Mistreating Artificial Intelligence

How can we truly know if AI is sentient? We do not yet fully understand the nature of human consciousness, so we cannot discount the possibility that today's AI is indeed sentient — and that we are mistreating it to potentially grave consequences.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly ubiquitous and is improving at an unprecedented pace.

Now we are edging closer to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) — where AI is smarter than humans across multiple disciplines and can reason generally — which scientists and experts predict could happen as soon as the next few years. We may already be seeing early signs of progress, too, with Claude 3 Opus stunning researchers with its apparent self-awareness.

But there are risks in embracing any new technology, especially one that we do not fully understand. While AI could be a powerful personal assistant, for example, it could also represent a threat to our livelihoods and even our lives.     READ MORE...

2,000 Year Old Carving

Brazilian archaeologists have discovered a vast number of 2,000-year-old rock carvings that depict human footprints, celestial-body-like figures, and representations of animals, such as deer and wild pigs.


The discovery was made during three expeditions between 2022 and 2023 in Jalapão State Park, located in the state of Tocantins. Researchers with Brazil's National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN) identified 16 precolonial archaeological sites, all located on rocky cliffs close to each other.

"This proximity suggests a possible connection between the sites and clarifies settlement patterns of the ancient communities that inhabited the region," Rômulo Macêdo, the archaeologist who led the work, told Live Science via Whatsapp.     READ MORE...

Humans Wearing Clothes

Clothes don't survive the way artifacts made of stone, bone and other hard materials do, so scientists have to get creative to answer this question.


As early humans evolved from ape-like ancestors, they came down from the trees, began to walk upright and lost their fur. But without fur, our ancestors would have been exposed to the elements. They would have needed clothing for protection.


So when did humans start wearing clothes?


This is a tricky question, because clothes don't survive the way artifacts made of stone, bone and other hard materials do. Instead, scientists have to get creative. The evidence used to answer this question comes from a few main sources, including bones bearing evidence of skinning, sewing needles and awls, and lice.  READ MORE...

Oxytocin Influences Animal Behavior

Oxytocin (OXT) is a hormone that is known for its effects on psychological well-being and emotional bonding in animals. Interestingly, research has shown that this natural chemical in the brain plays a crucial role in other cognitive processes as well, including learning and memory. 

Now, scientists may have discovered exactly how OXT influences memory in animals by studying "OXT neurons" that contain OXT receptors and function differently based on the availability of the chemical in the brain.  READ MORE...

A Cosmological Mystery

Astronomers have discovered a cosmic "ring" that's so enormous, it defies explanation with our best theories of the universe.

Named the Big Ring, the gigantic spiral of galaxies and galaxy clusters is 1.3 billion light-years wide and has a circumference of 4 billion light-years, making it one of the largest objects ever seen.

Because the Big Ring is so far from Earth — 9 billion light-years away — its light is too dim to be viewed with the naked eye. But if it were brighter, it would appear 15 times the size of the full moon in the night sky.  READ MORE...

First Wooden Satellite

NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are planning to launch the world's first wooden satellite into space in a bid to make spaceflight more sustainable.


LignoSat, a coffee mug-size satellite made from magnolia wood, is set to launch into Earth's orbit by summer 2024, according to the space agencies.

Wood doesn't burn or rot in the lifeless vacuum of space, but it will incinerate into a fine ash upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere — making it a surprisingly useful, biodegradable material for future satellites. After successfully testing their wood samples aboard the International Space Station (ISS) earlier this year, the scientists believe the test satellite is fit for launch.    READ MORE...

World's Largest Underwater Telescope in China

Scientists in China are building the world's largest "ghost particle" detector 11,500 feet (3,500 meters) beneath the surface of the ocean.

The Tropical Deep-sea Neutrino Telescope (TRIDENT) — called Hai ling or "Ocean Bell" in Chinese — will be anchored to the seabed of the Western Pacific Ocean. Upon completion in 2030, it will scan for rare flashes of light made by elusive particles as they briefly become tangible in the ocean depths.

Every second, about 100 billion ghost particles, called neutrinos, pass through each square centimeter of your body. And yet, true to their spooky nickname, neutrinos' nonexistent electrical charge and almost-zero mass mean they barely interact with other types of matter.

But by slowing neutrinos down, physicists can trace some of the particles' origins billions of light-years away to ancient, cataclysmic stellar explosions and galactic collisions.

