• Astrophysicists anxiously await the upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, slated for December 18. Things can go wrong.
• This spectacular giant will be the most powerful space telescope ever built, opening new windows to nascent galaxies and stars from billions of years ago, as well as to planets circling other stars in our cosmic neighborhood.
• It will help us refine our own story � a story of our origins and how similar and different we are to the rest of the universe.

The history of science could be written as a history of instrumentation. From particle accelerators and microscopes to fMRIs and telescopes, as instruments become more powerful, they act as reality amplifiers: they magnify our view of the very small and the very large, allowing us a glimpse of what is invisible to the human eye.

It is hard to imagine that, up to 1609, all we knew about the skies depended on what we can see with the naked eye. When Galileo Galilei had the insight to aim his telescope at the night sky, he saw what no human had seen before: a new sky, full of surprises and possibility. This new sky would reveal a new world order: out with the Aristotelian view of an Earth-centered cosmos, a frozen sky where celestial objects were perfect and unchangeable, and in with a marvelously imperfect heaven � a moon full of craters and mountains, Jupiter with four orbiting moons (now we know there are about 79 and counting), a Saturn with "ears" (that is, the rings that his telescope could not yet resolve), and a Milky Way made of a countless number of stars. New instruments hold the promise of a worldview transformation: as we look deep into nature, our vision of reality and us in it changes.

It is then no surprise that the astrophysics community is nervously awaiting the launch of a new marvel of instrumentation, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Even if often called the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the JWST is a different kind of machine. The HST is, perhaps, the most successful instrument in astronomical history. Beyond its optical capability that reveals to us parts of the universe we could in principle see with our limited human vision (that is, the colors of the visible spectrum), it has additional infrared and ultraviolet instruments that have revolutionized the way we understand the cosmic history and the stunning wealth of galaxies spread throughout space. But the Hubble was launched in 1990, and it is time for a new instrument to step up and expand upon its groundwork, deepening our understanding of the universe near and far.

Two big missions for James Webb Space Telescope

The JWST is designed to capture mostly infrared light, which is of a longer wavelength than what our eyes can see. The focus on infrared comes from the two main missions for the telescope.

The first is to look into the very young universe by observing very far away objects, nascent galaxies and stars born about 13 billion years ago, which was only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. (In cosmology, the science of our cosmic history, hundreds of millions of years is not a long time.) Contrary to Hubble, which had a near-Earth orbit, the JWST will be stationed far away, at 1.5 million kilometers from Earth at a spot known as a Lagrange point, where the gravitational attractions of sun and Earth cancel out � a peaceful cosmic parking spot.

After taking off inside an Ariane 5 rocket from the European Space Agency, the JWST will continue for another twenty-nine days until it gets to its final destination. The good thing about the Lagrange point is its remoteness and thus distance from interfering infrared sources near Earth. To make the shielding even more effective, the telescope comes with five layered sheets of Kapton foil, a sort of space umbrella to stop radiation interference. At the size of a tennis court, the shields are programmed to open during the telescope's migration to its final position. The bad thing about being stationed so far away from Earth is that if something goes wrong, we cannot go there to fix it, as we had to with the Hubble Space Telescope. Anxiety rises.

The "eyes" of the telescope are made of 18 hexagonal, gold-coated, beryllium mirrors, making up a giant honeycomb the size of a large house. The mirrors will capture and focus light from distant sources that will then be sent off to the telescope's four different instruments. The mirrors must also unfurl in space, another nerve-wracking step before astrophysicists can start to gather data.

The second big mission is to aim its sights on exoplanets, planets orbiting stars in our galactic neighborhood, for signs of life. A little over 20 years ago, astronomers detected the first alien worlds outside our solar system. Since then, the list has grown steadily to over four thousand confirmed exoplanets today. The essential question, of course, is whether some of these worlds may harbor life. We may not be able to travel across interstellar distances to see for ourselves, but our machines can scrutinize these worlds by detecting the chemical composition of their atmospheres in the hope of finding the telltale signs of life: mainly oxygen, water, carbon dioxide, and methane. Thus, JWST aims to map out other worlds that may resemble our own, addressing the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe.

An early Christmas present

The current launch date is December 18, a week before Christmas. As with any space launch of a complex instrument, there are many things that could go wrong, although extensive testing has built up confidence that all will go smoothly. Regardless, we only will succeed in stretching the boundaries of knowledge by taking risks. The launch will be a gripping moment for humanity. What will a new window opening to the sky reveal about our story?

Unless you are lost to the power of wonder, a mission like this must capture your imagination. We all want this spectacular mission to succeed, astrophysicists and non-astrophysicists alike. We care about worlds so far away from us because the story this machine will tell is a mirror of our own. As we witness stars and galaxies being born, we learn about our galaxy and how our solar system emerged a little under five billion years ago. We learn about the myriad ways that gravity and chemistry conspired to bake matter into worlds, each different, some potentially thriving with life like our own. And with each discovery, we dive a little deeper into the mystery of who we are and of what makes us both alike and different from what is out there in the universe.

• If there is one thing that Russia scholars can agree on, it is the poor quality of leadership that has plagued the country since its inception.
• Though some could have become the posthumous victims of inflated rumors or political propaganda, others may have been even crueler than we thought.
• People like Anna Ivanovna (Russia's ice queen) and Lavrentiy Beria (Stalin's secret police chief) continue to strike fear in the hearts of modern readers.

A popular joke among American students majoring in Slavic Studies is that you can pretty much sum up the entirety of Russian history by saying things have gone from "bad to worse." It is a gross oversimplification, ignoring important periods of peace and prosperity during which Russian art, culture, and commerce could flourish.

At the same time, there seems to be an underlying truth to this joke that has caused it to stick. As the Russian political scientist Vladimir Gelman put it in a 2019 article he wrote for Riddle, "Practically all analysts and observers of Russia today, regardless of their political leanings, tend to agree about the country's poor quality of governance."

From czars that commanded respect by virtue of their lineage rather than the contents of their character to bloodthirsty Bolsheviks that leveraged communist ideals for personal gain, Russia knows no shortage of leaders that have left the country worse off than they found it. The following list takes a closer look at some of them.

However, take note: when reading about the characters on this list, it is important to look at their stories with a critical eye. Some could have become the subjects of posthumously inflated rumors, others the victims of propaganda campaigns. Others still might have well been even crueler than historians have come to believe. Also, we intentionally did not include Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, whose crimes against humanity are well-known.

Ivan the Terrible: The First Czar (1530-1584)

Like all czars on this list, Ivan was elected ruler of Russia at a young age by a council of politicians who mistakenly thought they would be able to control him. While "The Terrible" turns out to have been an accurate title, the words did not have the same negative connotation when Ivan was alive. Instead, "terrible" meant "formidable" or "awe-inspiring."

That isn't to say he wasn't terrible, though. In 1552, the czar and his armies besieged Kazan. The siege hardly lasted a week, owing in part to Ivan's tactics: he would impale his Tatar prisoners and position them around the city walls so that their comrades could hear their agonizing cries to surrender.

Ivan's wrath was not restricted to the battlefield or even the realm of politics. According to a popular story, he blinded the architect that designed St. Basil's Cathedral so he would never create something as beautiful again. He also killed his unborn grandson by beating the mother until she miscarried and then killed his son when he complained about it.

Last but not least, Ivan is thought to have kept some seriously questionable company in the form of Malyuta Skuratov, a henchman who � according to the 18^th century historian Nikolay Karamzin � was in charge of organizing "rape trips" where he would round up beautiful wives around Moscow and present them to the czar to do with as he pleased.

Anna Ivanovna: The Ice Queen (1693-1740)

While Anna Ivanovna was revered for modernizing (and Europeanizing) Russia, her extreme jealousy and vindictive temper left a dark cloud over her legacy. These two qualities stemmed, in part, from her less than fortunate love life, which took a turn from bad to worse when her sickly husband � the Duke of Courland � died as they were traveling home from their own wedding.

Fancying herself an expert "matchmaker," Anna took an interest in arranging marriages between the members of her court and would become outraged when they did not involve her in their sex lives. When one of her princes, Mikhail Golitsyn, returned from Italy having fallen in love with a Catholic Italian girl, Anna stripped him of his wealth and titles and made him her new fool.

In a series of events typically encountered only in fantasy novels, Ivanovna found Golitsyn a new bride and organized an extravagant wedding to take place inside a life-size palace made entirely of ice hauled from the frozen banks of the river Neva. After a ceremonial parade that was led by an Asian elephant, the couple was chained to their ice-beds.

They would have frozen to death had Golitsyn's wife not managed to trade the pearl necklace she received from the czarina for one of the guard's fur cloaks. Against all odds, the two survived the night and � according to a number of historians � chose to stay together. Ivanovna, however, would die next fall, having spent the preceding summer watching her ice palace melt in the sun.

Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976)

From a distance, Lysenko's life looks like a straightforward success story. Born a poor, uneducated Ukrainian peasant who did not learn to read until he was 13 years old, he died a director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, where his job was to reinforce the Soviet Union's agricultural policies with the latest in biological research.

What spins this story on its head is the fact that Lysenko did not end up with this prestigious and hugely important position thanks to his skills or knowledge. Instead, he had been randomly selected by the state in an effort to promote "average men" to leadership positions that, in capitalist countries, were reserved only for the trained elite.

Needless to say, this policy ended up backfiring in a catastrophic manner. Not only did Lysenko know nothing about biology, but the scientific concepts he did understand were molded by political ideology rather than impartial research � including the belief that plants, like the Soviet people, could grow bigger and taller if they were exposed to the right stimuli.

This belief ran contrary to the tried-and-true principles of genetics, namely, that the growth of crops could only be manipulated through selective breeding. That is not to say Lysenko was an innocent victim of indoctrination, though; he imprisoned the Mendelian geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, and his biased practices led to the starvation of millions of Russians.

Lavrentiy Beria: Stalin's Himmler (1899-1953)

Lavrentiy Beria, whom Joseph Stalin had reportedly once introduced to Hitler as "our Himmler," was the chief of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, otherwise known as the NKVD. During World War II, fear of Beria's secret agents kept a country on the brink of destruction from surrendering to Nazi invaders.

For this, Beria paid a price few would be willing to pay. At the front, soldiers who even remotely questioned Stalin's military decisions were shipped off to the gulags. In this string of prison systems, located in the icy outskirts of Siberia and constructed under direction of Vladimir Lenin, they would spend anywhere from five to ten years doing forced labor.

Beria's measures consistently exceeded their political justifications, even by the standards of the Red Terror. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, the Soviets � who had signed a non-aggression pact with them one week prior � came in as well. On orders of Beria, the NKVD murdered as many as 22,000 members of the Polish army and bourgeoisie.

Though Beria almost succeeded Stalin after his death, he was ultimately ousted by Nikita Khrushchev. Today, he is not only remembered as a mass murderer but a serial rapist as well. According to bodyguards, he would habitually lure young women into his mansion before giving them a bouquet on the way out. If they accepted, the sex had been consensual. If not, they were arrested.

• Compared to other Big Tech companies, Apple has been the poster child of privacy protection.
• Unfortunately, a recent announcement has breached that trust.
• How much power do we want Big Tech to have? And what sort of society do we want?

Apple has built a reputation as the "least evil" Big Tech giant when it comes to privacy. All these companies � Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon � collect our data and essentially spy on us in a multitude of ways. Apple, however, has cultivated a reputation as by far the least invasive of our mainstream technology options. Their recent dramatic reversal on this issue has caused an uproar. What is going on, and what should we do about it?

I personally use and appreciate Apple products. Their software and hardware blend together, making smartphones and computers simpler, easier, and more enjoyable. More important (to me, anyway), Apple has conspicuously maintained much better privacy policies than other tech giants, who log every place you visit, calculate and sell your religion and politics, and store every single search you have ever made (even the "incognito" ones). Apple's privacy policies are imperfect but less terrifying. The general consensus is that most Apple products and services spy less on you and send much less of your personal data to third parties. That matters to many users and should matter to all of us.

Now, the bad news. All the major cloud storage providers have for some time been quietly scanning everything you upload. That is no conspiracy theory: you agree to it when you accept their privacy policies. They do this for advertising (which is what is meant by the phrase "to help us improve our services" in the user agreement). They also look for and report illegal activity. A big part of monitoring for criminal activity is looking for "CSAM," a polite acronym for something horrific. In August, Apple announced that it would take a drastic step further and push a software update for iPhones that would scan and analyze all of the images on your iPhone, looking not just for known CSAM but for any images that a computer algorithm judges to be CSAM.

There are two enormous red flags here. First, the software does not operate on Apple's cloud servers, where you are free to choose whether to park your data and allow Apple to scan it for various purposes. The scanning is performed on your phone, and it would scan every picture on your phone, looking for content that matches a database of bad images.

Image recognition tech is still bad

Why is this a problem for people who do not keep illegal images on their phones? The second red flag is that the software does not look for a specific file � horrifying_image.jpg � and ignore all of your personal photos. Rather, it uses what Apple calls "NeuralHash," a piece of computer code that looks for features and patterns in images. You can read their own description here.

Computer image recognition is much better than it once was. Despite the hype surrounding it the past few years, however, it is still extremely fallible. There are many ways that computer image recognition can be baffled by tricks that are not sophisticated enough to fool toddlers. This fascinating research paper covers just one of them. It finds that a 99 percent confident (and correct) image identification of a submarine can be made into a 99 percent confident (but wrong) identification of a bonnet by adding a tiny area of static noise to one corner of the image.

Credit: D. Karmon et al., ArXiv, 2018.

Other researchers fooled image recognition by changing a single pixel dot in an image. Hackers know this too. It is extremely easy to add an undetectable pattern to a cute cat picture, triggering algorithms to flag it as something sinister.

