For all its comparisons to the human brain, AI still isnt much like us. Maybe thats alright. In the animal kingdom, brains come in all shapes and sizes. So, in a new machine learning approach, engineers did away with the human brain and all its beautiful complexityturning instead to the brain of a lowly worm for inspiration.

Turns out, simplicity has its benefits. The resulting neural network is efficient, transparent, and heres the kicker: Its a lifelong learner.

Whereas most machine learning algorithms cant hone their skills beyond an initial training period, the researchers say the new approach, called a liquid neural network, has a kind of built-in neuroplasticity. That is, as it goes about its worksay, in the future, maybe driving a car or directing a robotit can learn from experience and adjust its connections on the fly.

In a world thats noisy and chaotic, such adaptability is essential.

The algorithms architecture was inspired by the mere 302 neurons making up the nervous system of C. elegans, a tiny nematode (or worm).

In work published last year, the group, which includes researchers from MIT and Austrias Institute of Science and Technology, said that despite its simplicity, C. elegans is capable of surprisingly interesting and varied behavior. So, they developed equations to mathematically model the worms neurons and then built them into a neural network.

Their worm-brain algorithm was much simpler than other cutting-edge machine learning algorithms, and yet it was still able to accomplish similar tasks, like keeping a car in its lane.

Today, deep learning models with many millions of parameters are often used for learning complex tasks such as autonomous driving, Mathias Lechner, a PhD student at Austrias Institute of Science and Technology and study author, said. However, our new approach enables us to reduce the size of the networks by two orders of magnitude. Our systems only use 75,000 trainable parameters.

Now, in a new paper, the group takes their worm-inspired system further by adding a wholly new capability.

The output of a neural networkturn the steering wheel to the right, for instancedepends on a set of weighted connections between the networks neurons.

In our brains, its the same. Each brain cell is connected to many other cells. Whether or not a particular cell fires depends on the sum of the signals its receiving. Beyond some thresholdor weightthe cell fires a signal to its own network of downstream connections.

In a neural network, these weights are called parameters. As the system feeds data through the network, its parameters converge on the configuration yielding the best results.

Usually, a neural networks parameters are locked into place after training, and the algorithms put to work. But in the real world, this can mean its a bit brittleshow an algorithm something that deviates too much from its training, and itll break. Not an ideal result.

In contrast, in a liquid neural network, the parameters are allowed to continue changing over time and with experience. The AI learns on the job.

This adaptibility means the algorithm is less likely to break as the world throws new or noisy information its waylike, for example, when rain obscures an autonomous cars camera. Also, in contrast to bigger algorithms, whose inner workings are largely inscrutable, the algorithms simple architecture allows researchers to peer inside and audit its decision-making.

Neither its new ability nor its still-diminutive stature seemed to hold the AI back. The algorithm performed as well or better than other state-of-the art time-sequence algorithms in predicting next steps in a series of events.

Everyone talks about scaling up their network, said Ramin Hasani, the studys lead author. We want to scale down, to have fewer but richer nodes.

An adaptable algorithm that consumes relatively little computing power would make an ideal robot brain. Hasani believes the approach may be useful in other applications that involve real-time analysis of new data like video processing or financial analysis.

He plans to continue dialing in the approach to make it practical.

We have a provably more expressive neural network that is inspired by nature. But this is just the beginning of the process, Hasani said. The obvious question is how do you extend this? We think this kind of network could be a key element of future intelligence systems.

At a time when big players like OpenAI and Google are regularly making headlines with gargantuan machine learning algorithms, its a fascinating example of an alternative approach headed in the opposite direction.

OpenAIs GPT-3 algorithm collectively dropped jaws last year, both for its sizeat the time, a record-setting 175 billion parametersand its abilities. A recent Google algorithm topped the charts at over a trillion parameters.

Yet critics worry the drive toward ever-bigger AI is wasteful, expensive, and consolidates research in the hands of a few companies with cash to fund large-scale models. Further, these huge models are black boxes, their actions largely impenetrable. This can be especially problematic when unsupervised models are trained on the unfiltered internet. Theres no telling (or perhaps, controlling) what bad habits theyll pick up.

Increasingly, academic researchers are aiming to address some of these issues. As companies like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft push to prove the bigger-is-better hypothesis, its possible serious AI innovations in efficiency will emerge elsewherenot despite a lack of resources but because of it. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention.

Image Credit: benjamin henon / Unsplash

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New 'Liquid' AI Learns Continuously From Its Experience of the World - Singularity Hub

John Carpenter performs at Aragon Ballroom on November 9, 2017 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by ... [+] Daniel Boczarski/Redferns)

In late December, filmmaker and composer John Carpenter moseyed around his Los Angeles home, fielding calls to discuss his new music. A few days before Christmas, the Master of Horror was in good spirits. It turns out the iconic scary-sci-fi aficionado has a soft-side for holiday cheer, family time and gathering around the tree.

While anticipating a conversation with one of the greatest purveyors of the abnormal, its easy to romanticize where the chat might go. Would it be an off the rails dive into the supernatural? Surely, at the least, it must be a psychoanalytical dissection of the mirroring themes from his cult-classic films and the sociopolitical climate of the Trump Era? Maybe hed lay into the film industry for what its doing wrong, explain why the economic elite deserve to be dethroned and confirm how prescienthis foreshadowing of class warfare in America actually was?

John Carpenter at Paramount Studios, 1996. (Photo by Bob Riha Jr.)

Somehow Carpenter completely subverts those expectations, but leaves you feeling satisfied.

Despite a chaotic 2020, the 73-year-old creator of epics like Big Trouble in Little China and Escape from New York prefers to discuss the mundanities of everyday life, the weather or make small-talk about your hometown. But, hell also interject with a tidbit perfectly suiting his storied personality.

Franklin Graham is on the television right now, telling me that Im a sinner, the Halloween (1978) director announces, scoffing at the Evangelical figurehead.

While Carpenter may have strong feelings about current events, the Hollywood veteran couldnt care less about sharing them. He tends to agreein an exhausted sighwith sentiments regarding outlandish politics and religious fanaticism, but doesnt care to pontificate in detail on such matters. Its common for him to throw some rhetorical questions as a caveat, too, when broaching a controversial subject. Hell sarcastically discredit himself or charmingly ask, Now, why would we want to talk about that?

Perhaps the director prefers to avoid making outrageous headlines at this stage in his career. In fairness, no one wants to become the personification of the old man yells at cloud! meme. Or maybe, at this stage, he just doesnt give a crap.

Daniel Davies, John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter

One thing Carpenter does make clear, is that hes grateful to be breathing and creating. And while the moviemaker turned touring musician doesnt know if or when hell return to the road, hes excited to share his bands newest album, Lost Themes III: Alive After Death, out February 5 via Sacred Bones Records. The synth-heavy group consists of Carpenter, his son, Cody, and godson, British multi-instrumentalist Daniel Davies. Davies father, Dave Davies, played guitar and sang in The Kinks.

Below, Carpenter discusses Lost Themes III, the delayed release of Halloween Kills and his unfamiliarity with The Mandalorian. And in his own ambivalent way, The Horror Master addresses conspiracy theorists, the concepts of Simluation Theory, the Multiverse, the Technological Singularity, and for good measure, UFOs and aliens.

Fans and critics have connected the themes from your films like They Live and The Thingto the current state of the world. I think one angle that hasnt been addressed is how there are all these anti-science right wing people who claim theyre the antithesis of the sheep. They believe they suddenly have their own all-seeing sunglasses.

But, instead of believing in Big Brother or the Powers That Be, many are just jumping on a similar bandwagon of blind-faith conspiracy. Do you see that irony? A few years ago you knocked down conspiracy theories about They Live and Judaism, in the time since conspiracy theories have become totally mainstream.

I do. Some of these conspiracies its weird. These conspiracies about Jewish people, have been around, since, forever. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a Russian hoax! Now its being regurgitated by these fools. God, really? I dont understand, man. The anti-science, the anti-vaxxers, I dont get it! Thank God Im old.

If I may make one more nod to They Live, I was recently driving on a highway between Tennessee and North Carolina and I saw a big billboard that basically said that Jesus would save us from the pandemic. To me, that seemed like the quintessential OBEY sign.

[laughs] Of course it is!

Ignore the doctors, ignore the science! Jesus has this under control!

I know, I know. That stuff never goes away.

Film director and composer John Carpenter (C) performs with scenes from the movie "They Live" in ... [+] support of his album "Anthology." 2017, Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Gabe Ginsberg/Getty Images)

Lets talk about music. Lost Themes III: Alive After Death isnt a film score, but youve got the word themes in the title there. Do you always see a cinema-esque quality to your music?

This is what I do. I make this kind of music, Im gonna put it on you. You have to come up with the story, but I will provide the soundtrack.

There must be some difference between going in to record a super synthy record like this as opposed to scoring a film. Whats the former like?

Its all instinct and improvisation. Nothing exists when we start. Were creating out of whole cloth. Whats the sound? Sometimes you take a long time just getting the sound right. Sometimes it comes quickly. Its all different. If were doing a soundtrack, we have a visual image to guide us and thats easier. That goes quickly.

Did you record the album in 2020? Was it born during the pandemic?

It was born right as we were finishing the [2018] tour. We had a couple of tunes that were rattling around, then it began to grow a little. It took a while. It wasn't like we have to do this. And we did the score for the first Halloween (2018) remake, that came in the middle. Actually, the score to the second, Halloween Kills (2021), came right at the end. So we did two scores while we were doing this album.

The release date of Halloween Kills is now pushed back to October of this year, as opposed to being released early on a streaming platform. Have you heard that Warner Bros. decided to place their 2021 films with HBO Max? Are you familiar with the blowback from some directors? What are your thoughts on the whole situation?

In general, not real specifically. This is what worries me, that this is the future here. These theaters are closing! Thats really bad. Ay! It seems like this business is changing once again.

Are you happy theyre holding Halloween Kills until people can see it in theaters? [Carpenter scored the film and is credited as original creator]

I dont know. They have to make business decisions. But theres nothing to say thats gonna last. Theres nothing to say that everybody wont be putting their slates of films on television. But what do I know? I worry about it. Theaters are important to the movie experience. Theyre communal.

I know youre into video games and basketball, but have you watched anything good lately?

I just saw the Herman Mankiewicz movie with David Fincher, Mank. Its good! Its good. Its not great. But, its good! I like David Fincher a lot.

Are you into the Star Wars world at all?

No, not really.

Can I spoil something for you? [Warning: Mandalorian spoilers ahead]

Hell, I hope you do.

They just finished the second season of The Mandalorian on Disney+, its meant to take place after the original Star Wars trilogy. In the final episode, they brought back your buddy Mark Hamill, who appeared in a few of your productions, like Village of the Damned and Body Bags.

At the conclusion of The Mandalorian, Hamill appeared as a young Luke Skywalker. They did some sort of deep fake CGI thingMark Hamill was on set, but hes portrayed just as he looked in 1977. What do you think about using technology to deage or bring people back from the dead?

Most of the time it doesnt look real. Most of the time you can tell. You can tell because you know the person doesnt quite look like that or is no longer with us. But theyre just servicing the story. So, I dont know. I have nothing against it nor do I think its the greatest. Im not gonna complain about a thing. Im a happy guy.

Mark Hamill and John Carpenter at the 22nd Annual Saturn Awards for Science Fiction excellence. ... [+] Century City, CA, 1996.

I was wondering what implications it has for the business side of film and likeness. In 50 years, when someone decides to cast a young De Niro or Pacino, whats the legality of that?

