Category Archives: Futurism

Image by Penn Dental Medicine

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine have accidentally discovered that bacteria and fungi can team up to form a mobile "superorganism" that will wreak havoc on your teeth, according to a new study published this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers discovered these "interkingdom assemblages" while studying toddlers with severe tooth decay. A closer look revealed that the conjoined bacteria-fungi exhibited a greater resistance to antimicrobials, and in general were much more virulent.

What's worse is that these superorganisms are mobile and can "walk" something they couldn't do before joining forces in an assemblage.

"We noticed the bacteria and fungi forming these assemblages and developing motions we never thought they would possess: a 'walking-like' and 'leaping-like' mobility," said Hyun Koo, a co-corresponding author of the study and a professor at Penn Dental Medicine, in a press release.

"They have a lot of what we call 'emergent functions' that bring new benefits to this assemblage that they could not achieve on their own," he added. "It's almost like a new organism a superorganism with new functions."

According to the study, this emergent mobility is facilitated by small branches of fungal filaments called hyphae, that, as they extend and make contact with another surface, lift the whole assemblage up, carrying the bacteria with it.

The researchers posit that the assemblages gain their increased virulence, resilience, and mobility from their tight cohesion between cells and a strong,glue-like extracellular polymer formed as a result of the bacteria-fungi assembly.

Being both hard to kill and extremely mobile means that these superorganisms can quickly colonize your teeth and cause some pretty nasty tooth decay.

The researchers believe that studying how to target these assemblages could help prevent childhood tooth decay, which affects more than half of all six- to eight-year-old children in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"If you block this binding or disrupt the assemblage before it arrives on the tooth and causes damage, that could be a preventive strategy [against childhood cavities]," Koo suggested.

More on dental health: Lazy Flossers Rejoice! Tiny Robot Shapeshifters Will Brush and Floss for You

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Researchers Say Microbes Assemble Into "Superorganisms" That Crawl Around Your Teeth - Futurism

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It's no secret that Tesla CEO Elon Musk likes to let loose sometimes,in a respite between extremely long work days and an infamously packed schedule.

From lavish weekend-long parties to attending Burning Man, Musk has long been known to attend social gatherings of all kinds, as detailed in a recent New York Times feature.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, recreational drug use is a topic that seems to come up a lot in his company.

According to the NYT, Musk likes to pass around a chartpurporting to explain why 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) and psilocybin mushrooms are healthier choices than alcohol.

As for taking these drugs himself, the richest man in the world seems to prefer playing it safe whatever that means in this context.

"I have been with him on mild exploratory journeys," David Marglin, a longtime friend of Musk's met him at Burning Man, told the NYT. "And he appreciates the value of those journeys."

"Nothing out of control or wild," he added, "but its all night, and theres dancing and revelry."

Then there was the time when musician Azealia Banks accused Musk of being on Twitter "while on acid" back in 2018, which Musk disputed.

However, Musk has long maintained that we should seriously consider the health benefits of these kinds of drugs.

"I think, generally, people should be open to psychedelics," Musk said during a 2021 interview. "A lot of people making laws are kind of from a different era, so I think, as the new generation gets into political power, I think we will see greater receptivity to the benefits of psychedelics."

Musk maintains that psychedelics may actually be better than commonly used drugs, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which are often prescribed to treat depression.

In April, Musk tweeted that "Ive talked to many more people who were helped by psychedelicsand ketamine than SSRIsand amphetamines."

But that doesn't mean we should take him by his word after all, he's a business magnate, not a neuroscientist.

And it's worth noting that while psilocybin is generally seen as fairly safe by doctors, the same isn't necessarily true of MDMA, known for causing intense euphoria and sometimes brutal hangovers. It might not be a disaster to take it every once in a while, but it's widely established that abusing it frequently can lead to a wide range of neurological issues.

There certainly has been plenty of recent interest and a significant number of small studies by the scientific community to study the potential therapeutic use cases of psychedelic and other recreational drugs.