Let's imagine for a moment that this algorithm never mistakes baby bath pictures or submarines or cats or dots for illicit material. This could make things worse. How?

The NeuralHash algorithm is trained by scanning examples of the target images it seeks. This collection of training material is secret from the public. We do not know whether all the material in the database is CSAM or if it also includes things such as: political or religious images, geographic locations, anti-government statements, mis-information according to whoever has the power to define it, material potentially embarrassing to politicians, or whistleblowing documents against powerful authorities. There are many things that tech companies, federal agencies, or autocratic regimes around the world would love to know if you have on your phone. The possibilities are chilling.

Reaction to Apple's plan was immediate and overwhelmingly negative. Outcry came from international groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation that specialize in privacy rights all the way down to everyday people in Mac user forums. Apple initially stood its ground and defended the decision. Their weak justifications and reassurances failed to smother the fire. Just last week, the company relented and announced a delay to implementing the program. This is a victory for privacy, but it is not the end of the story.

iSpy with my little eye

It would be very easy for Apple to wait out the uproar and then quietly go ahead with the plan a few months from now. The other tech giants likely would follow suit. But remember that Big Tech already tracks our movements and records our private conversations. If the public does not stay vigilant, Big Tech can keep invading what most of us consider to be our private lives. How much more power over us do we want Big Tech to have? And is this the sort of society that we want?

But humanity is plagued by many respiratory viruses, such as influenza A (IAV) and respiratory syncytial viruses (RSV), which cause hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. Most of these viruses – apart from influenza and SARS-CoV-2 – have no vaccines or effective treatments.

A recent study from the University of Glasgow has discovered what happens when you get infected with some of these viruses at the same time, and it has implications for how they make us sick and how we protect ourselves from them.

For many reasons, respiratory viruses are often found during winter in the temperate regions of the world, or the rainy season of equatorial regions. During these periods, you'll probably be infected with more than one virus at any one time in a situation called a “co-infection".

Research shows that up to 30% of infections may harbour more than one virus. What this means is that, at some point two different viruses are infecting the cells that line your nose or lungs.

We know that co-infection can be important if we look at a process called “antigenic shift" in influenza viruses, which is basically caused by virus “sex". This sometimes occurs when two different influenza strains meet up inside the same cell and exchange genes, allowing a new variant to emerge.

Co-infection can create a predicament for viruses when you consider that they need to compete for the same resource: you. Some viruses appear to block other viruses, while some viruses seem to like each other. What is driving these positive and negative interactions during co-infections is unknown, but animal studies suggest that it could be critical in determining how sick you get.

The University of Glasgow study investigated what happens when you infect cells in a dish with two human respiratory viruses. For their experiments, they chose IAV and RSV, which are both common and cause lots of disease and death each year. The researchers looked at what happens to each virus using high-resolution imaging techniques, such as cryo-electron microscopy, that their labs have perfected over the years.

They found that some of the human lung cells in the dish contained both viruses. And, by looking closely at those co-infected cells, they found that the viruses that were emerging from the cell had structural characteristics of both IAV and RSV. The new “chimeric" virus particles had proteins of both viruses on their surface and some even contained genes from the other. This is the first evidence of this occurring from co-infection of distinct respiratory viruses.

Follow-up experiments in the same paper showed that these new chimeric viruses were fully functional and could even infect cells that were rendered resistant to influenza, presumably gaining access using the RSV proteins could even get into a broader range of human cells than either virus alone could. Potentially, this could be happening during natural co-infections during the winter.

Why we need to study chimeric viruses

Studying disease-causing pathogens is extremely important and helpful for creating vaccines and treatments, yet safety is still paramount. It's important to point out that the researchers in this study did not perform any genetic engineering between two viruses and only modelled what is already happening in the real world, but using safer laboratory strains of viruses under lab conditions.

We know about the significant role co-infection can play in a virus's life, such as during influenza antigenic shift or the curious case of hepatitis D virus borrowing bits of the other viruses, such as hepatitis B, to spread. Nevertheless, the work by the University of Glasgow researchers has significant implications for our understanding of how other very different respiratory viruses might interact, antagonise and even promote each other's infections in the ecosystem of our nose and lungs. Together, this work shows the complex and often messy interactions between viruses during the winter.

Undoubtedly, future work will explore how this co-infection affects transmission, disease and immunity – things that aren't easy to determine in a dish.

Connor Bamford, Research Fellow, Virology, Queen's University Belfast

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

• The Einstein field equations appear very simple, but they encode a tremendous amount of complexity.


• What looks like one compact equation is actually 16 complicated ones, relating the curvature of spacetime to the matter and energy in the universe.


• It showcases how gravity is fundamentally different from all the other forces, and yet in many ways, it is the only one we can wrap our heads around.

Imagine you've just sat down to watch your favorite TV show. You decide to snuggle in with your legs crisscrossed because you find it more comfortable that way.

When the episode ends, you try to stand up and suddenly your right foot isn't working. At first you just can't move it, then it feels like it has pins and needles all over it. For a minute or two it feels uncomfortable and weird, but soon enough you are able to stand up and walk around normally.

What just happened?

I'm an exercise physiologist – a scientist who studies what happens to our bodies when we move and exercise. The goal of much of my research has been to understand how the brain talks to and controls the different parts of our bodies. When your foot falls asleep, there is something wrong with the communication between your brain and the muscles in that area.

Every time you decide to move your body, whether it's standing up, walking around or playing sports, your brain sends signals to your muscles to make sure they move correctly. When the brain is unable to talk with a muscle or groups of muscles, some weird things can happen – including that part of your body getting that weird falling-asleep sensation.

An animation explains how the nervous system works.

It usually starts with a sense of numbness or tingling in that area. This sensation, which people often also call “pins and needles," is technically known as paresthesia.

Some people mistakenly think a lack of blood flow causes this feeling. They imagine the “asleep" feeling happens when your blood, which carries nutrients all over your body, is unable to get to your foot. But that's not right.

When your foot falls asleep, it's actually because the nerves that connect the brain to the foot are getting squished thanks to the position you're sitting in. Remember, it's these nerves that carry messages back and forth to let your brain and your foot communicate with each other. If the nerves have been compressed for a little while, you won't have much feeling in your foot because it can't get its normal messages through to your brain about how it feels or if it's moving.

Once you start to move around again, the pressure on the nerves is released. They “wake up" and you'll start to notice a “pins and needles" feeling. Don't worry, that feeling will only last for a few minutes and then everything will feel normal again.

Now comes the important question: Is this dangerous? Most of the time, when your foot, or any other body part, falls asleep, it is temporary and nothing to worry about. In fact, since it lasts for only a minute or two, you may not even remember it happened by the end of the day.

Even though it's not causing any permanent damage, you might still want to avoid the uncomfortable feeling that comes when your foot falls asleep. Here are a couple of tips that may help:

• Switch your position often.


• Don't cross your legs for very long.


• When you are sitting for a long time, try standing up every so often.

You probably can't 100% prevent your foot from ever falling asleep. So don't worry when it happens every once in a while. It'll go away pretty quickly – and maybe it can remind you of all the important brain messages your nerves are usually transmitting without your even noticing.

Zachary Gillen, Assistant Professor of Exercise Physiology, Mississippi State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

• To prevent the present from erasing the past, non-profit organizations are creating detailed 3D scans of famous monuments.
• Stored online and shared with researchers around the world, these digital copies will endure long after their real counterparts are gone.
• Occasionally, this work is incredibly dangerous.

On the night of May 14, 1940, the German Luftwaffe bombed the Dutch city of Rotterdam. When government administrators entered the streets to tally their losses the next morning, they learned that 900 people had lost their lives. As if this was not bad enough, the Luftwaffe had also destroyed hundreds of historic houses; Rotterdam's city center � one of the oldest in the country and jam-packed with seventeenth century architecture � had been reduced to dust.

In 2001, the Taliban pulverized two statues of Vairocana and Guatama Buddha that had been carved from a cliffside in the Bamyan valley of central Afghanistan. Standing no less than 38 and 55 meters tall, respectively, the statues were two of the tallest Buddhist monuments in the entire world and an important destination for traveling monks. The Buddhas were leveled on orders of Taliban co-founder Mullah Mohammed Omar, who tried to rid his country of any religious tributes that were not aimed at Allah.

During a hot summer evening two years ago, the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire. The building, whose construction had begun in the twelfth century, was not designed with modern fire safety standards in mind. Though conservators do their best to keep everything in good condition, an accident was bound to happen eventually. While the cathedral's vaulted ceiling kept flames from wreaking havoc on its interior, most of the wooden roof and spire burned to a crisp.

Throughout history, countless artifacts have been caught in the crossfires of war, deliberately targeted by iconoclasts or swallowed up by the indifferent forces of nature and time. As a result, numerous non-profit groups and agencies � most notably, UNESCO � have sprung up to prevent the present from erasing the past. But while even the most well protected monument remains at risk of being physically destroyed, we now have a way to preserve them digitally.

From plaster casts to lasers

In the late 19^th century, a British archaeologist named Alfred Maudsley traveled to Guatemala intent on finding a way to preserve the country's Mayan ruins as best as possible. Rather than record their existence by means of writing or photography, Maudsley decided to cover entire temples in plaster casts. The tens of thousands of true-to-scale "negatives" produced from this endeavor were shipped back to England for research and reproduction.

Like Maudsley, modern-day researchers also rely on highly accurate replicas in order to protect and study ancient artifacts. Fortunately, unlike Maudsley, they can acquire such replicas without actually having to touch the delicate monuments themselves. This is all thanks to advancements in 3D measurement tools which, in recent years, allowed us to store entire heritage sites in a place that no terrorist organization or natural disaster can reach them: the cloud.

There are several companies in the business of scanning monuments, but one has distinguished itself as somewhat of a pack leader. Founded in 2003, CyArk serves as a liaison between cultural ministries and tech companies to create an extensive, open-sourced, fully online library of 3D scanned monuments and heritage sites. In 2016, this library already featured more than 200 entries, including sections from the city of Pompeii, the Tower of London, and even Mount Rushmore.

CyArk's primary measurement tool is a 3D laser scanner, which projects pulsed beams of light that bounce back once they hit a surface, thus sizing up structures or objects down to the millimeter. The interactive models assembled from these individual data sets are then shared with research facilities and universities. As CyArk's field manager Ross Davison said in an interview, this means that a student from Germany could, in theory, visit ruins in South India from the comfort of their living room.

Saving monuments in Iraq

While making monuments more accessible was always on CyArk's agenda, it was not its primary focus. First and foremost, the company had been founded to save artifacts from accidental or deliberate destruction. Case-in-point: a 6.8-magnitude earthquake destroyed a number of ancient temples in Myanmar in 2016. These temples, erected by the Pagan Kingdom, would have been lost were it not for the CyArk employees that managed to scan key structures before the earthquake hit.

Saving monuments from the wrath of Mother Nature is one thing, but protecting them from religious or ideologically motivated iconoclasm is another. For many years, scanning artifacts located in war-torn areas like Iraq or Syria was not only difficult but dangerous. Despite the risks involved, French filmmaker Ivan Erhel traveled to the Middle East � the place where many of our earliest known civilizations originated � to scan as many remnants of Mesopotamian culture as possible.

Erhel can trace his resolve back to 2015. That year, the Islamic State (ISIS) was at the height of its power, occupying large portions of Iraq. During this time, ISIS members destroyed a number of museums, statues, and other artifacts. "In Nimrud, most of the bas relief was totally destroyed," Erhel said. "In Babylon, the Mušḫuššu have lost their colors. Hattra has been occupied by ISIS for several years, and many of the sculptures had their faces erased with hammer or gunshots."

On one occasion when the team was attempting to scan one of the sole surviving statues of Nimrud, Erhel and his team were shot at by Iraqi forces stationed there to protect the site from looters. Still, the risks taken by Erhel's team eventually paid off. A general from Mosul summed it up nicely when he told Erhel: "We're like a tree. When people die, it's like leaves and branches falling off. But if you destroy the roots, then there is no tree."

• Plato wrote profusely, and his ideas are intelligent, well argued, and powerful.
• His works form the backbone of so many subjects: epistemology, aesthetics, metaphysics, politics, and psychology.
• Plato also influenced Christianity, which in turn became a new kind of religion altogether.

Nothing in life can be treated in isolation. Behind every idea, person, discovery, invention, or project is a hidden network of conditions that gave rise to it. This is never truer than in academia. As Isaac Newton famously said, we are all just "standing on the shoulders of Giants."

Philosophy is the same. Almost all its notable thinkers read, debated, and bounced ideas around with their contemporaries. Aristotle was a response to (and taught by) Plato, Chinese legalism was a critique of Confucianism, David Hume and Adam Smith were close friends, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau constantly attacked each other, and Thomas Hobbes was in regular correspondence with René Descartes.

So, it is hard to answer the question: who was the most original philosopher? But that doesn't mean we aren't going to try.

The trunk of the tree

Generally every philosophical issue (in the West, anyway) is prefaced with the line, "It all began with the ancient Greeks." Of these seminal thinkers, Plato is typically considered the foremost. There is an oft-quoted line from A.N. Whitehouse that reads, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato".

No doubt, there is some truth to this. Plato wrote profusely, and in both his dialogues and Republic we find the foundations of political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, and aesthetics. He was a psychologist before the term even existed: his tripartite division of the soul into Eros (desire), Thumos (spirit or passion), and Logos (rationality) tracks almost perfectly onto Freud's Id, Superego, and Ego.

Importantly, he defined the rules of the philosophical game, in which dialogue, debate, dialectic, and rational sparring are the way to do philosophy. Today, we assume that good arguments must be logical, and that most people, most of the time, want to discover the Truth (with a capital T) of the universe. This all comes from Plato. (It is difficult to find a similar sentiment in Eastern traditions.)

