{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

28-02-2023 om 21:15 geschreven door peter  

Strange DNA found in the desert offers lessons in the hunt for Mars life

Story by Joel Achenbach 

The Atacama Desert in Chile is just about the driest place on Earth. In spots, it looks a lot like Mars. But it’s not lifeless, even in the hyper-arid regions. Using state-of-the-art equipment to probe the desert rocks, researchers found bits of DNA from an intriguing mix of microbes.

Strange DNA found in the desert offers lessons in the hunt for Mars life

© Armando Azua-Bustos/Armando Azua-Bustos

Strikingly, 9 percent of the genetic fragments belong to organisms unknown to science, making them part of the “dark microbiome,” according to a report published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

These organisms are bacteria that are “so strange and different,” as the report puts it, that researchers could not identify any known relatives.

“In almost half of the cases, the databases could not clearly say what we had in our hands,” lead researcher Armando Azua-Bustos, a microbiologist at the Center of Astrobiology in Madrid, told The Washington Post.

And that brings him back to the Mars analogy: The Atacama, he and his scientific colleagues believe, is a brilliant test bed for the search for Martian life. But the same search conducted with versions of the instruments on today’s Mars rovers could barely detect the microbial signatures. That means finding conclusive evidence of present or past life in Martian soils is going to be difficult without bringing samples back to Earth, Azua-Bustos and his colleagues concluded.

The research seems to bolster the long-term Mars exploration strategy of NASA and its partner, the European Space Agency. They are in the midst of a multistage mission called Mars Sample Return. If all goes as planned, samples of Martian soil obtained by NASA’s Perseverance rover — which just celebrated its second anniversary on Mars — will be hauled back to Earth sometime early in the next decade for scrutiny in high-containment laboratories.

But this new research also highlights the challenges facing scientists who want to know the (conjectured) biological history of Mars. Microbial life, especially if extinct and long fossilized, may exist at or beyond the farthest limit of what can be detected with the kind of instruments small enough to be blasted into space and landed on another planet.

Scientists have never found an example of life beyond Earth, but a general assumption is that “habitable” worlds will become inhabited — that life emerges, somehow, under the right conditions. The Red Planet has long tantalized astrobiologists. It was more Earthlike about 3 billion years ago, when it had a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on the surface. Conceivably, there is still cryptic life on Mars, although astrobiologists would be thrilled to find even a microfossil of something that lived billions of years ago.

NASA’s Viking mission of 1976 carried experiments designed to detect life, and one offered an initially promising signal, but most scientists concluded that they’d landed on sterile soil.

Since the Viking mission, NASA has followed a more incremental strategy focused on finding and exploring sites that show evidence of being potentially habitable billions of years ago, when Mars was warmer and wetter. Perseverance and its still active predecessor, the Curiosity rover, have found traces of organic molecules — the kind of molecules that are the basis of life as we know it — on the surface, though this is not by itself proof of a biological origin.

“The question remains whether they are meteoritic, geologic, or biologic,” said Amy Williams, a planetary scientist at the University of Florida and a member of the Curiosity and Perseverance scientific teams.

Williams said the new report from Azua-Bustos and his collaborators is important because it shows that the preservation of organic matter is limited in Mars-like environments and will be difficult to detect even with state-of-the-art laboratory instruments.

“This means that organics detection with spaceflight instruments, like on current and future Mars rovers, may be an even larger challenge, as organic matter is readily broken down in the radiation-bathed Martian surface environment,” Williams said in an email.

Still, the Atacama research shows that even a very arid environment will have layers of sedimentary rock with significant amounts of biological remnants, said Chris House, a Pennsylvania State University geologist and astrobiologist. “It is not really a surprise, but the results might have just shown uniform bleakness,” he said. That’s good news for scientists hoping dry Mars rocks might yield traces of alien biology.

Azua-Bustos is a native of the Atacama who spent years as a winemaker before becoming a scientist. He recalls growing up in a Chilean town where rain would fall only about once a year, always a highlight. There are places, he said, where residents have never seen rain going back multiple generations.

He said he would regularly pass through a region of the desert, called Red Stone, en route to a research site, and one day he decided it would be worth a closer look. The rocks were rust-red because of the presence of a mineral, hematite, that also accounts for the red color of Mars, he said.

More than 100 million years ago, in the age of dinosaurs, the Red Stone site was a river delta, much like the plateau on Mars within Jezero Crater that Perseverance is exploring.

NASA’s Perseverance rover captured this portrait of 10 recently collected rock samples on Jan. 31.

Azua-Bustos was surprised by the genetic material of an unfamiliar nature seen in the Atacama research. All life on Earth comes from a common ancestor — so far as we know. There has been speculation, notably from scientist and author Paul Davies, that life could have originated on Earth more than once and to this day there could be a “shadow” biosphere that is simply too weird to fit into our definition of Earth life.

Azua-Bustos, however, defaults to the less spectacular interpretation of the unclassified organisms: This is relic genetic material from life forms long extinct and not previously documented.

The Perseverance rover continues to explore Jezero Crater, digging up and storing samples of Martian soil. The plan is to put another spacecraft on the surface, which would double as a launchpad. Perseverance would then deliver the samples to the lander, which would hurtle the material into orbit. There it would rendezvous with yet another vehicle, a European-built orbiter, that could transport the precious cargo back to Earth for analysis with the best possible lab instruments.

The new research suggests this may be the most effective — and possibly the only conclusive — way to find out if anything was ever alive on Mars.

“We know there are things to detect,” Azua-Bustos said. “But if your instrument is not designed to be able to detect those things, then we have a problem.”

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28-02-2023 om 20:51 geschreven door peter  

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

28-02-2023 om 20:37 geschreven door peter  

Mudlarker Finds Bronze Age Shoe on a UK Riverbank Dated 2,800 Years Old!