For instance, some studies have found that the psilocybin can improve the symptoms of depression. Scientists have also found that LSD-based drugs could also help with anxiety and depression.

The evidence, however, is still preliminary and many of these studies are still too small to draw any definitive conclusions.Methodologically, it's also impossible to establish a meaningful control group, because if someone starts tripping, it becomes pretty clear to them that they didn't take the placebo.

But Musk, for one, is a firm believer in their potential and he's willing to go out of his way to prove it to you.

READ MORE: Elon Musk Has the Worlds Strangest Social Calendar [The New York Times]

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Elon Musk Has Reportedly Been Telling Friends About Benefits of Shrooms and MDMA - Futurism

Who's telling the truth here?He Said, He Said

After reports emerged that Elon Musk had allegedly been in contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO smacked them down in classically Muskian fashion.

"I have spoken to Putin only once and that was about 18 months ago," Musk tweeted in response to the claims. "The subject matter was space."

This response runs counter to reports from analyst Ian Bremmer, the founder of the Eurasia Group political risk consultancy, who in a note to subscribers claimed that Musk had been speaking with the Russian president regarding the invasion of Ukraine, and that Putin was "prepared to negotiate" if Ukraine accepted the Russia's annexation demands.

Bremmer went on to say in the note, which was viewed byVice,Bloomberg, and other news outlets, that he'd discussed the purported peace talks with Musk a few weeks prior and that the Russian demands were mirrored by the billionaire's now-infamous Twitter poll in which he asked his followers whether Ukraine should give in to specific Russian demands.

That poll, while wildly unpopular in the West, was apparently viewed favorably by the Kremlin, with officials cracking jokes that seemed to denote a sort of backhanded affection for Musk.

"I wasnt planning on writing about this," Bremmer wrote in the subscriber note, adding that "it feels important to write about whats happening."

In response to yet another tweet in the thread, Musk went on to say that it would be "pointless" for him to speak with Putin, given that "there is currently no overlap between Russian and Ukrainian demands."

While it's now unclear which figure is lying, it should be noted that Musk has heretofore seemed pretty supportive of Ukraine amid its invasion from its large and powerful neighbor, and even was reported to have spoken with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in March of this year.

More Elon-ism:Professor of Engineering Issues Brutal Dig at Elon Musk, Sparking Backlash

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Elon Musk Says He Has Not Been Talking to Putin, Thank You Very Much - Futurism

A team of researchers from Purdue University claim to have discovered the "chemistry behind the origin of life" on Earth in simple droplets of water, and they're using strikingly strong language to celebrate the findings.

Graham Cooks, chemistry professor at Purdue and lead author of a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, called it a "dramatic discovery" and the "secret ingredient for building life" in a statement.

"This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life," he added. "This is the first demonstration that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides, the building blocks of life, in droplets of pure water."

And it's not just the principle researchers who are heralding the discovery, saying itcould have some vast implications on our understanding of how life formed on Earth billions of years ago.

"I find this discovery truly fascinating," Alan Doucette, associate professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, and expert in the field of mass spectrometry, who was not involved in the research, told Futurism.

"To me, the evidence seems to be growing that there is something really quite unique and extraordinary about the chemistry at or within small water droplet surfaces," he added.

In simple terms, the research supports the decades-old theory that life on Earth started in oceans. Amino acids, which scientists believe came to Earth billions of years ago via meteorite showers, can bond together to form peptides, which have long been considered the building blocks of proteins, and eventually life itself.

But what has confounded scientists is the fact that this process requires both aqueous and non-aqueous environments. Now, using state-0f-the-art spectrometers to get a close look at chemical reactions inside water droplets, Cooks and his colleagues found that "extremely quick reactions can take place" where water droplets meet the atmosphere.

That conclusion could explain how life thrived where the sea meets the land, or where fresh water crosses fertile landscapes.

Cooks and his team go as far as to claim that these building blocks of life can spontaneously form in water itself, without the need of other catalysts.

"The rates of reactions in droplets are anywhere from a hundred to a million times faster than the same chemicals reacting in bulk solution," Cooks said in the statement.