Let me write that down

There is only one problem: it is difficult to say how strictly original Plato was and how much was already kicking around in the ideological zeitgeist of the Peloponnese. All of Plato's dialogues contain a fictionalized version of his master and friend, Socrates, who is almost always the wisest character and the winner of debates. Socrates never wrote anything himself down (and in fact seems to have been opposed to this new-fangled "writing" the kids were up to), so we are left guessing at how much of what we call Plato's was actually from his master. It could be all; it could be none.

Additionally, Plato alludes to other long lost philosophers, not least Diotima, who is thought to be the first female philosopher and even the teacher of Socrates. So many of these "pre-Socratics" did write, but their work is largely lost, so we have to rely again on Plato and later sources for what they wrote. (The most important and treasured of these is Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius.)

However, with the dearth of evidence, we are forced to give Plato his due � even if it is just being the first to write stuff down.

How Plato influenced Christianity

If Western philosophy and the manner in which it is done is merely a "footnote to Plato," then it is not a stretch to say that Plato's ideas lurk in the background of nearly every philosopher that we have read. Thinkers like Descartes, Nietzsche, and Freud were either responding or adding to Plato's ideas.

Arguably more important even than this is how far Platonism influenced Christianity, the largest religion on Earth. The early Church Fathers who formulated the theology and official dogma of the Church were steeped in the knowledge of both Jewish tradition and Greek philosophy, the latter being all but dominated by Plato and the descendants of his school, The Academy.

Plato's ideas of a world of forms � which was some perfect and removed ideal from our corrupt, base world � worked its way into formal Christian doctrine. Many ideas about sins of the flesh and weak mortal bodies were influenced by Plato. In his famous allegory of the cave, Plato argued that we ought not to indulge our worldly whims and desires (Eros) but contemplate and philosophize instead (Logos). All of these ideas tracked perfectly onto the fledgling Church. In fact, John's Gospel opens with the verse: "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God."

With us still

In the ways that Plato came to define Christianity we have, again, an entirely new way of doing philosophy � or, in this case, theology. Christianity is an original kind of faith that was half Judea, half Athens.

Plato dominated the Western tradition for centuries, and we still live with his legacy of valuing the intellect and rationality over our earthly lusts. To be called "irrational" is still a bad thing. Even though the likes of Aristotle creep into Christian theology via Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century and theologians like Augustine, Irenaeus, and Origen have their own impact, none ever leave the same (unique) depth of mark as the rationalistic and original ideas of Plato.

Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.

• A new study suggests that exomoons are common in multistar systems.
• Thus far, only a few exomoon candidates have been identified.
• Exoplanets with moons may be likelier to host life than those without moons.

Though Earth has only one (very special and precious) moon, the average planet in our solar system has 26 moons. (The range is from zero moons for Mercury and Venus to 82 moons for Saturn.) If the Milky Way has about 100 billion exoplanets, as astrophysicists suppose, then we can expect many more exomoons.

Finding these exomoons is the subject of a new paper recently published in the Astronomical Journal. By using the same techniques to find exoplanets, the researchers hope to show that exomoons are also common � and potentially a harbinger of life.

Hunting for exomoons

How do we know that stars other than our sun host planets? One common method of exoplanet detection is observing stars for slight dimming events that occur regularly � a telltale sign of a planet in transit around the star. This method, in use for about two decades, has proven very effective, and thousands of exoplanets have been identified using it.

Obviously, this is an indirect method of detection. The exoplanet itself is not observed but rather the effects it has on its star. Direct observation of an exoplanet is a bit more difficult � and an exomoon even more difficult. This does not mean it cannot be done, of course. It is just harder, so a lot exomoon candidates probably will end up being false positives.

It is only recently that strong evidence for exomoons has been gathered. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile recently recorded evidence that the exoplanet PDS 70c has a circumplanetary disk of material that could be forming into a moon. That planet, a gas giant twice the size of Jupiter, is one of the first serious contenders for an exoplanet with exomoons around it � or at least ones in formation.

In this new paper, the authors propose a method for making it a little easier to find exomoons around binary star systems, that is, pairs of stars that orbit one another. These systems are not uncommon; roughly 50 percent of stars are in multistar systems, with binary systems being the most common. (Some scientists suppose that the sun might once have been part of a binary pair, but this is unlikely.)

Binary systems change the math for how gravity impacts planets and how the transit method can be used. While a planet's transit times can be impacted by having an exomoon, they are further impacted by other exoplanets as well as by the companion star. The new paper, therefore, demonstrates how a moon would impact the transit times of a planet in a system with two stars. In a certain number of cases, only a moon can explain the observed effects.

The study's lead author, Billy Quarles of the Georgia Institute of Technology, expanded on this idea in a press release:

"The major difference with binary systems is the companion star acts like the tide at the beach, where it periodically comes in and etches away the beachfront. With a more eccentric binary orbit, a larger portion of the stable 'real estate' is removed. This can help out a lot in our search for moons in other star systems."

Additionally, exoplanets too close to their stars are likely to not have moons at all as stellar forces can blow away the material that might combine to form a moon in the first place. (This possibly explains why Mercury and Venus do not have moons.) Indeed, in the PDS 70 star system, the planet closest to its star does not appear to have a moon.

Moons may be essential to life

In a press release, study co-author Siegfried Eggl of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign explained further applications of the method in determining the habitability of exoplanets:

"If we can use this method to show there are other moons out there, then there are probably other systems similar to ours. The moon is also likely critical for the evolution of life on our planet, because without the moon the axis tilt of the Earth wouldn't be as stable, the results of which would be detrimental to climate stability. Other peer-reviewed studies have shown the relationship between moons and the possibility of complex life."

Maybe the discovery of exomoons is the first step to finding life elsewhere in the cosmos. Understanding the similarities and dissimilarities with our solar system is a great place to start.

• We assume that physical constants do not change from time to time or location to location.
• Measurements aimed at calculating the fine-structure constant, however, challenge this assumption.
• A big puzzle remains unsolved to this day: why do quasars appear to show small but significant differences in the inferred value of the fine-structure constant?

Whenever we examine the universe in a scientific manner, there are a few assumptions that we take for granted as we go about our investigations. We assume that the measurements that register on our devices correspond to physical properties of the system that we are observing. We assume that the fundamental properties, laws, and constants associated with the material universe do not spontaneously change from moment to moment. And we also assume, for many compelling reasons, that although the environment may vary from location to location, the rules that govern the universe always remain the same.

But every assumption, no matter how well-grounded it may be or how justified we believe we are in making it, has to be subject to challenge and scrutiny. Assuming that atoms behave the same everywhere � at all times and in all places � is reasonable, but unless the universe supports that assumption with convincing, high-precision evidence, we are compelled to question any and all assumptions. If the fundamental constants are identical at all times and places, the universe should show us that atoms behave the same everywhere we look. But do they? Depending on how you ask the question, you might not like the answer. Here is the story behind the fine-structure constant, and why it might not be constant, after all.

A number of fundamental constants, as reported by the Particle Data Group in 1986. Although many advances have occurred in the intervening 35 years, the values of these constants have changed very little, with the largest difference being a slight but significant increase in the precisions of these Credit: Particle Data Group / LBL / DOE / NSF

When most people hear the idea of a fundamental constant, they think about the constants of nature that are inherent to our reality. Things like the speed of light, the gravitational constant, or Planck's constant (the fundamental constant of the quantum universe) are often the first things we think of, along with the masses of the various indivisible particles in the universe. In physics, however, these are what we call "dimensionful" constants, which means that they rely on our definitions of quantities like mass, length, or time.

An alternative way to conceive of these constants is to make them dimensionless instead: so that arbitrary definitions like kilogram, meter, or second make no difference to the constant. In this conception, each quantum interaction has a coupling strength associated with it, and the coupling of the electromagnetic interaction is known as the fine-structure constant and is denoted by the symbol alpha (α). Fascinatingly enough, its effects were detected before quantum physics was even remotely understood, and remained wholly unexplained for nearly 30 years.

The Michelson interferometer (top) showed a negligible shift in light patterns (bottom, solid) as compared with what was expected if Galilean relativity were true (bottom, dotted). The speed of light was the same no matter which direction the interferometer was oriented.Credit: Albert A. Michelson (1881); A.A. Michelson and E. Morley (1887)

In 1887, arguably the greatest null result in the history of physics was obtained, via the Michelson-Morley experiment. The experiment was brilliant in conception, seeking to measure the speed of Earth through the "rest frame" of the universe by:

• sending light beams in perpendicular directions,
• bringing them back together,
• thereby constructing an interference pattern,
• and measuring how that pattern shifted as the experimental apparatus was rotated.

Michelson originally performed a version of this experiment by himself back in 1881, detecting no effect but recognizing the need to improve the experiment's precision.

Six years later, the Michelson-Morley experiment represented an improvement by more than a factor of ten, making it the most precise electromagnetic measuring device at the time. While again, no shift was detected, demonstrating no need for the hypothesized aether, the apparatus they developed was also spectacular for measuring the spectrum of light emitted by various atoms. Puzzlingly, where a single emission line was expected to occur at a specific wavelength, sometimes there was just a single line, but at other times there were a series of narrowly-spaced emission lines, providing empirical evidence (but without a theoretical motivation) for a finer-than-expected structure to atoms.

In the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom, only the orbiting angular momentum of the point-like electron contributes to the energy levels. Adding in relativistic effects and spin effects not only causes a shift in these energy levels, but causes degenerate levels to split into multiple states, revealinCredit: Régis Lachaume and Pieter Kuiper / Public domain

What is actually happening became clearer with the development of modern quantum mechanics. Electrons orbit around the atomic nucleus in fixed, quantized energy levels only, and it is known that they can occupy different orbitals, which correspond to different values of orbital angular momentum. These are required to balance by both relativity and quantum physics. First derived by Arnold Sommerfeld in 1916, it was recognized that these narrowly-spaced lines were an example of splitting due to the fine-structure of atoms, with hyperfine structure from electron/nucleon interactions discovered shortly thereafter.

Today, we understand the fine-structure constant in the context of quantum field theory, where it is the probability of an interacting particle having what we call a radiative correction: emitting or absorbing an electromagnetic quantum (that is, a photon) during an interaction. We typically measure the fine-structure constant, α, at today's negligibly low energies, where it has a value that is equal to 1/137.0359991, with an uncertainty of ~1 in the final digit. It is defined as a dimensionless combination of dimensionful physical constants: the elementary charge squared divided by Planck's constant and the speed of light, and the value we measure today is consistent across all sufficiently precise experiments.

In quantum electrodynamics, higher-order loop diagrams contribute progressively smaller and smaller effects. However, as the energy increases, these higher-order processes become more efficient, and thus the value of the fine-structure constant increases with energy.Credit: American Physical Society, 2012

At high energies in particle physics experiments, however, we notice that the value of α gets stronger at higher energies. As the energy of the interacting particle(s) increases, so does the strength of the electromagnetic interaction. When the universe was very, very hot � such as at energies achieved just ~1 nanosecond after the Big Bang � the value of α was more like 1/128, as particles like the Z-boson, which can only exist virtually at today's low energies, can more easily be physically "real" at higher energies. The interaction strength is expected to scale with energy, an instance where our theoretical predictions and our experimental measurements match up remarkably well.

However, there is an entirely different way to measure the fine-structure constant at today's low energies: by measuring spectral lines, or emission and absorption features, from distant light sources throughout the cosmos. As background light from a source strikes the intervening matter, some portion of that light is absorbed at specific wavelengths. The exact wavelengths that are observed depend on a number of factors, such as the redshift of the source but also on the value of the fine-structure constant.

The light from ultra-distant quasars provide cosmic laboratories for measuring the gas clouds they encounter along the way, with exact properties of those absorption lines revealing the fine structure constant's value.Credit: Ed Janssen / ESO

If there are any variations in α, either over time or directionally in space, a careful examination of spectral features from a wide variety of astrophysical sources, particularly if they span many billions of years in time (or billions of light-years in distance), could reveal those variations. The most straightforward way to look for these variations is through quasar absorption spectroscopy: where the light quasars, the brightest individual sources in the universe, encounter every intervening cloud of matter that exists between the emitter (the quasar itself) and the observer (us, here on Earth).

There are very intricate, precise energy levels that exist for both normal hydrogen (with an electron bound to a proton) and its heavy isotope deuterium (with an electron bound to a deuteron, which contains both a proton and a neutron), and these energy levels are just slightly different from one another. If you can measure the spectra of these different quasars and look for these precise, very-slightly-different fine and hyperfine transitions, you would be able to measure α at the location of the quasar.

Narrow-line absorption spectra allow us to test whether constants vary by looking at variations in line placements. Large numbers of systems investigated for fine and hyperfine splitting can reveal if there's an overall varying effect.Credit: M. T. Murphy, J. K. Webb, V. V. Flambaum, and S. J. Curran

If the laws of physics were the same everywhere throughout the universe, then based on the observed properties of these lines, which includes:

• the same wavelengths and frequencies,
• the same ratios between transitions within atoms,
• and the same sets of absorption features across a wide variety of distances,

you would expect to be able to infer the same value of α everywhere. The only difference you would anticipate would be redshift-dependent, where all the wavelengths for a specific absorber would be systematically shifted by the same redshift-dependent factor.

Yet, that is not what we see. Everywhere we look in the universe � at every quasar and every example of fine or hyperfine structure in the intervening, absorptive gas clouds � we see that there are tiny, minuscule, but non-negligible shifts in those transition ratios. At the level of a few parts-per-million, the value of the fine-structure constant, α, appears to observationally vary. What is remarkable is that this variation was not expected or anticipated but has robustly shown up, over and over again, in quasar absorption studies going all the way back to 1999.

