Science. Technology. Civilization. Culture.

[rapidox]

Hah! we have a humor expert over here! I'm guessing you work on comedy central as a comedy scientist researcher?

Elon Musk once described the sensational advances in artificial intelligence as “summoning the demon.” Boy, how the demon can play Go.

And about conspiracy theories, I won't be quick to dismiss them like I used to in the past. Why? Because while it's only too easy to brand them as crackpots, there are many occasions when they have had the last laugh after they were proven correct afterall. And again you need to help yourself with that because I or anybody else might not feel obligated to help judgmental people out there. It's easy to be a skeptic, much harder still to dig around for truth and not come out as another common stereotype.

 

[Stormer0628]

I have a healthy sense of humor yes, but I don't pretend to be a stand up comedian like some people on the net. You can't even see the point about the line involving Elon Musk and you go ranting blah blah blah about it. Humor cannot be taught, and if you missed the point it's not my loss or anybody else's.

 

[Stormer0628]

People in Germany essentially got paid to use electricity on Christmas.

Electricity prices in the country went negative for many customers—as in, below zero—on Sunday and Monday, because the country's supply of clean, renewable power actually outstripped demand, according to The New York Times.

How this happens
The phenomenon is less rare than you may think.

Germany has invested over US$200 billion in renewable power over the last few decades, primarily wind and solar.

During times when electricity demand is low—such as weekends when major factories are closed, or when the weather is unseasonably sunny - the country's power plants pump more electricity into the grid than consumers actually need.

The disparity arises because wind and solar power are generally inconsistent. When the weather is windy or sunny, the plants generate a lot of electricity, but all that excess power is difficult to store. Battery technology is not quite advanced enough to fully moderate the supply to the grid.

So when the weather is hot, like it was in parts of Germany over the weekend, and most businesses are closed, plants generate an excess supply of power despite unusually low demand. Then it's a matter of simple economics—prices, in effect, dip below zero.

It's important to note that Germany's utilities companies aren't depositing money directly into consumer's accounts when this happens. Rather, the periods of negative-pricing lead to lower electricity bills over the course of a year.

The New York Times reported that some manufacturing plants and offices were incentivised to use electricity, at a cost of US$60 per megawatt-hour. And earlier this year, power prices in Germany spent a total of 31 hours below zero during an unseasonably warm October, according to the Times.

A key challenge for the transition to renewables
Traditional power grids - which mostly rely on fossil fuels to generate electricity - are designed so that output matches demand. But renewable energy technology hasn't yet been developed to produce according to demand, since generation is a function of weather.

That's "one of the key challenges in the whole transition of the energy market to renewable power," Tobias Kurth, the managing director of Energy Brainpool, told the Times.

As storage technology lags behind the efficiency of renewable power sources, it's likely that this negative-pricing situation will occur again. In that case, governments might need to provide incentives for people to increase their power usage when prices go negative.

These irregularities need to get figured out sooner rather than later, since renewable energy is growing rapidly, driven by the declining cost of technology and government subsidies. The International Energy Agency predicts that renewable energy will comprise 40 percent of global power generation by 2040.

In the next five years, the share of electricity generated by renewables worldwide is set to grow faster than any other source.

In Britain, renewable energy sources generated over triple the electricity as coal did in 2017, according to The Guardian. In June, during a particularly windy night, power prices actually went negative in Britain for a few hours as well - and it's likely to happen again.




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[Stormer0628]

We're not wired to feel safe all the time, but maybe one day we could be.

A new study investigating the neurological basis of anxiety in the brain has identified 'anxiety cells' located in the hippocampus – which not only regulate anxious behavior but can be controlled by a beam of light.

The findings, so far demonstrated in experiments with lab mice, could offer a ray of hope for the millions of people worldwide who experience anxiety disorders (including almost one in five adults in the US), by leading to new drugs that silence these anxiety-controlling neurons.

"We wanted to understand where the emotional information that goes into the feeling of anxiety is encoded within the brain," says one of the researchers, neuroscientist Mazen Kheirbek from the University of California, San Francisco.

To find out, the team used a technique called calcium imaging, inserting miniature microscopes into the brains of lab mice to record the activity of cells in the hippocampus as the animals made their way around their enclosures.

These weren't just any ordinary cages, either.

The team had built special mazes where some paths led to open spaces and elevated platforms – exposed environments known to induce anxiety in mice, due to increased vulnerability to predators.

Away from the safety of walls, something went off in the mice's heads – with the researchers observing cells in a part of the hippocampus called ventral CA1 (vCA1) firing up, and the more anxious the mice behaved, the greater the neuron activity became.

"We call these anxiety cells because they only fire when the animals are in places that are innately frightening to them," explains senior researcher Rene Hen from Columbia University.

The output of these cells was traced to the hypothalamus, a region of the brain that – among other things – regulates the hormones that controls emotions.