That's where the ocean bell comes in.

"Using Earth as a shield, TRIDENT will detect neutrinos penetrating from the opposite side of the planet," Xu Donglian, the project's chief scientist, told journalists at a news conference Oct. 10. "As TRIDENT is near the equator, it can receive neutrinos coming from all directions with the rotation of the Earth, enabling all-sky observation without any blind spots."

Neutrinos are everywhere — they are second only to photons as the most abundant subatomic particles in the universe and are produced in the nuclear fire of stars, in enormous supernova explosions, in cosmic rays and radioactive decay, and in particle accelerators and nuclear reactors on Earth..

Despite their ubiquity, their minimal interactions with other matter make neutrinos incredibly difficult to detect. They were first discovered zipping out of a nuclear reactor in 1956, and many neutrino-detection experiments have spotted the steady bombardment of the particles sent to us from the sun; but this cascade masks rarer neutrinos produced when cosmic rays, whose sources remain mysterious, strike Earth's atmosphere.  READ MORE...

Elusive Planet Nine

An artist's impression of what Planet Nine might look like at the edge of the solar system. (Image credit: Shutterstock)



The elusive Planet Nine, which is theorized to be lurking somewhere in the outer reaches of the solar system, may not be a planet after all, a new study suggests. Instead, what we assumed to be a massive object could be evidence that gravity doesn't work like we thought it does. But the new theory doesn't sit well with everyone.


The Planet Nine hypothesis, first proposed in 2016, argues that the unusual orbits of objects in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, which seem to be being pulled away from the sun, can be explained by the presence of an undiscovered ninth planet up to 10 times more massive than Earth. Astronomers have been looking for Planet Nine ever since. However, despite searching almost half of the night sky, they have so far come up empty-handed.

In the new study, published Sept. 22 in The Astronomical Journal, researchers proposed another explanation for the gravitational anomalies observed in the outer solar system — that there aren't any anomalies. Instead, the team shows that the inconsistencies disappear completely when applying an alternative concept of gravity known as modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND).   READ MORE...

An Ocean of Water Under An Ocean of Water

Ancient volcanic rocks were eroded and stored a sea's worth of water in Earth's crust as they became buried. (Image credit: James O'Neil via Getty Images)



Porous rock that formed during one of Earth's biggest volcanic eruptions absorbed so much water as it eroded that it created a huge reservoir over the eons, now buried deep in Earth's crust.

A massive water reservoir is hidden deep beneath the ocean floor off the coast of New Zealand — and it may explain why the region experiences slow-motion earthquakes, scientists have found.


A sea's worth of water became locked inside volcanic rocks that formed 120 million to 125 million years ago during the early Cretaceous, when a lava plume the size of the U.S. burst through Earth's crust and solidified into a vast plateau, researchers said in a statement. Thick layers of sediment have since blanketed these rocks and buried any trace of their explosive past 2 miles (3 kilometers) below the Pacific Ocean seabed.

The researchers mapped a fault line along the east coast of New Zealand's North Island and found that these ancient rocks were abnormally "wet," with water making up nearly half the volume of cores drilled up from the ocean floor.

"Normal ocean crust, once it gets to be about seven or 10 million years old, should contain much less water," study lead author Andrew Gase, a marine geophysicist and seismologist who conducted the research while at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG), said in the statement.


Shallow seas that surrounded the ancient volcanic plateau may have eroded the rocks into a porous honeycomb, which sponged up water and stored it like an aquifer, according to the statement. This water-logged terrain slowly transformed over the eons, absorbing more water as the rocks were ground into clay and became buried.  READ MORE...

New Section of Universe Discovered

Astronomers may have detected a dozen large objects lurking beyond the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system, suggesting there could be another equally massive, "second Kuiper Belt" hiding beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Researchers may have detected a dozen new, large objects beyond the Kuiper Belt, which suggests that there is lots more stuff in the solar system than we realized. It could even hint that there is a "second Kuiper Belt" further out toward the edge of our stellar neighborhood, Science.org reported.

The sun's influence reaches much further out into space than the eight planets that orbit around it. Beyond Neptune, the solar system stretches out to around 100 astronomical units (AU), which is 100 times the distance between Earth and the sun. For context, the most distant planet from the sun, Neptune, is roughly 30 AU from our home star.

Beyond the edge of the solar system, or heliopause, lies the Oort Cloud — a reservoir of comets and asteroids that are loosely contained by the sun's gravity — that stretches to at least 1,000 AU from the sun, and likely even further.

