This is New Zealand’s best pie – and for the first time in awards history, a woman baked it – Stuff.co.nz

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A female baker has taken out the top prize in the Bakels New Zealand Supreme Pie Awards for the first time in their quarter century history.

Sopheap Long, of Euro Patisserie in Torbay on Aucklands North Shore, won the coveted Supreme Award for her steak and cheese at a ceremony held in Auckland on Tuesday night.

The Supreme Pie is the best of the best, named by the competitions judges to be the top entry among the 11 category winners.

Supplied

Sopheap Long's Supreme Award-winning steak and cheese pie.

In all, Longs pie beat out nearly 5000 entries from 465 bakeries around the country.

READ MORE:* Take the ultimate Kiwi pie roadie* New Zealand's best mince and cheese takes baker to historic Pie Awards win* Why are South Island bakeries under represented at the NZ pie awards?

Bakels managing director Brent Kersel said Longs steak and cheese had everything going for it.

The steak was chunky but so tender it just melted in your mouth, he explained. It was surrounded by rich, dark gravy and topped with a semi-soft tangy cheese; just delicious. The golden flaky pastry had perfect layering and the base was lightly golden brown with a hand hold-able firmness. We just couldnt fault it.

Supplied

Sopheap Long, left, winning Best Apprentice Pie Maker in 2019; shes now baked the countrys best pie.

Steak and cheese is, along with mince and cheese, one of the most hotly contested categories in the annual awards, receiving the highest number of entries.

In winning the steak and cheese award, Long edged out seven-time supreme winner Patrick Lam, of Goldstar Patricks Pies in Tauranga, who placed second.

Long, who was Apprentice Pie Maker of the Year in 2019, also took out bronze in the bacon and egg category, won by another female baker, Shuly Ngann of Le Royal Bakery in Grafton, Auckland, and was highly commended for her mince and cheese, a category won by Ny Chan of Ronnies Cafe and Bakery in Matamata.

Chris McKeen/Stuff

Judges, including celebrity guest Peter Gordon, second from right, sampled close to 5000 pies.

Kersel said the standard of entries this year was very high across the board, after Covid-19 meant the competition did not go ahead this year.

On more than one occasion we had to go back and take another look at the top finalists in a few of the categories because the results were either a tie or half a point difference... Maybe during periods of lockdown in 2020 our bakers spent time polishing their skills.

Longs big win will almost certainly mean a run on her bakery, as has been experienced by previous winners, including Lam.

Pie fans from everywhere will be heading for [Longs] bakery to try her pies and Im sure they wont be disappointed, said Kersel.

BAKELS SUPREME PIE AWARDS 2021 WINNERS

MINCE & GRAVY

Gold Award: Jason Hay, Richoux Bakery, 119 Main Highway, Ellerslie

Silver Award: Chenth Bun, Euro Bake & Espresso Ltd, 45 Main Road, Kumeu

Bronze Award: Sok Heang Nguon, Taste Cafe & Bakery, 1a Crayford Street West, Avondale

Highly Commended: Vong Hean, Mairangi Bay Bakery, 366 Beach Road, Mairangi Bay

POTATO TOPPED

Gold Award: Michael Gray, Nada Bakery, Suite 4, 72 Main Road, Tawa

Silver Award: Patrick Lam, Goldstar Patricks Pies, Shop 14, 2 Taurikura, Tauriko

Bronze Award: Bunnarith Sao, Dairy Flat Bakery Ltd, 1443 Dairy Flat Highway, Dairy Flat

Highly Commended: Buntha Meng, Wild Grain Bakery, 16 Wainui Road, Silverdale

STEAK & CHEESE

Gold Award: Sopheap Long, Euro Patisserie Torbay, 1028 Beach Road, Torbay

Silver Award: Patrick Lam, Goldstar Patricks Pies, Shop 14, 2 Taurikura, Tauriko

Bronze Award: Geemun Chao, Baker Bobs Bakery Cafe, 135 Chadwick Road, Greerton

Highly Commended: Jason Hay, Richoux Bakery, 119 Main Highway, Ellerslie

CHICKEN AND VEGETABLE

Gold Award: Jason Danielson, Kai Pai Bakery, 17 Frederick Street, Wanaka

Silver Award: Nap Ly, Target Bakehouse & Cafe, 241 Manukau Road, Pukekohe

Bronze Award: Savanchamnan Ly, PieFee, 349 Karangahape Road

Highly Commended: Jacksea Tang, Penny Lane Bake Shop, 248 Onehunga Mall, Onehunga

CAFE BOUTIQUE

Gold Award: Lentil, potato, onion, carrot & celery; Brad Dalton, Ginger Dynamite go go food & coffee, 488 Main Road Riwaka, Riwaka

Silver Award: Venison & bacon; Jason Heaven, Caf Ahuriri, 16 Mahia Street, Ahuriri

Bronze Award: Beef, bourbon, bacon, aged cheddar cheese & garden herbs; Nicole Peake, The Whistling Frog, 9 Rewcastle Road, RD 2, Owaka

Highly Commended: Chicken breast with creamy mushrooms; Chi Meng Lo, Bay Coffee Hub, 279 Emerson Street, Napier South

GOURMET MEAT

Gold Award: Slow cooked Wagyu beef curry; Jason Hay, Richoux Bakery, 119 Main Highway, Ellerslie

Silver Award: Steak, mushroom & cheese; Geemun Chao, Baker Bobs Bakery Cafe, 135 Chadwick Road, Greerton

Bronze Award: Chicken, leek, mushroom & bacon; Jason Danielson, Kai Pai Bakery, 17 Frederick Street, Wanaka

Highly Commended: Roast pork, potato, mixed veg, gravy & apple sauce; Sopheap Try, Chelsea Bakery & Roast, 113 Randwick Road, Moera

STEAK & GRAVY

Gold Award: Kaing Sok, My Bakery Cafe Kelston, Suite 6, 4055 Great North Road, Glen Eden

Silver Award: Jason Danielson, Kai Pai Bakery, 17 Frederick Street, Wanaka

Bronze Award: Shuly Ngann, Le Royal Bakery, 21 Park Road, Grafton

Highly Commended: Patrick Lam, Goldstar Patricks Pies, Shop 14, 2 Taurikura, Tauriko

BACON & EGG

Gold Award: Shuly Ngann, Le Royal Bakery, 21 Park Road, Grafton

Silver Award: Chenth Bun, Euro Bake & Espresso Ltd, 45 Main Road, Kumeu

Bronze Award: Sopheap Long, Euro Patisserie Torbay, 1028 Beach Road, Torbay

Highly Commended: Ratanak Nov, Corner Bakery, 180A Hillsborough Road, Hillsborough

MINCE & CHEESE

Gold Award: Ny Chan, Ronnies Caf & Bakery, 74 Broadway, Matamata

Silver Award: Vong Hean, Mairangi Bay Bakery, 366 Beach Road, Mairangi Bay

Bronze Award: Sok Heang Nguon, Taste Caf & Bakery, 1A Crayford Street West, Avondale

Highly Commended: Sopheap Long, Euro Patisserie Torbay, 1028 Beach Road, Torbay

VEGETARIAN

Gold Award: Creamed white sauce, spinach, sweetcorn, pumpkin, mushroom; Vong Hean, Mairangi Bay Bakery, 366 Beach Road, Mairangi Bay

Silver Award: Spinach, pumpkin, kumara, cranberries sauce & camembert; Geemun Chao, Baker Bobs Bakery Cafe, 135 Chadwick Road, Greerton

Bronze Award: Creamy sauce, carrot, kumara, peas, broccoli, onion, sweetcorn & coriander; Ty Lim, Orewa Bakery, 8 Moana Avenue, Orewa

Highly Commended: Kumara, pumpkin, potato, mixed vegetables; Sok Heang Nguon, Taste Caf & Bakery, 1A Crayford Street West, Avondale

COMMERCIAL WHOLESALE

Gold Award: Terry McMahon, Couplands Bakeries, 140 Carmen Road, Hornby

Silver Award: Tim Milina, Oxford Pies, 142 Maui Street, Pukete

Bronze Award: Martyn Mayston, Bake Shack Bakery, 59 Hewletts Road, Mt Maunganui

Highly Commended: Adelle Neilson, GWF, 78 Kerrs Road, Wiri

SUPREME

Gold Award: Steak & Cheese; Sopheap Long, Euro Patisserie Torbay, 1028 Beach Road, Torbay

The rest is here:

This is New Zealand's best pie - and for the first time in awards history, a woman baked it - Stuff.co.nz

‘Aotearoa New Zealand’: What if it went to a vote? – Stuff.co.nz

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OPINION: While National demands debate, the Mori Party argues such a debate would only ever suit the majority.

STUART SMITH: There is no doubt that the Mori language has a significant place in New Zealand. I like using Mori place names, and I am an enthusiastic student of te reo. I take regular classes, as is my individual choice, but I might add my ability does not match my enthusiasm.

However, I am well aware that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for learning languages nor sees the role of te reo exactly as I do.

Ricky Wilson/Stuff

Kaikura MP Stuart Smith is concerned that moves towards co-governance are happening without democratic process.

In the past few months, there has been an increasing spotlight placed on significant changes to how our Government enacts the Crown responsibility to uphold the Treaty of Waitangi.

READ MORE:* The contentious He Puapua plan explained* The Detail: What is He Puapua, and why is it making headlines?* Let's not get tied in knots over the little that divides us* What Te Tiriti means for 2021 - and why it's more important than ever

While there are those who vehemently support the notion of co-governance and, of course, those who oppose it, it is my opinion that most New Zealanders fall into a third group. This group is more concerned with the lack of transparency from the Government in implementing co-governance policies without consultation or engagement with the whole of New Zealand.

National Party Leader Judith Collins has been labelled a racist by the Mori Party for bringing this conversation to the table and inviting Kiwis to have their say on these matters.

My view is that asking legitimate questions about the future of our country is not racist.

LAWRENCE SMITH/Stuff

Leader of the National Party, Judith Collins and her deputy, Shane Reti, attend the launch of their new Demand the Debate campaign on Carbine Road in Auckland.

Parliamentarians are voted in by the people and work for the people. If we sit back, dont ask questions, and let the Government advance what are pretty radical changes, without advocating for adequate consultation, then we are not doing our jobs properly.

There is a particular change that, while seemingly nominal, has sparked some controversy; the de facto changing of New Zealands name to Aotearoa New Zealand by the Government and in the media.

Now, I am not seeking to make a judgement call about whether we should change our name or not. That is neither here nor there. I am simply giving voice to the argument that perhaps before the shift began to be put in motion, New Zealanders themselves should have been consulted.

It is presumptuous and disrespectful to make a decision of such cultural importance for the country without engaging all who live there.

David Walker/Stuff

The George Hotel in Park Avenue, Christchurch, displays the five proposed flag options during the 2015 referendum.

Sir John Key had the courage to stand by his convictions and let New Zealanders decide whether we should change our flag. No matter where you stood on the issue, you still had the opportunity to have a say. Sir John lost that debate when New Zealand voted to retain the existing flag, and he accepted this verdict.

Arguably changing the name of the country is even more significant than changing the flag, and it is my belief that the right thing for the Labour Government to do is to advance an open conversation on this.

For some people, for example those who have represented or fought for New Zealand, there is a very strong connect with our existing name. For others, the te reo name Aotearoa holds greater significance.

As I see it, there is no right or wrong perspective. However, it is wrong for a public service and Government to decide a way forward with no regard for how New Zealanders think or feel about it.

