Category Archives: Singularity

The affecting, uneven Nomadland, set early in 2011 in the wake of the Great Recession but equally pertinent today, is a road movie of a very special sort. Fern, played by Frances McDormand, lost her husband a year after the closure of a gypsum factory in Empire, Nevada, that put nearly everybody out of work. Even the ZIP code of the town has been erased. With no desire to stay on, she packs up a camper and heads out across the high and low deserts, working seasonal jobs to get by.

She joins a migratory band of fellow travelers, a few of whom she befriends and reconnects with along the way. Some of these nomads, mostly older adults, choose to live like this because they believe they have no better way to survive. Others just like the peace and freedom.

Written and directed by Chlo Zhao, the film is based on Jessica Bruders 2017 nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, and includes several of the books real-life vagabonds, such as the ailing, valiant Swankie and the irrepressible Linda May,playing variants of their actual selves. Fern is not based on any one individual, but her singularity, like a character from a Steinbeck novel, makes her seem both her own person and symbolic of a larger reality.

Nothing terribly dramatic happens in Nomadland, and at times this can make the film seem wispy and digressive a piece of arty anomie with a semidocumentary overlay. The challenges of maintaining lifes basic necessities are downplayed. Fern faces few dangers: no hazardous encounters, no thefts, no violence.This seems more an idealization of her situation than a reality.Her biggest crisis comes when her camper breaks down and she cadges money for its repair from her sister Dolly (Melissa Smith), who liveswith her husband and childrenoutside Denverin conventional, and, in the films view, boring, middle-class comfort.

Fern reluctantly pays her a visit, and it is in this scene, more than halfway into the movie, that a bit of Ferns family backstory unfolds. She left home as soon as she could, married hastily, and moved, according to Dolly, to the middle of nowhere. Not altogether convincingly, Dolly commends the pioneer spirit of the big sister she looked up to, whose departure years ago left a big hole in her life.

It is also in this Denver setting that the film tips its ideological hand, just as it did earlier when the real-life nomad guru, Bob Wells, regales his followers with talk of the tyranny of the dollar. Fern chastises Dollys husband, George (Warren Keith), a real estate broker, for encouraging people to invest their whole life savings, go into debt, just to buy a house they cant afford. The implication is clear: Footloose Fern incarnates the spirit that made America great, a spirit that has been squelched in a mercenary economy gone bust. Im not homeless, she tells people. Im houseless.

Romanticizing Fern in this way glosses over her emotional complexity. Despite the films erratic attempt to pigeonhole her, its obvious that Ferns wanderlust owes far more to psychological need than ideological persuasion. She quietly affirms several times a lasting love for her late husband, but the affirmation seemingly lacks conviction. When a fellow nomad, beautifully played by David Strathairn, attempts to get close to her, she barely registers the overture. As was also true of the vengeful mother McDormand played in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the role of Fern gives McDormand license to indulge an opaqueness that is often more gnomic than expressive. Perhaps she and Zhao felt that being more demonstrative would shatter the films wayward poetic mood.

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They neednt have worried because, despite the movies manipulations, that mood often comes through anyway. Its there in the scenes where Fern is simply walking alone in a deserted RV park, or floating unclothed and unobserved in a mountain stream, or just watching a herd of bison from the window of her camper. In these moments, and others like them, Nomadland is mysteriously moving.

Peter Rainer is the Monitors film critic. Nomadland is available via theaters and streaming service Hulu on Feb. 19.

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Nomadland: A wispy, affecting vision of life on the road - Christian Science Monitor

This month has been a busy one for Mars exploration. Several countries sent missions to the red planet in June last year, taking advantage of a launch window. Most have now arrived after their eight-month voyage.

Within the next few days, NASA will perform a direct entry of the Martian atmosphere to land the Perseverance rover in Marss Jezero Crater.

Perseverance, about the size of a car, is the largest Mars payload everit literally weighs a ton (on Earth). After landing, the rover will search for signs of ancient life and gather samples to eventually be returned to Earth.

The mission will use similar hardware to that of the 2012 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, which landed the Curiosity rover, but will have certain upgrades including improved rover landing accuracy.

Curiositys voyage provided a wealth of information about what kind of environment Mars 2020 might face and what technology it would need to survive.

An artists impression of Mars 2020 approaching the red planet. NASA/JPL-Caltech

As Mars is a hostile and remote environment with an atmosphere about 100 times thinner than Earths, theres little atmosphere for incoming spacecraft to use to slow down aerodynamically.

Rather, surviving entry to Mars requires a creative mix of aerodynamics, parachutes, retropropulsion (using engine thrust to decelerate for landing), and often a large airbag.

Also, models of Martian weather arent updated in real time, so we dont know exactly what environment a probe will face during entry. Unpredictable weather events, especially dust storms, are one reason landing accuracy has suffered in previous missions.