Cooks and his team hope their finding could help us understand the basic processes involved in the formation of life on Earth which, in turn, could also help us investigate if we're alone in the universe, or even create our own versions of living matter.

In the short term, however, these reactions could prove useful in other areas such as drug discovery.

"We all know water was and is essential to life on Earth," Doucette told Futurism. "But we still have a lot to learn."

More on life: Harvard Study: We Shouldn't Rule Out Underground Life on the Moon and Mars

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Scientists Claim to Have Discovered the "Secret Ingredient for Building Life" - Futurism

Bless these humble worms.Spit Take

Researchers have discovered that the saliva of wax worms, the caterpillar larvae of the wax moths that feeds on beeswax in beehives, can quickly break down polyethylene, a material predominantly used in plastic bags that currently leads to immense waste worldwide.

If the humble worms could be scaled into a viable commercial process,The Guardian reports still a huge "if" at this point it could have a major impact on global recycling efforts,since polyethylene alone makes up 30 percent of all plastic production.

Conventional methods of recycling polyethylene involve mechanical breakdown, which leads to the resulting recycled material being less pure and less valuable.

Best of all, the enzymes present in the wax worms' saliva can break down the long polymer chains of polyethylene at room temperatures, in water, and at neutral pH levels far more convenient conditions than conventional plastic recycling methods that require high temperatures and carefully controlled acidity levels.

The researchers made the discovery by accident.

"My beehives were plagued with wax worms, so I started cleaning them, putting the worms in a plastic bag," Federica Bertocchini from the Biological Research Centre in Madrid and co-author of a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, told The Guardian.

"After a while, I noticed lots of holes and we found it wasnt only chewing, it was [chemical breakdown], so that was the beginning of the story," Bertocchini added.

There's growing interest in using insects or other living organisms to recycle plastic waste, from fungi to super-worms that can survive by eating styrofoam.

Unfortunately, the researchers still have a lot of work to do before wax worm saliva becomes a viable solution for a growing plastic waste crisis. For one, synthesizing the chemicals is still prohibitively expensive, according to experts.

"We need to do a lot of research and think about how to develop this new strategy to deal with plastic waste," Clemente Arias, Bertocchini's colleague and co-author, told The Guardian.

READ MORE: Wax worm saliva rapidly breaks down plastic bags, scientists discover [The Guardian]

More on worms: Scientists Discover "Superworms" That Can Survive on Eating Styrofoam

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Scientists Intrigued by Worms That Break Down Plastic Really Fast - Futurism

Chernobyl is best known as the site of the worst nuclear reactor meltdown in history. But since the residents left after the 1986 catastrophe, it's also become one of the biggest nature reserves in Europe and within the confines of its Exclusion Zone, frogs are now showing just how unique the area is.

A group of Spanish zoological researchers wrote in The Conversation how they became intrigued by strange, black-tinted Eastern tree frogs found near and around the Exclusion Zone,since the critters are usually a snazzy lime green.

In 2016, after the first swarthy amphibian was found, the team out of Spain's University of Oviedo and the Doana Biological Station decided to study the Eastern tree frogs.They found that critters in the preserve now range in coloration from pitch-black to forest green, as images from the researchers show.

They found that in the 36 years since the tragic accident at Chernobyl, the Eastern tree frogs in the regions surrounding the now-abandoned nuclear reactor seem to have undergone a sort of rapid evolution that caused them to develop more melanin in order to withstand the heightened and prolonged radiation from the disaster.

As researchers Germn Orizaola and Pablo Burraco wrote in their Conversation essay, which is based on findings published recently in thejournal Evolutionary Applications, they believe the darker colored frogs a genetic minority normally were better protected from the meltdown's radiation due to the melanin in their skin. In turn, they reproduced more successfully, creating more and more darker-tinted tree frogs in their wake.

In other words, we're watching natural selection play out in front of our eyes. That's pretty cool.

"More than ten generations of frogs have passed since the accident and a classic, although very fast, process of natural selection may explain why these dark frogs are now the dominant type for the species within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone," the researchers wrote in the essay.