I dont know. A person has the right to their own image, I think! You would have to get permission and all that s***, but I dont know! What the hell? [laughs]

Lets make a turn here. Are you familiar with Simulation Theory?

No, whats that?

Its the concept that we could all be living in a simulation. The idea is that the Earth could just be a fabrication in someones video game in another universe...

Im not quite sure if I grasp it yet Ive heard of the timelines business before in physics. Its an explanation for a lot of things that they dont understand. But, Simulation, they call it?

Alternate timelines are connected to Multiverse Theory, right? Do you think theres any possibility that could be real?

I dont know. Theres no evidence for it. But, I guess its possible!

Is the Technological Singularity near?

Have you heard of the concept of The Technological Singularity?

Whats this Singularity business?

Futurists embrace the idea that man and computer will form and be one sentient being. With exponential technological growth, The Singularity could help you live forever and have access to the internet in your brain. That type of thing...

It sounds like bulls***, but okay.

If given the chance, would you live forever as half man and half robot?

Hell yes! Are you kidding, of course? Sure!

1978: Carpenter on 'Halloween' set. (Compass International Pictures/Sunset Boulevard)

Youve mentioned that you believe Contagion is a great film. Do you think that any director could make a good film based on COVID-19 or the year 2020?

That depends on the story. If youre talking about, Okay, here we are in a civilization and we get a virus, contagion, and we get a pandemic going.

Okay, well, were living it! So, what else is there to the story?

Plus, its been done. So, how does that work?

Many sci-fi and horror fans watch films as a momentary escape from reality. Ive noticed that now, outside of film, everyone seems to be living within their own version of the real world. You could go door to door, and people might believe a completely different list of truths about what is going on in the world. Do you think its always been like this or are things getting way trippier?

Its a crazy time, man! I dont know. What scares me is maybe this just revealed whats going on and its always been like that. I mean, I always knew there was racism, I didnt think that ended. I grew up in the Jim Crow south. I know how deeply that belief is ingrained in people. But some of this nutball stuff, its unbelievable.

But, there are people who believe theres a satellite orbiting the Earth and it controls our thoughts. People believe crazy crap! They always have. Theres always been stuff that, if you do some critical thinking, you realize that its horse s***.

Have you found that as a director of science fiction and horror films that people expect you to believe in absurd stuff? Do you ever have to explain that youre a filmmaker and you dont believe that people like Starman exist?

Well, I have to differentiate. I know what you mean. Look, the supernatural exists in the movies but not in real life. Look at it that way. In the world of directing and telling stories, thats where all the ghosts and goblins are. But not in real life.

Have you kept up with all the new UFO footage and stories being reported by places like The New York Times? Many legitimate sources are beginning to give credibility to the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

Well, now did you see the footage that they released? Wow! I dont know what that is! I have no idea what that is! You can usually tell a fake. But that doesnt look like a fake to me.

Would you like to live in a world where alien life could exist?

I dont know. I suppose. I dont want to live in a world where the aliens that I depicted in The Thing are real. I dont like that idea. Thats bad. That means the end.

Whats in store for John Carpenter when the world restabilizes?

Ill go back on the road again when its safe, maybe, or maybe not. At my age, you just take it one day at a time. If I wake up, boy, Im doing great.

Thats a great outlook to have.

I have no choice!

Follow me on Twitter at@DerekUTG.

Originally posted here:

John Carpenter Ponders It All: Conspiracies, Simulation Theory, The Singularity, UFOs And Aliens - Forbes

On their debut album Homecoming, the Keith Robinson Band aimed to create a record that was true to Southern Arizonabut avoided sounding local. In many ways they succeeded. While never straying far from a folk/rock template, much of the albums singularity can be attributed to frontman Keith Robinsons lyrics jumping between genre conventions and more abstract themesand hell, even a mellotron made its way in between the acoustic guitars and desert imagery.

The album opens with Lost In Space, a rock song much in the borderlands vein, with fuzzy guitars and driving drums. However, it avoids sounding too familiar thanks to Robinsons philosophical background: studying Nietzsche and Heidegger at Fuller Seminary.

In the opener, Robinson sings about Judas and asks the Lord to show him the way, reflecting a kind of existential vertigo in the Sonoran sun. The following track, Psalm 151, shifts styles in favor of a sparse acoustic intro, slowly progressing as instruments join in. Its a delicate and gorgeous setting for Robinson to sing over: My malaise has gotten out of hand... Its a compromised promised land full of all these gospel songs.

We tried to balance the record for listeners by setting up dynamics and varying the instrumentation for different types of songs, Robinson said. At the same time we sprinkled some musical elements throughout the record to try to give it a unified feel rather than just a haphazard collection of songs; the picky stuff in Psalm 151 is echoed in the picking pattern in the final song, Homecoming, for instance. And the fuzz guitar in Lost in Space gets a reprise later in the album in Ocean Walker.

These varied sounds are helped with nearly every performer serving as a multi-instrumentalist: Robinson plays guitar, sings and performs some additional percussion; Evan Wagner plays bass and electric guitar plus percussion; Steven Tracy plays piano, organ and mellotron; and Dani Ponce sticks to the drumkit, though his energy serves multiple roles.

Released in the final days of 2020, the pandemic delayed and complicated Homecomings recording sessions. This isolation and difficulty is present in multiple tracks, but Robinson wrote the majority of the songs before COVID was in our collective vocabulary. This is reflected in the album cover, balancing saguaros on one side and tombstones on the other, and in lyrics like I saw an angel in the desert sun / A crystal hourglass empties fast / I used to walk on the forest floor / Present always becomes the past.

In March 2020, the band had a batch of songs ready to record, but everything was put on delay. While waiting, Robinson wrote two tracks inspired by the pandemic, which made their way into the recording sessions at St. Cecilia Studios in August, with Tracy as engineer.

It would have been tone-deaf, we thought, to record an album during such global upheaval without alluding to the pandemic at all, Robinson said. Everyone was wary of COVID, so the August sessions were limited to a tight little groupSteven, myself, bassist Evan Wagner, and drummer Dani Ponce. No girlfriends, friends, or outsiders allowed. We recorded the whole album in just three daysgranted, three long dayswith another day-and-a-half devoted to mixing and last-second adjustments.

Robinson credits these quick and successful sessions to the fact the band had extra rehearsal time due to COVID delaysthough this time both helped and hindered.

In April I was in a bad way. I had awful bouts of insomnia, I wasnt eating, I was cut off from almost all human interaction, I never knew what day of the week it was, and in my head it generally felt like the world was ending, Robinson said. That experience bled into the songs. The record, in other words, is not making any grand, definitive pronouncements about whether life is worth living or whether God exists. Those questions are up for grabs. The lyrics are more simply just an expression of how I was feeling at the time. Death seemed imminent, all around me, so I wrote material reflecting what that felt like.

Though themes of loss permeate the album, the warm instrumentals and broader philosophical linessuch as when Robinson echoes Heraclitus adage that you cant step in the same river twicecombine for an album that is true to Southern Arizona, and definitely true to the world beyond that.

The record certainly contains some bleak moments, Robinson said. But my hope is that the gloom contributes to the beauty rather than detracting from it.

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Keith Robinson Band digs beneath roots music on Homecoming - Tucson Local Media

Stardock Entertainment revealed this past week that Ashes Of The Singularity: Escalation will be getting a major update. It's been a long minute since we've heard anything about this game as it has been riding on only minor updates here and there. But nothing major has come down the pipeline in a while until this past week when the developers revealed that Version 3.0 is on the way. According to the announcement, this update is going to be a near-complete overhaul of the game's balance as they will leave very little of it as it once was. These changes will include units, buildings, orbital abilities, and more. It's not going to break the game (fingers crossed) but it will definitely change the way you see things and play it. We have more info on the update below as the update will roll out sometime in the month of February.

"Game balance is constantly a work in progress," said Brian Clair, the VP of Publishing for Stardock who worked extensively on the update. "This version is huge our major focus was to completely overhaul the game balance and optimize performance. GPUs and CPUs are constantly evolving. We wanted to make sure that the benchmark evolved with it. We removed redundant units and armies, revised to show more unit types, and updated camera views and positions for an overall better look."

Both game factions have had their units and buildings carefully balanced against each other. Rather than just adjusting hit points and unit cost, v3.0 focuses on giving each unit a unique role to play. The AI has also been updated significantly, which should provide players with new and exciting challenges when playing against a computer opponent. v3.0 brings a new benchmark, performance optimizations, and major improvements to visual effects. New maps, campaign adjustments, and much more are also included in the massive update.

Gavin is the current Games Editor for Bleeding Cool. He has been a lifelong geek who can chat with you about comics, television, video games, and even pro wrestling. He can also teach you how to play Star Trek chess, be your Mercy on Overwatch, recommend random cool music, and goes rogue in D&D. He also enjoys hundreds of other geeky things that can't be covered in a single paragraph. Follow @TheGavinSheehan on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Vero, for random pictures and musings.

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Epic Games Reveals The Mandalorian Mandos Bounty Mode for Fortnite

It appears that Mandalores way has taken over theFortniteUniverse.In a recent press release, Epic Games announced a new limited time mode inspired byThe Mandalorian. For a week starting today, Mandos Bounty will allow the players tocompete with and out-hunt all their opponents. Things get interesting when a player becomes the lead, because thats when theFortnite version ofDin Djarinstarts the top player hunt. Should a player survive all his opponents including Mando and win the Victory Royale, he or she will receive a specially-forged Beskar Umbrella bearingthe signet of a clan of two.

Like in the TV series, players have to eliminate their Bounty Puck target tocollect galactic credits.The first one to reach the credit goal while keeping his or her three lives wins the match. And to immerse everyone even more into theStar Warsatmosphere, fans canvisit Kits new cantina on the Island, located in the desert. Epic Games has also released a funny Mandos Bounty trailer. You can see Peely gettingencased in carbonite after a close encounter with Mando.

Take a look at the video in the player here below.

Star Warsfans have been pleased since they heard that the Mandalorians skin had been added to the game starting with the fifth season of ForniteChapter 2. Of course,Din Djarin made his debut flanked by the ever-presentBaby Yoda, a.k.a. Grogu. InForniteChapter 2 Season 5, the story follows the Zero Point exposition, the extremely dense singularity in the game. Agent Jones has gathered some of the best hunters across all universes to prevent people from escaping the loop.

You can playForniteon PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. The new Mandos BountyLTM is available from Feb. 2 to Feb. 9 at 9 a.m. ET.

Are you going to playMandos Bounty onFortnite? Let us know in the comments section below.

Recommended Reading:The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian (Season One)

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Epic Games Reveals The Mandalorian Mandos Bounty Mode for Fortnite - Superherohype.com

In recent years, satellites have become smaller, cheaper, and easier to make with commercial off-the-shelf parts. Some even weigh as little as one gram. This means more people can afford to send them into orbit. Now, satellite operators have started launching mega-constellationsgroups of hundreds or even thousands of small satellites working togetherinto orbit around Earth.

Instead of one large satellite, groups of small satellites can provide coverage of the entire planet at once. Civil, military, and private operators are increasingly using constellations to create global and continuous coverage of the Earth. Constellations can provide a variety of functions, including climate monitoring, disaster management, or digital connectivity, like satellite broadband.

But to provide coverage of the entire planet with small satellites requires a lot of them. On top of this, they have to orbit close to Earths surface to reduce interruption of coverage and communication delays. This means they take up an already busy area of space called low Earth orbit, the space 100 to 2,000km above the Earths surface.

