Category Archives: Singularity

AI is exerting an ever greater influence on our lives, which is leading to growing concern over whether we can trust it to act fairly and reliably. Ethical hackers, AI audits, and bias bounties could help us keep a lid on the potential harms, say researchers.

Theres increasing awareness of the dangers posed by our reliance on AI. These systems have a worrying knack for picking up and replicating the biases already present in our society, which can entrench the marginalization of certain groups.

The data-heavy nature of current deep learning systems also raises privacy concerns, both due to their encouragement of widespread surveillance and the possibility of data breaches. And the black box nature of many AI systems also makes it hard to assess whether theyre working correctly, which can have serious implications in certain domains.

Recognition of these issues has led to a rapidly expanding collection of AI ethics principles from companies, governments, and even supranational organizations designed to guide the developers of AI technology. But concrete proposals for how to make sure everyone lives up to these ideals are much rarer.

Now, a new paper in Science proposes some tangible steps that the industry could take to increase trust in AI technology. A failure to do so could lead to a tech-lash that severely hampers progress in the field, say the researchers.

Governments and the public need to be able to easily tell apart between the trustworthy, the snake-oil salesmen, and the clueless, lead author Shahar Avin, from Cambridge University, said in a press release. Once you can do that, there is a real incentive to be trustworthy. But while you cant tell them apart, there is a lot of pressure to cut corners.

The researchers borrow some tried and tested ideas from cybersecurity, which has grappled with the issue of getting people to trust software for decades. One popular approach is to use red teams of ethical hackers who attempt to find vulnerabilities in systems so that the designer can patch them before theyre released.

AI red teams already exist within large industry and government labs, the authors note, but they suggest that sharing experiences across organizations and domains could make this approach far more powerful and accessible to more AI developers.

Software companies also frequently offer bug bounties, which provide a financial reward if a hacker finds flaws in their systems and tells them about it privately so they can fix it. The authors suggest that AI developers should adopt similar practices, offering people rewards for finding out if their algorithms are biased or making incorrect decisions.

They point to a recent competition Twitter held that offered rewards to anyone who could find bias in their image-cropping algorithm as an early example of how this approach could work.

As cybersecurity attacks become more common, governments are increasingly mandating the reporting of data breaches and hacks. The authors suggest similar ideas could be applied to incidents where AI systems cause harm. While voluntary, anonymous sharingsuch as that enabled by the AI Incident Databaseis a useful starting point, they say this could become a regulatory requirement.

The world of finance also has some powerful tools for ensuring trust, most notably the idea of third-party audits. This involves granting an auditor access to restricted information so they can assess whether the owners public claims match their private records. Such an approach could be useful for AI developers who generally want to keep their data and algorithms secret.

Audits only work if the auditors can be trusted and there are meaningful consequences for a failure to pass them, though, say the authors. They are also only possible if developers follow common practices for documenting their development process and their systems makeup and activities.

At present, guidelines for how to do this in AI are lacking, but early work on ethical frameworks, model documentation, and continuous monitoring of AI systems is a useful starting place.

The AI industry is also already working on approaches that could boost trust in the technology. Efforts to improve the explainability and interpretability of AI models are already underway, but common standards and tests that measure compliance to those standards would be useful additions to this field.

Similarly, privacy-preserving machine learning, which aims to better protect the data used to train models, is a booming area of research. But theyre still rarely put into practice by industry, so the authors recommend more support for these efforts to boost adoption.

Whether companies can really be prodded into taking concerted action on this problem is unclear. Without regulators breathing down their necks, many will be unwilling to take on the onerous level of attention and investment that these approaches are likely to require. But the authors warn that the industry needs to recognize the importance of public trust and give it due weight.

Lives and livelihoods are ever more reliant on AI that is closed to scrutiny, and that is a recipe for a crisis of trust, co-author Haydn Belfield, from Cambridge University, said in the press release. Its time for the industry to move beyond well-meaning ethical principles and implement real-world mechanisms to address this.

Image Credit: markusspiske / 1000 images

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How Ethical Hackers Could Help Us Build Trust in AI - Singularity Hub

Heres a look at the most interesting products from the past week, featuring releases from Action1, Cloudflare, Code42, F5 Networks, NetQuest, Oxeye, SentinelOne and Tenable.

With Singularity Mobile, powered by Zimperium, the Singularity XDR platform now expands to deliver Mobile Threat Defense coverage to iOS, Android, and ChromeOS that is on-device, adaptive, and real-time, to thwart mobile malware and phishing attacks without cloud connection dependency.

The new platform identifies code vulnerabilities, open-source vulnerabilities, and secrets to highlight the most critical issues in the software development lifecycle.

With Cloudflares new cloud firewall functionality, CIOs can better secure their entire corporate network, apply zero trust policies to all traffic, and gain deeper network visibility. And since Cloudflares firewall runs everywhere, CIOs no longer need to rely on centralizing traffic on one box in one location, physical or virtual.