The researchers, who also in 2019 detailed the astonishing biodiversity of the Chernobyl region, added that they "hope the current war in Ukraine will end soon" because it's put an understandable damper on scientific study in the region.

READ MORE:Chernobyl black frogs reveal evolution in action [The Conversation]

More on Chernobyl: UN Watchdog Says Radiation from Chernobyl "Abnormal" After Russian Attack

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Something Cool Is Happening to the Frogs at Chernobyl - Futurism

It'll only take 300 million years.Come Together

Over the next 300 million years, all the Earths continents will smash together and form a new supercontinent called Amasia, closing the Pacific Ocean in the process.

At least,that'saccording to a new study from researchers at Curtin University, published in National Science Review last week,that plots the medium-term geological future of our planet.

"Over the past two billion years, Earths continents have collided together to form a supercontinent every 600 million years, known as the supercontinent cycle," said study lead author Chuan Hung in a press release. "This means that the current continents are due to come together again in a couple of hundred of million years time."

To establish a timeframe, the researchers used 4D geodynamic modeling of the Earths tectonic plates, determined to find out why previous supercontinents formed in completely different ways.

Of those ways, introversion is one of two main models, and occurs when continents close over an internal ocean that was formed when the previous supercontinent broke apart. On the opposing end is extroversion, which has the continents closing over the external, former superocean. If that bit of rocky history could be cleared up, the researchers could better predict the next supercontinental assembly.

What the researchers found is that the strength of the oceanic lithosphere determines which form of assembly occurs, andfrom there concluded that extroversion will be responsible for the next supercontinent. In this case, the former superocean is the Pacific, formerly the much greater Panthalassa superocean that surrounded Pangea, the previous supercontinent.

"The resulting new supercontinent has already been named Amasia because some believe that the Pacific Ocean will close (as opposed to the Atlantic and Indian oceans) when America collides with Asia," said Huang. "Australia is also expected to play a role in this important Earth event, first colliding with Asia and then connecting America and Asia once the Pacific Ocean closes."

If they hold up, these are remarkable findings that provide a glimpse of the planets future. But it's still only one of many hypotheses regarding the shifting of continents, including the Pangea Proxima model, which suggests the aforementioned Atlantic and Indian oceans will close instead.

More on geology: A New Island Just Appeared in the Pacific Ocean

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Scientists Say All Land on Earth Is Smashing Together Into a New Supercontinent - Futurism

Okay, this is pretty cool.DreamFusion

DreamFusion, Google's next-gen, AI-powered text-to-3D-image generator, is here.

Well, sort of. A proof-of-concept paper is here, at least. DreamFusion is an evolution of Dream Fields, a text-to-3D-image generator revealed by Google back in 2021. And like Dream Fields, DreamFusion creates its 3D images by combining a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) or a neural network that can create synthetic 3D scenes using partial 2D datasets with a pre-trained text-to-image prompt model.

The twist? Unlike Dream Fields, which utilized OpenAI's CLIP technology as that latter pre-trained model, DreamFusion now uses its own: Imagen, Google's DALL-E 2 competitor.

So, basically, Google booted Elon Musk's OpenAI tech and figured out how to use its own. Keeping things in-house smart.

"Happy to announce DreamFusion, our new method for Text-to-3D!" Ben Poole, a research scientist at Google Brain and co-author of the proof-of-concept paper, wrote on Twitter. "We optimize a NeRF from scratch using a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. No 3D data needed!"

While the DreamFusion models aren't totally realistic, they're admittedly pretty impressive as its creators explain the paper, the AI-generated forms that are shown off on its website are "coherent, with high-quality normals, surface geometry and depth, and are relightable with a Lambertian shading model."

In other words, while they might not be as convincingly realistic as some of those photorealistic DALL-E 2 images (yet), they have all of the right elements. The proportions are right, the depth makes sense, and so on. And not to shade OpenAI, but this next version of the tech is certainly a visual improvement from its first iteration.