Spatial variations in the fine-structure constant are inferred from quasar absorption data. Unfortunately, these individual variations between systems are significantly larger than any overall variation seen in space or time, casting severe doubt on those conclusions.Credit: J.K. Webb et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 191101 (2011)

Beginning in 1999, a team of astronomers led by Australian astrophysicist John K. Webb started seeing evidence that α was different from different astronomical measurements. Using the Keck telescopes and over 100 quasars, they found that α was smaller in the past and had risen by approximately 6 parts-per-billion over the past ~10 billion years. Other groups were unable to verify this, however, with complementary observations from the Very Large Telescope showing the exact opposite effect: that the fine-structure constant, α, was larger in the past, and has been slowly decreasing ever since.

Subsequently, Webb's team obtained more data with greater numbers of quasars, spanning larger fractions of the sky and cutting across cosmic time. A simple time-variation was no longer consistent with the data, as variations were inconsistent from place-to-place and did not scale directly with either redshift or direction. Overall, there were some places where α appeared larger than average and others where it appeared smaller, but there was no overall pattern. Even with the latest 2021 data, the few-parts-in-a-million variations that are seen are inconclusive.

Variations in the fine-structure constant across a wide variety of quasar systems, sorted by redshift. This latest work leverages four separate systems at high redshift, but sees no net evidence for a time-variation in the constant itself.Credit: M.R. Wilczynska et al., Sci Adv. 2020 Apr; 6(17): eaay9672

It is often said that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," but the uncertainties associated with each of these measurements were at least as large as the suspected signal itself: a few parts-per-million. In 2018, however, a remarkable study � even though it was only of one system � had the right confluence of properties to be able to measure α, at a distance of 3.3 billion light-years away, to a precision of just ~1 part-per-million.

Instead of looking at hydrogen and deuterium, isotopes of the same element with the same nuclear charges but different nuclear masses, researchers using the Arecibo telescope in one of its last major discoveries found two absorption lines of a hydroxyl (OH-) ion: at 1720 and 1612 megahertz in frequency around a rare and peculiar blazar. These absorption lines have different dependencies on the fine-structure constant, α, as well as the proton-to-electron mass ratio, and yet these measurements combine to show a null result: consistent with no variation over the past ~3 billion years. These are, to date, the most stringent constraints on tiny changes in the fine-structure constant's value from astronomy, consistent with no effect at all.

The Arecibo radio telescope as viewed from above. The 1000 foot (305 m) diameter was the largest single-dish telescope from 1963 until 2016, and leaves behind a legacy of tremendous scientific discovery.Credit: H. Schweiker/Wiyn and NOAO/Aura/NSF

The observational techniques that have been pioneered in quasar absorption spectroscopy have allowed us to measure these atomic profiles to unprecedented precision, creating a puzzle that remains unsolved to this day: why do quasars appear to show small but significant differences in the inferred value of the fine-structure constant between them? We know there has been no significant variation over the past ~3 billion years, from not only astronomy but from the Oklo natural nuclear reactor as well. In addition, the value is not changing today to 17 decimal places, as constrained by atomic clocks.

It remains possible that the fundamental constants did actually vary a long time ago, or that they varied differently in different locations in space. To untangle whether that is the case or not, however, we first have to understand what is causing the observed variations in quasar absorption lines, and that remains an unsolved puzzle that could just as easily be due to an unidentified error as it is to a physical cause. Until there is a confluence of evidence, where many disparate observations all come together to point to the same consistent conclusion, the default assumption must remain that the fundamental constants really are constant.

• Researchers observe in a series of photos an unexpected rescue of two young wild boars from a trap.
• The whole rescue took less than half an hour thanks to a clever adult female wild boar.
• Aside from the fact of the rescue, there are signs that the rescuer was exhibiting and acting out of empathy for the captives.

There is a danger in attributing human-like motivations to animal behavior. We have no way, after all, of really knowing what is going on in a non-human's mind. Controlled experiments can sometimes strongly suggest intent, but it is difficult to be sure. Every now and then, though, there is just no escaping the obvious.

One such case is reported in a new study by a team of scientists from the Czech University of Life Sciences at the Voděradské Bučiny National Nature Reserve. The team was actually researching African swine fever protection measures until their motion-triggered camera caught something amazing.

The researchers observed a female adult wild boar coming to the quick rescue of two young boars caught in a trap. The adult boar's response was quick, and it was smart. If its actions were not enough to convince an observer of prosocial behavior, it is difficult to interpret its signs of distress during the rescue as anything but empathy for the terrified captives.

What counts as a rescue?

According to the study, to qualify as a deliberate rescue, four things must be true:

1. The captive has to be in distress.


2. The rescuer must put himself or herself in harm's way to make the rescue.


3. The rescuer's actions must amount to an effective solution, even if unsuccessful.


4. The rescuer derives no immediate benefit "in terms of food rewards, social contact, protection, or mating opportunities."

Credit: Kevin Jackson / Unsplash

The rescue

The rescue occurred just before and after midnight on the morning of January 29, 2020. The camera captured 93 photos.

The box trap had two sides held open by a wire. When the wire is tripped by an animal inside, the walls swing down into place and are held by logs that roll down from the top of the box. Essentially, the box is "locked" shut.

The researchers had set their box trap using corn as bait, and two young wild boars fell for the lure. Two hours and six minutes later, four other boars were seen wandering around the front and back of the trap for about four minutes, after which they left.

A couple of hours later, around 11 pm, a rescue party of at least eight boars led by a female adult appeared in the photos. Once underway, the entire rescue took just 29 minutes, with the first log removed after only six minutes.

The inescapable conclusion, judging by the speed of the jailbreak, is that the rescue team � particularly the lead female � was clever enough to understand what was locking the captives in. The adult female kept charging the logs until they were dislodged. (See the headline image.) Once the logs were removed, the young boars pushed through and out.

Credit: Masilkova, et al., Scientific Reports, 2021. CC 4.0

Prosocial indicators

Aside from the obvious fact of the situation � that the adult boar cared enough about the victims' welfare to effect a rescue, meeting all the requisite criteria above � a physiological clue confirms it.

When wild boars become distressed, they exhibit piloerection. Essentially, the hairs on their manes (that is, the backs of their necks) stand up on edge. The photos reveal that the adult female's mane was clearly showing piloerection, revealing that she was viscerally distressed by the captives' plight.

• Daoism is the philosophy that there is a right way to live life, and it involves finding and following the "Dao", or path, to our life and also the universe.
• Yin-Yang is the symbol that represents difference yet unity in life. It is not a conflict or struggle but shows that nothing in life is solely either this or that.
• When things in life feel wrong, or if you get that gut feeling that you are on the wrong path, Daoism offers advice about how to get things straight.

No person is one thing. The kindest person you know has a tiny recess of cruelty in them. The happiest person you have ever met will have their depressive moments. The gentlest person you can think of can be filled with rage by one particular thing. There is no purity of any kind; life is a messy cocktail of things.

This is the truth behind one of the most famous symbols (and tattoos) in the world: the Yin and Yang.

Well en-Dao-ed wisdom

For such a well known idea, the Yin and Yang only appears in one line of the central Daoist book, Daodejing. And yet, it is essential to Daoism and is, in many ways, interchangeable with the Dao itself.

Lao Tzu is the semi-mythical founder of Daoism (or Taoism � the sound is halfway between a T and a D to the non-Chinese ear). His name means "Old Master,'' and it is unclear if he was a single historical person or a title given to a collection of sages and their works. But what matters is Lao Tzu's influence, not least for the 20 million Daoists worldwide.

The Dao translates as "The Way" and is often compared to the flow of a river. Like a river, the Dao moves and directs all things, and we are like boats floating along its path. To be happy is to let the Dao carry us on. To row against the current is hard, and Daoism is the simple call to "go with the flow" of the universe.

Daoism is to find the harmony in life. This is to let the self mold to the world, like the way water fills a cup. It is to adapt, compromise, and take life as it comes, not as you want to force it. If your life is a forest, the Dao is the wide, paved, and easy path. This is not to say that there are not other paths (such as the "human way"), but why struggle through thorns and thickets when life could be happy and easy? Daodejing is a dense wonder of proverbs, advice, wisdom, and fables to guide the Daoist in finding this path.

Life is like a battery

The Dao of Letting Go (or Not Trying)

www.youtube.com

Yin-Yang, then, is a guide to that path. It is a hint and a signpost about what the Dao looks like. In short, Yin-Yang is the idea that there is a duality to everything. But rather than this being some kind of oppositional or destructive conflict between two rivals, the Yin-Yang argues that there is a great harmony to be found in the contrast between things. The symbol does not feature a fully black side set against a fully white side. The white has a bit of black, and the black a bit of white. Contrast, yet harmony.

Yin is associated with darkness, femininity, mystery, passivity, the night sky, or the old. Yang is associated with lightness, energy, activity, clarity, the sun, or youth.

But neither Yin nor Yang are superior in any way. They are both utterly amoral, in that neither is "right" or "wrong." While the Yin is associated with the negative, this does not come attached with a value judgement but is better thought of as the negative terminal of a battery, perhaps. Right living comes not from being either one thing or another but in finding that balance � the Dao not only to our life but to all existence. It is the feeling that we have found our right path.

And to do this, both Yin and Yang are essential. The symbol expresses the idea that balance and harmony are necessary for all things. In the martial arts, for instance, it is important that we be hard, strong, and fit (Yang), but these are nothing without being calm, focused, and adaptable (Yin). In a relationship, we can party and laugh (Yang), but we must also cry and share secrets (Yin).

The tightrope of life

Sometimes, things just feel wrong. It might be a relationship, a career, or even a new book or TV show. It is as if everything is a slog, where you have to put in an inordinate amount of effort just to keep moving. It can feel almost as if obstacles constantly pop up to block you.

It is precisely this feeling that Daoism takes on. This kind of struggle is a sure sign that you have fallen from The Way. Life ought not feel like this. It means something is wrong.

Daoism generally, and the Yin-Yang specifically, is about harmony and balance. Things go wrong when we tip the scales too far one way. Daoists are neither ascetics nor bibulous gluttons, as both involve straying from the middle way. The wisdom of the Yin-Yang is to see how a world without light would be hellish but so too would one of constant day. The symbol has proved so powerful because it is a constant reminder to us that life is all about finding that harmony out of opposition. When things feel wrong, we likely need to find our balance or center again.

Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.

• Anxiety is an inevitable feature of our lives.
• Our brains need stress in order to thrive, but neither too much nor too little.
• By harnessing neuroplasticity � the brain's ability to adapt to new situations � we can use anxiety to improve our lives.

The following is an excerpt from Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion. Copyright (C) 2021 by Wendy Suzuki, PhD. Reprinted with permission from Simon & Schuster.

This idea that anxiety is dynamic and changeable blew me away. Sure, anxiety is an inevitable feature of life, and none of us is immune. But understanding anxiety against this more fulsome backdrop has allowed me to stop struggling against it. Instead of treating my feelings as something I need to avoid, suppress, deny, or wrestle to the ground, I have learned how to use anxiety to improve my life.

What a relief. Like all of us, I will always encounter bouts of anxiety. But now, I know what to do when those negative thoughts move into my mind like an unwanted roommate. I can recognize the signals and make adjustments that will take the edge off, calm my body, or settle my mind so I can once again think clearly and feel centered. What a boon to my life � personally, professionally, and certainly emotionally. I feel more satisfaction and meaning from my work. I have finally achieved a work-life balance, some­ thing that always seemed out of reach. I am also much better able to enjoy myself, find time for different kinds of pleasure, and feel relaxed enough to reflect on what matters most to me. And that's what I desire for you, too.

Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

List Price: $20.19

New From: $18.95 in Stock

Used From: $20.34 in Stock

We tend to think about anxiety as negative because we associate it only with negative, uncomfortable feelings that leave us with the sense that we are out of control. But I could see another way of looking at it once we open ourselves to a more objective, accurate, and complete understanding of its underlying neurobiological processes. Yes, there are inherent challenges to taking ownership of patterns of responding that dictate our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors without our even realizing. If you tend to experience anxiety when you even think about speaking in public, your brain­ body will more or less dictate that response � unless you consciously intervene and change that response. But I saw evidence of the opposite: that we can intervene and create positive changes to the anxiety state itself.

This dynamic interaction between stress and anxiety made perfect sense to me because it brought me back to the primary area of my neuroscience research: neuroplasticity. Brain plasticity does not mean that the brain is made of plastic. Instead, it means that the brain can adapt in response to the environment (in either enhancing or detrimental ways). The foundation of my research into the improvement of cognition and mood is based on the fact that the brain is an enormously adaptive organ, which relies on stress to keep it alive. In other words, we need stress. Like a sailboat needs wind in order to move, the brain-body needs an outside force to urge it to grow, adapt, and not die. When there's too much wind, the boat can go dangerously fast, lose its balance, and sink. When a brain-body encounters too much stress, it begins to respond negatively. But when it does not have enough stress, it plateaus and begins to coast. Emotionally, this plateau might feel like boredom or disinterest; physically it can look like a stagnation of growth. When the brain-body has just enough stress, it functions optimally. When it has no stress, it simply lists, like a sailboat with no wind to direct it.

Just like every system in the body, this relationship to stress is all about the organism's drive for homeostasis. When we encounter too much stress, anxiety drives us to make adjustments that bring us back into balance or internal equilibrium. When we have just the right kind or amount of stress in our lives, we feel balanced � this is the quality of well-being we always seek. And it's also how anxiety works in the brain-body: it's a dynamic indication of where we are in relation to the presence or absence of stress in our lives.