A man exploring along a riverbank in northern Kent recently discovered the oldest shoe ever found on United Kingdom soil. Carbon dating tests proved the decayed but still recognizable leather artifact was nearly 3,000 years old, having been manufactured sometime between the years 888 and 781 BC. This incredible age highlights what an absolute miracle this discovery was, as the ancient shoe, which likely belonged to a toddler, was lying out in the open fully visible to anyone who might walk by.

One of the Best Mudlarking Adventures Ever

The small, flattened shoe was spotted by archaeologist Steve Tomlinson, a resident of Ramsgate, Kent who works with the Canterbury Archaeological Trust.

On September 17, 2022, Tomlinson and a colleague, archaeologist Emily Brown, were out walking along rivers in Kent, searching for valuable artifacts that might have washed up along the edges. This activity is known as mudlarking, and archaeologists who do it often find intriguing objects that may be anywhere from a few decades to a few centuries old. The best sites for mudlarking are rivers that feed into the ocean (like the River Thames , for example) and are affected by the rising and sinking of the tides. Mudlarkers will arrive during times of low tide, searching along shores that are normally covered by water.

• Mudlarking the Thames: How a Riverbed Became the World’s Biggest Archaeological Site
• The Havering Hoard: Baffling Bronze Age Artifacts Found in London

The unassuming ‘thing’ on the river beach didn’t slip past finder Steve’s trained eye

( Steve Tomlinson )

Someone with an untrained eye might have passed by the shoe without noticing it, or even caring if they did notice. But Tomlinson was actively searching for anomalous objects, and the aged shoe caught his attention immediately.

“The day started well, and between us we had a good selection of finds including plenty of pottery sherds from the Roman period, and various small objects like a small piece of Roman tesserae,” Tomlinson recalled in an article in the Isle of Thanet News :

“We had been out for 3 hours scouring the shoreline, and the tide was turning when we hit the last leg of our day. As we made our way along the foreshore … I came across what looked like a very old shoe-like piece of leather washed up on the mud. It was around 15 centimeters [6 inches] in length.”

Tomlinson and Brown examined the weathered leather of the flattened shoe carefully, trying to estimate its age. The archaeologists concluded that it was most likely an early medieval artifact, meaning it might have been dropped or washed into the river as long as 1,000 years ago.

It might seem unusual that someone finding a shoe next to a river would conclude the object was centuries old. But this wasn’t Tomlinson first time. While mudlarking in 2018, he discovered an Anglo-Saxon shoe sticking out of the mud that was ultimately dated to the 10th century AD.

Expecting a similar result this time, Tomlinson sent his interesting discovery on to the SUERC carbon dating facility in East Kilbride, Scotland. But when the lab revealed the results five weeks later, Tomlinson received one of the great shocks of his life, as he learned he’d underestimated the age of the little old shoe by nearly 2,000 years.

"The date they had given me was just astonishing," Tomlinson said. “This could be not only the oldest shoe found in Kent, but in the British Isles itself, and a very high possibility that this is also the smallest Bronze Age shoe ever discovered in the world.”

It has now been confirmed that this is the most ancient shoe ever recovered in the United Kingdom. This distinction previously belonged to a 2,000-year-old shoe found in 2005 in a quarry in Somerset.

By modern standards the shoe would be listed as a child size 7, and would be appropriate for a toddler aged around 2-3 years old, explained Mr Tomlinson. The child presumably had lost the shoe while playing in or around the riverbank all those years ago, and it had been lying on the bottom of the riverbank waiting to be found ever since.

• What Does This 5,500-Year-old Shoe Found in a Cave Tell Us About Ancient Armenians?
• Ironclad Hoof: Unique Roman Horse Shoes Found on Hadrian’s Wall

The shoe has been conserved by Dana Goodburn Brown, an accredited Archaeological Conservator at DGB Conservation . 

(Steve Tomlinson )

Walking Back in Time in a Bronze Age Toddler’s Shoe

Archaeologists are always surprised and delighted when they find ancient items of clothing that are in good enough shape to be studied.

“Prehistoric textiles like this rarely survive and the only chance is by finding them in anaerobic conditions such as bogs and mud (away from the air),” Tomlinson explained. 

But even when an organic artifact is preserved for hundreds or thousands of years, it still takes a lot of luck to actually locate it. And Steve Tomlinson was blessed with an inordinate amount of good fortune, as he fully appreciates.

"Finding something like that is quite extraordinary,” Tomlinson confirmed in an interview with Kent Online . "It opens up history too; we just know nothing about these kinds of things."

The ancient toddler’s shoe will be transferred to the British Museum for more analysis. Now that the shoe has been successfully dated to the Late Bronze Age , it will be tested further to see if scientists can learn what animal it came from. Attempts will be made to extract traces of human DNA from the artifact as well, and if this is successful it could reveal the true age, gender and ethnic identity of the child who wore the leather shoe in the first millennium BC.

• Top image: The Bronze Age shoe, in situ where it was found on the river edge in Kent, England.   
• Source: Steve Tomlinson

By Nathan Falde

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

28-02-2023 om 17:13 geschreven door peter  

Discovery of Bronze Age child's shoe suggests perennial problem of toddlers dropping their things stretches back 3,000 years

• A 3,000-year-old leather shoe belonging to a toddler was found in north Kent 
• The 15cm shoe was found by archaeologist Steve Tomlinson, 51, in a riverbed 

By CHRIS MATTHEWS FOR MAILONLINE 

Most parents will know the feelin

g of getting home, opening the door and realising your child has somehow lost a shoe.

Scientists now think it could be a feeling that tens of billions of parents have felt for millennia.

A 3,000-year-old toddler's shoe from the Bronze Age, dating from between 888 and 781BC, has been discovered in a north Kent riverbed.

A comforting fact is since then at least 62 billion people have come and gone on Earth and many have likely also faced the same shoe problem that parents today often scratch their heads about.

The rare Bronze Age 15cm leather shoe is thought to be the oldest found in the UK and was found by archaeologist Steve Tomlinson, 51, as he was mudlarking in September.