NASA engineers call the entry, descent, and landing phase (EDL) of Mars entry missions the seven minutes of terror. In just seven minutes there are myriad ways entry can fail.

A profile of Mars 2020s entry, descent and landing phase. NASA JPL

The 2012 MSL spacecraft was fitted with a 4.5-meter-diameter heat shield that protected the vehicle during its descent through Marss atmosphere.

It entered the Martian atmosphere at around 5,900m per second. This is hypersonic, which means its more than five times the speed of sound.

Mars 2020 will be similar. It will rely heavily on its thermal protection system, including a front heat shield and backshell heat shield, to stop hot flow from damaging the rover stowed inside.

Pictured are the Mars 2020 backshell heat shield (foreground) and the main PICA heat shield (background). NASA/JPL-Caltech

At hypersonic speeds, Marss atmosphere wont be able to get out of the spacecrafts way fast enough. As a result, a strong shock wave will form off the front.

In this case, gas in front of the vehicle will be rapidly compressed, causing a huge jump in pressure and temperature between the shock wave and the heat shield.

The hot post-shock flow heats up the surface of the heat shield during the entry, but the heat shield protects the internal structure from this heat.

Since the MSL 2012 and Mars 2020 missions use relatively larger payloads, these spacecrafts are at higher risk of overheating during the entry phase.

But MSL effectively circumvented this issue, largely thanks to a specially-designed heat shield which was the first Mars vehicle ever to make use of NASAs Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA) material.

This material, which the Mars 2020 spacecraft also uses, is made of chopped carbon-fiber embedded in a synthetic resin. Its very light, can absorb immense heat, and is an effective insulator.

All entries before the 2012 MSL mission had been unguided, meaning they werent controlled in real-time by a flight computer.

Instead, the spacecraft were designed to hit Marss entry interface (125km above the ground) in a particular way, before landing wherever the Martian winds took them. With this came significant landing uncertainty.

The area of landing uncertainty is called the landing ellipse. NASAs 1970s Viking Mars missions had an estimated landing ellipse of 280x100km. But both MSL and now Mars 2020 were built to outperform previous efforts.

The MSL mission was the first guided Mars entry. An upgraded version of the Apollo guidance computer was used to control the vehicle in real time to ensure an accurate landing.

With this, MSL reduced its estimated landing ellipse to 206.5km and ended up landing just 2km from its target. With any luck, Mars 2020 will achieve similar results.

Pictured are NASAs various Mars landing sites, including the proposed Perseverance landing site. Perseverance is expected to land in a relatively less clear area. NASA/JPL-Caltech

A parachute will be used to slow down the Mars 2020 spacecraft enough for final landing maneuvers to be performed. With a 21.5m diameter, the parachute will be the largest ever used on Mars and will have to be deployed faster than the speed of sound.

Deploying the parachute at the right time will be critical for achieving an accurate landing. A brand new technology called range trigger will control the parachutes deployment time, based on the spacecrafts relative position to its desired landing spot.

About 20 seconds after the parachute opens, the heat shield will separate from the spacecraft, exposing Perseverance to the Martian environment. Its cameras and sensors can begin to collect information as it approaches ground.

The rovers specialized terrain-relative navigation system will help it land safely by diverting it to a stable landing surface.

Perseverance will compare a pre-loaded map of the landing site with images collected during its rapid descent. It should then be able to identify landmarks below and estimate its relative position to the ground to an accuracy of about 40m.

Terrain-relative navigation is far superior to methods used for past Mars entries. Older spacecraft had to rely on their own internal estimates of their location during entry.

And there was no way to effectively recalibrate this information. They could only guess where they were to an accuracy of about 2-3km as they approached ground.

The parachute carrying the Mars 2020 spacecraft can only slow it down to about 320km per hour.

To land safely, the spacecraft will jettison the parachute and backshell and use rockets facing the ground to ease down for the final 2,100m. This is called retropropulsion.

And to avoid using airbags to land the rover (as was done in missions prior to MSL), Mars 2020 will use the skycrane maneuver; a set of cables will slowly lower Perseverance to the ground as it prepares for autonomous operation.

Once Perseverance senses its wheels are safely on the ground, it will cut the cables connected to the descent vehicle (which will fly off and crash somewhere in the distance).

And with that, the seven minutes of terror will be over.

Perseverance rover being placed on Martian soil by the skycrane. NASA/JPL-Caltech

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

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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'7 Minutes of Terror': The Technology Perseverance Will Need to Survive Landing on Mars - Singularity Hub

Climate change is rapidly making the Earth's atmosphere unsuitable to human life, as industrial and international pivots to sustainable energy goals aim to secure the common future of humanity.

However, when multiple threats to the existence of human life happen at the same time like the climate and COVID-19 crises the question of long-term survival arises. We'll almost certainly beat the COVID-19 crisis, and the species stands a good chance at overcoming climate change in the long run.

