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Researchers have successfully made super-heavy element 116 using a beam of titanium-50. That milestone sets the team up to attempt making the heaviest element yet: 120.

Think about background radiation and most people immediately think of the cosmic background radiation and stories of pigeon excrement during its discovery. That’s for another day though. Turns out that the universe has several background radiations, such as infrared and even gravitational wave backgrounds. NASA’s New Horizons is far enough out of the Solar System now that it’s in the perfect place to measure the cosmic optical background (COB). Most of this light comes from the stars in galaxies, but astronomers have always wondered if there are other sources of light filling our night sky. New Horizons has an answer. No!

Ok lets talk pigeon excrement.  Back in 1965 two telecommunication engineers were exploring signal interference at the Bell Laboratory. Penzias and Wilson detected a faint ‘hum’ in all directions and initially put it down to pigeon excrement as they nested in the horn of the radio receiver. Instead, what they had discovered was the cosmic background radiation, the faint glow that permeates the entire universe and is the thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang. Studying it allows us to understand more about the Universe when it was 380,000 years old. 

The full-sky image of the temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) in the cosmic microwave background, made from nine years of WMAP observations. These are the seeds of galaxies, from a time when the universe was under 400,000 years old. Credit: NASA/WMAP

In the late 80’s a different type of background radiation was detected; the infrared background radiation. It consists of the diffuse infrared glow that fills the universe coming from numerous sources throughout the history of the universe. It is mostly from thermal emissions from dust grains heated by stellar radiation. In addition to this is the gravity wave background although this has yet to be detected. 

Another hotly debated background is the cosmic optical background (COB), a diffuse light which originates from stars and galaxies and spans the whole of the visible spectrum. There has been gathering momentum in its study however with observations from Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Infrared Telescope. The studies however revealed that a large contribution to a general background optical glow come from faint unresolved galaxies. The study of the COB allows us to explore the total energy output of the universe, about galaxy and star formation across the history of the cosmos. 

The detection of the COB is a challenging one however with Earth based instruments or even those in Earth orbit plagued by interference. The zodiacal light for example is the result of sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust, it is dominant in the inner solar system  and makes studies of the COB difficult. The New Horizon probe is ideally positioned out beyond the orbit of Pluto over 8 billion kilometres away from interference. On board New Horizons is the LORRI (Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) camera which was identified as an ideal platform to begin a search. 

The New Horizons instrument payload that is currently doing planetary science, heliospheric measurements, and astrophysical observations. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Using images from the LORRI camera, a team of astronomers led by Marc Postman from the Space Telescope Science Institute attempted to measure the COB over the range 0.4 to 0.9 micrometers. The images were from high galactic latitudes to ensure no diffuse light from the Milky Way or scattered light from bright stars. Isolating the COB contribution to the total sky brightness levels required digitally subtracting the scattered light from bright stars and galaxies and from faint stars within the field that were fainter than that detectable by LORRI. Interestingly, the results showed that, based on the estimated galaxy counts in the sampled regions the COB is the result of light from all the galaxies within our observable region of the universe.

Source : New Synoptic Observations of the Cosmic Optical Background with New Horizons

The post New Horizons Measures the Background Light of the Universe appeared first on Universe Today.

The prospect of actually resolving the event horizon of black holes feels like the stuff of science fiction yet it is a reality. Already the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has resolved the horizon of the black holes at the centre of the Milky Way and M87. A team of astronomers are now looking to the next generation of the EHT which will work at multiple frequencies with more telescopes than EHT. A new paper suggests it may even be possible to capture the ring where light goes into orbit around the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. 

Black holes are strange objects that are the powerhouses of many galactic phenomenon. They have a complex anatomy with a singularity at the centre, a point of infinite density where gravity is so intense that the laws of physics cease to work. Surrounding the singularity is the event horizon, the boundary beyond which, nothing, not even light can escape. Just outside the event horizon is the photon ring and it is here that light is bent into a circular orbit around the singularity. Further out than this is the accretion disk but the focus of the next generation Event Horizon Telescope will be the photon ring. 