F5s complementary solutions now offer comprehensive account takeover protection on a single platform. Organizations can better defend against bots targeting their web properties and those of third-party providers with Aggregator Management, recognize legitimate users throughout the customer journey with Authentication Intelligence, and gain insight into client-side digital skimming attacks with Client-Side Defense.

The Streaming Network Sensors feature NetQuests unsampled flow metering performance capable of scaling flow metadata generation from a single 10G link to multiple 100G network links in a compact 1RU footprint. Flow data at this scale makes the sensors ideal for securing large-scale regional networks, data center backbones, ISP peering and international optical links.

Action1 Corporation released the new version of its RMM platform, giving MSPs and IT departments real-time visibility and control over corporate endpoints and empowering companies to support hybrid workforce.

With the release of Tenable.cs, Tenable will help organizations protect the full cloud-native stack throughout the DevOps lifecycle, from the time applications and infrastructure are defined in code through production usage.

The new data exfiltration detectors give security teams full visibility when files are shared, downloaded, or emailed to untrusted destinations on OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, Office 365 and Gmail, whether those insider risk events take place on a computer, in the cloud or over email.

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New infosec products of the week: December 10, 2021 - Help Net Security

In 2020, scientists made global headlines by creating xenobotstiny programmable living things made of several thousand frog stem cells.

These pioneer xenobots could move around in fluids, and scientists claimed they could be useful for monitoring radioactivity, pollutants, drugs, or diseases. Early xenobots survived for up to ten days.

A second wave of xenobots, created in early 2021, showed unexpected new properties. These included self-healing and longer life. They also showed a capacity to cooperate in swarms, for example by massing into groups.

Last week, the same team of biology, robotics, and computer scientists unveiled a new kind of xenobot. Like previous xenobots, they were created using artificial intelligence to virtually test billions of prototypes, sidestepping the lengthy trial-and-error process in the lab. But the latest xenobots have a crucial difference: this time, they can self-replicate.

The new xenobots are a bit like Pac-Man. As they swim around they can gobble up other frog stem cells and assemble new xenobots just like themselves. They can sustain this process for several generations.

But they dont reproduce in a traditional biological sense. Instead, they fashion the groups of frog cells into the right shape, using their mouths. Ironically, the recently extinct Australian gastric-brooding frog uniquely gave birth to babies through its mouth.

The latest advance brings scientists a step closer to creating organisms that can self-replicate indefinitely. Is this as much of a Pandoras Box as it sounds like?

Conceptually, human-designed self-replication is not new. In 1966, the influential mathematician John Von Neumann discussed self-reproducing automata. Famously, Eric Drexler, the US engineer credited with founding the field of nanotechnology, referred to the potential of grey goo in his 1986 book Engines of Creation. He envisaged nanobots that replicated incessantly and devoured their surroundings, transforming everything into a sludge made of themselves.

Although Drexler subsequently regretted coining the term, his thought experiment has frequently been used to warn about the risks of developing new biological matter.

In 2002, without the help of AI, an artificial polio virus created from tailor-made DNA sequences became capable of self-replication. Although the synthetic virus was confined to a lab, it was able to infect and kill mice.

The researchers who created the new xenobots say their main value is in demonstrating advances in biology, AI, and robotics.

Future robots made from organic materials might be more eco-friendly, because they could be designed to decompose rather than persist. They might help address health problems in humans, animals, and the environment. They might contribute to regenerative medicine or cancer therapy.

Xenobots could also inspire art and new perspectives on life. Strangely, xenobot offspring are made in their parents image, but are not made of or from them. As such, they replicate without truly reproducing in the biological sense.

Perhaps there are alien life forms that assemble their children from objects in the world around them, rather than from their own bodies?

It might be natural to have instinctive reservations about xenobot research. One xenobot researcher said there is a moral imperative to study these self-replicating systems, yet the research team also recognizes legal and ethical concerns with their work.

Centuries ago, English philosopher Francis Bacon raised the idea that some research is too dangerous to do. While we dont believe thats the case for current xenobots, it may be so for future developments.

Any hostile use of xenobots, or the use of AI to design DNA sequences that would give rise to deliberately dangerous synthetic organisms, is banned by the United Nations Biological Weapons Convention and the 1925 Geneva Protocol and Chemical Weapons Convention.

However, the use of these creations outside of warfare is less clearly regulated.

The interdisciplinary nature of these advances, including AI, robotics, and biology, makes them hard to regulate. But it is still important to consider potentially dangerous uses.

There is a useful precedent here. In 2017, the US national academies of science and medicine published a joint report on the burgeoning science of human genome editing.

It outlined conditions under which scientists should be allowed to edit human genes in ways that allow the changes to be passed on to subsequent generations. It advised this work should be limited to compelling purposes of treating or preventing serious disease or disability, and even then only with stringent oversight.