There are many issues associated with introducing this many satellites into orbit, from the dangers of space junk to obstructing our view of the night sky. But the shift toward mega-constellations is also a challenge for global space governance.

There are almost 3,000 active satellites in orbit around Earth today, and this is set to skyrocket in the coming years. The European Commission, for example, recently announced plans to launch thousands of satellites into orbit around Earth, adding to a growing list of planned mega-constellation launches.

As companies and governments around the world continue to pursue mega-constellations, it is critical that the governance framework is able to support the rise in activity. There are a number of important problems that need to be considered.

Satellites are regulated at the national level and through licensing, guided by the principles of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Though the terms constellation or mega-constellation are not found in the treaty, they are considered space objects, like all other satellites.

As procedures and regulations vary from country to country, the challenge is how to govern mega-constellations without creating legal fragmentation. It is imperative that the topic is discussed at the international level.

Yet currently, there is no legally binding definition for a satellite constellation, nor for the newer term mega-constellation. Exactly how many satellites make up a mega-constellation is unknown, and each country could consider the term to mean something different. Clarity at the international level could pave the way for creating guidelines specifically for mega-constellations, which could aid the safe and sustainable use of low Earth orbit.

Most satellites in low Earth orbit are operating between 600 and 800km above sea level. This is considered a congested area, as there are lots of satellites there already. Small satellites have shorter lifespans than the larger satellites, which typically orbit above low Earth orbit.

However, it can still take up to about 150 years for satellites to be removed, by re-entering the atmosphere and burning up, if they are about 750km above sea level. Some are removed purposefully, through controlled re-entry, and others are designed to fall in an uncontrolled way. Satellite and mega-constellation operators must consider ways of reducing the debris caused by these satellites above and beyond the usual procedure, in order to maintain a sustainable use of low Earth orbit.

Given the amount of future mega-constellations currently planned, the space around Earth termed low Earth orbit could easily become a limited resource.

This is not only true when it comes to physical space, but also radio use. To communicate, satellites use the radio spectrum. With the increase in mega-constellations, there is a danger of operators warehousing radio frequencies, stockpiling them before they actually need them.

To prevent this, a United Nations specialized agency for satellite radio spectrum use has recently updated its regulatory framework, dealing with the issue separately from other space regulation. Mega-constellations will be put on a flexible timeline, only being granted use of the frequencies they need at the time.

If low Earth orbit becomes overcrowded with satellite and mega-constellations, avoiding collisions will become more difficult. In September 2019, the European Space Agency had to fire the boosters on one of its satellites to get it out of the way of another satellite, otherwise the two wouldve collided.

As the orbit becomes more congested, there may be need for more collision avoidance maneuvers and better communication between satellite operators.

There are national endeavors, predominately in the United States, for satellite tracking and collision avoidance maneuvering. A system alerts satellite operators to potential collision paths and allows for course corrections where possible.

Hopefully, mega-constellations will be discussed by member states at the UN as soon as they are able to do so. Though work in the committee can be slow and highly political, international guidelines along with national licensing procedures need to add considerations for mega-constellations.

The benefits of constellations and mega-constellations in low Earth orbit for socio-economic and environmental purposes are great. Because of this, it looks likely that the numbers of constellations will increase in the near future. To make sure we avoid problems arising, the rules and definitions surrounding mega-constellations should be made clear, on an international scale.

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

Image Credit: Starlink Mission/Wikimedia Commons

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Thousands More Satellites Will Soon Orbit EarthWe Need Better Rules to Prevent Space Crashes - Singularity Hub

'Hitman 3' screenshots by author

I found Hitman 3 to be an uneven experience, but I cannot lie to you: theres one level thats got me excited enough to dive back into it over and over again. Club Hlle is a dance club thats tucked into the forest outside Berlin in the remains of a nuclear facility, and its an aberration of a map. But its this singularity, this weirdness among its cohort, that makes it something worth traveling back to over and over again.

Berlin just doesnt work like any other Hitman level. The first time you play it, youre not given targets that glow red through when you hit your investigative vision button. Instead, you have to simply wander through the level waiting to see if another assassin will be foolish enough to use their radio and give away their position. Thats because Berlin is a cat-and-mouse game. Youre hunting the people who have been sent to hunt you, and youre locked in this little cage where you can all ping-pong off each other until youve completed your mission of assassinating five of a possible ten opponents in the club and its surrounding facilities.

This works in the campaign. I found it exciting and thrilling, but like so many things in Hitman, this assassination mission takes on a whole new register when you revisit the location and start working on its challenges and different story missions that show off the whole level to you (something we talked about extensively in this episode of Waypoint Radio).

Er, uh, except that Berlin doesnt have any story missions. It does not have a mode of directing you around the level. You are entirely left to your own devices to discover the different ways of hunting down your enemies, and thats balanced by now being able to access their red highlights when youre using your Hitman Vision (I honestly have no idea what this ability is called, and I will never learn).

You still have challenges, though, and they give you strong hints about what you need to do in order to trigger some pseudo-story missions. A challenge to electrocute two assassins by using an EDM light show that has been overloaded with power gives you a sense that you need to be around the light show, but it doesnt give you any direct markers about what you need to accomplish, and I spent 30 minutes or more fumbling around a big, weird lighting setup to figure out what I had to sabotage and then, later, how I had to manipulate the music as a DJ to setup a perfectly...electrifying...crime.

There are more of these little situations. You can deliver food to a biker gang, and you can poison the fan system of a grow op. Theres a sword made of salvaged materials, and you can find that bad boy and start slinging it around. You can serve juice.

While all of these things are signaled in the challenges, how they are accomplished is all up for your personal discovery, and to me this makes Berlin a keystone map in the entire World of Assassination Trilogy precisely because it trusts that youve done all this enough that you can recognize opportunities without being directed to them. Watching a food delivery guy mill around talking on a cell phone is Hitmans visual rhetoric for something wild is possible here, and you need to see where it leads you. This is the freedom that I love so much about the Hitman games across the board. If you see something happening, you can probably intervene in it, and that is most often going to open up newer and weirder pathways of action or movement that will allow you to accomplish your goals in ways you might not have thought about.

And, you know, maybe thats not all that special across the trilogy. There have been plenty of moments of improvisation and opportunity-exploitation across these three games. But in a lot of ways, I feel like the Berlin levels hands-off approach and large number of targets is the apex of what Hitman is doing, and it would have made so much more sense as a big finale than the deeply disappointing train level that actually caps off the game. This trilogy ends in what is essentially a plodding score challenge, and it would have been so much more fulfilling to be given this strange social space, with its Florida Man, drug dealer, security guards, drug-dealing biker bros, and juice servers, and told to accomplish something complex and unguided. It would have felt like Agent 47 was really doing the damn thing.

That didnt happen, though, so instead we have this excellent little playground thats smack in the middle of the game. And I am so glad for it, because it really is a highlight for me, and I keep diving back in to see what other strange playthroughs I can accomplish after unlocking secret entrances and new starting points. I havent reached it yet, but I am eager to attempt the Terminator challenge in which Agent 47 takes on the whole level in a biker costume with a shotgun, warping two fictional worlds into each other with clothes and weapons.

Im sure that well see Agent 47 again sometime in the future, and Im hopeful for more Berlins. More small operations with complicated tasks, please, and fewer big missions with huge stakes.

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The Astonishing Berlin Level in 'Hitman 3' Is a Landmark in the Series - VICE

It is the pain and suffering that over shadows almost all human endeavours, and keeps the pot boiling for the endless stretch of agonies for mankind. The galleries of art, carvings on stones, and various other manifestations of human feelings and emotions paint the elegy of human suffering. Pleasure is an ephemeral break that fails to last long. Ghulam Rasool Josh, one of the remarkable modern poets of Kashmir, weaves his poetry around this phenomenon. Pain and grief constitute the major motifs of his poetics. He sings pain! He doesnt celebrate it though. He has a strong aspirational tendency that prevents him from acceding this pain as something divine and predetermined. Nevertheless, procrastination prevails his poetic discourse. He makes a bold confession to this cunctation:

Labi ander taam gashi zechun manz ti fehlay yoos

Shahre manz aaes baang dapan me oos gomut cheer.

In the interiors of walls I spread through rays of light

Adhan was raised in the city, and I was late!

Surprisingly when the stalwarts of Kashmiri poetry and his contemporaries explored the theories of aestheticism and pleasure in poetry, Josh maintains his singularity. When Prof. Rahman Rahi, an icon of Kashmiri poetry and mentor of Josh, could not escape the luring attractions of life and wrote:

Su golaab roie deuthum bay az golaab chavaan

Me chi ven misaalene manz rambe ven khayaal ravaan

Josh remained unmoved.

Yi chu Josh zindagi huend jate josh vuchni Aamut

Nate harde kale kansta tsaraan bahar aasiya

Josh has come to discern the glitter of life

could there be someone searching Spring in Autumn

Thus the themes of isolation and grief are very dominate in his poetics. They may not be radically new or exclusively his own, nevertheless his treatment and perennial association with these themes make him an out-standing poet of grief.

Brought up in the second half of the 20th century when the fabric of family and society was thinning away and individuality overtook all earlier corporate and social dimensions of society the poet laments the loss of human feelings:

Bihith majlisi ander kanh lari ne kaansay

Akis akh kun tavy kathe kari ne kaansay

Together, yet all apart from each other

None talks to each other now

Josh is an anti-romantic and an iconoclast who shatters all hypocrisy, and illusion by the rod of truth:

Faaqae het lukh intizaaras manz stagus kun vuchan

Ishtihaaras peth lekhith oosukh azab te dilberi

Starved souls waitingly looking at the Podium

The Poster had been printed on; penance and romance.

He propounds a realism that is unromantic and unsentimental and thus devoid of any great outburst of emotions and sentiments. As Emerson sets off his aims in poetry:

I will not read a pretty tale

To pretty people in a nice saloon

Borrowed from their expectation

But I will sing aloud and free

From the heart of the world

Josh sets to unpack the mysteries of the heart of the world. He unravels his loneliness that seems enveloping him day in and day out. In his poem Saffar Saffar Tanha he espouses:

Siriyes kariha kancha thour

Zameen ti nachiha ruch khand lot

Be ti dev labeha

Sani khamooshi manz

Ani gati

Pan ni tanhayee hund voont.

May someone shield the sun

May the earth slow her rotation

So I may find

In the deep silence

And utter dark

The depth of my loneliness

The depth is unfathomable and a mere material and physical outreach cant make the poet discover it. This loneliness is the common denominator of all mankind. An individual is caught in a fix in the modern age. As Firaq Gorakhpori puts it as:

Is door mai zindagi basher ki

Beemaar ki raat hogaye hai

The life of an individual in this age

Has become the night of a sick

Bade chi dapaan aasaar chi tith ven taraqee karo

Shure chi lamaan hagrus te dapaan hay rail vuchiv

Elders say that that signs of development there are

Street boys pull the cart and call it a rail!

The poet personifies the pain and agony outside and struggles against it. This struggle is painstaking and at times suffocating, however, the poet is not disappointed by such things. He says:

Chu ketihaan hoosh ravan yaam deshaan kainatek rung

Magar as Josh hoshus thaph kerith zagaan chu shaitaanan

Many lose consciousness at the sight of facets of the Universe

But Josh is now cautiously ambushing the Satans!