The Event Horizon Telescope name is a little misleading for it is not one telescope but a global network of radio telescopes that work together to act as a virtual Earth-sized radio telescope. The technology that makes this happen is known as interferometry where the telescopes are all connected together. The very long baseline of the telescope or put more simply the fact it is virtually VERY big means it has incredible resolution capabilities allowing it to capture the event horizon around Sagittarius A at the centre of the Milky Way and also of the black hole at centre of M87.

The ALMA array in Chile. Once ALMA was added to the Event Horizon Telescope, it increased the EHT’s power by a factor of 10. Image: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), O. Dessibourg

The EHT was launched in 2009 but now attention is turning to the next generation. The addition of ten new dishes and a whole host of new technology will transform EHT. Modern high-speed data transfer protocols will speed up transfer times and the addition of new dishes and technology will mean EHT will be able to observe at 86, 230 and 345 GHz simultaneously. This allows for the utilisation of frequency phase transfer techniques where lower frequency data can be used to supplement higher frequency. Using this will mean integration times of minutes at 345 GHz rather than seconds opening up a whole universe of new observations such as, the photon rings of black holes. 

Studies of the supermassive black hole at the centre of M87 and Sagittarius A suggest a magnetically arrested accretion disk. In this accretion model, the accretion disk forms a series of irregular spiral streams and a vertical magnetic field, which is split into separate field lines, pokes through the accretion plane. As the disk rotates the material spirals inward, dragging the field lines and twist them around the axis of rotation leading to the formation of jets. These magnetically arrested disks exhibit symmetrically polarised synchrotron emissions which were used by a team of astronomers to study the detectability of the photon ring using next generation EHT.

M87 and the jet streaming away from its central supermassive black hole. Credits: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgment: P. Cote (Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics) and E. Baltz (Stanford University)

The paper authored by Kaitlyn M. Shavelle and Daniel C. M. Palumbo from the Princeton University and Harvard & Smithsonian (respectively) show through simulations that the planned enhancements to the EHT are likely to enable the detection of photon rings. In the analyses of the enhancements they find that the higher sensitivity of the new EHT will likely be more critical than better processing techniques in the detection of the photon ring.

Source : Prospects for the Detection of the Sgr A* Photon Ring with next-generation Event Horizon Telescope Polarimetry

The post Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope To Unlock Mysteries of Black Holes appeared first on Universe Today.

A prototype device harvests drinking water from the atmosphere, even in arid places.

A method that helped create two atoms of the rare, super-heavy element livermorium may pave the way towards making the hypothetical element 120

The field of extrasolar planet studies has grown exponentially in the past twenty years. Thanks to missions like Kepler, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and other dedicated observatories, astronomers have confirmed 5,690 exoplanets in 4,243 star systems. With so many planets and systems available for study, scientists have been forced to reconsider many previously-held notions about planet formation and evolution and what conditions are necessary for life. In the latter case, scientists have been rethinking the concept of the Circumsolar Habitable Zone (CHZ).

By definition, a CHZ is the region around a star where an orbiting planet would be warm enough to maintain liquid water on its surface. As stars evolve with time, their radiance and heat will increase or decrease depending on their mass, altering the boundaries of the CHZ. In a recent study, a team of astronomers from the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) considered how the evolution of stars affects their ultraviolet emissions. Since UV light seems important for the emergence of life as we know it, they considered how the evolution of a star’s Ultraviolet Habitable Zone (UHZ) and its CHZ could be intertwined.

The research team was led by Riccardo Spinelli, an INAF researcher from the Palermo Astronomical Observatory. He was joined by astronomers from the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), the University of Insubria, and the Astronomical Observatory of Brera. Their paper, “The time evolution of the ultraviolet habitable zone,” recently appeared in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.

This infographic compares the orbit of the planet around Proxima Centauri (Proxima b) with the same region of the Solar System. Credit: ESO

As Spinelli told Universe Today via email, the UHZ is the annular region around a star where a planet receives enough UV radiation to trigger the formation of RNA precursors but not so much that it destroys biomolecules. “This zone primarily depends on the star’s UV luminosity, which decreases over time,” he said. “As a result, the UV habitable zone is farther from the star during the early stages of the star’s evolution and gradually moves closer to the star as time progresses.”

