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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beijing from space. Image credit: NASA

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image Credit: NASA

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Out and then in, like a giant breath.

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

Contact Aliya Haas Blinman at [emailprotected].

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

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

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

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

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

Dying stars form black holes

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

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

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

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

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

Black holes play yo-yo with stars

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

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

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

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

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

This article was republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons licence

Published in Dawn, EOS, Octoberr 18th, 2020

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

A new test of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity has proved the iconic physicist right again this time by re-analyzing the famous first-ever picture of a black hole , which was released in April 2019.

That image of the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87 was the first direct observation of a black hole's shadow the imprint of the event horizon, a sphere around the black hole's singularity from which no light can escape. Einstein's theory predicts the size of the event horizon based on the mass of the black hole; and in April 2019, it was already clear that the shadow fits general relativity's prediction pretty well.

But now, using a new technique to analyze the image, the researchers who made the picture showed just how well the shadow fits the theory. The answer: 500 times better than any test of relativity done in our solar system. That result, in turn, puts tighter limits on any theory that would seek to reconcile general relativity, which describes the behavior of massive celestial objects, with quantum mechanics, which predicts the behavior of very small things.

General relativity's great accomplishment was to describe how gravity operates in the universe: how it pulls objects toward each other; how it warps space-time; and how it forms black holes. To test general relativity, scientists use the theory to predict how gravity will act in a certain situation. Then, they observe what actually happens. If the prediction matches the observation, general relativity has passed its test.

But no test is perfect. Watch how the sun's gravity tugs Mercury along its orbit, and you can measure general relativity in action. But telescopes can't measure the movement of Mercury down to the nanometer. And other forces the tug of Jupiter's gravity, and Earth's gravity and the force solar wind, to name just a few impact Mercury's movement in ways that are difficult to separate from the effects of relativity. So the result of every test is an approximation and Einstein's theory is only proven more or less.

Related: 8 ways you can see Einstein's Theory of Relativity in real life

The size of that uncertainty the "more or less" factor is important. When scientists test general relativity over and over, they are putting constraints on Einstein's idea. The reason this work is important is that even though general relativity keeps passing tests, physicists do expect it to eventually fail.

General relativity must be incomplete, physicists believe, because it contradicts quantum mechanics. Physicists believe that discrepancy signals the presence in our universe of some larger, all-encompassing mechanism describing both gravity and the quantum world that they have yet to uncover. Looking for cracks in relativity, they hope, might turn up clues to help them find that complete theory."We expect a complete theory of gravity to be different from general relativity, but there are many ways one can modify it," University of Arizona astrophysicist Dimitrios Psaltis said in a statement. Psaltis is lead author of a paper published Oct. 1 in the journal Physical Review Letters describing this new test, and is part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team, responsible for imaging the M87 black hole's shadow.

In this new test, Psaltis and colleagues used a computer to generate artificial images of the M87 black hole based on a modified version of gravity, where the force of gravity is weaker or stronger at the event horizon. With that weakened-gravity scenario, they asked,how large or small would that black hole's event horizon be? What about with stronger gravity? Then, they checked how many of those possible modifications produced event horizons with sizes that matched that of the image EHT actually captured of M87. Some did, their slight variances from general relativity's predictions much too small to show up in the admittedly fuzzy snap of the black hole. But the vast majority did not.

Related: The 12 strangest objects in the universe

"Using the gauge we developed, we showed that the measured size of the black hole shadow in M87 tightens the wiggle room for modifications to Einstein's theory of general relativity by almost a factor of 500, compared to previous tests in the solar system," University of Arizona astrophysicist Feryal zel, another study co-author and EHT scientist, said in the statement.

Most alternative ways that gravity might work that they considered theories that violate Einstein's general relativity don't fit within this newly narrowed wiggle room.

In the future, the EHT researchers said, they might be able to tighten that wiggle room even further.

The EHT is a network of radio telescopes all over the world that work together to produce the sharpest possible images of supermassive black holes objects that, while large, are much too small and dim for any one telescope to resolve on its own. So far, the EHT has just published one image of one black hole, in M87. But there's another, smaller black hole in our own neighborhood that the collaboration should be able to image: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive at the center of the Milky Way.

As the EHT has trained its army of radio telescopes on this more nearby target, they've refined their theoretical technique and added new telescopes to the collaboration. The next image they produce, they say, should constrain general relativity even further.

Or maybe they'll see something Einstein didn't predict at all.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Physicists keep trying to break the rules of gravity but this supermassive black hole just said 'no' - Live Science

First published in 1686, Newtons Law of Gravitation laid the foundation for modern physics: that every particle in the universe is attracted to and attracted by every other particle changed the way scientists and mathematicians viewed the world. But could gravity hold onto light?

The speed of light is finite and represents an upper limit to velocity in our present understanding. The idea, then, that a star could be so massive that its escape velocity would be greater than the speed of light first occurred to the English astronomer and priest John Michell in 1783. Michell calculated that a star 500 times larger than the Sun but with the same density would have a gravitational pull so large its light would be trapped. In 1796, the French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace came to the same conclusion but for a star only 250 times larger than the sun.

Both scientists had essentially outlined the object we now call a black hole but it really wasnt until Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915 that the idea took hold. Within two months of its publication, the German astrophysicists Karl Schwarzschild was able to wade through the complicated mathematical equations and provide the first theoretical description of a black hole using general relativity. He provided a solution to Einsteins equation describing the curvature of space-time around a spherically symmetric, non-rotating mass.

Schwarzschilds metric provided a practical approach for tests of general relativity, such as the precession of Mercurys perihelion, the gravitational bending of light, or the confirmation of gravitational time dilation. But the equation also demanded the existence of two extraordinary points. The first being at a radius of zero (r = 0) which corresponds to a true singularity while the second so-called Schwarzschild singularity corresponded to a distance, R, much further from the origin (R = 2GM/c^2). We now know the latter as the event horizon. It is the sphere surrounding a black hole representing the point-of-no-return. It defines the region of space-time isolated from the rest of the universe.

In 1939, the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, with his student Hartland Snyder, were studying the collapse of a spherical cloud of matter and realized the importance of the Schwarzschild radius: The star thus tends to close itself off from any communication with a distant observer; only its gravitational field persists. But their results were predicated on spherical symmetry and for many years arguments were presented refuting the premise. Indeed, American physicist John Wheeler speculated quantum mechanics would prevent the collapse of space-time to a singularity.