Supplied

Mori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi says Smith will be left behind if he will not embrace a Te Tiriti centric Aotearoa.

RAWIRI WAITITI: I want to mihi to MP Smiths opinion piece for not only giving his view but also allowing the opportunity for reply. Not only does the piece make mention of Te Paati Mori (the Mori Party), but it also makes mention of the changes being made to uphold our obligation to Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Take a deep breath, perhaps a gaze outside to clear your mind. Then ask yourself this - have we really, ever upheld Te Tiriti o Waitangi in the first place?

You see, the document has been around for 181 years but still Mori remain worse off when it comes to health statistics, dying seven years younger. We are worse off when it comes to educational achievement, homelessness and incarceration, the list goes on.

KATHRYN GEORGE/STUFF

Stuff's NZ Made/N Nu Treni project: When the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, Mori owned more than 66 million acres of land. By 1975, almost 97 per cent had been sold or taken.

The intergenerational effects of these outcomes for Mori are engrained from kaumatua (elders) to mokopuna (grandchildren), except now there is a new horizon on the rise the rise of a Te Tiriti centric Aotearoa, the changing of the tides.

I applaud MP Smiths quest in taking up te reo Mori and using Mori place names, however, demanding a debate that Mori have never really been part of to determine the outcomes best for us, will only ever suit the majority. Demanding a debate will only keep Mori as second-class citizens on their own whenua (land).

Te Tiriti o Waitangi was never about the democratic process in this country, it was always about rowing our waka alongside each other.

This is not about change, this is about the return to the true intention of Te Tiriti o Waitangi as consented by our tpuna (ancestors). Sharing of the whenua for the greater good of both tangata whenua (people of the land) and tangata tiriti (people of the treaty), moving together in a Te Tiriti centric Aotearoa.

Mori TV

Mori youth are the key to ending high Mori prison population numbers believes Justice Sir Joe Williams. (Video first published in May 2021)

Its also not about race. It should, however, be all about our right. Nine times out of 10, Mori have never been involved in the debate and the creation of systems and solutions suited for us.

But lets also not be afraid, because as Kura Kaupapa, Khanga Reo and Whnau Ora have proven when Mori are given the opportunity to create solutions for us, we all succeed.

You can feel the change in the air, you can read the messages and posts from tangata tiriti on social media, you hear it on the street change is occurring.

STACY SQUIRES

With the support of a Te Ora Hou Whanau Ora navigator, Dave and Joanne Conrad and their children have settled into school, work and a home.

This is not about inciting hatred, division and dare I say it, apartheid these words dont belong to us. This is all about living up to the expectations of Te Tiriti as signed 181 years ago in Waitangi.

Perhaps MP Smiths identification of the third group of people has been wrongly mistaken for those who arent afraid of that new sunrise and change in the tide those embracing and committed to a true Tiriti centric Aotearoa.

So my question to MP Smith, and yourself is, as the next sunrise occurs and at the changing of the tide what will you do? Will you go with the sunrise into a new tomorrow and so naturally as tides change, or will you be left behind, in the archaic dark day and age and struggle to stay afloat against the changing tide?

Perhaps youre already living in the aspirations of a Tiriti centric Aotearoa nau mai, haere mai.

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'Aotearoa New Zealand': What if it went to a vote? - Stuff.co.nz

If Aldi’s not coming to New Zealand, who will shake up our supermarkets? – Stuff.co.nz

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ANALYSIS: Another player may yet storm the New Zealand supermarket pitch currently dominated by Foodstuffs and Countdown but Kiwis are warned, dont get your hopes up it will be Aldi.

The Government has been looking into whether New Zealands supermarkets are giving a fair deal to consumers and suppliers. New Zealand has only two big chain owners: Countdown with its Fresh Choice and Super Value chains, and Foodstuffs which owns the New World, Pak n Save and Four Square brands.

The Commerce Commission is due to publish its draft market study into the $22 billion groceries industry on Thursday, and one possibility is to pave the way for a new supermarket company.

Other big overseas retail brands have come Zara, Taco Bell, H&M, Chemist Warehouse, Sephora. We are still waiting for Ikea, which announced plans for a store in Auckland in 2019.

READ MORE:* Countdown and Foodstuffs about to find out what's in the regulator's trolley* Top five retail brands NZ should hope to see in 2021* NZ supermarkets - the illusion of choice when there are just two big players

But the grocery market has not attracted big names to the same extent, although Costco is making headway with its Auckland superstore and confirmed it was looking to open by the middle of next year.

The brand people would love to see is definitely Aldi, said First Retail Group managing director Chris Wilkinson, who described it as a potential disruptor.

Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Aldi is a massive global player, and can use that to keep prices low.

The German low-price supermarket opened its first Australian store in 2001, and has been registered with the New Zealand companies office since 2000.

Most of its products are home brand, said Wilkinson. It also brings in very odd types of categories, for example toasters or beach toys, keeping shoppers loyal and interested.

Aldis focus is low price, but its a pleasant environment, he said.

They are a massive player globally, so theyre able to leverage that.

But Aldi has been saying no to New Zealand for years, and Wilkinson does not see that changing.

Ours is a tiny market and any newcomer would have to spend big money on infrastructure and stores, if it could even find suitable properties in the first place. Compounding those challenges are Covid-19s uncertainty and supply chain disruption.

Derek Flynn/Stuff

Foodstuffs owns the New World, Pak n Save and Four Square brands.

It would be great, but I dont see it. There are a lot of other things going on at the moment, and its going to take a while for some stabilisation to happen before there will be the confidence for big operators to come in like that, he said.

Aldi is the one that everyone wants, there isnt another player to be honest.

Dr Bodo Lang, senior lecturer at University of Aucklands business school, said Kiwis were paying far too much for groceries and were keen for alternatives.

Any brand thats in Australia that will address the issues in consumers minds with the grocery market, I think that would be the preferred brand, and Aldi seems to be one of those brands that ticks all of the boxes.

Aldi was known to be cost-competitive, Lang said.

I think the evidence is pretty clear that grocery prices at supermarkets in Australia decreased pretty rapidly once Aldi was in the market. I think we would see the same result here.

If not Aldi, then another large international chain that was efficient and willing to disrupt the sector, such as fellow German retailer Lidl, would do, Lang said.

However, a shock decision by Lidls sister brand Kaufman early last year may have hurt the chances of another supermarket firm coming here.

Kaufman was on the verge of opening its first store in Australia, having spent hundreds of millions of dollars on building distribution centres and taking shop sites, before pulling the plug.

Cameron Burnell/Stuff

Aldi is the one that everyone wants, there isnt another player to be honest, says Chris Wilkinson.

They made a massive play, and they were tipped to be shaking up the market in a massive way, but they pulled out, Wilkinson said.

The company wanted to focus on its European operations, but there was speculation that changes to Australias retail sector, and flagging consumer confidence partly as a result of recent bushfires, had also forced its hand.

So that would have rocked the confidence of others, Wilkinson said.

However, Costco was almost ready here.

Costcos difference is their focus is on selling bulk products, so instead of buying one can of baked beans you buy a catering sized can of baked beans, or you buy a box, and thats how you achieve your savings, he said.

ROBERT KITCHIN/STUFF

Countdown also operates the Fresh Choice and Super Value chains.

The arrival of Costco in itself would be a major shakeup, even if it was only based in Auckland. Wilkinson said it would attract people from places such as Hamilton or the Bay of Plenty to buy in bulk.

The Warehouse had already had a crack at the fresh groceries market, and was unlikely to have another go, Wilkinson said.

The worlds biggest retailer is US company Walmart, followed by Amazon, Costco, Germanys Schwarz Group (owner of Lidl and Kaufman), and Kroger, all of which offer groceries. Aside from Costco, they are off the local menu, along with Frances Carrefour, or the United Kingdoms Tesco or Waitrose.

But more competition was still possible even without the worlds big players. The rise of shopping from home meant a supermarket did not need to have a physical presence.

For example, Australian grocer Coles, owned by Wesfarmers along with Kmart and Bunnings, could use Kmart and Bunnings stores as pick-up points if it had a New Zealand distribution centre, Wilkinson said.

These are the types of things that are not beyond the bounds of reason, and this is the type of disruption that we probably will see going forward.

SUPPLIED

Costco is making headway with its Auckland superstore and hopes to open by mid-2022.

Lang agreed that the only viable alternative at the moment would be for another brand to enter the market as an online retailer.

Were doing that more and more anyway, and you just can't on a national scale launch another grocery retailer and just expect all these large sites in highly competitive locations to suddenly become available, its just not going to happen.

New Zealand had a long way to go in terms of automation compared with companies such as Amazon, which operated nearly fully automated warehouses, Lang said.

I fill in my form on the website and then somebody goes shopping for me - thats unbelievably backwards. It just seems a really obvious task that should be automated.

Its 2021, its not 1921, so Im surprised where we are at with online shopping, to be honest.

But again, dont hold out any hopes for groceries by Amazon.

Its like Ikea. Ikeas business model works on the premise they need one million people within one car hour from the shop - you can easily achieve that in Auckland and you cant achieve that anywhere else in New Zealand, Lang said.

Supplied

Its 2021, its not 1921, so Im surprised where we are at with online shopping, to be honest, says Bodo Lang.

I think for very much the same reason we wont see a large-scale Amazon retailer entering the grocery market, because their business model is yeah they do groceries, but they do a whole bunch of other things, and were just too small.

A mix and match of smaller local providers could be part of the answer.

Weve seen more people blending their shopping journeys or relationships with their food suppliers, said Wilkinson.

Sometimes theyre shopping in store, sometimes theyre ordering online and having it delivered, other times its pick up in store, and well see more and more of that with potentially less dedication to one particular brand.

Stefan Postles/Getty Images

Australian grocer Coles isnt going to open up a chain of supermarkets in New Zealand, but it could think creatively, says Wilkinson.

Were already seeing that now with the likes of My Food Bag and Hello Fresh, where people will nimbly swap between those brands as well as also potentially doing that staple shop at Pak n Save and those convenience shops at New World and Countdown.

At the premium end there are smaller regional grocers such as Moore Wilsons and Farro, and at the bargain end players such as Reduced to Clear, which stocked products from around the world, he said.

But at the moment they were a drop in the ocean compared with the turnover at the main supermarkets.

Were now starting to see significant changes across New Zealand in terms of the demographics and populations and so everythings up for grabs at the moment as far as we can see.

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If Aldi's not coming to New Zealand, who will shake up our supermarkets? - Stuff.co.nz

What dairy farming is doing to NZ’s water – RNZ

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Photo: RNZ / Vinay Ranchhod

The problem

Dairy is New Zealand's biggest export earner, but the industry producing liquid gold for the economy is frequently accused of polluting our fresh water.

Ninety-five percent of New Zealand's dairy is exported, but the country still has to deal with 100 percent of the cows' urine and feces, as well as the excess chemicals from fertiliser for their feed leaching into waterways.

And there's international recognition that New Zealand's farming has impacted the environment.

A 2017 environmental performance review from the OECD says: "New Zealand's growth model is approaching its environmental limits. Greenhouse gas emissions are increasing. Pollution of freshwater is spreading over a wider area. And the country's biodiversity is under threat."

What's the damage?

The most recent environmental reporting estimated, between 2013 and 2017, 95 percent of river length in pastoral land had nutrient or turbidity levels above default guideline values (DVGs). These values are based on what water quality would be like in the absence of human influence.