A Bronze Age leather shoe (pictured) thought to be the oldest in the UK was unearthed in north Kent riverbed

Archaeologist Steve Tomlinson, 51, (pictured) discovered the 3,000-year-old shoe that belonged to a toddler

A micro-CAT scan (pictured) of the shoe discovered that the sole was made from several layers

Mr Tomlinson, from Ramsgate, Kent, didn't think much of the find at first but sent it for carbon-dating at a unit in East Kilbride, Scotland.

Five weeks later he received the 'shocking' result that dated the show from the late Bronze Age.

Mr Tomlinson said: 'I thought it was something good but I still thought it was medieval. 

'I sent it off for carbon-dating and five weeks later I got a call from a gentleman at the lab who said to me, "I think you better sit down for this".

'I'd had a good day's mudlarking that day - I'd found quite a few Roman pottery shards - but I was not expecting that. 

'I could've quite easily missed it but I had an inkling it was something special.

'It's absolutely fascinating.'

The unassuming ‘thing’ on the river beach didn’t slip past finder Steve’s trained eye

( Steve Tomlinson )

The shoe is 15cm long, meaning in today's terms the child would have been a size seven

The child is thought to have been around two or three years old and scientists will do DNA tests to try to determine whether the show's owner was a boy or a girl

An X-ray carried out at Canterbury Christchurch University found the underside of the sole is imprinted with a textile pattern

In today's sizes the shoe would be a size seven and archaeologists think its owner was around two or three years old.

Mr Tomlinson said he is 'confident' it is the oldest of its kind in the UK and possibly the smallest in the world.

He said: 'It's a tiny little thing really.'

READ MORE: 

• Ancient treasures emerge from sinking reservoir in heatwave: Rocks that were intentionally marked by prehistoric Britons up to 6,000 years ago are found as water level drops 

'We hope professionals might be able to reconstruct it eventually and that it might go into the British Museum down the line.

'It's of incredible national interest.'

The shoe is now in the care of heritage scientist and archaeological conservator Dana Goodburn-Brown, 63, who specialises in micro-excavation.

Ms Goodburn-Brown said: 'Organic materials like leather, textiles or wood will not survive unless they're somewhere very arid or in mud without oxygen.

'This shoe has been in a silt environment with sediment, without oxygen. 

'It's what we call anaerobic conditions .

'It gets to this equilibrium state where it doesn't biodegrade. That's why it's so rare.

'It's amazing that it survived so long. 

'The fact that it dislodged from elsewhere and Steve came across it before it started to degrade is incredible.

'We don't know where it originated but it's most likely it was either washed out with cliff erosion, which happens quite regularly in Kent, or emerged during dredging.

Dana, from Sittingbourne, Kent, took the shoe to experts at the University of Kent who examined it under a micro-CT scanner, where they discovered the sole was made up of several layers.

More significantly, an X-ray carried out at Canterbury Christchurch University found the underside of the sole is imprinted with a textile pattern, suggesting it had either been wrapped in or pressed against a piece of material for some time.

The next step is to send the leather for DNA testing to see what they can learn about the shoe's original owner. 

Scientists might even be able to tell whether the toddler was a boy or a girl and what animal the leather came from.

The shoe has been conserved by Dana Goodburn Brown, an accredited Archaeological Conservator at DGB Conservation . 

(Steve Tomlinson )

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

28-02-2023 om 16:57 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

28-02-2023 om 16:22 geschreven door peter  

Three UFO Reports, Mexico To Florida! Feb 27, 2023, UFO Sighting News. 100% Raw Footage!

Date of sighting: Feb 27, 2023

Location of 1st sighting: River Maya, Mexico

Location of 2nd sighting: Miami, Florida, USA

Location of 3rd sighting: Sarasota Florida, USA

 

Hey everyone, check this out. Three different eyewitness videos just came in today and they are all of the same UFO, but in different locations and this baby is big! I as a UFO researcher for the last 20 years have never seen anything like this. It's really strange, very odd, looks like a cloud, but its not, its a solid craft, actually two solid craft one following the other. Absolutely mind-blowing raw footage! This is 100% proof that aliens are putting in the effort to make themselves known to the public. The real question is...how is the US government going to try to cover this one up? 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

 

{https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

28-02-2023 om 14:43 geschreven door peter  

“What’s Up With UAPs?” Exploring the Government’s Interest in UFOs with Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson

Unidentified aerial phenomena, commonly referred to as UFOs, have captured the imagination of people around the world for decades. These sightings of strange objects in the sky have prompted many to speculate about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, sparking widespread interest and fascination. However, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explains in a recent Youtube video, the government’s interest in investigating these phenomena is not based solely on their potential connection to alien life.

According to Tyson, the government’s interest in investigating UFOs is largely motivated by concerns over safety and security. If there is something flying in the sky that cannot be identified, it is important to determine whether it poses a threat to individuals, the economy, or national security. As such, it is reasonable to allocate resources towards identifying and investigating these phenomena.

Despite the common association between UFOs and aliens, Tyson cautions against jumping to conclusions about the nature of these phenomena. As a scientist, Tyson encourages a skeptical, evidence-based approach to studying and investigating the unknown. While it may be tempting to attribute unexplained sightings to alien life, it is important to maintain a rational perspective and consider alternative explanations.

Furthermore, Tyson notes that the prevalence of technology such as smartphones means that any potential alien invasion would likely be reported and documented quickly. With millions of people around the world carrying smartphones capable of recording and sharing videos, it is unlikely that any significant event would go unnoticed or unreported.

In summary, while UFOs and their potential connection to alien life continue to capture the public’s imagination, the government’s interest in investigating these phenomena is primarily motivated by concerns over safety and security. Rather than making extraordinary claims without evidence, it is important to approach these sightings with a scientific mindset, embracing the unknown and seeking to understand the phenomena through rational investigation.