In the late 1950s, compact and powerful radio sources were identified in all-sky surveys with no detectable visible counterpart. These objects were labeled quasars short for quasi-stellar radio objects. In the early 1960s, optical astronomers were finally able to identify extragalactic visible objects associated with quasars. Because of the distances involved, their luminosity would need to be 1,000 times greater than the output from all the stars in our entire galaxy. Quasars were originally postulated as supermassive stars but their size meant they would be extremely unstable. The question became could they be black holes?

The discovery of quasars prompted Wheeler to reconsider the notion of gravitational collapse and the formation of singularities. He discussed his ideas with Roger Penrose who set out to analyze what would happened without the assumption of spherical symmetry. He only needed to assume the collapsing matter had a positive energy density.

But to do this, he need to invent a new mathematics built on the concept of trapped surfaces two-dimensional surfaces with the property that all light rays orthogonal to the surface converge when tracked toward the future, regardless of the curvature of the surface. Schwarzschilds spherical symmetry is just a special case of Penroses mathematics. Penrose had provided the mathematics for describing black holes and so for his discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity, Roger Penrose has been awarded half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The other half goes to two astronomers Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, who followed a prediction made by John Michell in 1783. Michell wrote: If any other luminous bodies would happen to revolve around them [super-massive stars] we might still perhaps from the motions of these revolving bodies infer the existence of the central ones with some degree of probability.

Michell realized a super-massive star a black hole might be invisible but its effect on any surrounding bodies might give it away. Genzel and Ghez have each spent the last 30 years examining the core of our galaxy and for their work plotting stellar orbits in the core, they have been awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.

We are orbiting a massive black hole that may one day consume us all.

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Physics prize centuries in the making - Prince George Citizen

In the 1940s, agronomist Norman Borlaug was tasked by the US government with improving the yield of wheat plants in Mexico. The thinking was that if Americas southern neighbor had better food security, relations between the two countries would improve, and fewer migrants would cross the US border.

At that time, a plant disease called stem rust was ravaging crops in Mexico and parts of the US, depleting harvests and causing panic among farmers. Borlaug started crossbreeding seeds in hopes of stumbling upon a genetic combination that was resistant to stem rust and produced a high yield. Over the course of three years, Borlaug and his assistants pollinated and inspected hundreds of thousands of plants by hand: 110,000 in just one growing season.

Their work paid off; the resulting wheat seeds produced three times more yield on the same amount of land. Borlaug is known as the father of the Green Revolution, and was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

With the global population growing while climate change begins to impact our ability to produce food, many are calling for a 21st-century Green Revolution. In short, we need to figure out better ways to grow food, and fast.

This week a tech powerhouse joined the effort. Google parent company Alphabets X divisioninternally called the moonshot factoryannounced a project called Mineral, launched to develop technologies for a more sustainable, resilient, and productive food system.

The way we grow crops now, the project page explains, works pretty well, but its not ideal. Dozens or hundreds of acres of a given crop are treated the same across the board, fertilized and sprayed with various chemicals to kill pests and weeds. We get the yields we needs with this method, but at the same time were progressively depleting the soil by pumping it full of the same chemicals year after year, and in the process were making our own food less nutrient-rich. Its kind of a catch-22; this is the best way to grow the most food, but the quality of that food is getting worse.

But maybe theres a better wayand Mineral wants to find it.

Like many things nowadays, the key to building something better is data. Genetic data, weather pattern data, soil composition and erosion data, satellite data The list goes on. As part of the massive data-gathering that will need to be done, X introduced what its calling a plant buggy (if the term makes you picture a sort of baby stroller for plants, youre not alone).

It is in fact not a stroller, though. It looks more like a platform on wheels, topped with solar panels and stuffed with cameras, sensors, and software. It comes in different sizes and shapes so that it can be used on multiple types of crops (inspecting tall, thin stalks of corn, for example, requires a different setup than short, bushy soybean plants). The buggy will collect info about plants height, leaf area, and fruit size, then consider it alongside soil, weather, and other data.

Having this type of granular information, Mineral hopes, will allow farmers to treat different areas of their fields or even specific plants individually rather than using blanket solutions that may be good for some plants, but bad for others.

Its sort of like the quantified self trend in healthcare; all of our bodies are different, as are our genomes and the factors likely to make us ill; by gathering as much data as possible about ourselves and monitoring our bodies various systems, we can customize our diets, medications, exercise, and lifestyles to what will work best for us, rather than whats likely to work best for the average person.

In a blog post about Mineral, project lead Elliott Grant asks, What if every single plant could be monitored and given exactly the nutrition it needed? What if we could untangle the genetic and environmental drivers of crop yield? What if we could measure the subtle ways a plant responds to its environment? He and his team hope that tools like those being developed as part of Mineral will help the agriculture industry transform how food is grown.

There are all sorts of projectsall over the worlddevoted to the future of food, from cultured meat and fish to nanoparticles that help plants grow in the desert to factories raising millions of bugs for protein. Google X has taken on some ambitious goals and hasnt disappointed, so with Mineral joining the effort, we may see another Green Revolution in the not-too-distant future.

Image Credit: Mineral/X

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Alphabet's New Moonshot Is to Transform How We Grow Food - Singularity Hub

BTS member V, who is known as the 'Ultimate Stan Attractor' of the K-pop industry, is going viral once again as non K-pop fans are falling for his insane vocal talent with his chart-topping solo track, Singularity.

BTS member V became a viral sensation among non-K-pop fans, once again.

Since the day Taehyung's Singularity was released it always caught the attention of non-fans and local with Taehyung's unique voice and insane visuals.

As Taehyung went viral on Twitter after his BBMA performance, a fan edit of Taehyung along with song singularity went viral.

Non-K-pop fans went gaga after the song asking about it and going feral over Taehyung for his insane vocal skills and charming personality. Twitter was flooded with messages about the 24-year-old singer and Singularity. Not that we blame them in the least!this is not the first time Taehyung song singularity went viral and caught the attention of people.

Not only Taehyung and his song singularity went viral on SNS but "THE ULTIMATE STAN ATTRACTOR OF KPOP INDUSTRY KIM TAEHYUNG " caught the attention of people around the world after BBMA 2020 performance with his unique voice and expression, perfect dance moves, stage presence, and with god gifted visuals.

Even fans can't stop themselves from praising Taehyung for his stage presence and the way he set fire on stage with his Dynamite performance.

SNS is flooded with tweets praising Taehyung.

And this the reason why Taehyung is named "Commander in charge of tripling the size of fandom", "GLOBAL VISUAL REPRESENTATIVE OF KPOP" and "ULTIMATE STAN ATTRACTOR OF KPOP INDUSTRY " and he always keeps up to his name by his stage presence after every performance.