Because this same regulation process operates in people, too – not just lab mice exposed to anxiety-inducing labyrinths – the researchers hypothesize that the anxiety neurons themselves could be a part of human biology, too.

"Now that we've found these cells in the hippocampus, it opens up new areas for exploring treatment ideas that we didn't know existed before," says one of the team, Jessica Jimenez from Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons.

Even more exciting is that we've already figured out a way of controlling these anxiety cells – in mice at least – to the extent it actually changes the animals' observable behavior.

Using a technique called optogenetics to shine a beam of light onto the cells in the vCA1 region, the researchers were able to effectively silence the anxiety cells and prompt confident, anxiety-free activity in the mice.

"If we turn down this activity, will the animals become less anxious?" Kheirbek told NPR.

"What we found was that they did become less anxious. They actually tended to want to explore the open arms of the maze even more."

This control switch didn't just work one way.

By changing the light settings, the researchers were also able to enhance the activity of the anxiety cells, making the animals quiver even when safely ensconced in enclosed, walled surroundings – not that the team necessarily thinks vCA1 is the only brain region involved here.

"These cells are probably just one part of an extended circuit by which the animal learns about anxiety-related information," Kheirbek told NPR, highlighting other neural cells justify additional study too.

In any case, the next steps will be to find out whether the same control switch is what regulates human anxiety – and based on what we know about the brain similarities with mice, it seems plausible.

If that pans out, these results could open a big new research lead into ways to treat various anxiety conditions.

And that's something we should all be grateful for.

"We have a target," Kheirbek explained to The Mercury News. "A very early way to think about new drugs."

The findings are reported in Neuron.




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A study using epilepsy patients undergoing surgery has given neuroscientists an opportunity to track in unprecedented detail the movement of a thought through the human brain, all the way from inspiration to response.

The findings confirm the role of the prefrontal cortex as the coordinator of complex interactions between different regions, linking our perception with action and serving as what can be considered the "glue of cognition".

Previous efforts to measure the passing of information from one area to the other have relied on processes such as electroencephalography (EEG) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which, while noninvasive, offer less than perfect resolution.

The study led by researchers from the University of California, Berkley, recorded the electrical activity of neurons using a precise technique called electrocorticograhy (ECoG).

This required hundreds of tiny electrodes to be placed right up against the cortex, providing more spatial detail than EEG and improving the resolution in time of fMRI.

While this poses an unethical level of risk for your average volunteer, patients undergoing surgery for epilepsy have their brain activity monitored in this very way, giving the researchers a perfect chance to conduct a few tests.

Each of the 16 test subjects performed a number of tasks varied to suit their individual arrangement of electrodes, all while having their neural activity monitored and tracked.

Participants were required to listen to a stimulus and respond, or watch images of faces or animals on a screen and asked to perform an action.

Some tasks were more complex than others; for example, a simple action involved simply repeating a word, while a more complex version was to think of its antonym.

Researchers monitored the split-second movement of electrical activity from one area – such as areas associated with interpreting auditory stimuli – to the prefrontal cortex, to areas required to shape an action, such as the motor cortex.

While none of this threw up any surprises, the results clearly emphasized the role of the prefrontal cortex in directing activity.

For some tasks its input was fairly limited. In others the area was required to work hard, managing signals from multiple parts of the brain to coordinate the recognition of words, possibly dredging up memories before setting to work a bunch of muscles to provide a novel answer.

"These very selective studies have found that the frontal cortex is the orchestrator, linking things together for a final output," says neuroscientist Robert Knight from UC Berkeley.

"It's the glue of cognition."

The prefrontal cortex was seen to remain active throughout most of the thought process, as would be expected for a multitasking region of the brain.

The quicker the handoff from one area to the other, the faster people responded to a stimulus.

"fMRI studies often find that when a task gets progressively harder, we see more activity in the brain, and the prefrontal cortex in particular," says the study's lead author Avgusta Shestyuk.

"Here, we are able to see that this is not because the neurons are working really, really hard and firing all the time, but rather, more areas of the cortex are getting recruited."

What did come as something of a surprise were details on the precise timing of each area.

Some of the responding areas lit up remarkably early, often during the stimulus, suggesting that even before we have a complete response handy, our brain is already getting those parts of the cortex ready for action.

"This might explain why people sometimes say things before they think," suggests Shestyuk.

This research was published in Nature Human Behaviour.




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[Stormer0628]

That orbiting lump of rock we call the Moon is thought to have been formed by a giant object smashing into Earth's crust, and a new study has revealed more about how the Moon might have slowly retreated from Earth around 4 billion years ago.

The dynamic simulation model paints a picture of a Moon that drifted slowly away from an icy Earth, lit by a Sun shining around 30 percent less brightly than it does today.

As well as filling in some of the blanks about how Earth and the Moon first became neighbors in the Hadean period, this latest research also helps to explain the Moon's equatorial or fossil bulge – the way it's thicker than it really should be around the middle.