Both the US and UK now allow human gene editing under specific circumstances. But creating new organisms that could perpetuate themselves was far beyond the scope of these reports.

Although xenobots are not currently made from human embryos or stem cells, it is conceivable they could be. Their creation raises similar questions about creating and modifying ongoing life forms that require regulation.

At present, xenobots do not live long and only replicate for a few generations. Still, as the researchers say, living matter can behave in unforeseen ways, and these will not necessarily be benign.

We should also consider potential impacts on the non-human world. Human, animal, and environmental health are intimately linked, and organisms introduced by humans can wreak inadvertent havoc on ecosystems.

What limits should we place on science to avoid a real-life grey goo scenario? Its too early to be completely prescriptive. But regulators, scientists, and society should carefully weigh up the risks and rewards.

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

Image Credit: An AI-designed parent organism (C shape; red) beside stem cells that have been compressed into a ball (offspring; green). Douglas Blackiston and Sam Kriegman

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Will Self-Replicating Xenobots Cure Diseases, Yield New Bioweapons, or Simply Turn the World Into Grey Goo? - Singularity Hub

Iridia to Double Headcount and Footprint to Accelerate Growth

Amy Kruse of Prime Movers Lab to Join Board of Directors

SAN DIEGO, Dec. 14, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Iridia, Inc., a pioneer in DNA-based data storage, today announced that it has closed a follow-on round of $6 million with Prime Movers Lab. Amy Kruse, General Partner of Prime Movers Lab, will be joining Iridias Board of Directors effective immediately. This round is preceded by an oversubscribed $24 million financing, which will facilitate the companys ability to double its headcount and physical footprint. Proceeds from this follow-on round will fund further validation of the companys technology and the development of working prototypes.

Iridias disruptive technology is designed to integrate the writing, storage, and read back of massive amounts of data using synthetic DNA as the storage media. This combination of functionality will significantly increase data density and durability compared to conventional approaches, while dramatically reducing the physical and carbon footprints of commercial data centers around the world.

We are extremely excited to have Prime Movers Lab on board as an equity partner, as well as the addition of Amy to our board, said Murali K. Prahalad, Ph.D., President and CEO of Iridia. They bring a tremendous amount of strategic expertise in deploying complex technologies into real-world environments, as well as the potential for participating in additional financing rounds.

Amy Kruse brings over 15 years of experience working with emerging companies. She is currently a General Partner at Prime Movers Lab where she leads their life sciences investments. Previously, Amy served as the Chief Scientific Officer at Optios, as well as VP and Chief Technology Officer at Cubic Global Defense overseeing innovation and the R&D portfolio across the entire defense enterprise. Early in her career, she served as a government civilian program manager at DARPA. Amy is a Founding Member of the Loomis Innovation Council and a Guest Lecturer for Singularity University. She earned a BS in Cell and Structural Biology and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, where she was awarded an NSF Graduate Fellowship.

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As the volume of data being generated every day increases at exponential rates, the demand for storing that data is also skyrocketing. We think DNA provides the most exciting opportunity for solving the data storage problem, and Iridia has the right team and approach for the vast and underserved data storage space, said Kruse. Iridias proprietary biochemistry and system architecture will be more energy-efficient, cost-competitive, and secure than competing data storage solutions.

Data generation is expanding exponentially. The Economist predicts there will be up to 1 trillion computerized, networked devices by 2035. The worlds ability to generate digital data is far exceeding our ability to store it, thus significantly constraining the power of big data analytics. Currently, over 20 zettabytes of digital data are lost each year due to storage capacity limitations. To put this in context, to store one zettabyte of data would require more than one billion, one terabyte hard drives. And if technologies such as flash memory were used to meet this growing need, the resultant archive would need up to 100 times the worlds available supply of microchip-grade silicon by 20401.

Iridias unique and patented method of data storage integrates semiconductor technology with a disruptive enzyme-based chemistry to add DNA-based bits representing 0s and 1s in a programmable fashion. This offers the potential to add orders of magnitude more storage capacity compared to current archival technologies such as magnetic tape and hard-drives paving the way for commercially viable DNA data storage solutions.

As the industry focus on DNA data storage expands, Iridia will be well positioned with a solution designed specifically for the modern data center, said Jay T. Flatley, Chairman of the Board of Iridia and Chairman and former CEO of Illumina. This additional funding will enable the company to accelerate development of working prototypes, an important milestone on the path to commercialization and adoption.

About Iridia, Inc.Headquartered in Carlsbad, CA, Iridia Inc. strategically combines proprietary enzymology and semiconductor technology to revolutionize long-term data storage. By leveraging DNA, natures perfected data storage system, the company is developing a durable, decodable, and ultra-high-density mode of data storage, that significantly reduces the infrastructure requirements and environmental impact compared to current approaches. Iridias solution is the worlds first affordable, integrated data storage solution that can write, store, and read data in the form of DNA. Using proprietary semiconductor technologies and biochemistries, the company can manipulate single molecules of DNA to write information and read it back using the same device for a fraction of the cost of competing technologies. For more information, please visit http://www.iridia.com.