Now fans are wondering what Taehyung has in store for them for his next performance.

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BTS V solo song Singularity and fan edit fmv once again gone viral among locals and also caught attention of people with his BBMA performance -...

Abdullah Shuaib1,, Husain Arian,1 Ali Shuaib2

1Department of General Surgery, Jahra Hospital, Jahra, Kuwait; 2Biomedical Engineering Unit, Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, Kuwait University, Kuwait City, Kuwait

Dr Abdullah Shuaib passed away on July 21, 2020

Correspondence: Ali ShuaibBiomedical Engineering Unit, Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, Kuwait University, Kuwait City, KuwaitTel +965 24636786Email ali.shuaib@ku.edu.kw

Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) pertains to the ability of computers or computer-controlled machines to perform activities that demand the cognitive function and performance level of the human brain. The use of AI in medicine and health care is growing rapidly, significantly impacting areas such as medical diagnostics, drug development, treatment personalization, supportive health services, genomics, and public health management. AI offers several advantages; however, its rampant rise in health care also raises concerns regarding legal liability, ethics, and data privacy. Technological singularity (TS) is a hypothetical future point in time when AI will surpass human intelligence. If it occurs, TS in health care would imply the replacement of human medical practitioners with AI-guided robots and peripheral systems. Considering the pace at which technological advances are taking place in the arena of AI, and the pace at which AI is being integrated with health care systems, it is not be unreasonable to believe that TS in health care might occur in the near future and that AI-enabled services will profoundly augment the capabilities of doctors, if not completely replace them. There is a need to understand the associated challenges so that we may better prepare the health care system and society to embrace such a change if it happens.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, technological singularity, health care system

This work is published and licensed by Dove Medical Press Limited. The full terms of this license are available at https://www.dovepress.com/terms.php and incorporate the Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commercial (unported, v3.0) License.By accessing the work you hereby accept the Terms. Non-commercial uses of the work are permitted without any further permission from Dove Medical Press Limited, provided the work is properly attributed. For permission for commercial use of this work, please see paragraphs 4.2 and 5 of our Terms.

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The Increasing Role of Artificial Intelligence in Health Care: Will Ro | IJGM - Dove Medical Press

Authors note: This is a reprisal of a column I wrote in the 1990s for the Moultrie News. Given that this is the middle of banana spider season, I thought it worth a reprint.

If you suffer from arachnophobia, a fear of spiders, stop reading now. If you suffer from Mondayphobia, or whatever a "fear of Mondays" is rightfully called, definitely stop reading now.

There are 180 banana spiders living in my yard. I know because I counted. One-hundred-and-eighty professional, tarantula-sized web-weavers who have diligently (and artfully) draped spider silk from every bush, tree and inanimate object they deem suitable as an anchor for their strong and elaborate webs. My front and back doors are particularly favored and no amount of attacks with a broom stops them from rebuilding. Apparently the bug hunting in these spots, especially at night when the porch lights are on, is too good to give up.

If you don't know what a banana spider is, these are large and, in their arachnoid way, beautiful spiders -- with black-and gold striped legs and a long yellowish body. They are harmless outdoor spiders, usually seen in the woods or on a front porch with similar woodsy characteristics, like mine. I'm not alone in this gracious plenty of banana spiders. I understand that a friend of mine, a woman from Isle of Palms who is so "girly" I find this almost impossible to believe, actually resorts to scissors. Each morning, she dutifully cuts apart the tough new webs the spiders have woven across her door without harming the spiders.

Some are small, insignificant things (I've been told these are the males) hardly larger than a mosquito. Others are magnificent, two-and three-inchers, females whose tiger-striped markings glisten with a menacing beauty in the sunlight. The silk they produce is incredibly strong and all manner of objects can get hung up in their webs, from insects (which are why they're such good spiders to have around) to a small chicken bone which Belle the Dog probably robbed from the garbage can. How it made it to a spider web is beside the point. This particular spider is very large and fat.

Some live in comfortable singularity, majestic and plump, residing alone in the center of their own personal, well-tended web. Others apparently enjoy the gregarious life and share their webs with an entire community of banana spiders, each busily attending its own subdivision in Spiderville.

No, I have not attacked them with a can of Raid. Why? Because they do good duty. They eat mosquitoes. Still, accidentally walking into one of their webs is just plain ghastly.

And that is how I started Monday.

I had put the coffee on and was going out to get the paper hardly out the door before I found myself enmeshed in a banana spider web which had not been there eight hours previously. There's nothing, not anything, like starting a day with your hair and face swathed in the thick, gummy, clinging, sticky and downright ghoulish net of banana spider web.

Could anything be worse?

Yes. All I can say is, at least I was wearing shoes. Suffice to say that it was dead, mouselike, a cat leftover perfectly camouflaged on the Oriental rug. When I accidentally stepped on it and this was a forceful, rapid step since I was charging my way toward the shower to divest myself of the spider web on my head it made a sudden, awful "POP!" I will leave out the gory particulars of what happens to the insides when you step hard on a dead, partially-eaten mouse. It not only requires cleaning the floor, but a section of the wall.

As I look back, this explains why the cats, Belle and the visiting dog were all so quiet. Why they were clustered in a tight, silent circle in the living room instead of underfoot in the kitchen while I started the coffee.

A word about the visiting dog. His name is Jammer and he is a small, white, curly-coated Benji type of dog, the epitome of the word cute. He spends his day with my dog, Belle, since his owners, good friends of mine, both work and haven't found a suitable way to keep the dog secure in their own banana spider-filled, backyard. Jammer (a.k.a. "the cute little white dog formerly known as Joe") was retrieved from the pound, having been given up for adoption because his previous owner considered the dog uncontrollable and "hyperactive."

Jammer comes to the house every morning clean and white and smelling of his mistress's perfume. Jammer usually leaves dirty and, sometimes, wet. Despite their disparity in size and color (Belle is a large black Labrador retriever) the two dogs are best friends. Hyperactive? Heck, the dog just needed play time. Uncontrollable? He is also spending his days with four cats larger than he is.

Today, Jammer is going to go home clean. Either that, or Jammer will smell like the dead thing on the rug. Jammer may look like a pampered priss, but he's all dog.

The sequence went like this.

I stepped, the mouse popped and, in a flash, the cute little white dog rolled in the dead thing.

Ah, Mondays! Ain't life grand?

Suzannah Smith Miles is a local author, illustrator and historian. Keep an eye out for her history columns monthly.