As astronomers have known for some time, CHZs are also subject to evolution, owing to changes in the star’s luminosity and heat output, which increase or decrease over time depending on the mass of the star. Addressing the interaction of these two habitable zones could shed light on which exoplanets are most likely to be “potentially habitable” for life as we know it. As Spinelli explained:

“We still do not know precisely how life originated on Earth, but we have some clues suggesting that ultraviolet (UV) radiation may have played a crucial role. Experimental studies, such as the one conducted by Paul Rimmer and John Sutherland in 2018, provide significant insights. In their experiment, Rimmer and Sutherland exposed hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen sulfite ions in water to UV light and discovered that this exposure efficiently triggered the formation of RNA precursors.

“Without UV light, the same mixture resulted in an inert compound that could not form the building blocks of life. Furthermore, RNA demonstrates a resistance to damage from UV radiation, indicating that it likely formed in a UV-rich environment. Indeed, UV radiation was one of the most abundant sources of chemical-free energy on the surface of the early Earth, suggesting it might have played a crucial role in the emergence of life.”

For their purposes, Spinelli and his colleagues sought to determine if (and for how long) the CHZ and the UVZ would overlap – thus facilitating the emergence of life. To this end, the team analyzed data from NASA’s Swift Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) to measure the current UV luminosity of stars with exoplanets that reside in the “classical” HZ. They then consulted data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), an orbiting space telescope that has been observing galaxies up to 10 billion years away in the UV wavelength.

Illustration of the Trappist-1 system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

From GALEX, they incorporated how moving groups of young stars evolve in terms of their near-UV luminosity. “To estimate the evolution in time of the ultraviolet habitable zone, we used the results obtained by Richey-Yowell et al. 2023,” said Spinelli. “In this work, the authors derived an average UV luminosity evolution for each type of star. In our work, we reconstructed the evolution of the UV brightness of stars hosting planets in the classical habitable zone by combining the average evolution derived by Richey-Yowell et al. 2023 and the measurements carried out with the Swift Telescope.”

From this, they determined there is an overlap between the evolution of CHZs and UHZs. These results were especially significant for M-type (red dwarf) stars, where many rocky planets have been found orbiting within their CHZs. Previous research, which includes a 2023 paper by Spinelli and many of the same colleagues, has suggested that M-dwarf stars are not currently receiving near-UV radiation to support the prebiotic chemistry necessary for the emergence of life. However, their conclusions in this latest paper contradicted their previous findings. Said Spinelli:

“We assert that, when examining the evolution of NUV luminosity in M-dwarfs, most of these cool stars are indeed capable of emitting an appropriate amount of NUV photons during the first 1–2 billion yr of their lifetimes to trigger the formation of important building blocks of life. Our results suggest that the conditions for the onset of life (according to the specific prebiotic pathway we consider) may be or may have been common in the Galaxy. Indeed, in this work, we demonstrated that an intersection between the classical habitable zone and the ultraviolet habitable zone could exist (or could have existed) around all stars of our sample at different stages of their life, with the exceptions of the coolest M-dwarfs (temperature less than 2800 K, notably Trappist-1 and Teegarden’s star).”

While they may be a bit of a letdown for those hoping to find life on some of TRAPPIST-1s seven rocky planets, it bodes well for other M-type stars hosting rocky planets in their HZs. This includes the closest exoplanet to the Solar System (Proxima b), Ross 128 b, Luyten b, Gliese 667 Cc, and Gliese 180 b, all of which are within 40 light-years of Earth. These findings could have significant implications for exoplanet and astrobiology studies, which have been transitioning from discovery to characterization in recent years.

These fields will benefit from next-generation telescopes like Webb, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and ground-based observatories that will enable Direct Imaging studies of exoplanets.

Further Reading: MNRAS

The post The Ultraviolet Habitable Zone Sets a Time Limit on the Formation of Life appeared first on Universe Today.

On May 30th, the Mars Curiosity rover was just minding its own business exploring Gediz Vallis when it ran over a rock. Its wheel cracked the rock and voila! Pure elemental sulfur spilled out. The rover took a picture of the broken rock about a week later, marking the first time sulfur has been found in a pure form on Mars.

After Curiosity’s encounter with the broken rock and its pure sulfur innards, the rover trundled over to another rock, called “Mammoth Lakes” for a little drilling session. Before it left to explore other rocks, the rover managed to cut into that rock and take samples for further study to find out its chemical composition.

