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Researchers developed a new wireless receiver that can block strong interference signals at the earliest opportunity, which could improve the performance of a mobile device.

Researchers developed a new wireless receiver that can block strong interference signals at the earliest opportunity, which could improve the performance of a mobile device.

Researchers have found that artificial intelligence models that are most accurate at predicting race and gender from X-ray images also show the biggest 'fairness gaps' -- that is, discrepancies in their ability to accurately diagnose images of people of different races or genders.

Computer scientists have written a network flow algorithm that computes almost as fast as is mathematically possible. This algorithm computes the maximum traffic flow with minimum transport costs for any type of network. It thus solves a key question in theoretical computer science. The superfast algorithm also lays the foundation for efficiently computing very large and dynamically changing networks in the future.

Bringing us one step closer to solving the 'missing satellites problem,' researchers have discovered two new satellite galaxies.

Researchers have made a significant breakthrough by discovering that the drug 4-OI can enhance the effectiveness of a cancer-fighting viral agent. This may lead to treatment of cancers that are otherwise resistant to therapies.

An international team of researchers combine orbital imagery with seismological data from NASA's Mars InSight lander to derive a new impact rate for meteorite strikes on Mars. Seismology also offers a new tool for determining the density of Mars' craters and the age of different regions of a planet.

Martin Vargic is a space enthusiast, author, and graphic artist from Slovakia. He created two new infographic posters that show almost 1600 exoplanets of different types and sizes. One is called Icy and Rocky Worlds, and the other is called The Exoplanet Zoo.

Vargic has been interested in astronomy and space for as long as he can remember. When he was 10 years old, he used his family’s telescope to gaze at lunar craters, Jupiter’s moons, and Venus’s phases despite living in areas with lots of light pollution.

“On the rare occasions I got to see a clear sky and the Milky Way I was astounded by the sheer amount of stars,” Vargic told Universe Today.

In 2015, he devoured books on astronomy, cosmology, space exploration, and physics and created the first versions of what would eventually become these ambitious infographics. In 2019, after three years of work, Vargic published a visual book on the universe, astronomy, and space exploration called the “Curious Cosmic Compendium.” In the Compendium, “10 pages were solely dedicated to exoplanets, with their temperature ascending page-by-page until transitioning to brown dwarfs and red dwarf stars,” Vargic told Universe Today.

All of that work led to these two new exoplanet infographic posters.

This is “The Exoplanet Zoo,” one of two new exoplanet infographics from Slovak artist and space enthusiast Martin Vargic. Image Credit and Copyright: Martin Vargic.

“With the help of scientific models and up-to-date information, this poster attempts to artistically visualize together over 1100 known exoplanets of all the different types we have discovered so far, arranged by the amount of heat they receive from their stars, comparing their relative sizes and providing a window to how they might look like,” Vargic explains on his website.

The poster shows exoplanets in all their weird and wonderful forms. It shows PSR-B1620-26b, the oldest known exoplanet.

This zoom-in of “The Exoplanet Zoo” shows the oldest known exoplanet, PSR B1620-26b. Image Credit and Copyright: Martin Vargic.

It also shows WASP-12b, a scorching hot gas giant so close to its star that it’s warped into an egg shape.

You can’t miss WASP-12b on “The Exoplanet Zoo.” It’s so close to its star that it’s warped into an egg shape. Image Credit and Copyright: Martin Vargic.

“Finishing both infographics took about 6-7 months. I worked on both simultaneously while creating planetary textures and rendering the planets one by one,” Vargic told Universe Today.

More detail from “The Exoplanet Zoo.” Eburonia is a gas giant about 134 light-years away. It takes fewer than five days to orbit its star and is named after a Belgic tribe called the Eburones. Image Credit and Copyright: Martin Vargic.

“Data for both exoplanet infographics was gathered from three public exoplanet databases, The Extrasolar Planet Encyclopaedia, NASA Exoplanet Archive and ExoKyoto,” Vargic explained. The colours of the gas giant exoplanets are based on the Sudarsky Scale. It takes into account the various chemicals and temperatures of planetary atmospheres. Vargic also used existing exoplanet illustrations as a source.

Detail from “The Exoplanet Zoo.” The planets get progressively hotter from left to right. This detail shows 55 Cancri e, the hottest known rocky exoplanet. Image Credit and Copyright: Martin Vargic.

See Martin’s work, including high-resolution versions of his infographics, at halcyonmaps.com.

The post Take a Look at These Stunning New Exoplanet Infographics appeared first on Universe Today.

Here’s an 11-minute video of CNN commentators (and a few guests), most of whom are certainly Democrats, discussing the debate and agreeing that Biden’s performance was dismal—that Biden appeared disengaged and incompetent.  As David Axelrod notes, Biden did make some good points, but his performance, particularly near the beginning, made Democrats panic.

Yes, of course Trump blustered and lied, but his supporters are used to that, and probably ignore the lies. Debates are about appearances, not substance, and appearances were critically important in this debate when so many Americans, like me, are worried about Biden’s ability to run the country. Biden flunked. And remember too, he has coattails.  If Biden’s defeated, it will affect other Democrats across the country. We’re faced with the prospect of a Republic President, a Congress with two Republican houses, and a conservative, pro-Republican Supreme Court.

My view is the same as that of most of the commentators, and I especially agree with Van Jones. “it was painful.”  But I also liked his quip: it was “an old man versus a con man.” Jones added this:

“I just want to speak from my heart. I love that guy. That’s a good man. He loves his country; he’s doing the best that he can. But he had a test to meet tonight—to restore confidence of the country in a debate, and he failed to do that. And I think there’s a lot of people who are going to want to see him consider taking a different course now.  We’re still far from our convention, and it’s time for this party to figure out a different way forward if he will allow us to do that. But that was not what we needed from Joe Biden, and it’s personally painful for a lot of people: it’s just panic—it’s pain.”

Most of us Democrats harbor similar affection for Biden, but that doesn’t mean he should now run the country.

A different way forward? Who could the Democrats nominate now? The money has come in, the posters and buttons are printed, and the Democratic Convention is ready to roll. Will Biden step aside now? I wouldn’t bet on it. He and his wife appear convinced that he did okay. And who could take on the painful job of saying, “Joe, it’s time to step aside”?

From Richard:

Humanity is facing an atmospheric threat of our own device, and our internecine squabbles are hampering our ability to neutralize that threat. But if we last long enough, the reverse situation will arise. Our climate will cool, and we’ll need to figure out how to warm it up. If that day ever arises, we should be organized enough to meet the challenge.

If there are other civilizations out there in the galaxy, one may already be facing a cooling climate or an ice age. Could we detect the greenhouse chemicals they would be purposefully emitting into their atmosphere in an attempt to warm their planet?

New research in The Astrophysical Journal explains how the JWST or a future telescope named LIFE (Large Interferometer For Exoplanets) could detect certain chemicals in an exoplanet’s atmosphere that signal an intentional attempt to warm it. The title is “Artificial Greenhouse Gases as Exoplanet Technosignatures.” The lead author is Edward Schwieterman, Assistant Professor of Astrobiology at UC Riverside and a Research Scientist at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle, Washington.