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Suffering from the "fear of Mondays" | History | postandcourier.com - Charleston Post Courier

Exclusive: John Boyega teases tone & production start of They Cloned Tyrone

While talking with the 28-year-old star for his role in the forthcoming Steve McQueen-helmed anthology seriesSmall Axe, ComingSoon.net chatted with John Boyega about another of his upcoming projects, the Netflix-set sci-fi mysteryThey Cloned Tyrone, in which he stars alongside Jamie Foxx (Soul) and Teyonah Parris (Dear White People).

RELATED:Star Wars: John Boyega Calls Out Treatment of POC Characters

Looking to the future, Boyega revealed that he and the rest of his cast and crew are currently in the rehearsal process via Zoom meetings for the film and is currently eyeing a production start date in the next couple months, and though he was tight-lipped on exact story or character details, he did compare it to one of his international star-making roles.

The film is going to be likeAttack the Blockfor stateside, Ill give you that, Boyega teased. Juels making his directorial debut with the movie and he wrote a brilliant script. I mean, you dont just attract Jamie Foxx with nothing, this is a really well-written one that I think is going to be a lot of fun.

This project marks Foxxs latest collaboration with Netflix after recently starring in the superhero film Project Power which is now available for streaming. The 52-year-old actor will next be seen in Pixars Soul, Blumhouses Spawn, and in the Mike Tyson biopic.

Parris notable film credits include: 2014s Dear White People, Spike Lees Chi-Raq and Barry Jenkins If Beale Street Could Talk. She is also set to star in two high-profile projects including Nia DaCostas Candyman reboot and Disney+s highly-anticipated MCU series WandaVision.

They Cloned Tyrone will follow anunlikely trio as they investigate a series of eerie events, alerting them to a nefarious conspiracy lurking directly beneath their hood. The film is being described as a pulpy sci-fi mystery caper that is likened to Fridaymeets Get Out.

The film will be the directorial debut of Creed 2 writer Juel Taylor, who penned the script along with Tony Rettemaier. It is produced by MACROs CEO Charles D. King with Taylor, Rettenmaier and Stephen Dr. Love also serving as producers. It is also executive produced by Macros Mark R. Wright and Jack Murray.

RELATED:Jamie Foxx Says Black Panther Opened the Door For the Spawn Reboot

Boyega gained worldwide recognition for his role as Finn in the Star Wars film franchise. He first appeared in the 2015 The Force Awakens and was last seen in 2019sStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. He will next be seen in Steve McQueens anthology series Small Axeand the film Naked Singularity.

Small Axeis set to premiere on Amazon Prime Video on November 20 with new episodes airing through December 18.

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Exclusive: John Boyega Teases Tone & Production Start of They Cloned Tyrone - ComingSoon.net

With a few notable exceptions, the level of scientific discourse within the political and journalistic classes is abysmal. And for those with a sense of humour, Im going to prove this by anecdote. A well-known journalist recently referred publicly to the spread of Covid-19 as being only mildly exponential. This is about as meaningless a statement as could possibly be. And as for the politicians well, dont get me started. Professor Sunetra Guptas emphatic take-down of the Health Secretarys recent mansplaining about the undesirability of herd immunity was far too polite.

It is worth reminding ourselves of how the scientific method is supposed to work. First, you put up a hypothesis. Second, you try and disprove it. If you successfully do this, you have a definitive answer (your hypothesis was wrong). If you fail to disprove your theory, then your hypothesis stands. But the corollary is not true: you cant prove a non time-limited hypothesis.

A hypothesis that does stands the test of time by dint of not being disproved becomes universally accepted as a good hypothesis. Borrowing cinematic language, it becomes canon. However, long-lasting hypotheses can have spectacular falls from grace because a good hypothesis has to explain all observed facts a single proven discrepancy is enough to consign it to the bin.

Still, a scientific theory that works well for us most of the time may still be useful, even if it is found to have a big hole in it such as classical electromagnetism finding it rather difficult to explain point charges (the problem literally being a hole singularity in the theory). Thus, the scientific method the incremental ruling out of hypotheses by experiment and review by peers has served mankind well in recent centuries.

The concept of some theories standing the test of time better than others was beautifully captured by Sir Arthur Eddington: If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwells equations then so much the worse for Maxwells equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it (but) to collapse in deepest humiliation.

A dystopian vision of science in 2020

Reluctantly, though, we need to move on from sharing nuggets of wisdom from long-departed rational luminaries and consider the problems of the day. A new type of science has emerged during the coronavirus pandemic, one more palatable to those who wish to consume information in very small corpuscles. It involves capturing the imagination with nightmarish visions of Armageddon, and evidencing these doomsday scenarios with proof from a computer modeller. The souffl of fear is then leavened with a barrage of carefully selected facts and a smattering of non-representative samples.

Rinse, repeat, and in the blink of an eye we find ourselves in a totally new world. The concept of mass hysteria is not new to the human race, but perhaps navely we all thought that our society might have developed some (herd?) immunity to such phenomena.

The scientific method in its true sense seems to have been abandoned by too many in this crisis. In the face of fast-moving events in early 2020, various scientists rushed to put forward competing theories in an attempt to diagnose the problem. Despite very nasty outbreaks of Covid-19 in certain concentrated geographies, which was itself due to the very rapid (and exponential) spread of the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus, these fizzled out relatively quickly. In the cases of Wuhan in China and Bergamo in Italy, this correlated with the imposition of aggressive policies of restrictions of movement. But as many at the time point out, this did not mean that the now ubiquitous lockdowns were the cause of this fizzling.

Scientists that postulated alternative hypotheses for this rapid drop-off in cases based on the observation that this behaviour was akin to the spread of a virus that was struggling to find susceptible people to infect were given short shrift. Or, to be more accurate, they were absolutely monstered. For instance, John Ioannidis, a Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, and Population Health from Stanford University, was essentially ostracised for presenting early data that put the infection fatality rate lower than the merchants of doom were using to sell their wares.

Instead, we listened carefully to the panicked demands of those urging our government to shut down the economy to save lives.

As a thesis, lockdowns save lives is unproven. A good thesis needs to explain all observed facts, or it is disproved by inspection. Brutal lockdowns have had high death rates and still not suppressed the virus; areas of relatively low restrictions have had fewer excess deaths.

And now? The World Health Organisation has just published a peer-reviewed paper by Professor Ioannidis that states: the inferred infection fatality rates tended to be much lower than estimates made earlier in the pandemic and most locations probably have an infection fatality rate less than 0.20% and with appropriate, precise non-pharmacological measures that selectively try to protect high-risk vulnerable populations and settings, the infection fatality rate may be brought even lower.