About Prime Movers LabPrime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in early-stage companies reinventing human augmentation, energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, and agriculture. Our team is dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs in their mission to commercialize breakthrough science and serve humanity. For more information, visit: http://www.primemoverslab.com.

Media ContactJoleen Schultz760-271-8150joleen@joleenschultzassociates.com

Zhirnov, V., et al., Nucleic acid memory, Nature Materials., vol. 15, no.4,pp 366-370, 2016.

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Iridia Raises $6 Million in Follow-on Equity Funding for Development of Industrys First DNA-based Memory Chips - Yahoo Finance

In science fiction movie, The Core, an intrepid crew journeys to the center of the Earth in a vessel that melts through the planets crust and mantle with a giant laser. Drilling startup, Petra, was founded on a similar idea. But they had a problem.

What do you do with all the lava?

In The Core, you dont do anything with it because its science fiction, and the vessel, Virgil, is made of a fanciful material called unobtainium that not only withstands extreme heat and pressure but also converts it into energy that somehow further reinforces Virgils hull.

Lacking unobtainium, Petra pivoted.

To be clear, their first prototype didnt use lasers, rather it melted rock with a plasma torch. But when the team realized disposing of all that magma was a bit of an issue, they decided to try pulverizing the rock with superheated gas instead.

The new rig is a robot, semi-automated with machine vision, that tunnels through solid rock without touching it. (Though the drilling itself is contact-free, the robot touches the surface with sensors.)

In a recent trial of the tech, the Petra team decamped to Minnesota to pit their tunneling robot, Swifty, against Sioux Quartzite, one of the worlds toughest rock types. After setting Swifty up and hitting the gas, they made quick work of a 20-foot demonstration bore hole.

we averaged an astounding one-inch-per-minute in a geology usually excavated by dynamite, said Ian Wright, Petras CTO and a Tesla cofounder, in a press release. No tunneling method has been able to tunnel through this kind of hard rock until now. Petras achievement is due to Swiftys thermal drilling method which efficiently bores through rock without touching it.

Next stop, the center of the Earth? Not so much. The company has some fairly specific plans in mind for the near future.

While other startups, like Elon Musks Boring Company, focus on tunnels big enough for roads, Petra is aiming to hollow out tunnels 20 to 60 inches in diameter to bury utilities. (Though Wright cofounded Tesla, he says he wasnt involved in the Boring Company.)

Cofounder and CEO Kimberly Abrams was motivated to start a company to tackle the challenge in 2018 when downed power lines sparked the devastating Paradise wildfire in California. That fire, and others since, led California utility PG&E to pledge to bury 10,000 miles of power lines in the riskiest areas at an estimated cost of $15 billion to $30 billion. With $65 billion from the recently passed $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill earmarked for grid improvements, demand for alternative boring technologies may grow in coming years.

What we realized in 2018 was that some of the most disaster-prone areas of the country were also the areas that had these nightmare geologies that no utility company or construction company could bore utility tunnels throughgeologies of granite and basalt that stopped tunneling projects in their tracks and that cause billions of dollars of cost overruns, Abrams said to Forbes.

Expense is a reason utilities havent buried more power lines in the past. John Fluharty, a contractor who works with utility companies to install pipelines, told Wired that its costs five times more to bury lines as opposed to stringing them pole-to-pole above-ground and up to 20 times as much when the buried lines need to travel through hard rock.

Abrams said the company think their tech could reduce costs by 50 to 80 percent.

The process, called thermal spallation drilling, isnt new, but has yet to be widely commercialized. Petra isnt sharing technical details, citing competitive concerns. Generally, though, Swifty breaks rock into small pieces with a jet of gas heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and uses a vacuum to clear the shattered remains from the tunnel. The non-contact method makes quick work of hard rock without suffering broken cutter heads.

Its much too early to know how much of an impact Petras technology will have, but the company, which emerged from stealth only recently, has raised $33 million to find out. Up next are tests out in the field on materials like granite, dolomite, limestone, and basalt.

Burying utilities, power lines in particular, would likely take many years to complete, even after new innovations prove themselves. But it seems a worthy project.

In addition to reducing the risks of disasters like wildfires, burying utilities infrastructure can also reduce longterm maintenance costs. And the grid is only likely to grow as demand for renewable energy and electric vehicles increases.

But besides practical and safety benefits, wouldnt it be just lovely to hide the mess of cables electrifying the planet, too?

Image Credit: Petra

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This Robot Tunnels Through Solid Rock by Blasting It With a Jet of Superheated Gas - Singularity Hub

Raise your hand if you live in a stable universe thats rapidly expanding to support its own vastness. Not so fast Earthlings. We might have an end-game level crunch-time problem on our hands.