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{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

28-02-2023 om 14:23 geschreven door peter  

Neil Savage

Credit: Neil Webb

When Rohit Bhattacharya began his PhD in computer science, his aim was to build a tool that could help physicians to identify people with cancer who would respond well to immunotherapy. This form of treatment helps the body’s immune system to fight tumours, and works best against malignant growths that produce proteins that immune cells can bind to. Bhattacharya’s idea was to create neural networks that could profile the genetics of both the tumour and a person’s immune system, and then predict which people would be likely to benefit from treatment.

But he discovered that his algorithms weren’t up to the task. He could identify patterns of genes that correlated to immune response, but that wasn’t sufficient¹. “I couldn’t say that this specific pattern of binding, or this specific expression of genes, is a causal determinant in the patient’s response to immunotherapy,” he explains.

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Part of Nature Outlook: Robotics and artificial intelligence

Bhattacharya was stymied by the age-old dictum that correlation does not equal causation — a fundamental stumbling block in artificial intelligence (AI). Computers can be trained to spot patterns in data, even patterns that are so subtle that humans might miss them. And computers can use those patterns to make predictions — for instance, that a spot on a lung X-ray indicates a tumour². But when it comes to cause and effect, machines are typically at a loss. They lack a common-sense understanding of how the world works that people have just from living in it. AI programs trained to spot disease in a lung X-ray, for example, have sometimes gone astray by zeroing in on the markings used to label the right-hand side of the image³. It is obvious, to a person at least, that there is no causal relationship between the style and placement of the letter ‘R’ on an X-ray and signs of lung disease. But without that understanding, any differences in how such markings are drawn or positioned could be enough to steer a machine down the wrong path.

For computers to perform any sort of decision making, they will need an understanding of causality, says Murat Kocaoglu, an electrical engineer at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. “Anything beyond prediction requires some sort of causal understanding,” he says. “If you want to plan something, if you want to find the best policy, you need some sort of causal reasoning module.”

Incorporating models of cause and effect into machine-learning algorithms could also help mobile autonomous machines to make decisions about how they navigate the world. “If you’re a robot, you want to know what will happen when you take a step here with this angle or that angle, or if you push an object,” Kocaoglu says.

In Bhattacharya’s case, it was possible that some of the genes that the system was highlighting were responsible for a better response to the treatment. But a lack of understanding of causality meant that it was also possible that the treatment was affecting the gene expression — or that another, hidden factor was influencing both. The potential solution to this problem lies in something known as causal inference — a formal, mathematical way to ascertain whether one variable affects another.

Causal inference has long been used by economists and epidemiologists to test their ideas about causation. The 2021 Nobel prize in economic sciences went to three researchers who used causal inference to ask questions such as whether a higher minimum wage leads to lower employment, or what effect an extra year of schooling has on future income. Now, Bhattacharya is among a growing number of computer scientists who are working to meld causality with AI to give machines the ability to tackle such questions, helping them to make better decisions, learn more efficiently and adapt to change.

A notion of cause and effect helps to guide humans through the world. “Having a causal model of the world, even an imperfect one — because that’s what we have — allows us to make more robust decisions and predictions,” says Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist who directs Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, a collaboration between four universities in Montreal, Canada. Humans’ grasp of causality supports attributes such as imagination and regret; giving computers a similar ability could transform their capabilities.

Climbing the ladder

The headline successes of AI over the past decade — such as winning against people at various competitive games, identifying the content of images and, in the past few years, generating text and pictures in response to written prompts — have been powered by deep learning. By studying reams of data, such systems learn how one thing correlates with another. These learnt associations can then be put to use. But this is just the first rung on the ladder towards a loftier goal: something that Judea Pearl, a computer scientist and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, refers to as “deep understanding”.

In 2011, Pearl won the A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the Nobel prize for computer science, for his work developing a calculus to allow probabilistic and causal reasoning. He describes a three-level hierarchy of reasoning⁴. The base level is ‘seeing’, or the ability to make associations between things. Today’s AI systems are extremely good at this. Pearl refers to the next level as ‘doing’ — making a change to something and noting what happens. This is where causality comes into play.

A computer can develop a causal model by examining interventions: how changes in one variable affect another. Instead of creating one statistical model of the relationship between variables, as in current AI, the computer makes many. In each one, the relationship between the variables stays the same, but the values of one or several of the variables are altered. That alteration might lead to a new outcome. All of this can be evaluated using the mathematics of probability and statistics. “The way I think about it is, causal inference is just about mathematizing how humans make decisions,” Bhattacharya says.

Bengio, who won the A.M. Turing Award in 2018 for his work on deep learning, and his students have trained a neural network to generate causal graphs⁵ — a way of depicting causal relationships. At their simplest, if one variable causes another variable, it can be shown with an arrow running from one to the other. If the direction of causality is reversed, so too is the arrow. And if the two are unrelated, there will be no arrow linking them. Bengio’s neural network is designed to randomly generate one of these graphs, and then check how compatible it is with a given set of data. Graphs that fit the data better are more likely to be accurate, so the neural network learns to generate more graphs similar to those, searching for one that fits the data best.

This approach is akin to how people work something out: people generate possible causal relationships, and assume that the ones that best fit an observation are closest to the truth. Watching a glass shatter when it is dropped it onto concrete, for instance, might lead a person to think that the impact on a hard surface causes the glass to break. Dropping other objects onto concrete, or knocking a glass onto a soft carpet, from a variety of heights, enables a person to refine their model of the relationship and better predict the outcome of future fumbles.

Face the changes

A key benefit of causal reasoning is that it could make AI more able to deal with changing circumstances. Existing AI systems that base their predictions only on associations in data are acutely vulnerable to any changes in how those variables are related. When the statistical distribution of learnt relationships changes — whether owing to the passage of time, human actions or another external factor — the AI will become less accurate.

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For instance, Bengio could train a self-driving car on his local roads in Montreal, and the AI might become good at operating the vehicle safely. But export that same system to London, and it would immediately break for a simple reason: cars are driven on the right in Canada and on the left in the United Kingdom, so some of the relationships the AI had learnt would be backwards. He could retrain the AI from scratch using data from London, but that would take time, and would mean that the software would no longer work in Montreal, because its new model would replace the old one.