It’s not that sulfur isn’t prevalent on Mars. It is, but in different forms. The stuff is highly abundant in the Solar System, so this find isn’t as surprising as you’d think. However, Curiosity finding pure sulfur in the middle of broken rocks is a new experience in Mars exploration. So, of course, that’s raising questions about how it got there and its implications for habitable environments in Mars’s long history.

Curiosity’s Peregrinations

At the moment, the Curiosity rover is making its way through the Gediz Vallis. That’s a flow channel winding its way down a section of Mount Sharp (aka Aeolis Mons). That’s the central peak of Gale Crater. The rover has been heading up since 2014, charting different surface layers as it goes. Each layer was put down during a different era of Mars’s history. They could contain clues to the planet’s habitability in the past.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this view of Gediz Vallis channel on March 31. Floods of water and debris piled rocks and sand into mounds within the channel. The rock the rover broke lies in a channel in this region.
 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS 

Fast-moving liquid water raged over the surface and carved Gediz. The floods carried a lot of rocks and sand and deposited them all along the way. Other piles of flood debris lie around the region, bearing witness to other ancient floods and landslides. “This was not a quiet period on Mars,” said Becky Williams, a scientist with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and the deputy principal investigator of the Mast Camera, or Mastcam on Curiosity. “There was an exciting amount of activity here. We’re looking at multiple flows down the channel, including energetic floods and boulder-rich flows.”

Understanding Sulfur’s Presence

The surface materials in Gediz contain high amounts of sulfates. Those are sulfur-bearing salts that appear as water evaporates. They are a chemical clue that water existed in the region. Judging by some parts of the surface, it also appears the water ponded at some times, in addition to the floods that scoured the landscape and then deposited debris.

Now the planetary science team has to explain how a pure form of elemental sulfur got stuck in the middle of rocks, according to project scientist Ashwin Vasavada. “Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert,” said Vasavada. “It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.”

Putting Sulfur in Context

Sulfur, of course, exists on Earth, which helps scientists understand its behavior and the environments where it’s found. The presence of sulfur can be a result of various geological processes. The sulfur “cycle” includes the flow of sulfur from the core to the surface through volcanism. That’s not unusual. Sulfur commonly appears around volcanic vents. Mt Ijen in Indonesia is a good example. It sports extensive elemental sulfur deposits that are mined.

Traditional sulfur mining at Ijen. Candra Firmansyah. CC BU-SA 4.0.

The volcanic moon Io in the Jupiter system features patches of different allotropes of sulfur. They’re also volcanic in origin, spewed out along with widespread lava flows. This moon has more than 400 volcanic features, making it the most volcanically active (and sulfurous) place in the Solar System.

The Jovian moon Io is seen by the New Horizons spacecraft. The mission’s camera caught a view of one of this moon’s volcanos erupting. The region that Curiosity is investigating shows evidence of different kinds of sulfur-bearing minerals. Courtesy: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.

The pure sulfur in the Mars rock most likely came from volcanic processes. They occurred sometime in the past, but that doesn’t answer how the crystals got inside the rock it crushed. Scientists have known for years that Mars was extremely volcanically active in the past. For a long time, they also thought it was dead, or at least dormant. The planet has no plate tectonics like we see on Earth, either. However, the Mars InSight mission found evidence of some seismic activity on the planet in 2021.

In 2023, planetary scientists at the University of Arizona offered up evidence of a giant mantle plume under Elysium Planitia that drove some kinds of activity in the more recent past. Gale Crater lies in this region and could well have experienced related volcanic and seismic activity during the recent geologic past. If so, that could help explain the presence not only of pure sulfur but also the flood-related sulfates deposited on the surface.

For More Information

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Discovers a Surprise in a Martian Rock
Recent Volcanism on Mars Reveals a Planet More Active than Previously Thought
Sulfur on Mars from the Atmosphere to the Core

The post Curiosity Drives Over a Rock, Cracking it Open and Revealing an Amazing Yellow Crystal appeared first on Universe Today.