It's unclear when DreamFusion or whatever comes next will be available to the public, though we can definitely see a number of applications already.Just think of the value to indie game developers alone!And according to Twitter, it's already been used to 3D-print a ghost eating a hamburger, so cheers to that.

More on text-to-image generators: Researcher Says an Image Generating AI Invented Its Own Language

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Google Creates AI That Turns Text Into 3D Objects - Futurism

"...the reality is they are being forced out."Shhhh

The full picture of Facebook-turned-Meta's rumored layoffs is coming further into focus and, well, things aren't looking too good for the metamates. Insiderreports that the companyis planning a mass round of "quiet layoffs," which could impact up to 15 percent of the entire company.

For the folks at home, that number would equal roughly 12,000 employees. And the reason why they're being called whisper voice quiet layoffs? According to Insider's sources, Facebook has already started the process, which it plans to execute via shifting performance expectations rather than outright firing hordes of staffers all at once.

Insider'ssources allege that last week shortly before the company Q&A where Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a hiring freeze and a plan to "manage out employees who aren't succeeding" Zucko commanded managers to label 15 percent of their team members as someone who "needs support."

Per Facebook's employee review process, anyone who "needs support" is then put on what they call a "performance improvement plan," or PIP. Although in this case, employees seem to believe that "PIP" actually translates to "You're Screwed."

"These 15 percent will likely be put on PIP and be let go," one Facebook worker reportedly posted on an anonymous forum called Blind, a popular app in Silicon Valley. Once they're on PIP, sources say, employees will then have 30 days to either apply to another position in the company or depart entirely.

Managers are at risk, too one source alleged a number of them have already been PIP'd and told to find new jobs.

"It might look like they are moving on," the source explained, "but the reality is they are being forced out."

But while Zuck is clearly wanting to keep this massive workforce slash on the hush-hush, Meta's last few quarters speak loudly (as does randomly renting out the UFC Apex arena, but we digress). Blows to its advertising revenue stream have caused major setbacks, as has its failure to compete with TikTok. Elsewhere, billions have been poured into the chief metamates's metaverse vision, which has pretty much nothing to show for itself just yet.

Basically, it's been a bad year, and Facebook has a lot to figure out. Might we suggest, perhaps, putting it on a performance improvement plan? The whole thing is clearly in need of some support.

More on the Facebook layoffs: Layoffs Hitting Facebook as Zuckerberg's Vision Stumbles

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Facebook Reportedly Laying Off Thousands of Employees - Futurism

Described as "war dogs" that "descend from the sky."Air Drop

A video has gone viral of a large drone dropping off a gun-wielding robot dog, a terrifying vision of what the future of warfare and policing could soon look like.

The footage shows a sizable octocopter drone dropping off its armed payload on a rooftop in an urban area. The robodog then springs to life and stretches its legs.

The robot appears to be carrying a modified, semiautomatic assault rifle, which has been the service rifle for the People's Liberation Army and paramilitary agencies in China since 1995.

The clip was shared by an account called Kestrel Defense Blood-Wing on Chinese social media. According to a rough Google translation of the account's description of the video, "war dogs" that "descend from the sky" can be "directly inserted into the weak links behind the enemy to carry out surprise attacks," be delivered "to the top of enemy buildings," or provide fire suppression.

Needless to say, it's a controversial use of the technology. Just this week, Boston Dynamics, maker of the popular Spot Mini robodog,which bears a striking resemblance to the robot in the video, announceda pledge to never weaponize any of its robots.

That hasn't stopped others from arming quadruped robots. Several US defense contractors have shown off prototypes of four-legged robots carrying large weapons.

And last year, a Russian tinkerer strapped a submachine gun to a Chinese robodog, firing off rounds after rounds in an alarming video.

It's unclear if we'll ever see robot dogs being air dropped from the sky via drones but, as the video demonstrates, the technology definitely already exists.

More on robot dogs: New York is Deploying Robot Dogs to Fight Fires Now

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China Shows Off Drone That Drops Robodog With Huge Gun Anywhere - Futurism