Up front: Everyones heard of the Big Bang. And long-time Neural readers will certainly be familiar with the Big Rip. But its long past time we talked about the Big Crunch.

This hypothetical event would be our universes final act. It would essentially be the exact opposite of the Big Bang.

Our universe would collapse in on itself until it became an infinitesimal singularity a single point containing everything that ever was.

Background: The astrophysics world is all atwitter right now on the heels of the recent discovery of yet another galaxy that apparently contains low or no dark matter.

This is a lot like cutting open an apple and realizing that instead of its delicious, juicy pulp, it contains well, nothing.

It wouldnt make much sense because we expect there to be something inside the apple to help it keep its physical form. Even air would be something. Finding nothing would be a difficult pill to swallow.

Such a discovery would force us to rethink the physics of apples, much like Sir Isaac Newton did in the summer of 1666.

More background: The Big Crunch is, of course, only theoretical. But the recent discovery of these dark matter-free galaxies could lend some credence to the idea.

This is because many scientists believe that dark energy and dark matter make up the majority of the universe.

We believe our universe started expanding the moment the Big Bang happened and hasnt stopped since. And we believe that this expansion is fueled by dark energy.

Dark matter (theoretically) works diametrically to dark energy. Its believed to be a force that holds space together.

Its a bit more complicated than all that, but the important part is that we can only observe these forces indirectly. Thats why theyre called dark, we cant actually see them, but astrophysics simulationsdont tend to work unless we account for them.

How it all ends: Obviously, if the entire universe were once again reduced to a singularity, as scientists believe it was just before the Big Bang, everything in it would be rearranged. We cant say it would be destroyed because it would all still be there, it would just be infinitely tiny.

Its a pretty good bet than anything living wouldnt survive the Big Crunch. And the lack of dark matter in observable galaxies could be a major cause for concern.

This is because, as astrophysicist Paul Sutter wrote in an article published earlier today, whether or not the universe itself is actually stable remains an open question.

An unstable or even mostly stable universe could be potentially catastrophic for the future of its inhabitants. This may have something to do with the fact that the universe hates entropy.

According to Sutter:

The apparent metastability of the quantum fields of the universe is a little unsettling. Although it could mean that the universe could persist for billions, even trillions, of years without anything going wrong at all, it could also mean that the universe is already beginning to transform.

This sounds like a form of error-correction at a fundamentally universal level. Sutter hypothesizes such a transformation could be entirely mundane, leaving our observations of the universe mostly unchanged. However, they also posit that it could radically alter the underlying physics of the universe to such a degree that chemistry and atomics as we understand them no longer function viably.

Quick take: The lack of dark matter in nearby galaxies is a cause for concern because, currently, we cant explain why it isnt there. Like the pulp inside of an apple, we expect to see dark matter inside of a galaxy when we use technology to penetrate its outer skin.

Ultimately, this could be nothing. Science is hard and sometimes the answers to big exciting questions are boring. Maybe the dark matter is there and we just arent looking for it the right way.

But the scientists are convinced theyve got it right, at least as right as any other observations on distant galaxies have been.And, if they are right about the missing dark matter, then its possible the instability of the universe could be a big problem.

If the Big Crunch were to eventually happen, there should be a single moment where the universes expansion away from its original singularity converts into a reduction toward an infinitesimal point again.

This process could have already begun.

According to Sutters article:

All it would take is one little shake in the wrong direction, in some random patch of the universe, where the Higgs falls apart and the underlying quantum fields find a new, more stable configuration. That region of new universe would then propagate outward at nearly the speed of light through the old universe.

Sutter isnt necessarily referring to the idea of the Big Crunch, but the ideas they present lend themselves to the possibility of such an end for our universe.

The Big Crunch, or some other universe-altering event, could be happening right now. And wed have no way of knowing when its effects would reach our neck of the cosmos. It could be trillions of years from now orbefore you finish reading this sentence.

Whew! Glad were all still here.

The good news is that if the universe can go from Big Bang to Big Crunch once, it seems perfectly plausible to assume it can do it again. So if we all snuff it in an instant, we can take solace in the fact that the stardust were made out of could once again burn brightly after the next Big Bang populates the cosmos with stellar entities again.

Maybe our entire universe is just a time crystal expanding and contracting inside a giant quantum computer.

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Can galaxies without dark matter tell us how the universe ends? - The Next Web

From a roadtrip through the Australian desert, to traversing treacherous terrain in New Zealand, here are a collection of new books that explore the highs and lows of travel whilst celebrating extraordinary journeys.

By Chance the Future is Amy Rudders debut novel that tells a story of stepping out into the world and trusting youll know what to do when you get there.

Blending travel writing, philosophical treatise, self-deprecating comedy with a dose of political criticism, the book takes you on a journey back in time to the year 2001.