But someday billions of years from now the Sun will ultimately obliterate the Earth. A recent study published in the journal Nature Astronomy offered a glimpse of Earth-like crusts floating about their host star system.While none of us will be around to see Earth reach a similarly final stage, it raises the question of how humanity will survive Earth. If it can.

A year ago, Elon Musk tweeted new details about his plans to settle Mars with his aerospace company, SpaceX suggesting a viable human presence could take seed on the Red Planet by the mid-21st century.

If we take Musk at his word, the entirety of SpaceX's launches and deals from commercial rideshares and Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit, the contract from NASA to launch parts for the forthcoming Lunar Gateway, to the exploding prototype Starships are united in a single mission to establish a permanent human presence on Mars.

With human populations on both Earth and Mars, the species stands a better chance of surviving extinction-level events, since barring a rogue black hole singularity, unusually monstrous super-solar flare, or nearby supernova such events have yet to be seen on both planets at the same time.

The challenge, of course, is developing a new comprehensive suite of engineering and technology to support humans in environments inherently deadly to human bodies. One day we might terraform the Red Planet thickening and altering its atmosphere to support human life but this could take centuries, or longer.

Regardless, Musk's SpaceX has come a long way from a few commercial launches per year with 26 successful launches in 2020. But despite Musk's claim to put humans on Mars by 2024. Or was it 2026?

Since the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Hydrogen probe touched down on the surface of Jupiter's moon, Titan, researchers have considered the planet for possible colonization.

Unlike the moon and Mars, Titan has the densest atmosphere of any moon in the solar system which would serve as protection from solar radiation. The Jovian moon may also have large bodies of liquid hydrocarbons in methane and ethane seas which could serve as fuel.

Titan also likely has water, in addition to abundant natural resources with which future astronauts could construct and maintain a base.

While Venus and Europa could also support small habitats in the clouds and under the ice sheets of each body, respectively the most effective way for humans to survive local extinction events is to spread beyond our solar system.

The nearest star system Alpha Centauri is roughly 4.4 light-years away which means it would take nearly 4.5 years to arrive at the system if we moved at the speed of light (which is not theoretically possible). This is especially vexing since new research pointed to a possibly life-sustaining world orbiting in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A.

Sadly, conventional methods of chemical rocket propellant would take 19,000 to 81,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri. Additionally, a 2019 study suggested a generational ship where humans can live and reproduce through the eons-long journey would need to have artificial land to grow food, and be large enough to generate artificial gravity via spinning. This could mean a minimum radius of 735 ft (224 m), and a minimum length of 1,050 ft (320 m).

Barring such a hefty and long-term commitment, we could also simply "seed" planets throughout the galaxy with the building blocks of life effectively conceding our species' survival to our home solar system while allowing other forms of life to evolve in radically alien environments.

Called the Genesis project, the interplanetary seeding endeavor would distribute microbial life on "transiently habitable exoplanets i.e. planets capable of supporting life, but not likely to give rise to it on their own," said Claudius Gros of Goethe University's Institute for Theoretical Physics, according to a Phys.org report.

While we still have options to help humans survive Earth by settling other planets in our solar system, a relatively low-cost back-up plan could "jump-start" evolution on planets not likely to develop life independently and make sure the "light of consciousness," as Musk has called it, has a chance to evolve elsewhere. Just in case we don't survive Earth.

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Will Humanity Survive the Earth? | IE - Interesting Engineering

Tesla bought Bitcoin. It feels as if that sentence should properly begin with Imagine if and a wry chuckle. But no. Imagine no longer.

Tesla Inc.s annual report disclosed the electric-car maker updated its investment policy last month and then bought $1.5 billion of the crypto. That news added roughly $5,000, or 14%, to said crypto on Monday morning, sending it to a new all-time high. Teslas own stock rose about 3%, adding roughly $11 billion in market cap, because well, probably because of this. I dont know.

On the face of it, a change in investment policy that simply by its disclosure adds hundreds of millions of dollars in value to a companys portfolio and billions to the companys market cap in a sort-of virtual virtuous circle seems like a winning change. Ordinarily, such things lie forgotten in the 10-K.

Yet its hard to shake the feeling that it is just inadvisable to be (forgive me) crossing the memes like this. Its as if the Earth has shifted a billionth of a degree on its axis or we are approaching some singularity in the capital markets with Lovecraftian overtones.

Teslas explanation for the move is relatively straightforward: To further diversify and maximize returns on our cash that is not required to maintain adequate operating liquidity. Fair enough. You may have noticed cash doesnt earn very much these days. (Teslas current stock price may reflect that issue to some degree.) Also, companies routinely diversify their cash holdings, especially if they operate in multiple countries.