“Atmospheric pollutants such as chlorofluorocarbons and NO2 have been proposed as potential remotely detectable atmospheric technosignature gases,” the authors write in their paper. “Here, we investigate the potential for artificial greenhouse gases, including CF4, C2F6, C3F8, SF6, and NF3, to generate detectable atmospheric signatures.”

The first three are perfluorocarbons, potent and long-lived greenhouse gases (GHGs.) SF6 is Sulfur hexafluoride, and NF3 is Nitrogen trifluoride. They’re both greenhouse gases with global warming potentials 23,500 times greater and 17,200 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period.

These artificial GHGs could be a technosignature of a civilization actively trying to warm their planet. They’re long-lived, have low toxicities, and have low false-positive potential. They also occur only in small amounts naturally. Their presence indicates industrial production.

“For us, these gases are bad because we don’t want to increase warming. But they’d be good for a civilization that perhaps wanted to forestall an impending ice age or terraform an otherwise-uninhabitable planet in their system, as humans have proposed for Mars,” said UCR astrobiologist and lead author Edward Schwieterman.

These chemicals could persist in an atmosphere for up to 50,000 years, making them near ideal for a civilization facing a freezing future. “They wouldn’t need to be replenished too often for a hospitable climate to be maintained,” Schwieterman said in a press release.

Unlike CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), which damage the ozone layer, these chemicals are largely inert. Any civilization smart enough to engineer their atmosphere would avoid CFCs. CFCs also don’t last long in an oxygen atmosphere and wouldn’t be great technosignatures.

“If another civilization had an oxygen-rich atmosphere, they’d also have an ozone layer they’d want to protect,” Schwieterman said. “CFCs would be broken apart in the ozone layer even as they catalyzed its destruction.”

But from our ETI-seeking viewpoint, the best thing about the chemicals the researchers are studying is their prominent infrared signatures at extremely low concentrations.

“With an atmosphere like Earth’s, only one out of every million molecules could be one of these gases, and it would be potentially detectable,” Schwieterman said. “That gas concentration would also be sufficient to modify the climate.”

To understand these chemicals and their detectability, the research team simulated the atmosphere of TRAPPIST 1-f. This well-studied rocky exoplanet is in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star about 40 light-years away, making it a realistic observational target at that distance.

This artist’s illustration shows the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f, a potentially rocky Super-Earth orbiting in a red dwarf’s habitable zone. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This study is based on the potential results of the LIFE telescope, which is still a concept. Its purpose is to examine the atmospheres of dozens of warm, terrestrial exoplanets. LIFE builds on telescope concepts from a couple of decades ago, like the European Space Agency’s Darwin spacecraft. Darwin wasn’t built, but the idea behind it was two-fold: to both find Earth-like exoplanets and to search for evidence of life.

Darwin was conceived as an interferometer, and so is LIFE. LIFE would have four separate space telescopes acting as one.

This artist’s illustration shows LIFE’s four telescopes and its central unit acting as an interferometer. Interferometers create a large and powerful “virtual telescope.” Image Credit: LIFE/ETH Zurich

With LIFE, the GHGs would be easier to see than other standard biosignatures like O2, O3, CH4, and N2O. But unlike these chemicals, which can give false positives without a planetary context, the GHGs are more akin to technosignatures, which can be understood more independently from atmospheric chemistry. “In contrast to biosignatures, many technosignatures may provide greater specificity (less “false positive” potential), as many putative technosignatures have more limited abiotic formation channels when compared to biosignatures,” the authors explain in their research.

These figures show some of the simulation transmission spectra from the research. The top panel shows how different concentrations of three of the GHGs show up in MIR spectrometry for a simulated Earth-like TRAPPIST 1-f planet. The bottom panel shows how different concentrations of NF3 show up. O3 is shown because it shows up in the same band. The black line is the atmospheric spectrum without the GHGs. The 100 ppm results are from observing the planet for 10 transits. Image Credit: Schwieterman et al. 2024.

One desirable aspect of the search for these technosignature GHGs is that astronomers can find them as part of a general effort to study atmospheres.

“You wouldn’t need extra effort to look for these technosignatures, if your telescope is already characterizing the planet for other reasons,” said Schwieterman. “And it would be jaw-droppingly amazing to find them.”

These figures show some of the simulated emission spectra for the GHGs compared to Earth with no technosignatures. They also show some of the technosignatures at different PPM concentrations and Earth’s O3, CO2, and H20. The spectra are different than the transmission spectra. Image Credit: Schwieterman et al. 2024.

This is not a futuristic scenario awaiting the development of new technology. We have the capability to do this soon, according to Daniel Angerhausen. Angerhausen is from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology/PlanetS, a collaborating organization on LIFE.

“Our thought experiment shows how powerful our next-generation telescopes will be. We are the first generation in history that has the technology to systematically look for life and intelligence in our galactic neighborhood,” said Angerhausen.

This concept figure illustrates a hypothetical Earth-like inhabited planet terraformed with various combined abundances of artificial greenhouse gases C3F8, C2F6, and SF6 and its resulting qualitative MIR transmission (top) and emission (bottom) spectra. Image Credit: Sohail Wasif, UC Riverside/Schwieterman et al. 2024.

“While all technosignature scenarios are speculative, we argue that it is unlikely fluorine-bearing technosignature gases will accumulate to detectable levels in a technosphere due only to inadvertent emission of industrial pollutants (or volcanic production),” the authors write.

They also explain that before individual GHG technosignatures were identified, anomalous MIR or NIR absorption signatures “… would be consistent with the presence of artificial greenhouse gases in a candidate technosphere.”

In their conclusion, they say that GHGs are viable technosignatures that can be found during routine exoplanet characterizations. “Both positive or negative results would meaningfully inform the search for life elsewhere,” they conclude.

The post Could We Detect an Alien Civilization Trying to Warm Their Planet? appeared first on Universe Today.

Reader Lou Jost, who works as a naturalist in Ecuador, was making one of his occasional visits to his home country, the U.S., and came upon a duck rescue in Wisconsin. He sent a video and some photos, which I’m posting here. First, Lou’s notes:

I in visiting the US now, and as I was hiking in a local Milwaukee park (Wehr Nature Center/ Whitnall Park), I noticed a gathering of people on a pier on the edge of the aptly-named Mallard Lake. There were also large boxes being unloaded from a park vehicle. I had stumbled upon a duck rescue in progress! This was the “tail end” of the process, in which thirty adolescent mallards would be released after growing up in a Wisconsin Humane Society shelter. Of course I thought of PCC(E) but I didn’t have a camera with me. A woman, who turned out to be Carly Hintz, the Director of the Wehr Nature Center, was taking pictures and she kindly offered to send them to me for you. The ducks were at first very reluctant to make the jump from the pier into the water below, but after the first few dared to do it and began swimming and splashing and exploring the duckweed with obvious energy, most of the others followed at once. A few stragglers needed more persuasion. They all  then formed a dense mallard flotilla and went off to do duck things. I think they will be very happy here. The rescue was on June 20, and here’s a video, with credits to Carly Hintz (the director of Wehr) and to the Wehr Nature Center: ‘

Carly’s photos of the release:

The mallards, unused to freedom, grouped together at first.  As Carly said (she knows about my duck tending):

It was remarkable to see the “teenagers” rally together and take the leap into Mallard Lake (aptly named). Perhaps it’s a four star hotel to them much like your Botany Pond. I’m increasingly impressed by the Wisconsin Humane Society and all wildlife rehabers out there doing their best to care for injured and orphaned wildlife. It’s a good thing to care for the earth as in return it will care for us.