The socio-political injustices that have added miseries and woes of the masses disturb the poet. To deconstruct the power structure and outdo the authoritative establishments, the poet makes some daring choices. The poet, nevertheless, maintains his cool and saves himself from becoming a political sloganeer. He didnt let the poetry become subservient to physical and material needs. He didnt look down upon these needs though. He espouses the tyrant structures be pulled down with inteligence and inner power that every human being possess within. The poet laments all those structures that discourage the aspirational tendencies of mankind. He writes:

Sawala kor jawaba diyut te pake brounh

Vuniyuk taamuth dalaan chu ne ame neber kanh

Here is a question, there is an answer, and thus we move

Till now this is the limit of all the human movement

The poet is not, however, a Niobe figure. Niobe , as per greek mythology, lost all her sons to Leto. The poet, on the contrary, rises phoenix-like. Through out his ouvere he never succumbs, and surrender is never an option in the scheme of things he devises. He doesnt make his reader fall in a bottomless gorge. He finds him already fallen. He has his own approach to make him out and that is not self destruction or self annihilation. That is the Self Realisation! However, the journey to the Self Realisation is not an easy go. It needs a strong, unflinching and unwavering character that shall overcome all the miseries and challenges on this path. The development of such a character is evolutionary. The poet believes that there is a metaphysical and spiritual force that guides one in this voyage of self. This voyage demands Sacrifice. Sacrifice is an antithesis to Self Anhilation.

Yi chi aze kathe mashemech yi chu shooq raaase gomut

Nate wante cha yi mumkin Mansoor khasi ne daarus.

Its a forgotten tale and the Love has been eroded

Otherwise, is it possible that Mansoor kisses not the gallows

However, the poet doesnt ignore the physical dimension of being in this supernatural foray. He achieves the self realisation through this physical and material orbit.

Banan tufaan bazay shooq miyounoe

magar chapi tati panun zuu jaan dede

My longing turns at times into a storm

It needs my immolation though.

The poet undoes all these things with a cool mind. In this journey his register is marked with soberness and there is no sense of urgency unlike most of the reformists and revolutionaries. This journey is one of metaphysical and transcendental nature, thus free from any hubbub and bedlam.

This Realisation leads to Reconstruction. The Self-effulgent nature of human soul shall illuminate the darkness that prevents the soul to reach its perfection. This stage is one of utter celebration and utter joy. The Realisation does not land you into some Utopean landscape. It makes you to live and live with your physical self. However, an immense reservoir of spiritual strength makes you to undo all the rough edges. Josh writes in poemThor:

Zameen nachaan nachaan

Gov langi piyounta akh

Akhtabus thor

Te

Banev

Shehjar me kiyut

The Earth while on rotation

A mere twig became

A shield to the Sun

And

A shade for me.

Mohammad Shafi Rather is Lecturer in English, Govt Higher Secondary School Pakherpora.

Read the original:

GR Josh: Reading the grief - Greater Kashmir

Planet Earth Report provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.

Astronomer Avi Loeb Says Aliens Have Visited, and Hes Not Kidding In conversation, the Harvard University astrophysicist explains his shocking hypothesisand calls out what he sees as a crisis in science, reports Lee Billings for Scientific American.

How Universes Might Bubble Up and Collide What lies beyond all we can see? The question may seem unanswerable. Nevertheless, some cosmologists have a response: Our universe is a swelling bubble. Outside it, more bubble universes exist, all immersed in an eternally expanding and energized seathe multiverse, reports Charlie Wood for Nautil.us.

New Liquid AI Learns Continuously From Its Experience of the World, reports Singularity Hub. For all its comparisons to the human brain, AI still isnt much like us. Maybe thats alright. In the animal kingdom, brains come in all shapes and sizes. So, in a new machine learning approach, engineers did away with the human brain and all its beautiful complexityturning instead to the brain of a lowly worm for inspiration.

A new frontier is opening in the search for extraterrestrial life, reports astrophysicist Adam Frank for The Washington Post. The reason we havent found life elsewhere in the universe is simple: We havent really looked until now. Something remarkable is happening in the science of life and intelligence beyond Earth. The age of technosignatures is dawning.

The missing link that triggered the ice ages -Melting icebergs from Antarctica are the key, according to a new study, reports Science Norway. Researchers have suspected that the Southern Ocean and Antarctica were crucial to global climate, but this has not been documented in the geological data until now, according to Margit Hildegard Simon, a researcher at Norce, the Norwegian Research Centre.

Building a Higgs Factory the highest priority collider after the LHC, reports CERN. Despite this great success, the Higgs boson is connected to many of the most troublesome aspects of the Standard Model. It is for this reason that the recently concluded update of the European strategy for particle physics advocated an electronpositron Higgs factory as the highest priority collider after the LHC, to allow detailed study of this novel and unique particle.

Did a Supermassive Black Hole Influence the Evolution of Life on Earth? asks Harvards Avi Loeb for Scientific American The idea isnt as crazy as it might sounds. Traditionally, the Sun was thought to be the only astronomical source of light that affected life on Earth. But it is also possible that the black hole, SgrA* played an important role in shaping the history of terrestrial life.

The Enduring Mystery of Earths Water New clues have emerged about exactly where your last drink came from, reports astrophysicist Caleb Scharf for Scientific American.

How to redesign COVID vaccines so they protect against variantsLineages that can evade immunity are spurring vaccine makers to explore ways to redesign their shots, reports Nature.

Why Anthropology MattersIts the antidote to nativism; the enemy of hate; a vaccine of understanding, tolerance and compassion tha

Orca Outcasts Is Now Dominating an Entire SeaKiller whales that feast on seals and hunt in small packs are thriving while their widely beloved siblings are dying out, reports Katherine Gammon for The Atlantic.

No Trees Harmed: MIT Aims to One Day Grow Your Kitchen Table in a Lab,reports Singularity Hub.MIT researchers will soon publish a paper describing a proof-of-concept for lab-grown plant tissues, like wood and fiber. The research is early, but its a big vision. The idea is to grow instead of build some products made of biomaterials.

Parisians want to recover a legendary river now buried under concreteThe Bivre flowed through Victor Hugos Paris. Conservation efforts may bring the historic river back, reports National Geographic.

The Complete Morons Guide to GameStops Stock Roller Coaster, reports Kyle Orland for Ars Technica. The WallStreetBets subreddit (WSB) describes itself as like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal, and thats not a bad description. WSB is a generally disorganized mess of posters throwing up memes and slang that can be hard to parse for an outsider. At the center of it, though, are members who analyze the market for opportunities so they can try to rally the subs millions of subscribers (2.9 million as of this writing) to a potential value play.

The Galaxy Report brings you exclusive, twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.

Yes, view and sign me up for my free subscription.

Link:

Planet Earth Report --"ET Visitation Hypothesis Creates a Crisis in Science to Age of 'Technosignatures' is Dawning" - The Daily Galaxy...

I am often asked the question as to what technical game-changing innovations are around the corner in the marine industry, be that in the superyacht, defence or commercial marine sectors. These questions tend to arise at the start of new projects, when the foundations of design intent are being laid, and how engineering will serve to deliver them.

We operate in a mature industry, where significant innovations have happened over a long period of time. Many have in fact come, gone and come back again. Some many times over, and with every cycle, are often even held up as new innovations. It would be slightly arrogant to suppose that further significant advancements are not there to be innovated; however, the reality is that innovation is (in the main) incremental and progressive in nature.

I would suggest that asking such a question is to only see part of the answer. We live in a period where change is accelerating, both in a technical and social context. I for one enjoy, in my world of engineering, this pace of change; I enjoy that capitalism drives the search for a competitive edge, which in turn drives the advancement of knowledge and progress. There is a theory called the Technology Singularity, which suggests that eventually the pace of change will be so advanced that it will happen instantaneously.

Whether or not you believe in that being possible, we all experience that change (driven by innovation) finds its way to market at an increasingly faster rate. Consumer products that would typically have had several product generations on the same fundamental platform are now achieving market penetration at an accelerated rate, in turn driving a faster market response and a rapid need for the next generation product.

However, there is a problem with comparing superyachts with the generalities of consumer products. We are building artisanal products (on a grand scale perhaps), mostly all unique prototypes, in a very niche market, with multiyear delivery timescales. Our throughput is tiny by comparison. The result of this is that progress will continue to be incremental. We should embrace that, because it will drive investment in a long-term view.

But is our industry responding to change in the right way? We seem to be selling pretty much the same product we were 10-plus years ago. Many are significantly better, in design, engineering, materials and quality terms, but in essence its the same. Are we limited by the incremental pace of innovation in our industry?

The seemingly frustrating technological limitations of the present should force us to reflect on our actual needs, and whether our perceived needs are based on real facts or ingrained paradigms.

The seemingly frustrating technological limitations of the present should force us to reflect on our actual needs, and whether our perceived needs are based on real facts or ingrained paradigms. Change the question and perhaps we can answer it well with the technology we have today, and better serve the real needs of our customers, while advancing science and engineering and driving progress.

To give this some context, lets look at some ingrained paradigms. Yachts have developed over many centuries; today, we have some broad labels we apply, principally motoryacht and sailing yacht. Our industry has certain narratives around each type of vessel; the customers who might buy them and what they might enjoy about them. Alongside this, we point to certain specifics and hold them up as the future, such as hydrogen and other alternative fuels for example.

Imagine now a world with no ingrained paradigms. A yacht is a yacht, if you want carbon neutral propulsion, then that technology exists in the wind. Go apply it. Dont misread me, I am not promoting sailing yachts (although that is a passion), I am promoting adjusting our perspective. Perhaps the next game-changer lies not in what answer we are going to apply to our existing question; the game-changer may lie in looking at the whole question from a different perspective.

The challenge here is making it compelling in the market, because it is unlikely to sit well with the majority who wear the spectacles of existing beliefs and perceptions. Taking this example, why cant we make sail a compelling proposition to those who see a focus on zero emissions? The answer is not to sell them a sailing yacht. Im not sure what the answer is, but it will lie in act of innovating.

Of course, this is a fairly fluffy cloud example. In the real world our clients do have ingrained paradigms. They know what they want (largely) and while wanting to be unique they dont want to be the wildcard. But it serves to highlight that not all innovation lies in new answers. It equally lies in new questions as well.

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Design - Innovation and changing perspectives - Superyacht News - The Superyacht Report

Ctrl IQ, Inc. is officially unveiling its first full technology stack that merges the key capabilities of enterprises, hyper-scale, cloud, and high-performance computing (HPC).

Founded to meet the growing global demand for securing and orchestrating computational-intensive workflows, Ctrl IQs multi-cloud, multi-site, and performance-focused orchestration solution opens access to artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics, and scientific workflows everywhere, according to the vendor.

Machine learning, artificial intelligence, scientific computing and large-scale data analytics common in research and HPC are becoming a requirement in enterprise, said Gregory Kurtzer, founder and chief executive officer at Ctrl IQ, Inc. Ctrl IQ was founded to integrate key capabilities in enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud and HPC technologies necessary for performance-intensive workflows. Were thrilled to be introducing orchestration that is intelligent, secure and performance-focused and accessible everywhere, from onsite to the cloud to the edge, and across multiple architectures.

Ctrl IQ was formed by Kurtzer, high performance computing (HPC) veteran and creator of open source projects CentOS and Rocky Linux, and debuts with $4 million in Series A backing from OpenDrives Inc. and IAG Capital Partners.

Ctrl IQs fully supported technology stack was created to accelerate speed and efficiency of multi-prem, multi-cloud, multi-architecture orchestration of workflows. The solution fits within existing enterprise architecture and infrastructures, and will include:

With experience rooted in performance and security, Kurtzer architected the technology for HPC and scientific computation groups at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley. He also founded Warewulf and Singularity, in addition to CentOS and Rocky Linux. Kurtzer is joined by former Dell Inc. technologist Robert Adolph as VP of Strategy and Business Development, in addition to a software and architecture team with expertise in HPC and cloud architectures.