Bitcoin is anything but routine, though. New, stateless, volatile, subject to cybertheft and potential government regulation, it is a currency only if you squint really hard and can jump through the hoops of actually using it. Teslas comment that it expects to begin accepting Bitcoin as payment in the near future is irrelevant; doing that doesnt require hoarding it ahead of time.

On the other hand, the casual reference to Tesla taking Bitcoin as payment down the road is like digital catnip, helping to boost the value of that $1.5 billion bet. And it is a bet. Tesla is speculating with $1.5 billion of the roughly $19 billion it had on the balance sheet at the end of December, $12 billion of which was raised from selling more equity into last years frenzied rally. If confirmation were needed that Tesla announced several at-the-market offerings in 2020 simply because it could, its hard to think of one that is more resounding.

The move raises the usual questions about Teslas governance. Apart from the speculative nature of it, the fact that CEO Elon Musk has been tweeting heavily about cryptocurrencies of late should ring alarm bells in whatever passes for Teslas boardroom. Not necessarily because anything untoward has happened, but its fair to say Musk has some history to live down when it comes to the tweeting. Giving authorities any reason to scrutinize Tesla is inadvisable. One has to wonder what a regulator might make of this tweet from just a month before the updated investment policy was approved, for example:

I guess you could argue having a currency that is only almost as bs as fiat money helps to diversify Teslas exposure on the bs axis, leading to a lower weighted average of bs ratio or some such. Im not a corporate treasurer.

One way in which the foray into crypto certainly helped on Monday was taking the spotlight off some less exciting news. Tesla was recently summoned by Chinese regulators to answer complaints about quality and safety issues with its cars. China is crucial for Tesla because, as the 10-K also revealed, revenue in this growth companys home market in the fourth quarter was still lower than two years previously:

Having witnessed Gamestonk, we surely all knew that this Venn diagram eclipse of the most speculative car company in the world and the most speculative currency in the world was coming. Tesla sells stock because it can and then uses some of the proceeds to buy Bitcoin because it can. Its as simple, and disconcerting, as that.

AssumingTesla bought its Bitcoin at the average price for January or $34,672 according to Bloomberg it would own roughly 43,000 units. The gain on Monday mornings rally would add up to about $220 million.

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy, mining and commodities.

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The Tesla-Bitcoin singularity is here at last - The Japan Times

A scene from Korean sci-fi blockbuster Space Sweepers on Netflix. [NETFLIX]

On Dec. 29, 1959, the American Physical Society held a conference in Pasadena, California. Caltech Professor Richard Feynman, then 41, gave a lecture titled Theres Plenty of Room at the Bottom and proposed a challenge of fitting the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin.

The diameter of a pinhead is about 1.6 millimeters, equivalent to the size of the encyclopedia if the pin head is magnified 25,000 times. The challenge was how to reduce the information by 1/25,000. He proposed that the first person to compact a page to 1/25,000 would win $1,000.

That was when sciences nano technology was born. In 1985, Tom Newman, a Stanford graduate student, reduced Charles Dickenss A Tale of Two Cities to that scale and won the prize.

The prefix nano is derived from the Greek nanos, meaning dwarf. It denotes a factor of 1/1 billionth in unit. Nano technology utilizes nano substances in the size of an atom or molecule.

Most notable examples are graphene and carbon nanotube. While graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagonal lattice, carbon nanotubes are tube-shaped graphene. They are high-tech materials of unique properties.

Another promising field is nanorobotics, or nanobots, referring to tiny robots nearly the size of an atom or molecule. Nanobots take the forms of biochips, nucleic acid robots (nubots), biohybrids, and bacteria-based and virus-based systems. Nanomedicine is a leading example of using nanobots to diagnose and treat diseases.

Korean sci-fi blockbuster Space Sweepers, which had a budget of 25 billion won ($22.4 million), was released on Netflix. Various sci-fi subjects appear in the movie, like space elevators connecting space stations, terraforming, or modifying a planets environment to resemble Earth, artificial gravity to enable movement on Earth like in space and space junk.

A key element of the plot is the nanobot. Futurist Ray Kurzweil, 73, predicted healthy longevity made possible by nanobots in his books The Singularity is Near and Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever. Humanity dreams of the world after singularity, like Dorothy (Kot-nim) on Space Sweepers whose terminal illness is treated by nanobots. But what should we do now? Our feet are still trapped in the quagmire of Covid-19.

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Nanorobotics beyond the singularity - Korea JoongAng Daily

Modern life can feel dizzying, like everything is motion and change. But there are some constants we set our lives against: the relative position of the stars wheeling above, the mountaintops below, and the continents on which we walk. These things feel immutable.

Of course, they arent.

The beauty of science is how far it extends our view into space and time. We now know the sun and stars whip around the center of our galaxy just as the Earth orbits the sun. The universes hundreds of billions of galaxies are likewise in ceaseless motion, colliding and coalescing in deep time.

