Daily Archives: February 1, 2022

Why is Silicon Valley still waiting for the next big thing? – The Straits Times

Posted: February 1, 2022 at 2:25 am

NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - In the autumn of 2019, Google told the world it had reached "quantum supremacy". It was a significant scientific milestone that some compared to the first flight at Kitty Hawk.

Harnessing the mysterious powers of quantum mechanics, Google had built a computer that needed only 3 minutes and 20 seconds to perform a calculation that normal computers could not complete in 10,000 years.

But more than two years after Google's announcement, the world is still waiting for a quantum computer that actually does something useful. And it will most likely wait much longer. The world is also waiting for self-driving cars, flying cars, advanced artificial intelligence and brain implants that will let you control your computing devices using nothing but your thoughts.

Silicon Valley's hype machine has long been accused of churning ahead of reality. But in recent years, the tech industry's critics have noticed that its biggest promises - the ideas that really could change the world - seem farther and farther on the horizon. The great wealth generated by the industry in recent years has generally been thanks to ideas, like the iPhone and mobile apps, that arrived years ago.

Have the big thinkers of tech lost their mojo?

The answer, those big thinkers are quick to respond, is absolutely not. But the projects they are tackling are far more difficult than building a new app or disrupting another ageing industry. And if you look around, the tools that have helped you cope with almost two years of a pandemic - the home computers, the videoconferencing services and Wi-Fi, even the technology that aided researchers in the development of vaccines - have shown the industry has not exactly lost a step.

"Imagine the economic impact of the pandemic had there not been the infrastructure - the hardware and the software - that allowed so many white-collar workers to work from home and so many other parts of the economy to be conducted in a digitally mediated way," said Professor Margaret O'Mara from the University of Washington who specialises in the history of Silicon Valley.

As for the next big thing, the big thinkers say, give it time. Take quantum computing. Dr Jake Taylor, who oversaw quantum computing efforts for the White House and is now chief science officer at quantum start-up Riverlane, said building a quantum computer might be the hardest task ever undertaken. This is a machine that defies the physics of everyday life.

A quantum computer relies on the strange ways that some objects behave at the sub-atomic level or when exposed to extreme cold, like metal chilled to nearly 460 degrees below zero. If scientists merely try to read information from these quantum systems, they tend to break.

While building a quantum computer, Dr Taylor said, "you are constantly working against the fundamental tendency of nature".

The most important tech advances of the past few decades - the microchip, the Internet, the mouse-driven computer, the smartphone - were not defying physics. And they were allowed to gestate for years, even decades, inside government agencies and corporate research labs before ultimately reaching mass adoption.

"The age of mobile and cloud computing has created so many new business opportunities," Prof O'Mara said. "But now there are trickier problems."

Still, the loudest voices in Silicon Valley often discuss those trickier problems as if they were just another smartphone app. That can inflate expectations.

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Our Universe is normal! Its biggest anomaly, the CMB cold spot, is now explained – Big Think

Posted: at 2:25 am

Ever since the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) nearly 60 years ago, scientists have been searching for a hint any hint of a crack in the faade of the hot Big Bang. At every step along the way, as our instruments became more sensitive and our observational reach extended farther than ever before, the Big Bangs predictions were borne out in spectacular fashion, one after another.

The Universes expansion and how that expansion changed over time was measured, and found to be precisely consistent with the expanding Universe predicted by physical cosmology. The spectrum of the CMB was measured, confirming it was the most perfect blackbody ever seen in the Universe. The initial cosmic abundances of the light elements and their isotopes were determined, and found to be in direct agreement with the predictions of Big Bang nucleosynthesis. And the formation of large-scale structure and the growth of the cosmic web matched the Big Bangs predictions without exception.

But with the launches of WMAP and Planck, the small-scale imperfections in the CMB were measured, and one anomaly stood out: a cold spot that simply couldnt be explained based on the Universe we knew. At last, that mystery may finally be solved, as the culprit has been identified at long last: the largest supervoid in the nearby Universe. If this research holds up, it teaches us that our Universe is normal, after all, and that the CMB cold spot isnt an anomaly at all.

The fact that the CMB is so perfect is, itself, a modern wonder of the Universe. Everywhere we look, in all directions, its plain to see just how different the Universe is from place to place. Some regions of space are extremely rich in structure, with scores, hundreds, or even thousands of large galaxies all collected into the same gravitationally bound structure. Other locations still have galaxies, but theyre relatively sparsely located: in small groupings and collections scattered about through space. Still other places have only isolated galaxies, while in the least dense locations, there are no galaxies to be found at all for volumes that span tens or even hundreds of millions of light-years on a side.

And yet, the theory of Big Bang comes along with an inextricable prediction: that in the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang, the Universe must have been both isotropic, or the same in all directions, and homogeneous, or the same in all locations, to a tremendous degree of precision. It can only come into existence with tiny, minuscule imperfections, or regions of slightly greater-or-lesser density than average. Its only because of the tremendous amount of cosmic time that passes and the relentlessly attractive nature of the gravitational force that we have a rich, structure-filled Universe today.

The Cosmic Microwave Background was discovered back in the mid-1960s, and the early goals were to:

Over time, we were able to refine our measurements. Initially, the CMB was announced to be at 3.5 K, which then was revised to 3 K, then 2.7 K, and a little later, a third significant figure was added: 2.73 K. In the mid-to-late 1970s, a small, 1-part-in-800 imperfection was discovered: an artifact of our own motion through the Universe.

It wasnt until the 1990s that the first primordial imperfections were found, coming in at about the 1-part-in-30,000 level. At last, we had the observational evidence to not only confirm a Big Bang-consistent origin for the CMB, but to measure what sort of imperfections the Universe itself began with.

You see, the hot Big Bang, although it was the beginning of our observable Universe as we know it, wasnt the very beginning of everything. Theres a theory thats been around since the early 1980s cosmic inflation that posits a set of properties that the Universe possessed prior to the start of the hot Big Bang. According to inflation:

The only reason the Universe isnt perfectly, absolutely uniform everywhere is because the tiny fluctuations inherent to quantum physics, during this epoch of rapid expansion, can get stretched across the Universe, creating the overdense and underdense seeds of structure. From these initial seed fluctuations, the entire large-scale structure of the Universe can arise.