In pastoral land 75 percent of river length has a D or E rating for swimming due to E. coli counts.

Water quality in towns and cities is worse, however urban rivers only account for one percent of the length of New Zealand's rivers. The biggest proportion of our rivers - around 50 percent - are in pastoral land.

Photo: Supplied / Minstry for the Environment

How did we get here?

Victoria University of Wellington's Dr Mike Joy has long highlighted the degraded state of New Zealand's waterways. Part of the damage the ecologist sees is caused by what he describes as an increasing reliance on farming inputs.

As the number of cows have increased, so has the amount of fertiliser, irrigation and supplementary food. Since 1990, the amount of nitrogen applied to land has increased 629 percent from 62,000 to 452,000 tonnes.

"We've industrialised. Just in 40 years, we've gone from virtually no inputs to very high levels of inputs, and we've more than doubled the stocking rates of dairy. We've way more than doubled the amount of nitrate and pollution that's lost from the systems."

How does dairy cause the damage?

Farming 'inputs' all have different impacts and some are easier to mitigate than others.

More cows means more hooves walking through waterways and stirring up sediment. Fencing, stock crossings and culverts can help mitigate this and DairyNZ says farmers have worked hard to rectify issues. Riparian planting has also been carried out to reduce the amount of nutrients, such as nitrogen, entering water.

Even though dairy cattle numbers are reducing from the 6.7 million high in 2014, there's still more cows than there used to be, and more cows means more nitrogen-rich urine.

In Canterbury, the problem is exacerbated by the type of soil.

"They're very gravelly, sort of loose soils that that water flows through really, really quickly. What's happening is the urine, highly nutrient laden, almost totally nitrogen, urine going through those soils and appearing in the aquifers," Joy says.

Nitrogen also appears in fertiliser used to promote grass growth.

What's the beef with nitrogen?

Cattle urine and fertiliser both contain nitrogen. It makes grass grow, but if there's more nitrogen than the grass can use, it leaches into groundwater. If it makes its way into rivers it promotes the growth of plants in the water and contributes to algal blooms, reduced oxygen levels and reduced light.

Too much nitrogen in water is bad for fish. Three-quarters of New Zealand's fish species are at risk of extinction, which Joy says is "higher than I can find for any country in the world".

It can also be bad for humans.

In drinking water, high levels can cause the rare but fatal blue baby syndrome. New Zealand's drinking water quality rules are set at a level to avoid this, however recent research has shown an association between much lower levels of nitrate in drinking water and bowel cancer.

What is the 1mg/L thing everyone is talking about?

There are two conversations going on at once, both calling for the central government to set nitrogen limits at 1mg/L, or under 1mg/L

One conversation is related to drinking water.

The level of nitrate-nitrogen allowed in drinking water is currently 11.3mg/L, a level set to avoid the risk of blue baby syndrome and in line with advice from the World Health Organisation.

Public health experts have called for the maximum allowable volume of nitrogen in drinking water to be lowered to 1mg/L as a precautionary response to emerging research associating bowel cancer, preterm births, and low birth weights with levels above 1mg/L.

The second conversation is about the amount of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) allowed in rivers and fresh waterways. Other countries, including China and parts of the United States and Europe, have a limit of 1 mg/L.

When the government put together a package of rules around freshwater in 2020 a limit on DIN was discussed but - controversially - not implemented.

Twelve scientists, including Joy, wanted the limit to be set at 1mg/L but five scientists of the 19-strong Science and Technical Advisory Group consulting on the fresh water package weren't convinced a bottom line would lead to an improvement in ecosystem health.

The government did strengthen the nitrate toxicity measure from 80 percent to 95 percent. This means the quality of water can only kill 5 percent of macroinvertebrates - creatures without backbones, which can be seen without a microscope - living in it.

It was a measure suggested by DairyNZ, who pushed for 90 percent, and promoted by the Ministry for Primary Industries instead of a DIN, but not everyone was happy with this, especially environmental groups.

When the government announced the new rules, it committed to a review of the DIN bottom line in September this year.

That review is now underway. The Ministry for the Environment told RNZ it's currently preparing advice for the government on whether the science behind a bottom line of 1mg/L DIN has become clearer and establishing the environmental benefit and economic impact of the bottom line.

What does the industry say about dissolved inorganic nitrogen bottom line?

DairyNZ is still against a DIN. "We oppose the DIN limit due to a lack of science demonstrating it will deliver the ecosystem health outcomes targeted. Instead, we advocated for strengthening of the nitrate toxicity standards," a spokesperson says.

Dropping to 1mg/L would have "massive impacts, significantly constraining production in many agricultural catchments over a rule which would not deliver better ecosystem health."

Fonterra says it supports a bottom-line but there are caveats: "We do not support using nitrogen and phosphorous limits alone as a measure of a waterway's health - measures should represent the full, biological ecosystem such as presence of macroinvertebrates and fish, and be tailored to each region."

Fonterra hasn't analysed what the economic impact of a DIN bottom line of 1mg/L would be.

Federated Farmers says its view is that "rather than imposing further standards and limits at this time, such as a 1mg/L rule, it is better to give the agricultural sector time to implement the plethora of new rules and regulations first."

In areas of the country which are intensively farmed, a spokesperson for Federated Farmers says a bottom line of 1mg/L would "have a substantial and perhaps devastating impact on farming and entire New Zealand economy."

What do the people who want a lower DIN say?

Recently there have been calls for the limit to be set to under one.

Joy co-authored a paper showing the 1mg/L limit is generous. "It should have been even less than that." The paper suggests 0.6mg/L.

Environmental groups are also calling for the limit to be set at "under one". In a joint statement Greenpeace, Choose Clean Water, Forest & Bird and the Environmental Defense Society said the science is clear and the government should slash the limit.

Forest & Bird's Freshwater Advocate Annabeth Cohen said: "We urge the Government to accept the scientific consensus that ecosystem health isn't possible if nitrate pollution in waterways exceeds 1 mg/L.

"This is a conservative standard of freshwater quality, despite what the agri-industry would have New Zealand believe. We need to stay under one, just to ensure the river can support life."

Read more:

What dairy farming is doing to NZ's water - RNZ

New Zealand-shaped front brings heavy rain, wild winds, and flood risk – Stuff.co.nz

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Braden Fastier/Stuff

A pedestrian navigates their way to work in central Nelson during rain on Monday, with more expected through the day.

Many areas are being battered by heavy rain and wild winds as a New Zealand-shaped front rolls west across the country.

Severe weather warnings were in force for Northland, Auckland, the Coromandel, Bay of Plenty, Nelson, and Westland on Monday morning, with heavy rain expected.

People in Auckland and Fiordland were warned to brace for strong winds, and there were also a number of less severe weather watches in force across the country.

Hossein Soltanloo/Unsplash

Auckland had 40 millimetres of rain on Monday morning (file photo).

MetService meteorologist Dan Corrigan said all the mornings warnings and watches related to an active weather front coming from the Tasman Sea, moving in a line parallel to New Zealand.

READ MORE:* Weather warning: Flood-hit areas in firing line as stormy front set to cover the country* Weather: Snow, frosty temperatures and wet, windy weather on the way* Severe gales expected for Far North, heavy rain for Northland and Coromandel

Everyones going to be affected, he said.

For Auckland, despite the worst being already over, ferry services from Pine Harbour and Gulf Harbour were cancelled on Monday morning due to severe weather.

Corrigan said 40 millimetres had fallen in the past six hours, but half of that fell in just one hour, from 2am.

The Nelson-Tasman district, still recovering from last weeks devastating floods, saw the heaviest rainfall, with the ranges west of Motueka getting nearly 70mm in the past six hours.

CHRIS SKELTON / PETER MEECHEM

Westport is now moving into a recovery mode after recent flooding in the small coastal town.

That heavy rain warning is in force well into the evening there. Were expecting [it] to continue to fall throughout the day.

Of most concern were the rain warnings for Nelson and Westland, and the less severe heavy rain watch for north-west Marlborough, MetService told Stuff on Sunday.

Those areas were affected by severe flooding and heavy rain on July 17 and 18, with Buller district still under a state of emergency and dozens of flood-damaged homes in Westport thought to be lost.

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Rivers bursting their banks, flash floods and more intense cyclones. How climate change is making floods more extreme.

Corrigan said places where the ground was saturated may experience further impacts, including possible flooding.

After the front breezes through, he said, it would be followed by a showery flow, bringing a risk of thunderstorms along the countrys west coast including Auckland until later in the day.

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New Zealand-shaped front brings heavy rain, wild winds, and flood risk - Stuff.co.nz

Russian Module Headed for the ISS Is Still Having Problems – Gizmodo

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The International Space Station in 2006, shortly after the departure of Space Shuttle Atlantis.Image: NASA (Getty Images)

Russias newly launched International Space Station module Nauka is still in the fight as of Friday afternoon, as early reports indicate that the modules backup engines have fired successfully. Thats a big relief for Roscosmos, which nearly saw its long-awaited module become a tragic piece of space trivia instead of the newest piece of the International Space Station. But its not out of the woods yet.

The first glitch in Naukas journey happened yesterday, when the spacecraft didnt complete its first orbit-raising burn. This meant that the uncrewed Nauka wasnt on track to actually intercept the ISS, which its scheduled to dock with on Thursday, July 29. The problem was attributed to a software issue in a computer aboard Nauka, which prevented the spacecrafts main engines from firing. Naukas team was able to manage a remote course correction, but a second bout of course corrections were deemed necessary, and scheduled for today. One early report from journalist Anatoly Zak indicated that one of the spacecrafts engines sputtered back to life in a mission. The backup engine seems to have fired fine, said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in an email today, though he added that the status of the engines was not yet certain and it would likely be a few hours before a new dataset from Nauka verified the situation.

The thrusters are just one piece of the engineering puzzle, so the new module is hardly home free. Naukas also been having issues with one antenna and its docking target, and its uncertain how those issues will affect docking attempts, SpaceNews reported. Apparently there is still an issue with the Kurs rendezvous system, and that is pretty critical for docking, McDowell said, adding that the spacecrafts TORU systemwhich allows the astronauts aboard the ISS assist with the dockingis working normally.

For now, the Pirs docking compartment is currently sitting in Naukas assigned dock on the ISS. Pirs scheduled undocking to make way for the new module was postponed from Friday to Sunday, according to RussianSpaceWeb.

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It is not unusual for complex spacecraft to have teething troubles. However, the number and severity of problems on this flight is above the norm, and perhaps this is not too surprising given the long delays in the development of the vehicle. Nevertheless, I am moderately optimistic that they will eventually complete a successful docking, although not necessarily on the first attempt, McDowell said.

Keep your eyes on this spacecraft. Theres certainly a twist or two left in this tale.

More: Russia Averts Possible Disaster as New Space Station Module Finally Reaches Proper Orbit

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Russian Module Headed for the ISS Is Still Having Problems - Gizmodo

Russia ditches 20-year-old space station module to clear way for lab’s arrival – CBS News

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A Russian Progress cargo ship undocked from the International Space Station early Monday, taking with it the two-decades-old Pirs airlock and docking compartment to clear the way for Thursday's arrival of Russia's new Nauka multipurpose lab module.

With the Progress MS-16/77P supply ship firmly locked to Pirs, hooks and latches holding the docking compartment to the Zvezda service module's Earth-facing port were commanded open, and the Progress backed away at 6:55 a.m. EDT.