And just as the stars are in motion, so too is the ground beneath our feet.

From decades analyzing Earths rocks, scientists have assembled an astonishing history of a restless, wandering planet. Earths core is a white-hot ball of iron and nickel nestled in a molten sea called the mantle. The surface on which we live is a thin crust of rock, jig-sawed into mammoth plates that skate over the planets interior. This motion is called plate tectonics.

The Earths plates move agonizingly slowly, little more than a few centimeters a year. To us mayfly-humans, they may as well be eternal and unchanging. But speed up the tapeand theyre anything but.

This week, a team of scientists from the University of Sydney published the most comprehensive simulation of Earths tectonic history yet. In a new video, you can watch the last billion years in less than a minute. These plates move at the speed fingernails grow, said the University of Sydneys Dr. Sabin Zahirovic, a coauthor on the paper. But when a billion years is condensed into 40 seconds a mesmerizing dance is revealed.

Plates collide and grind past each other; continents form and break apart; oceans split and narrow. For most of that time, earth, sea, and sky would have appeared utterly alien to us.

How, you may understandably ask, can we possible know anything about the motion of Earths tectonic plates a billion years ago?

The videos brevity and smooth visualization belies the intellectual effort that goes into an undertaking like this. In a paper describing the new tectonic model, the team goes over the evidence, gathered by a host of scientists over many years, in painstaking detail.

To stitch together plate simulations, geophysicists search for and record geologic formations correlating to past tectonic movement along plate borders. They also observe magnetic minerals in rock layers to determine the strength and direction of the Earths magnetic field over time. Together, this information offers clues about where rocks from around the world were located in the distant past.

The new research isnt the first such simulation, nor is it the first to go so far back in time. In their paper, the researchers include a family tree of nine other full-plate reconstructions.

Until now, however, all the models have focused on shorter periods of time. Over the last four years, the team quilted four of these models into the simulation you see abovethe first continuous, full-plate reconstruction spanning the last billion years.

And the model is, of course, more than a mind-boggling video.

Plate tectonics inform our understanding of the Earths composition, climate, and how life emerged and evolved. Our planet is unique in the way that it hosts life, said Professor Dietmar Muller, coauthor and leader of the University of Sydneys EarthByte geosciences group. But this is only possible because geological processes, like plate tectonics, provide a planetary life-support system.

Tectonic motion is an evolutionary forceas populations of animals merge and separate over eonsand tectonics also drive planetary carbon and mineral cycles and affect sea level. All this influences both climate and creatures over geological cycles.

This week, in a separate study, for example, scientists from Chinas Peking University said a thinning of Earths crust from roughly 1.8 billion to 0.8 billion years ago suggests a slowing of plate tectonics. As a result, the formation of mountains ground to a halt and literally wore down to nothing.

Their findings coincide with a period of slow evolution, known as the boring billion. More research is needed, but they suggest slower tectonics and mountain formation may have meant less replenishment of the life-sustaining elements upon which animals depend, and thus, lower productivity stalled evolution.

Science aside, its fascinating to travel so far into the past, when just three oceansthe Mirovoi Ocean, Mozambique Ocean, and Mawson Sealapped at the shores of supercontinent Rodinia. Or when Antarctica, now buried under miles of ice, was a rather balmy place, having wandered up near the equator.

Wait long enough, and the face of the planet will shift again, rearranged by its tectonic dance through deep time.

Image Credit: NASA

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See a Billion-Year Dance of Earth's Tectonic Plates in 40 Seconds - Singularity Hub

VIRTUAL REALITY

Epic Games MetaHuman Creator Lets Developers Create Realistic Digital Humans Within MinutesDean Takahashi | VentureBeatEpic Gameshas unveiled its MetaHuman Creator, a new browser-based app that enables game developers and creators of real-time content to slash the time it takes to builddigital humansfrom weeks to less than an hour. And as you can see from the images in this story, the tools can create highly realistic human characters.

Jack Dorsey and Jay Z Invest 500 BTC to Make Bitcoin Internets CurrencyManish Singh and Tege Kene-Okafor | TechCrunchTwitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey and rapper Jay Z have created an endowment to fund bitcoin development initially in Africa and India, Dorsey said on Friday. The duo is putting 500 bitcoin, which is currently worth $23.6 million, in the endowment called trust. The mission of the fund is to make bitcoin the internets currency, a job application describes.

Listen to an 18,000-Year-Old Instrument Sing Once MoreMatt Simon | Wiredresearchers from several universities and museums in France describe how they used CT scans and other imaging wizardry to show that a person during the Upper Paleolithic age took great care to modify the shell, the oldest such instrument ever found. They even got a musician to play it for us, revealing sounds that have not rung out for millennia.

