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study.

They suggest a “fifth force” could be arranging the galaxies into disk shapes, while still considering the existence of dark matter, the mysterious substance that appears to make up the vast majority of the universe’s mass.  READ MORE...

Leaving NASA

Warp Drive Inc
Traveling at faster than the speed of light has been the subject of countless works of science fiction. Most notably, the “warp drive” in “Star Trek” allowed cosmic travelers to break the lightspeed barrier to traverse vast galactic distances.

In the real world, research into potential warp drive technologies has been slow, but significant enough to attract the interest of NASA and even a handful of independent ventures.


Take Harold “Sonny” White, a big name in warp drive research who left NASA in 2019 to work at a Houston-based nonprofit called the Limitless Space Institute — where, he says, he was allowed by NASA to continue his work and even take his lab equipment with him.

“Yeah, I have a lab here full of all my goodies from NASA,” White told The Debrief in a fascinating new interview. But the engineer didn’t burn any bridges in the process, adding that “we have a Space Act agreement with the agency.”


Leaving NASA
It sounds like NASA is pretty chill with White continuing his work elsewhere.

Sonny said that “when I was working in NASA, we really didn’t try to go through and patent anything.”

“Probably a little too early to try and really work towards patenting anything,” he told The Debrief. “I mean, there may be a time it’s right to do that, but there wasn’t at NASA.”

Where the transition leaves White’s progress on realizing a new form of propulsion that could allow humans to travel past the speed of light remains somewhat murky (although The Debrief says it’s going to publish two more installments of its interview with White, so stay tuned.)  READ MORE