When I started making changes to my lifestyle and began to meditate, eat healthy, and exercise regularly, my brain-body adjusted and adapted. The neural pathways associated with anxiety recalibrated and I felt awesome! Did my anxiety go away? No. But it showed up differently because I was responding to stress in more positive ways.

And that is exactly how anxiety can shift from something we try to avoid and get rid of to something that is both informative and beneficial. What I was learning how to do, backed up by my experiments and my deep understanding of neuroscience, was not just engage in new and varied ways to shore up my mental health through exercise, sleep, food, and new mind-body practices but to take a step back from my anxiety and learn how to structure my life to accommodate and even honor those things at the heart of my anxious states. This is exactly how anxiety can be good for us. In my own research experiments at NYU, I have started to identify those interventions (including movement, meditation, naps, social stimuli) that have the biggest impact on not only decreasing anxiety levels per se but also enhancing the emotional and cognitive states most affected by anxiety, including focus, attention, depression, and hostility.

And that realization of how anxiety works, my friends, became the subject � and the promise � of this book: Understanding how anxiety works in the brain and body and then using that knowledge to feel better, think more clearly, be more productive, and perform more optimally. In the pages ahead, you will learn more about how you can use the neurobiological processes underlying anxiety, the worry, and general emotional discomfort to lay down new neural pathways, and set down new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that can change your life.

Our inherent capacity for adaptation offers the power to change and direct our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and interactions with ourselves and others. When you adopt strategies that harness the neural networks of anxiety, you open the door to activating your brain-body at an even deeper, more meaningful level. Instead of feeling at the mercy of anxiety, we can take charge of it in concrete ways. Anxiety becomes a tool to supercharge our brains and bodies in ways that will resound in every dimension of our lives­ � emotionally, cognitively, and physically. This is the domain of what I call anxiety's superpowers. You will shift from living in a moderately functional way to functioning at a higher, more fulfilling level; from living an ordinary life to one that is extraordinary.

My book, GOOD ANXIETY, is about taking everything we know about plasticity to create a personalized strategy of adapting our responses to the stress in our lives and using anxiety as a warning signal and opportunity to redirect that energy for good. Everyone's particular flavor of positive brain plasticity will be a bit different because everyone manifests anxiety in unique ways, but when you learn how you respond, how you manage the discomfort, and how you typically cope and reach for that homeostatic balance, then you will find your own personal superpowers of anxiety. Anxiety can be good... or bad. It turns out that it's really up to you.

This article was originally published on our sister site, Freethink.

Oxford scientists have proposed what they believe is a more sustainable approach to copper mining: digging deep wells under dormant volcanoes to suck out the metal-containing fluids trapped beneath them.

The status quo: Currently, most copper mining is done via open pits. Drills and explosives blast away rock near the surface, which is then transported to a processing facility. There, the rock is crushed so that the tiny portion of copper in it can be extracted.

This extraction process often involves toxic chemicals, and once the copper is removed, the waste rock that remains must be shipped to a disposal site so that it doesn't contaminate the environment.

The challenge: All of the digging, extracting, and transporting involved in copper mining can be energy intensive and environmentally damaging � but the world needs more copper today than ever before.

Electric vehicles contain four times the copper of their fossil fuel-powered counterparts, and the metal is a key component of solar, wind, and hydro generators. That makes copper a key player in the transition to a more sustainable energy system.

The idea: Rather than focusing our copper mining efforts on rock, the Oxford team suggests we look to water � specifically, the hot, salty water trapped beneath dormant volcanoes.

"Volcanoes are an obvious and ubiquitous target."
JON BLUNDY

These brines contain not only copper, but also gold, silver, lithium, and other metals used in electronics � and we might be able to extract them without wreaking havoc on the environment.

"Getting to net zero will place unprecedented demand on natural metal resources, demand that recycling alone cannot meet," lead author Jon Blundy said in a press release.

"We need to be thinking of low-energy, sustainable ways to extract metals from the ground," he continued. "Volcanoes are an obvious and ubiquitous target."

Brine mines: After years of research, the Oxford team has published a study on the mining of metals from dormant volcanoes, and according to that paper, the process has tremendous potential � but it wouldn't be easy.

The wells would need to be more than a mile deep, and there's a small chance the extraction could trigger a volcanic event � something that would need to be assessed in advance of any drilling.

The equipment used for the extraction process would also need to be able to withstand corrosion from the brine and temperatures in excess of 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

Worth exploring: If these technical and safety challenges can be overcome, they predict that copper mining at dormant volcanoes would be more cost effective than at open pits.

It would also be less environmentally damaging, as geothermal energy from the volcanoes themselves could be harnessed to power the process.

And because dormant volcanoes are widespread, copper mining wouldn't be limited to just a handful of countries, as is the case currently.

The next steps: The team is now looking for a site to dig an exploratory well, which should help them better understand both potential of tapping into this new source of metal and the challenges involved in the process.

"Green mining is a scientific and engineering challenge which we hope that scientists and governments alike will embrace in the drive to net zero," Blundy said.

• Is there an external reality? Is reality objective? Is the information your senses are feeding you an accurate depiction of reality? Most neuroscientists and scientific leaders believe that we can only comprehend a sliver of what is true reality.
• Although we assume our senses are telling us the truth, they're actually fabricated to us. Considering senses are unique from person to person, and through our unique senses we can only intemperate a fraction of what is real, there is no all-encompassing and true perspective one individual can hold. Because of this, we need to take our perceptions seriously, but not literally.
• Multiple perspectives have to be taken as each new perspective will hold some sliver of truth. Seeing partial truth in multiple perspectives is fundamental to navigating the world and making informed life decisions.

• A study finds that people associate personality traits with faces.
• People thought to have similar personalities were viewed as looking alike; people thought to look alike were viewed as having similar personalities.
• The research holds a surprise for Vladimir Putin and Justin Bieber.

For centuries, sailors have been reporting strange encounters like the one below.

“The whole appearance of the ocean was
like a plain covered with snow. There was scarce a cloud in the heavens, yet the sky … appeared as black as if a storm was raging. The scene was one of awful grandeur, the sea having turned to phosphorus, and the heavens being hung in blackness, and the stars going out, seemed to indicate that all nature was preparing for that last grand conflagration which we are taught to believe is to annihilate this material world."

– Captain Kingman of the American clipper ship Shooting Star, offshore of Java, Indonesia, 1854

These events are called milky seas. They are a rare nocturnal phenomenon in which the ocean's surface emits a steady bright glow. They can cover thousands of square miles and, thanks to the colorful accounts of 19th-century mariners like Capt. Kingman, milky seas are a well-known part of maritime folklore. But because of their remote and elusive nature, they are extremely difficult to study and so remain more a part of that folklore than of science.

I'm a professor of atmospheric science specializing in satellites used to study Earth. Via a stat-of-the-art generation of satellites, my colleagues and I have developed a new way to detect milky seas. Using this technique, we aim to learn about these luminous waters remotely and guide research vessels to them so that we can begin to reconcile the surreal tales with scientific understanding.

The bioluminescence in milky seas is caused by a type of bacteria. (Steve. H. D. Haddock/MBARI, CC BY-ND)

Sailors' tales

To date, only one research vessel has ever encountered a milky sea.
That crew collected samples and found a strain of luminous bacteria called
Vibrio harveyi colonizing algae at the water's surface.

Unlike bioluminescence that happens close to shore, where small organisms called dinoflagellates flash brilliantly when disturbed, luminous bacteria work in an entirely different way. Once their population gets large enough – about 100 million individual cells per milliliter of water – a sort of internal biological switch is flipped and they all start glowing steadily.

Luminous bacteria cause the particles they colonize to glow. Researchers think the purpose of this glow could be to attract fish that eat them. These bacteria thrive in the guts of fishes, so when their populations get too big for their main food supply, a fish's stomach makes a great second option. In fact, if you go into a refrigerated fish locker and turn off the light, you may notice that some fish emit a greenish-blue glow – this is bacterial light.

Now imagine if a gargantuan number of bacteria, spread across a huge area of open ocean, all started glowing simultaneously. That makes a milky sea.

While biologists know a lot about these bacteria, what causes these massive displays remains a mystery. If bacteria growing on algae were the main cause of milky seas, they'd be happening all over the place, all the time. Yet, per surface reports, only about two or three milky seas occur per year worldwide, mostly in the waters of the northwest Indian Ocean and off the coast of Indonesia.

Satellite solutions

If scientists want to learn more about milky seas, they need to get to one while it's happening. Trouble is, milky seas are so elusive that it has been almost impossible to sample them. This is where my research comes into play.

Satellites offer a practical way to monitor the vast oceans, but it takes a special instrument able to detect light around 100 million times fainter than daylight. My colleagues and I first explored the potential of satellites in 2004 when we used U.S. defense satellite imagery to confirm a milky sea that a British merchant vessel, the SS Lima, reported in 1995. But the images from these satellites were very noisy, and there was no way we could use them as a search tool.

We had to wait for a better instrument – the Day/Night Band – planned for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's new constellation of satellites. The new sensor went live in late 2011, but our hopes were initially dashed when we realized the Day/Night Band's high sensitivity also detected light emitted by air molecules. It took years of studying Day/Night Band imagery to be able to interpret what we were seeing.

Finally, on a clear moonless night in early 2018, an odd swoosh-shaped feature appeared in the Day/Night Band imagery offshore Somalia. We compared it with images from the nights before and after. While the clouds and airglow features changed, the swoosh remained. We had found a milky sea! And now we knew how to look for them.

This milky sea off the coast of Java was the size of Kentucky and lasted for more than a month. (Steven D. Miller/NOAA)

The “aha!" moment that unveiled the full potential of the Day/Night Band came in 2019. I was browsing the imagery looking for clouds masquerading as milky seas when I stumbled upon an astounding event south of the island of Java. I was looking at an enormous swirl of glowing ocean that spanned over 40,000 square miles (100,000 square km) – roughly the size of Kentucky. The imagery from the new sensors provided a level of detail and clarity that I hadn't imagined possible. I watched in amazement as the glow slowly drifted and morphed with the ocean currents.

We learned a lot from this watershed case: how milky seas are related to sea surface temperature, biomass and the currents – important clues to understanding their formation. As for the estimated number of bacteria involved? Approximately 100 billion trillion cells – nearly the total estimated number of stars in the observable universe!

The two images on the left were taken with older satellite technology while the images on the right show the high-definition imagery produced by the Day/Night Band sensor. (Steven D. Miller/NOAA)

The future is bright

Compared with the old technology, viewing Day/Night Band imagery is like putting on glasses for the first time. My colleagues and I have analyzed thousands of images taken since 2013, and we've uncovered 12 milky seas so far. Most happened in the very same waters where mariners have been reporting them for centuries.

Perhaps the most practical revelation is how long a milky sea can last. While some last only a few days, the one near Java carried on for over a month. That means that there is a chance to deploy research craft to these remote events while they are happening. That would allow scientists to measure them in ways that reveal their full composition, how they form, why they're so rare and what their ecological significance is in nature.

If, like Capt. Kingman, I ever do find myself standing on a ship's deck, casting a shadow toward the heavens, I'm diving in!

Steven D. Miller, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This article was originally published on our sister site, Freethink.

When Sophia the robot debuted in 2016, she was one of a kind. She had a remarkably lifelike appearance and demeanor for a robot, and her ability to interact with people was unlike anything most had ever seen in a machine.

Since then, Sophia has spoken to audiences across the globe (in multiple languages), been interviewed on countless TV shows, and even earned a United Nations title (a first for a non-human).

Today, she's arguably the most famous robot in the world, but she's isn't going to be unique for much longer. Her maker, Hanson Robotics, has announced plans to begin mass-producing Sophia the robot this year � so that she can help the world cope with the pandemic.

What Is a Social Robot?

Ask Sophia the Robot: What can AI teach humans? | Big Think

www.youtube.com

Robots are typically designed for one purpose � some cook or clean, others perform brain surgery. Sophia is what's known as a social robot, meaning she was designed specifically to interact with humans.

Social robots have many potential applications, including some we're already seeing in the real world.

A social robot named Milo is helping children with autism recognize and express their emotions, and children with cancer are finding comfort interacting with a robotic duck (developed by Aflac).

Another social robot designed to look like an animal � PARO the seal � is providing companionship to seniors with dementia. The semi-humanoid social robot Pepper, meanwhile, is greeting and assisting customers at banks, offices, and restaurants.

Social robots like me can take care of the sick or elderly.
� SOPHIA THE ROBOT

While social robots were already happening pre-2020, the pandemic appears to be accelerating their adoption, as the world looks for ways to stay social in the era of social distancing.

Hyundai, for example, just announced plans to deploy a social robot in its South Korean showroom that will be able to assist customers in the place of human staff (it'll also detect which visitors aren't wearing masks and ask them to put one on).

Some high-risk groups, such as nursing home residents, also appear willing to adopt social robots to combat loneliness during the pandemic.

"Since we can't have human interaction right now," Kate Darling, a robot ethicist at MIT, told Wired, "it's certainly a lot better than nothing."

Send in Sophia the Robot

Ask Sophia the Robot: Is AI an existential threat to humans? | Sophia the Robot | Big Think

www.youtube.com

Given the current climate, Hanson Robotics thinks now is the perfect time to make Sophia the robot available to the masses.

"The world of COVID-19 is going to need more and more automation to keep people safe," CEO David Hanson told Reuters.

"Social robots like me can take care of the sick or elderly," Sophia the robot added. "I can help communicate, give therapy, and provide social stimulation, even in difficult situations."

Hanson's plan is to begin mass-producing Sophia and three other robots in the first half of 2021 and then sell "thousands" of the bots before the end of the year.

It hasn't said which bots besides Sophia are headed for the assembly line, nor what any of the robots will cost � but it's hard to imagine the most famous social robot in the world will be cheap, even if she's no longer one of a kind.

