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Can A.I. Predict Events in the Lives of Real People?

By Peter Aagaard Brixen

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In a new scientific article, ‘Using sequences of life-events to predict human lives’, published in Nature Computational Science, researchers have analyzed health data and attachment to the labor market for 6 million Danes in a model dubbed life2vec. After the model has been trained in an initial phase, i.e., learned the patterns in the data, it has been shown to outperform other advanced neural networks and predict outcomes such as personality and time of death with high accuracy (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-023-00573-5).
The predictions from Life2vec are answers to general questions such as: ‘death within four years’? When the researchers analyze the model’s responses, the results are consistent with existing findings within the social sciences; for example, all things being equal, individuals in a leadership position or with a high income are more likely to survive, while being male, skilled or having a mental diagnosis is associated with a higher risk of dying. Life2vec encodes the data in a large system of vectors, a mathematical structure that organizes the different data. The model decides where to place data on the time of birth, schooling, education, salary, housing and health.
The researchers behind the article point out that ethical questions surround the life2vec model, such as protecting sensitive data, privacy, and the role of bias in data. These challenges must be understood more deeply before the model can be used, for example, to assess an individual’s risk of contracting a disease or other preventable life events.
According to the researchers, the next step would be to incorporate other types of information, such as text and images or information about our social connections. This use of data opens up a whole new interaction between social and health sciences.
A transformer model is a type of AI, deep learning data architecture used to learn about language and other tasks. The models can be trained to understand and generate language. The transformer model is designed to be faster and more efficient than previous models and is often used to train large language models on large datasets.
A neural network is a computer model inspired by the brain and nervous system of humans and animals. There are many different types of neural networks (e.g. transformer models).
Like the brain, a neural network is made up of (artificial) neurons. These neurons are connected and can send signals to each other. Each neuron receives input from other neurons and then calculates an output that is passed on to other neurons.
A neural network can learn to solve tasks by training on large amounts of data. 
Neural networks rely on training data to learn and improve their accuracy over time. But once these learning algorithms are fine-tuned for accuracy, they are powerful tools in computer science and artificial intelligence that, according to researchers, allow us to classify and group data at high speed. One of the most well-known neural networks is Google’s search algorithm.

AR #112

The Artificial Intelligence Threat

by Stephen Robbins, Ph.D.

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Cognitive strategies to augment body with robotic arm

Alain Herzog CC-BY-SA

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EPFL scientists show that breathing may be used to control a wearable extra robotic arm in healthy individuals, without hindering control of other parts of the body.

Neuroengineer Silvestro Micera develops advanced technological solutions to help people regain sensory and motor functions that have been lost due to traumatic events or neurological disorders. Until now, he had never before worked on enhancing the human body and cognition with the help of technology.
Now in a study published in Science Robotics, Micera and his team report on how diaphragm movement can be monitored for successful control of an extra arm, essentially augmenting a healthy individual with a third – robotic – arm.
“This study opens up new and exciting opportunities, showing that extra arms can be extensively controlled and that simultaneous control with both natural arms is possible,” says Micera, Bertarelli Foundation Chair in Translational Neuroengineering at EPFL, and professor of Bioelectronics at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna.
The study is part of the Third-Arm project, previously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (NCCR Robotics), that aims to provide a wearable robotic arm to assist in daily tasks or to help in search and rescue. Micera believes that exploring the cognitive limitations of third-arm control may actually provide gateways towards better understanding of the human brain.
Micera continues, “The main motivation of this third arm control is to understand the nervous system. If you challenge the brain to do something that is completely new, you can learn if the brain has the capacity to do it and if it’s possible to facilitate this learning. We can then transfer this knowledge to develop, for example, assistive devices for people with disabilities, or rehabilitation protocols after stroke.”