After moving a safe distance away, the Progress fired its thrusters at 10:01 a.m., setting up a destructive plunge into the atmosphere 41 minutes later. The braking burn was planned to make sure any debris that might survive reentry heating would fall harmlessly into the southern Pacific Ocean.

Undocking originally was planned for last Friday, two days after Nauka's launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, but problems with the lab's navigation and propulsion systems prompted Russian flight controllers to delay Pirs' departure.

Finally, after several anxious days of troubleshooting, Nauka's propulsion system was restored to normal operation, and two successful tests of its KURS navigation and rendezvous system were carried out. While few details were provided, Russian mission managers then cleared Pirs and Progress for departure.

Pirs was launched on September 14, 2001, three days after the 9/11 attacks. It served as a docking port for visiting Soyuz crew ships and Progress freighters for nearly 20 years and as an airlock for Russian spacewalks.

The much larger 44,000-pound Nauka module features an airlock and docking port, expanded crew quarters, research space, an additional toilet, oxygen generator, solar arrays and a European Space Agency-built robot arm. Nauka's thrusters also will help provide roll control to keep the station properly oriented.

With the departure of Pirs, NASA flight controllers planned to reposition the station's Canadian-built robot arm on the Russian Zarya module so it could carry out a seven-hour inspection of the Zvezda module's now-vacant Earth-facing port. Russian engineers want to make sure no debris or other issues are present that might prevent the docking mechanism from working properly when Nauka arrives.

Assuming no problems are found, the lab module will complete its rendezvous with the space station Thursday, moving in for docking at Zvezda's Earth-facing port at 9:24 a.m. It will take up to 11 Russian spacewalks over about seven months to electrically connect and outfit the new lab module.

Nauka's docking will come the day before a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket launches a Boeing CST-100 Starliner crew capsule to the station for an unpiloted test flight. The Atlas 5 rollout to pad 41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is expected Wednesday, setting up a launch at 2:53 p.m. Friday.

The Starliner, like SpaceX's already operational Crew Dragon spacecraft, is designed to carry U.S. and partner-agency astronauts to and from the space station on a commercial basis, helping end NASA's post-shuttle reliance on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for crew transportation.

An initial Starliner test flight in December 2019 had major software problems, prompting Boeing to launch a second unpiloted test flight before the ship's first planned launch with a crew on board late this year or early next year.

For the test flight, the Starliner will dock at the front end of the station's forward Harmony module, returning to a White Sands, New Mexico, landing on August 5.

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Russia ditches 20-year-old space station module to clear way for lab's arrival - CBS News

Space Station Freedom – Wikipedia

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Proposed U.S. space station

Space Station Freedom was a NASA project to construct a permanently crewed Earth-orbiting space station in the 1980s. Although approved by then-president Ronald Reagan and announced in the 1984 State of the Union address, Freedom was never constructed or completed as originally designed, and after several cutbacks, the project evolved into the International Space Station program.

Space Station Freedom was a multinational collaborative project involving four participating space agencies: NASA (United States), NASDA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada).

As the Apollo program began to wind down in the late 1960s, there were numerous proposals for what should follow it. Of the many proposals, large and small, three major themes emerged. Foremost among them was a crewed mission to Mars, using systems not unlike the ones used for Apollo. A permanent space station was also a major goal, both to help construct the large spacecraft needed for a Mars mission as well as to learn about long-term operations in space. Finally, a space logistics vehicle was intended to cheaply launch crews and cargo to that station.

In the early 1970s, Spiro Agnew took these general plans to President Nixon, who was battling with a major federal budget deficit. When he presented the three concepts, Nixon told him to select one. After much debate, NASA selected the space logistics vehicle, which by this time was already known as the Space Shuttle. They argued that the Shuttle would so lower costs of launching cargo that it would make the construction of the station less expensive.

From this point forward these plans were never seriously changed, in spite of dramatic changes to the funding environment and the complete redesign of the Shuttle concept. In the early 1980s, with the Space Shuttle completed, NASA proposed the creation of a large, permanently crewed space station, which then-NASA Administrator James M. Beggs called "the next logical step" in space. In some ways it was meant to be the U.S. answer to the Soviet Mir.

NASA plans called for the station, which was later dubbed Space Station Freedom, to function as an orbiting repair shop for satellites, an assembly point for spacecraft, an observation post for astronomers, a microgravity laboratory for scientists, and a microgravity factory for companies.

Reagan announced plans to build Space Station Freedom in 1984, stating: "We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful economic and scientific gain."

Following the presidential announcement, NASA began a set of studies to determine the potential uses for the space station, both in research and in industry, in the U.S. or overseas. This led to the creation of a database of thousands of possible missions and payloads; studies were also carried out with a view to supporting potential planetary missions, as well as those in low Earth orbit.

Several Space Shuttle missions in the 1980s and early 1990s included spacewalks to demonstrate and test space station construction techniques. After the establishment of the initial baseline design, the project evolved extensively, growing in scope and cost.

In April 1984, the newly established Space Station Program Office at Johnson Space Center produced a first reference configuration; this design would serve as a baseline for further planning. The chosen design was the "Power Tower", a long central keel with most mass located at either end. This arrangement would provide enough gravity gradient stability to keep the station aligned with the keel pointed towards the Earth, reducing the need for thruster firings. Most designs featured a cluster of modules at the lower end and a set of articulated solar arrays at the upper end. It also contained a servicing bay. In April 1985, the program selected a set of contractors to carry out definition studies and preliminary design; various trade-offs were made in this process, balancing higher development costs against reduced long-term operating costs.

At the same time, late 1986, NASA carried out a study into new configuration options to reduce development costs; options studied ranged from the use of a Skylab-type station to a phased development of the Dual-Keel configuration. This approach involved splitting assembly into two phases; Phase 1 would provide the central modules, and the transverse boom, but with no keels. The solar arrays would be augmented to ensure 75kW of power would be provided, and the polar platform and servicing facility were again deferred. The study concluded that the project was viable, reducing development costs while minimizing negative impacts, and it was designated the Revised Baseline Configuration. This would have a development cost of US$15.3 billion (in FY1989 dollars) and FEL in the first quarter of 1994. This replanning was endorsed by the National Research Council in September 1987, which also recommended that the long-term national goals should be studied before committing to any particular Phase 2 design.

During 1986 and 1987, various other studies were carried out on the future of the U.S. space program; the results of these often impacted the Space Station, and their recommendations were folded into the revised baseline as necessary. One of the results of these was to baseline the Station program as requiring five shuttle flights a year for operations and logistics, rotating four crew at a time with the aim of extending individual stay times to 180 days.

NASA signed final ten-year contracts for developing the Space Station in September 1988, and the project was finally moving into the hardware fabrication phase.

The Space Station Freedom design was slightly modified in late 1989 after the program's Fiscal 1990 budget again was reduced from $2.05 billion to $1.75 billion when the design was found to be 23% overweight and over budget, too complicated to assemble, and providing little power for its users. The 1990 Space Exploration Initiative called for the construction of the Space Station Freedom. Congress consequently demanded yet another redesign in October 1990, and requested further cost reductions after the fiscal 1991 budget was cut from $2.5 billion to $1.9 billion. NASA unveiled its new space station design in March 1991.

Repeated budget cuts had forced a postponement of the first launch by a year, to March 1995. The Station would be permanently crewed from June 1997 onwards, and completed in February 1998. Cost escalation of the project and financial difficulties in Russia led to a briefing between NASA and NPO Energia on Mir-2. In November 1993, Freedom, Mir-2, and the European and Japanese modules were incorporated into a single International Space Station.

Underestimates by NASA of the station program's cost and unwillingness by the U.S. Congress to appropriate funding for the space station resulted in delays of Freedom's design and construction; it was regularly redesigned and re-scoped. Between 1984 and 1993 it went through seven major re-designs, losing capacity and capabilities each time. Rather than being completed in a decade, as Reagan had predicted, Freedom was never built, and no Shuttle launches were made as part of the program.

By 1993, Freedom was politically unviable; the administration had changed, and Congress was tiring of paying yet more money into the station program. In addition, there were open questions over the need for the station. Redesigns had cut most of the science capacity by this point, and the Space Race had ended in 1975 with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. NASA presented several options to President Clinton, but even the most limited of these was still seen as too expensive. In June 1993, an amendment to remove space station funding from NASA's appropriations bill failed by one vote in the House of Representatives.[1] That October, a meeting between NASA and the Russian Space Agency agreed to the merger of the projects into what would become the International Space Station. The merger of the project faced opposition by representatives such as Tim Roemer who feared Russia would break the Missile Technology Control Regime agreement and felt the program was far too costly.[2] Proposed bills did not pass Congress.

In 1993, the Clinton administration announced the transformation of Space Station Freedom into the International Space Station (ISS). NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin supervised the addition of Russia to the project. To accommodate reduced budgets, the station design was scaled back from 508 to 353 square feet (47 to 33 m), the crew capacity of the NASA-provided part was reduced from 7 to 3 (while the complete station is crewed by 6 but may be increased to 7[3]), and the station's functions were reduced.[4] Its first component was launched into orbit in 1998,[5] with the first long-term residents arriving in November 2000.[6]

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Space Station Freedom - Wikipedia

NASA astronauts are growing chili peppers on the International Space Station – Chron

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NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station are growing red and green Hatch chile peppers that will be ready to eat in just a few months.

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The 48 chile pepper seeds were planted here on Earth at the Kennedy Space Center then delivered to the ISS in June. The seeds were slotted into the Advanced Plant Habitat, one of three plant growth chambers on the ISS. This is one of the longest and hardest growth experiments the astronauts and scientists on the ground have attempted.

Luckily, NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough, who initiated NASAs Plant Habitat-04 (PH-04) experiment onboard, has already tended to space crops. He helped grow (and eat) "Outredgeous" red romaine lettuce in late 2016.

The peppers will be harvested in about four months. Some will be sampled by the astronauts onboard, while others will be sent back to the Kennedy Space Center for analysis.

It is one of the most complex plant experiments on the station to date because of the long germination and growing times, said Matt Romeyn, principal investigator for PH-04. We have previously tested flowering to increase the chance for a successful harvest because astronauts will have to pollinate the peppers to grow fruit.

Jason Fischer (left), a research scientist, and Lashelle Spencer, a plant scientist, with the Laboratory Support Services and Operations contract at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, harvest peppers from pepper plants on Jan. 15, 2020, that were grown in the Space Station Processing Facility for a growth assessment in preparation for sending them to space. As NASA prepares to send humans beyond low-Earth orbit, the ability for astronauts to grow a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables in space will be critical. Fresh produce will be an essential supplement to the crew's pre-packaged diet during long-duration space exploration when they are away from Earth for extended periods of time.

Growing peppers on the ISS has a few benefits for NASA's astronauts. Living in microgravity can cause astronauts to lose some of their sense of taste and smell, which means spicy foods are a welcome meal for some. Peppers are also high in Vitamin C and other nutrients. Plus, the bright peppers even help the astronauts' mental health while onboard the ISS.

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Growing colorful vegetables in space can have long-term benefits for physical and psychological health, Romeyn said. We are discovering that growing plants and vegetables with colors and smells helps to improve astronauts well-being.

It's comforting to know when humans eventually colonize Mars, we might not have to give up our beloved chiles. Man can only live on astronaut ice cream for so long.

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NASA astronauts are growing chili peppers on the International Space Station - Chron

Japan plans remote-controlled robotic space tourism to the ISS and beyond – The Register

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The International Space Station is getting mobile robot space avatars controllable by the public from Earth, courtesy of a joint project between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and ANA Holdings telepresence start-up avatarin.