A causal model, on the other hand, allows the system to learn about many possible relationships. “Instead of having just one set of relationships between all the things you could observe, you have an infinite number,” Bengio says. “You have a model that accounts for what could happen under any change to one of the variables in the environment.”

Humans operate with such a causal model, and can therefore quickly adapt to changes. A Canadian driver could fly to London and, after taking a few moments to adjust, could drive perfectly well on the left side of the road. The UK Highway Code means that, unlike in Canada, right turns involve crossing traffic, but it has no effect on what happens when the driver turns the wheel or how the tyres interact with the road. “Everything we know about the world is essentially the same,” Bengio says. Causal modelling enables a system to identify the effects of an intervention and account for it in its existing understanding of the world, rather than having to relearn everything from scratch.

This ability to grapple with changes without scrapping everything we know also allows humans to make sense of situations that aren’t real, such as fantasy movies. “Our brain is able to project ourselves into an invented environment in which some things have changed,” Bengio says. “The laws of physics are different, or there are monsters, but the rest is the same.”

Counter to fact

The capacity for imagination is at the top of Pearl’s hierarchy of causal reasoning. The key here, Bhattacharya says, is speculating about the outcomes of actions not taken.

Bhattacharya likes to explain such counterfactuals to his students by reading them ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost. In this poem, the narrator talks of having to choose between two paths through the woods, and expresses regret that they can’t know where the other road leads. “He’s imagining what his life would look like if he walks down one path versus another,” Bhattacharya says. That is what computer scientists would like to replicate with machines capable of causal inference: the ability to ask ‘what if’ questions.

Imagining whether an outcome would have been better or worse if we’d taken a different action is an important way that humans learn. Bhattacharya says it would be useful to imbue AI with a similar capacity for what is known as ‘counterfactual regret’. The machine could run scenarios on the basis of choices it didn’t make and quantify whether it would have been better off making a different one. Some scientists have already used counterfactual regret to help a computer improve its poker playing⁶.

The ability to imagine different scenarios could also help to overcome some of the limitations of existing AI, such as the difficulty of reacting to rare events. By definition, Bengio says, rare events show up only sparsely, if at all, in the data that a system is trained on, so the AI can’t learn about them. A person driving a car can imagine an occurrence they’ve never seen, such as a small plane landing on the road, and use their understanding of how things work to devise potential strategies to deal with that specific eventuality. A self-driving car without the capability for causal reasoning, however, could at best default to a generic response for an object in the road. By using counterfactuals to learn rules for how things work, cars could be better prepared for rare events. Working from causal rules rather than a list of previous examples ultimately makes the system more versatile.

Using causality to program imagination into a computer could even lead to the creation of an automated scientist. During a 2021 online summit sponsored by Microsoft Research, Pearl suggested that such a system could generate a hypothesis, pick the best observation to test that hypothesis and then decide what experiment would provide that observation.

Right now, however, this remains a way off. The theory and basic mathematics of causal inference are well established, but the methods for AI to realize interventions and counterfactuals are still at an early stage. “This is still very fundamental research,” Bengio says. “We’re at the stage of figuring out the algorithms in a very basic way.” Once researchers have grasped these fundamentals, algorithms will then need to be optimized to run efficiently. It is uncertain how long this will all take. “I feel like we have all the conceptual tools to solve this problem and it’s just a matter of a few years, but usually it takes more time than you expect,” Bengio says. “It might take decades instead.”

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Bhattacharya thinks that researchers should take a leaf from machine learning, the rapid proliferation of which was in part because of programmers developing open-source software that gives others access to the basic tools for writing algorithms. Equivalent tools for causal inference could have a similar effect. “There’s been a lot of exciting developments in recent years,” Bhattacharya says, including some open-source packages from tech giant Microsoft and from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He and his colleagues also developed an open-source causal module they call Ananke. But these software packages remain a work in progress.

Bhattacharya would also like to see the concept of causal inference introduced at earlier stages of computer education. Right now, he says, the topic is taught mainly at the graduate level, whereas machine learning is common in undergraduate training. “Causal reasoning is fundamental enough that I hope to see it introduced in some simplified form at the high-school level as well,” he says.

If these researchers are successful at building causality into computing, it could bring AI to a whole new level of sophistication. Robots could navigate their way through the world more easily. Self-driving cars could become more reliable. Programs for evaluating the activity of genes could lead to new understanding of biological mechanisms, which in turn could allow the development of new and better drugs. “That could transform medicine,” Bengio says.

Even something such as ChatGPT, the popular natural-language generator that produces text that reads as though it could have been written by a human, could benefit from incorporating causality. Right now, the algorithm betrays itself by producing clearly written prose that contradicts itself and goes against what we know to be true about the world. With causality, ChatGPT could build a coherent plan for what it was trying to say, and ensure that it was consistent with facts as we know them.

When he was asked whether that would put writers out of business, Bengio says that could take some time. “But how about you lose your job in ten years, but you’re saved from cancer and Alzheimer’s,” he says. “That’s a good deal.”

• doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00577-1

• This article is part of Nature Outlook: Robotics and artificial intelligence, an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of third parties. About this content.

References

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Download references

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28-02-2023 om 00:36 geschreven door peter  

BY ANTON POZDNYAKOV

“The Universe Breakers”: Six Galaxies That are Too Big, Too Early

New images from JWST show six galaxies at a time when the Universe was only 3% of its current age, 500-700 million years after the Big Bang. They should be baby galaxies, but they contain 100 times more stellar mass than astronomers were expecting to see soon after the beginning of the Universe. If true, this calls the current thinking of galaxy formation into question or challenges most models of cosmology.

• More about the “impossible” galaxies.