It would be tricky to burn away the outer layers of Uranus, but doing so could reveal a possible stash of gems – in this episode of Dead Planets Society, the hosts reveal a relatively simpler technique to rob the ice giant

Efficient solar panels have helped make solar power the cheapest form of energy on the planet, and new designs based on space-age technology are going further

The slow-running movement, in which people meet for unhurried jogs, is booming – but don't be fooled into thinking that if there's no pain, there's no gain

After several years of effort, graduate students getting paid for research or teaching at the University of Chicago joined a labor union.  Because they couldn’t form a union de novo but had to join an existing one, they became dues-paying members of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, Local 11o3.  This enables graduate students who get paid as research assistants or for teaching to engage in collective bargaining and to strike against the University if the bargaining reaches an impasse. The University of Chicago opposed the students’ efforts to join a union, but the University can’t prevent it.

You can see why the University would oppose unionization, for often research assistantships and teaching are regarded by universities as training rather than jobs; and if there were a strike, it would cripple research at the school as well teaching itself, for in some courses graduate teaching assistants do much of the work. But the students prevailed.  I didn’t have much of a dog in this fight, except that I thought the possibility of strikes was a dangerous byproduct of unionizing.

But joining the union came with an unexpected downside: unions can take political and ideological positions, and as a member of one (qualified students are required to join and pay union dues), you implicitly sign on to those positions.  And you may not want to do that.  In the case at hand, the Union has taken pro-Palestinian positions, and some students, especially Jewish ones, don’t want to sign on to these positions. So a group called “Graduate Students for Academic Freedom” has sued the union, alleging that the union makes them engage in implicit endorsement of the union’s positions. That, they claim, is Constitutionally prohibited “compelled speech.” You may have already guessed that this involves the war in Gaza.

Click the screenshot to read. I’ve put an excerpt below

An excerpt by Baude (there’s more at the site):

A few years ago, the graduate students at the University of Chicago, where I teach, formed a legally recognized labor union. Last year, that union expanded to include the law school, at least to the extent that law students engage in paid work such as providing research assistance. Law students who want to work as research assistants must either join the union and pay dues, or else pay agency fees to the union even if they do not join. Either way, giving money to the union is a legally required condition of working as a research assistant.

Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago, the union, engages in political speech that some law students find quite objectionable. The union is part of the United Electrical, Radio and Mine Workers of America, which also engages in political speech. For some law students, having to give money to these causes is an unacceptable condition of employment.

Yesterday, a group of those students, Graduate Students for Academic Freedom, filed a federal lawsuit against the union arguing that the arrangement violates their First Amendment rights under cases like Janus v. AFSCME, which holds that compelled agency fees “violate[] the free speech rights of nonmembers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.”

You can read the complaint here, and the motion for a preliminary injunction here.

This is from the complaint, so you can see what the students are objecting to. Bolding is mine:

INTRODUCTION

1.  Graduate students at the University of Chicago have been put to the choice of halting their academic pursuits, or funding antisemitism. That is unlawful.

2.  In the Winter of 2023, graduate students at Chicago voted to unionize, and are now exclusively represented by GSU-UE—a local of United Electrical (UE).

3.  That is a real problem. Among much else, UE has a long history of antisemitism. It is an outspoken proponent of the movement to “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” Israel (BDS)—something so clearly antisemitic that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have condemned it as such. Indeed, for years, the union has had a consuming fixation with the world’s only Jewish state—a fixation peppered with all-too-common rhetoric. UE has charged Israel with “occupying” Palestine; has branded Israel an “apartheid regime”; and has accused Israel of committing “ethnic cleansing.”

4.  GSU-UE is cut from the same cloth. On campus, it has not only echoed its parent union’s rhetoric, but has added to it. It took pains to publicly “reaffirm” its commitment to BDS just one week after the October 7 terrorist attacks. And it has joined the “UChicago United for Palestine Coalition,” which gained notoriety for its protest encampment and hostile takeover of the Institute of Politics. Through it, GSU-UE has joined calls to “honor the martyrs”; fight against campus “Zionists”; resist “pigs” (i.e., police); “liberate” Palestine from the “River to the Sea,” and by “any means necessary”; and “bring the intifada home.” Jimmy Hoffa’s union this is not.

5.  Nonetheless, under a recent collective bargaining agreement extracted by the GSU-UE, graduate students at the University must now either become dues-paying members of the union, or pay it an equivalent “agency fee,” as a condition of continuing their work as teaching assistants, research assistants, or similar positions.