According to the theory of inflation, there should be a very specific set of fluctuations that the Universe starts with at the onset of the hot Big Bang. In particular:

All of these predictions have since been borne out and confirmed by observations, some to within the limits of our measurement precision and others quite spectacularly.

However, its always worth looking for anomalies, as no matter how thoroughly your predictions agree with reality, you must always put ahead, hoping to uncover something unexpected. After all, its the only way you can discover something new: by looking as youve never looked before. If you have specific predictions and expectations for what your Universe is going to look like, then anything that defies your expectations is at the very least worth a second look.

Perhaps the most unusual remaining feature that we see in the microwave sky, once we subtract out the effect of the Milky Way galaxy, is the fact that theres a cold spot that doesnt align with these theoretical explanations. Once weve quantified the types and scales of temperature fluctuations that ought to exist, we can correlate them together, and see how fluctuations on smaller and larger scales should be related.

In one particular region of space, we find that theres a very deep cold spot: about 70 microkelvin below the average temperature on a relatively large angular scale. Moreover, that cold spot appears to be encircled by a hotter-than-average region, making it even more anomalous. To many, the cold spot in the CMB represented a potential challenge to inflation and the standard cosmological model, as it wouldnt make sense if the Universe was somehow born with this anomalously low-temperature region.

Its important to recognize where these temperature fluctuations come from in the first place. The Universe, even at the start of the hot Big Bang, really is the exact same temperature everywhere. The thing thats different from location to location is the density of the Universe, and this is the component that has those 1-part-in-30,000 imperfections, as imprinted by inflation. The reason we observe the Universe to possess different temperatures in different regions of space is because of the phenomenon of gravitational redshift: matter curves space, and where space is more severely curved, light has to lose more energy to climb out of that gravitational potential well. In the astrophysics community, this is known as the Sachs-Wolfe effect, and its the primary cause of the temperature differences we observe in the CMB.

But theres another, more subtle effect: the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. As structure forms in the Universe, as gravitation brings more and more mass together, as clusters grow and voids form, and as the relative ratios of radiation, matter, and dark energy change with respect to one another, the gravitational effects of traveling into a certain region of space dont necessarily equal the gravitational effects of traveling out of that same region of space later on. The Universe evolves, structures form and become more matter-rich in some areas and more matter-poor in others, and any light passing through those regions is affected.

Imagine, if you will, that you have two different regions of space: a large-scale overdensity (like a supercluster) and a large-scale underdensity (like a great cosmic void). Now, imagine, just like in our real Universe, you have some form of dark energy: a component of the Universe that behaves differently from matter, and doesnt dilute in density as the Universe expands. Now, lets imagine what happens as the photon, traveling through space, encounters either a big overdensity or a big underdensity.

If something appears anomalously cold in the CMB, it could be because theres something wrong with our model of the Universe; thats of course the more interesting option. But it could also be, quite simply, because theres a large cosmic void in that location, and that void grew shallower as the light traveled through it because of dark energy.

Now, heres where the idea becomes testable: you cant point to a void thats too far away along the line-of-sight to explain it, because dark energy only becomes important for the Universes expansion over the past ~6 billion years or so. If one exists along this line-of-sight, it must be closer, at present, than 7.5 billion light-years.

So, what do we find when we go out and look?

Thats where the latest results from the Dark Energy Survey come in. Scientists were able to confirm that, yes, there is a supervoid there, and it may have a much higher-amplitude integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect that a typical underdensity does. While some underdensities were previously found at greater distances some 6-10 billion light-years away, they were determined to account for no more than ~20% of the effect. However, a 2015 study revealed a nearby supervoid right in that precise direction: 1.9 billion light-years away and about 0.5-1.0 billion light-years across. The most recent study confirms this void and measures its properties, finds that its the largest supervoid that exists since the onset of dark energys dominance, and suggests but doesnt yet prove that there is a causal relation between this late-time supervoid and the cold spot in the CMB.

There are many different ways to map out the large-scale structure of the Universe: from galaxy counts to gravitational lensing to the overall impact that the structure has on the background light emitted from various redshifts. In this particular case, it was the construction of a gravitational lensing map that confirmed the presence of this supervoid, which happens to be the emptiest large region of space in our nearby corner of the Universe. We cannot say for certain that this supervoid explains the full extend of the CMB cold spot, but its looking more and more likely that, once the presence of the supervoid is taken into account, what remains is no more anomalous than any other typical region of the sky.

The way well tell for sure, of course, is through better, deeper, higher-resolution imaging of this relatively large region of the sky, which spans somewhere around 40 square degrees. With the ESAs Euclid mission poised to launch just next year, in 2023, and with the Vera Rubin Observatory and NASAs Nancy Grace Roman Telescope expected to come online over the next few years, the critical data will soon be in our hands. After nearly two decades of wondering at what could have caused the CMB cold spot, we finally have our answer: the largest supervoid in the nearby Universe. All we need is a robust confirmation of what the present data strongly indicates, and this will be yet another cosmic challenge that our standard cosmological model is thoroughly capable of rising to.

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Here are the Top 10 science anniversaries of 2022 – Science News Magazine

Posted: at 2:25 am

Even though its only even odds that 2022 will turn out to be less of a disaster than 2021 (or 2020), at least 2022 is the best recent year for compiling a Top 10 list of science anniversaries.

Curiously, many of those anniversaries are of deaths: the astronomer William Herschel for instance, who died in 1822; Hermann Rorschach, Alexander Graham Bell and the mathematician Sophie Bryant (all in 1922); and Louis Leakey (1972).

But there are also some notable firsts (the original slide rule, for instance) and births, including the scientist who illuminated how science could save society from devastating infectious diseases. Honorable mentions go to the birthdays of physicists Rudolf Clausius (200th), Leon Lederman (100th) and C.N. Yang (100th). They just missed edging out the oldest anniversary, a death from an earlier millennium:

Abl-Abbs al-Fal ibn tim al-Nayrz was a Persian mathematician and astronomer, probably born around A.D. 865 in the town of Nayriz (in present-day Iran), which is why he became known as al-Nayrz. He died in 922 or thereabouts (close enough for Top 10 purposes). He got a job in Baghdad with the caliph al-Mutaid, writing treatises on math and weather, among other topics.