Ctrl IQ is currently working with customers and organizations in the military, aerospace, chip manufacturing, national labs, oil and gas, pharmaceutical and enterprise organizations. Demos and early build-outs are available starting today.

For more information about this news, visit http://www.ctrliq.com.

Continued here:

Ctrl IQ debuts solution for performance intensive workflows - KMWorld Magazine

With reductions of up to 75% across coveted titles, the TASCHEN book sale is a wonderful opportunity to acquire some cracking titles at equally cracking prices; the hefty discounts applying to select books across the world of art, photography, music, architecture, film and more. Taking place online and in-store from 2831 January, make some space on your bookshelves, sit back, browse, hit add to cart (or hoot foot it to your nearest shop) and treat yourself to some choice documents of momentous cultural importance.

Marking the launch of this rapid sale, and to get you started with some early inspiration, We Heart was asked to hand-pick five essential titles from the celebrated publisher. From pop culture to pivotal moments in global architecture, heres five brilliant bargains that deserve to be snapped straight up.

10 ( 30) | Buy it Now

From candid images of Winehouse performing in Paris to playing the drums at her home studio in Camden Town, London; lovingly composed portraits of the artist at ease on paradisiacal St. Lucia to carefree vamping for the camera. Amy Winehouse by Blake Wood is an intimate and emotional visual diary of a soul diva at the height of fame, and a testament to the bond that she and American photographer and filmmaker Wood shared after their meeting in 2007.

With 85 colour and black-and-white photographsmost of them never published beforealongside text by acclaimed pop culture critic Nancy Jo Sales, the images here capture a rare and lighter side of the infamously troubled prodigy; exhibiting Amy as Amy, a typical young London girl enjoying her life to the fullest, Woods document is a touching reminder that pop idols are real people at heart.

***

15 ( 40) | Buy it Now

Starting her career as a photojournalist for Rolling Stone in 1970 while still a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, Annie Leibovitz went on to establish herself as Vanity Fairs foremost rock music photographer before a move to Vogue which saw her taking culture-defining photographs of actors, directors, writers, musicians, athletes, and political figures, as well as fashion; her portraits imprinted on our collective consciousness by both the singularity of their subjects and Leibovitzs inimitable style.

In this publication, Annie Leibovitz. The Early Years. 19701983, the reader is taken on a journey from artistic revelation to a meticulously and personally curated collection that includes contact sheets and Polaroids, providing an insight into Leibovitzs development as a young artist, and that of a pivotal era. With many portraits linked to images of cars and driving, this book is a celebration of life on the road, a tribute to an earlier time a female photographer immersed in a culture that was itself adapting.

***

20 ( 30) | Buy it Now

With hundreds of iconic images by photographers including Margaret Bourke-White, Berenice Abbott, Ruth Orkin, Allen Ginsberg, Bruce Davidson and Joel Meyerowitz, immerse yourself in the charisma, glamour, and grit of the worlds greatest metropolis; the City that Never Sleeps enticing and exciting readers over 560 pages.

A photographic journey of New Yorks remarkable rise, reinvention, and growth, this tome comprises moments from the building of the Brooklyn Bridge to the immigrants arriving at Ellis Island; the slums of the Lower East Side to the magnificent art deco skyscrapers; the urban beach of Coney Island and the sleaze of Times Square; the vistas of Central Park and the crowds on Fifth Avenue. Paying homage to the indomitable spirit of those who call themselves New Yorkers, whilst capturing the chaos and energy of the frenetic city, this stunning publication is a sort of bible for anyone who has had their heart captivated by this iconic city.

***

30 ( 40) | Buy it Now

Genius or madman? (Gaud had become such a disheveled recluse by the time of his death, that passersby to an accident with a tram would assume he was a vagrant.) One thing that is truly undeniable is there are few more internationally noted architects; the Catalan having overseen some of the worlds most whimsical and unforgettable buildings in his 73 years.

From Gell Park and Gell Palace to Casa Calvet, Torre Bellesguard, Casa Batll and La Sagrada Familia, the complete works of this revered and epoch-making architect are catalogued in impressive style in Gaud. The Complete Works; an XL, 368-page hardback showcasing how his aesthetic put Barcelona on the global architecture map. A comprehensive appendix and biography as mesmerising as many of the images of his creations themselves, when TASCHEN say the complete works, they mean it. And then some.

***

20 ( 40) | Buy it Now

From the beginning of the 1970s through to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the USSR experienced an entirely singularfrequently bizarreperiod in architectural reform. Taking advantage of the nations crumbling control, architects pushed the boundaries of design. Beyond the modernism of the world at large, these Soviet experimentalists would dot the nation with expressionist works that defied any kind of traditional convention.

Fascinated by what he considers to be the fourth age of Soviet architecture, Frdric Chaubineditor in chief of French lifestyle magazine Citizen Khas captured these spectacular feats of otherworldly architecture in CCCP. Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed; an inspired document of a new dawn that is still an outlier in contemporary architectural aesthetics.

@taschen

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Taschen Sale, 2831 January 2021, Art and Design Book Sale - We Heart

From 2016 to 2020 in Richmond, Virginia, writer-director-animator Dash Shaw and animation director Jane Samborski hand drew Cryptozoo with a small team of artists. On the surface, so what? The age-old tradition of meticulously hand-drawn animation isnt a modern-day spectacle simply because the practice is almost extinct. But the married couple isnt just bringing hand drawn animation back to cinema. Theyre revolutionizing it. Of course, thats a loaded statement.

The film follows human cryptozookeeper and cryptid (an animal whose existence is disputed or unsubstantiated) rescuer Lauren Gray (Lake Bell) and her new cryptid understudy, Phoebe (the cleverly cast Angeliki Papoulia), a gorgon from Greek mythology (think: Medusa) who must tranquilize her snakes (read: hair) and hide them to fit in. She also has to cover and disguise her eyes to keep from turning others into stone.

Lauren and Phoebe are searching for the ethereal Japanese Baku, a pig-elephant-esque cryptid that emits hundreds of little smoky, pearlescent blue spirals and is known for its omnipotent ability to steal dreams a truly mindboggling creature. They intend to bring the Baku back to the cryptozoo, where it will be safe from deep state lackeys who want to capture it in order to mine its power for military use against the rising 1960s counterculture.

The stacked cast also features a unicorn-meddling hippie voiced by Michael Cera, a wheeling and dealing dive-bar Mr. Tumnus of sorts voiced by Peter Stormare, and more natural and supernatural oddities voiced by Grace Zabiskie, Jason Schwartzman, Thomas Jay Ryan, and Louisa Krause. They bring to mind acid-induced dream logic adventures like Belladonna of Sadness, Fantastic Planet, Yellow Submarine, and that banned Mormon cartoon from the 80s.

Its difficult to land on a lone descriptor that accurately captures the breadth of animated expression in the mythological menagerie that is Cryptozoo. However, any number of words would suffice to describe the experience as a whole: kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory, inventive words that could also apply to John Carroll Kirbys terrific score. The animation is, in Shaws own words, exploiting what drawing can do that live-action cant: depict[ing] what we cant see.

With inspiration from early 20th-century cartoonist Winsor McCay and other pioneers in the field, Shaw and Samborski took a new thin-line approach to Cryptozoo. From the first scenes skinny ribbons of red-blue forestry laid like neon over black slate, the animation of the couples second feature is very different from their 2016 debut, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, the thick-black-lined subjects of which looked more like newspaper comic strip characters. Here, outlines are hardly traceable and sometimes invisible to the naked eye.

The near-absence of densely lined barriers between different styles of animation creates a flattening effect that miraculously renders everything on the same plane at once. It allows characters and settings to exist in a fluid transition of color from top to bottom and heightens the gorgeous, trippy aesthetic of the film. Rocks are painted like Pollocks, strewn globs of oil protruding from the surface. Cryptids and humans alike are painted with watercolors (almost all of them done by Samborski herself). Settings are comprised of wild patterns, texture swatches, pencil sketches, impressionistic creations, and so much more. Its insanely impressive, a full-force imagination. But where that nebulous energy thrives in the vast imagination of the animation, it sours in the stale narrative.

Unfortunately, and quite shockingly, another set of less desirable words would also suffice to describe the Cryptozoo experience: tiresome, aimless, strained. I want to be clear: these words do not apply to the animation, which remains wondrous throughout, but to the story at the center. But why? We travel from California to Florida to Kentucky and back with a pursuant sinister military head on our tail and a seemingly infinite cast of newly minted cryptids. On paper, it sounds like a rollercoaster. A seminal tarot card reading sequence stands out as one of the films most compelling. Yet, its those few compelling moments down the road that awaken the realization that, while transfixed with the morphing of colors and unfolding of textures that define Shaws idiosyncratic direction, the story is missing an emotional core.

Racism is paralleled through the tangled relationship between humans and cryptids. The sickening effects of capitalism on non-profit-pursuits-turned-profitable sit center stage thematically as Lauren begins to question the function of the cryptozoo/sanctuary/theme park and its effect on the cryptids on display after Phoebe expresses concerns. Theres no shortage of ambition in what Shaw tries to address in the story, but it feels inert and lacks a sense of navigation when it comes to tackling, or even just touching on, themes like racism, capitalism, and captivity. They fall woefully short of the gripping standard set by the animation.

The spoon-fed themes and narrative predictability can be summed up in an interaction between the naked free spirits that stumble onto the cryptozoo in the opening sequence. There could be magic here, or a utopia, the man says, already scaling the fence to see whats behind it. Utopias never work out, the woman replies in an all too heavy-handed, foreshadowing tone.

Films arent often fascinating and tedious at the same time, but consider the nature of the work, which feels more like wandering through a great museum than watching a movie at times. How often do you stare at your favorite artworks for ninety-five minutes uninterrupted? Or even thirty minutes? Barring outright obsession or a research initiative, it sounds a bit dull, no?

However, it would be ridiculous of me not to recommend it. At the end of the day, its a fever dream unlike any youve seen. It makes Fantastic Planet look tame. And in 2021, dreams are more important than ever. They form the collective imagination that drives us toward change. It is a singular vision such as this even if that singularity only occupies certain aspects of the film that draws out the real-world meaning at Cryptozoos core: Without dreams, there can be no future. And that is a nightmare.

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Dash Shaws Sophomore Effort Cryptozoo Fascinates on the Surface - Film School Rejects

The 2020 Nobel prize in physics has been jointly awarded to Roger Penrose, Reinhart Genzel, and Andrea Ghez for their contributions to our understanding of black holesthe Universes most mysterious and compact objects. Whilst Genzel and Ghez claim their share of the most celebrated prize in physics for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxyan object that we would later come to realize was a supermassive black hole which was later named Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*)Penrose is awarded his share for an arguably more fundamental breakthrough.

The Nobel is awarded to Penrose based on a 1965 paper in which he mathematically demonstrated that black holes arise as a direct consequence of the mathematics of Einsteins theory of General Relativity. Not only this; but for a body of a certain mass, the collapse into a singularity wasnt just possible, or even probable. If that collapse could not be halted, singularity formation, Penrose argued, is inevitable.

For the discovery, that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity

The fact that Penrose showed that black holes mathematically emerge from general relativity may seem even more revolutionary when considering that the developer of general relativitya geometric theory of gravity that suggests mass curves the fabric of spacetimeAlbert Einstein did not even believe that black holes actually existed.