6.  Constitutionally speaking, that is not kosher. The union’s ability to obtain agency fees from nonconsenting students is the direct product of federal law—i.e., it involves governmental action, subject to the First Amendment. But if GSU-UE wishes to wield such federally backed power, it must accept the responsibility that comes with it; it cannot use a government-backed cudgel, outside constitutional constraint. And if the First Amendment means anything, it means students cannot be compelled to fund a group they find abhorrent as the price of continuing their work.

7.  The stories of Plaintiff’s members lay bare the stakes that are at issue here. One member is an Israeli; another a proud Jew with family fighting in Israel; and some are graduate students simply horrified by the union’s antisemitism—as well as its other (to put it mildly) controversial political positions, which reach well beyond collective bargaining to virtually every hot-button subject (e.g., abortion, affirmative action, policing, gender ideology, even the judiciary). Although members come from different backgrounds, none can stomach sending a penny to this union.

Now I’m no lawyer (I only play one on television), but it seems that this is indeed compelled speech: Jewish students are being forced to endorse policies that can be regarded as anti-Israel and likely as antisemitic. Nor do I know the solution, unless it’s to ditch the agreement that qualified students should have to join the union.  It seems to me, in my ignorance, that unions, like universities, should be “institutionally neutral”: they should not take political or ideological positions that have nothing to do with the working of the union itself.

The First Amendment itself prohibits compelled speech. As a free-speech site says,

The compelled speech doctrine sets out the principle that the government cannot force an individual or group to support certain expression. Thus, the First Amendment not only limits the government from punishing a person for his speech, it also prevents the government from punishing a person for refusing to articulate, advocate, or adhere to the government’s approved messages.

The Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) is the classic example of the compelled speech doctrine at work.

In this case, the Court ruled that a state cannot force children to stand, salute the flag, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The justices held that school children who are Jehovah’s Witnesses, for religious reasons, had a First Amendment right not to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or salute the U.S. flag.

In oft-cited language, Justice Robert H. Jackson asserted, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

The problem, of course, is that this doctrine applies only to the government punishing people for their speech or for refusing to adhere to approved governmental speech. Since schools are arms of the government, they can’t be forced, as noted above, to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance.  But the plaintiffs argue that the power of unions ultimately derives from the government—from legislative acts. From the complaint:

80. Step one asks: “Whether the claimed constitutional deprivation resulted from the exercise of a right or privilege having its source in state authority.” Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co., 500 U.S. 614, 620 (1991). And the answer here is yes: GSU-UE’s extraction of fees is the product of its legal power to bind all workers to a single collective bargaining agreement, as their sole and exclusive representative.

81. The Supreme Court has said as much: The “collection of fees from nonmembers is authorized by an act of legislative grace—one that we have termed ‘unusual’ and ‘extraordinary.’” Knox v. SEIU, Local 1000, 567 U.S. 298, 313-14 (2012).

This case, then, would seem to be an important one, for it could decide whether unions in general can indeed take political positions that are seen as implicitly endorsed by their members.  And, of course, unions regularly endorse political candidates.

The fate of this case thus depends on whether the compelled speech involved in being a union member is construed as being connected with government. As I said, I think unions, representing a broad spectrum of views among their members, should be politically neutral even if there’s no governmental connection. Compelled speech is chilled speech and inhibits free speech; this is why our university has its institutional neutrality embodied in the Kalven report.

But if the court does find that union activities occur under the aegis of government, then it’s game over: the plaintiffs win. We shall see.

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Reader Su called my attention to the AI website below, which you can join simply by giving your email and a password. And, of course, I couldn’t resist. Click on the link I just gave you, or on the screenshot below.  The figures you can talk to (ask them anything!) include Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Genghis Khan, Socrates, Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Galileo, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Catherine the Great, Alexander the Great, Alan Turing, Sigmund Freud, and Leonardo da Vinci. Clearly there are hours of fun to be had, and much time to be wasted. I asked a few of them questions, with the answers reproduced below. You’ll have to click on the conversations to enlarge them.