The author highlights both our very human hypocrisy and genuine attempts to connect, and the singularity and the sameness of our youthful adventures as we attempt to individuate from our families and countries of origin.

While the story is focused on life at the turn of the century, it makes you reflect on where we were 20 years ago in comparison to where we are today at a distance and with hindsight.

Uprising by Nic Low is a riveting blend of nature writing, indigenous storytelling and great adventure through New Zealands Southern Alps.

Best described as a part-guide and part-memoir, the book follows Low on a journey of discover as he retraces the paths and stories of his ancestors.

Having grown up hearing stories from the mountains on his fathers European side, the author sets out to understand how his Maori ancestors on his mothers side knew that same terrain before Europeans arrived in New Zealand.

Throughout the gripping adventure, the author meets with tribal leaders to try and understand how his forebears saw and traversed the land. He then sets out on an expedition across treacherous terrains using only the traditional oral maps of his ancestors as his guide.

Inspired in part by a bundle of wartime love letters from the authors English-born father to her mother, the 300-page memoir dissects what it means to be a Chutney Mary and the complexities and nuances of having mixed blood.

Throughout the book, the Melbourne-based author and social researcher shares some fascinating moments from her own life, having worked for over two decades in India. It also provides a wealth of observation, knowledge and insight; from horrendous accounts of the 1947 partition, to a dowry murder, to chronic corruption.

Engaging and beautifully written, A Touch of India leaves readers with a richer understanding of middle-class India, whilst providing a touch of history, travel and textiles along the way.

Road Tripping with Pearl Nash is Poppy Nwosus third romantic novel for young adults. It follows protagonist Pearl Nash on a road trip during the summer holidays before her final year of school, exploring friendship, love, grief and the courage to move forward in life.

While the whirlwind road trip through South Australias coastal desert region was supposed to save Pearls slowly disintegrating friendship with her best friend, nothing seems to go to plan and the protagonist ends up in the middle of nowhere beside a boy with an endlessly irritating attitude but a great smile.

Full of adventure, humour and heart, Road Tripping with Pearl Nash is a story about home and family, about breaking apart and fusing together, and, of course, about love.

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Four new books to reactive your sense of adventure over the holidays - The West Australian

BTS V is known for his soulful jazz vocals on songs like Stigma and Singularity. Last Christmas, this artist shared his love for several jazz artists, even revealing that hes been listening to two or three holiday LPs.

Heres what we know about the Inner Child singer, Kim Taehyung.

Along with Jin, Suga, J-Hope, RM, Jimin, and Jungkook, V is one of the vocalists behind songs like Permission to Dance, Life Goes On, and Butter. He appears as a dancer, singer, and songwriter in BTS, even acting as a visual consultant for the Be (Deluxe Edition) photoshoots.

Outside of his work with BTS, the singer sometimes releases solo music inspired by the winter and snow. In 2019, that included the all-English track Winter Bear. He released Snow Flower on Christmas Eve in 2020, sharing his love for the holiday season that same year.

In 2020, the BTS members participated in solo interviews, discussing their latest album Be (Deluxe Edition) and the success of their first all-English single Dynamite. Because it was around the holidays, it made sense that V shared he was listening to Christmas music.

Well, Im listening to LPs lately. Its getting to be Christmas season, and I love snow, so I bought two or three Christmas LPs to listen to, V said during the interview with Weverse Magazine. Im also listening to old jazz songs by Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis Jr. Frank Sinatra is cool, like chilled wine; Sammy Davis Jr. is crazy talented.

V wouldnt be the only BTS member to share his love for the holiday season, as these K-pop idols often wish fans a happy holiday during live streams and on social media. They even performed Santa Claus is Comin to Town in conjunction with the Disney Holiday Singalong.

V often shares his love for all things vintage, including movies like The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption. V added that Sinatra and Davis Jr. were artists he found cool during the same Weverse interview.

Those two were also a big inspiration to me while we were working on Dynamite, V said. Sinatra has all this jazzy body language, but he also threw some disco in there. And I imagined how Sammy Davis Jr. might dance if there were a mic on stage and he had to dance around it.

Of course, V often shares his love for todays top artists. In one Twitter video, he played with a tiger puppet while listening to The View by Surfaces. In his Spotify playlist, V included songs by Anthony Joseph, David Halliday, and others.

RELATED: What Does Kim Taehyungs Stage Name, V, Stand For? Heres Some of the Hidden Meanings Behind the BTS Members Nicknames

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BTS' V Gets in the Holiday Spirit by Listening to Christmas LPs and These Jazz Artists - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Juice WRLD: Into the Abyss, the HBO documentary on one of Gen Zs biggest music stars, opens with the late poster child of SoundCloud rap freestyling straight to camera nudged only by a woozy, hymned beat. A 19-year-old Juice, real name Jarad Anthony Higgins, appears at ease toggling between disconsolation and winking bravado off the cuff: I gotta admit myself, Im on these drugs, feel like I cant save myself, he says, pausing for a cigarette pull. Nobodys ever felt the pain Ive felt / so I share it / put it out to the whole world, I aint embarrassed.