Perhaps we would have been better off following the science in the first place.

We owe it to the most vulnerable, the sick, those less fortunate in life to give everyone the best possible deal. Lockdowns, circuit breakers, increased measures, higher risk tiers are just about tolerable for those haves who can afford it. But the have nots and the have not much time left might well question whether these are in any way proportional measures. This is especially so for a virus SARS-CoV-2 that seems to have reached a state of what is called endemic equilibrium in many parts of the world (and quite likely in the UK).

Science reminds us that correlation does not imply causation. The blanket, draconian separation of us social beings with a great lockdown didnt work last time, and therefore we cannot say it will work this time. A more credible hypothesis as proposed by various scientists back in the early days of this crisis is that Covid-19 is not the killer the misguided and the doomsday cultists made it out to be. Clearly, my heart goes out to all those affected by the tragedies that befall us mortal beings, but some of the terrible consequences of our lockdown strategies for cancer sufferers are horrific. In these straitened times, we need to consider very carefully where the areas of greatest risk are.

So, let me put up a hypothesis. If (1) the rise in respiratory disease and hospitalisations caused by SARS-CoV-2 perhaps adjusted for regional differences approximates a linear uptick in line with the usual rise we see every year, and (2) we are chasing asymptomatic people round the country with a non-specific testing regime, then any rise in cases of coronavirus are actually a sign that the virus is in endemic equilibrium. In this case, we would be decreasing the likelihood of a devastating outbreak during the winter, by letting it spread naturally linearly through the healthy population now.

This hypothesis is consistent with observed facts. Prove me wrong.

If only we had Sir Arthur with us today. He might have helped us to be guided by the scientific method rather than this terrible politicisation ofthe science we are currently experiencing.

Dr Alex Starling is an advisor to and non-executive director of various early-stage technology companies.

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To lockdown or not to lockdown: how about we actually follow the science for a change? - Reaction

If a black hole were to appear between the Earth and an observer, the Earth would appear ... [+] gravitationally lensed in a fashion similar to this, dependent on the Earth's position relative to the black hole and the observer. If a black hole were to form from the Earth itself, it would create an event horizon just 1.7 centimeters in diameter.

One of the most remarkable facts about the Universe is this: in the absence of any other forces or interactions, if you start with any initial configuration of gravitationally bound masses at rest, they will inevitably collapse to form a black hole. A straightforward prediction of Einsteins equations, it was Roger Penroses Nobel-winning work that not only demonstrated that black holes could realistically form in our Universe, but showed us how.

As it turns out, gravity doesnt need to be the only force: just the dominant one. As the matter collapses, it crosses a critical threshold for the amount of mass within a certain volume, leading to the formation of an event horizon. Eventually, some time later, any object at rest no matter how far away from the event horizon it initially was will cross that horizon and encounter the central singularity.

If, somehow, the electromagnetic and quantum forces holding the Earth up against gravitational collapse were turned off, Earth would quickly become a black hole. Heres what we would experience if that were to happen.

If you begin with a bound, stationary configuration of mass, and there are no non-gravitational ... [+] forces or effects present (or they're all negligible compared to gravity), that mass will always inevitably collapse down to a black hole. It's one of the main reasons why a static, non-expanding Universe is inconsistent with Einstein's relativity.

Right now, the reason Earth is stable against gravitational collapse is because the forces between the atoms that make it up specifically, between the electrons in neighboring atoms is large enough to resist the cumulative force of gravity provided by the entire mass of the Earth. This shouldnt be entirely surprising, as if you considered the gravitational versus the electromagnetic force between two electrons, youd find that the latter force was stronger by about a factor of a whopping ~1042.

In the cores of stars that are massive enough, however, neither the electromagnetic force nor even the Pauli exclusion principle can stand up to the force inciting gravitational collapse; if the cores radiation pressure (from nuclear fusion) drops below a critical threshold, collapse to a black hole becomes inevitable.

Although it would take some sort of magical process, such as instantaneously replacing Earths matter with dark matter or somehow turning off the non-gravitational forces for the material composing Earth, we can imagine what would occur if we allowed this to happen.

One of the most important contributions of Roger Penrose to black hole physics is the demonstration ... [+] of how a realistic object in our Universe, such as a star (or any collection of matter), can form an event horizon and how all the matter bound to it will inevitably encounter the central singularity.

First off, the material composing the solid Earth would immediately begin accelerating, as though it were in perfect free-fall, towards the center of the Earth. In the central region, mass would accumulate, with its density steadily rising over time. The volume of this material would shrink as it accelerated towards the center, while the mass would remain the same.

Over the timescale of mere minutes, the density in the center would begin to rise fantastically, as material from all different radii passed through the exact center-of-mass of the Earth, simultaneously, over and over again. After somewhere between an estimated 10 and 20 minutes, enough matter would have gathered in the central few millimeters to form an event horizon for the first time.

After just a few minutes more 21 to 22 minutes total the entire mass of the Earth would have collapsed into a black hole just 1.75 centimeters (0.69) in diameter: the inevitable result of an Earths mass worth of material collapsing into a black hole.

When matter collapses, it can inevitably form a black hole. Penrose was the first to work out the ... [+] physics of the spacetime, applicable to all observers at all points in space and at all instants in time, that governs a system such as this. His conception has been the gold standard in General Relativity ever since.

If thats what the Earth beneath our feet does, however, what would a human being on Earths surface experience as the planet collapsed into a black hole beneath our feet?

Believe it or not, the physical story that wed experience in this scenario would be identical to what would happen if we instantly replaced the Earth with an Earth-mass black hole. The only exception is what wed see: as we looked down, a black hole would simply distort the space beneath our feet while we fell down towards it, resulting in bent light due to gravitational lensing.

However, if the material composing the Earth still managed to emit or reflect the ambient light, it would remain opaque, and wed be able to see what happened to the surface beneath our feet as we fell. Either way, the first thing that would happen would be a transition from being at rest where the force from the atoms on Earths surface pushed back on us with an equal and opposite force to gravitational acceleration to being in free-fall: at 9.8 m/s2 (32 feet/s2), towards the center of the Earth.

When a human enters free-fall, such as this 1960 skydive jump by Colonel Joseph Kittinger from over ... [+] 100,000 feet, they accelerate towards the center of the Earth at a roughly constant rate of ~9.8 m/s^2, but are resisted by the non-accelerating air molecules around them. After only a few seconds, a human will reach terminal velocity, as the drag force will counterbalance and cancel out the accelerative force of gravitation. (U.S. Air Force/NASA/Corbis via Getty Images)

Unlike most free-fall scenarios we experience on Earth today, such as a skydiver experiences when jumping out of an airplane, youd have an eerie, lasting experience.