Unfortunately, many of al-Nayrzs writings were long ago lost. But other writers mention his works and report that he was a master of astronomy and geometry. Among his surviving works is a translation and commentary on Euclids Elements. Al-Nayrz also attempted a proof of Euclids famous postulate about parallel lines never meeting. One of Al-Nayrzs treatises for the caliph discussed how to determine the distance to upright objects. Had golf been invented yet, the caliph would have used such knowledge to calculate the distance to the flagstick without need of a GPS app.

Lewis Fry Richardson, a mathematician who later turned to psychology, worked early in his career at Englands National Peat Industries. He was given the task of calculating optimal designs of drainage systems for peat moss subjected to different amounts of rain. He worked out the equations and then realized they could be applied to other problems, such as predicting the weather.

In the years leading up to World War I, he worked on a book, to be titled Weather Prediction by Numerical Process. He showed how values for temperature, humidity, air pressure and other weather data from one day could be processed by his equations to make a forecast for the next day. He took a break to be an ambulance driver during the war and then finished his book, published in 1922.

As Science News-Letter reported that year, one U.S. Weather Bureau scientist believed the book to show that meteorology has become an exact science. Unfortunately, to make the next days forecast from one days data took Richardson six weeks of calculation time. Only decades later did modern electronic computers make the mathematics of weather forecasting practical, and sometimes useful.

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William Oughtred, born in England in 1575, became a priest and part-time mathematician and tutor. In 1631 he wrote a book summarizing arithmetic and algebra, which became widely popular, later earning lavish praise from Isaac Newton.

Nine years before his book, Oughtred had designed the first slide rule. In 1614 John Napier had invented logarithms, showing how multiplication could be accomplished by addition. Six years later the astronomer Edmund Gunter had the bright idea of marking numbers on a straightedge proportional to their logarithms. Multiplication could then be performed by using a compass (the caliper kind, not for finding north) to find the answer by measuring the distances between the numbers to be multiplied.

In 1622, Oughtred had the even brighter idea of placing two such rulers next to each other. Sliding one along the other to properly position the numbers of interest allowed him to read the product of a multiplication right off one of the rulers. Oughtred later designed a circular slide rule, but one of his students claimed to have had that idea first, initiating a nasty priority dispute.

Further advances in slide rule design, incorporating things like cubes and trigonometric functions, made slide rules the premier computing devices of the 19th and 20th centuries UNTIL electronic calculators came along, sadly depriving slide rules the opportunity to make it to age 400. But some people alive today once used slide rules, and probably still have one in a box somewhere.

Maria Goeppert was born in what is now Poland in 1906. Encouraged by her father, a university professor, to pursue higher education, Maria chose mathematics. But in the mid-1920s her fascination with a newfangled idea called quantum mechanics induced her to shift to physics. After earning her Ph.D., she married a chemist (Joseph Mayer) and moved to the United States. She was allowed to teach classes where her husband was on the faculty (first at Johns Hopkins, later at Columbia and then Chicago) but not offered a job of her own. She was free to pursue research projects, though, often in collaboration with her husband or other scientists, and she produced important work on many topics at the interface of quantum physics and chemistry.

She was a master of the math needed to understand spectroscopy; her studies of the light emitted by the newly discovered transuranic elements in the 1940s showed that they belonged in a chemical family related to the rare-earth elements an essential clue to the proper positioning of the transuranics in the periodic table. After World War II, she began studying nuclear physics and soon deduced the existence of a shell-like structure for the arrangement of nucleons (protons and neutrons) in the atomic nucleus. Her findings complemented similar work by Hans Jensen, with whom she later collaborated in writing a book on the nuclear shell model. Jensen and Goeppert Mayer shared the 1963 Nobel in physics for that work.

Her shell model research was aided by a suggestion from Enrico Fermi, the physicist famous for his work on the secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. That was only fair, as when Fermi disappeared from Columbia University in 1941 to work on the bomb, Goeppert Mayer was hurriedly recruited to teach his class. In 1960, Goeppert Mayer finally was awarded a full-time primetime job of her own at the University of California, San Diego, but shortly thereafter she suffered a stroke, limiting her ability to do research in the years before her death in 1972.

Niels Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922, the same year as the birth of his son Aage. Aage grew up surrounded by physicists (who came from around the world to study with his father) and so naturally became a physicist himself. During World War II, Aage accompanied his father to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project, afterwards returning to his native Denmark to earn his Ph.D. at the University of Copenhagen. During that time Aage turned his attention to a problem with the atomic nucleus.

His fathers theory that a nucleus behaves much like a drop of liquid had been applied successfully in explaining nuclear fission. But more recent work by Maria Goeppert Mayer (remember her?) showed that nuclei had an inner shell-like structure, suggesting ordered arrangements of individual particles, not collective, liquidlike behavior. Aage developed a new theoretical view, showing that his fathers view could be reconciled with Goeppert Mayers shell model. He then worked on experiments that corroborated it and shared the 1975 physics Nobel for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection.

Born July 22, 1822 to a family of farmers in what is now the Czech Republic, Johann Mendel preferred higher education to farming, enrolling in a philosophy program properly complemented with math and physics. When the time came to return home and take charge of the family farm, he opted instead to enter a monastery (where he adopted the monastic name Gregor). He did not particularly enjoy his priestly duties, though, so he got a job as a teacher, which required him to enter the University of Vienna for advanced science education. There, in addition to more math and physics, he encountered botany. Later he returned to the monastery, where he applied his botanical skills to investigating patterns in the physical features of successive generations of pea plants.

In 1866 he published results implying the existence of differentiating characters (now known as genes) that combined in different ways when transmitted by parents to offspring. Apparently nobody very astute read his paper, not even Charles Darwin, who would have been intrigued by Mendels mention that his work was relevant to the history of the evolution of organic forms. Only at the dawn of the 20th century was Mendels work translated into English and then recognized for its importance to heredity, evolution and biology in general.

Of all the robotic spacecraft launched from Earth into space, Pioneer 10 was truly the pioneer. It was the first craft to fly beyond the orbit of Mars and the first to exceed the distance of the solar systems outermost planet, Neptune. Launched March 2, 1972, Pioneer 10s mission was to visit Jupiter to take some cool snapshots of the giant planet and a few of its moons. Pioneers escape velocity from Earth surpassed 51,000 kilometers per hour (about 32,000 miles per hour), at the time a solar system speed record for any flying machine or bird. After dodging asteroids (most of them anyway) on its journey, Pioneer 10 reached the solar systems largest planet in late 1973, passing within 131,000 kilometers (about 81,000 miles) on December 4.