A 500-Meter-Long Asteroid Flew Past Earth and Astronomers Were Watching

An asteroid the size of the Empire State Building flew past Earth on Feb. 3rd, coming within 1.8 million km of our planet. For context, that’s about five times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Astronomers turned the Goldstone Solar System Radar dish on the space rock, mapping its surface. The asteroid, called 2011 AG5, is one of the most elongated objects ever seen, with a length-to-width ratio of 10:3. It’ll have another close flyby in 2040 when it comes within three times the Earth-Moon distance.

Source of Dark Energy

A new paper was released suggesting that there might be a link between dark energy and the growth of supermassive black holes. Researchers speculate that, in fact, black holes can be the source of dark energy. If true (which we yet need to prove) this can be ground-breaking.

To shed more light on the research here’s an in-depth interview with Dr Chris Pearson from STFC RAL Space, who is a co-author of the paper.

• More about black holes and dark energy.

New Spacecraft Can See Into the Permanently Shadowed Craters on the Moon

The permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s south pole are exciting because they contain vast reserves of water ice that future human explorers could use. But studying these craters is difficult because they’re in shadow and have no direct illumination falling inside them. NASA’s new ShadowCam instrument is at the Moon, flying with Korea’s Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter. ShadowCam can see in such low light that it can reveal incredible details in these shadowed craters as if they were lit in sunlight.

• More about ShadowCam.-

ESA’s Early Warning System for Asteroids

ESA is considering their own mission to search for potentially dangerous asteroids. The spacecraft will be called NEOMIR and it will go to the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point. This way it will be able to see incoming space rocks that will otherwise be missed because of the Sun blinding the telescopes. NEOMIR will also operate in the infrared, which will make its task even easier.

• More about NEOMIR.

Don’t Miss Out On Space News

If you want to get a curated selection of the most important space and astronomy news every week, subscribe to our Weekly Email Newsletter and get magazine-size ad-free news directly from Fraser Cain.

If you prefer the news to be videoed at you, check out our Space Bites playlist on our YouTube channel

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

27-02-2023 om 22:48 geschreven door peter  

Lights Over Luke AFB Near Glendale, Arizona Feb 1, 2023, UFO Sighting News. Warning The Military That Aliens Are Still #1 Most Powerful On Earth.

Date of sighting: Feb 1, 2023

Location of sighting: Glendale, Arizona, USA

 

They eyewitness was really on top of it when he caught a fleet of glowing spheres over Luke AFB a few days ago. The UFOs glowed powerfully and each was almost the same size as the one next to it. UFOs are often seen investigating the USAF military bases, even known at to shut down nuclear missiles in silos, forcing the military to remove them entirely since they could never repair them (Ellsworth AFB, South Dakota). Ellsworth was my personal base I worked at in the USAF (Scott Waring) and its also where I had a sighting of a fleet of over 25 spheres the size of 747s back in 1990 abouts, when I worked on B1 Lancer Bombers. There is another aliens interaction with guards at Ellsworth, but this is about Luke AFB, so for a later time. Aliens have a high interest in US military, to both predict, control and warn the Governments of the world of their own alien power being still #1 on Earth.

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

Eyewitness states: 

Started off with 3 Lights then I initially saw them they slowly faded in then 5 other lights fade into sight then faded out the same way they appeared.

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

27-02-2023 om 20:29 geschreven door peter  

Mexican president photographed a Maya elf in a tree, releasing it on Twitter, UFO Sighting News.

The president of Mexico has posted a photo on Twitter of a strange tree climbing, hiding creature that resembles a human with a hoodie. The photo resembles some ancient mayan gods carved in stone, but he said it reusables a woodland elf. Maybe, maybe not, but its odd, and he  himself recored this strange alien creature. Yes I said alien. I believe it to be an alien species watching the president, recording him, because he will do something very important, very soon. Similar sightings occurred to US president Ronald Reagan, who saw twice a UFO while flying his private plane as Governor of California. Also US president Jimmy Carter said he came out of the building and saw from a distance a glowing light in the sky, watching him. It was such a profound experience that President Carter went home and wrote it all down in a diary. So yeah, presidents are on the top of the list for aliens to observer, record, and even visit. In 1957 US president Eisenhower met with an alien from Venus Captain Val Valient Thor, so says the US delegated priest in charge of meeting all foreign VIPs at the US presidents side. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

Negative focused view above. 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

27-02-2023 om 20:27 geschreven door peter  

The remote village of Hessdalen, Norway may well be the scene of the longest continuously recorded UFO activity in the world. For more than forty years, people have observed -- and scientists have recorded -- highly unusual and so far inexplicable phenomena there. 

Especially high activity of Hessdalen lights took place from December 1981 until the summer of 1984 when lights were observed 15–20 times per week. Since then, the activity has decreased and now the lights are observed some 10–20 times per year. 

Some researchers believe that that bubbles of ionized gas are created when sulphurous fumes from the River Hesja react with the humid air of the valley. The geology also forms electromagnetic field lines in the valley, which could explain why for example orbs of light move around, but that has not been proven and it doesn't explain all the other unknown objects appearing over Hessdalen from which some of these objects appear to have involved craft under intelligent control, others have not. 

Now, Dr. Erling Strand has studied the Hessdalen mystery since the beginning and speaks with Richard Dolan about what he knows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmdBWCB1n8s

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

27-02-2023 om 18:25 geschreven door peter  

Unexplained UFO Sighting in Glendale, Arizona – Witness Reports Mysterious Appearance and Disappearance of Lights on February 1, 2023

On February 1, 2023, a mysterious sighting of unidentified flying objects occurred in Glendale, Arizona. According to a witness report, the sighting started with three lights that slowly faded into view. Then, five additional lights appeared and also slowly faded out of sight, leaving observers puzzled and intrigued.

The witness report describes the UFO sighting as a slow and deliberate appearance and disappearance of the lights. This raises questions about what type of technology was used to create such an effect. Were the lights under the control of a human operator, or was this something beyond our current understanding of technology?

Glendale, Arizona is not a stranger to UFO sightings, as there have been numerous reports of similar events in the past. In fact, Arizona is considered to be one of the top places in the United States for UFO sightings, with some of the most famous sightings taking place in Phoenix in 1997.