Now I know what happens to my rescue ducklings, though they’re tended at Willowbrook  Wildlife Center in the Chicago suburbs.

What wonderful people to take such good care of these orphans!  Clearly, they didn’t agree with a member of the Chicago Facilities team at Botany Pond, who dismissed any accidents that befall ducklings with “Well, they’re only ducks.”  I responded with the Jewish proverb, “If you save one life, you save the world entire.”  (I would also have asked this person if they had pets or children and would apply the same “let-natural-selection-sort-it-out philosphy with them; but I bit my tongue.)

Millions of tonnes of water vapour have been lingering in the atmosphere since the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted in 2022– possibly contributing to global warming

Every year on June 30, Asteroid Day marks the anniversary of a meteor airburst in 1908 that leveled hundreds of square miles of Siberian forest land. But a more recent meteor blast — and a new plan for getting advance warning of the next one — is receiving some added attention for this year’s Asteroid Day.

The first-ever Schweickart Prize, named in honor of Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, is going to a researcher who has proposed a system for spotting potentially threatening asteroids coming at us from a difficult-to-monitor zone between Earth and the sun. It was just such an asteroid that blew up over the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013, spraying debris that injured about 1,500 people and caused an estimated $33 million in property damage.

The proposal from astronomy Ph.D. student Joseph DeMartini calls for setting up a consortium of ground-based observatories, anchored by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, to focus on the twilight sky just after sunset and just before sunrise. Those are the times of day when astronomers have the best chance of finding sunward near-Earth objects (NEOs) that spend much of their time within Earth’s orbit.

“It’s a very interesting proposal that we hope gets picked up,” Rusty Schweickart said.

DeMartini’s concept for what he calls the Sunward NEO Surveillance and Early Twilight detection collaboration — or SUNSET for short — was judged the top entry in the competition for the Schweickart Prize. The award, which is a program of the California-based B612 Foundation, recognizes graduate students who come up with innovative ideas for planetary defense. As the prize winner, DeMartini will receive a $10,000 cash prize and a trophy topped by an authenticated meteorite during a ceremony on June 29 at the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, Calif.

“The thing that actually got me to put my idea forward was the meteorite fragment,” said DeMartini, who’s earning his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. “I saw that and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I really want that.’ But maybe that’s just me being an asteroid nerd.”

DeMartini said the idea behind SUNSET came out of discussions he had with a colleague about the asteroid that sparked the Chelyabinsk blast. “The reason we didn’t have any warning was because it came from the direction of the sun, and we can’t look in the direction of the sun,” he said. “That got me thinking, ‘Wow, that’s a region we should really monitor.'”

It turns out that the Rubin Observatory is looking into conducting just such a monitoring effort after it gets up and running next year. DeMartini suggests that the SUNSET network could augment the sightings made at the Rubin Observatory, and confirm the precise orbits traced by sunward NEOs.

“If these other telescopes know where to point in advance, then they can follow up on anything that Rubin discovers in a night, and then we can get these confirmations more easily,” he said.

The current focus of DeMartini’s research actually has to do with a different topic: numerical simulations of asteroid surfaces and interiors, and how close encounters with Earth might change those values. But when his faculty adviser told him about the Schweickart Prize, DeMartini decided to enter the competition.

From left: Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart; the Schweickart Prize, topped by a meteorite; and the first winner of the prize, University of Maryland astronomer Joseph DeMartini. (Credits: RustySchweickart.com; Christopher Che via SchweickartPrize.org; University of Maryland)

It should come as no surprise that Rusty Schweickart himself was one of the judges. In his post-NASA career, he has focused on the challenges of asteroid threat detection and mitigation. He’s the founder and past president of the Association of Space Explorers, which took up the NEO threat as one of its causes. He’s also a co-founder of the B612 Foundation, which raises awareness about planetary defense, and a co-founder of Asteroid Day as well.

“What we’re talking about here in planetary defense is having the capability to ever so slightly, but critically, reshape the solar system to enhance the future of life on Earth,” Schweickart said. “To prevent this existential threat — that is what I’ve dedicated the last 20 years of my life to bringing about.”

Thanks in part to a congressional mandate, more than 90% of the biggest near-Earth asteroids, exceeding a kilometer (0.6 mile) in diameter, are thought to have been identified and are being tracked. That’s the kind of asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs roughly 66 million years ago. “But it’s the ones that are the city-killers — the 40- to 50-meter-diameter guys — that you can’t see until they’re pretty close to the Earth,” Schweickart said. “That means looking interior [to Earth’s orbit] is going to be more productive than looking exterior.”

DeMartini’s proposal was selected as the winner because it addresses one of the biggest gaps in asteroid monitoring, and because it takes advantage of advances in observational firepower.

The Rubin Observatory’s Survey Cadence Optimization Committee, or SCOC, says doing the kind of twilight sky survey that DeMartini discusses in his SUNSET proposal would be “scientifically compelling.” It recommends starting such a survey soon after the telescope begins science operations next year.

“We currently are simulating the effect of adding low-solar-elongation observations during the start and end of twilight, spending about 15 to 20 minutes of the start and end of about a quarter of the survey nights observing at high airmass toward the sun,” Lynne Jones, an astronomer who’s part of the Rubin team, said in an email. “This gives us the opportunity to detect asteroids interior to the Earth, even down to parts of the sky which are closer than 40 degrees from the sun.”

This time-lapse simulation illustrates how the Rubin Observatory could focus on twilight zones at the start and end of a survey night. Credit: Lynne Jones / Aerotek / Rubin Observatory.

DeMartini said the Rubin Observatory’s twilight survey campaign would be “step one” in his vision for the SUNSET collaboration. “The next bit, I suppose, would be networking. Hopefully, this event that I’ll be going to when I’m receiving the prize will be a good opportunity for that. And that’s something that B612 can really help with,” he said.

“If it takes off, I don’t know what it looks like in 10 years. But my hope is that we’re safer because of it,” DeMartini added.

Randy Schweickart, who is one of Rusty’s sons and the chair of the prize program’s judging committee, said he and other family members are committed to funding the Schweickart Prize for at least five years. “The hope is that — similar to the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, which has expanded tremendously from its beginnings — there would be support from other sources as we move in time and are able to get more of the word out,” he said.

Rusty Schweickart said that the prize is meant for more than astronomers. “The really toughest problems related to planetary defense are the governance issues — the non-technical, geopolitical and legal issues,” he said. “So, in the future, what we want to do is move more in that direction, and get law students, economics students, public-safety people, emergency-response people to be involved in this. Because in the end, they’re going to be very critical.”

Schweickart, who’ll turn 90 next year, hopes the prize will carry on his legacy when he’s “pushing up daisies.”