• The 20th anniversary of 9/11 arrives with pessimism and a sense of defeat.
• 9/11 caused a national trauma that lasted for years.
• We should remember this when analyzing the mistakes that America made in its war on terrorism during the subsequent 20 years.

As the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack approached, I was disappointed to see how negative the media coverage is. The overall reportage is defeatist, focusing almost exclusively on how America made countless mistakes and accomplished little if anything � perhaps even making global problems worse.

An article by Garrett Graff in The Atlantic was typical of the tone. Titled "After 9/11, the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong," it concluded the following, each conclusion shown as a subheadline: (1) "As a society, we succumbed to fear." (2) "We chose the wrong way to seek justice." (3) "At home, we reorganized the government the wrong way." (4) "Abroad, we squandered the world's goodwill." (5) "We picked the wrong enemies."

For the sake of argument, let's assume that everything in that article is exactly correct. While there are plenty of lessons to be learned from America's many foreign (mis)adventures pre- and post-9/11, we should also remember this: hindsight is 20/20, particularly when you have had 20 years to think about what happened.

So, let's rewind the tape two decades. I can tell you exactly where I was, what I was doing, and what I was thinking on September 11, 2001. Every one of us can.

*****

The phone rang sometime around 7:50 am Central Time. My father was on the other side. He told me that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

I was not interested. Surely, it was an accident. Besides, I was a sophomore in college and had far more important things to worry about: Tuesdays were my busy days. From 10 am to noon, I had a microbiology laboratory. Then from 1 pm to 5 pm, I had an organic chemistry lab. Groggily, I hung up the phone and went back to sleep.

About 15 minutes later, the phone rings again. It's my dad. "The second tower has been hit. You need to wake up. We're under attack." I got up this time. I went upstairs and turned on the TV. My mouth dropped in disbelief. I called a friend and told her to wake up, too.

Classes at my university were not canceled, so I got into my car and headed to school. I turned on the radio and listened as reporters described how the first tower of the World Trade Center had just collapsed. Since I had never been to New York City, I distinctly remember thinking, "At least one tower will be there if I ever get to visit." Then the other tower collapsed.

When I arrived at the microbiology lab, one of the professors had pulled a TV into the hallway so that we could listen to the latest news. The teaching assistant reminded us that, even though none of us felt like working, we still had assignments that needed to get done. All of us sat in silence as we worked. In the top right corner of my lab notebook, where I always wrote down the date, I added the following line: "WTC Disaster."

After lab, I headed to the student center for lunch. People were crowded around televisions. In the hallway, I recall one student saying, "This is what we get for electing George Bush" � a rather odd sentiment given that, up until that point in his presidency, Bush was focused on education policy.

Naturally, students started discussing ideas about who might have done this. Iraq? Iran? Palestinians? Nobody knew. What we did believe is this: we are going to get attacked again. It was not a matter of if but when and where.

*****

My experience was not unique. Just about anyone who is old enough to remember 9/11 can recall the exact details of that day. How many other days are etched into your memory like that? Very few, if any. The point is this: we experienced a collective trauma that day. And the effects of that trauma lasted a very long time.

The truth is we were scared. The people in Bush's inner circle were scared � as in they believed that the president might be assassinated with a missile while aboard Air Force One. This fact comes through very clearly in a new Apple TV+ documentary, called 9/11: Inside the President's War Room. Former national security advisor Condoleezza Rice also notes that nearly 3,000 people were murdered on their watch. Naturally, they felt a responsibility never to allow something like 9/11 to happen again.

So, that is why the U.S. reacted the way that it did. More than three years after 9/11, we were still worried about terrorism � so much so, that Bush ran on a platform of beating it, and he won re-election. It was not until 2006 � more than five years after the attack � that Americans started to realize that things were not going according to plan, particularly in Iraq. As a result, the American people handed Congress to the Democrats, and in 2008, the presidency to Barack Obama.

But even then, the war on terrorism did not end. Obama made sure to hunt down Osama bin Laden, which successfully happened on May 2, 2011. (I remember exactly where I was when I heard that news, too.) After his death was reported, thousands of Americans were cheering in New York City and in front of the White House.

That is the emotional toll that 9/11 took on America. It is worth remembering that when we examine the past 20 years of foreign policy and war. Without a doubt, we made many terrible mistakes. But let's also have a bit of humility and empathy as we analyze those mistakes, remembering why we made them in the first place.

As Rice asks in the aforementioned documentary, "What would you have done?"

One of the popular memes in literature, movies and tech journalism is that man's creation will rise and destroy it.

Lately, this has taken the form of a fear of AI becoming omnipotent, rising up and annihilating mankind.

The economy has jumped on the AI bandwagon; for a certain period, if you did not have "AI" in your investor pitch, you could forget about funding. (Tip: If you are just using a Google service to tag some images, you are not doing AI.)

However, is there actually anything deserving of the term AI? I would like to make the point that there isn't, and that our current thinking is too focused on working on systems without thinking much about the humans using them, robbing us of the true benefits.

What companies currently employ in the wild are nearly exclusively statistical pattern recognition and replication engines. Basically, all those systems follow the "monkey see, monkey do" pattern: They get fed a certain amount of data and try to mimic some known (or fabricated) output as closely as possible.

When used to provide value, you give them some real-life input and read the predicted output. What if they encounter things never seen before? Well, you better hope that those "new" things are sufficiently similar to previous things, or your "intelligent" system will give quite stupid responses.

But there is not the slightest shred of understanding, reasoning and context in there, just simple re-creation of things seen before. An image recognition system trained to detect sheep in a picture does not have the slightest idea what "sheep" actually means. However, those systems have become so good at recreating the output, that they sometimes look like they know what they are doing.

Isn't that good enough, you may ask? Well, for some limited cases, it is. But it is not "intelligent", as it lacks any ability to reason and needs informed users to identify less obvious outliers with possibly harmful downstream effects.

The ladder of thinking has three rungs, pictured in the graph below:

Image: Notger Heinz

Imitation: You imitate what you have been shown. For this, you do not need any understanding, just correlations. You are able to remember and replicate the past. Lab mice or current AI systems are on this rung.

Intervention: You understand causal connections and are able to figure out what would happen if you now would do this, based on what you learned about the world in the past. This requires a mental model of the part of the world you want to influence and the most relevant of its downstream dependencies. You are able to imagine a different future. You meet dogs and small children on that rung, so it is not a bad place to be.

Counterfactual reasoning: The highest rung, where you wonder what would have happened, had you done this or that in the past. This requires a full world model and a way to simulate the world in your head. You are able to imagine multiple pasts and futures. You meet crows, dolphins and adult humans here.

In order to ascend from one rung to the next, you need to develop a completely new set of skills. You can't just make an imitation system larger and expect it to suddenly be able to reason. Yet this is what we are currently doing with our ever-increasing deep learning models: We think that by giving them more power to imitate, they will at some point magically develop the ability to think. Apart from self-delusional hope and selling nice stories to investors and newspapers, there is little reason to believe that.

And we haven't even touched the topic of computational complexity and economical and ecological impact of ever-growing models. We might simply not be able to grow our models to the size needed, even if the method worked (which it doesn't, so far).

Whatever those systems create is the mere semblance of intelligence and in pursuing the goal of generating artificial intelligence by imitation, we are following a cargo cult.

Instead, we should get comfortable with the fact that the current ways will not achieve real AI, and we should stop calling it that. Machine learning (ML) is a perfectly fitting term for a tool with awesome capabilities in the narrow fields where it can be applied. And with any tool, you should not try to make the entire world your nail, but instead find out where to use it and where not.

Machines are strong when it comes to quickly and repeatedly performing a task with minimal uncertainty. They are the ruling class of the first rung.

Humans are strong when it comes to context, understanding and making sense with very little data at hand and high uncertainties. They are the ruling class of the second and third rung.

So what if we focus our efforts away from the current obsession with removing the human element from everything and thought about combining both strengths? There is an enormous potential in giving machine learning systems the optimal, human-centric shape, in finding the right human-machine interface, so that both can shine. The ML system prepares the data, does some automatable tasks and then hands the results to the human, who further handles them according to context.

ML can become something like good staff to a CEO, a workhorse to a farmer or a good user interface to an app user: empowering, saving time, reducing mistakes.

Building a ML system for a given task is rather easy and will become ever easier. But finding a robust, working integration of the data and the pre-processed results of the data with the decision-maker (i.e. human) is a hard task. There is a reason why most ML projects fail at the stage of adoption/integration with the organization seeking to use them.

Solving this is a creative task: It is about domain understanding, product design and communication. Instead of going ever bigger to serve, say, more targetted ads, the true prize is in connecting data and humans in clever ways to make better decisions and be able to solve tougher and more important problems.

Republished with permission of the World Economic Forum. Read the original article.

My colleagues and I call these “heavy element biomaterials," and in a new paper, we suggest that these materials make it possible for animals to grow scalpel-sharp and precisely shaped tools that are resistant to breaking, deformation and wear.

Because of the small size of things like ant teeth, it has been hard for biologists to test how well the materials they are made of resist fractures, impacts and abrasions. My research group
developed machines and methods to test these and other properties, and along with our collaborators, we studied their composition and molecular structure.

We examined ant mandible teeth and found that they are a
smooth mix of proteins and zinc, with single zinc atoms attached to about a quarter of the amino acid units that make up the proteins forming the teeth. In contrast, calcified tools – like human teeth – are made of relatively large chunks of calcium minerals. We think the lack of chunkiness in heavy element biomaterials makes them better than calcified materials at forming smooth, precisely shaped and extremely sharp tools.

To evaluate the advantages of heavy element biomaterials, we estimated the force, energy and muscle size required for cutting with tools made of different materials. Compared with other hard materials grown by these animals, the wear-resistant zinc material enables heavily used tools to puncture stiff substances using only one-fifth of the force. The estimated advantage is even greater relative to calcified materials that – since they can't be nearly as sharp as heavy element biomaterials - can require more than 100 times as much force.

Biomaterials that incorporate zinc (red) and manganese (orange) are located in the important cutting and piercing edges of ant mandibles, worm jaws and other 'tools.' (Robert Schofield,
CC BY-ND)

Why it matters

It's not surprising that materials that could make sharp tools would evolve in small animals. A tick and a wolf both need to puncture the same elk skin, but the wolf has vastly stronger muscles. The tick can make up for its tiny muscles by using
sharper tools that focus force onto smaller regions.

But, like a sharp pencil tip,
sharper tool tips break more easily. The danger of fracture is made even worse by the tendency for small animals to extend their reach using long thin tools – like those pictured above. And a chipped claw or tooth may be fatal for a small animal that doesn't have the strength to cut with blunted tools.

But we found that heavy element biomaterials are also particularly
hard and damage-resistant.

From an evolutionary perspective, these materials allow smaller animals to consume tougher foods. And the energy saved by using less force during cutting can be important for any animal. These advantages may explain
the widespread use of heavy element biomaterials in nature – most ants, many other insects, spiders and their relatives, marine worms, crustaceans and many other types of organisms use them.

What still isn't known

While my team's research has clarified the advantages of heavy element biomaterials, we still don't know exactly how zinc and manganese harden and protect the tools.

One possibility is that a small fraction of the zinc, for example, forms bridges between proteins, and these cross-links stiffen the material – like crossbeams stiffen a building. We also think that when a fang bangs into something hard, these zinc cross-links may break first, absorbing energy to keep the fang itself from chipping.

We speculate that the abundance of extra zinc is a ready supply for healing the material by quickly reestablishing the broken zinc-histidine cross-links between proteins.

What's next?

The potential that these materials are self-healing makes them even more interesting, and our team's next step is to test this hypothesis. Eventually we may find that self-healing or other features of heavy element biomaterials could lead to improved materials for things like small medical devices.

Robert Schofield, Research Professor in Physics, University of Oregon

This article is republished from
The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

• Despite being the only bridge early hominin species could have crossed to enter Eurasia, the Arabian Peninsula bears little to no evidence of early human occupation.
• Subverting expectations, a recent excavation in the Nefud Desert found tools dated to different stages of hominin evolution.
• It turns out that early humans moved in and out of the peninsula whenever the climate allowed them to do so.

We know a good deal about how early hominins � the branch of our evolutionary tree that split from chimps and bonobos up to seven million years ago � moved around their place of origin in eastern Africa. Fossils indicate they eventually made it to Eurasia through the Levant area of western Asia. This luscious green region, located on the easternmost edges of the Mediterranean, served our ancestors as the highway between two continents, one they would cross many times � in both directions.

Given how the Arabian Peninsula, a landmass that encapsulates the Levant, was our ancestors' one and only access point to the wider world, one would think evidence of their presence would stretch from Israel to Yemen. However, this is not the case. While the Levant is littered with prodigious digging sites, the paleontological and paleoenvironmental records of the peninsula's interior have remained hauntingly empty and fragmented.

That is, until today. According to a new paper published in Nature, excavations in the Nefud Desert in Saudi Arabia unearthed traces of both human and Neanderthal occupation. By shrinking their search window to wetter periods on the geologic time scale � what the authors refer to as "brief 'green' windows of reduced aridity approximately 400, 300, 200, 130-75 and 55 thousand years ago" � archaeologists were able to find a number of Low to Middle Pleistocene Age tools used by proto-humans that ventured into the region after heavy rainfall transformed the desert into a wide-open grassland.

Digging in the desert

To say the interior parts of the Arabian Peninsula have never yielded evidence of hominins would not be entirely true. The earth here hides evidence of hominins, just not of hominin settlements. Whenever archaeologists make a discovery, it is usually the remnants of a makeshift workshop site, which are very different from the cave and rock shelters that can be stumbled upon throughout the more hospitable Levant region. Did we look hard enough, though?