Artificial Human Genomes Could Help Overcome Research Privacy ConcernsIsaac Schultz | GizmodoA team of geneticists and computer scientists have been using neural networks to construct novel segments of human genomes, according to a paper published in the journal PLOS Genetics. iFor most properties, they are not distinguishable from other genomes from the biobank we used to train our algorithm, except for one detail: they do not belong to any gene donor,isaid co-author Luca Pagani, a geneticistat the University of Tartu.

Mighty Buildings Nabs $40M Series B to 3D Print Your Next HouseMary Ann Azevedo | TechCrunchMighty Buildings can then 3D print elements like overhangs or ceilings without the need for additional supporting formwork. That way, its able to fully print a structure and not just the walls. Robotic arms can post-process the composite, which combined with the companys ability to automate the pouring of insulation and the 3D printing gives Mighty Buildings the ability to automate up to 80% of the construction process, the company claims.

Shell, in a Turning Point, Says Its Oil Production Has PeakedStanley Reed | The New York TimesRoyal Dutch Shell on Thursday made the boldest statement among its peers about the waning of the oil age, saying its production reached a high in 2019 and is now likely to gradually decline. Shells total oil production peaked in 2019 and will now drop 1 or 2 percent annually, the company said in a statement.

Theres a Tantalizing Sign of a Habitable-Zone Planet in Alpha CentauriNeel V. Patel | MIT Technology ReviewThe planet in question hasnt even been named yet, and its existence has not been verified. The new signal would suggest its the size of Neptune. That means were not talking about an Earth-like world but a warm gas planet five to seven times larger than Earth. If its home to life, it would probably bemicrobial life hanging out in the clouds.

How Vulnerable Is the World?Nick Bostrom and Matthew van der Merwe | AeonSooner or later a technology capable of wiping out human civilization might be invented. How far would we go to stop it? We call this the vulnerable world hypothesis. The intuitive idea is that theres some level of technology at which civilization almost certainly gets destroyed, unless quite extraordinary and historically unprecedented degrees of preventive policing and/or global governance are implemented.

OpenAI and Stanford Researchers Call for Urgent Action to Address Harms of Large Language Models Like GPT-3Kyle Wiggers | VentureBeatThe paper looks back at a meeting held in October 2020 to consider GPT-3 and two pressing questions: What are the technical capabilities and limitations of large language models? and What are the societal effects of widespread use of large language models? Coauthors of the paper described a sense of urgency to make progress sooner than later in answering these questions.i

Microsofts Big Win in Quantum Computing Was an Error After AllTom Simonite | WiredIn a 2018 paper, researchers said they found evidence of an elusive theorized particle. A closer look now suggests otherwise. Three years later, Microsofts 2018 physics fillip has fizzled. Late last month, Kouwenhoven and his 21 coauthors released a new paper including more data from their experiments. It concludes that they did not find the prized particle after all.

Image Credit: SplitShire /Pixabay

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through February 13) - Singularity Hub

When I was asked to calculate the total volume of SARS-CoV-2 in the world for the BBC Radio 4 show More or Less, I will admit I had no idea what the answer would be. My wife suggested it would be the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Either that or a teaspoon, she said. Its usually one or the other with these sorts of questions.

So how to set about calculating an approximation of what the total volume really is? Fortunately, I have some form with these sorts of large-scale back-of-the-envelope estimations, having carried out a number of them for my book The Maths of Life and Death. Before we embark on this particular numerical journey, though, I should be clear that this is an approximation based on the most reasonable assumptions, but I will happily admit there may be places where it can be improved.

So where to start? Wed better first calculate how many SARS-CoV-2 particles there are in the world. To do that, well need to know how many people are infected. (Well assume humans rather than animals are the most significant reservoir for the virus.)

According to stats website Our World in Data, half a million people are testing positive for Covid every day. Yet we know that many people will not be included in this count because they are asymptomatic or choose not to get tested, or because widespread testing is not readily available in their country.

Using statistical and epidemiological modeling, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluations has estimated that the true number of people infected each day is more like three million.

The amount of virus that each of the people currently infected will carry around with them (their viral load) depends on how long ago they were infected. On average, viral loads are thought to rise and peak about six days after infection, after which they steadily decline.

Of all the people who are infected now, those who got infected yesterday will contribute a little to the total count. Those who were infected a couple of days ago will contribute a little more. Those infected three days ago a little more still. On average, people infected six days ago will have the highest viral load. This contribution will then decline for people who were infected seven or eight or nine days ago, and so on.

The final thing we need to know is the number of virus particles people harbor at any point during their infection. Since we know roughly how viral load changes over time, its enough to have an estimate of the peak viral load. An unpublished study took data on the number of virus particles per gram of a range of different tissues in infected monkeys and scaled up the size of tissue to be representative of humans. Their rough estimates for peak viral loads range from 1 billion to 100 billion virus particles.