The five-minute freestyle is an arresting introduction to Juices prodigious talent for rhyming from the dome that now doubles as an elegy. In the early hours of 8 December 2019, less than a week after his 21st birthday, Juice WRLD died of an accidental overdose of oxycodone and codeine shortly after landing at Chicagos Midway airport. Two years later, he remains one of the most popular music artists in the world according to Spotify, the third most streamed in the US of 2021, behind Drake and Taylor Swift and a beloved icon of a genre whose stars burned bright and too fast.

The brief life and career of Juice WRLD was one of mind-boggling singularity: one of the most vertiginous rockets to superstardom, even by internet standards; one of the most ubiquitous and influential artists of his generation, with streams in the billions for a career that lasted barely two years. And as Into the Abyss, the final instalment of HBOs Music Box series (which also includes Jagged and Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage) illustrates, through archival footage of his near-ceaseless freestyling and testaments from collaborators, Juice was a singular talent, both in the prolificness of his output and the rawness of his lyrics.

He was both willing and able to discuss the things that he was going through without a filter and without shame or regard for how it was received, Tommy Oliver, the films director, told the Guardian. For so many people who tend to bottle things up or dont have the language to discuss something to be able to see somebody who is willing to do that and can make incredible music with that, I think that was something really special.

Oliver never got the chance to meet Juice; he came aboard the project after the singers death, distilling behind the scenes footage shot by videographers Steve Cannon and Chris Long into a loose, unvarnished portrait of the superstar in the final year and a half of his life his creative powers turbocharged, his demons dissembling into full-blown addiction.

The person Oliver and co-editor Joe Kehoe got to know through hundreds of hours of footage was sweet, goofy, anxious about losing himself to superstardom. He was a virtual spigot of rhymes, in love with and committed to his girlfriend, the influencer Ally Lotti, a near constant presence at his side. He was an enthusiastic artist on the vanguard of blending drug-infused rap with the pop-punk influences of Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco and Blink-182. In both the hyperbolic stakes of his lyrics and his signature aching delivery, Juices music embodied ripping your heart open and throwing blood on the wall. To quote Lucid Dreams, his breakout teenage breakup anthem from 2018: You were my everything / Thoughts of a wedding ring / Now Im just better off dead.

He was also a kid struggling with longstanding depression and anxiety exacerbated by the hyper-onset of fame. Raised in the south suburbs of Chicago by a single mother, Juice posted an EP, JuiceWRLD 9 9 9, on SoundCloud in 2017, the year he graduated from high school, which caught the attention of Chicago music figures Gmoney and G Herbo, who both appear in the film. His first music video, for All Girls Are The Same, was released in February 2018 to overnight success; within a year, he had moved to Los Angeles, scored a record deal at Interscope for $3m, topped the Billboard charts, and occupied the Gen Z zeitgeist just as emo rap lost its forebears. Lil Peep, the subject of the similar posthumous documentary Everybodys Everything, died of an accidental overdose just after his 21st birthday in 2017; the rapper XXXTentacion, controversial for his domestic abuse charges, was murdered at 20 in 2018. Whats the 27 Club? Were not making it past 21, Juice WRLD, who released a tribute EP, Too Soon for the pair, once rapped.

Into the Abyss mostly skips over that early ascent, instead embedding in the day-to-day of its brief cruising altitude a remarkably homespun touring operation of creative hangs, ATV joyrides and continuous, casual drug use. Juices fraught relationship with drugs, especially Percocet pills and lean (codeine syrup mixed with soda) is well documented in his lyrics and on frequent display here. Theres barely a moment when he doesnt appear to be on something; he mixes lean while freestyling about dark Sprite, flashes a tongue dotted with pills to the camera, dozes off mid-sentence. At one point, he offers a Percocet to the videographer, who accepts, then snorts more off his Nintendo Switch with Lotti passed out in his lap.

For all Juices talent and the electricity of his stage moments, the film often plays like a slow-rolling funeral, particularly as Juices drug use starts impinging on his ability to complete a 45-minute set in his final weeks. It came down to never wanting to be exploitative, never wanting to glamorize, never wanting to sensationalize, said Oliver of the decision to include such moments. And beyond that it was just him being him, and the situation being what it was, without judgment, good or bad.

He can no longer speak for himself, but he chose to have this stuff recorded, Oliver said of the heavy reliance of archival footage, which eschews narration and incorporates sparse interviews. The goal became to get out of the way and allow him to tell his own story, and for us to see who he was without the bias of an agenda, or a bias of trying to fit him into some preconceived idea of who he was or who he couldve been, or shying away from certain things.