“It seems to me that that we have, as human beings, a special responsibility to do whatever we can to see that this evolutionary experiment that we’re having here on planet Earth continues,” he said. “I’m not quite sure why that’s the responsibility, but I think it is. And if so, I feel obligated to do what I could.”

Scores of events have been scheduled around the world to mark Asteroid Day, including a two-day festival in Luxembourg. The award ceremony for the Schweickart Prize will take place at 3:30 p.m. PT June 29 at the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, Calif. The event will feature a presentation by Rusty Schweickart, plus comments from NASA astronauts Steve Smith and Nicole Stott, and from YouTube space commentator Scott Manley. Click to purchase tickets.

Founding Sponsors who have funded the Schweickart Prize program include Anousheh Ansari, Barringer Crater Company, B612 Foundation, Future Ventures, Geoffrey Notkin, Jurvetson Family Foundation, Meteor Crater, Randy Schweickart and Michelle Heng, and Rusty B. Schweickart and Joanne Keys.

The post Happy Asteroid Day! Schweickart Prize Spotlights Planetary Defense appeared first on Universe Today.

An experiment with a robot and gelatine determined that 65-micrometre-thick paper is the most prone to slicing our skin – but it can also make for a handy recyclable knife

Welcome to, June 28, 2024, and National Tapioca Day. I liked the pudding with its “fish eyes”, and now tapioca pearls, made from starch extracted from the cassava plant, have been used to make the wildly popular bubble tea, which I also love. At least have some bubble tea today: it’s everywhere now:

Howief, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Ceviche Day, National Cream Tea Day (with scones, strawberry preserves, and clotted cream!), International Body Piercing Day, National Food Truck Day, and INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 28 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I haven’t watched the debate yet, as I went to bed early with a terrible stomach ache (I think I ate something bad). But I’ll watch it this monrong. I’m better now, but the NYT suggests the debate was a total debacle, with Trump blustering and Biden, sadly, losing it.  It’s SO bad that Democrats (including the mushbrain Nick Kristof) is calling for Biden to be replaced as a candate. Here are all 12 NYT op-ed columnists weighing in, and all think that Trump won or, for two of the clueless, that it was a draw (click to read):
SAVE YOUR COMMENTS FOR THE UPCOMING POST (AFTER READERS’ WILDLIFE).

I’ll watch it this morning, but we’ll have a reactions post for readers this morning. Posting may also be light today, as we have a department party at noon to celebrate the departure of our beloved departmental administrator, who’s been here for several decades.

Here’s the whole debate:

and MSNBC’s 3-minute summary:

*Over at his Substack Site The Silver Bulletin, statistician Nate Silver, founder of the site FiveThirtyEight, announces, to my dismay, that “The Presidential election isn’t a toss-up.”  (h/t Rosemary) Oy vey, because he’s putting the odds in Trump’s favor. He’s just published a new model for predicting outcomes.  It’s a long post, but here’s the upshot:

It’s not my job to tell you how to vote, and I hope that we have some Trump (and RFK Jr., etc.) voters among the Silver Bulletin readership. Republicans buy sneakers — and sign up for Substack newsletters. But I think it’s important to be up front, because I’ve been rather lucky in one sense in my election forecasting career. I began making election forecasts in 2008, and in literally every presidential year since then, I haven’t really had to deal with a conflict between what I personally wanted to see happen and what my forecast said. This year, I do have that conflict. The candidate who I honest-to-God think has a better chance (Trump) isn’t the candidate I’d rather have win (Biden).

. . .And what I’d noticed over time is that the reasons that Trump would win have gradually become somewhat more compelling than the reasons for Biden. Emphasis on gradually and somewhat. Biden clearly could win in November. He won the same matchup four years ago. Not only would he be within a normal-sized polling error of Trump if the election were held today, but there are still four-and-a-half-months to go.

Still, the items on the “reasons to think Trump might win” checklist have proven to be more robust. There’s Biden’s age, which voters have extremely persistent concerns about. There’s the very high inflation of mid-2021 through mid-2023 — which has considerably abated, but still is reflected in much higher prices than when Biden took office. There’s the fact that the global mood is pessimistic and that incumbents have been getting crushed everywhere around the world. Plus, some of the factors I thought would be an advantage for Biden haven’t proven to be. There’s less of a fundraising gap than I expected, for instance, and I’m not sure that Biden has run the smarter tactical campaign.

. . . . When the model was finally done on Sunday night, it turned out that Trump was favored by a slightly larger degree than I’d anticipated at Manifest — although Biden retains highly viable paths to victory.

, , , It would be easy to overstate the case, however. Trump does still lead in our national average — however narrowly. But the bigger problem for Biden though is that elections in the United States aren’t determined by the popular vote. His current popular-vote disadvantage is modest — modest enough that a couple more polls like the recent Fox News national poll could be enough to put him ahead. And the fundamentals part of our model — which in the case of the Silver Bulletin, just means the economy and incumbency — slightly helps Biden, as I’ll cover in the next section.

. . . . Of course, you could also argue for subjective adjustments that go the other way, like for Trump’s criminal convictions. I just don’t think it’s so obvious that there are strong gravitational forces pulling in Biden’s direction. In a time of extremely high polarization, elections tend toward being 50/50 affairs, and it’s a challenge to win the 50/50 races when you’re at a disadvantage in the Electoral College.

It’s a long article but a good one, and we Democrats are right to worry A LOT about Biden’s chances in this election.

*NYT columnist Pamela Paul, in her latest piece called “Who you calling conservative?“, has the same beef I do: not agreeing 100% with “progressive Leftists” automatically turns you into a right-winger, or even a “fascist.”

You know you’ve touched a nerve with progressive activists when they tell you not just that you’re wrong but that you’re on the other side.

Such is the fate of any old-school liberal or mainstream Democrat who deviates from progressive dogma. Having personally been slapped with every label from “conservative” to “Republican” and even, in one loopy rant, “fascist,” I can attest to how disorienting it is given my actual politics, which are pure blue American only when they aren’t center French.

But it’s not just me. New York magazine’s liberal political columnist Jonathan Chait was accused of lending “legitimacy to a reactionary moral panic” for critiquing political correctness. When Nellie Bowles described the excesses of social justice movements in her book “Morning After the Revolution,” a reviewer labeled it a “conservative memoir.” Meghan Daum, a lifelong Democrat, was accused of having fallen into a “right-wing trap” for questioning the progressive doctrine of intersectional oppression.

If this was just about our feelings, these denunciations could be easily brushed aside. But the goal and the effect is to narrow the focus of acceptable discourse by Democrats and their allies. If liberals are denounced for “punching left” when they express a reasonable difference of opinion, potentially winning ideas are banished.

. . .In the run-up to a tight election with a weak Democratic candidate and a terrifying Republican opponent, pushing liberals and centrists out of the conversation not only exacerbates polarization, it’s also spectacularly counterproductive.

Take President Biden’s recent executive order severely limiting asylum. The Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal accused him of trying to “out-Republican the Republicans.” Mother Jones called the action “Trump-like.”

Meanwhile, according to a recent Axios poll, even 42 percent of Democrats support mass deportations of illegal immigrants. It’s no secret this election will be fought in the swing states and won in the middle, which makes another poll’s finding that 46 percent of independents in support even more concerning for the party’s electoral prospects.