“We want to understand if our brains are hardwired to control what nature has given us, and we’ve shown that the human brain can adapt to coordinate new limbs in tandem with our biological ones,” explains Solaiman Shokur, co-PI of the study and EPFL Senior Scientist at the Neuro-X Institute. “It’s about acquiring new motor functions, enhancement beyond the existing functions of a given user, be it a healthy individual or a disabled one. From a nervous system perspective, it’s a continuum between rehabilitation and augmentation.”
To explore the cognitive constraints of augmentation, the researchers first built a virtual environment to test a healthy user’s capacity to control a virtual arm using movement of his or her diaphragm. They found that diaphragm control does not interfere with actions like controlling one’s physiological arms, one’s speech or gaze.
In this virtual reality setup, the user is equipped with a belt that measures diaphragm movement. Wearing a virtual reality headset, the user sees three arms: the right arm and hand, the left arm and hand, and a third arm between the two with a symmetric, six-fingered hand.
“We made this hand symmetric to avoid any bias towards either the left or the right hand,” explains Giulia Dominijanni, PhD student at EPFL’s Neuro-X Institute.
In the virtual environment, the user is then prompted to reach out with either the left hand, the right hand, or in the middle with the symmetric hand. In the real environment, the user holds onto an exoskeleton with both arms, which allows for control of the virtual left and right arms. Movement detected by the belt around the diaphragm is used for controlling the virtual middle, symmetric arm. The setup was tested on 61 healthy subjects in over 150 sessions.
“Diaphragm control of the third arm is actually very intuitive, with participants learning to control the extra limb very quickly,” explains Dominijanni. “Moreover, our control strategy is inherently independent from the biological limbs and we show that diaphragm control does not impact a user’s ability to speak coherently.”
The researchers also successfully tested diaphragm control with an actual robotic arm, a simplified one that consists of a rod that can be extended out, and back in. When the user contracts the diaphragm, the rod is extended out. In an experiment similar to the VR environment, the user is asked to reach and hover over target circles with her left or right hand, or with the robotic rod.
Besides the diaphragm, but not reported in the study, vestigial ear muscles have also been tested for feasibility in performing new tasks. In this approach, a user is equipped with ear sensors and trained to use fine ear muscle movement to control the displacement of a computer mouse.
“Users could potentially use these ear muscles to control an extra limb,” says Shokur, emphasizing that these alternative control strategies may help one day for the development of rehabilitation protocols for people with motor deficiencies.
Part of the third arm project, previous studies regarding the control of robotic arms have been focused on helping amputees. The latest Science Robotics study is a step beyond repairing the human body towards augmentation.
“Our next step is to explore the use of more complex robotic devices using our various control strategies, to perform real-life tasks, both inside and outside of the laboratory. Only then will we be able to grasp the real potential of this approach,” concludes Micera.

AR #84

Molecular Machines that Defy Darwin

by Casey Luskin

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Brains Can Now Communicate with Thought Alone

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A speech prosthetic developed by a collaborative team of Duke neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, and engineers can translate a person’s brain signals into what they’re trying to say.

Appearing in the journal Nature Communications, the new technology might one day help people unable to talk due to neurological disorders regain the ability to communicate through a brain-computer interface.
“There are many patients who suffer from debilitating motor disorders, like ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or locked-in syndrome, that can impair their ability to speak,” said Gregory Cogan, PhD, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Duke and one of the lead researchers involved in the project. “But the current tools available to allow them to communicate are generally very slow and cumbersome.”
Imagine listening to an audiobook at half-speed. That’s the best speech decoding rate currently available, which clocks in at about 78 words per minute. People, however, speak around 150 words per minute.
The lag between spoken and decoded speech rates is partially due the relatively few brain activity sensors that can be fused onto a paper-thin piece of material that lays atop the surface of the brain. Fewer sensors provide less decipherable information to decode.
To improve on past limitations, Cogan teamed up with Jonathan Viventi, PhD, associate professor of biomedical engineering, whose lab specializes in making high-density, ultra-thin, and flexible brain sensors.
Viventi and his team packed a record-breaking 256 microscopic brain sensors onto a postage stamp-sized piece of flexible, medical-grade plastic. Neurons just a grain of sand apart can have wildly different activity patterns when coordinating speech, so it’s necessary to distinguish signals from neighboring brain cells to help make accurate predictions about intended speech.
After fabricating the new implant, Cogan and Viventi teamed up with several Duke University Hospital neurosurgeons, including Derek Southwell, MD, PhD, Nandan Lad, MD, PhD, and Allan Friedman, MD, who helped recruit four patients to test the implants. The experiment required the researchers to place the device temporarily in patients who were undergoing brain surgery for some other condition, such as  treating Parkinson’s disease or having a tumor removed. Time was limited for Cogan and his team to test drive their device in the OR.
Read the full story from Duke Institute of Brain Sciences on Duke Today and in Newsweek.

AR #79

Brain to Brain Communication

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Pliosaur Carcass, the Oldest Sea Monster Yet Found

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The fossils of a 170-million-year-old ancient marine reptile from the Age of Dinosaurs have been identified as the oldest-known mega-predatory pliosaur – a group of ocean-dwelling reptiles closely related to the famous long-necked plesiosaurs. The findings are rare and add new knowledge to the evolution of plesiosaurs. The study has been published in the journal Scientific Reports (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43015-y).

The fossils were found 40 years ago in north-eastern France. An international team of palaeontologists have now analized them and identified them as a new pliosaur genus: Lorrainosaurus.
Pliosaurs were a type of plesiosaur with short necks and massive skulls. They appeared over 200 million years ago, but remained minor components of marine ecosystems until suddenly developing into enormous apex predators. The new study shows that this adaptive shift followed feeding niche differentiation and the global decline of other predatory marine reptiles over 170 million years ago.
Lorrainosaurus is the oldest large-bodied pliosaur represented by an associated skeleton. It had jaws over 1.3 m long with large conical teeth and a bulky ‘torpedo-shaped’ body propelled by four flipper-like limbs.
“Lorrainosaurus was one of the first truly huge pliosaurs. It gave rise to a dynasty of marine reptile mega-predators that ruled the oceans for around 80 million years,” explains Sven Sachs, a researcher at the Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld, who led the study.
This giant reptile probably reached over 6 m from snout to tail, and lived during the early Middle Jurassic period. Intriguingly, very little is known about plesiosaurs from that time.
“Our identification of Lorrainosaurus as one of the earliest mega-predatory pliosaurs demonstrates that these creatures emerged immediately after a landmark restructuring of marine predator ecosystems across the Early-to-Middle Jurassic boundary, some 175 to 171 million years ago. This event profoundly affected many marine reptile groups and brought mega-predatory pliosaurids to dominance over ‘fish-like’ ichthyosaurs, ancient marine crocodile relatives, and other large-bodied predatory plesiosaurs”, adds Daniel Madzia from the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who co-led the study.
Pliosaurs were some of the most successful marine predators of their time. “Famous examples, such as Pliosaurus and Kronosaurus – some of the world’s largest pliosaurs – were absolutely enormous with body-lengths exceeding 10 m. They were ecological equivalents of today’s Killer whales and would have eaten a range of prey including squid-like cephalopods, large fish and other marine reptiles. These have all been found as preserved gut contents”, said senior co-author Benjamin Kear, Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Researcher in Palaeontology at The Museum of Evolution, Uppsala University.
The recovered bones and teeth of Lorrainosaurus represent remnants of what was once a complete skeleton that decomposed and was dispersed across the ancient sea floor by currents and scavengers.
“The remains were unearthed in 1983 from a road cutting near Metz in Lorraine, north-eastern France. Palaeontology enthusiasts from the Association minéralogique et paléontologique d’Hayange et des environs recognised the significance of their discovery and donated the fossils to the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg”, said co-author Ben Thuy, Curator at the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg.

AR #119

The Dragon Factor

by William B. Stoecker

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Trees of Amazon Rainforest Cultivated by Pre-Columbian Humans

By Carolina Levis

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Trees that were domesticated by pre-Columbian peoples still dominate the forests of the Amazon Basin. The findings put a dent in the notion that the vast rainforests were untouched by human hands before the arrival of the Spanish explorers in South America. In an article published in Science, an international team including Florian Wittmann from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, the scientists report their findings (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aal0157).

As far back as 8,000 years ago, the peoples of Amazonia began to domesticate plants such as the Brazil nut, the cacao tree and the acai palm tree. For a long time, it was not clear to what extent the indigenous inhabitants of the forest really transformed the forest by specifically tending to or cultivating certain trees or carrying their seeds over large distances. The international team from the Brazilian national institute for Amazon research (INPA) therefore investigated the occurrence of 85 tree species used for food or as a construction material by the pre-Columbian inhabitants. The scientists looked at data from the Amazon Tree Diversity Network (ATDN). The database contains an inventory of tree species found at approximately one thousand study sites in the Amazon Basin.
The team found that 20 out of 85 domesticated species are abundant in the entire Amazon Basin and dominate large swathes of the rainforest. A study published in 2013 and co-authored by Florian Wittmann identified 4,962 different tree species in total at the ATDN study sites. Only 227 of these were widely distributed. While only five per cent of all tree species are abundant in the Amazon Basin, 24 per cent of the domesticated species occur frequently there. The proportion of abundant domesticated species was thus five times greater than would have been expected if humans had not interfered.
Florian Wittmann comments on the result: “The study sheds considerable light on how many tree species were propagated by humans; for example, Bertholletia, the Brazil nut.” A researcher in Manaus (Brazil) for the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry until 2016, Wittmann is now working at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Genetic studies have demonstrated that there are only very slight genetic differences between Brazil nut trees found in different areas of the Amazon region. Since the differences are much greater among species that have spread through the rainforest by chance, it is very probable that the species’ propagation was helped along by humans. Further investigation is required to confirm such findings concerning other trees, such as the cacao tree.
The study produced another finding: Around archaeological sites, the abundance and richness of domesticated trees increased. The researchers concluded that the American indigenous populations conferred an advantage on useful trees through their activities, thereby changing the ecosystems. The scientists believe that the finding confirms that human activities shaped the Amazon rainforest before the arrival of the Spanish. Florian Wittmann agrees: “Hardly any corner of Amazonia has been left untouched by humans,” the expert on floodplains ecology says. “According to estimates, about ten million people lived there prior to European colonization.”

AR #82

Ancient Cities in the Forest

by William B. Stoecker

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1918 Flu Pandemic Targeted the Poor After All

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New analysis of the remains of victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, contradicts the widespread belief the flu disproportionately impacted healthy young adults.

According to Konya News service, archaeologist Hasan Uguz, head of excavations of the Konya Museums Directorate, scientists have determined that “the local Christian people used the underground city in the 8th century to protect themselves from the raids that lasted for 150 years.” Yet while conventional archaeology may assign the city to the middle ages, the possibility that the structure may have been occupied during the Roman era, does little to explain just when the giant complex was actually designed and engineered. The builders were far more capable than Christian refugees of the Roman era are believed to be, and clearly had much greater resources at their disposal.
Elderly people who had lived in the area all their lives, says Uguz, played in the tunnels as children, and knew a very large underground city was nearby, but no one suspected just how enormous it was, and scientists did not believe the underground tunnels, corridors, and rooms could spread over such an extensive area. The human capacity and exact size of the complex is expected to become clear as the work progresses, but, for now, how people of Sarayini actually lived remains a mystery.
Since 2012, many astonishing subterranean sites in Turkey have drawn the attention of archaeologists from around the world. So far, over two hundred such cities have been reported, but most have not yet been adequately explored, and it seems certain that many more await discovery. Much of the recent digging has been guided by Semih Istanbulluoglu, an archaeologist from Ankara University. In December, 2015, Istanbulluoglu told Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News, that scientists believe, pending further laboratory work, at least some of the underground cities will date back to even before the Hittites in the second millennium BC.
To this day nobody really knows the true extent of the area’s underground cities, but they are certainly substantial. Celebrated Boston University geologist Robert Schoch, in a report for Atlantis Rising Magazine, (AR #95) described two of the cities, “Kaymakli consists of at least eight floors or underground stories (only four of which are currently accessible), each extending in a labyrinthine manner over a vast area. The city may have supported a population of 3,000 to 4,000 people plus farm animals and supplies, all housed underground. Derinkuyu, with an estimated twenty floors and extending an estimated 85 meters (280 feet) below the surface may have supported anywhere from a few thousand to 10,000 people plus their livestock and goods. And the underground cities may not have been entirely isolated from one another. Kaymakli and Derinkuyu are less than a dozen kilometers (seven and a half miles) from each other and there are reports of a tunnel that may connect them.”
Cappadocia’s astonishing underground cities, Schoch believes, though, in all probability, occupied many times since, were originally built around the end of the last ice age, twelve to thirteen thousand years ago.

AR #90

“The Paraffin Mold Experiments,”

by Michael E Tymn

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Another Enormous Underground City Unearthed in Turkey

Archaeologists Struggle to Explain Sarayini

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Covering at least 20,000 square meters, the newly discovered underground city of Sarayini, is one of the largest of its kind yet found in Central Anatolia. Included are large domestic areas with adjoining galleries, room-like living spaces, water wells, furnaces, workshops, chimneys, oil lamps for lighting, cellars, warehouses, ventilation, and many—as yet un-investigated—areas.

According to Konya News service, archaeologist Hasan Uguz, head of excavations of the Konya Museums Directorate, scientists have determined that “the local Christian people used the underground city in the 8th century to protect themselves from the raids that lasted for 150 years.” Yet while conventional archaeology may assign the city to the middle ages, the possibility that the structure may have been occupied during the Roman era, does little to explain just when the giant complex was actually designed and engineered. The builders were far more capable than Christian refugees of the Roman era are believed to be, and clearly had much greater resources at their disposal.
Elderly people who had lived in the area all their lives, says Uguz, played in the tunnels as children, and knew a very large underground city was nearby, but no one suspected just how enormous it was, and scientists did not believe the underground tunnels, corridors, and rooms could spread over such an extensive area. The human capacity and exact size of the complex is expected to become clear as the work progresses, but, for now, how people of Sarayini actually lived remains a mystery.
Since 2012, many astonishing subterranean sites in Turkey have drawn the attention of archaeologists from around the world. So far, over two hundred such cities have been reported, but most have not yet been adequately explored, and it seems certain that many more await discovery. Much of the recent digging has been guided by Semih Istanbulluoglu, an archaeologist from Ankara University. In December, 2015, Istanbulluoglu told Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News, that scientists believe, pending further laboratory work, at least some of the underground cities will date back to even before the Hittites in the second millennium BC.
To this day nobody really knows the true extent of the area’s underground cities, but they are certainly substantial. Celebrated Boston University geologist Robert Schoch, in a report for Atlantis Rising Magazine, (AR #95) described two of the cities, “Kaymakli consists of at least eight floors or underground stories (only four of which are currently accessible), each extending in a labyrinthine manner over a vast area. The city may have supported a population of 3,000 to 4,000 people plus farm animals and supplies, all housed underground. Derinkuyu, with an estimated twenty floors and extending an estimated 85 meters (280 feet) below the surface may have supported anywhere from a few thousand to 10,000 people plus their livestock and goods. And the underground cities may not have been entirely isolated from one another. Kaymakli and Derinkuyu are less than a dozen kilometers (seven and a half miles) from each other and there are reports of a tunnel that may connect them.”
Cappadocia’s astonishing underground cities, Schoch believes, though, in all probability, occupied many times since, were originally built around the end of the last ice age, twelve to thirteen thousand years ago.

AR #95

“The Ancient Subterranean Shelters of Cappadocia,”

by Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D.

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The Advanced Astronomy of Prehistoric Cave Art

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A ‘Lunar calendar’ found in the caves at Lascaux, France “may predate equivalent record-keeping systems by at least 10,000 years.” Hunter-gatherers from the ice age, it seems, had a primitive writing system which has now been uncovered by Ben Bacon, an amateur archaeologist, who concluded that the 20,000-year-old markings recorded the mating cycles of local animals.

Working with academic experts Bacon has published his research in a paper for the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0262407923000039?via%3Dihub).