The project will create a virtual remote space tourism experience aimed at those who can't afford to hitch a ride with Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson.

JAXAs press release reads:

This isnt the first collaboration between JAXA and avatarin. The duo collaborated last year resulting in a technology demonstration of virtual experience enabling robots onboard the KIBO module of the ISS.

The new project builds on that technology demonstration increasing the role of robots onboard the ISS with a new type of avatar that will act as a co-worker for astronauts on the station and on other settings like the moon. Avatars working in this capacity will have high-precision hands. Other avatars will be all about an entertainment experience .

In addition to the two new types of avatars, the project will use an existing type of avatar robot called newme as education and public relations tools, giving virtual tours and nurturing interest in space exploration from Earth.

avatarin will provide the avatars and telepresence tech; JAXA will bring its space experience, knowledge and facilities; and a third party, the University of Tokyo School of Engineering, will pitch in by developing a self-position estimation system.

None of the parties are saying when the avatars will become available for a spot of tele-tourism, but their aspirations already exceed ISS experiences and aim at "possible robotics technologies that can be effectively deployed in future space exploration missions."

And seeing as JAXA has twice landed on asteroids, we may be in for quite a ride.

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Japan plans remote-controlled robotic space tourism to the ISS and beyond - The Register

An arm made for walking is about to arrive at the space station – Digital Trends

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The International Space Station (ISS) is preparing to take delivery of the European Robotic Arm (ERA) later this week.

The 11-meter-long robot launched on a Russian Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 21, and is scheduled to dock with the ISS on Thursday.

Due to its large size, the ERA was folded into a more compact shape prior to loading, and then attached to what will be its home base at the ISS the new Multipurpose Laboratory Module, also called Nauka.

The space station is already home to two robotic arms from Canada and Japan. While extremely useful for docking procedures and assisting astronauts on spacewalks, neither of these arms can reach the Russian segment of the orbiting outpost. But the ERA will be able to do just that.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the new robotic arm will also be the first with the ability to walk around the outside of the ISS by moving hand-over-hand between fixed base-points.

Moving hand-over-hand around the Russian parts of the station, the ERA will bring more freedom, more flexibility, and more skills to space operations, said David Parker, ESA director of human and robotic exploration.

Itll also be the first robotic arm at the ISS thats able to be controlled by crew members both inside and outside the station.

The robots main tasks will be to handle experiment payloads and other components, transport spacewalkers between locations outside the station like a cherry-picker crane, and carry out inspection work of the stations exterior using its four built-in cameras. During its activities, the ERA will be able to handle components weighing up to 8,000kg with an impressive 5mm precision.

First, though, the ERA needs to be set up. Current ISS astronaut Thomas Pesquet will help prepare the robot for installation, with incoming astronauts Matthias Maurer and Samantha Cristoforetti conducting the first of five spacewalks to fully deploy the device.

The ERA is the work of a consortium of 22 European companies from seven countries. It was actually designed more than three decades ago and was supposed to head to the ISS long before now, but technical issues kept it grounded for longer than expected.

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An arm made for walking is about to arrive at the space station - Digital Trends

Planetary conjunction: Mars, Venus, Moon set to align on July 12-13 – Hindustan Times

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PUBLISHED ON JUL 12, 2021 07:28 AM IST

Those interested to see the Earth's neighbours are in for a treat this week. Mars and Venus - two of the Earth's closest neighbours - will come closest to each other in the sky on Tuesday giving a chance to sky gazers to watch these planets with naked eyes.

Both Mars and Venus will appear in the western horizon under clear weather conditions just after sunset.

Before that, the moon will pass closest to the two planets on Monday.

This unique phenomenon is part of planetary conjunction. Such conjunction takes place when two planets appear to have come closer, while in reality they remain far away.

Mars and Venus are likely to be 0.5 degrees apart as observed from Earth, though they are actually further apart. Bengalurus Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) stated that the conjunction will also include the Earths moon coming close to within four degrees of the planets.

"Mars and Venus are passing close to each other in the sky and will be only 0.5 deg (as wide as the size of the Moon) on 13 July. The Moon will also be close to them on 12 July. This is a naked eye event, so go out and see them every evening from today. We bring you 12 posters!" the institute posted in its Twitter handle IIAstrophysics.

Both Mars and Venus are expected to move away gradually after Tuesday. The planetary alignment will be observable only from Earth. It can be viewed from anywhere in India in clear skies. Both planets can be spotted aligned in the same frame through telescopes or binoculars. The angles of the paths are set to be slightly different for northern parts of India.

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Planetary conjunction: Mars, Venus, Moon set to align on July 12-13 - Hindustan Times

Worlds largest telescope will see better with Irish technology – The Irish Times

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The worlds largest telescope the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is under construction in Chile. When it captures its first light, sometime in 2027 or 2028, Irish adaptive optics technology will be there to ensure it sees further and with greater clarity than any telescope in human history.

The opportunity for Irish astronomers to take part in the ELT project arose when the government decided to join the European Southern Observatory (ESO) the top intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe in 2018. Membership cost 14.66 million, with an annual fee of 3.5 million.

A team of researchers at NUI Galway, led by Dr Nicholas Devaney, with expertise in adaptive optics are involved in the ELT project as part of a consortium also involving the Grenoble Institute for Planetary Sciences and Astrophysics and the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) in Italy.

The consortium will design and manage the construction of an instrument on the ELT, called multi-conjugate adaptive optics relay (MAORY), which corrects image distortion due to atmosphere blurring. The NUIG team were invited to join the MAORY project based on their scientific reputation.

The Galway team is responsible for the device we call the test unit that is needed to pass all the performance on this domain here in Europe and then also when we arrive on the mountains in Chile, says Paolo Ciliegi, an astronomer at INAF; the overall principal investigator of MAORY.

They put on the table their expertise in adaptive optics and also the construction of this test unit, Ciliegi adds.

The construction of the ELT at an altitude of some 10,000 feet on top of a mountain called Cerro Amazones has halted due to the Covid situation in Chile. The site is in the Atacama Desert, a high plateau covering an area slightly bigger than Ireland, and made up mostly of stones, salt and sand.

The altitude puts it above the cloud line, so there is very little precipitation, which can distort telescope images of space. That dryness this is the driest desert on the planet outside the poles make it an ideal location for astronomers to view the heavens. Yet the ELT must still peer up and out through about 480km of atmosphere, with the distortion that this brings.

When you feel the bumpiness in an airplane thats the atmospheric turbulence, says Devaney. The turbulent atmosphere, he says, is made up of bubbles of air with differing temperatures. The speed of light through air varies slightly with the temperature of the air through which it travels.

The net effect of this is to reduce the sharpness of images from space that a ground telescope can gather. That introduces distortions in the light which leads to a blurry image instead of a sharper image, he adds.

Adaptive optics technology works hard to overcome such atmospheric distortion. This task is akin to gathering light that has been bent and scattered in water and rebuilding it into its underformed original form. This is the job that the MAORY instrument will be performing for the ELT.

A limitation of adaptive optics technology up to now has been that it relies on a natural constellation of bright stars to sharpen distorted images from an optical telescope viewing a big area of sky, but such constellations are not always available. In order to get over this issue scientists use guide stars.

The ELT is going to generate six artificial laser-generated guide stars which will act like a natural constellation of six bright stars to facilitate adaptive optics to work wherever the ELT is pointing towards in the sky. It has proved a huge challenge over decades to get the lasers up to sufficient power to produce bright enough guide stars to facilitate adaptive optics.

After much research scientists decided to use a sodium wavelength for producing guide stars. This is because there is a natural layer of charged sodium ions in the Earths atmosphere at an altitude of 90km, which can be excited and energized by a laser so that it looks just like a natural star.

This is perfect for astronomers, says Devaney. Its like the ions were put out there specifically for that purpose. It means that it is possible to make constellations of artificial guide stars using the six lasers on the ELT.

An optical telescope works by gathering light through mirrors. The bigger its mirrors the more light the telescope can gather and the farther it can see. The main mirror of the ELT will be an enormous 39 metres ( 127.9ft), in diameter. Thats roughly equivalent to 21 men, six feet tall, lying head to toe.

The designers knew that technically it wasnt possible to construct the main mirror as one piece. They also knew that it would be difficult to carry large mirror segments to a mountain top. A decision was therefore made to separately make 798 hexagonal-shaped segments; each 1.5 metres wide weighing 250kg, which, when aligned carefully together, would make up the main ELT mirror.

The mirror segments had to be aligned with nano-metre precision, and that alignment has to be maintained as the telescope moves and tracks objects. There are some 9,000 tiny sensors arranged around each segment so that any kind of motion in one segment with respect to another is accounted for.

There are also actuators that bend the mirrors into optimum shape. The biggest optical telescopes today have three mirrors. The ELT will have five.

In return for Devaneys team working on the adaptive optics on the ELT his astronomer colleagues at NUIG are to be offered ELT observation time. One of those scientists hoping to use the ELT to advance his work is physicist Dr Matt Redman, director of the centre of astronomy at NUIG.

Redman is interested in planetary nebulae. These are badly named celestial objects as they have nothing to do with planets. They looked like planets when viewed by the first telescopes so thats how they got the name. They might better be described as the glowing shell of gas ejected from a dying star.

These nebulae are observed in a variety of shapes including butterfly-shaped, elliptical, spherical, ring-shaped, bi-polar, cylindrical and round.

The big mystery is that the Sun is round, spherical and will turn into one of these objects, and these objects are not round and spherical, says Redman. The most likely idea is a companion star, or even a companion planet, disturbing the material as the dying star throws it off, he explains.

I am hoping the MAORY will be able to get right into the centre of these objects and we might even see that shaping mechanism happening, he adds.

There are some who question the economic and scientific logic of building expensive telescopes on the top of Chilean mountains in order to see through atmospheric distortion when it is possible to put a space telescope, like the Hubble telescope, into orbit up where atmospheric distortion is not a factor.

The justification lies in the cost of getting telescopes into orbit against building them on Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope, which had a primary mirror 2.4metres wide, cost 2.5 billion (today equivalent) to get into orbit and operational. The ELT will cost some 1.3 billion; about half the price.

This point of view holds that although they do different things, ground-based telescopes like ELT give more scientific bang for your buck than space telescopes. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), set to launch in November, will cost 8.2 billion.

The ELT sees farther, clearer. You are able to collect a lot more, like with a 39-metre mirror, says Devaney. You are able to see further away and see things that are much fainter, such as really faint galaxies. The ELT will be able to see things that are fainter than was possible with the Hubble.

The huge jump in astronomical capability that the ELT will provide is likely to trigger a round of unexpected scientific findings that will change our understanding of the Universe and how it was formed in its earliest days.

Weve seen it before. For example, in 1998 data from the Hubble led scientists to conclude the universe was expanding at an ever accelerating rate. Each time there is a big step forward like this it leads to a huge mushrooming of astronomical activities and discoveries, says Devaney.

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Worlds largest telescope will see better with Irish technology - The Irish Times

Stars and Galaxies . Seeing Some Cosmic X-Ray Emitters Might Be a Matter of Perspective – Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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Scientists have suspected that some ULXs might be hidden from view for this reason. SS 433 provided a unique chance to test this idea because, like a top, it wobbles on its axis a process astronomers call precession.