Consider other liberal political positions that have been denounced by the progressive left: Criminal offenders — even those not named Donald Trump — should go to prison and a well-trained and respected police force provides community safety.

The goal of progressives may be solidarity, but their means of achieving it are by shutting alternative ideas down rather than modeling tolerance. Leah Hunt-Hendrix, a co-author of a recent book called “Solidarity,” said those liberals who critique illiberalism on the left are “falling into the right’s divide-and-conquer strategy.”

But liberal people can disagree without being called traitors. Liberals can even agree with conservatives on certain issues because those positions aren’t inherently conservative. Shouldn’t the goal be to decrease polarization rather than egg it on? Shouldn’t Democrats aim for a big tent, especially at a time when registered party members are declining and the number of independents is on the rise?’

It may sound a bit defensive (and I probably do at time, too), but the more progressive Democrats, who are increasingly insinuating their policies into Biden’s agenda, may help cost Biden the election in November. It certainly cost Jamaal Bowman the election this week.

*The Sackler family, infamous for making and sneakily pushing opioids on the American public (read the fantastic book about them, Empire of Pain), have lost one in the Supreme Court.  The judges ruled that the family could not be exempt from civil lawsuits, which could bankrupt the gazillionaire family easily, under the bankruptcy plan they confected.

The Supreme Court rejected a bankruptcy plan for OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma that would have allocated billions of dollars from members of the wealthy Sackler family to combat opioid addiction in exchange for shielding them from civil lawsuits over their alleged role in fueling the drug epidemic.

The 5-4 decision marks a victory for the minority of opioid victims who voted to reject the settlement plan because they want to continue pressing lawsuits against the Sackler family members who own Purdue, and a loss for the majority of opioid victims and state and local governments who voted to accept it.

The high court said U.S. bankruptcy law doesn’t allow for a release of the Sacklers’ legal liabilities stemming from their ownership of Purdue when not all opioid-related plaintiffs have accepted the terms offered by the company’s family owners, whose wealth has been estimated at $11 billion.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a dissent, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Notice the split in the liberal Justices here, with Jackson joining the conservatives and Roberts joining the liberals (Roberts is becoming saner every year), though it’s above my pay grade to weigh in on this particular decision.

Thursday’s ruling—among the highest-profile bankruptcy decisions ever from the high court—weakens the ability of corporations and their insiders to use bankruptcy to resolve mass litigation alleging they harmed consumers.

The Sacklers didn’t file for bankruptcy themselves and didn’t agree to place “anything approaching their full assets on the table” for distribution to opioid victims, Gorsuch wrote. “Yet they seek a judicial order that would extinguish virtually all claims against them for fraud, willful injury, and even wrongful death, all without the consent of those who have brought and seek to bring such claims,” he wrote.

Nothing in U.S. bankruptcy law authorizes that outcome, Gorsuch said.

Now the Sacklers will have to reorganize some kind of bankruptcy plan that leaves them open to civil cases.

*Doctors Without Borders (“MSF”) has been beefing because one of their staff in Gaza City was killed in an IDF strike. At any rate, the staffer proved to be a terrorist who made rockets for Islamic Jihad. turning rockets into precision-guided rockets, and thus he was an enemy combatant whose death likely saved the lives of many Israelis.  I am not sure whether MSF knew of this terrorist connection. Although I dislike the organization, I wouldn’t accuse them of knowingly hiring terrorists.

(The organization has long denigrated Israel, and it kills me that I gave them over ten thousand bucks as the proceeds from a multiply-illustrated and Kelly-Houle illuminated copy of Why Evolution Is True that I auctioned off on eBay. Had I known the extent of their Jew-denigration then, I would have found some other charity.)

A Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket expert, named by Doctors Without Borders as a staffer, was killed in an Israeli drone strike in Gaza City on Tuesday, the military said.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, reported on Tuesday morning that Fadi al-Wadiya was one of its staffers.

The organization said in a post on X that al-Wadiya was killed along with five other people, among them three children, while riding his bicycle to the MSF clinic where he worked.

A Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket expert, named by Doctors Without Borders as a staffer, was killed in an Israeli drone strike in Gaza City on Tuesday, the military said.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, reported on Tuesday morning that Fadi al-Wadiya was one of its staffers.

“Killing a healthcare worker while on his way to provide vital medical care to wounded victims of the endless massacres across Gaza is beyond shocking; it’s cynical and abhorrent,” Caroline Seguin, the organization’s local operations manager, was quoted saying in a statement.

The Israel Defense Forces later in the day confirmed that it had killed al-Wadiya, saying that he was an Islamic Jihad operative involved in developing the terror group’s missiles.

. . . Al-Wadiya was involved in “the development and advancement of the organization’s missile array,” the military said in a statement.

The IDF said he was also a “source of knowledge” within the Islamic Jihad, in the fields of electronics and chemistry.

According to ther IDF, Hamas fired at an aid convoy:

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Hamas launched mortar shells at Israeli troops escorting a United Nations humanitarian aid convoy in the central Gaza Strip, the military said, publishing footage of the incident.

The IDF and COGAT had been coordinating a UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) convoy, part of a mission to reunite children from northern Gaza with their families in the south, according to the military.

Here’s the IDF’s picture of al-Wadiya in his two roles, MSF on the left and wearing a Palestinian Islamic Jihad uniform on the right:

It’s sad if any civilians were killed, but if you look at the video (below), you don’t see anybody around al-Wadiya, so I would take that claim with a grain of salt.

Here’s the outrage from MSF:

We are outraged and strongly condemn the killing of our colleague, Fadi Al-Wadiya, in an attack this morning in Gaza City.

The attack killed Fadi, along with 5 other people including 3 children, while he was cycling to work, near the MSF clinic where he was providing care. pic.twitter.com/Lmd8E5AkC1

— MSF International (@MSF) June 25, 2024

And a response:

Medicins San Frontier may have engaged in material support of terrorism under federal and state law depending on what they knew about their Islamic Jihad employee. Their full defense of him even after evidence of his Islamic Jihad role come out will make it hard to argue this was… https://t.co/ulFsoIMNPm

— Eugene Kontorovich (@EVKontorovich) June 26, 2024

The IDF’s video of the drone strike in Gaza City. Google translation:

An Air Force aircraft, under the direction of the Southern Command and AMN, attacked earlier today in the Gaza City area and killed the terrorist Fadi Jihad Muhammad Alwadia, who served as an operative in the GAP terrorist organization and was involved in the development and promotion of the organization’s missile system. Also, the terrorist was a unique center of knowledge in the organization in the fields of electronics and chemistry.

And yes, there could have been bystanders; it’s hard to tell.

כלי-טיס של חיל-האוויר, בהכוונת פיקוד הדרום ואמ”ן, תקף מוקדם יותר היום במרחב העיר עזה וחיסל את המחבל פאדי ג׳האד מחמד אלואדיה, אשר שימש כפעיל בארגון הטרור גא״פ ועסק בפיתוח וקידום מערך הטילים של הארגון.
כמו כן, המחבל היווה מוקד ידע ייחודי בארגון בתחומי האלקטרוניקה והכימיה. pic.twitter.com/kidkxFRNVQ

— Israeli Air Force (@IAFsite) June 25, 2024

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili feels depressed about the world and also unloved:

Hili: I’m going to you with a specific goal. A: What goal? Hili: I need closeness. In Polish: Hili: Idę do ciebie w określonym celu. Ja: Jakim? Hili: Potrzebuję bliskości.