Pioneer continued transmitting signals back to Earth until 1997, when budget cuts forced NASA to stop listening except for an occasional check-in. The very last signal came on January 23, 2003, from 7.6 billion miles away. By now Pioneer 10 is roughly 12 billion miles away, headed in the direction of the star Aldebaran. It will arrive in a mere 2 million years or so. If any Aldebaranians encountering it can decipher the sketches of a man and woman and the map revealing the point of origin, perhaps they will refuel it and send it back.

In a century of medical miracles, one of the earliest and most dramatic was the discovery of insulin for treating diabetes. Diabetes had been recognized as a serious disease in ancient times. By the 20th century, scientists suspected that the pancreas produced a substance that helped metabolize carbohydrates; a malfunctioning pancreas meant a person could not extract energy from carbohydrates in food, resulting in dangerously high blood sugar levels while depriving the body of needed energy. It was nearly always fatal in children, and adults diagnosed with diabetes could hope for only a few more years of life.

As Science News-Letter reported in 1922, diabetes ranked with cancer in fatality and incurability. But in that year, a young doctor reported success in treating diabetes with a substance secreted by the pancreas. That doctor, Frederick Banting, had tried the idea with dogs the year before and gave the first insulin injection to a human, a 14-year-old boy, in January 1922. Banting originally used insulin purified from animals; in the decades since, researchers have engineered more sophisticated forms for human use. But even with the animal insulin, success was so dramatic that Banting and his lab director John Macleod were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1923.

In its first year of providing news of science to the world, the organization then known as Science Service transmitted a weekly package of mimeographed pages (labeled Science News Bulletin) to newspapers and other media around the country. But soon other groups (such as libraries) as well as individuals began to request the package, and so Science Service initiated a new strategy with issue No. 50. On March 13, 1922, Science News-Letter was born, with a new masthead offering subscriptions for $5 per year, postpaid. Its first article: an account of a U.S. Department of Commerce report on the allocation of radio wavelengths. The report assured everybody that widespread use of radio for the broadcasting of public information and other matters of general interest would be forthcoming. In 1966 the magazine dropped Letter and became Science News, providing an excuse for another centennial celebration in 2066.

Born in France in December 1822, Louis Pasteur was not a precocious youth. His interests tended toward art, but later some inspiring lectures shifted his attention to chemistry, and he became one of the greatest chemists of all time. Also one of the greatest biologists. And although he received no medical education, he provided the foundation for modern medicines ability to fight disease.

Pasteurs understanding of microorganisms led to the recognition of their capacity to damage human health. His tenacity in conducting rigorous experiments and his pugnacious public promotion of his findings established the germ theory of disease and encouraged new methods of hygiene. Time after time he was called on to devise solutions for perplexing problems facing various industries. He saved the silk industry. He showed how to prevent wine from going sour, and how to make milk safe to drink. He devised vaccines for various diseases, including one to cure rabies. No one person in history is more responsible than Pasteur for preserving human health and preventing unnecessary deaths. He is lucky he was born 200 years ago, though. If he were around today, hed be getting death threats.

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Can Animal Behavior Simply Be Transferred Into the Genome? – Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Posted: at 2:24 am

Recently, geologist Casey Luskin interviewed Eric Cassell, author of Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts (2021) on one of the central mysteries of biology: How do animals know things that they cant have figured out on their own? Heres the first part, with transcript and notes. Below is the second part, which looks at some how questions.

Eric Cassell is an expert in navigation systems, including GPS whose experience includes more than four decades of experience in systems engineering related to aircraft, navigation and safety. He has long had an interest in animal navigation. His model for animal navigation is the natural algorithm: The animals brain is programmed to enable navigation.

Heres Part II of our three-part series on Animal Algorithms Webinar: One of Natures Biggest Mysteries, (January 20, 2022), where a partial transcript and notes follow:

Casey Luskin: We already talked about this a little bit, the idea of path integration, where animals keep track of their compass heading and distance traveled so they can fly directly home but not necessarily along the path that they took. And you say that they can do this without necessarily following landmarks. You talk about honeybees and their ability to navigate using the suns angle. So they can learn how to navigate using the suns angle at different times of day to find their way home, regardless of what time it is. Or they can use polarized light by studying different regions of the sky to determine the position of the sun. (21:23)

This requires doing trigonometry, spherical geometry, and other complex math. They [insects] have a brain with a million neurons and I have supposedly a hundred billion neurons in my brain. And I dont think I can do those kinds of calculations in my brain. I find this all incredible.

There are cases that seem to require inherited know-how. How does a sea turtle innately know how to swim to its feeding area hundreds of miles through murky water and return to its exact nesting beach 35 years later? How do chicks of the Pacific golden plover find the Hawaiian Islands, mere specks in the trackless ocean, never having been there before? How do monarch butterflies in Canada get to the same trees in Mexico their great-grandparents wintered on? Some of these natural miracles cannot be dismissed easily with other labels like a map sense or other terms of art.

Casey Luskin: So the fact that these kinds of features evolved really just makes me wonder, how could they arise by an unguided, stepwise Darwinian process. Id love to see a stepwise evolutionary explanation for this, if it exists. And Im wondering, are you aware of attempts to explain behaviors like this through a standard typical Darwinian model? (21:58)

Eric Cassell: The short answer is no. I have not come across any name in the literature about those kinds of behaviors and how they could have evolved. I think its such a daunting task to try to explain how something is sophisticated as an algorithm, particularly a mathematical type of algorithm, could have evolved in the first place.