Both inside and outside the event horizon of a Schwarzschild (non-rotating) black hole, space flows ... [+] like either a moving walkway or a waterfall, depending on how you want to visualize it. At the event horizon, even if you ran (or swam) at the speed of light, there would be no overcoming the flow of spacetime, which drags you into the singularity at the center. Outside the event horizon, though, other forces (like electromagnetism) can frequently overcome the pull of gravity, causing even infalling matter to escape.

As you can see from the illustration above, the size of the arrows as well as the speed that they move at increases as we get closer to the central singularity of a black hole. In Newtonian gravity, which is a good approximation as long as youre very far away from the event horizon (or the equivalent size of the event horizon), the gravitational acceleration you experience will quadruple every time your distance to a point halves. In Einsteinian gravity, which matters as you get close to the event horizon, your acceleration will increase even more significantly than that.

If you start off at rest with respect to the center of Earth, then by the time youve:

and while you might only be a millisecond from the event horizon, youll never get to experience what its like to get there.

If you were represented by a sphere falling towards a central point mass, like a black hole, these ... [+] arrows would represent the tidal forces on you. While, overall, you (as the falling object) would experience an average force over your entire body, these tidal forces would stretch you along the direction towards the black hole and compress you in the perpendicular direction.

Thats because your body, as you fall closer and closer to the center of the collapsing Earth, starts to experience enormous increases in tidal forces. While we normally associate tides with the Moon, the same physics is at play. Every point along any body in a gravitational field will experience a gravitational force whose direction and magnitude are determined by their displacement from the mass theyre attracted to.

For a sphere, like the Moon, the point closest to the mass will be attracted the most; the point farthest from it will be attracted the least; the points that are off-center will be preferentially attracted to the center. While the center itself experiences an average attraction, the points all around it will experience different levels, which stretches the object along the direction of attraction and compresses it along the perpendicular direction.

Here on the surface of Earth, these tidal forces on a human being are minuscule: a little less than a millinewton, or the gravitational force on a typical small earring. But as you get closer and closer to Earths center, these forces octuple each time you halve your distance.

At every point along an object attracted by a single point mass, the force of gravity (Fg) is ... [+] different. The average force, for the point at the center, defines how the object accelerates, meaning that the entire object accelerates as though it were subject to the same overall force. If we subtract that force out (Fr) from every point, the red arrows showcase the tidal forces experienced at various points along the object. These forces, if they get large enough, can distort and even tear individual objects apart.

By the time youre 99% of the way to Earths center, the force pulling your feet away from your torso and your head away from your feet works out to about 110 pounds, as though the equivalent of nearly your own body weight was working to pull you apart.

When you experience a force on your body thats equivalent to the gravitational acceleration on Earth or a force thats equal to your weight scientifically thats known as 1g (pronounced one-gee). Typically, humans can only withstand a handful of gs over a sustained period of time before either lasting damage occurs or we lose consciousness.

Above that threshold, youre headed for trauma and possibly death.

This illustration of spaghettification shows how a human gets stretched and compressed into a ... [+] spaghetti-like structure as they approach the event horizon of a black hole. Death by these tidal forces would be painful and traumatic, but at least it would also be quick.

By the time youve reached about 25 kilometers from the central singularity, youll cross a critical threshold: one where these tidal forces will cause traumatic stretching your spine, causing it to lengthen so severely that the individual vertebrae can no longer remain intact. A little farther about 14 kilometers away and your joints will begin to come out of your sockets, similar to what happens, anatomically, if you were drawn-and-quartered.

In order to approach the actual event horizon itself, youd have to somehow shield yourself from these tidal forces, which would rip your individual cells apart and even the individual atoms and molecules composing you before you crossed the event horizon. This stretching effect along one direction while compressing you along the other is known as spaghettification, and its how black holes would kill and tear apart any creature that ventured too close to an event horizon where space was too severely curved.

As spectacular as falling into a black hole would actually be, if Earth spontaneously became one, youd never get to experience it for yourself. Youd get to live for about another 21 minutes in an incredibly odd state: free-falling, while the air around you free-fell at exactly the same rate. As time went on, youd feel the atmosphere thicken and the air pressure increase as everything around the world accelerated towards the center, while objects that werent attached to the ground would appear approach you from all directions.

But as you approached the center and you sped up, you wouldnt be able to feel your motion through space. Instead, what youd begin to feel was an uncomfortable tidal force, as though the individual constituent components of your body were being stretched internally. These spaghettifying forces would distort your body into a noodle-like shape, causing you pain, loss of consciousness, death, and then your corpse would be atomized. In the end, like everything on Earth, wed be absorbed into the black hole, simply adding to its mass ever so slightly. For the final 21 minutes of everyones life, under only the laws of gravity, our demises would all truly be equal.

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What Would We Experience If Earth Spontaneously Turned Into A Black Hole? - Forbes

To be a thing

without use value.

To be a thing that gains value over time

though no one knows why.

To let yourself be called

a decorative item.

To hear that youre superfluous.

To hear they cant make it without you.

To breathe inside yourself.

To change owners.

To be unpossessed.

To be an object of admiration.

To change locations,

to avoid migration.

To be satisfied.

To be a ship.

Face turned to the seafloor to be

on both sides of the deep.

To leave a trace

not for eternity.

To sail in.

To sail out

the same way.

To be loved in harbors.

To be a ship.

To love

the better part of life in the open sea

to dream of harbors.

To avoid waiting. To move

always by the same path

from harbor back towards it.

Entranced by the nets on deck.

To transform cargo into stories.

To be a ship.

To bear yourself without effort.

To be kin. To anyone.

To men, women, algae,

tigers leaping at a deer,

lotuses settled in their own tears,

islands, caves who have at least one

chamber unexplored

to be related.

To love you

and never to learn it.

To be always suddenly

new joy and unexpected pain.

To avoid existence.

A drop

on your skin

thats already a memory of touch.

The drops already another drop.

To be actually never.

To be now.

Singularity in passage.

Marija Kneevi is an award-winning poet, editor, writer and translator based in Belgrade. Born in 1963, she studied Comparative Literature as a BA at the University of Belgrade and as an MA at Michigan State University. She has authored eight collections of poetry and 11 novels. This poem is part of her new bilingual anthology, Breathing Technique, published by Zephyr Press. You can get your copy here.