• Two round bright UFO that didn’t move - San Diego, CA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWD_4T8C42Q

{https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

27-02-2023 om 17:10 geschreven door peter  

27-02-2023 om 01:58 geschreven door peter  

Wat waren de twee heldere lichtpuntjes aan de hemel afgelopen nacht?

Gisterenavond en afgelopen nacht kon je naast de maan nog twee andere, heldere puntjes opmerken aan de hemel. Op Twitter zijn er verschillende foto’s terug te vinden van dit fenomeen. Wetenschapsjournalist Martijn Peters bracht al snel helderheid. “De planeten Venus en Jupiter zijn nu prachtig zichtbaar boven de westelijke horizon”, klonk het op Twitter en Facebook.

 Bron: Twitter

KIJK.

• Twee heldere lichtpuntjes waren zichtbaar aan de hemel. Dat waren de planeten Venus en Jupiter

De planeten Venus en Jupiter zijn naast de zon en de maan de twee helderste objecten aan de hemel. Op dit moment zijn de twee planeten op weg naar een conjunctie of dichte samenstand, die vindt plaats op 1 en 2 maart. “Venus is de helderste van de twee. De volgende dagen zullen de planeten mekaar verder naderen”, aldus Martijn op Facebook.

Bij een conjunctie of dichte samenstand lijkt het, vanaf de Aarde bekeken, alsof de twee planeten met elkaar zullen botsen, maar niet is minder waar. In werkelijkheid staan de planeten zo’n 700 miljoen kilometer uit elkaar.

Een conjunctie of dichte samenstand komt wel vaker voor, telkens zijn de planeten dan ‘s avonds en ‘s nachts te zien boven onze westelijke horizon. En dat was gisterenavond en vorige nacht dus het geval. Dat blijkt uit verschillende foto’s die Twitter-gebruikers de wereld in stuurden.

LEES OOK:

• Kijk vannacht even omhoog: zie Mars van zijn beste kant én verduisterd door de maan

• James Webb-telescoop werd een jaar geleden gelanceerd: een overzicht van de waanzinnige beelden

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

27-02-2023 om 00:56 geschreven door peter  

The Planet That Shouldn’t Exist

“The host star, TOI-5205, is just about four times the size of Jupiter, yet it has somehow managed to form a Jupiter-sized planet, which is quite surprising!” exclaimed Dr. Shubham Kanodia, who is a postdoctoral fellow in the Carnegie Earth & Planets Lab and an expert in red dwarf stars, and lead author of the study. Dr. Shubham recently discussed the discovery in an in-depth blog post, as well. Using food as an analogy, Jupiter orbiting our Sun is equivalent to a pea orbiting a grapefruit, whereas TOI-5205b orbiting its parent star would be equivalent to a pea orbiting a lemon.

The general theory of planetary formation begins with a massive, rotating disk of gas and dust encircling young stars, with gas planets initially being formed from rocky material comprising approximately 10 Earth masses. Over time, this material forms the core of the giant planet which then accumulates large amounts of gas from the disk to produce the massive gas giants we observe today. As it turns out, the confirmation of TOI-5205b could throw this theory into disarray.

“TOI-5205b’s existence stretches what we know about the disks in which these planets are born,” explained Dr. Kanodia. “In the beginning, if there isn’t enough rocky material in the disk to form the initial core, then one cannot form a gas giant planet.  And at the end, if the disk evaporates away before the massive core is formed, then one cannot form a gas giant planet.  And yet TOI-5205b formed despite these guardrails. Based on our nominal current understanding of planet formation, TOI-5205b should not exist; it is a ‘forbidden’ planet.”

The discovery was initially made using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which uses the transit detection method for locating exoplanets, and the data indicated that TOI-5205b blocks approximately 7% of its parent star’s light, making TOI-5205b one of the largest transits ever recorded for a confirmed exoplanet in orbit around a main-sequence star.

To confirm the TESS data, follow-up observations were made from an international collaboration of instruments and observatories. These include the Habitable-zone Planet Finder, the ARCTIC camera on the 3.5-m Apache Point Observatory, the NN-Explore Exoplanet Stellar Speckle Imager, the 0.6-m Red Buttes Observatory, and the Three-hundred MilliMeter Telescope.

Given the very large transit that TOI-5205b produced, the researchers demonstrated that this could make this exoplanet an ideal candidate for future atmospheric observations using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which could help scientists better understand the secrets behind its formation and evolution, as well. This is because JWST has already been successful in observing exoplanet atmospheres in incredible detail, as it recently demonstrated with exoplanet, WASP-39b.

What fascinating new discoveries will scientists make about exoplanets in the coming years and decades, and how much will these discoveries continue to push our knowledge of planetary formation and evolution? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

27-02-2023 om 00:32 geschreven door peter  

UFO Caught On NASA Sun Image Recored Turning, 100% Intelligently Controlled UFO Sighting News.

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

27-02-2023 om 00:14 geschreven door peter  

Pulsating Orb Over El Paso, Texas Feb 25, 2023, UFO Sighting News. Video.

Date of sighting: Feb 25, 2023

Location of sighting: El Paso, Texas, USA

 

Wow, this one was recorded over Texas a few days ago. The eyewitness saw it coming from over the mountains and then all about for 15+ minutes. From the colors, I would say this one has a real friendly and happy glow about it. The orb knew it was being watched and didn't want to cause any fear. Oh, and yes, orbs can change colors, saw a softball size UFO up close 2 meters from me here in Taiwan and it was like cloudy liquid silver, colors moving slowly within it, but 50 meters away it was white as a star. Orbs change colors at will, they can also read your mind, your thoughts and if you call them to you with a kind and open heart, I promise, you will see one. But they are sneaky, the one I saw so close, it came behind my camera. As I said, it could read my thoughts and knew where to come safely. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

Eyewitness states: 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

27-02-2023 om 00:07 geschreven door peter  

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 26-02-2023

Ancient Aliens: Great Flood DESTROYS Lost Iraqi Civilization (Season 19)

Did civilization exist 12,000 years ago? See more in this scene from Season 19, Episode 3, "Mystery of the Lost Civilization."