It has to be in the genome somehow. And then that information thats in the genome has to be encoded in a neural network when the brain develops, and then it all has to be run, as the animal is performing the behavior. So theres a lot of unanswered questions about how all that takes place. (22:42)

Casey Luskin: Figure 3.3 [in the book] it talks about the different components necessary for animal navigation and migration behavior to work. Youve got to have navigation sensor physiology, a navigation algorithm. Youve got to have destination location information, migration decision algorithm, and migratory physiology to implement all of this. And if youre missing one of those components, one of those elements, then it doesnt work. Those five separate groups of genes, and as you put it, other genetic information in the genome, all have to be there in order for these navigation and migration algorithms to work. (23:36)

So lets talk about another example you give, the Monarch butterfly, which in North America requires three generations for the migration to complete itself. And so that has to be, genetically programmed because, obviously, the butterflies that are maybe in the middle of that migration pathway how could they have learned where theyre going? They werent even alive when the migration started. So how did they know where to go? Theyve never been to the destination. to me that obviously implies Im- Im sure you- you argue this in the book, very persuasively that the information had to be pre-loaded into those organisms, when theyre born, you call it pre-loaded software. So where do they get the pre-loaded software that tells them where to go and how does this evolve by an unguided Darwinian process? (24:22)

Eric Cassell: Again, thats a really difficult question that nobody has an answer for. Theres, there are some theories out there about how, in some cases, animals might have developed a behavior, or basically learned the behavior, and then somehow that behavior gets transferred into the genome. How that happens, thats a good question. Its a theory that Ive seen, people propose, but I dont understand how it could even work, in reality because you have a behavior that somehow then gets transmitted into the gametes and the genomes. But its a serious proposal that a number of people, believe in. (25:09)

Casey Luskin: It sounds very Lamarckian So maybe there is some influence of, you know, inheritance of acquired characteristics going on here, but as you said, its yet to be demonstrated. So these sound very mysterious at the present time. (26:05)

Note: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (17441829) was a French evolutionary thinker who held that characteristics could be acquired during the lifetime of a life form and passed on to offspring. Although at one time widely dismissed, this mechanism of evolution is becoming more widely accepted in the form of epigenetics.

Casey Luskin: Maybe 100 years ago or 2000 years ago, humans navigated much differently than they do today. So how has technology changed the way we navigate? (26:28)

Eric Cassell: Fundamentally animals are better navigators than humans. Were able to use that information and landmarks, but other than that, humans are very poor natural navigators, whereas all of these animals are actually expert navigators. Theyre all designed to perform, accurate navigation, to suit their own purposes. (27:09)

Its only been in within the last couple of hundred years that weve even developed any, any useful technology for navigation. Were basically just trying to catch up to what animals have been doing for a long time. (27:51)

Casey Luskin: I did not appreciate how important the sun is for human navigation till I moved to the Southern hemisphere during my PhD. Obviously if youre living in the Northern hemisphere, which is where I grew up, the sun is always in the south. but when I moved to South Africa, the sun is always in the north. I lived just north of the university and there were literally a couple times where I would get in my car to drive home from school and start driving in the opposite direction, south, because in my mind I was orientating myself with the sun. I knew I was supposed to go north, and for me going north meant you drive away from the sun. I didnt even think about it. I did not even appreciate how much, intuitively as a human being, I used the sun to navigate until the sun was in the wrong place and I was going in the wrong direction. (28:28)

You also talk about spider webs in your book and, theyre probably one of the most famous examples of an amazing animal behavior. How do spiders produce silk and what does the theory say about how spiders know instinctively how to produce a web. Are there evolutionary explanations for the origin of spiderwebs? If so, what do, what do you think of them? (29:19)

Eric Cassell: The question about silk, its a very complex material that involves a lot of, proteins and its a very complex process to produce the material. Humans have been trying to duplicate [spider] silk artificially for a long time. Basically weve never been able to do it because its so complex. We have some materials that sort of approximate the composition of silk, but never really duplicate it. So thats one thing there. (30:00)

And the process that the spiders use to generate it is a complex process, also. There has been a lot of research into web designs and, how they possibly could have evolved over time. But there are issues there as well because, for example, there are species of spiders that are completely unrelated, but yet produce the same exact web design. So how do you explain that? (30:42)

The typical Darwinian explanation that its convergent evolution, selection pressure, or some other vague term but really, the origin of the webs and then how spiders are able to manipulate them is really a complex behavior thats pretty sophisticated. (31:16)

Casey Luskin: I note that you provide a really striking quote in your book from Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini from their book What Darwin Got Wrong (2010). Theyre talking about animal behavior and they say that, Such complex sequential, rigidly pre-programmed behavior could have gone wrong in many ways, at any one of its steps And they say spiderwebs, bee foraging, as we saw above and many more, cannot be accounted for by means of optimizing physical, chemical, or geometric factors. (32:26)

They go on to say that, They can hardly be accounted for by gradual adaptation either. Its fair to acknowledge that, although we bet some naturalistic explanation will one day be found, we have no such explanation at present. If we insist that natural selection is the only way to try, we will never have one. (32:59)

These are two authors who describe themselves in their book as outright, card carrying, signed up, dyed in the wool, no-holds-barred atheists. And yet theyre saying that there is no Darwinian natural selection-based explanation and theyre really doubtful there ever will be for the origin of these complex behaviors. You also talk about a textbook that says, We still know little about the rate and type of evolutionary change, experienced by behavioral traits. (33:20)

Eric Cassell: In my research in the literature, for the most part, there is only one, theres one particular type of behavior [for which] at least some theories have been proposed and that concerns insect social behavior. The basic theory is that there are, insects ants, et cetera that exhibit solitary behaviors. Theres, in other words, theres a difference between those that are social and those that are solitary. (34:14)

The theory is that when an animal transitions from a solitary lifestyle to a social lifestyle, its just a matter of adding a few algorithms, if you will, a few steps to integrating that information into a social environment. Well, at first that sounds somewhat plausible, but the evidence really is not there that thats the case, for two reasons. One is that the social behaviors that these animals exhibit far exceed the behaviors that solitary animals do. Thats one thing. (34:47)

The other is that insect social behavior is one area that has seen quite a bit of research into the genomes, And whats been found is that the genomes of the social insects have undergone significant change, when they transition from solitary to social. So theres literally hundreds of thousands of genetic changes that take place in these animals, when theyre social. So how that could have happened through a step by step linear Darwinian fashion is not very plausible. (35:28)

Casey Luskin: So, okay. Well, this will, I think, lead into my final question during our conversational part of the interview. It sounds like a lot of information goes into the origin of these animal behaviors. So how does information important for the origin of these animal behaviors and what is your view on what this implies for intelligent design? (36:18)

Eric Cassell: These behaviors, for the most part, are controlled by algorithms in one form or another. And to have an algorithm, you have to have the information. Where does information come from that even defines the algorithm in the first place? So thats the part thats challenging. A lot of the research thats been done by the ID community tends to indicate that you really cant generate information through a- random process, which is, you know, mutations and natural selection. (36:44)

Its just incapable of doing that. If you look at the work of design theorist William Dembski and some others, regarding these No Free Lunch theorems, thats basically what they say. Its difficult to explain the origin of this kind of information through a purely random process. I think thats one of the biggest hurdles to overcome in trying to explain, the origin of these kinds of behaviors. (37:24)

Next: Challenges from the audience, as well as challenges from nature

Heres the earlier portion of the episode, with transcript and notes.