Shhh. . . Szaron is sleeping:

*******************

From reader Smith Powell, and oldie but a goodie:

From Science Humor, a joke for chemistry nerds:

A bumper sticker from Linkiest:

Retweeted by Masih; I did a Google translation (if you don’t know the principals, look at the links).

On the right side of Massoud Al-Madikian, on the grave of Qassem Soleimani, and on the left side of Laili Mahdavi, the mother of Siavash Mahmoudi.

سمت راست مسعود پزشکیان بر قبر قاسم سلیمانی و سمت چپ لیلی مهدوی مادر سیاوش محمودی pic.twitter.com/UjEYAtnGZV

— Arash Sigarchi (@sigarchi) June 25, 2024

Anas Saleh, the guy who told the Zionists to raise their hands and then exit has been caught and charged with coercion in the third degree.

ON A NYC SUBWAY CAR: “Raise your hands if you’re a Zionist. This is your chance to get out.”

Change the word “Zionist” to “trans, “gay”, “black”,” or “Muslim,” and see what happens.

It’s open season on the Jews.@NYCMayor @NYPDnews @NYPDPC pic.twitter.com/1OFd2QaKYk

— NYScanner (@nyscanner) June 11, 2024

From Luana,  The Biden Administration is not doing a good job with this stuff! See the NYT article here.

I’ve been reporting on the political corruption of advocates for transitioning minors, absence of robust scientific evidence, for over 2 years now! Now @nytimes readers are finally learning that pediatric sex-trait modification has always been guided by activism, not science. pic.twitter.com/Qz3SE8T6rD

— Christina Buttons (@buttonslives) June 26, 2024

From Malcolm. “Laugh, kookaburra, laugh kookaburra; gay your life must be.”  What a call! It must be the weirdest of all bird songs (it’s a territorial call):

From Barry. This is EXACTLY what it’s like in Istanbul!

Catstanbul pic.twitter.com/u9EJOoUnlS

— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) June 23, 2024

My friend Anna Krylov is in Istanbul and sent me this photo (I’m not sure what this is; it may be a mosque; but the cats are certainly tame ferals).

From the Auschwitz Memorial; one I posted:

A two-year-old French girl, put in the gas chamber upon arrival at Auschwitz. https://t.co/5OwiCCJGXS

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) June 28, 2024

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb, who is back in Manchester. The first one is his own tweet:

When UFOs are revealed to be bats or large moths. https://t.co/Ui21w4zrNv

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) June 27, 2024

Look at these beautiful mammals:

YOINK!

It’s currently breeding season at the National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center and BFFs are pairing up. The science being done at the center to help preserve the black-footed ferret species, is incredible. pic.twitter.com/T0JAYXJlC8

— U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (@USFWS) June 25, 2024

An AI that can tell which chess moves are awe-inspiring is being used to make a chess computer that would play creatively, possibly making it more enjoyable to watch or compete against

"I value criticism and my collaborations are based on the ability to openly criticize other's ideas as a means of finding the 'right' answer."

The post An Open Letter to Dr. Stefan Baral: Let’s Revisit Your Article “Covid Vaccines for Children Should Not Get Emergency Use Authorization.” first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

One proposal offers a unique method to directly image ExoEarths, or rocky worlds around nearby stars.

It’s the holy grail of modern exoplanet astronomy. As of writing this, the count of known worlds beyond the solar system stands at 6,520. Most of these are ‘hot Jupiters,’ large worlds in tight orbits around their host star. But what we’d really like to get a look at are ‘ExoEarths,’ rocky worlds (hopefully) like our own.

Now, a recent study out of the University of Paris, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the University of Cambridge entitled Exoplanets in Reflected Starlight with Dual-Field Interferometry: A Case For Shorter Wavelengths and a Fifth Unit Telescope at VLTI/Paranal suggests a method to do just that in the coming decade. This would involve one the most massive telescope complexes ever built: the Very Large Telescope. Based at Paranal Observatory in Chile, this array consists of four 8.2-metre telescopes working in concert via a method known as interferometry. The study advocates adding a fifth telescope, giving the VLT the capacity to see Jupiter-sized worlds shining directly in the host star’s light… and with a few key upgrades, the new and improved VLT could perhaps image ‘ExoEarths’ directly.

Pioneering Dual-Field Interferometry

Interferometry is the method of using superimposed waves collected from two telescopes to merge a signal into one image. This method allows for a resolution equivalent to the baseline between the two collecting instruments, bypassing the need for one enormous telescope. Long baseline radio interferometry can span continents, and there are plans to move the technique into space. Interferometry at visual wavelengths is a tougher proposition, one that’s just reaching its true potential.

Dual Field Interferometry uses the technique to simultaneously focus on two narrow fields in context within a larger field. One field is centered on the host star, and one on the target exoplanet. This can then minimize (subtract) photon shot noise from the primary, allowing for a clear view of the target world.

“With this technique, at the VLTI, we have a resolution equivalent to having a telescope of 130 meters,” lead author on the study Sylvestre Lacour (University of Paris) told Universe Today. “This allows us to distinguish the exoplanet’s light from the contamination by the stellar light, allowing to detect exoplanets very close to the star.”

ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) timelapse of Beta Pictoris b around its parent star. This young massive exoplanet was initially discovered in 2008 using the NACO instrument at the VLT.  The sequence tracked the exoplanet from late 2014 until late 2016, using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument (SPHERE) — another instrument on the VLT.

“The term ‘dual’ in dual interferometry comes from the fact the we are observing at the same time the exoplanet and the star with the optical interferometer,” says Lacour. “This is necessary to be able to probe at the same time the phase of the stellar light and the phase of the exoplanet light, to be able to distinguish the two. By ‘phase’ I mean the phase of the electric field entering the interferometer.”

The GRAVITY instrument at the VLTI in Paranal. Credit: ESO The Hunt for ExoEarths

The method is already being applied to reveal nearby worlds. “We typically observe exoplanets at a few tens of parsecs,” says Lacour. “They are massive exoplanets, more massive than Jupiter (between 4 and 10 Jupiter masses), and they are young, less than 50 million years (old). You can look for the results for the GRAVITY collaboration, operating the GRAVITY instrument at Paranal.”

One key technique used to overcome the effects of ‘shot noise’ is what’s termed as ‘apodization’. “Apodization is a way to decrease the contamination of the stellar light entering into our interferometer,” says Lacour. “It is similar to adding a coronagraph.”

Apodization makes ground-based systems such as the VLTI viable in terms of exoplanet science and direct detection. Other efforts such as the European Space Agency’s Proba-3 space telescope launching later in 2024 will use a free flying coronagraph to directly image exoplanets.

A pro to this method is it can characterize orbits within a few Astronomical Units from their host star. Other techniques observe planets very close in, or very far out. The downside of the method is that it’s a very difficult technique, right on the grim edge of what’s currently possible with existing telescopes.