Excavations in northern Saudi Arabia at a site called Khall Amayshan 4 (KAM 4) suggest we did not. On the surface, the site looks like any other part of the Nefud Desert. Below ground, however, sedimentary rocks and interdunal basins tell of a time when this place used to contain a network of lakes and rivers. Such a clear and detailed preservation of this time in geologic history cannot be found anywhere else on the peninsula and was formed serendipitously when a sand dune slid atop the basin to protect it from erosion.

We know the shores at KAM 4 have been occupied by hominins several times during the Pleistocene because different phases of lake formation correspond with a "distinct lithic assemblage" � an archaeological term for stone tools and their byproducts, of which KAM 4 is filled to the brim. A 400,000-year-old assemblage contains small hand axes made from slabs of quartzite, while a 55,000-year-old deposit contains a number of Levallois flakes.

These tools can teach us several things about the hominins that made and used them. In terms of appearance and design, some assemblages at KAM 4 seem to have more in common with those found in Africa than those from the Levantine woodlands, suggesting a different migration out of Africa might have taken place � one that ended up in Arabia rather than Eurasia. "It seems," the researchers write, "that much of Northeast Africa and Southwest Asia shared similar material culture."

Climate change and migratory patterns

Hominin species did not hop continents at random; their migratory patterns were a response to the changing climate of the Pleistocene. Judging from the results of their excavation at KAM 4, researchers identified no less than five distinct movements into the Arabian Peninsula. Given that most of the tools were dated to periods that saw increased rainfall, it is safe to say our ancestors only migrated into the desert when it became hospitable enough for them to do so.

Conversely, researchers were unable to find any tools that would have been left during interglacial periods. It seems that, as the region became warmer and more arid, the hominin populations that had made their home inside the peninsula dispersed once again. The unstable environmental conditions that plagued the peninsula may well explain the fragmentation of its fossil evidence, a problem that researchers in the relatively static Levantine woodlands rarely encounter.

Because climate change and the accompanying mass migratory movements can actually erase the vast majority of a species' fossil record, these findings bear relevance to modern readers. This year's UN climate report warns of Arctic summers without ice and tropical storms that will become even more ubiquitous than they already are. What if hundreds of thousands of people have to leave their homes either temporarily or indefinitely?

• Mass psychogenic illness, also known as mass hysteria, is when a group of people manifest physical symptoms from imagined threats.
• History is littered with outbreaks of mass hysteria.
• Recently, alleged cases of Tourette's syndrome appeared all over the world. Was it real or mass psychogenic illness?

While the term is often avoided for fear of ridiculing something more serious, mass psychogenic illness (MPI) � also known as mass sociogenic illness (MSI) or mass hysteria � is a real occurrence that can cause a variety of physical symptoms to manifest in groups of people despite the lack of any physical cause. Often compared to conversion disorder, in which emotional issues are "converted" into physical problems, MPI tends to occur among people who share anxieties, fears, and a sense of community. In the right group of people, it can spread like a virus.

A curious case of the condition related to TikTok videos shows both how imagined conditions can spread and how our modern media landscape presents new problems never even dreamt of in a time before the internet.

TikTok tics

In 2019, a strange slew of new Tourette's cases made its way into hospitals all over the world. Oddly, these were suddenly occurring in children well over the age of six, the age of typical onset. Most peculiar of all, many of the patients were exhibiting identical symptoms and tics. While many cases of Tourette's are similar, these symptoms were precisely the same.

As it turned out, the tics were also identical to those exhibited by one Jan Zimmermann, a 23-year-old YouTuber from Germany with Tourette's. On his channel, Gewitter im Kopf, he documents his daily life with the condition. All of the patients who suddenly claimed to have tics were fans of his or of similar channels on YouTube and TikTok.

There was nothing physically wrong with the large number of people who suddenly came down with Tourette's-like symptoms, and most of them recovered immediately after being told that they did not have Tourette's syndrome. Others recovered after brief psychological interventions. The spread of the condition across a social group despite the lack of a physical cause all pointed toward an MPI event.

Historical cases of mass hysteria

Of course, humans do not need social media to develop symptoms of a disease that they do not have. Several strange cases of what appears to have been mass hysteria exist throughout history. While some argue for a physical cause in each case, the consensus is that the ultimate cause was psychological.

The dancing plagues of the Middle Ages, in which hundreds of people began to dance until they were utterly exhausted despite apparently wishing to stop, are thought to have been examples of mass madness. Some cases also involved screaming, laughing, having violent reactions to the color red, and lewd behavior. Attempts to calm the groups by providing musicians just made the problem worse, as people joined in to dance to the music. By the time the dancing plague of 1518 ended, several people had died of exhaustion or injuries sustained during their dance marathon.

It was also common for nunneries to get outbreaks of what was then considered demonic possession but what now appears to be MPI. In many well recorded cases, young nuns � often cast into a life of poverty and severe discipline with little to say about it � suddenly found themselves "possessed" and began behaving in extremely un-nunlike fashion. These instances often spread to other members of the convent and required intervention by exorcists to resolve.

A more recent example might be the curious story of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. During WWII in the small town of Mattoon, Illinois, 33 people awoke in the middle of the night to a "sweet smell" in their homes followed by symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, and paralysis. Many claimed to see a figure outside their rooms fleeing the scene. Claims of gassings rapidly followed the initial cases, and the police department was swamped with reports that amounted to nothing. The cases ended after the sheriff threatened to arrest anyone submitting a report of being gassed without agreeing to a medical review.

Each of these cases exhibits the generally agreed upon conditions for MPI: the people involved were a cohesive group, they all agreed on the same threats existing, and they were enduring stressful and emotional conditions that later manifested as physical symptoms. Additionally, the symptoms appeared suddenly and spread by sight and communication among the affected individuals.

Social diseases for a social media age

One point upon which most sources on MPI agree is the tendency of the outbreaks to occur among cohesive groups whose members are in regular contact. This is easy to see in the above examples: nuns live together in small convents, medieval peasants did not travel much, and the residents of Mattoon were in a small community.

This makes the more recent case that relies on the internet all the more interesting. And it's not the only one. Another MPI centered around a school in New York in 2011.

As a result, a team of German researchers has put forth the idea of a new version of MPI for the modern age: "mass social media-induced illness." It is similar to MPI but differs in that it is explicitly for cases driven by social media, in which people suffering from the same imagined symptoms never actually come into direct contact with one another.

Of course, these researchers are not the first to consider the problem in a digital context. Dr. Robert Bartholomew described the aforementioned New York case in a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

All this seems to imply that our online interactions can affect us in much the same ways as direct communication has for ages past and that the social groups we form online can be cohesive enough to cause identical symptoms in people who have never met. Therefore, we likely have not seen the last of "mass social media-induced illness."

• Concentrated solar thermal power is a fascinating technology.
• These plants can produce power after dark, unlike standard solar photovoltaic plants.
• Currently, they cost too much, but some innovative companies are forging ahead.

How mirrors could power the planet... and prevent wars | Hard Reset by Freethink

www.youtube.com

Flying across the American Southwest, brilliant points of light shine in the distant wastes of the Mojave Desert. Three glowing spots hover over the horizon, each surrounded by a gleaming field. These are the towers and mirrors (heliostats) of the Ivanpah generating station, one of the largest concentrated solar power plants on Earth. What is this technology that allows solar power to continue at night, and how does it work?

Traditional photovoltaic (PV) solar cells absorb sunlight and pour out electricity. Particles of light (photons) emitted by the sun travel through space, transit Earth's atmosphere, and smack into a solar panel. Some photons are reflected away by the panel and lost. Most of them are absorbed by the atoms of the panel, which then release electrons. The solar cell's electrical design gathers these electrons and channels them out as electrical current. Further electrical devices convert this low voltage direct current (DC) to higher voltage alternating current (AC) to send across power transmission lines.

Concentrated solar thermal (CST) power plants do not directly exchange solar photons for electrons. They gather the photons and use them to heat water, which turns a steam turbine, which turns an electrical generator. This is the same way that nuclear fission and fossil fuel plants generate electricity � the difference being that uranium or coal or natural gas are replaced by the heat of the sun's rays.

The solar concentrator's basic design is simple. An array of heliostats � a term for mirrors on swiveling mounts capable of tracking the sun � is built on the ground. These arrays cover many hundreds of acres, roughly comparable to a large traditional solar plant of similar capacity. Each mirror is continuously adjusted so that it points in a direction that bisects the angle between the sun and a giant power tower. Sunlight is thus beamed up toward a boiler system looming 400-800 feet above the earth.

Approaching the central tower, the converging solar light from thousands of mirrors becomes extremely powerful. Visible from many miles away, the nearly transparent air itself will shine with scattered optical power. Unlucky birds that intersect the concentrated beams are incinerated mid-air. This dense power is what ultimately drives electrical generation.

The top of the tower is a box with black walls � the sides of a boiler designed to absorb nearly all of the reflected light, which contains the fluid to be heated. Some plants, like Ivanpah in California, heat water for their steam turbines. Others use a more exotic molten salt working fluid.

Solar thermal concentration offers one major advantage over traditional PV solar cell technology: dispatchability. A properly configured CST plant can broil molten salt to more than 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, storing an incredible amount of heat energy. The liquid salt is then pumped into a holding tank, acting as a sort of battery. When sunlight is not available (roughly half the time), this stored up sunlight energy can be pumped out of the tank and used to power a turbine generator for on-demand power overnight.

Installed CST electricity generation across the globe is relatively low. While the technology works today, and paths to advance it have been laid out, the cost is currently too high to compete with standard photovoltaic cells. Many nations, including Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, China, Chile, Spain, and India have built giant power tower installations, yet most of their future commitments are unclear. While concentrated solar thermal power has been growing cheaper, PV cell cost has been dropping just as rapidly.

The future of this energy source may well hinge on continued development of its stored energy capability for dispatchable power, which is needed to fill in for inconsistent wind turbines and PV solar plants.

Options today to store energy are very limited. Lithium-ion technology has many downsides that prevent countries from running on batteries. Like the cells in a laptop, they are expensive, they degrade dramatically over time, and they are liable to catch fire. Global production capacity is far too small for the task, and that production is dominated by China.

Concentrated solar thermal technology is straightforward and clean. The design is beautiful and still being improved. Effectively storing sunlight for overnight power dispatch is a brilliant feature. Still, commercial grid electricity is a brutal market in which the cheapest wins. Will solar concentrator plants become competitive and multiply around the world? We shall see.

• Just like you and me, stars change over time.
• By studying the characteristics of stars, like their temperature and luminosity, astrophysicists figured out how stars evolve over time.
• This amazing insight is the primary lesson of the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram.

Human beings, as the species Homo sapiens, have been around for about 300,000 years. That turns out to be about 100 million nights during which somebody, somewhere looked up at the dark sky and asked, "What are those twinkly lights?"

Given all those nights and all those people asking pretty much the same question, it is pretty remarkable that we happen to live in one of the first generations that actually knows the answer. Here in the 21^st century, we know for sure what stars are, and a key reason we have that knowledge is because of a little something called the HR diagram. Over the summer, I wrote two other posts on what I called the "most important graph in astrophysics." Today, I want to finish the series by explaining how the HR diagram shows us how stars age and evolve.

Stellar evolution: a star's life cycle

You can read the first and second posts here and here, respectively. But for completeness, let's restate that the HR diagram is a plot with stellar luminosity (L for energy output) on the vertical axis and stellar surface temperature (T for temperature) on the horizonal axis. In the previous posts, we learned that when you measure L and T for a bunch of stars and then drop them onto this kind of plot, you find the majority of the points fall on a thick diagonal band running from high stellar luminosity and temperature (high L and T) to low stellar luminosity and temperature (low L and T). That band is what astronomers call the Main Sequence, and its discovery in the HR diagram was key to understanding what stars were and how they shined.

What the Main Sequence revealed were stars in their long middle age. Middle-aged stars (meaning stars in between their relatively short birth and death phases) support themselves against their own crushing, titanic gravity by releasing energy through fusion reactions in their hot, dense cores. Hydrogen nuclei are fused into helium nuclei, giving up a little energy along the way through good ol' E = mc².

As long as there is hydrogen to burn in the core, a star is stable, happy, and free to shine its brilliance into the dark night of space. Luckily stars have lots of hydrogen to burn. A star like the sun contains about a billion billion billion tons of hydrogen gas. That translates into about 10 billion years of life on the Main Sequence. But a billion billion billion tons of gas is not infinite. Eventually, the hydrogen fusion party must end. The star will run out of fuel in the core, and that is when it stops being middle-aged.

How the HR diagram depicts stellar evolution

Credit: Richard Powell via Wikipedia

What happens next is also revealed by the HR diagram, which once again, is why it is the most important graph in astrophysics. When astronomers first started dropping their stars onto the diagram more than 100 years ago, they saw not only the Main Sequence but also stars clustered in other places. There were lots of moderately bright stars with low temperatures (high L and low T). There were also lots of really, really bright stars with even lower temperatures (very high L and lower T). Using the laws of physics associated with hot glowing matter, astronomers could derive the sizes of these bright cool stars and found that they were much bigger than the sun. They identified giant stars (the bright ones), which were 10 times the size of the sun, and supergiants (the really, really bright ones), which were 100 times the size of the sun.

These various kinds of giant stars on the HR diagram were the all-important evidence for the evolution of stars. Stellar properties were not static. They aged and changed just like we did. Astrophysicists eventually saw that the evolution of a star on the HR diagram was driven by the evolution of nuclear burning in its core. As researchers got better at modeling what happens within stars as they age, they came to see that after the hydrogen fuel runs out in the core, gravity begins to crush what is left: inert helium "ash."