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'Warmth shifts moods': 2 soothing Serbian poems on loss and longing for the chilly days ahead - The Calvert Journal

SentinelOne announced it has secured a new patent from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO). SentinelOnes latest patent, USPTO Patent No. 10,762,200, titled System and Methods for Executable Code Detection, Automatic Feature Extraction, and Position-Independent Code Detection, recognizes SentinelOne for its unique approach to uncovering exploits in their initial payload stage.

In addition, the patent highlights the innovative way in which SentinelOnes industry-lauded, AI-based engine extracts the valuable traits out of any given file in order to catch the most advanced malware. The patent is a testament to SentinelOnes innovative XDR platform and underlying technology innovation.

Most enterprises today are tasked with defending a dissolving perimeter in a complex threat environment, which means that endpoint protection solutions must be comprehensive, said Shlomi Salem, AVP, Security Research, SentinelOne.

The platform must be able to not only identify and stop initial attacks, but mitigate exploits in progress, directly on the endpoint. This new patent is a recognition of our ability to protect and monitor every asset across the enterprise from endpoint to cloud workloads to IoT devices for an unprecedented level of autonomous protection.

The patent is a combination of three separate SentinelOne innovations automatic feature extractor, code detector, and position-independent code detection that significantly enhance the XDR platforms detection capabilities.

SentinelOnes automatic feature extractor leverages the capabilities of neural networks to automatically identify patterns inside a file format and determine if a sample is malicious or benign.

SentinelOnes code detector detects whether certain memory buffers are an executable code and identifies suspicious structures in a file by finding code in unusual locations.

Lastly, SentinelOnes position-independent code detector identifies the execution of position-independent code, a type of code commonly used by attackers during successful exploitations.

These capabilities help detect and stop attacks before execution, even if an attack is in progress, adding yet another layer of defense to the SentinelOne Singularity XDR platform.

In October 2019, SentinelOne was granted USPTO Patent No. 10,417,424 for its comprehensive approach to monitoring and attributing events in various computing environments to their real source of operation and in relation to other relevant events.

In October 2018, SentinelOne was granted USPTO Patent No. 10,102,374 for the companys unique malware remediation technology. This new patent further builds on SentinelOnes commitment to take cybersecurity defenses to new levels of speed, efficacy, and efficiency by delivering the best-in-class AI cybersecurity platform of the future.

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SentinelOne secures patent for unique approach to uncovering exploits in their initial payload stage - Help Net Security

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

Scientists Trapped In Ice for Past Year Return With a Dire Warning Markus Rex, an atmospheric scientist at Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, warned that the trip revealed a dying Arctic ocean, reports Motherboard Science.

New Clues to Chemical Origins of Metabolism at Dawn of Life The ingredients for reactions ancestral to metabolism could have formed very easily in the primordial soup, reports Quanta.

Unvisited Earth May Exist in a Galaxy of Interstellar Space-Faring Civilizations

How Andrea Ghez Won the Nobel for an Experiment Nobody Thought Would Work She insisted on doing it anywayand ultimately provided conclusive evidence for a supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way, reports Scientific American

Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 5050 Gauging whether or not we dwell inside someone elses computer may come down to advanced AI researchor measurements at the frontiers of cosmology, reports Scientific American.

Earths New Gilded EraThe world is getting hotter, and the divide between rich and poor is getting bigger, reports The Atlantic,https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-chances-are-about-50-50/

Climate Change Helped Drive Homo sapiens Cousins Extinct: Study Sharp drops in global temperatures helped seal the fate of three extinct hominin species, including our close relatives, the Neanderthals, according to thousands of archaeological specimens and a model of past climate conditions, reports The Scientist

Why a Historic Emissions Drop from COVID Is No Cause to Celebrate The greenhouse gas reductions highlight the difficult road ahead to substantially limit global warming, reports Scientific American.

Estonia Is a Digital RepublicWhat That Means and Why It May Be Everyones Future, reports Singularity Hub.

No, Roger Penrose, We See No Evidence Of A Universe Before The Big Bang, reports Ethan Siegel for Forbes. 2020 Nobel Laureate Roger Penroses attempted alternative, Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, cannot match the inflationary Big Bangs successes. Contrary to recent headlines and Penroses assertions, there is no evidence of a Universe before the Big Bang.

Scientists Found a New Way to Control the Brain With LightNo Surgery Required, reports Singularity Hub.Optogenetics. uses light of different frequencies to control the brain. Its a brilliant mind-meld of basic neurobiology and engineering that hijacks the mechanism behind how neurons naturally activateor are silencedin the brain.

Scientists Are Finding a Ton of New and Mysterious Craters on Mars Martian craters appear concentrated in certain areas and we know that physically there is no reason for that, said a JPL researcher. An AI tool may help figure out why, reports Motherboard Science.

The Dire Wolf Might Have Prowled Asia, Fossil Suggests The carnivores likely crossed the Bering Land Bridge into Asia, reports The New York Times.

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Planet Earth Report The Supermassive-Milky Way Experiment Nobody Thought Would Work to a Prior Universe - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

The celebrated Israeli novelist David Grossman has called on his fellow writers to be trenchant witnesses to the Covid-19 pandemic, and to sound warnings in every place where civil and human rights are threatened as a result of the crisis.

The author and peace activist was speaking from his home outside Jerusalem on Tuesday at the launch of the Frankfurt book fair, which opens on Wednesday. Usually the worlds largest trade publishing event, with more than a quarter of a million visitors, this year the event is mostly a digital occasion, with more than 4,400 online exhibitors from 103 countries, and 2,100 virtual events during the week of the fair.

The winner of the Man Booker International prize for his novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar, Grossman suggested authors can ease the burden of the coronavirus outbreak with their power of observation.

Most writers and poets I know including myself are embarrassingly clumsy when it comes to engaging with reality. But we do know how to observe it, he said. You cant take that away from us. And there is much to observe, much to put into words Millions have lost and are yet to lose their livelihoods. In many countries, the middle class will become poor, and the poor will become destitute. Deprivation and perhaps starvation will propel yet more waves of migration.

As the pandemic continues, Grossman predicted a surge of nationalism, of religious fundamentalism, of xenophobia and racism, of severe damage to democracy and civil rights which the literary world will record.

We shall sound warnings in every place where our language is corrupted, where we are subjected to linguistic and cognitive manipulations, the novelist said. Where our civil rights, and our human rights, are threatened. I say this as a citizen of the world, but also as an Israeli watching the developments in my country with deep concern.