An artist’s conception of the E-ELT telescope. Credit: Swinburne Astronomy Productions/ESO The Future of Exoplanet Astronomy

There’s already a good case for plans to extend the VLTI baseline to a fifth instrument. This includes direct imaging for worlds known orbiting around nearby stars to include Proxima Centauri B and Tau Ceti e. Lessons learned from the VLTI could also work for the Extremely Large Telescope, which may see first light in 2028.

An artist’s conception of Tau Ceti e, a possible ‘ExoEarth’ in the habitable zone. Ph03nix1986/Wikimedia Commons/CCA 4.0

It’ll be exciting to see more nearby worlds revealed by this technique in the coming decade.

The post Existing Telescopes Could Directly Observe ‘ExoEarths…’ with a Few Tweaks appeared first on Universe Today.

A survey of women who have had vaginal sex with men found that 4 in 5 said they had experienced pain during intercourse

Note from editors: In response to the growing concerns about artificial intelligence development, on November 1–2, 2023, the British Government held the first ever summit on AI Safety, attended by representatives of 28 countries as well as business leaders working in the field of AI. The summit aptly took place at Bletchley Park, the very location where Alan Turing cracked the German Enigma code, which played a significant part in the Allied victory in WWII.

The result of the summit was the signing of The Bletchley Declaration, which recognizes the urgent need to understand and collectively manage potential risks of AI through a joint global effort to ensure AI is developed and deployed in a safe, responsible way for the benefit of the global community. The signatories of the declaration include Canada, China, the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The world leaders in attendance officially recognized the need to collaborate on testing the next generation of AI models against a range of critical national security, safety, and societal risks.

At the conclusion of the event, the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk sat down at the prime minister’s residence for a private conversation, and then held a public discussion. Their public dialogue is transcribed below, with only minor edits for clarity.

Rishi Sunak has served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since 2022 and has been Member of Parliament since 2015. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and earned his MBA from Stanford as a Fulbright Scholar. Prior to his political career, he was a hedge fund manager.

Elon Musk was a founding board member of OpenAI, the research organization behind ChatGPT. He is the owner of Tesla, a pioneer in autonomous electric vehicles, and the founder of Neuralink, a company working on developing implantable brain-computer interfaces. He is also the CEO of the rocket company SpaceX and owner of the social media platform X.com (formerly Twitter).

Rishi Sunak: Bill Gates said there is no one in our time who has done more to push the bounds of science innovation than you. That’s a nice thing to have anyone say about you. But oddly enough, when it comes to AI, you’ve been doing almost the opposite. For around a decade, you’ve been saying, “Hang on, we need to think about what we’re doing and what we’re pushing here. And what do we do to make this safe?” What was it that caused you to think about it that way? Why do we need to be worried?

Elon Musk: I’ve been somewhat concerned for quite a while. I would tell people, “We should really be concerned about AI.” They’re like, “What are you talking about?” They’ve never really had any experience with AI. But since I have been immersed in technology for a long time, I could see it coming.

I think this year there have been a number of breakthroughs. We’re at the point at which someone can see a dynamically created video of themselves, like video of you saying anything in real time. These sorts of deep fake videos are really incredibly good, sometimes more convincing than real ones. And then obviously things like ChatGPT were quite remarkable. I saw GPT-1, GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-4—the whole sort of lead up to that. It was easy for me to see where it’s going. If you just extrapolate the points on a curve and assume that trend will continue, then we will have profound artificial intelligence. And obviously at a level that far exceeds human intelligence.

But I’m glad to see that, at this point, people are taking safety seriously, and I’d like to say thank you for holding this AI Safety conference. I think it will go down in history as being very important. It’s really quite profound.

I do think, overall, that the potential is there for artificial intelligence to most likely have a positive effect and to create a future of abundance where there is no scarcity of goods and services. But it is somewhat of the Magic Genie problem: if you have a magic genie that can grant all the wishes…usually those stories don’t end well. Be careful what you wish for, including wishes.

RS: So, you talked a little bit about the summit and thank you for being engaged in it, which has been great. One of the things that we achieved today in the meetings between the companies and the leaders was an agreement that, ideally, governments should be doing safety testing of models before they’re released.

In government, my job is to say, “Hang on, there is a potential risk here.” Not a definite risk, but a potential risk of something that could be bad. My job is to protect the country, and we can only do that if we develop the capability we need in our safety institute, and then make sure we can test the models before they are released. You’ve talked about the potential risk. What are the types of things governments like ours should be doing to manage and mitigate those risks?

EM: Well, I generally think that it is good for government to play a role when public safety is at risk. For the vast majority of software, public safety is not at risk. If the app crashes on your phone or your laptop, it’s not a massive catastrophe. But talking about digital super intelligence, does it pose a risk to the public? Then there is a role for government to play, to safeguard the interests of the public.

This is true in many fields. I deal with regulators throughout the world because of Starlink (communications), SpaceX (aerospace), and Tesla (cars). So I’m very familiar with dealing with regulators and I actually agree with the vast majority of regulations. There are a few that I disagree with from time to time, probably less than one percent.

There is some concern from people in Silicon Valley who have never dealt with regulators before, and they think that this is going to just crush innovation, slow them down, and be annoying. And it will be annoying—it’s true, they’re not wrong about that. But I think we’ve learned over the years that having a referee is a good thing. And if you look at any sports game, there’s always a referee and nobody’s suggesting to have a sports game without one. I think that’s the right way to think about this: for government to be a referee to make sure the public safety is addressed.

I think there might be, at times, too much optimism about technology. I say that as a technologist, so I ought to know. But like I said, on balance, I think that the AI will be a force for good. But the probability of it going bad is not zero percent. We just need to mitigate the downside potential.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks at a plenary session on day two of the AI Summit at Bletchley Park on November 2, 2023. (Photo by Kirsty O’Connor / No 10 Downing Street [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED])

RS: Do you think governments can develop the expertise? Governments need to quickly tool up capability personnel-wise, which is what we’re doing. Is it possible for governments to do that fast enough given how quickly the technology is developing?

EM: It’s a great point you’re making. The pace of AI is faster than any technology I’ve seen in history, by far. And it seems to be growing in capability by at least five-fold, perhaps ten-fold per year. It will certainly grow by an order of magnitude in 2024. And government isn’t used to moving at that speed. But I think even if there are no firm regulations and even if there isn’t an enforcement capability, simply having insight and being able to highlight concerns to the public will be very powerful.

RS: Well, hopefully we can do better than that. What was interesting over the last couple of days talking to everyone who’s doing the development of this—and I think you can go with this—is just the pace of advancement here is unlike anything all of you have seen in your careers in technology, because you’ve got these kind of compounding effects from the hardware, and the data, and the personnel.

EM: Currently, the two leading centers for AI development are the San Francisco Bay Area and the London area, and there are many other places where it’s being done, but those are the two leading areas. So, I think if the U.S. and the UK, and China are aligned on safety, that’s all going to be a good thing because that’s really where the leadership is generally.

RS: Good. Thanks. You mentioned China. I took a decision to invite China to the summit over the last days, and it was not an easy decision. A lot of people criticize me for it. My view is, if you’re going to try to have a serious conversation, you need to. What are your thoughts?