Lets work with the higher end of the estimates so that we get an overestimate of the total volume at the end. When you add up all the contributions to the viral load of each of the three million people who became infected on each of the previous days (assuming this three million rate is roughly constant), then we find that there are roughly two quintillion (210 or two billion billion) virus particles in the world at any one time.

This sounds like a really big number, and it is. It is roughly the same as the number of grains of sand on the planet. But when calculating the total volume, weve got to remember that SARS-CoV-2 particles are extremely small. Estimates of the diameter range from 80 to 120 nanometers. One nanometer is a billionth of a meter. To put it in perspective, the radius of SARS-CoV-2 is roughly 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. Lets use the average value for the diameter of 100 nanometers in our subsequent calculation.

To work out the volume of a single spherical virus particle we need to use the formula for the volume of a sphere that is, no doubt, on the tip of everyones tongue:

V = 4 r/3

Assuming a 50 nanometer radius (at the center of the estimated range) of SARS-CoV-2 for the value of r, the volume of a single virus particle works out to be 523,000 nanometres.

Multiplying this very small volume by the very large number of particles we calculated earlier, and converting into meaningful units gives us a total volume of about 120 milliliters (ml). If we wanted to put all these virus particles together in one place, then wed need to remember that spheres dont pack together perfectly.

If you think about the pyramid of oranges you might see at the grocery store, youll remember that a significant portion of the space it takes up is empty. In fact, the best you can do to minimize empty space is a configuration called close sphere packing in which empty space takes up about 26 percent of the total volume. This increases the total gathered volume of SARS-CoV-2 particles to about 160ml, easily small enough to fit inside about six shot glasses. Even taking the upper end of the diameter estimate and accounting for the size of the spike proteins all the SARS-CoV-2 still wouldnt fill a Coke can.

It turns out that the total volume of SARS-CoV-2 was between my wifes rough estimates of the teaspoon and the swimming pool. Its astonishing to think that all the trouble, the disruption, the hardship, and the loss of life that has resulted over the last year could constitute just a few mouthfuls of what would undoubtedly be the worst beverage in history.

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

Image Credit: Pete Linforth from Pixabay

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All the Coronavirus in the World Could Fit Inside a Coke Can, With Plenty of Room to Spare - Singularity Hub

11 February 2021, 16:34 | Updated: 12 February 2021, 17:27

Education Entertainment Recreation is taken from the band's show at London's Alexandra Palace, which was their only UK performance of 2018.

New Order have announced the release of a special performance, which has been made into a live album and video.

Education Entertainment Recreation (Live At Alexandra Palace) will feature the band's 2018 gig at London's Alexandra Palace, which marked their only UK show of that year.

The two hour and 20 minute spectacular includes beautifully mixed New Order classics alongside tracks from their latest album, Music Complete (2015) and iconic Joy Division songs.

READ MORE: why Joy division had to change their name to New Order

Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris, Gillian Gilbert, Phil Cunningham and Tom Chapman's 22-track set, pens with Music Complete's Singularity and ends on the iconic Ian Curtis-penned Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Education Entertainment Recreation will be released on May 7th on various formats - 2CD audio, 2CD audio plus the film on BluRay, 3LPs and a limited edition box set featuring all formats with a book and art prints.

Watch the band perform Sub-culture live at the gig:

Education Entertainment Recreation is out now.

Order it at the official New Order store.

READ MORE: What is the meaning of New Order's Blue Monday?

1. Das Rheingold: Vorspiel (introduction music)

2. Singularity

3. Regret

4. Love Vigilantes

5. Ultraviolence

6. Disorder

7. Crystal

8. Academic

9. Your Silent Face

10. Tutti Frutti

11. Sub-Culture

12. BLT

13. Vanishing Point

14. Waiting for the Sirens Call

15. Plastic

16. The Perfect Kiss

17. True Faith

18. Blue Monday

19. Temptation

20. Atmosphere

21. Decades

22. Love Will Tear Us Apart

See more here:

New Order announce new live album and film Education Entertainment Recreation - Radio X

Imagine that you are sitting in a classroom full of students and it is time for attendance to be taken. It may be dreadful for the young soul with a long name, who will always be poked at afterward because it is certainly lengthy. You might not even have to imagine this scenario at all in fact, this could be you. To all of the Antonio Esperanza Garcia Marquezs, there are many reasons why having more than one name can be beautiful.

First, it is important to acknowledge the stereotypical fact that most Hispanics are victim to having multiple names. However, there is cultural and logical reasoning to support why this is so. Dr. Manuel A. Prez-Quiones, is a professor at UNC Charlotte (an institution focused on computing and informatics), however, and his multiple names allow him to understand this concept. According to Dr. Manuel A. Prez-Quiones, also known as Dr. MAPQ, in Spanish a last name is not called a last name (ltimo nombre would be the literal translation of last name and it is meaningless in Spanish). In Spanish, the last name has a name of its own, it is called apellido.