It was ten years after Einsteins death in April 1955 when Penrose showed that singularities form as a result of the mathematics of general relativity and that these singularities act as the heart of the black hole. At this centralor gravitationalsingularity, Penrose argued, all laws of physics displayed in the outside Universe ceased to apply.

The paper published in January 1965just eight years after Penrose earned his Ph.D. from The University of CambridgeGravitational Collapse and Spacetime Singularities is still widely regarded as the second most important contribution to general relativity after that of Einstein himself.

Yet, Penrose wasnt the first physicist to mathematically unpick general relativity and discover a singularity. Despite this, his Penrose Singularity Theorem is still considered a watershed moment in the history of general relativity.

A black hole is to be expected when a large massive body reaches a stage where internal pressure forces are insufficient to hold the body apart against the relentless inward pull of its own gravitational influence.

Black holes are generally regarded as possessing two singularities; a coordinate singularity and an actual gravitational singularity. Penroses work concerned the actual singularity, so named because unlike the coordinate singularity, it could not be removed with a clever choice of coordinate measurement.

That doesnt mean, however, that the coordinate singularity is unimportant or even easy to dismiss. In fact, you may already be very familiar with the coordinate singularity, albeit under a different namethe event horizon. This boundary marks the point where the region of space defined as a black hole begins, delineating the limit at which light can no longer escape.

The discovery of the event horizon occurred shortly after the first publication of Einsteins theory of general relativity in 1915. In 1916, whilst serving on the Eastern Front in the First World War astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild developed the Schwarzschild solution, which described the spacetime geometry of an empty region of space. One of the interesting features of this solutiona coordinate singularity.

The coordinate singularityalso often taking a third more official name as the Schwarzschild radius (Rs)exists for all massive bodies at r =Rs = 2GM/c. This marks the point where the escape velocity of the body is such that not even light can escape its grasp. For most cosmic bodies the Schwarzschild radius falls well within its own radius (r). For example, the Suns Rs occurs at a radius of about 3km from the centre compared to an overall radius of 0.7 million km.

Thus, the Schwarzschild radius or event horizon marks the boundary of a light-trapping surface. A distant observer could see an event taking place at the edge of this surface, but should it pass beyond that boundaryno signal could ever reach our observer. An observer falling with the surface, though, would notice nothing about this boundary.

The passing of Rs would just seem a natural part of the fall to them despite it marking the point of no return. To the distant observer the surface would freeze and become redder and redder thanks to the phenomena of gravitational redshiftalso the reason the event horizon is sometimes referred to as the surface of infinite redshift.

The very definition of a black hole is a massive body whose surface shrinks so much during the gravitational collapse that its surface lies within this boundary. But, what if this collapse continues? When does it reach a central singularity at the heart of the black holer= 0 for the mathematically inclined?

We see that the matter continues to collapse inwards through the surface called the event horizon, where the escape velocity indeed becomes the speed of light. Thereafter, no further information from the star itself can reach any outside observer, and a black hole is formed.

Penrose and other researchers have found that the equations of general relativity open the possibility that a body may undergo a complete gravitational collapseshrinking to a point of almost infinite densityand become a black hole.

In order for this to happen, however, a series of limits have to be reached and exceeded. For example, planets are unable to undergo this gravitational collapse as the mass they possess is insufficient to overcome the electromagnetic repulsion between their consistent atomsthus granting them stability.

Likewise, average-sized stars such as the Sun should also be resistant to gravitational collapse. The plasma found at the centre of stars in this solar-mass range is believed to be roughly ten times the density of lead protecting from complete collapse, whilst the thermal pressure arising from nuclear processes and radiation pressure alone would be sufficient to guarantee a star of low to intermediate-mass stability.

For older, more evolved stars in which nuclear reactions have ceased due to a lack of fuel. Its a different story. Especially if they have a mass ten times greater than the Sun.

It was suggested as early as the 1920s that small, dense starswhite dwarf starswere supported against collapse by phenomena arising from quantum mechanics called degeneracy.

This degeneracy pressure arises from the Pauli exclusion principle, which states that fermions such as electrons are forbidden from occupying the same quantum state. This led a physicist called Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar to question if there was an upper limit to this protection.

In 1931, Chandrasekhar proposed that above 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, a white dwarf would no longer be protected from gravitational collapse by degeneracy pressure. Beyond this boundaryunsurprisingly termed the Chandrasekhar limitgravity overwhelms the Pauli exclusion principle and gravitational collapse continues unabated.

The discovery of neutronsthe neutral partner of protons in atomic nucleiin 1932 led Russian theorist Lev Landau to speculate about the possibility of neutron stars. The outer part of these stars would contain neutron-rich nuclei, whilst the inner sections would be formed from a quantum-fluid comprised of mostly neutrons.

Again, neutron stars would be protected against gravitational collapse by degeneracy pressurethis time provided by this neutron fluid. In addition to this, the greater mass of the neutron in comparison to the electron would allow neutron stars to reach a greater density before undergoing collapse.

To put this into perspective, a white dwarf with the mass of the Sun would be expected to have a millionth of our stars volumegiving it a radius of5000 km roughly that of the Earth. A neutron star of a similar mass though, that would have a radius of about 20kmroughly the size of a city.

By 1939, Robert Oppenheimer had calculated that the mass-limit for neutron stars would be roughly 3 times the mass of the Sun. Above that limitagain, gravitational collapse wins. Oppenheimer also used general relativity to describe how this collapse appears to a distant observer. They would consider the collapse to take an infinitely long time, the process appearing to slow and freeze as the stars surface shrinks towards the Schwarzschild radius.

So long as Einsteins picture of classical spacetime can be maintained, acting in accordance with Einsteins equation then a singularity will be encountered within a black hole. The expectation is that Einsteins equation will tell us that this singularity cannot be avoided by any matter in the hole

For Penrose, the mathematical proof of a physical singularity at the heart of a black hole arising from this complete collapse was not enough. He wanted to demonstrate the singularity and the effects on a spacetime that would arise there. He did so with the use of light cones travelling down a geodesican unerringly straight line. In the process, he unveiled the anatomy of the black hole.

A light cone is most simply described as the path that a flash of light created by a single event and travelling in all directions would take through spacetime. Light cones can be especially useful when it comes to physicists calculating which events can be causally linked. If a line cant be drawn between the two events that fits in the light cone, one cannot have caused the other.

We call a line emerging from a lightcone a world-linethese move from the central event out through the top of the conethe future part of the diagram. The worldline shows the possible path of a particle or signal created by the event at the origin of the lightcone. Throwing a light cone at a black hole demonstrates why passing the event horizon means a merger with the central singularity is inevitable.

Penrose considered what would happen to a light cone as it approached and passed the event horizon of what is known as a Kerr black hole. This is a black hole that is non-charged and rotating. Its angular momentum drags spacetime along with it in an effect researchers call frame dragging.

Far from the black hole, light is free to travel with equal ease in any direction. The lightcones here have a traditionally symmetrical appearance which represents this.

However, towards the static limitthe point at which the black hole starts to drag spacetime around with itthe lightcones begin to tip towards the singularity and in the direction of rotation and narrow. Thus the static limit represents the point at which light is no longer free to travel in any direction. It must move in a direction that doesnt oppose the rotation of the black hole. Particles at this limit can no longer sit stillhence the name static limit.

Yet, despite the fact the dragging effect is so strong, here that not even light can resist it, signals can escape this regionit isnt the event horizonbut they can only do so by travelling in the direction of the rotation.

Interestingly, Penrose suggests that particles entering the static limit and decaying to two separate particles may result in energy leaching from the black hole in what is known as the Penrose process, but thats a discussion for another time.

So as our light cone moves toward the event horizon, it begins to narrow and tip. But, something extraordinary happens when it passes this boundary. As long as one is using so-called Swartzchild coordinates, once inside the black hole proper, the lightcone flips on its side, with the future end of the cone pointed towards the singularity.

This can mean only one thing for the worldline of that event, it points to the central singularity signalling that an encounter with that singularity is evitable.

It is generally believed that the spacetime singularities of gravitational collapse will necessarily always lie within an event horizon, to that whatever happens to be the extraordinary physical effects at such a singularity, these will be hidden from the view of any external observer.

Black holes arent particularly complex in construction and posses only three properties mass, electric charge, and angular momentumbut physicists working with light cones were able to determine the layers of their anatomyand crucially, the bounded surfaces that exist within them.This is what was revolutionary about Penroses concepts, they introduced the concept of bounded surfaces to black holes.

Looking back on this from an era in which a black hole has been imaged for the first time and gravitational waves are beginning to be routinely measured from the mergers of such objects, its important to not underestimate the importance of Penroses findings.

Before any practical developments surround black holes could even be dreamed of, Roger Penrose provided the mathematical basis to not just suggest the existence of black holes, but also laying the groundwork for their anatomy, and the effect they have on their immediate environment.

Thus, what Penroses Nobel award can really be seen as a recognition of moving these objectsor more accurately, spacetime eventsfrom the realm of speculation to scientific theory.

Penrose. R., Gravitational Collapse and Space-Time Singularities, Physical Review Letters, vol. 14, Issue 3, pp. 57-59, [1965]

Penrose. R., The Road to Reality, Random House, 2004

Senovilla. J. M. M., Garfinkle. G., The 1965 Penrose Singularity Theorem, Classical and Quantum Gravity, [2015].

Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology,Robert J. Lambourne, Cambridge Press, 2010.

Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology: A basic introduction, Ta-Pei Cheng, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Extreme Environment Astrophysics,Ulrich Kolb, Cambridge Press, 2010.

Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis,Sean G. Ryan, Andrew J. Norton, Cambridge Press, 2010.

Cosmology,Matts Roos, Wiley Publishing, 2003.

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Singularity Minded: The Black Hole Science that Won a Nobel Prize - ZME Science

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

A Radical New Technique Lets AI Learn With Practically No DataKaren Hao | MIT Technology ReviewShown photos of a horse and a rhino, and told a unicorn is something in between, [children] can recognize the mythical creature in a picture book the first time they see it. Now a new paper from the University of Waterloo in Ontario suggests that AI models should also be able to do thisa process the researchers call less than one-shot, or LO-shot, learning.

Artificial General Intelligence: Are We Close, and Does It Even Make Sense to Try?Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology ReviewA machine that could think like a person has been the guiding vision of AI research since the earliest daysand remains its most divisive idea. So why is AGI controversial? Why does it matter? And is it a reckless, misleading dreamor the ultimate goal?

The Race for a Super-Antibody Against the CoronavirusApoorva Mandavilli | The New York TimesDozens of companies and academic groups are racing to develop antibody therapies. But some scientists are betting on a dark horse: Prometheus, a ragtag group of scientists who are months behind in the competitionand yet may ultimately deliver the most powerful antibody.

How to Build a Spacecraft to Save the WorldDaniel Oberhaus | WiredThe goal of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is to slam the [spacecraft] into a small asteroid orbiting a larger asteroid 7 million miles from Earth. It should be able to change the asteroids orbit just enough to be detectable from Earth, demonstrating that this kind of strike could nudge an oncoming threat out of Earths way. Beyond that, everything is just an educated guess, which is exactly why NASA needs to punch an asteroid with a robot.

Inside Gravitys Daring Mission to Make Jetpacks a RealityOliver Franklin-Wallis | WiredThe first time someone flies a jetpack, a curious thing happens: just as their body leaves the ground, their legs start to flail. Its as if the vestibular system cant quite believe whats happening. This isnt natural. Then suddenly, thrust exceeds weight, andtheyre aloft. Its that moment, lift-off, that has given jetpacks an enduring appeal for over a century.