Most of us feel helpless in the face of a devastating event such as the Covid-19 pandemic, he added. To look straight at it, and at its repercussions, is almost like looking straight at the sun. But many of us have frequently looked into one sun or another, and told of what we saw. That is the nature of our strange profession We will be witnesses: active, curious witnesses. Trenchant witnesses.

As global deaths from Covid-19 pass one million, Grossman pointed to the chilling comment attributed to Stalin, that a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.

These words allude to what we do in our work, he said. We, authors and poets, people of literature, struggle to extricate the drama of the individual, the uniqueness and singularity of the individual, from dead statistics.

Grossmans work, which includes fiction, non-fiction and childrens books, has been translated into 36 languages. He is the winner of literary awards including the French Chevalier de lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres, Germanys Buxtehuder Bulle, the Frankfurt peace prize, and Israels Emet prize.

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David Grossman calls on writers to bear witness to pandemic - The Guardian

Red, White and Blue, the third film of Steve McQueens Small Axe miniseries, will wrap up the five-part anthology when it premieres at the end of November on Prime Video. The series covers five stories of West Indians living in Britain between the 60s and the 80s, with four of them based on history.

Red, White and Blue traces the experiences of Leroy Logan, a forensic scientist who yearns to be a bridge between his community and the police system in Britain. His ambition to change the system from within propels him to become a police-officer. His journey is less straightforward.

Red, White and Blue is immediately distinguished from the other two Small Axe entries that have premiered at the New York Film Festival for the singularity of its focus. Whereas Lovers Rock and Mangrove emphasised communal stories, Red, White and Blue is significant as a character-study of Leroys hope, and then growing disillusionment, for the justice system in his country. There are two critical moments that seem to spur Leroys desire. A childhood encounter with a police officer, interrupted by his forceful father, opens the film. An incident years later, where his father is brutally beaten by a pair of officers, feels even more impactful. For Kenneth, Leroys Jamaican father, the incident calcifies his resentment of the police. For Leroy, the incident is a chance to mend the broken relationship between black people and the police.

Leroys journey through the police training punctuates his difference. His blackness stands out in a sea of whiteness as he thrives in the training sessions, and that difference becomes an immediate liability when he joins the force. Unlike the more spontaneous developments of Mangrove and Lovers Rock, the script (written by McQueen and Courttia Newland) is tracing a familiar journey of increasing awareness. Leroy begins with the hope of someone adamant on the good he can do, but that certainty soon dissipates as he recognises that his own co-workers cannot see beyond his skin colour.

Red, White and Blue is less thrilling than the previous two Small Axe episodes playing at the festival but by the end its clear that that lack of thrill is essential to what McQueen is presenting. Unlike the laidback joy of Lovers Rock, or the decisive anger of Mangrove, this entry finds strength not in its community but in its isolation. The moments of solidarity, when they do come, are welcome but the film is interrogating loneliness what it means to be alone not just physically, but emotionally. Leroys isolation from his father, who cannot understand his desire, becomes the strongest arc as McQueen seems to use the schism between the two as a metaphor for the schism between the various ways of activism. John Boyega and Steve Toussaint give sharp performances as son and father, and McQueen mines their chemistry especially in an explosive argument to great effect. Their interpersonal relationship is oftentimes more incisive than the films larger arguments about the police force.

In a way, this makes Red, White and Blue occasionally more compelling as a thesis on race than as a film but only in comparison to the previous entries. As it goes on, it becomes ambitious and wholly incisive for the ways it avoids the most cathartic moments of our expectations and for the ways it nods to so many pertinent issues.

In an excellent scene, Leroys only other non-white colleague (Assad Zaman in a brief but layered performance) is reprimanded for speaking Urdu to the victims of a robbery. The moment is baffling and Shabier Kirchners camera sharply places the two men in a shot together in a moment that feels revelatory. There are numerous moments like this where McQueen nods to complex ideas, revealing a keen awareness of the time and place. And as it builds, Red, White and Blue becomes effective not for what it does, but for what it does not do. McQueens entire Small Axe endeavour has hinged on complicating our ideas about stories about Black characters, and Red, White and Blue further complicates our expectations about heroes. Its shrewdly daring stuff that closes on an ellipsis of uncertainty.

In an illuminating moment Leroy confesses, I just feel like someones got to be the bridge. But when you do it, you realise youre alone. The line illustrates how Red, White and Blue is keyed into the ways that this entry something of a warning as the final entry confronts the limitations of any kind of activism. It is hard and draining work, and the seeds of hope are not always immediately seen, if ever. Its a sobering note to end but one that feels propulsive for that ambition. The films final scene, in particular, a great scene between Boyega and Toussaint, emphasises the underbelly of melancholic tension in a way that feels sad, but still clear-eyed and even hopeful.

If Red, White and Blue and the whole of Small Axe does anything, hopefully that is beginning a necessary conversation on immigrant burdens and the complicated nature of assimilation. McQueens vision with Small Axe is gargantuan but at the core it is about the humanity of the black experience. McQueens clarity of thematic vision meets a vitality in filmmaking that makes for layered and rewarding work and Red, White and Blue lingers because it does not deign to offer simplistic answers to these complicated situations. Instead, when confronted with Boyegas face communicating the pain and disappointment of heroic intentions foiled by the system, Red, White and Blue feels like its forcing us to confront the reality that so many prefer to ignore. And, as the credits roll, it as if McQueen is asking us, Now what?

Red, White and Blue is the fifth of a five-episode anthology series of films by Steve McQueen that will premieres for audiences on December 18 on Prime Video. It had its world premiere earlier in October at the New York Film Festival.

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NYFF 2020: Red, White and Blue considers the impossibility of unity - Stabroek News

To the Editor,

How does humankind correct its collective addiction to disposability when regardless of scuba divers reports of immense tangled plastic messes (not to mention plastic bags found at some of the oceans deepest points) so much of it is not immediately observable, i.e. out of sight, out of mind, thus misperceived as no threat to us?

It doesnt surprise me, as general human mentality collectively allows us to, amongst other forms of blatant pollution, throw non-biodegradables down a dark chute like were safely dispensing it into a black-hole singularity to be crushed into nothing.

And then theres the astonishing short-sighted entitled selfishness. I observed this not long ago when a Global TV news reporter randomly asked a young urbanite wearing sunglasses what he thought of government restrictions on disposable plastic straws.

Its like were living in a nanny state, always telling me what I cant do, he recklessly retorted.

And I can imagine the feeling being mutual in most of the southern hemisphere.

Frank Sterle, Jr.

White Rock, B.C.

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Humankinds addiction to disposability - Clearwater Times