Most of the time, both of SS 433s cones point well away from Earth. But because of the way SS 433 precesses, one cone periodically tilts slightly toward Earth, so scientists can see a little bit of the X-ray light coming out of the top of the cone. In the new study, the scientists looked at how the X-rays seen by NuSTAR change as SS 433 moves. They show that if the cone continued to tilt toward Earth so that scientists could peer straight down it, they would see enough X-ray light to officially call SS 433 a ULX.

Black holes that feed at extreme rates have shaped the history of our universe. Supermassive black holes, which are millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, can profoundly affect their host galaxy when they feed. Early in the universes history, some of these massive black holes may have fed as fast as SS 433, releasing huge amounts of radiation that reshaped local environments. Outflows (like the cones in SS 433) redistributed matter that could eventually form stars and other objects.

But because these quickly consuming behemoths reside in incredibly distant galaxies (the one at the heart of the Milky Way isnt currently eating much), they remain difficult to study. With SS 433, scientists have found a miniature example of this process, much closer to home and much easier to study, and NuSTAR has provided new insights into the activity occurring there.

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Stars and Galaxies . Seeing Some Cosmic X-Ray Emitters Might Be a Matter of Perspective - Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Venus, Mars and crescent moon to align in ‘planetary conjunction’ during 12-13 July – Firstpost

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FP TrendingJul 12, 2021 09:37:08 IST

A special week is ahead for sky gazers and astronomy enthusiasts as two of Earths immediate neighbours - Venus and Mars will be coming close to one another in the coming days. This celestial event is being termed as planetary conjunction because it will be easily visible to the naked eye.

Being observable only from Earth, a planetary conjunction occurs when two planets come closest to each other on a specific day even though they remain far away from one another.

Venus, Mars and moon planetary conjunction. Image credit: Abigail Banerji/Tech2

Informing people about the event on social media, the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) shared a post revealing details. Mars and Venus are passing close to each other in the sky and will be only 0.5 degrees (as wide as the size of the Moon) on 13 July, a tweet from the official handle reads.

Further in the post, the IIA informed that the moon will also be close to Venus and Mars on 12 July. The institute had asked sky gazers to go out and witness the event every evening from today, 8 July.

This amazing sight will be only visible in the western sky or horizon under clear sky conditions after sunset.

As the meeting of these celestial objects is a big occurrence in the sky, astronomy enthusiasts can commence observing the sky from Thursday (8 July) and continue till Tuesday (13 July). People who continue watching it after the event will also be able to see the departure of these planets. Any ordinary binoculars will show Venus and Mars at their closest.

Meanwhile, the Pune-based Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) and the IIA, located in Bengaluru have invited photograph entries of the event. Candidates who are interested can send their photos or sketches to outreach@iiap.res.in. The best among them will be published by the institutes online.

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Venus, Mars and crescent moon to align in 'planetary conjunction' during 12-13 July - Firstpost

Researchers Discover Orbital Patterns of Trans-Neptunian Objects Vary Based on Their Color – SciTechDaily

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Credit: NYU Abu Dhabi

Data collected can be used to provide new insights into the evolution of the Kuiper Belt, and the larger solar system.

Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), small objects that orbit the sun beyond Neptune, are fossils from the early days of the solar system which can tell us a lot about its formation and evolution.

A new study led by Mohamad Ali-Dib, a research scientist at the NYU Abu DhabiCenter for Astro, Particle, and Planetary Physics,reports the significant discovery that two groups of TNOs with different surface colors also have very different orbital patterns. This new information can be compared to models of the solar system to provide fresh insights into its early chemistry. Additionally, this discovery paves the way for further understanding of the formation of the Kuiper Belt itself, an area beyond Neptune comprised of icy objects, that is also the source of some comets.

In the paper,The rarity of very red TNOs in the scattered disk,publishedinThe Astronomical Journal,the researchers explain how they studied the chemical composition of TNOs in order to understand the dynamical history of the Kuiper Belt. TNOs are either deemed Less Red (often referred to as Gray), or Very Red (often referred to as Red) based on their surface colors. By re-analyzing a 2019 data set, the researchers discovered that gray and red TNOs have vastly different orbital patterns. Through additional calculations, the researchers determined that the two groups of TNOs formed in different locations, and this led to the dichotomy in both their orbits and colors.

Many models of the solar system have been designed to show how the Kuiper Belt has evolved, but these models only study the origins of its orbital structure or colors, not both simultaneously.

With more data, our teams work could be applied to more detailed solar system models and has the potential to reveal new insights about the solar system and how it has changed over the course of time, said Ali-Dib.

Reference: The Rarity of Very Red Trans-Neptunian Objects in the Scattered Disk by Mohamad Ali-Dib, Michal Marsset, Wing-Cheung Wong and Rola Dbouk, 16 June 2021, The Astronomical Journal.DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/abf6ca

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Researchers Discover Orbital Patterns of Trans-Neptunian Objects Vary Based on Their Color - SciTechDaily

Taught skills needed for the space sector the space sector – Open Access Government

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The space sector of the worlds economy is growing, the UK is no exception and, indeed, it is UK Government policy that it should grow. Currently, the UK has 5.1% of worldwide economic activity related to space, and the Government has set the goal to grow that to 10% by 2030.

The UK is already involved in the production of nearly half of all small satellites and a quarter of all telecommunications satellites. A 2020 report states that the space sector itself is worth an annual 14.8 billion to the UK economy, with productivity at three times the national average. This does not include the larger contribution from companies that access space data or assets in their daily work.

That is part of the attraction. Though the hardware is launched into space, the money stays on Earth, paying for a wide variety of skilled jobs. Engineers of many types, physicists, mathematicians, programmers, material scientists, telecommunications experts, geographers, earth scientists, oceanographers, data analysts, the list goes on. Once up there, the hardware creates new markets with new users, products and services. There is also the endless positive PR of the scientific exploration of the Moon and planets, via UK involvement in the European Space Agency (ESA) and projects run by the UK Space Agency.

As well as providing support via central facilities at places such as the Harwell Space Cluster, and trade bodies such as UK Space, the UK must do more. One thing it needs is a supply of trained graduates for the space job market. This doesnt just mean astronauts or jobs with ESA, as most jobs are in the UK in industry and applications.

Traditionally, graduates entering these positions have come from the big city red-bricks supporting the aerospace industry, such as Southampton, Birmingham and Strathclyde. Often, however, these courses are more aero than space. There are also other niche providers with courses like Astronomy, Space Science and Astrophyics degrees, which provide broader, physics based qualifications with space specialisms.

If the sector is to grow, more of the mainstream engineering departments must add space to their aero courses, and more niche providers must add space as well, or at the very least, utilise space products and data sets in their courses.

By adding space related or generated activities to their courses, universities will be keeping their degrees up to date, and also sensitise students to the many work opportunities which will only grow over the next decade.

One important step is the growth of undergraduate degrees with a year in industry. Traditionally often the preserve of engineering and business degrees, these are now widely available in many universities and should be offered on every science or engineering degree programme at the very least. Companies themselves offer internships, either during the undergraduate degree or as one-year courses after graduation in the case of ESA.

Finding a job in the space sector may sound daunting, but there is always help. For example, UKSEDS (the organisation of UK space students) runs a careers web page. UK Space also helps students find internships, and there is a service by the UK Space Agency helping students and companies find short term placements.

The next workforce generation wants meaningful employment which improves the world. But how do you monitor the climate? From space. How do you find the carbon and methane emitters? From space. How do you build a new, connected world? From space. From a graduates perspective, the space sector means well-paid jobs in an industry that is making a difference.

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Taught skills needed for the space sector the space sector - Open Access Government

NASA will attempt a ‘risky’ maneuver to fix its broken Hubble Space Telescope as early as next week – Business Insider

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has been offline for nearly a month.

The telescope's payload computer a 1980s machine that controls and monitors all of the spacecraft's science instruments suddenly stopped working on June 13. Engineers have been troubleshooting the problem since then, but with little success.

However, a recent NASA announcement suggests a glimmer of hope: The agency tweeted on Thursday that it had successfully tested a procedure that would switch parts of the telescope's hardware to their back-up components.

This could pave the way for the payload computer to come back online, leading to the restart of Hubble's scientific observations.

NASA reported the procedure could happen as early as next week, following additional preparations and reviews. The telescope and the scientific instruments on board remain in working condition.

But the switch will be "risky," according to NASA astrophysics division director Paul Hertz.

"You can't actually put your hands on and change hardware or take a voltage, so that does make it very challenging," he told New Scientist.

Hubble is the world's most powerful space telescope; it orbits 353 miles above the Earth.

On June 30, NASA announced it had figured out that the source of the payload computer problem was in Hubble's Science Instrument Command and Data Handling unit (SI C&DH for short), where the computer resides.

"A few hardware pieces on the SI C&DH could be the culprit(s)," NASA said.

Backup pieces of hardware are pre-installed on the telescope. So it's just a matter of switching over to that redundant hardware. But before attempting the tricky switch from Earth, engineers have to practice in a simulator, the agency added.

NASA has rebooted Hubble using this type of operation in the past. In 2008, after a computer crash took the telescope offline for two weeks, engineers successfully switched over to redundant hardware. A year later, astronauts repaired two broken instruments while in-orbit Hubble's fifth and final reservicing operation. (NASA does not currently have a way to launch astronauts to the space telescope.)

Getting the observatory back online is critical to NASA.

"Hubble is one of NASA's most important astrophysics missions. It's been operating for over 31 years, and NASA is hopeful it will last for many more years," an agency spokesperson told Insider in June.

Hubble, which launched into orbit in 1990, has captured images of the births and deaths of stars, discovered new moons around Pluto, and tracked two interstellar objects as they zipped through our solar system. Hubble's observations have also allowed astronomers to calculate the age and expansion of the universe and to peer at galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang.

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NASA will attempt a 'risky' maneuver to fix its broken Hubble Space Telescope as early as next week - Business Insider

Die as a human or live forever as a cyborg: Will robots rule the world? – Sydney Morning Herald

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In movies, theyre the bad guys killer cyborgs with bones of steel and lightning-fast reflexes, perhaps an Austrian accent too. But Peter Scott-Morgan has never been afraid of robots. As a scientist and roboticist by trade, he spent decades researching how artificial intelligence (AI) might transform our lives.

Then, in 2017, Dr Scott-Morgan was diagnosed with motor neuron disease, the same paralysing condition that killed Stephen Hawking. Months after puzzling over his wonky foot falling asleep, he was told he had two years to live.

He had other ideas. To survive, he would turn to the technology he had spent his career researching. He would become the cyborg. Scott-Morgan has now had two major surgeries to help keep himself alive with robotics machine upgrades that breathe for him, help him speak, and hopefully will even see him stand again as the advancing paralysis traps him inside his body. He plans to merge his brain with AI eventually too, so he can speak with his thoughts rather than the flicker of his eyes. And Im OK with giving up some control to the AI to stay me, he says. Though that might change what it means to be human ... Theres a long tradition of scientists experimenting on themselves. But die as a human or live as a cyborg? To me, its a no-brainer.

But what about the rest of us? Is humanity destined to merge with machine? We keep hearing that the robots are coming to take our jobs, how likely are they to stage a coup? And why are Facebook and Elon Musk already building machines to read our thoughts?

Credit:Illustration: Matt Davidson

A century ago, a Spanish scientist mapped the human brain and uncovered a hidden kingdom. As microscopes began to peer deeper into that mass of little grey cells, Santiago Cajal lay bare the wiring within, so dense he called it a jungle. It is from his detailed drawings that the world understood neurons for the first time and how they exchange information in a tangled network, giving rise to the senses, the emotions and possibly even consciousness itself.