Inside Singapores Huge Bet on Vertical FarmingMegan Tatum | MIT Technology Reviewto cram all [of Singapores] gleaming towers and nearly 6 million people into a land mass half the size of Los Angeles, it has sacrificed many things, including food production. Farms make up no more than 1% of its total land (in the United States its 40%), forcing the small city-state to shell out around $10 billion each year importing 90% of its food. Here was an example of technology that could change all that.

The Effort to Build the Mathematical Library of the FutureKevin Hartnett | QuantaDigitizing mathematics is a longtime dream. The expected benefits range from the mundanecomputers grading students homeworkto the transcendent: using artificial intelligence to discover new mathematics and find new solutions to old problems.

Image credit:Kevin Mueller /Unsplash

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 17) - Singularity Hub

When did something like us first appear on the planet? It turns out theres remarkably little agreement on this question. Fossils and DNA suggest people looking like us, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, evolved around 300,000 years ago. Surprisingly, archaeologytools, artifacts, cave artsuggest that complex technology and cultures, behavioral modernity, evolved more recently: 50,000 to 65,000 years ago.

Some scientists interpret this as suggesting the earliest Homo sapiens werent entirely modern. Yet the different data tracks different things. Skulls and genes tell us about brains, artifacts about culture. Our brains probably became modern before our cultures.

Key physical and cultural milestones in modern human evolution, including genetic divergence of ethnic groups. Image credit: Nick Longrich / author provided

For 200,000 to 300,000 years after Homo sapiens first appeared, tools and artifacts remained surprisingly simple, little better than Neanderthal technology, and simpler than those of modern hunter-gatherers such as certain indigenous Americans. Starting about 65,000 to 50,000 years ago, more advanced technology started appearing: complex projectile weapons such as bows and spear-throwers, fishhooks, ceramics, sewing needles.

People made representational artcave paintings of horses, ivory goddesses, lion-headed idols, showing artistic flair and imagination. A bird-bone flute hints at music. Meanwhile, arrival of humans in Australia 65,000 years ago shows wed mastered seafaring.

This sudden flourishing of technology is called the great leap forward, supposedly reflecting the evolution of a fully modern human brain. But fossils and DNA suggest that human intelligence became modern far earlier.

Bones of primitive Homo sapiens first appear 300,000 years ago in Africa, with brains as large or larger than ours. Theyre followed by anatomically modern Homo sapiens at least 200,000 years ago, and brain shape became essentially modern by at least 100,000 years ago. At this point, humans had braincases similar in size and shape to ours.

Assuming the brain was as modern as the box that held it, our African ancestors theoretically could have discovered relativity, built space telescopes, written novels and love songs. Their bones say they were just as human as we are.

300,000 ya skull, Morocco. Image credit: NHM

Because the fossil record is so patchy, fossils provide only minimum dates. Human DNA suggests even earlier origins for modernity. Comparing genetic differences between DNA in modern people and ancient Africans, its estimated that our ancestors lived 260,000 to 350,000 years ago. All living humans descend from those people, suggesting that we inherited the fundamental commonalities of our species, our humanity, from them.

All their descendantsBantu, Berber, Aztec, Aboriginal, Tamil, San, Han, Maori, Inuit, Irishshare certain peculiar behaviors absent in other great apes. All human cultures form long-term pair bonds between men and women to care for children. We sing and dance. We make art. We preen our hair, adorn our bodies with ornaments, tattoos and makeup.

We craft shelters. We wield fire and complex tools. We form large, multigenerational social groups with dozens to thousands of people. We cooperate to wage war and help each other. We teach, tell stories, trade. We have morals, laws. We contemplate the stars, our place in the cosmos, lifes meaning, what follows death.

The details of our tools, fashions, families, morals and mythologies vary from tribe to tribe and culture to culture, but all living humans show these behaviors. That suggests these behaviorsor at least, the capacity for themare innate. These shared behaviors unite all people. Theyre the human condition, what it means to be human, and they result from shared ancestry.

We inherited our humanity from peoples in southern Africa 300,000 years ago. The alternativethat everyone, everywhere coincidentally became fully human in the same way at the same time, starting 65,000 years agoisnt impossible, but a single origin is more likely.

Archaeology and biology may seem to disagree, but they actually tell different parts of the human story. Bones and DNA tell us about brain evolution, our hardware. Tools reflect brainpower, but also culture, our hardware and software.

Just as you can upgrade your old computers operating system, culture can evolve even if intelligence doesnt. Humans in ancient times lacked smartphones and spaceflight, but we know from studying philosophers such as Buddha and Aristotle that they were just as clever. Our brains didnt change, our culture did.

That creates a puzzle. If Pleistocene hunter-gatherers were as smart as us, why did culture remain so primitive for so long? Why did we need hundreds of millennia to invent bows, sewing needles, boats? And what changed? Probably several things.

First, we journeyed out of Africa, occupying more of the planet. There were then simply more humans to invent, increasing the odds of a prehistoric Steve Jobs or Leonardo da Vinci. We also faced new environments in the Middle East, the Arctic, India, Indonesia, with unique climates, foods and dangers, including other human species. Survival demanded innovation.

Many of these new lands were far more habitable than the Kalahari or the Congo. Climates were milder, but Homo sapiens also left behind African diseases and parasites. That let tribes grow larger, and larger tribes meant more heads to innovate and remember ideas, more manpower, and better ability to specialize. Population drove innovation.

Beijing from space. Image credit: NASA

This triggered feedback cycles. As new technologies appeared and spreadbetter weapons, clothing, sheltershuman numbers could increase further, accelerating cultural evolution again.

Numbers drove culture, culture increased numbers, accelerating cultural evolution, on and on, ultimately pushing human populations to outstrip their ecosystems, devastating the megafauna and forcing the evolution of farming. Finally, agriculture caused an explosive population increase, culminating in civilizations of millions of people. Now, cultural evolution kicked into hyperdrive.

Artifacts reflect culture, and cultural complexity is an emergent property. That is, its not just individual-level intelligence that makes cultures sophisticated, but interactions between individuals in groups, and between groups. Like networking millions of processors to make a supercomputer, we increased cultural complexity by increasing the number of people and the links between them.

So our societies and world evolved rapidly in the past 300,000 years, while our brains evolved slowly. We expanded our numbers to almost eight billion, spread across the globe, reshaped the planet. We did it not by adapting our brains but by changing our cultures. And much of the difference between our ancient, simple hunter-gatherer societies and modern societies just reflects the fact that there are lots more of us and more connections between us.

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

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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When Did We Become Fully Human? What Fossils and DNA Tell Us About the Evolution of Modern Intelligence - Singularity Hub

Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in nature. They warp space and time in extreme ways and contain a mathematical impossibility, a singularity an infinitely hot and dense object within. But if black holes exist and are truly black, how exactly would we ever be able to make an observation?

This morning the Nobel Committee announced that the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics will be awarded to three scientists Sir Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez who helped discover the answers to such profound questions. Andrea Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics.

Robert Penrose is a theoretical physicist who works on black holes, and his work has influenced not just me but my entire generation through his series of popular books that are loaded with his exquisite hand-drawn illustrations of deep physical concepts.

As a graduate student in the 1990s at Penn State, where Penrose holds a visiting position, I had many opportunities to interact with him. For many years I was intimidated by this giant in my field, only stealing glimpses of him working in his office, sketching strange-looking scientific drawings on his blackboard. Later, when I finally got the courage to speak with him, I quickly realized that he is among the most approachable people around.

Sir Roger Penrose won half the prize for his seminal work in 1965 which proved, using a series of mathematical arguments, that under very general conditions, collapsing matter would trigger the formation of a black hole.

This rigorous result opened up the possibility that the astrophysical process of gravitational collapse, which occurs when a star runs out of its nuclear fuel, would lead to the formation of black holes in nature. He was also able to show that at the heart of a black hole must lie a physical singularity an object with infinite density, where the laws of physics simply break down. At the singularity, our very conceptions of space, time and matter fall apart and resolving this issue is perhaps the biggest open problem in theoretical physics today.

Penrose invented new mathematical concepts and techniques while developing this proof. Those equations that Penrose derived in 1965 have been used by physicists studying black holes ever since. In fact, just a few years later, Stephen Hawking, alongside Penrose, used the same mathematical tools to prove that the Big Bang cosmological model our current best model for how the entire universe came into existence had a singularity at the very initial moment. These are results from the celebrated Penrose-Hawking Singularity Theorem.

The fact that mathematics demonstrated that astrophysical black holes may exactly exist in nature is exactly what has energized the quest to search for them using astronomical techniques. Indeed, since Penroses work in the 1960s, numerous black holes have been identified.

The remaining half of the prize was shared between astronomers Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, who each lead a team that discovered the presence of a supermassive black hole, 4 million times more massive than the Sun, at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

Genzel is an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Germany and the University of California, Berkeley. Ghez is an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The location of the black hole in the Milky Way galaxy relative to our solar system. Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, CC BY-NC

Genzhel and Ghez used the worlds largest telescopes (Keck Observatory and the Very Large Telescope) and studied the movement of stars in a region called Sagittarius A* at the center of our galaxy. They both independently discovered that an extremely massive 4 million times more massive than our Sun invisible object is pulling on these stars, making them move in very unusual ways. This is considered the most convincing evidence of a black hole at the center of our galaxy.

This 2020 Nobel Prize, which follows on the heels of the 2017 Nobel Prize for the discovery of gravitational waves from black holes, and other recent stunning discoveries in the field such as the the 2019 image of a black hole horizon by the Event Horizon Telescope serve as great recognition and inspiration for all humankind, especially for those of us in the relativity and gravitation community who follow in the footsteps of Albert Einstein himself.

This article is republished from The ConversationbyGaurav Khanna, Professor of Physics, University of Massachusetts Dartmouthunder a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Black holes at the center of 2020 Nobel Prize in physics astrophysicist explains why its a big deal - The Next Web

If youve seen the movie The Martian, you no doubt remember the rescue scene, in which (spoiler alert!) Matt Damon launches himself off Mars in a stripped-down rocket in hopes of his carefully-calculated trajectory taking him just close enough to his crew for them to pluck him from the void of outer space and bring him safely home to Earth. Theres a multitude of complex physics involved, and who knows how true-to-science the scene is, but getting the details right to successfully grab something in space certainly isnt easy.

So it will be fascinating to watch NASA aim to do just that, as its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft attempts to pocket a fistful of rock and dust from an asteroid called Bennu then ferry it back to Earthwith the whole endeavor broadcast live on NASAs website starting Tuesday, October 20 at 5pm Eastern time. Here are some details to know in advance.

Bennus full name is 101955 Bennu, and its close enough to Earth to be classified as a near-Earth object, or NEOthat means it orbits within 1.3 AU of the sun. An AU is equivalent to the distance between Earth and the sun, which is about 93 million miles. The asteroid orbits the sun at an average distance of 105 million miles, which is just (just being a relative term here!) 12 million miles farther than Earths average orbital distance from the sun.

Every six years, Bennu comes closer to Earth, getting to within 0.002 AU. Scientists say this means theres a high likelihood the asteroid could impact Earth sometime in the late 22nd century. Luckily, an international team is already on the case (plus, due to Bennus size and composition, it likely wouldnt do any harm).