I started with Darwin, of course, and asked him about speciation. He clearly knew much more about species and speciation than he discussed in The Origin. His definition of species at the bottom is spot on. Click to enlarge:

I asked Freud if he was a fraud, and of course he was evasive:

Genghis Khan denied being a mass murderer:

I asked Socrates the Euthphro question, and he gave a very good answer!:

I asked Marie Curie how she felt about her work contributing to the atomic bomb.  She gave a boilerplate answer, but it shows she (or AI) would make a good politician:

Asked about whether Gandhi was mistaken in insisting that India remain a country of simple farming and crafts, and not embrace modern technology, he equivocated.

This gives uis a chance to revise history: to find out what can be, unburdened by what has been.  Perhaps those of you of a philosophy bent would like to interact with philosophers of the past.  In the meantime, I better leave this site alone.

Often times the answer to a binary question is “yes”. Is artificial intelligence (AI) a powerful and quickly advancing tool or is it overhyped? Yes. Are opiates useful medicines or dangerous drugs? Yes. Is Elon Musk a technological visionary or an eccentric opportunist? This is because the world is usually more complex and nuanced than our false dichotomy or false choice simplistic thinking. People and things can contain disparate and seemingly contradictory traits – they can be two things at the same time.

This was therefore my immediate reaction to the question – are AI companions a potentially healthy and useful phenomenon, or are they weird and harmful? First let me address a core neuropsychological question underlying this issue – how effective are chatbot companions, for just companionship, or for counseling, or even as romantic partners? The bottom line is that the research consistently shows that they are very effective.

This is likely a consequence of how human brains are typically wired to function. Neurologically speaking, we do not distinguish between something that acts alive and something that is alive. Our brains have a category for things out there in the world that psychologists term “agents”, things that are acting on their own volition. There is a separate category for everything else, inanimate objects. There are literally different pathways in the brain for dealing with these two categories, agents and non-agents. Our brains also tend to overall the agent category, and really only require that things move in a way that suggest agency (moving in a non-inertial frame, for example). Perhaps this makes evolutionary sense. We need to know, adaptively, what things out there might be acting on their own agenda. Does that thing over there want to eat me, or is it just a branch blowing in the wind.

Humans are also intensely social animals, and a large part of our brains are dedicated to social functions. Again, we tend to overcall what is a social agent in our world. We easily attribute emotion to cartoons, or inanimate objects that seem to be expressing emotions. Now that we have technology that can essentially fake human agency and emotion, this can hack into our evolved algorithms which never had to make a distinction between real and fake agents.

In short, if something acts like a person, we treat it like a person. This extends to our pets as well. So – do AI chatbots act like a real person? Sure, and they are getting better at it fast. It doesn’t matter if we consciously know the entity we are chatting with is an AI, that knowledge does not alter the pathways in our brain. We still process the conversation like a social interaction. What’s the potential good and bad here?

Let’s start with the good. We already have research showing that AI chatbots can be effective at providing some basic counseling. They have many potential advantages. They are good listeners, and are infinitely patient and attentive. They can adapt to the questions, personality, and style of the person they are chatting with, and remember prior information. They are good at reflecting, which is a basic component of therapy. People feel like they form a therapeutic alliance with these chatbots. They can also provide a judgement-free and completely private environment in which people can reflect on whatever issues they are dealing with. They can provide positive affirmation, while also challenging the person to confront important issues. At least these can provide a first line of defense, cheaply and readily available.

Therapeutic relationships easily morph into personal or even romantic ones, in fact this is always a very real risk for human counselors (a process called transferance). So, why wouldn’t this also happen with AI therapists, and in fact can be programmed to happen (a feature rather than a bug). All the advantages carry over – AI romantic partners can adapt to your personality, and have all the qualities you may want in a partner. They provide companionship that can lessen loneliness and be fulfilling in many ways. l

What about the sexual component? Indicators so far are that this can be very fulfilling as well. I am not saying that anything is a real replacement for a mutually consenting physical relationship with another person. But as a second choice, it can have value. The most important sex organ, as they say, is the brain. We respond to erotic stimuli and imagery, and sex chatting can be exciting and even fulfilling to some degree. This likely varies from person to person, as does the ability to fantasize, but for some sexual encounters happening entirely in the mind can be intense. I will leave for another day what happens when we pair AI with robotics, and for now limit the discussion to AI alone. The in-between case is like Blade Runner 2049, where an AI girlfriend was paired with a hologram. We don’t have this tech today, but AI can be paired with pictures and animation.