Decades later, a philosopher and a young, homeless mathematician wondered if that network could be broken down into the most fundamental binary of logic: true or false. Neurons could, after all, be considered on or off, firing a signal or not. This theory, by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts at the University of Chicago, proved to be an incomplete model for the human brain, too simple to capture all the strange magic really going on inside. But it did give rise to the binary code of computers those ones and zeroes now form infinite variations of on or off to tell machines what to do. Scientists have been trying to bring computers closer to human brains, at least in function, ever since.

Because machines interpret the world through this binary code, and algorithms (rules made from that code), they are good at a lot of specific things we find difficult, such as solving complex equations fast (and playing chess better than a grandmaster). Yet they often struggle with the mundane things we, with our more complex, adaptable thinking centres, find easy: recognising facial expressions, making small talk and, most of all, improvising.

To overcome this, machine learning models seek to train computers to categorise and then react to things themselves rather than waiting on human programming. Over the past decade, one such model known as deep learning has charged beyond the rest, fuelling an AI boom. Its why your iPhone can recognise your face and Alexa understands you when you ask her to switch on the lights. And deep learning did it by going back to Cajals neural jungle. The learning is said to be deep because a machine is trained to classify patterns by filtering incoming information through layers of interconnected neuron-like nodes.

Im sorry, Dave, Im afraid I cant do that. In the 1968 sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, a computer called HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic) takes over a spaceship.Credit:Fair Use

While these artificial networks take a staggering amount of data to train compared to a human brain, experts such as Scott-Morgan hope they will only get better and more efficient as computing power increases (it is roughly doubling every two years). Already, AI can translate speech, trade stock, and perform surgery (under supervision). Since his own surgical journey was documented in the British documentary Peter: The Human Cyborg, Scott-Morgan has been upgrading to a very Hollywood cyborg-like interface that uses AI to track the movement of his eyes across its screen with tiny cameras and then offers up phrases for his robot voice to say predictive text based on the letters he has spelt out so far.

As UNSW professor of AI Toby Walsh points out, machines are not limited by biological processing speeds the way humans and animals are. But others suspect that the capability of even this kind of AI is about to hit a wall. At the University of Sheffield, computer scientist James Marshall says deep learning networks are still based on a cartoon of how the [human] brain works. They are not really making decisions, because they do not understand for themselves what matters and what doesnt. That means theyre fragile. To tell a picture of a cat from a dog, for example, an AI needs to sift through a huge trove of images. While it might pick up tiny changes that would escape the notice of a human, such as a few pixels out of place, these tiny changes usually dont matter a lot because we understand the main features that set a cat apart from a dog. But suddenly you change some pixels and the AI thinks its a dog, Marshall says. Or if it sees a drawing of a cat or a cat in real life [in 3D] it might have to start from scratch again.

The tendency of AI, however powerful, to break in unexpected ways is part of the reason those driverless cars we keep being promised are yet to arrive. Machines can be fooled even into seeing things that arent really there driverless cars tricked into accelerating past stop signs when the addition of a few stickers on the sign makes them instead perceive increased speed limits; or facial recognition programs duped into skipping past suspects wearing wigs and glasses.

Any AI network is vulnerable to this kind of manipulation, and if hackers know its weak points they can do more than break it, they can hijack it to perform a new task entirely. Of course, AI can be trained to identify and resist this kind of sabotage too but, at some point, it will encounter a problem it hasnt prepared for.

Perhaps a little paradoxically, some experts say that a way to give deep learning more common sense is to fuse it with the old, more rigid form of AI that came before it, where machines used hard-coded rules to understand how the world worked. Others say deep learning needs to become more flexible yet, writing its own algorithms and programs to perform new functions as it needs to, even testing its actions in the real world through robotics (or at least very good simulators) to help it understand causality. Amazons new line of Alexa assistants look through a camera to better understand the world (and their owners).

But I dont think [deep learning] will ever work for driverless cars, Marshall says. When you have to build a more and more complicated machine for a fairly simple task, maybe the machine is built wrong.

Arnold Schwarzenegger (and his iconic Austrian accent) starred as a killer cyborg in The Terminator franchise.Credit:

Marshall is flying a drone around his lab. Its not bumping into walls, the way drones normally do when trying to distinguish one beige, slab of office wallpaper from another. This drone has a tiny chip in its brain holding an algorithm borrowed from a honeybee. It tells it how to navigate the world as the insect does.

At Marshalls lab in Sheffield, now a company offshoot of his university called Opteran, the team is trying something new modelling machine thinking on animals. Marshall calls it natural intelligence, not artificial intelligence. Autonomy, the kind driverless cars and robot vacuums need to navigate their surrounds, is a solved problem, he says. It happens all the time in the natural world. We require very little brain power ourselves to drive, most of the time were on autopilot.

Bees have a less formidable number of neurons than humans about a million, next to tens of billions and yet they can still perform impressive behaviours: navigating, communicating and problem-solving. Marshall has been mapping their brains, training them to perform tasks such as flying through tunnels and then measuring their neural activity; making silicon models of different regions of their brain according to their function and then converting that into algorithms his machines can follow.

Its like a jigsaw puzzle, Marshall says. We havent mapped it all yet, even those million neurons still interact in really complex ways.

So far, he has converted into code how bees sense the world and navigate it, and is busy finalising algorithms from the decision-making centre of their brains. Unlike Cajol, hes not looking to record all the exquisite detail that keeps the brain alive. We just need how it does the function we want. We dont just reproduce the neurons, we reproduce the computation.

When he first put his bee navigation algorithm in the drone, he was stunned at how much it improved, changing course as people moved around it, as walls came closer. Thats when we saw it could work, he says. But because everyone is focused on deep learning, we decided to make our own company to scale it up.

Marshall is also mapping the brains of ants to improve ground-based robots, imagining a world in which autonomous devices are as common as computers, cleaning and improving the world around us. And as machines get smaller smaller even than the head of a pin or the width of a human hair scientists hope they may help fight disease in the body too, cleaning blood or killing cancer and infection. Perhaps one day these nanobots could even repair the nerves fraying apart in people with motor neuron disease such as Scott-Morgan, or keep humans alive longer.

Marshall hopes to eventually look into the brains of larger animals too, including primates. There scientists might find more complex functions again, beyond just autonomy, and into advanced problem-solving, even moral reasoning. Still, just as Marshall is sure his robot bee is not a real bee, he doubts wed be able to reproduce an entire human brain in silico and fire it up to see if some kind of consciousness springs to life. A lot of this research comes out of that very question: could we just replicate the brain somehow, suppose we had a 3D printer, Marshall says. But the brain isnt just its neurons, its how it all interacts. And we still dont understand it yet.

In his latest book Livewired, US neuroscientist David Eagleman describes in new detail the plasticity of the human brain, where neurons fight for territory like drug cartels. There may even be a kind of evolution, a survival of the fittest being waged within our minds day to day, as new neural connections are forged. Quantum scientists, meanwhile, wonder if reactions are happening inside the brain, at its smallest scale, which we cannot even measure. How then could we ever hope to replicate it accurately? Or upload someones consciousness to a machine (another popular sci-fi plot)?

Will Smith battles another pesky AI that thinks it knows best (and a few thousand robots) in the 2004 film I, Robot.

Of all the renderings of AI in science fiction, few occupy the minds of real-world researchers like the singularity a hypothetical (and some say inevitable) tipping point where machine intelligence growth becomes exponential, out of control. In the 1960s, British mathematician I.J. Good spoke of an intelligence explosion, and everyone from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk has since weighed in.

The theory is that as soon as we have a system as smart as a human, and we allow it to design a system superior to itself, well kick off a domino effect of ever-increasing intelligence that could shift the balance of power on Earth overnight. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldnt compete, and would be superseded, Hawking told the BBC in 2014.

And, if AI were ever smart enough to be put in charge and make decisions for us, as is imagined in films such as I, Robot and The Matrix, what if their radical take on efficiency involves enslaving or powering down humans (i.e. mass murder)? Remember the glowing red eye of Hal the AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey, who decided the best thing to do, when faced with a crisis far out in space, was to stage a mutiny against his human crew? Musk himself says that, for a powerful AI, wiping out the human race wouldnt be personal if we stood in their way, it would be a matter of course, like squishing an ant hill to build a road.

When we refer to intelligence in machines, we usually mean weve taught a computer to do something that in humans requires intelligence, Walsh says. As of 2021, those smarts are still very narrow beating a human in a game of chess, for example. AI enthusiasts point to machines helping write music or mimicking the styles of great painters as signs of burgeoning creativity, but such demonstrations still rely on considerable human input, and results are often random or spectacularly bad. The limits of deep learning again mean true spontaneity, originality, is lacking. At IBM, Arvind Krishna imagines you could train an AI on images of what is and isnt beautiful, good art and bad art, for example, but that would still be training the AI on the creators own tastes, not moulding a new artist for the world. Mostly, experts see machines becoming another tool to deepen human creativity and decision-making, revealing patterns and combinations that might have otherwise been missed.

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Still, Walsh says theres no scientific or technical reason why the gap between human and machine intelligence couldnt close one day. Every time we thought that we were special, that the sun went around the Earth, that we were different than the apes, we were wrong, he says. So to think theres anything special about our intelligence, anything that we could not create and probably surpass in silicon, I think would be terribly conceited of the human race.

Indeed, machines have a lot of apparent advantages over us mere flesh bags, as Hawking alluded to. Theyre faster thinkers, with bigger, potentially infinite memories; they can network and interface in a way that would be called telepathy if a human could do it. And theyre not limited by their physical bodies.

In Scott-Morgans case, transforming into a cyborg has already come with unexpected benefits. He can no longer speak on his own Im answering these questions long after my body has stopped working sufficiently well to keep me alive, he writes instead but through his new robot voice, he can communicate in any language. In May, his digital avatar even broke into song during a live interview with broadcaster Stephen Fry. His wheelchair, meanwhile, will soon allow him to stand, so he will tower over his fellow mortals and hopefully, with the aid of an inbuilt AI, it will drive itself wherever Scott-Morgan wishes to go. (I envision being able to speed through an obstacle course or safely make my way through a showroom of porcelain vases.)

The hair of his avatar is never out of place and my powers will double every two years. Ill be a thousand times more powerful by the time Im 80. Hes working on programming in a maniacal laugh for his avatar, too.

Of course, because these AI networks are being built by humans, they may inherit the worst of us along with the best. Weve seen this already on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube where AI used to curate user content has been shown to veer sharply into extremism and misinformation. Or police surveillance networks learning their human developers cultural prejudices. And, because AIs operate using complex mathematics, they are often themselves a black box, hard to scrutinise. Experts, including the late Hawking, have stressed that regulation and ethical frameworks must catch up fast to the technology, so we can maximise its social good, not just profit margins.

But what we may learn too, is that theres a ceiling to how intelligent something can be. The universe is full of fundamental limits, Walsh says. It might not be [as simple as] we wake up one day and the computers can program themselves. I suspect that we will get smarter computers, but it will be the old-fashioned way, through our sweat, ingenuity and perseverance.