The tour footage is bookended with interviews from people in his orbit collaborators such as the video director Cole Bennett and producer Benny Blanco, who calls him a therapist to millions of kids; managers Gmoney and Lil Bibby; a still-devastated Lotti and Juices mother, Carmela Wallace. There are no appearances from people not seen in the archival footage, just the people whom he chose to have around him, said Oliver, who spent time with him, who understood him best. That was it.

This includes recollections from the entourage with him the night he died, with graphic descriptions of the seizure that occurred as the plane was searched for drugs and weapons by federal agents. Though the police presence has spawned theories over his death, Into the Abyss doesnt suggest a mystery: it was addiction. The singer probably consumed a pint of lean and more than 20 pills the day he died. I just wanted to show what happened, said Oliver, and I didnt feel the need to address what didnt happen such as the rumor that, afraid of authorities, he suddenly swallowed a handful of pills.

Throughout the film and his lyrics, Juice WRLD exhibited a fixation with his own demise that now reads prophetic. It seemed like he was keenly aware of the possibility or the likelihood [of death], said Oliver, and that is probably one of the reasons why he lived his life as fast as he did. As Lotti says, eyes closed, in her brief interview: he knew, he fucking knew.

Juice WRLDs legacy carries on, in two posthumous albums, 2020s Legends Never Die, which set a Billboard record for five singles in the Top 10, and this months Fighting Demons. His protege, the Australian emo rapper the Kid LAROI (real name Charlton Kenneth Jeffrey Howard), who appears in the film and was on the plane with Juice when he died, scored the biggest pop song of the year with Stay, featuring Justin Bieber. His songs remain as anthemic to a generation of stressed-out kids as their supersonic debut.

[Executive producer] Bill Simmons asked me why people dont think of Juice like Kurt Cobain, Oliver said of Juices legacy as a generational star gone too soon. And I said, because they havent seen the film yet.

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I wanted to show what happened: the tragic story of Juice WRLD - The Guardian

Youve probably heard of black holes existing in the universe and may even have studied the phenomena in a high school science class. According to NASA, scientists speculate that they can range in size from a mere atom to supermassive ones the size of a million suns combined.

While countless artists have used their imaginations to depict these mysterious objects, you might be surprised to find out that, in spite of the size of some of them, they cannot be seen with either the naked eye or with the most powerful telescopes. How can something potentially so massive hide so well? To understand this, we must learn about what black holes are and how they are formed.

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Britannica states that a black hole is a cosmic body of gravity that is so strong nothing can escape from it not even rays of light. For a black hole to form, a massive star needs to collapse on itself. When stars age, they will grow in mass until the center can no longer support the body. Upon collapsing, the star will explode into a supernova, sending the outermost layers hurling into space. The remaining bulk of the star caves in on itself, crushing and compressing the star into an object with zero volume and infinite density. This object is what is known as a black hole.

A black hole consists of two parts: the event horizon and the singularity. The event horizon is the perimeter outside of the black hole itself, which is known as the point of no return. Crossing the event horizon means that you would need an escape velocity stronger than that of the speed of light in order to move away from the black hole. As nothing we know of has a velocity greater than light, nothing we know could ever escape from a black hole when it gets too close.

The event horizon forms a radius around the black hole that is called the Schwarzschild radius. Named after famed German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild, this radius is calculated by determining the mass of the object that collapsed to make the black hole. Schwarzschild surmised large collapsed stars that should be emitting radiation would not, as this radiation would have been pulled into the black hole.

The singularity is the center of the black hole itself. As light cannot escape, it means that a black hole cannot be technically seen in the traditional sense. So how do we know that they exist?

Scientists will detect, rather than see, black holes. This is done in several ways. By observing how stars are reacting, scientists can determine if they are orbiting a black hole assuming there is high-energy light being emitted from the star (via NASA). The extraordinarily high amount of gravitational pull on nearby objects creates observable behavior, as well, giving observers a good notion that these objects are being affected by a black hole.

Cool Cosmos further explains that this force of gravity from the black hole will cause gases to be sucked closer to it, creating a gaseous disc that will rapidly rotate around it. When the disc rotates at a certain speed, the gas molecules will become very hot and emit X-rays. These X-rays can be seen here on Earth by the scientists who observe the night sky.

Only the most massive stars will ever become black holes. Small and medium-sized stars do not have the potential mass to trigger the powerful collapse necessary to begin the chain reaction to form a black hole. Stars that lack this mass will eventually begin to die and become white dwarfs or neutron stars.

Worried that our sun will collapse upon itself and suck all life on Earth into a black hole? Dont be. Our sun is a medium-sized star and wouldnt have the necessary mass to become a black hole. Its also worth mentioning that even if our sun could become a black hole, we wouldnt be alive to witness it. Long before a star dies, it swells with mass and heat, the result of which would scorch our planet of all life long before it collapsed.

Link:

What Are Black Holes and How Do They Form? - SlashGear