EM: It’s essential.

RS: Should we be engaging with China? Can we trust them?

EM: If we don’t, if China is not on board with AI safety, it’s somewhat of a moot situation. The single biggest objection that I get to any kind of AI regulation or sort of safety controls is, “Well, China is not going to do it and therefore they will just jump into the lead and exceed us all.” But actually, China is willing to participate in AI safety. And thank you for inviting them. And I think we should thank China for attending. When I was in China earlier this year, my main subject of discussion with the leadership in China was AI safety. They took it seriously, which is great, and having them here I think was essential. Really, if they are not participants, it’s pointless.

RS: We were pleased they were engaged in the discussions yesterday and actually ended up signing the same communiqué that everyone else did. Which is a good start. And as I said, we need everyone to approach this in a similar way if we’re going to have a realistic chance of resolving it.

We had a good debate today about open source. And I think you’ve been a proponent of algorithmic transparency, making some of the X.com algorithms public. Some are very concerned about open source models being used by bad actors. And then you’ve got people who say they are critical to innovation. What are your thoughts on how we should approach this?

EM: Well, the open source algorithms and data tend to lag the closed source by 6 to 12 months. Given the rate of improvement this is quite a big difference; if things are improving by a factor of let’s say five or more, then being a year behind you are five times worse. It’s a pretty big difference. And that might be an OK situation.

But certainly it will get to the point where you’ve got open source AI that will start to approach human level intelligence, perhaps exceed it. I don’t quite know what to do about it. I think it’s somewhat inevitable. There will be some amount of open source and I guess I would have a slight bias towards open source because at least you can see what’s going on, whereas with closed source, you don’t know what’s happening. Now it should be said that even if AI is open source, do you actually know what’s going on? If you’ve got a gigantic data file and billions of data points, weights, and parameters…you can’t just read it and see what it’s going to do. It’s a gigantic file of inscrutable numbers. You can test it when you run it. But it’s probabilistic as opposed to deterministic. It’s not like traditional programming where you’ve got very discrete logic, and the outcome is very predictable and you can read each line and see what each line is going to do. A neural net is just a whole bunch of probabilities.

RS: The point you’ve just made is one that we have been talking about a lot. AI is not like normal software, where there’s predictability about inputs improving leading to a particular output improving. And as the models iterate and improve, we don’t quite know what’s going to come out the other end. Which is why there is this bias for that we need to get in there while the training runs are being done, before the models are released…to understand what has this new iteration brought about in terms of capability,

When I talk to people about AI, the thing that comes up the most is probably not so much the stuff we’ve been talking about, but jobs. It’s, “What does AI mean for my job? Is it going to mean that I don’t have a job, or my kids are not going to have a job?”

My answer as a policymaker and as a leader is that AI is already creating jobs and you can see that in the companies that are starting, and also in the way it’s being used more as a co-pilot versus replacing the person. There’s still human agency, but AI is helping you do your job better, which is a good thing. And as we’ve seen with technological revolutions in the past, clearly there’s change in the labor market. I was quoting an MIT study today that they did a couple of years ago; something like 60 percent of the jobs at that moment didn’t exist 40 years ago. So—it’s hard to predict.

And my job is to create an incredible education system, whether it’s at school, whether it’s retraining people at any point in their career. Ultimately, if we’ve got a skilled population, then we ought to keep up with the pace of change and have a good life. But it’s still a concern. What are your observations on AI and the impact on labor markets and people’s jobs, and how people should feel as they think about this?

EM: Well, I think we are seeing the most disruptive force in history here. For the first time, we will have something that is smarter than the smartest human. It’s hard to say exactly what that moment is, but there will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you want to have a job for personal satisfaction, but the AI will be able to do everything. I don’t know if that makes people comfortable or uncomfortable. That’s why I say, if you wish for a magic genie that gives you any wishes you want and there’s no limit—you don’t have this three wish limit—you just have as many wishes as you want… It’s both good and bad.

One of the challenges in the future will be, how do we find meaning in life, if you have a magic genie that can do everything you want? When there’s new technology, it tends to usually follow an S-curve. In this case, we’re going to be on the exponential portion of the S-curve for a long time. You’ll be able to ask for anything. We won’t have universal basic income. We’ll have universal high income. In some sense, it’ll be somewhat of a leveler or an equalizer. Really, I think everyone will have access to this magic genie. You’ll be able to ask any question. It’ll certainly be good for education. It’ll be the best, most patient tutor. There will be no shortage of goods and services. It will be an age of abundance.

I’d recommend people read Iain Banks. The Banks culture books are definitely, by far, the best envisioning of an AI future. There’s nothing even close that’ll give you a sense of what is a fairly utopian or protopian future with AI.

RS: Universal high income is a nice phrase. I think part of our job is to make sure that we can navigate to that largely positive place that you’re describing and help people through it between now and then.

EM: It is largely positive, yes. You know, a lot of jobs are uncomfortable or dangerous or sort of tedious, and the computer will have no problem doing that. It will be happy to do it all. And we still have sports where humans compete, like the Olympics. Obviously, a machine can go faster than any human, but humans still race against each other. Even though the machines are better, people do find fulfillment in that.

RS: Yes, we still find a way. It’s a good analogy. We’ve been talking a lot about managing the risks… Let’s talk a little bit about the opportunities.

Having that personalized tutor is incredible compared to classroom learning. If you can have every child have a personal tutor specifically for them that evolves with them over time, that could be extraordinary. And so that you know, for me, I look at that, I think, gosh, that is within reach at this point! That’s one of the benefits I’m most excited about.

I was just going over a couple of things with the team, like how are we doing AI right now that it’s making a difference to people’s lives. We have this thing called gov.uk, all the government information brought together on one website. If you need to get a driving license, passport, pay your taxes, any interaction with government, it is centralized in a very easy to use way. So, a large chunk of the population is interacting with gov.uk every single day to do all these day-to-day tasks, right?

We are about to deploy AI across the platform to make that whole process even easier. Like, “Look, I’m currently here and I’ve lost my passport and my flight is in five hours.” At the moment, that would require how many steps to figure out what you do. When we deploy the AI, it should be that you could just literally say that, and boom, we’re going to walk you through. And that’s going to benefit millions and millions of people every single day.

That’s a very practical way that, in my seat, I can start using this technology to help people in their day-to-day lives—not just healthcare discoveries and everything else that we’re also doing. That’s quite a powerful demonstration.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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When you look at the landscape of things that you see as possible, what are you particularly excited about?

EM: I think certainly an AI tutor is going to be amazing. I think there’s also, perhaps, companionship, which may seem odd. How can a computer really be your friend? But if you have an AI that has memory and remembers all of your interactions, and, say, you gave it permission to read everything you’ve ever done…and you can talk to it every day, and those conversations build upon each other… It will really know you better than anyone, perhaps even yourself. You will actually have a great friend. I think that will be a real thing. One of my sons has some learning disabilities and has trouble making friends. An AI friend would be great for him.

RS: OK… You know, that was a surprising answer that’s worth reflecting on. That’s really interesting.

© Crown Copyright 2023. Reproduced under the Open Government Licence v 3.0. Transcribed by Skeptic.