While Marshall doubts well ever create a machine that is itself conscious (along the lines of, say, the eloquently self-aware cyborgs in Blade Runner), he is wary of the new push for robots or algorithms that can evolve independently designed to breed the way computer viruses spread now and so rewrite and advance their own programming. I dont think thats the path, Marshall says. I think we need to always know what it does, and, if it can evolve on its own, well, life finds a way

How can you tell? Cyborgs called replicants are much like humans in the 1982 sci-fi film Blade Runner. Credit:Fair Use

Rather than turning to one all-knowing AI to run the show, many experts think it more likely we will draw on the power of machines to improve our own thinking. If we had a better way to connect with computers, closer than our screens, futurists wonder if we could surf the internet with our minds, back up our memories to the cloud, even download ready-formed skills such as a second language or another sense entirely like echolocation or infrared vision.

In 2020, Elon Musk was ruling out none of this when he introduced the world to a pig called Gertrude and the coin-sized computer chip in her brain he hoped would allow people to plug in directly to machines one day. Its kind of like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires, Musk said, conceding this is sounding increasingly like a Black Mirror episode. In 2021, a monkey with the same chip, made by Musks company Neuralink, was shown playing a game of ping-pong using only his mind to control a joystick.

Labs, including military labs, around the world have been developing neural implants for more than a decade, mostly to help people with paralysis operate robotic limbs and those with epilepsy head off seizures. In 2016, an implant connected to a robotic arm even gave back the sensation of touch as well as movement to a man paralysed from the neck down he used it to fist-bump president Barack Obama.

But this is still new technology, so far involving about 100 electrodes inserted into the brain that read its neural signals and send them wirelessly back to a machine. Neuralinks prototype has more than a 1000 electrodes, each smaller than a human hair, and grand claims of fast insertion into the skull using a robotic surgery (and no need for even a general anesthetic).

Plunging anything into the brain is risky and can cause damage. But in 2016 two neurologists at the University of Melbourne, Tom Oxley and Nicholas Opie, developed a clever technique to insert an implant without the need for open surgery using, Oxley says, the veins and blood vessels as the natural highway into the brain. Theyve just received $52 million in funding from Silicon Valley to run more clinical trials of their own chip, called the Stentrode, in the US. Its about the size of a paperclip and in Melbourne its helped patients with motor neuron disease text, email and bank online by thought alone.

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Neuralinks end goal is to develop a non-invasive headset instead of a chip but for now such external devices pick up a much weaker signal from the brain. Facebook, meanwhile, is looking at wearable wrist devices that would read your mind, literally, where nerves carry messages down to your hands, eventually allowing users to do away with the traditional mouse and keyboard and type at a speed of 100 words per minute just by thinking. Like Neuralink, helping patients with paralysis is their first goal, but they also plan to scale up to everyday users. Already, researchers funded by Facebook have managed to translate brain waves into speech with an accuracy rate of between 61 and 76 per cent (that beats Google Translate in some cases), using existing electrodes implanted in the brains of patients with epilepsy.

Some of this work being done by Facebook and Musk is right out on the edge for enhancement, says the chief executive of Bionics Queensland, Robyn Stokes, but it will likely benefit health applications along the way. Just as brain chips could become digital assistants of the mind, she imagines they could also help manage mental health conditions such as serious depression. Those sorts of brain computer interfaces are really advancing quickly, she says, pointing to the Strentrode. She expects an implant that can perform many functions inside the body, beyond reading brainwaves, will soon follow.

Even then, there are still concerns. While the brains now-famed plasticity could help it rewire around implants, for example, some experts warn it could also mean it quickly forgets how to perform important functions, if they are taken over by machines. What then if something fails?

Peter Scott-Morgan tries out AI technology that tracks his eye movements to spell out his speech.Credit:Cardiff Productions

Still, enthusiasts, or transhumanists, imagine the next stage of human evolution will inevitably be technological future generations can expect reinforced bones and improved brain power thanks to cybernetic upgrades. In British drama Years and Years, a new parental nightmare plays out as a daughter announces she wants to upload her mind and live as a machine. (I dont want to be flesh. I want to escape this thing and become digital.)

In his first book on robotics in 1984, long before his disease had emerged, Scott-Morgan himself considered how AI might unlock human potential, and vice versa. AI on its own is like a brilliant jazz pianist, but without anyone to jam with, he says now. Its nowhere near its full potential. The duet of human and AI, meanwhile, would seem close to magic ... a mutually dependent partnership, not a rivalry. And, to his mind, it could well be the only route that doesnt lead to a dead end. I anticipate that otherwise therell be a crippling backlash against whats typically perceived as the uncontrolled rise of raw AI.

Scott-Morgan plans for his eye-controlled communication interface to rely more and more on its underlying AI to generate his speech. That means sometimes what comes out will not be what biological Peter was planning to say. And Im very comfortable with that. I keep reassuring [everyone] I have absolutely no qualms about technology potentially making me appear cleverer, or funnier, or simply less forgetful, than I was before.

Others imagine a greater fusion of robotics, especially nanotech, with animals too. Already parts of nature are being re-engineered as technology in the lab from viruses repurposed as vaccines and computer chips that mimic the function of human organs to a robot-fish hybrid sent down as a deep-sea probe to collect data beneath the waves. Both the US and Russian armies have kitted out trained dolphins as underwater spies over the years, so perhaps its no surprise military researchers have been looking at going further even putting mind-controlling brain chips into sharks next. And, if bees die out, some experts say cyborg insects may be needed to pollinate plants in their place. All this again raises the strange question of when something is alive, or conscious, and whether we are building better robots or creating new life entirely.

The Terminator robots have no plans to co-exist to humans. They want the whole planet.Credit:Fair Use

Even if we dont get shark cyborgs, low-cost lethal machines are already changing the face of warfare. Imagine fighter drones talking to one another to find bombing targets, instead of a human pilot back at a base. Or swarms of explosive drones slamming themselves into people and buildings.

These are not visions of the future but news stories from 2020. According to a recent UN report, Turkish drones, packing explosives and facial recognition cameras, were sent out by Libyas army in 2020 to eliminate rebels via swarm attack in Tripoli, without requiring a remote connection between drone and base. They were, effectively, hunting their own targets. And the tech on board was not much more impressive than what youd find on a smartphone. Meanwhile, the Poseidon is a new class of robotic underwater vehicle that Russia is said to have already made, which can travel undetected and launch cobalt bombs to irradiate entire coastal cities all unmanned.

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Machines that decide to kill like this, based on their sensors and a pre-programmed target profile, are making humanitarian groups increasingly nervous. The International Committee of the Red Cross wants the worlds governments to ban fully autonomous weapons outright. ICRC president Peter Maurer says they will make it difficult for countries to comply with international law, in effect substituting human decisions about life and death with sensor, software and machine processes.

Walsh agrees autonomous killer robots raise a host of ethical, legal and technical problems. If things go wrong or they break international law, who is held accountable? Should it be the programmer, the commander or the robot on trial for war crimes? Theyre not sentient, theyre not conscious, they cant have empathy, they cant be punished, Walsh says. And that takes us to a very, very dark place. It would be terribly destabilising and would change the speed and scale of war.

Of course, he adds, autonomous systems built for defence, such as the robots used to clear landmines, show that AI can reduce casualties in war too. And computers will continue to come online that can process battlefield data and make recommendations faster than humans ever could. But [we need] human oversight, human judgment, which is still significantly better than machines, at least today, Walsh says.

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He thinks we should ban lethal autonomous weapons as we have chemical and biological weapons (as well as blinding lasers and cluster munitions), with enforcement powers for the UN to check no rogue state is stepping out of line.

The problem is that such bans rarely happen before things get ugly. For chemical weapons, it took the horrors of the First World War.

Im fearful that we wont have the initiative to do the same here until weve seen such weapons being used, Walsh says. A swarm of robot drones, hunting down humans and killing them mercilessly. It will look like a Hollywood movie.

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Mind and body connect with Garmin Venu 2 Stuff – Stuff Magazines

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Garmin has once again upped the ante in the GPS smartwatch and fitness tracking landscape with the release of the Garmin Venu 2.

The second-generation Garmin Venu 2 is the perfect GPS smartwatch that combines sports fitness and functionality for the modern age. It is designed to be the bridge between the mind and the body in order for its users to live the best healthy and holistic active lifestyle.

The Venu 2 utilises Garmins advanced health and monitoring features gives the user an up-to-date stats-based reflection of their mental and physical health. It is all about giving users the information they need to be the best version of themselves.

Advanced fitness features as well as more than 25 built-in apps will give users the perfect tool to get in tune with their mind and body.

This includes GPS sports apps, such as walking, running, cycling, HIIT, swimming, golf and many more on offer.

On a micro level, this is fantastic for sportsmen and women who want to track specific stats such as stroke type detection for swimmers and shot distance measurement for golfers in a long list of sport-specific features.

The unprecedented functionality is where the Venu 2 really shines with a plethora of options for the user.

Some of the daily smart features include the well-known calendar and weather apps as well as continuous activity tracking features so the user literally does not miss a step.

At a physical workout level, the Venu 2 also does not disappoint. The built-in animated workouts are one of its best features with an in-depth muscle targeting feature for each workout as well as the correct way to do each specific curl or lunge.

Workouts take on another level as users can use preloaded workouts or fully customize every aspect of their workout in the Garmin Connect app on a smartphone. The preloaded workouts include cardio, yoga, strength, HIIT and Pilates. Essentially, the Venu 2 fits in with your lifestyle and creates the best platform to help users achieve their daily goals.

Health monitoring features such as the Health Snapshot feature, Body Battery energy levels, sleep score, fitness age and all-day stress tracking combines all that is required for the modern user on a 24/7 basis.

On a monitoring level, the sleep scoring system comes in real handy to track your bodys sleep response one of the key factors of a healthy lifestyle. The sleep scoring system can also give insights to improve the quality of sleep. The stress tracking feature is also one of the key elements of the Venu 2, with relaxation reminders to give users a real balance in their daily routines. The built-in memory can also store up to 200 hours of activity data on the watch.

The functionality of the Venu 2 will as per usual gives unlimited access to your Android or Apple smartphone with smart notifications delivered to your wrist. Safety is also one of the best features of the Venu 2 with built-in incident detection and assistance. A live location can be sent to emergency contacts which is quite a reassuring feature for those that prefer outdoor activities.

Activities can also be achieved uninterrupted with a battery of up to 11 days in smartwatch mode and up to 8 hours in GPS mode thanks to rapid recharging and battery saver mode. A water rating of 5 ATM is also a fantastic feature that can withstand pressures of up to 50 metres, perfect for users with a love for water-based activities or when taking a shower.

The AMOLED display gives a crystal-clear picture of your health and with a superb battery life you will never miss a beat whether you are training or relaxing with up to 650 songs that can be stored right on your wrist. Users can also upload playlists from Deezer, Amazon Music or Spotify.

This circular designed watch has an aesthetic beauty that comes in two colours as well as two wrist sizes to cater to every individuals needs. Another advantage of the Venu 2 lies in its lightweight (38.2 grams) and durable design with a silicone strap, stainless steel bezel material and a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 lens.

Further personalization comes in the form of watch faces, apps and widgets from Garmins Connect IQ Store which can be synced with the Garmin Connect app on a users compatible smartphone to review your health and fitness data in detail.

As the Venu 2 smartwatch is part of the Garmin Connect ecosystem and community it lets you store and monitor all your health stats, join challenges, earn badges, and interact with friends and family.

Garmin has always been about connecting mind and body with its latest cutting-edge technology and the Venu 2 is the latest star edition to the Garmin family.

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Mind and body connect with Garmin Venu 2 Stuff - Stuff Magazines