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Category: climatology – Page 64

Connecting Brains: The BrainNet — VPRO documentary

Can we connect human brains together? What are the limits of what we can do with our brain? Is BrainNet our future?
In science fiction movies, scientists’ brains are downloaded into computers and criminal brains are connected to the Internet. Interesting, but how does it work in real life?
Original title: The greedy brain.
Scientific journalist Rob van Hattum wondered what information we can truly get from our brain and came across an extraordinary scientific experience.
An experiment where the brains of two rats were directly connected: one rat was in the United States and the other rat was in Brazil. They could influence the brain of the other directly. Miguel Nicolelis is the Brazilian neurologist who conducted this experiment. In his book ‘Beyond Boundaries’ he describes his special experiences in detail and predicts that it should be possible to create a kind of BrainNet.
For Backlight, Rob van Hattum went to Sao Paulo and also visited all Dutch neuroscientists, looking for what the future holds for our brain. He connected his own brain to computers and let it completely be scanned, searching for the limits of reading out the brain.
Originally broadcasted by VPRO in 2014.
© VPRO Backlight July 2014

On VPRO broadcast you will find nonfiction videos with English subtitles, French subtitles and Spanish subtitles, such as documentaries, short interviews and documentary series.
VPRO Documentary publishes one new subtitled documentary about current affairs, finance, sustainability, climate change or politics every week. We research subjects like politics, world economy, society and science with experts and try to grasp the essence of prominent trends and developments.

Visit additional youtube channels bij VPRO broadcast:
VPRO Broadcast, all international VPRO programs: https://www.youtube.com/VPRObroadcast.
VPRO DOK, German only documentaries: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBi0VEPANmiT5zOoGvCi8Sg.
VPRO Metropolis, remarkable stories from all over the world: https://www.youtube.com/user/VPROmetropolis.
VPRO World Stories, the travel series of VPRO: https://www.youtube.com/VPROworldstories.
VPRO Extra, additional footage and one off’s: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTLrhK07g6LP-JtT0VVE56A
www.VPRObroadcast.com.

Credits:
Director: Rob van Hattum.
English, French and Spanish subtitles: Ericsson.
French and Spanish subtitles are co-funded by European Union.

Seaweed project wins million dollar XPRIZE for carbon removal

Year 2022 😗😁

The Climate Foundation’s SeaForestation project has won a Milestone XPRIZE for carbon removal, from Elon Musk’s foundation.

According to the prize’s official site, the competition “is aimed at tackling the biggest threat facing humanity — fighting climate change and rebalancing Earth’s carbon cycle”.

Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, this $100 million competition claims to be the largest incentive prize in history.

Fourier Transformations Reveal How AI Learns Complex Physics

One of the oldest tools in computational physics — a 200-year-old mathematical technique known as Fourier analysis — can reveal crucial information about how a form of artificial intelligence called a deep neural network learns to perform tasks involving complex physics like climate and turbulence modeling, according to a new study.

The discovery by mechanical engineering researchers at Rice University is described in an open-access study published in the journal PNAS Nexus, a sister publication of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This is the first rigorous framework to explain and guide the use of deep neural networks for complex dynamical systems such as climate,” said study corresponding author Pedram Hassanzadeh. “It could substantially accelerate the use of scientific deep learning in climate science, and lead to much more reliable climate change projections.”

Dr. Emily Osborne Ph.D. — Research Scientist — Ocean Chemistry and Ecosystems Division — NOAA/AOML

Studying Our Ocean’s History To Understanding Its Future — Dr. Emily Osborne, PhD, Ocean Chemistry & Ecosystems Division, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Dr Emily Osborne, Ph.D. (https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/people/emily-osborne/) is a Research Scientist, in the Ocean Chemistry and Ecosystems Division, at the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.

The Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML), a federal research laboratory, is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), located in Miami in the United States. AOML’s research spans tropical cyclone and hurricanes, coastal ecosystems, oceans and human health, climate studies, global carbon systems, and ocean observations. It is one of ten NOAA Research Laboratories.

With a B.S. in Geology from the College of Charleston and a Ph.D. in Marine Science from University of South Carolina, Dr. Osborne is currently involved in investigating regional and global biogeochemical issues related to ocean health and climate through the use of a combination of paleoceanographic approaches, new autonomous sensors, and conventional measurements on large multi-disciplinary oceanographic cruises.

Paleoceanography is the study of the history of the oceans in the geologic past with regard to circulation, chemistry, biology, geology and patterns of sedimentation and biological productivity. Paleoceanographic studies using environment models and different proxies enable the scientific community to assess the role of the oceanic processes in the global climate by the re-construction of past climate at various intervals.

Continue reading “Dr. Emily Osborne Ph.D. — Research Scientist — Ocean Chemistry and Ecosystems Division — NOAA/AOML” | >

Artificial leaf can produce 40 volts of electricity from wind or rain

This process of harvesting energy from rain is new.

Researchers in Italy have engineered an artificial leaf that can be embedded within plants to create electricity from raindrops or wind. It functions extremely well under rainy or windy conditions to light up LED lights and power itself, according to a report by IEEE Spectrum.

Fabian Meder, a researcher studying bioinspired soft robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, Italy, told the science news outlet that the system could be practical for agricultural applications and remote environmental monitoring in order to observe plant health or monitor climate conditions.

Coldsnowstorm/iStock.

It functions extremely well under rainy or windy conditions to light up LED lights and power itself, according to a report by IEEE Spectrum published on Wednesday.

Bees learn to dance and to solve puzzles from their peers

Social insects like bees demonstrate a remarkable range of behaviors, from working together to build structurally complex nests (complete with built-in climate control) to the pragmatic division of labor within their communities. Biologists have traditionally viewed these behaviors as pre-programmed responses that evolved over generations in response to external factors. But two papers last week reported results indicating that social learning might also play a role.

The first, published in the journal PLoS Biology, demonstrated that bumblebees could learn to solve simple puzzles by watching more experienced peers. The second, published in the journal Science, reported evidence for similar social learning in how honeybees learn to perform their trademark “waggle dance” to tell other bees in their colony where to find food or other resources. Taken together, both studies add to a growing body of evidence of a kind of “culture” among social insects like bees.

“Culture can be broadly defined as behaviors that are acquired through social learning and are maintained in a population over time, and essentially serves as a ‘second form of inheritance,’ but most studies have been conducted on species with relatively large brains: primates, cetaceans, and passerine birds,” said co-author Alice Bridges, a graduate student at Queen Mary University of London who works in the lab of co-author Lars Chittka. “I wanted to study bumblebees in particular because they are perfect models for social learning experiments. They have previously been shown to be able to learn really complex, novel, non-natural behaviors such as string-pulling both individually and socially.”

Surviving An Apocalypse

Go to https://brilliant.org/IsaacArthur/ to get a 30-day free trial + the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual subscription.
If the end of the world is nigh, it may be too late to avert a catastrophe. So what can we do to mitigate the damage or recover after a cataclysm comes?

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▬ Cataclysm Index ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
0:00 — Intro.
03:43 — Nuclear War.
11:24 — Asteroid.
15:34 — Supernova.
18:34 — Gamma Ray Burst.
21:51 — Massive Climate Shift.
23:15 — Snowball Earth.
24:34 — Super Volcano.
28:51 — BioWar.
30:46 — Zombie Apocalypse.
32:25 — Robots / AI
35:10 — