Scientists at Caltech and Occidental College have discovered a methane-fueled symbiosis between worms and bacteria at the bottom of the sea, shedding new light on the ecology of deep-sea environments. They found that bacteria belonging to the Methylococcaceae family have been hitching a ride on the feathery plumes that act as the respiratory organs of Laminatubus and Bispira worms. Methylococcaceae are methanotrophs, meaning that they harvest carbon and energy from methane, a molecule composed of carbon and hydrogen.
The conservative president of the northeastern Veneto region has proposed a special “license” for Italians who possess antibodies that show they have had, and beaten, the virus. The former prime minister, Matteo Renzi, a liberal, has spoken about a “Covid Pass” for the uninfected. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said that while the lockdown remained in place, the government had begun working with scientists to determine how to send people who have recuperated back to work. With its echoes of a “Brave New World,” the debate about how to reopen arrived in earnest this week in Italy.
Valuable intelligence on thousands of suspected terrorists risks being lost because of backlogs at a little-known US federal government database that processes DNA samples gathered in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The unfinished work at the database – part of a classified intelligence partnership of military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies – has been referred to in public documents but has not been openly discussed by US government officials.
DNA profiling (also called DNA fingerprinting) is the process of determining an individual's DNA characteristics. DNA analysis intended to identify a species, rather than an individual, is called DNA barcoding. DNA profiling is a forensic technique in criminal investigations, comparing criminal suspects' profiles to DNA evidence so as to assess the likelihood of their involvement in the crime. It is also used in parentage testing, to establish immigration eligibility, and in genealogical and medical research. DNA profiling has also been used in the study of animal and plant populations in the fields of zoology, botany, and agriculture.
New episode from the popular series "Oligarchic psychopaths driving the agenda"
Bill Gates - the second richest oligarch on earth - is "looking at getting vaccines to everyone in the world" (quote from the video), after last week predicting that "Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it." Good times.
These Community Mobility Reports aim to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. The reports chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential. The Reports were developed to be helpful while adhering to our stringent privacy protocols and protecting people’s privacy.
Abstract: Inattentional blindness is the psychological phenomenon that causes one to miss things in plain sight. It is a consequence of the selective attention in perception that lets us remain focused on important parts of our world without distraction from irrelevant details. Motivated by selective attention, we study the properties of artificial agents that perceive the world through the lens of a self-attention bottleneck. By constraining access to only a small fraction of the visual input, we show that their policies are directly interpretable in pixel space. We find neuroevolution ideal for training self-attention architectures for vision-based reinforcement learning tasks, allowing us to incorporate modules that can include discrete, non-differentiable operations which are useful for our agent. We argue that self-attention has similar properties as indirect encoding, in the sense that large implicit weight matrices are generated from a small number of key-query parameters, thus enabling our agent to solve challenging vision based tasks with at least 1000x fewer parameters than existing methods. Since our agent attends to only task-critical visual hints, they are able to generalize to environments where task irrelevant elements are modified while conventional methods fail.
William Harrison Withers Jr. (1938 – 2020) was an American singer-songwriter and musician. He recorded several major hits, including "Ain't No Sunshine" (1971), "Grandma's Hands" (1971), "Use Me" (1972), "Lean on Me" (1972), "Lovely Day" (1977), and "Just the Two of Us" (1980). Withers won three Grammy Awards and was nominated for four more. Withers died in LA on March 30, 2020, from heart complications.
After years of meddling with the internet and censoring everything left and right, China now wants to introduce a new authoritarian-friendly internet protocol. The Financial Times has recently gained access to several documents about the protocol. Huawei, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MITT), and state-run Unicom and China Telecom were the ones to craft the proposal and presented it to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
It was found that Russia and maybe Saudi Arabia were in favor of the proposal, whereas nations such as the US and UK expressed concerns. Based on what the developers of the protocol say, it may be standardized at a conference in India later this year with the testing of the protocol beginning in early 2021. On the whole, China’s new proposal states that the internet must catch up with the future and that the “current designs are obviously insufficient”. Considering the fact that the underlying technical architecture of the internet hasn’t really changed in a long time, China’s thoughts to modernize the whole infrastructure does sound like a necessary step to take. The proposal calls for an advanced internet that has improved security and efficiency while supporting holograms as well as latency stability.
Finally, the new protocol aims to integrate the interactions between ManyNets (networks from IoT and satellites) and the internet seamlessly. But there is a strong concern with the new proposal that was even pointed out by countries such as the US and UK. The new proposal, if accepted globally, will give governments the ultimate power over the internet accessibility in their nations.
Such a “top-down” internet architecture will lead to potential internet censorship. With many countries already practicing blatant internet censorship, especially China, the idea of placing more power over internet accessibility into the hands of a country’s government may not be the wisest course of action. It is also worth noting that authoritarian governments such as Russia are already moving in the direction of gaining “cyber sovereignty“. For instance, Russia already tested its own heavily controlled internet.
At such a juncture, the new proposal by China, while promising the hopes of a better future, might make it easy for countries to practice internet censorship.
The energy therapy is now available in many hospitals. What its ascendance says about shifts in how American patients and doctors think about health care.