"The Moon's fossil bulge may contain secrets of Earth's early evolution that were not recorded anywhere else," says co-lead researcher Shijie Zhong, from the University of Colorado Boulder.

"Our model captures two time-dependent processes and this is the first time that anyone has been able to put timescale constraints on early lunar recession."

The Moon is currently moving away from our planet at the rate of about 4 centimetres (1.57 inches) a year, which is why Earth's rotation is gradually slowing down and our days are always getting ever-so-slightly longer.

We can log those measurements for ourselves, but what the new study does is examine how that movement might have happened billions of years ago. The model the researchers came up with shows a slow separation over several hundred million years.

For that to have been the case though, Earth would have needed to be less influenced by tidal forces that it is today, suggesting much of the planet's water was still frozen solid.

"Earth's hydrosphere, if it even existed at the Hadean time, may have been frozen all the way down, which would have all but eliminated tidal dissipation or friction," says Zhong.

That in turn would suggest the Sun was significantly weaker than it is now, leading to a colder planet Earth.

The concepts of a "snowball Earth" and a cooler Sun have both been proposed by scientists before, though not this far back in time – it's difficult to peer back 4 billion years into history, though the new research adds some useful extra data to the various possible permutations.

The final mystery the new study addresses is why the Moon is flatter at its poles and wider at its equator than it should be, given its rotation and speed. That was a problem first raised by French mathematician and physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace 200 years ago.

Most scientists think the bulge comes from a time when the Moon was hotter, bigger, and closer to Earth than it is now, with the excess material gradually getting frozen into place as the Moon spun out from our planet.

What the new research has managed to do is develop a model that fits that hypothesis, showing how an icy Earth and a slowly retreating Moon could've helped form that extra padding that we see today.

It's still just a hypothesis – albeit a very intelligently calculated one – but we might have just a little more of an idea about how the two objects split up billions of years ago.

Next up, the researchers want to refine their sums to look at the period between 3.8 and 4.5 billion years back in time.
The researchers themselves admit there's still much about this time and these events that is uncertain.

We don't have much in the way of direct evidence for any of this, but the researchers conclude that "our lunar fossil bulge formation model provides new and unique insights into studies of climate and surface environment of the early Earth".

The research has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.


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[xyanteror]

Re: How Humans Sort Facts from Faith

okay sya useful sa mga mahilig magbasa basa

 

[southern]

Re: First Evidence of Higher Consciousness Found

http://www.symbianize.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1196216&stc=1​

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The six-foot mollusc lives in stinking mud and in a symbiotic relationship with chemosynthetic bacteria that feed on hydrogen sulfide gas.

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A worm-like creature that grows to almost two metres long, lives in stinking mud and doesn’t eat a thing is shedding new light on evolution and the nature of co-dependence.

Described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the giant shipworm (Kuphus polythalamia) has been found alive for the first time, after a scientist saw it in a wildlife documentary aired on Philippines television and realised it was a species unknown to science.

In one sense, Kuphus polythalamia has been known for centuries, because the characteristic long empty shells it leaves behind have often been collected by fisherfolk and travellers.

However, no one had ever seen a live specimen, much less discovered where it lived or what it ate.

The answer to the first question, it turns out, is remote lagoons filled with rotting wood and deep, sucking mud that emits large amounts of hydrogen sulfide – often called, for good reason, rotten-egg gas.

And the answer to the second question seems to be nothing at all – and it is at this point that a mollusc almost as tall as a basketball player gets even more interesting.

A team of researchers led by Daniel Distel of Northeastern University in Massachusetts, US, discovered that the shipworms harbor in their gills colonies of bacteria that survive by digesting the hydrogen sulfide – a type of consumption known as chemosynthesis.

Chemosynthetic bacteria are not uncommon. They colonise many environments where sunlight is absent, ranging from deep-sea hydrothermal vents to animal corpses and rotting plant matter. While some derive energy from rotteneegg gas, others process ammonia, molecular hydrogen, ferrous iron or sulfur.

In processing the hydrogen sulfide, the bacteria in Kuphus polythalamia gills produce organic carbon that provides its nourishment. That this has been a very long-term symbiosis is evidenced by the fact that many of the shipworm’s internal digestive organs have atrophied.

The discovery of the living giants provides welcome support for Distel, who has been studying the shipworm family, Teredinidae, for decades.

All other types of shipworm are comparatively small, and live exclusively in rotting wood. Some 20 years ago Distel suggested that other species would need to strike up intimate relationships with chemosynths in order to colonise less narrow environments.

In Kuphus polythalamia he appears to have found proof, and perhaps the first of many examples.

“We are also interested to see if similar transitions can be found for other animals that live in unique habitats around the world,” he says.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcDhv_wAaBo​

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tamilok naman yan