What is the potential downside? That depends on how these apps are used. As a supplement to the full range of normal human interactions, there is likely little downside. It just extends our experience. But there are at least two potential types of problems here – dependence on AI relationships getting in the way of human relationships, and nurturing our worst instincts rather than developing relationship skills.

The first issue mainly applies to people who may find social relationship difficult for various reasons (but could apply to most people to some extent). AI companions may be an easy solution, but the fear is that it would reduce the incentive to work on whatever issues make human relationships difficult, and reduce the motivation to do the hard work of finding and building relationships. We may choose the easy path, especially as functionality improves, rather than doing the hard work.

But the second issue, to me, is the bigger threat. AI companions can become like cheesecake – optimized to appeal to our desires, rather than being good for us. While there will likely be “health food” AI options developed, market forces will likely favor the “junk food” variety. AI companions, for example, may cater to our desires and our egos, make no demands on us, have no issues of their own we would need to deal with, and would essentially give everything and take nothing. In short, they could spoil us for real human relationships. How long will it be before some frustrated person shouts in the middle of an argument, “why aren’t you more like my AI girlfriend/boyfriend?” This means we may not have to build the skills necessary to be in a successful relationship, which often requires that we give a lot of ourselves, think of other people, put the needs of others above our own, compromise, and work out some of our issues. ]

This concept is not new. The 1974 movie, based on the 1972 book, The Stepford Wives, deals with a small Connecticut town where the men all replace their wives with robot replicas that are perfectly subservient. This has become a popular sci-fi theme, as it touches, I think, on this basic concept of having a relationship that is 100% about you and not having to do all the hard work of thinking about the needs of the other person.

The concern goes beyond the “Stepford Wife” manifestation – what if chatbot companions could either be exploited, or even are deliberately optimized, to cater to – darker – impulses? What are the implications of being in a relationship with an AI child, or slave? Would it be OK to be abusive to your AI companion? What if they “liked” it? Do they get a safe word? Would this provide a safe outlet for people with dark impulses, or nurture those impulses (preliminary evidence suggests it may be the latter).  Would this be analogous to roleplaying, which can be useful in therapy but also can have risks?

In the end, whether or not AI companions are a net positive or negative depends upon how they are developed and used, and I suspect we will see the entire spectrum from very good and useful to creepy and harmful. Either way, they are now a part of our world.

The post AI Companions – Good or Bad? first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Modern mathematical tools reveal the conditions pathogens needed to remain active in a ship’s population for the duration of a historical journey

The gas that surrounds galaxies appears to be more spread out than previously thought – and this could help solve a mystery over missing matter

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For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived.

This experience spurred Junger—a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical—to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions?

In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery.

Sebastian Junger is The New York Times bestselling author of Tribe, War, Freedom, A Death in Belmont, Fire, and The Perfect Storm, and codirector of the documentary film Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He is also the winner of a Peabody Award and the National Magazine Award for Reporting. Here is how a Wall Street Journal reviewer described him:

Sebastian Junger has lived multiple lives and almost died in many of them. There was his accident while working for a tree-felling company that inspired him to research a book on dangerous jobs, which ultimately became The Perfect Storm (1997). There was the time he almost drowned while surfing. Then there was his work as an embedded journalist in Afghanistan, where machine-gun fire missed him by inches. Later, there was the assignment he did not take, to war-torn Libya, which claimed the life of his frequent collaborator and close friend, the British photographer Tim Hetherington.

His new book is In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face-to-Face with the Idea of an Afterlife, a book-length memento mori: remember, you are going to die.

Shermer and Junger discuss:

• how he became a professional writer and journalist
• his religious background and current beliefs even after his near-death experience
• what happened to him and how it changed his life
• NDEs and OBEs
• how the brain works under hallucinations
• consciousness and altered states of consciousness
• sensed presence effect
• sleep paralysis
• why there is no “proof” of an afterlife
• what it would be like to live forever
• what belief in life after death does for people
• empirical truths vs. mythic truths
• longevity and how to live longer.

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