With machine learning, Loihi can recognize hazardous chemicals “in the presence of significant noise and occlusion,” Intel said, suggesting the chip can be used in the real world where smells — such as perfumes, food, and other odors — are often found in the same area as a harmful chemical. Machine learning trained Loihi to learn and identify each hazardous odor with just a single sample, and learning a new smell didn’t disrupt previously learned scents. Intel claims Loihi can learn 10 different odors right now.
Researchers explore how certain scents often elicit specific emotions and memories in people, and how marking companies are manipulating the link for branding.
corona virus crisis unfolds, an army of conspiracy theorists has emerged, producing a dizzying amount of colourful viral narratives. The mainstream media is responding aggressively, with an onslaught of critical coverage about how "the alternative media and crazy conspiracy theorists are putting all our health in danger". Yet on closer examination, the mainstream's responds is as primitive and manipulative as the narratives of conspiracy theorist they critique.
While they might appear like enemies engaged in a war over the sovereignty of interpretation of reality, in actuality the mainstream media and conspiracy theorists have a complex, interdependentrelationship.Regardless of who's "truth" is "righter", both are in effect collaboratively poisoning an already highly in-transparent media and communications environment, contributing to a global narrative breakdown.
Currently billions of peoples are assaulted with overwhelming amounts of "information", "truths" and "opinions", presented by experts, politicians, oligarchs and conspiracy theorists. In such an environment, where all signals are lost in an ocean of noise, shared narratives (right/wrong, etc.) quickly collapse and large-scale developments can happen silently, unnoticed by most.
A global narrative collapse is especially dangerous in a time where there is no shortage of actual"conspiracy facts", mostly ignored in the public discourse.For examples: How the USA and EU are pumping uncounted trillions into the world economy (mostly reaching super elites, cementing totalitarian control structures) - or the accelerating global oil crash (oil is in 85% of stuff we consume) - or the bifurcation of global infrastructure (china/russia are launching their own internet and digital currencies) - or the ongoing collapse of capitalism and rebirth as the "fourth industrial rei...volution" - or the radical expansion of computational surveillance and policing (Dictators with A.I's don't care if you "have nothing to hide", they care about power) and the creation of global DNA databases.
In the shadow of the the corona virus dominating the global media cycle for month, such projects ("conspiracy facts") are accelerating and reaching maturity. Its effect will be felt for decades to come (unlike this virus). Yet instead of informing the public about such urgent matters, who does the global mainstream media choose to constantly ridicule and critique? A wide range of incoherent conspiracy theorists - mixing up everything from biowarfare, killer beams, space aliens and Jesus Christ into one crazy story.
What is at play here are political attack tactics, known at least since Machiavelli: "Gaslighting", "Fog of war" and "Flooding the zone": Providing experts, idiots, crazies and disinfo agents a megaphone, so they can pump out wast amounts of confusing and contradictory information, frequently attacking the integrity of those making counter-claims, and occasionally injecting conspiracy theories. Within such a media environment, all serious discussion about "conspiracy facts" will be inevitably confused with far-out garbage - to be disagreed by any half way thinking person. We now have a global media environment in which very large-scale developments ("conspiracy facts") can happen silently, unnoticed by most.
But hey, back to the program: Switch off your brain immediately and just PANIC! So that nobody dears to even ask critical question when conspiratorial scenarios like the post-democratic police state emerges in full force. Now smile, go wash your hands and enjoy the breakdown of the global narrative and rise of the global grid.
The findings suggest that Earth's southernmost continent was once home to temperate, swampy rainforests teeming with life. The research underscores the dramatic climate changes Earth has undergone in the past - and is currently undergoing today.
With spectacular as well as hypnotically beautiful recordings, US researchers have succeeded in showing how life spreads in a fertilized egg when activated proteins spread in a spiral wave through the egg membrane and thus give the star signal for cell division. (via)
In January, we wrote about a cybernetic micro air vehicle under development at Draper called DragonflEye. DragonflEye consists of a living, slightly modified dragonfly that carries a small backpack of electronics. The backpack interfaces directly with the dragonfly’s nervous system to control it, and uses tiny solar panels to harvest enough energy to power itself without the need for batteries.
The number of marine species threatened with global extinction has decreased from 18 per cent in 2000 to 11.4 per cent in 2019. Notable rebounds from the brink of extinction include humpback whales, which have increased from a few hundred animals to more than 40,000; and northern elephant seals, from just 20 breeding animals to more than 200,000 today. Scientists say the focus should be on rebuilding depleted wildlife populations and ecosystems, not simply on conserving what remains.
"However, that raises another less-obvious but still-implied question, and hence our high octane speculation of the day. The coupling of testing with sequencing companies suggests the possibility that the tests could include a covert DNA sampling itself, building up a large database. Indeed, perhaps the sequencing expertise was needed in a certain way, for if one suspected biowarfare were being carried out, one would want sample of patients' DNA to see what, if any, might be genetic markers for people taken ill with the virus. And that possibility suggests in turn yet another possibility. Perhaps, just perhaps, one of the objectives of the whole plandemic is to create a climate of opinion for massive testing (voluntary or otherwise), because the designers of the operation are looking for some particular "group" of "someones" not otherwise visible to the naked eye, but only detectable through genetic sequencing."