RELATED VIDEOS

A 10 Million Year Old Find Rewrite Human History!

I often talk about the fact that archeological finds can rewrite our history, and this time the find was not long in coming. In Germany, archaeologists discovered a unique object that was checked in a variety of ways in order to 100% clarify its age. And they were amazed that it was about 10 million years old! It has the power to completely rewrite our history! I will talk about this find and others in this video.

00:00 ► Intro

00:23 ► Silver Scrolls of Ketef Hinnom

00:59 ► Acambaro figurines

01:41 ► The oldest buildings in the UAE found

03:28 ► Mangazeya

04:34 ► Madaba map

05:27 ► An unusual dinosaurs feature

06:53 ► 10 million year old tooth

07:25 ► One of the oldest Buddhist temples in the world

09:02 ► Peruvian "sea monster"

10:45 ► Humanity nearly died out 70,000 years ago

12:36 ► The oldest family tree in the world7

14:24 ► Ancient tombs and sarcophagus found under Notre Dame

A unique find of archaeologists that amazed the whole world. It has the power to rewrite the history of mankind. To learn more about it and see the most ancient buildings of the United Arab Emirates, the oldest Buddhist temple, the Peruvian "sea monster" and the world's oldest family tree, then you should watch this video to the end! Hi Friend. You are on the KirTop channel.

The UnXplained: "Unearthly Image" Hidden in Utah Desert (Season 4)

Over 200 monoliths have mysteriously appeared around the world. See more in this scene from Season 4, Episode 22, "Mysterious Monoliths."

Have Aliens Found Us? More Oumuamua Like Technology Interstellar Spacecrafts Now in Our Solar System

Have Aliens Found Us? More Oumuamua Like Technology Interstellar Spacecrafts Now in Our Solar System. A strange Cosmic object was flying past our planet and no one had the slightest clue 5 days later the interstellar object was on its way out of the solar system when Robert Warwick an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa spotted it. It was from the moment of its discovery a weird object, weird orbit, weird speed, and weird properties, the strange object was called Oumuamua, the first known Interstellar object to visit the solar system but here is the thing astronomers had only 11 days to observe the odd visitor.

China’s New H-20 Stealth Bomber is Worse Than You Think

This new aircraft could change the balance of power in the world. Currently the United States is the only nation to operate a strategic stealth bomber fleet like the B-2. This new Chinese stealth bomber is the type of aircraft that is sent to destroy an entire enemy airfield or soften up defenses for an invasion. The H-20 would have major ramifications for a possible invasion of Taiwan if it is able to evade their air defense systems.

19 Events That Will Happen Before 2050 Compilation

19) Colonization of Mars No, we’re not talking about an upcoming sci-fi blockbuster – the colonization of Mars is a real possibility in the foreseeable future.

18) Technological singularity The technological singularity is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial super-intelligence will trigger rampant technological growth, resulting in unimaginable changes to human civilization.

17) Nuclear fusion In nuclear physics, nuclear fusion is a reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei are combined to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles - neutrons or protons. Fusion was accomplished in 1951 with the Greenhouse Item nuclear test, while nuclear fusion on a large scale in an explosion was first carried out on November 1, 1952, in the Ivy Mike hydrogen bomb test.

16) Interstellar exploration Until recently, interstellar travel was nothing more than a theoretical possibility. However, the exploration of other star systems may become reality sooner than you think

15) Ice-free Arctic The loss of Arctic sea ice is one of the clearest signs of human-caused climate change and so far the Arctic Ocean has melted to its lowest extent ever recorded since satellites began measuring it in 1979

14) 99942 Apophis asteroid threat Before global warming brings humanity on the verge of extinction, a giant rock from outer space might wipe us all out

13) Chocolate extinction Bad news for all of you chocolate lovers out there: your favorite food may actually become extinct in a few decades

12) Antibiotics stop working According to a major 2016 UK study, urgent action is needed to control the use of antibiotics before they stop working and leave a number of major conditions untreatable

11) Technological singularity The technological singularity is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial super-intelligence will trigger rampant technological growth, resulting in unimaginable changes to human civilization

10) New countries Situations and circumstances keep changing, but conflicts rarely end. Unfortunately, in most cases, it is war that ultimately leads to the division of borders and fights for independence have been ongoing for a long time in many parts of the world. Countries and Land Masses At first, this one may sound a bit...abstract. After all, don't we already have a LOT of countries on this Earth of ours?

9) A New Pandemic? We're sure that this one terrifies you to a certain level, but if 2020 proved anything to us, it's that you don't know what to expect until it happens

8) Brand New Medicines If you were to look at medicine as it was in the 1920s and see where they are in the year 2020, you'll see such a rapid scale improvement it would see ludicrous that people survived during the times without this medicine.

7) Sci-Fi Tech Don't go overboard on this one, we're not saying that hovercars and jetpacks are going to be commonplace in our world in the year 2050, however, certain pieces of sci-fi tech are likely to come around by 2050.

6) Green Planet? This one is honestly a bit more wishful thinking than anything else but it could happen should the right forces come into play.

5) Y2K Part 2? If you recall the year 1999, you might remember a gigantic fear that was going on called the Y2K Bug.

4) True Virtual Reality Heading back to sci-fi tech, let's single out another desired object that might just happen by 2050: true virtual reality.

3) A.I. Everywhere Judgment Day is inevitable, and yes, we're quoting Terminator.

2) Super-Automation Here's a darker element of growing technology that we're already facing right now. The more that technology grows, the more that humans can be replaced by automated machines.

1) The Unthinkable When it comes to predicting the future...there's always a risk. Because in truth, you have NO idea what's going to happen in the next however many days or months or years or decades

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

26-02-2023 om 22:38 geschreven door peter