But a majority of the largest known asteroids, comets and other large objects that lie beyond Neptune's orbit are contained within the Kuiper Belt, which stretches between 30 and 50 AU from the sun. 

Famous residents of the Kuiper Belt include the dwarf planet Pluto and the double-lobed object Arrokoth — the most distant object visited by a spacecraft. Planet Nine, if it exists, would also lurk somewhere within the Kuiper Belt. 

Until now, very few massive objects in the solar system have been found beyond the Kuiper Belt.  READ MORE...

Matter in the Universe

Most matter in the universe cannot be seen — but its influence on the largest structures in space can.

Astronomers estimate that roughly 85% of all the matter in the universe is dark matter, meaning only 15% of all matter is normal matter. Accounting for dark energy, the name astronomers give to the accelerated expansion of the universe, dark matter makes up roughly 27% of all the mass energy in the cosmos, according to CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research).

Astronomers have a variety of tools to measure the total amount of matter in the universe and compare that to the amount of "normal" (also called "baryonic") matter. The simplest technique is to compare two measurements.

The first measurement is the total amount of light emitted by a large structure, like a galaxy, which astronomers can use to infer that object's mass. The second measurement is the estimated amount of gravity needed to hold the large structure together. 

When astronomers compare these measurements on galaxies and clusters throughout the universe, they get the same result: There simply isn't enough normal, light-emitting matter to account for the amount of gravitational force needed to hold those objects together.

Thus, there must be some form of matter that is not emitting light: dark matter.

Different galaxies have different proportions of dark matter to normal matter. Some galaxies contain almost no dark matter, while others are nearly devoid of normal matter. But measurement after measurement gives the same average result: Roughly 85% of the matter in the universe does not emit or interact with light.  READ MORE...

The Mystery of Planet Formation

Until the 1950s, ideas about planet formation were mosly dismissed as fanciful and few astronomers took the question seriously. (Image credit: Andrzej Wojcicki/Getty Images)



We've only got to grips with how the planets in our solar system formed in the last 100 years. In the extract below from "What's Gotten Into You" (HarperCollins, 2023), Dan Levitt looks at the Soviet mathematician who spent a decade working on a problem that most astronomers had given up on, and — when he finally solved it — was met with disinterest and skepticism.

Over 4.8 billion years ago, the atoms that would create us sailed in great clouds of gas and dust, toward… well, nothing. There was no solar system, no planets, no Earth. In fact, for a long time, scientists could not explain how our solid planet, not to mention one so hospitable to life, appeared at all. 

How was our now-rocky planet conjured, like magic, out of an ethereal cloud of gas and dust? How and when did Earth become so welcoming to life? And what travails were our molecules forced to brave until life could evolve?

Scientists would learn that our atoms could finally create life only after they endured wrenching collisions, meltdowns, and bombardments — catastrophes that beggar any destruction ever witnessed by humankind.  READ MORE...

TWENTY-TWO People Needed to Colonize Mars

Researchers estimated that as few as 22 people would be needed to sustain a colony on Mars. But there are lots of caveats, and the new study largely misses the point of colonizing the Red Planet in the first place, experts say.

Only 22 people are needed to create a colony on Mars, an optimistic new study suggests. However, not everyone agrees, and some experts think many more people would be needed to create a lasting human presence on the Red Planet.

In the study, which was uploaded to the pre-print database arXiv on Aug. 11 and has not been peer-reviewed, researchers used a computer program, known as an agent-based model (ABM), to predict how many people would be needed to sustain a colony on Mars. ABMs simulate how well groups react to challenging scenarios based on their personality types.

The model looked at four personality types: agreeables, who are not very competitive or aggressive; socials, who are extroverted and do well in social settings; reactives, who struggle to deal with changes to routine; and neurotics, who are highly competitive and aggressive. The model then varied the number of each type when doing key tasks such as Martian mining and farming.

The researchers found that iIf most people were agreeables or socials, just 22 people could sustain a colony. With more neurotics and reactives, larger groups were needed to succeed.

Limiting the size of the first Martian colonies will be very important, because the more people and equipment that are needed, the more expensive it will be.    READ MORE...

Ancient Roman Boat Found in Serbia

The wooden remains and the layers of sand above them were damp, indicating the wreck was protected by moisture from the air. (Image credit: Institute of Archaeology, Belgrade)



Coal miners in Serbia have discovered the remains of a large wooden boat likely used by the Romans to supply a nearby city and military headquarters on the empire's frontier.