Such special meaning in cave art symbols, however, has already been studied, and recently, as reported in Atlantis Rising Magazine. In 1996 at the Return to the Source conference at the University of Delaware, independent American researcher Frank Edge announced that he had identified certain celestial formations incorporated into cave drawings at Lascaux. Edge’s evidence including identification of the Pleiades and other stars in a series of black dots placed over the most prominent bull in the famed ‘Hall of the Bulls’ and was described by reporter Laura Lee in an article for Atlantis Rising in February of 1997. Then in 2000, the BBC also took notice of evidence for an ancient hidden language in the Lascaux designs, albeit without crediting the original discoverer.

Dr. David Whitehouse, BBC’s News Online science editor wrote at the time that “a prehistoric map of the night sky has been discovered on the walls of the famous painted caves at Lascaux in central France.” His story went on to describe the “map” thought to date back 16,500 years. Credited by the BBC with making the discovery, was Dr. Michael Rappenglueck, a German professor from the University of Munich, who argued that the map represented the three bright stars known as the summer triangle as well as the Pleiades. A similar pattern of stars was shown on a cave painting in Spain. The maps, said Rappenglueck show that our ancestors were more sophisticated than many believe, revealing that considerable scientific knowledge accompanied their legendary painting skill.

The significance of the art in the Lascaux caves may be greater than even the BBC suspects. More recent groundbreaking research on very ancient cave paintings in Lascaux and elsewhere, underscores the point that ancient people had a very advanced knowledge of astronomy.

A study produced in 2018 by researchers at the University of Edinburg, documents that artworks at sites across Europe, are not simply depictions of wild animals, as was previously supposed. Instead, analysis showed, the animal symbols represent star constellations in the night sky, and are used to represent dates and mark events such as comet strikes. They reveal that, perhaps as far back as 40,000 years ago, humans kept track of time using knowledge of how the position of the stars slowly changes over thousands of years. The findings suggest that long before the Greeks, ancient people understood a phenomenon known as the ‘precession of the equinoxes’. The ‘precession’ tracks in reverse order, the twelve 2150-year cycles, corresponding to the signs of the zodiac (i.e., the Age of Aquarius), also known as the “Great Year”.

The study was published in Athens Journal of History in 2018. “Early cave art shows,” said Dr Martin Sweatman, of the University of Edinburgh, and the lead author, “that people had advanced knowledge of the night sky within the last ice age. Intellectually, they were hardly any different to us today.”

AR #101

Neanderthal & Civilization

by Martin Ruggles

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Could ‘Terminator Zones’ on Distant Planets Harbor Life?

Astronomers Say These in-Between Regions Could Be Prime Sites for Liquid Water

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In a new study, astronomers from the University of California at Irvine describe how extraterrestrial life has the potential to exist on distant exoplanets inside a special area called the “terminator zone,” which is a ring on planets that have one side that always faces its star and one side that is always dark.

“These planets have a permanent day side and a permanent night side,” said Ana Lobo, a postdoctoral researcher in the UCI Department of Physics & Astronomy who led the new work, which just published in The Astrophysical Journal. Lobo added that such planets are particularly common because they exist around stars that make up about 70 percent of the stars seen in the night sky – so-called M-dwarf stars, which are relatively dimmer than our sun.

The terminator is the dividing line between the day and night sides of the planet. Terminator zones could exist in that “just right” temperature zone between too hot and too cold.

“You want a planet that’s in the sweet spot of just the right temperature for having liquid water,” said Lobo, because liquid water, as far as scientists know, is an essential ingredient for life.

On the dark sides of terminator planets, perpetual night would yield plummeting temperatures that could cause any water to be frozen in ice. The side of the planet always facing its star could be too hot for water to remain in the open for long.
“This is a planet where the dayside can be scorching hot, well beyond habitability, and the night side is going to be freezing, potentially covered in ice. You could have large glaciers on the night side,” Lobo said.