The significance of this is that it is inevitable for Hispanic children to take on the surnames of their parents. These surnames can be technical and enable others who understand the meanings behind apellidos to identify others parents. For example, Dr. Manuel A. Prez-Quiones describes that the order of last names is telling of who ones mother and father are.

To elaborate with a personal example, my name is Kiana Monique Perez-Granados. The first surname presented is Perez, which is the surname of my father, whereas Granados belongs to my mother. In the instance that I or any other Hispanic woman with two last names get married, the first surname would be kept, and the second would be changed. For a man, everything remains the same.

However, having two last names may not always be for cultural reasons. A family article titled Why Married Women Are Using Two Last Names on Facebook from The Atlantic explains that women who use two last names on social media find it easier to be identified through search engines. For women in a professional field of work, this can be essential. Laurie Schueble, a Penn State professor with expertise in marital naming, states in the article how these are women who are more established in their career, very educated. So they do that to maintain their identity.

The Atlantic article from above also discusses how the founder of MissNowMrs.com, Danielle Tate, offers similar reasoning for why women choose to keep their original surnames along with their married surnames: including both a birth surname and a married surname boosts a womans chances of being found online by people looking for her, a concept she calls personal SEO

Aside from having two last names as a professional choice, it is common to do so in order to maintain ones identity in religious, cultural and sexual contexts. The article titled Considering a Hyphenated Last Name? Heres What You Need to Know from The Knot focuses on having a hyphenated last name and there is one statement that rings true: It allows you to retain your identity while still legally adopting your partners moniker.

Despite any conflicts regarding having more than one surname, there always seems to be a bright side, such that it can be a guarantee of uniqueness and singularity.

This statement has proven to be vital and accurate for many different people of many different backgrounds. According to a New York Times article, one woman named Katherine Yuk reflects on how she was forced to endure endless amounts of teasing as a child because of her difficult last name. However, even after marriage she kept the name Yuk. Although she has kept her last name alone, it is still outside of the standard paradigm that reflects women taking their husbands surnames.

I hadnt only survived it, but it had defined me as someone who was different yet proud of those differences, a survivor of childhood bullying, a first-generation immigrant with a funny last name who had found her own skin and found her own opportunities and identity, is a powerful statement from Yuk, offering her own wisdom for keeping her last name.

As derived from the article previously mentioned, Katherine Ruiz-Avila, a woman with a long Spanish surname, safeguards her last name because it serves to remind her of her heritage. Ruiz-Avila acknowledges this aspect by sharing how the struggle of pronouncing her name can link her to her past, whether it be from her school days, or from her ancestors who fled as refugees to a new and safer country.

Oftentimes, last names can mark ones dual heritage. Kristina Wallengren Steengaard is a Swede woman married to a Danish man. By carrying her last name, as well as her husbands, she remarks on creating a cross-cultural symbol for her children; they will always remember that they represent both Sweden and Denmark.

Of course, like everything else in this world, there can be complications. For couples where each person carries a hyphenated last name, or simply more than one last name, it can be unclear of how to go about naming their children. Do they give them all four names? How does one choose whose name(s) will be inherited? These are questions that a surprising number of couples must face in their lifetime.

Furthermore, it is a similar conflict for same-sex couples who choose to have children. Whether or not the child will carry either partners last name or both is a serious decision, especially because there is no tradition for same-sex marriages in the sense that it is a general practice for the husbands surname to be taken.

For couples like Cora Stubbs-Dame and her wife, with a surname of Jeyapalan, the two configured an inventive name of their own: Jeyadame. It seems like a creative solution for couples facing name troubles, and for those who believe they must give their child a novel as a surname, this may be a way out of that.

It is even fair game to give your child a hyphenated name as a result of two single surnames. As said in an article from the New York Times discussing the generation of children receiving double the name, author Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow gets personal. She explains, The invented names are distinctive; Ive never come across a Tuhus-Dubrow outside my immediate family. The inconveniences blank stares, egregious misspellings are outweighed by the blessing of never having to worry about a Google doppelgnger. Despite any conflicts regarding having more than one surname, there always seems to be a bright side, such that it can be a guarantee of uniqueness and singularity.

Brilliantly enough, the ever-changing world has brought with it custom surnames, hyphenated and non-hyphenated double surnames and other versions of retaining or mixing identities. Having two last names or nontraditional surnames can be a symbol of culture, love or way to success in the buzzing, networking world. Names are important, whichever kind they may be, and it is vital that we remember that.

Kiana Monique Perez-Granados believes that if pictures are worth a thousand words, names are too.

Excerpt from:

More Than Just a Name - Daily Nexus