Neuroscience mystery: How do tiny brains enable complex behavior? Eric Cassell notes that insects with brains of only a million neurons exhibit principles found only in the most advanced manmade navigation systems. How? Cassell argues in his recent book that an algorithm model is best suited to understanding the insect mind and that of many animals.

You may also wish to read: A navigator asks animals: How do you find your way? The results are amazing. Many life forms do math they know nothing about. The question Eric Cassell: asks is, how, exactly, is so much information packed into simple brain with so few neurons?

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Genomics’ role beyond healthcare and medical research – BioNews

Posted: at 2:24 am

31 January 2022

The UK government has investigated possible future applications of genomics beyond healthcare and the potential risks involved in its growing use, published in an open report.

The technology to sequence the human genome has developed rapidly in recent years from costing 4 billion twenty years ago to only around 800 today. Genome sequencing is already widely used in the UK to screen for genetic diseases. But in their Genomics Beyond Health report, the Government Office for Science highlights how growing access to genomics could continue its use beyond health, from DNA based predictions of children's behavioural traits and educational achievement to an athlete's inherent capabilities. The report also indicates that while there are many benefits to this information, predictions based on genomics are open to misinterpretation and they raise ethical questions surrounding discrimination based on DNA.

'Now is the time to consider what might be possible, and what actions government and the public could take to ensure the widespread application of genomics can occur in a way that protects and benefits us all', said Sir Patrick Vallance, UK Government Chief Scientific Advisor.

In their 198-page report, the authors outline how genomics can help determine certain disease risks, identify suspects at crime-scenes and develop crops resistant to pests and harsh climates.

But they point to several ethical and practical issues where genomics is heading next. Genome based predictions of how well a child will perform at school could help tailor education to individual needs. But the authors note that other factors such as parental education currently predict academic performance much more accurately, yet there are no regulations in the UK to limit genomic testing marketed at parents.

Another possibility is the use of genomics in hiring to select workers with optimal health and the desired personality traits. The authors argue this would be inherently discriminatory and lack scientific grounding by disregarding environmental influence.

The report suggests that as genomics sequencing technologies become increasingly advances and increase in use more consideration should be given to policy and regulation. A structured framework governing how genomic information is collected and used could protect by law the privacy, anonymity, and security of the genome sequences of UK citizens.

'The use of genomic data outside the healthcare setting needs careful scrutiny, and safeguards are needed to protect the public from any potential misuse of their data' said Sarah Norcross, director of the Progress Educational Trust. 'This report must be acted on expeditiously, as genomics is such a fast-moving area.'

The report was produced together with thirty experts in science, technology and policy to provide a 'basis for discussion within government departments', helping engage with future issues before they arise.

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The seed revolution is coming – SWI swissinfo.ch – swissinfo.ch

Posted: at 2:23 am

Seed companies are promising sweeter strawberries, drought-resistant cabbage and healthier tomatoes in less time and at lower cost thanks to genome editing technology. Theres a catch though: In some cases, rules are so lax that we may never know our food was genome edited.

Jessica covers the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to big global companies and their impact in Switzerland and abroad. Shes always looking for a Swiss connection with her native San Francisco and will happily discuss why her hometown has produced some of the greatest innovations but cant seem to solve its housing crisis.

More from this author| English Department

On the northern coast of the Netherlands, around 30 companies are working in fields and greenhouses to develop the next greatest thing in vegetables. The region calls itself Seed Valley. It is the heartland of European vegetable breeding the way Silicon Valley is the center of IT and software innovation. During a Syngenta media field trip last autumn, the rows of vegetables reminded me of a Disneyland park before all the guests arrive pristine, bright and trimmed to perfection almost make-believe.

All the vegetables here are bred using conventional methods, which Syngenta explains, are very scientific and can take years, sometimes decades, to bear fruit (literally). There is no talk of genome editing or CRISPR in these fields because it isnt allowed in Europe. But several thousand kilometres in either direction to the US and China seed companies like Syngenta are starting to show off their latest CRISPR creations.

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Thats the fragmented regulatory world we live in right now, but it is quickly changing. More governments are opening their doors to genome editing with tools like CRISPR. Covid vaccine nationalism left its mark countries are gripped by the F.O.B.L.B the Fear Of Being Left Behind as other countries pourmoney into genome edited seed research. Everyone wants an invention they can call their own.

Governments arent just allowing genome editing in food, they arent regulating it at all in some cases. This means no strict safety checks, no labelling, and no transparency that our food was genome edited. Some seed companies argue genome editing is simply speeding up something that could happen in nature so why should it be treated any differently. Critics argue otherwise.

What do you think? Ive created a debateExternal link to engage with readers on the topic. Curious to hear your thoughts. jessica.davis@swissinfo.ch.

Nestl will pay African cocoa farmers to keep children in schools. Some 10,000 farmers in Ivory Coast stand to gain extra cash if they follow a set of guidelines set down by Nestl including refraining from child labour by enrolling all children in school and increasing the productivity of their cocoa farms with best practice techniques. The company plans to expand the programme to 160,000 cocoa farmersby 2030 and introduce a new range of products under the scheme. This may the greatest hope yet of a child labour-free chocolate bar from a big multinational.

Switzerland is keeping its options open to compensate for losses from the minimum corporate tax deal. After relying for so long on low tax rates as its calling card with big companies, the country is trying to figure out what else it can do to stay attractive in the face of the global minimum tax rate. Should the country loosen immigration restrictions? Should it have less regulation? Or more regulation on dirty industries? Should the government fund company researchExternal link and promising start-ups? All options are on the table. One idea being floated is to lower the tax burden on wealthy executives to keep them, and their companies, in the country. This idea is unlikely to go over well with the public when the cries to raise taxes from billionaires, even from a few billionaires themselvesExternal link, are getting louder.