Bennu isnt solid, but rather a loose clump of rock and dust whose density varies across its area (in fact, up to 40 percent of it might just be empty space!). Its shape is more similar to a spinning top than a basketball or other orb, and its not very bigabout a third of a mile wide at its widest point. Since its small, it spins pretty fast, doing a full rotation on its axis in less than four and a half hours. That fast spinning also means its likely to eject material once in a while, with chunks or rock and other regolith dislodging and being flung into space.

OSIRIS-REx stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer. Yeahthats a lot. Its the size of a large van (bigger than a minivan, smaller than a bus), and looks sort of like a box with wings and one long arm. Its been orbiting Bennu for about two years (since 2018) after taking two years to get there (it was launched in 2016).

The spacecrafts arm is called TAGSAM, which stands for Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism. Its 11 feet long and has a round collection chamber attached to its end.

OSIRIS-REx doesnt have any legs to land on, but thats for a good reason: landing isnt part of the plan. Which brings us to

As far as plans go, this one is pretty cool. The spacecraft will approach the asteroid, and its arm will reach out to tap the surface. A pressurized canister will shoot out some nitrogen gas to try to dislodge some dust and rock from Bennu, and the collection chamber on the spacecrafts arm will open up to grab whatever it can; scientists are hoping to get at least 60 grams worth of material (thats only 4 tablespoons! Its less than the cup of yogurt you eat in the morning!).

And thats not even the wildest detail; if the mission goes as planned and OSIRIS-REx scoops up those four tablespoons of precious cargo, scientists on Earth still wont see them for almost three more years; the spacecraft is scheduled for a parachute landing in the Utah desert on September 24, 2023.

The NASA team working on this project thinks its likely theyll find organic material in the sample collection, and it may even give them clues to the origins of life on Earth.

Does the mission have better odds of success than Matt Damons rescue in The Martian? Tune in on Tuesday to see for yourself.

Image Credit: NASA

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NASA's About to Try Grabbing a Chunk of Asteroid to Bring to Earthand You Can Watch - Singularity Hub

Lost within a YouTube hole, I came across a silly, animated science video about black holes by Kurzgesagt In a Nutshell. A lot of what I heard went over my head, but I knew that the idea of black holes made me feel anxious, the way I feel in the ocean at night: so immensely swallowed that I lose myself.

These past seven months have left me reeling in a similar limbo. It feels as though there is no acting force of gravity keeping me on track. Time goes on and on and on and I am infinitely in disarray.

***

Some days I am exponentially radiating outward in all directions and there are endless possibilities. On other days I am taught that there is a limit to growth that is called Logistical and is Shaped like a Crooked Spine.

But what if I could just grow larger and larger and larger until the point of implosion, upon which all of that denseness of thought and energy and pure being could shrink into the size of a dust grain? Not diminished, but concentrated.

A black hole is a star that grew so massive iron bubbled up inside its core. The star, with its iron heart, sank and sank until its body couldnt hold up its burden. The child within me could read it as a story: The Star Who Got Too Big for its Britches, or maybe just the star who got lonely despite all of its mass and gravity.

Out and then in, like a giant breath.

I lie awake in bed, tense between the shoulder blades, finding breathing insufficient. I think about the giant stars that give in to their burdens and instead of release are brought into a concentrated agony. It is and isnt like drowning and waking on a cold mountain peak.

***

Located in the center of a black hole is whats known as a gravitational singularity, in which a huge mass exists in an infinitely small space. This gives the point infinite density and gravity, and it warps the curvature of the universe.

If we looked at a black hole, we wouldnt really see it. It is hidden behind the event horizon: a sphere of absolute darkness out of which nothing, not even light, escapes.

***

When I was younger my understanding of darkness was nothing more than fear of my own imagination, like when the lights turned off and I had to count the number of steps to my bed because there were unnamed terrors in the corners of the room. But my mother would come in and I would find that the monsters and dragons and ghouls were nothing but shadows playing on the wall, or a jacket hanging from the doorframe.

Darkness has changed since childhood. Now, Im not afraid of the monsters but of the emptiness when I reach my hand out and feel nothing. Its scarier when you find out your imagination is foolish and that darkness is mostly empty.

But black holes dont represent my cynical view of darkness. They arent emptiness or absence. A single point at the center of a black hole, so small it has a hypothetical volume of zero, holds multiple infinities. Why did I grow up to think my imagination was insufficient?

***

In reality, if I was to enter a black hole my body would be stretched out into a long string of plasma as it is drawn closer to the singularity. I would be funneled. The gravitational funnel inside a black hole is so strong that if a star were to stray too close, its entire mass could be ripped apart.

I think about the giant stars that give in to their burdens and instead of release are brought into a concentrated agony.

Nothing can escape a black hole once it passes the horizon, because turning back around would require a moving velocity faster than the speed of light. Incapable of turning back or to the side, you are committed to what seems a lot like fate. Rapid descent toward the point from which there is no return. Like tripping through the looking glass into an unavoidable future.

For spectators watching you enter a black hole, the time it takes to cross the event horizon seems infinite because they are never given the signal that you are gone. The phantom image of yourself reflects back on them for an infinite amount of time long after you have edged past the lip of blackness.

I could disappear with nobody knowing where and when I had gone. In thinking of this I feel lonely. And disconnected.

***

Stephen Hawking came up with a theory to describe how black holes lose energy. Its called Hawking Radiation, and it describes how black holes evaporate.

Over time, they lose an extremely tiny amount of matter, and for the largest black hole in our universe, it might take 10,100 years, at which point it would explode with an eruption energy 1,000 times the total nuclear capacity on Earth.

But at its cease, would the knowledge of that original star and all other matter caught within the event horizon really be lost? That seems sad to me.

Black holes seem like one of those indefatigable forces of the world. It is enough to know they are up there somewhere, a virginal presence, impenetrable. But even they, with their multitudes and carefully folded legs, cannot last forever. And here I was thinking that infinity was the same as eternity.

***

It is not particles that make up our universe, but information. Information arranges the elementary particles of existence. If you lose information, you lose the possibility of creation.

The conservation of quantum information or the no-hiding theorem states that information can neither be created nor destroyed. But for black holes, the line is blurry.

It was originally thought that information was lost forever in a black holes interminable void. But Hawking also came up with what is called the information paradox, and the thinking is as follows: What if, when something enters a black hole, it leaves behind a holographic projection of its life on the screen of the event horizon before it pushes through and into the funnel toward singularity?

It would be nice, I think, to leave behind my life, with all of its tangles, on the event horizon and have the molecules and elementary particles of my physical body enter the cosmic hodgepodge of singularity.

And what if every time a particle leaves the black hole thanks to Hawking Radiation it takes information away with it? Like walking into a library filled with trillions of books and walking away having read only one.

This theory would make black holes a movie of the universe. Fractaling toward origin or maybe infinity.

These days, its easier to think of myself in the third person, as if I was watching a film reel of the moments that would be harder to bear than to watch. It would be nice, I think, to leave behind my life, with all of its tangles, on the event horizon and have the molecules and elementary particles of my physical body enter the cosmic hodgepodge of singularity. I imagine it would be a lot like giving in. Like reincarnation into something whose existence is a lot more straightforward, or maybe just different.

***

But, alas, the nearest event horizon is 1,000 light-years from my room. My haphazard trail of thought isnt showing me any cosmic truth.

Our knowledge of black holes is nothing but logical conjecture, based on the absolutes we rely on to feel safe and comfortable.

We feel better knowing that science is reliable and that there are fundamental laws of our universe scrawled out on blackboards by geniuses with chalk on their slacks.

But logic makes breathing feel robotic, absolutes have failed me and safety is temporal.

***

I prefer to wonder about the unknown because maybe then I can stay hopeful. Maybe that black hole 1,000 light-years away contains worlds where I could be happy and held and something completely different from who I am here and now. I could be woman or otherwise, I could be two-dimensional and have no need to breathe and feel breathless. I could be a system of veins or connective tissue: a building block for something much larger than myself. I could be all my past lives all at once. I could be a supermodel or a supernova, a fetus or a mother of stars.

Contact Aliya Haas Blinman at [emailprotected].

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Weekender | Falling through the rabbit hole: A personal essay - Daily Californian

Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in nature. They warp space and time in extreme ways and contain a mathematical impossibility, a singularity an infinitely hot and dense object within. But if black holes exist and are truly black, how exactly would we ever be able to make an observation?

On October 6, the Nobel Committee announced that the2020 Nobel Prize in physicswill be awarded to three scientists Sir Roger Penrose,Reinhard GenzelandAndrea Ghez who helped discover the answers to such profound questions. Andrea Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics.

Penroseis a theoretical physicist who works on black holes, and his work has influenced not just me but my entire generation through hisseries of popular booksthat are loaded with his exquisite hand-drawn illustrations of deep physical concepts.

As a graduate student in the 1990s at Penn State, where Penrose holds a visiting position, I had many opportunities to interact with him. For many years, I was intimidated by this giant in my field, only stealing glimpses of him working in his office, sketching strange-looking scientific drawings on his blackboard. Later, when I finally got the courage to speak with him, I quickly realised that he is among the most approachable people around.

Dying stars form black holes

Penrosewon half the prize for his seminal work in 1965 which proved, using a series of mathematical arguments that, under very general conditions, collapsing matter would trigger the formation of a black hole.

This rigorous result opened up the possibility that the astrophysical process of gravitational collapse, which occurs when a star runs out of its nuclear fuel, would lead to the formation of black holes in nature. He was also able to show that at the heart of a black hole must lie a physical singularity an object with infinite density, where the laws of physics simply break down. At the singularity, our very conceptions of space, time and matter fall apart and resolving this issue is perhaps the biggest open problem in theoretical physics today.

This years Nobel Prize winners in physics led the discovery of the presence of a black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy

Penroseinvented new mathematical concepts and techniqueswhile developing this proof. Those equations that Penrose derived in 1965 have been used by physicists studying black holes ever since. In fact, just a few years later, Stephen Hawking, alongside Penrose, used the same mathematical tools to prove that the Big Bang cosmological model our current best model for how the entire universe came into existence had a singularity at the very initial moment. These are results from the celebrated Penrose-Hawkingsingularity theorem.

The fact that mathematics demonstrated that astrophysical black holes may exactly exist in nature is exactly what has energised the quest to search for them using astronomical techniques. Indeed, since Penroses work in the 1960s, numerous black holes have been identified.

Black holes play yo-yo with stars

The remaining half of the prize was shared between astronomers Genzel and Ghez, who each lead a team that discovered the presence of a supermassive black hole, four million times more massive than the Sun, at thecentre of our Milky Way galaxy.

Genzel is an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Germany and the University of California, Berkeley. Ghez is an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Genzel and Ghez used the worlds largest telescopes (Keck Observatory and the Very Large Telescope) and studied the movement of stars in a region called Sagittarius A* at the centre of our galaxy. They both independently discovered that an extremely massive four million times more massive than our Sun invisible object is pulling on these stars, making them move in very unusual ways. This is considered the most convincing evidence of a black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

This 2020 Nobel Prize, which follows on the heels of the 2017 Nobel Prize for the discovery of gravitational waves from black holes, and other recent stunning discoveries in the field such as the the2019 image of a black hole horizonby the Event Horizon Telescope serves as great recognition and inspiration for all humankind, especially for those of us in the relativity and gravitation community, who follow in the footsteps of Albert Einstein.

The writer is a professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

This article was republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons licence

Published in Dawn, EOS, Octoberr 18th, 2020

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SCIENCE: A QUEST TO UNDERSTAND THE KNOWN UNIVERSE - DAWN.com