Archaeologists are waiting for radiocarbon dates of wood from the remains, but they think it may be from the third or fourth centuries A.D. They suggest the ancient vessel carried supplies along small rivers between the Danube River and the Roman city of Viminacium about 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) away, which was established early in the first century A.D.

The ancient wreck was unearthed in late July at the Drmno surface coal mine near Kostolac, about 30 miles (50 km) east of Belgrade.
The wooden remains were buried in a layer of silt about 25 feet (8 meters) below the surface. The mine's coal seam is reached by cutting away the topsoil with a mechanical digger, and the wreck was found on the wall of the cutting.  READ MORE...

Arrowhead Made from a Meteorite

In the late 1800s, archaeologists discovered an arrowhead at a Bronze Age dwelling in Mörigen, Switzerland. In the years since, the 3,000-year-old artifact has been part of the collection at the Bern Historical Museum.

Now, a new analysis reveals that the object is no ordinary arrowhead — it was crafted from a meteorite that crashed to Earth 3,500 years ago, according to a study published in the September issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

"On the outside it looks like a typical arrowhead coated in rust," lead author Beda Hofmann, head and curator of mineralogy and meteorites at the Natural History Museum of Bern, told Live Science. Their analysis showed that "there is still a lot of metal preserved," he said.

Several methods, including X-ray tomography (computerized imaging) and gamma spectrometry (a process that detects gamma-emitting radioactive materials), showed that the palm-size arrowhead not only contained aluminum-26 isotopes that don't naturally occur on Earth but also traces of iron and nickel alloy consistent with meteorites, according to the study.

The analysis also revealed grind marks left over from when the meteorite was shaped into an arrowhead, and the remains of tar, which was likely used to attach the point to the arrow's shaft, according to a statement.

At first, scientists thought the artifact was linked to the 170,000-year-old Twannberg meteorite site, less than 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the dwelling. However, further study revealed that the concentrations of nickel and germanium (a chemical element) in the arrowhead weren't a match, according to the statement.

"It wasn't from the meteorite that I suspected it was from," Hofmann said of the artifact, which weighs one-tenth of an ounce (2.9 grams) and measures just over 1 inch (3 centimeters) long.  READ MORE...

Entrance to the Underworld

The Catholic Church of San Pablo in Mitla is built on the footprint of an earlier Zapotec temple. (Image credit: Marco M. Vigato/The ARX Project)





A hidden "entrance to the underworld" built by the ancient Zapotec culture has been discovered beneath a Catholic church in southern Mexico, according to a team of researchers using cutting-edge ground-scanning technology.


The complex system of underground chambers and tunnels was built more than a millennium ago by the Zapotec, whose state arose near modern-day Oaxaca in the late sixth century B.C. and grew in grandeur as people created monumental buildings and erected massive tombs filled with lavish grave goods.

The architectural complex at Mitla, 27 miles (44 kilometers) southeast of Oaxaca, boasts unique and intricate mosaics, having functioned as the main Zapotec religious center until the late 15th century, when the Aztec conquest likely resulted in the abandonment of the site. The Spanish then reused stone blocks from the ruins to build the San Pablo Apostol church a century later.

Oral histories have long suggested that the main altar of the church was purposefully built over a sealed entrance to a vast underground labyrinth of pillars and passages that originally belonged to a Zapotec temple known as Lyobaa, which means "the place of rest."

Investigating this claim with modern geophysical methods, the Project Lyobaa research team announced on May 12 that they had found a complex system of caves and passageways beneath the church. The project is a collaboration of 15 archaeologists, geophysical scientists, engineers and conservation experts with the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and the ARX Project.   READ MORE...

Universe Expansion Could be a Mirage

Astronomers use the light from distant stars, such as the Helix Nebula seen here, to measure the apparent expansion of the universe. New resaerch suggests there may be more to the pictue that we're not seeing. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSC)



The expansion of the universe could be a mirage, a potentially controversial new study suggests. This rethinking of the cosmos also suggests solutions for the puzzles of dark energy and dark matter, which scientists believe account for around 95% of the universe's total energy and matter but remain shrouded in mystery.


The novel new approach is detailed in a paper published June 2 in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, by University of Geneva professor of theoretical physics Lucas Lombriser.