Big food has a big problem with nutrition. According to an investigation by Swiss public television, RTS, the food industry lobby is pushing back on regulation aimed at curbing skyrocketing obesity ratesExternal link in some countries. RTS uncovered an email exchange from Swiss food giant Nestl calling on the Swiss governments support to reject a new law on nutrition labelling in Mexico. The company told RTS it supported the purpose of the law but believed it had no scientific basis and would restrict consumer choice.

Mergers and acquisitions boomed last year. Rock bottom interest rates and excess cash sloshing around Swiss companies saw a three-fold increaseExternal link in the value of mergers and acquisitions (M&A), rising to CHF170 billion ($186 billion) last year. The pharmaceutical and life science sectors saw M&A deal activity surge from CHF6 billion in 2020 to CHF56 billion last year, comprising four of the ten largest corporate deals. More biotech deals are expected this year with many wondering how Novartis is planning to spend the CHF19 billion from the sale of the Roche stake.In an interview in Finanz & Wirtschaft, Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan indicated that there may be smaller acquisitionsExternal link on the way.

Switzerland stumbles in the latest corruption ranking. Transparency International ranked Switzerland 7th, down four spots from last year, in its annual Corruption Perceptions Index. A series of scandals last year didnt help. The Swiss public sector is especially vulnerable to nepotism, says the NGO. Its a small country, we know each other, we went to school together often this implies conflicts of interest. But there are bigger problems not captured by the Index, says the NGOs director, Martin Hilti. Specifically, money laundering and the entire enabling industry including lawyers, notaries and real estate agents.

Thanks for reading.

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Reply to Gaudry et al.: Cross-validation is necessary for the identification of pseudogenes – pnas.org

Posted: at 2:23 am

Our article (1) describing a widespread loss of uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1) in cetaceans, sirenians (the manatee), and one pinniped (the Antarctic fur seal, Arctocephalus gazella) as a convergent mechanism to minimize heat loss has raised questions from experts in the field of mammalian energy metabolism (2).

Briefly, Gaudry etal. (2) argue, after examining raw high-throughput sequencing data from National Center for Biotechnology Information Sequence Read Archive, that 1) while UCP1 inactivation is likely associated with a higher reliance on insulation in fully aquatic mammals (cetaceans and sirenians), this is likely not the case for pinnipeds; 2) our findings reflect a misassembly of the A. gazella genome (generated by ref. 3); and 3) when UCP1 is lost in pinnipeds, this event is possibly associated with a greater body size (case in point, the northern and southern elephant seals).

Apparent UCP1 loss is observed in A. gazella in a genome assembly derived from PacBio sequencing data (v1.2 and subsequent versions) (3), while an assembly derived from Illumina sequencing (v1.1) (4) indicates that the gene is intact (Fig. 1). We are very grateful to Gaudry etal. (2) for pointing out this error. This reminds us that it is not only important to assess the quality of published genomes prior to data analysis but also necessary to cross-validate using data from multiple sources before conclusions are made.

Differences in exon 1 and exon 6 sequences of UCP1 in Antarctic fur seal PacBio and Illumina genome assemblies. Gray blocks indicate regions unique to the Antarctic fur seal PacBio assembly. For comparison, the sequences of northern fur seal, walrus, and California sea lion are shown.

Gaudry etal. (2) describe pseudogenization of UCP1 in the northern and southern elephant seals and speculate that this is linked with the large body size of the two species. While this extrapolation is fascinating, we argue that this conclusion is not necessarily valid. Firstly, the frameshift in exon 1 is located in the ostensibly 5 untranslated region; another start codon appears about 10 amino acids later (Fig. 2A). Considering that we did not detect a signal of relaxed selection in these species (Fig. 2B), we cannot fully confirm, without transcriptomic data, that this gene has been pseudogenized. Secondly, even if this gene has been lost in elephant seals, a link between loss of UCP1 and body size, in our opinion, is not straightforward. UCP1 loss could reflect an adaptive thermoregulatory mechanism coincidentally associated with a larger body size. However, we agree with Gaudry etal., in general, that the thermoregulatory strategy is likely to be different between fully aquatic and semiaquatic marine mammals.

(A) Alignment of exon 1 and exon 3 of the UCP1 of southern elephant seal and northern elephant seal. The gray blocks and the red arrows show the position of the start codon, and the yellow blocks indicate amino acids missing in the elephant seals. (B) Summary of relaxed selection test of northern and southern elephant seal UCP1. A red star indicates the foreground branch.

The project was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 41422604 and 41306169), One Belt and One Road Science and Technology Cooperation Special Program of the International Partnership Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant 183446KYSB20200016), the Key Deployment Project of Center for Ocean Mega-Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant COMS2020Q15), and the Research Funds for Interdisciplinary Subject, Northwestern Polytechnical University (Grant 19SH030408).

Author contributions: K.W. and S.L. designed research; Y.Y., P.Z., H.K., G.F., K.W., and S.L. performed research; Y.Y., I.S., K.W., and S.L. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; Y.Y. and Y.Z. analyzed data; and Y.Y., I.S., A.R.H., D.W., K.W., and S.L. wrote the paper.

The authors declare no competing interest.

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Illumina, Invitae Founding Members of ASHG’s Genetics and Genomics Impact Partnerships Program – Bio-IT World

Posted: at 2:23 am

By Bio-IT World Staff

January 31, 2022 | The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) today announced the launch of the ASHG Genetics and Genomics Impact Partnerships program. Illumina, a leader in next-generation genomic sequencing technologies, and Invitae, a leading medical genetics company, have joined as founding partners.

The opportunity to apply human genetics and genomics research to build a more equitable world is urgent and ASHG is grateful for Illuminas and Invitaes support to help drive progress forward. said ASHG President Charles Rotimi, PhD in a press release. The commitment were sharing will help the researchers of today and tomorrow to make new discoveries that serve populations worldwide, apply genetics knowledge in more just and equitable ways, and inspire and support others to join the field. We thank these organizations for their tireless dedication to equity as we work toward a better future together.