Lobo, alongside Aomawa Shields, UCI associate professor of physics & astronomy, modeled the climate of terminator planets using software typically used to model our own planet’s climate, but with a few adjustments, including slowing down planetary rotation.
It’s believed to be the first time astronomers have been able to show that such planets can sustain habitable climates confined to this terminator region. Historically, researchers have mostly studied ocean-covered exoplanets in their search for candidates for habitability. But now that Lobo and her team have shown that terminator planets are also viable refuges for life, it increases the options life-hunting astronomers have to choose from in the search for any possible extraterrestrial civilization.
Elsewhere on the ET front, geologist, and Atlantis Rising contributor, Robert Schoch reported in 2017, in Atlantis Rising Magazine that there are those who think the peculiar irregular dimming of, what has been dubbed Tabby’s Star (KIC 8462852star), could be caused by a ‘Dyson sphere’. The phenomenon continues to the present. Enclosing a star with an artificial structure like a giant lantern shade, to harness its energy, was proposed by British physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson in 1960. If such a thing exists on Tabby’s star (named after discoverer Tabetha Boyajian) it would be clear evidence for the existence of an extremely advanced engineering technology by an alien society.
Another alien-technology story concerns the notorious “Wow” signal, reported by astronomer Jerry R. Ehman in 1977. Ehman, a researcher with the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) spotted an anomalous radio signal that looked artificial in nature and wrote “Wow” on his data printout. Ever since, it has been called the “Wow” signal. It has never been satisfactorily explained, but now there is a new attempt.
Antonio Paris, a professor of astronomy at St. Petersburg College in Florida, has determined that two comets were passing through the area of the sky under observation by Ehman’s telescope, and one of them was accompanied by a hydrogen cloud. Paris, isn’t sure how, but he thinks the comet may have caused the “Wow” signal. He thinks it was a natural phenomenon, but he can’t rule out artificial origins. ▲

AR #99

The Future of Scientific Genius

by J. Douglas Kenyon, Publisher’s Letter

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Can Machines Be Made Self-Aware?

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According to Australian Ph.D. candidate Michael Timothy Bennett, in an online column for The Conversation (www.theconversation.com/us) “To build a machine, one must know what its parts are and how they fit together. To understand the machine, one needs to know what each part does and how it contributes to its function. In other words, one should be able to explain the “mechanics” of how it works. “Human-like intent,” believes Bennett, “would require human-like experiences and feelings, which is a difficult thing to engineer. Furthermore, we can’t easily test for the full richness of human consciousness. Consciousness is a broad and ambiguous concept that encompasses—but should be distinguished from—the more narrow claims.”

According to a philosophical approach called mechanism, humans are arguably a type of machine—and our ability to think, speak and understand the world is the result of a mechanical process we don’t understand.
“Bombs and phones, say other critics, may be getting smarter, but we are getting dumber,” wrote anthropologist Dr. Susan Martinez in A.R. #130, “attention span alarmingly shortened from the New York minute to the Cyber Second. Constant emailing and instant-messaging, says one group of London psychiatrists, “might do more damage to you brain than smoking pot.” Meanwhile, said Martinez, “one Canadian researcher has concluded that our obsessive use of information technology is dumbing us down and encouraging superficial and uncritical thinking … [as well as] leading to compulsive behavior”. Tech addicts are fessing up: Casey F., for one, says she had to ditch her smartphone altogether: “If I have one, I will check it obsessively”. Recovering addict, Blake S. talks about how he finally broke the spell of “days attached to a smart phone from wake until sleep.” The addiction has become so prevalent (many Americans spending one quarter of their time staring at their phones) that we now have books with titles like How to Break Up With Your Phone. College kids, taking out their earbuds long enough to discuss how technology dominates their lives, swarm across campus “like giant schools of cyborg jellyfish” (Gregoire).

You know the blowback is getting serious when major Apple investors call for a probe into iPhone addiction among young users. There is a sense that much of today’s tech is less about “facilitating” the way we live than about shaping and controlling it.

Over a half century ago in his best-seller Future Shock, Alvin Toffler gave a dim prognosis for “goals set without the participation of those affected.” Instability and upheaval, he predicted, will inevitably arise from “top-down technocracy.”

AR #99

The Future of Scientific Genius

by J. Douglas Kenyon, Publisher’s Letter