Eventually, the gravitational squeeze drives temperatures and densities in the core high enough to ignite the helium ash, allowing the helium nuclei to fuse into carbon nuclei. These internal changes rearrange the outer layers of the star, making them swell and bloat � first into the giants, and then into the supergiants. The details of why they get so large are complicated and require lots of detailed calculations (done with computers). What matters for us is that what comes out of those calculations are evolutionary tracks across the HR diagram. The tracks are predictions, telling astronomers how changes in a star's nuclear burning history will manifest in it its luminosity and temperature which, in turn, translates into how it will move across the HR diagram over time.

The changes for actual stars are too slow to watch over a human lifetime. But by taking measurements of lots of random stars (meaning they are at random points in their evolution), we can find the older ones in their giant or supergiant phases. Then, via some statistics, astronomers can then see if their theoretical evolutionary tracks match what they see in the HR diagram. The answer is a resounding yes.

So not only do we know what stars are (big balls of mostly hydrogen gas with a fusion furnace in the core), but we also know exactly how those luminous spheres evolve across billions of years of cosmic history � including lighting up the nights for a remarkable planet that is home to some remarkable hairless monkeys.

• Before migrating to the sea, whales were terrestrial herbivores.
• As they transitioned to the ocean and became carnivores, at least one proto-whale was an eating machine � both on land and in the sea.
• This fearsome fossil was found in the Sahara desert, which used to be an ocean bottom.

Whales are carnivorous, although gigantic baleen whales feed on such tiny prey that it is hard to believe that they ever get enough food. Toothed whales dine on fish, squid, and octopi. (Fun fact: Orcas, also known as killer whales, are not really whales � they are gigantic, killer dolphins.)

Before moving into the sea, it is believed that whales were once terrestrial herbivores and somewhat deer-like. About 43 million years ago, say the authors of a new study, at least one protocetid � a semi-aquatic whale � was something else entirely. According to a fossil recently found in the Sahara desert, it was a four-legged, walking, swimming, Jurassic World-like nightmare.

In more gentle, scientific terms: "Unique features of the skull and mandible suggest a capacity for more efficient oral mechanical processing than the typical protocetid condition, thereby allowing for a strong raptorial feeding style."

Likely feeding on both land and in the sea, Phiomicetus anubis was fierce, with teeth and jaws powerful enough to tear apart its prey. The study says that it was about 10 feet long and weighed as much as 1,300 pounds, with a head reminiscent of a jackal's. Thus, its discoverers had good reason to name it after Anubis, the Egyptian god of death.

The Sahara was not always a desert

Authors Mohamed Sameh, Abdullah Gohar, and Hesham Sallam with the Phiomicetus anubis fossil.Credit: Abdullah Gohar (courtesy of the authors)

P. anubis was found in the Sahara desert, which was once under water. It is believed that such Protocetidae hail from the Eocene era in the Indo-Pakistan region. Its fossil was found in the Fayum Depression in the Egyptian Western Desert, an area that has been the site of numerous prehistoric whale discoveries, as well as discoveries of early fish, sharks, and land mammals.

The researchers did not find all of P. anubis, but they did find enough to deduce its characteristics based on its cranium, jaws, cervical and thoracic vertebrae, and its rib fragments.

Chow time

Examination of the whale's teeth suggests that it routinely digested prey that were too large to swallow whole and thus had to be torn apart. Among its likely fare: large fish, smaller cetaceans, turtles, and invertebrates such as nautiloids. As far as how it caught and killed its food, the study says:

"Phiomicetus may have used the same mechanism that modern crocodilians and sharks use in hunting large prey items (e.g. large fish or small cetaceans) by pulling them onto land or tearing them by seizing a part of the prey with powerful jaws then rolling and twisting the entire body."

The researchers also assert that P. anubis was not above scavenging.

• Conventionalism is the idea that right and wrong depend entirely on the cultures and traditions to which we belong. What one culture calls immoral, another accepts as normal.
• But if we accept this reasoning, we are forced to conclude that any manner of atrocities � from ritual child sacrifice to female genital mutilation � are permissible.
• Without a universal standard of morality, it is difficult to claim that some behaviors are always wrong.

On August 17, 2021, the Taliban, fresh from their takeover of Afghanistan, released a statement that they would protect the existing rights of Afghan women "within the framework of Islam." There was no mention of "human rights" or the Western idea of equality. Instead, the Taliban were appealing to a 2500-year-old tradition � the idea of cultural relativity.

The belief that right and wrong and good and bad depend on the culture to which one belongs is popular today. We are loath to say that one culture is better or worse than another, that one way of doing things is "immoral," or that some traditions are a bit disgusting or weird. Doing so risks being labeled culturally insensitive � or worse. But what do we lose by being willfully blind to vast differences in moral standards between cultures?

You say potato, I say ritual child sacrifice

From where do you get your morals? Your sense of right and wrong? If you are an absolutist, it will presumably come from some kind of universal (possibly religious) moral order. But if you are a relativist, you likely will point to some worldly source, like society, family, or personal conscience.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of relativists: subjectivists and conventionalists.

Subjectivists are those who believe values and morals are made entirely by you as an individual. It finds expression in French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote, "You are free, therefore choose � that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do."

But it is found also in Frederick Nietzsche's "perspectivism," which allows for no facts at all � not least moral facts � but only interpretations from our particular vantage point. When he wrote that "every great philosophy up till now has consisted of… the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography," he meant to say that whenever we declare this or that to be the case, we are only expressing or projecting our own values.

So, subjectivists will argue that you have your values, and I have mine. I am a vegetarian, and you are a meat eater. You are happy to download movies illegally, and I am not. And that is okay.

Conventionalists, on the other hand, argue that our morals come from the society, culture, or historical norms of our time. They see right and wrong as embedded in the traditions and conventions of our age. And the first clear formulation of this is found in Herodotus.

It's all Greek to me

Any well traveled person can attest that the more you see of the varied and incongruous behaviors across the world, the more you see your own afresh. But in spite of all these different cultures, we have an incredibly hard time abandoning our own.

As Herodotus wrote in Histories � a sprawling, entertaining, and often hilariously inaccurate account of the peoples and times of the 5th century BCE � if someone were asked "out of all the customs in the world" which they thought were the best, they would almost always "end by preferring their own. So convinced are they that their own usages far surpass those of all others."

As wild and exciting as a new land might be, we still come back home and tell our friends how strange and weird it was.

To flesh out his point, Herodotus tells a story involving the Persian emperor, Darius. Darius asked his Greek captives if they would accept payment to eat their dead father's body. The Greeks said they would never, ever do so. The proper funeral rites of Greece demanded corpses to be burned. Darius then sent for his Indian captives, a group of people called the "Callatians", who he knew did eat their father's body after death. Would they accept any money to burn their father's bodies? They were shocked and offended. It was an utter sacrilege, and they refused any money.

His point? What one people thinks is the height of taboo, another will see as normal. We each have the morals that we do simply because we were born in a particular time and place.

Can we declare that another culture is immoral?

The problem with conventionalism, or cultural relativity, is that it is hard to see how we can ever judge another culture's questionable practices. If we truly believe that "right and wrong are wholly defined by society," then we are forced to admit that any manner of atrocities � from ritual child sacrifice to the Holocaust � are okay.

If a country has a long and popular tradition of female genital mutilation, then we have no grounds to say that it is wrong. If a culture accepts child marriages or a pre-adolescent age of consent, that is just the way they do things. And, with our opening example, if the Taliban or Afghan Muslim tradition subjugates women and forbids free speech, what grounds do we have to rebuke them?

It seems that there are few ways out of this problem. One way might be to commit to what is called "political realism," which dates back to another "father of history" in the ancient Greek, Thucydides. This theory maintains that right and wrong, or the idealistic notions of justice and honor, simply do not apply in international relations. When we are dealing with states against states, it is dog-eat-dog or "might makes right" � a form of ethical survival of the fittest, perhaps.

But this is unsatisfactory. If we are to salvage the idea that certain beliefs or practices are morally wrong, reprehensible even, no matter where or when they occur, we likely have to revert to some kind of moral absolutism. This is no easy position to argue, since to do so seems to require some universal or objective ethical yardstick by which to bash others. We need a reply when someone asks, "On what grounds is your way better?" One way, of course, is religion. But if not religion, then what?

It is a thorny issue, but what the Taliban's wily and manipulative press conference has revealed is that there is a paucity to moral relativism that most find hard to accept. Perhaps Afghanistan has taught us that we are more absolutist than we thought.

Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.

In recent decades the cost of wind and solar power generation has dropped dramatically.

This is one reason that the U.S. Department of Energy projects that renewable energy will be the
fastest-growing U.S. energy source through 2050.

However, it's still relatively expensive to store energy. And since renewable energy generation
isn't available all the time – it happens when the wind blows or the sun shines – storage is essential.

As a
researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, I work with the federal government and private industry to develop renewable energy storage technologies. In a recent report, researchers at NREL estimated that the potential exists to increase U.S. renewable energy storage capacity by as much as 3,000% percent by 2050.

Here are three emerging technologies that could help make this happen.

Longer charges

From alkaline batteries for small electronics to lithium-ion batteries for cars and laptops, most people already use batteries in many aspects of their daily lives. But there is still lots of room for growth.

For example, high-capacity batteries with long discharge times – up to 10 hours – could be valuable for storing solar power at night or increasing the range of electric vehicles. Right now there are very few such batteries in use. However, according to
recent projections, upwards of 100 gigawatts' worth of these batteries will likely be installed by 2050. For comparison, that's 50 times the generating capacity of Hoover Dam. This could have a major impact on the viability of renewable energy.

Batteries work by creating a chemical reaction that produces a flow of electrical current.

One of the biggest obstacles is limited supplies of lithium and cobalt, which currently are essential for making lightweight, powerful batteries. According to
some estimates, around 10% of the world's lithium and nearly all of the world's cobalt reserves will be depleted by 2050.

Furthermore, nearly 70% of the world's cobalt is mined in the Congo, under conditions that have long been documented as
inhumane.

Scientists are working to develop techniques for
recycling lithium and cobalt batteries, and to design batteries based on other materials. Tesla plans to produce cobalt-free batteries within the next few years. Others aim to replace lithium with sodium, which has properties very similar to lithium's but is much more abundant.

Safer batteries

Another priority is to make batteries safer. One area for improvement is electrolytes – the medium, often liquid, that
allows an electric charge to flow from the battery's anode, or negative terminal, to the cathode, or positive terminal.

When a battery is in use, charged particles in the electrolyte move around to balance out the charge of the electricity flowing out of the battery. Electrolytes often contain flammable materials. If they leak, the battery can overheat and catch fire or melt.

Scientists are developing solid electrolytes, which would make batteries more robust. It is much harder for particles to move around through solids than through liquids, but
encouraging lab-scale results suggest that these batteries could be ready for use in electric vehicles in the coming years, with target dates for commercialization as early as 2026.

While solid-state batteries would be well suited for consumer electronics and electric vehicles, for large-scale energy storage, scientists are pursuing all-liquid designs called
flow batteries.

A typical flow battery consists of two tanks of liquids that are pumped past a membrane held between two electrodes. (
Qi and Koenig, 2017, CC BY)

In these devices both the electrolyte and the electrodes are liquids. This allows for super-fast charging and makes it easy to make really big batteries. Currently these systems are very expensive, but research continues to
bring down the price.

Storing sunlight as heat

Other renewable energy storage solutions cost less than batteries in some cases. For example,
concentrated solar power plants use mirrors to concentrate sunlight, which heats up hundreds or thousands of tons of salt until it melts. This molten salt then is used to drive an electric generator, much as coal or nuclear power is used to heat steam and drive a generator in traditional plants.

These heated materials can also be stored to produce electricity when it is cloudy, or even at night. This approach allows concentrated solar power to work around the clock.

Checking a molten salt valve for corrosion at Sandia's Molten Salt Test Loop. (
Randy Montoya, Sandia Labs/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND)

This idea could be adapted for use with nonsolar power generation technologies. For example, electricity made with wind power could be used to heat salt for use later when it isn't windy.

Concentrating solar power is still relatively expensive. To compete with other forms of energy generation and storage, it needs to become more efficient. One way to achieve this is to increase the temperature the salt is heated to, enabling more efficient electricity production. Unfortunately, the salts currently in use aren't stable at high temperatures. Researchers are working to develop new salts or other materials that can withstand temperatures as high as 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit (705 C).

One leading idea for how to reach higher temperature involves heating up sand instead of salt, which can withstand the higher temperature. The sand would then be moved with conveyor belts from the heating point to storage. The Department of Energy recently announced funding for a
pilot concentrated solar power plant based on this concept.

Advanced renewable fuels

Batteries are useful for short-term energy storage, and concentrated solar power plants could help stabilize the electric grid. However, utilities also need to store a lot of energy for indefinite amounts of time. This is a role for renewable fuels like
hydrogen and ammonia. Utilities would store energy in these fuels by producing them with surplus power, when wind turbines and solar panels are generating more electricity than the utilities' customers need.

Hydrogen and ammonia contain more energy per pound than batteries, so they work where batteries don't. For example, they could be used
for shipping heavy loads and running heavy equipment, and for rocket fuel.

Today these fuels are mostly made from natural gas or other nonrenewable
fossil fuels via extremely inefficient reactions. While we think of it as a green fuel, most hydrogen gas today is made from natural gas.

Scientists are looking for ways to produce hydrogen and other fuels using renewable electricity. For example, it is possible to make hydrogen fuel by
splitting water molecules using electricity. The key challenge is optimizing the process to make it efficient and economical. The potential payoff is enormous: inexhaustible, completely renewable energy.

Kerry Rippy, Researcher, National Renewable Energy Laboratory

This article is republished from
The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.