As the worlds largest professional organization for human genetics and genomics, ASHG believes itself to be uniquely positioned to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in human genetics and genomics research on a global scale. The Society is working strategically and programmatically to expand participation and strengthen careers of researchers from diverse backgrounds, sustain emphasis on increasing diversity and inclusion in research cohorts, and develop a knowledge network and professional education for researchers.

Knowing that collective effort is required to ensure all people benefit from genetics and genomics research, ASHG Impact Partners include organizations likewise dedicated to advancing DEI in human genetics and genomics. Through their financial contributions, Impact Partners support the ASHG Fund for Equity in Genetics and Genomics Research, which helps the Society to design innovative programs with demonstrable impacts on DEI; enhance capacity to expand DEI efforts in future years; and sustain DEI programs and initiatives.

Joining as founding Impact Partners, Illumina and Invitae recognize the critical importance of advancing DEI in the field of human genetics and genomics.

At Illumina, we recognize that our efforts to improve human health can be magnified if all people and places have access to genomic technology, said Illuminas Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion Lisa Toppin, EdD in the same statement. We know that there are still significant gaps in access to genomic technology, personalized medicine, and even representative data to understand genomes in the context of global diversity. Through this exciting new partnership with ASHG, we will continue to close those gaps to increase access, improve the equity of representation, and expand the transformative benefits of genomics for all.

We are proud to support this initiative which aligns with our mission to bring comprehensive genetic information into mainstream medicine to improve healthcare for billions of people, added Invitaes Chief Medical Officer Robert Nussbaum, MD. The era of Genome Management is now here, and equity in genomics is paramount in order to transform the way medicine is practiced.

As part of this historic partnership, ASHG and Impact Partners will meet periodically to share knowledge and experiences and learn about effective DEI strategies that institutions and individual researchers can implement to advance more inclusive and equitable workforces and research study populations.

We remain focused on fostering enduring change in the human genetics and genomic field and our newest partnership with Illumina and Invitae will further that effort, Rotimi said. Recruiting, retaining and engaging a robustly diverse and inclusive human genetics community is essential to identifying and addressing the profound questions in human genetics and advancing health equity, and everyone has a role to play in this critical mission.

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Utilizing museomics to trace the complex history and species boundaries in an avian-study system of conservation concern | Heredity – Nature.com

Posted: at 2:23 am

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Download Tor Browser for Windows – Free – 11.0.3

Posted: at 2:22 am

With the internet being the massive resource that it is, people are becoming more and more reliant on it. Not only do we search for recipes and directions on the web, but we use it for banking, storing photos and videos of ourselves and our loved ones, accessing healthcare information, and doing other activities that may involve sending and receiving private information. It seems like more and more frequently, there are stories of personal data being leaked from financial institutions, social media services, and the cloud. Tor looks to ease our worries with a web browser that aims to help people use the internet without fear of being tracked or spied on. According to Tor, their mission is to "advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies, supporting their unrestricted availability and use, and furthering their scientific and popular understanding". If that doesn't say security, we don't know what does!

So, what exactly is Tor, and how does it work? Every day when we use the internet, especially if we're using devices that don't have software that protects us from spyware, hacking, and other malicious activity, we are essentially at risk. This doesn't just include times that we go to our bank's website and transfer money, or enter our social security number to take care of our taxes. With every website that we visit, someone somewhere could track where we go, what we search, what we save and download, and more. To works by shielding us from all of that. Tor is an internet browser run by volunteer-operated servers. Tor's icon is an onion because like an onion, Tor's has layers that encrypt your internet connection. When you connect, your activity is sent through three different voluntarily operated servers around the world. So, three layers of protection secure your activity in transit from you to your destination on the internet. None of the locations of any of the servers are known.

Once you've downloaded Tor, you're prompted to choose the language you'd like to view the browser in. From there, you're taken to the main page where you can start searching. For those new to the browser, it does offer a step by step tutorial on how to navigate around. To ensure your privacy, Tor erases cookies and your browsing history after you're finished using the internet. Each time you use Tor, you can also change the route and servers that your connection goes through before you access the website that you've searched for with the Circuit Display. At this point, you can click "See My Path", and a separate tab will pop up. In this tab, you can see the countries that house the servers that your connection is currently passing through. Next, you're able to see your security level and make adjustments in the advanced settings. Everyone starts off with a standard connection, which means that every function that the Tor browser has available is turned on. Safer is the next level, and removes JavaScript and HTML5 media, which Tor says have been involved in dangerous activity in the past. The final level of security is the safest which works by disabling scripts, media, and certain images. You can toggle on and off functions like blocking deceptive content, giving you alerts for strange software and more. In the general tab you can select Tor as your default browser and make changes to the browser's appearance as well.

Finally, Tor warns you that because of all the services that it offers, your browser may run a little slower depending on the level of security you've selected and which features are enabled. Onion services include creating your own webpages and stores.

Tor is currently available for download on Mac and PCs running Windows.

This depends on the user. If you just use the internet for casual browsing, social media and maybe to do some shopping from time to time, this may not be the browser for you. The Chrome browser would be an excellent option, as its faster than other popular browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer (which is surprisingly still widely used), it has a simple and clean layout, and has a large extension gallery that grows exponentially as time passes.

Tor is a browser for a specific type of user. It has a lot of functions in place to help people keep their information private, and walks us through all of our options - and there are many. It does a good job of repeatedly reassuring the user that they dont have to worry about who is seeing their web activity.

For the everyday user, we dont recommend Tor. As we said earlier, Tor is for a specific type of user. The browser is supposed to help keep things a secret with all of the security features that it has, but we dont think most of the general population is going to make use of them. The location of the voluntary servers are unknown, but this also means that we have no idea who is running the servers and what they see. Tor is also known to be the home of many black market websites, so even if youre not using Tor for that purpose, that fact alone is understandably enough to scare a lot of users away. Sure, this browser jumps through hoops to lock in your connection, but its not foolproof. As unfortunate as it may be, if someone wants to hack into your computer through Tor, they still might be able to do it. Your connection is encrypted as it moves from server to server, but the moment it leaves the third server and makes its way to your internet destination, there is no layer of encryption covering it. Unless youre an undercover journalist, you live in a country that has heavy restrictions in place by the government on internet use, or youre looking for trouble, we would pass on downloading Tor.

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Download Tor Browser for Windows - Free - 11.0.3

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