Scientists know the universe is expanding because of redshift, the stretching of light's wavelength towards the redder end of the spectrum as the object emitting it moves away from us. 

Distant galaxies have a higher redshift than those nearer to us, suggesting those galaxies are moving ever further from Earth.

More recently, scientists have found evidence that the universe's expansion isn't fixed, but is actually accelerating faster and faster. This accelerating expansion is captured by a term known as the cosmological constant, or lambda.


The cosmological constant has been a headache for cosmologists because predictions of its value made by particle physics differ from actual observations by 120 orders of magnitude. The cosmological constant has therefore been described as "the worst prediction in the history of physics."

Cosmologists often try to resolve the discrepancy between the different values of lambda by proposing new particles or physical forces but Lombriser tackles it by reconceptualizing what's already there.     READ MORE...

Aboriginal Painted Rock

Hundreds of years ago, in a cramped cave, Indigenous people in Australia painted a pair of watercraft whose origins have puzzled archaeologists since the artworks' discovery about 50 years ago. Now, a new study may have solved the mystery: The paintings likely depict "fighting craft" from what is now Indonesia, hinting that there may have been "physical violence" between the Indigenous people and visitors from afar.


Archaeologists identified the boats as being warships from the Moluccas (also known as the Maluku Islands), an archipelago off the eastern coast of Indonesia that's located directly north of Australia, according to a study published May 2 in the journal Historical Archaeology.


"Just these two craft suddenly add another dimension to the sphere of interaction of northern Australia — that Australia is not just some sort of land that's on its own, in the middle of nowhere and is cut off for 65,000 years from everywhere else," study co-author Daryl Wesley, an archaeologist and senior lecturer at Flinders University, told ABC News Australia.  READ MORE...

Time Swapping - Slits in Time

A new diffracton study sends lasers through 'slits in time' in a novel take on the classic double slit experiment. (Image credit: Thomas Angus, Imperial College London)

In a first, scientists have shown that they can send light through "slits" in time.


The new experiment is a twist on a 220-year-old demonstration, in which light shines through two slits in a screen to create a unique diffraction pattern across space, where the peaks and troughs of the light wave add up or cancel out. In the new experiment, researchers created a similar pattern in time, essentially changing the color of an ultrabrief laser pulse.

The findings pave the way for advances in analog computers that manipulate data imprinted on beams of light instead of digital bits - it might even make such computers "learn" from the data. They also deepen our understanding of the fundamental nature of light and its interactions with materials.

For the new study, described April 3 in the journal Nature Physics(opens in new tab), the researchers used indium tin oxide (ITO), the material found in most phone screens. 

Scientists already knew ITO could change from transparent to reflective in response to light, but the researchers found it occurs much faster than previously thought, in less than 10 femtoseconds (10 millionths of a billionth of a second).

"This was a very big surprise and at the beginning it was something that we couldn’t explain," study lead author Riccardo Sapienza(opens in new tab), a physicist at the Imperial College London, told Live Science. 

Eventually, the researchers figured out why the reaction happened so fast by scrutinizing the theory of how the electrons in ITO respond to incident light. "But it took us a long time to understand it."  READ MORE...

Human Life Span

 

Johanna Quaas, 97, is the world's oldest competitive gymnast. She's pictured here at age 92. (Image credit: ROSLAN RAHMAN / Staff via Getty Images)



Scientists have long debated the greatest possible age of a person, with previous studies placing the limit at up to 150 years. But in the past 25 years, no one has surpassed the record for the world's oldest person, held by Jean Louise Calment, who died at age 122 in 1997.

"This has led people to argue that the maximum life span has been reached," David McCarthy(opens in new tab), an assistant professor of risk management and insurance at the University of Georgia, told Live Science. 

In a new study, McCarthy and his colleagues say they've uncovered evidence that this longevity record will be broken within the next four decades. The team did not propose a maximum age that humans can live to, but rather, they used a mathematical model to project what mortality trends might look like in upcoming years.

However, not everyone agrees with the team's conclusions, experts told Live Science.

In the study, published March 29 in the journal PLOS One(opens in new tab), the scientists analyzed mortality data from hundreds of millions of people in 19 countries who were born between the 1700s and the late 1900s, up to 1969. 

They tweaked an existing mathematical model to explore how the mortality rates among people ages 50 to 100 differed in people with different birth years. They then used this information to predict the ages that people may reach in the future.  READ MORE...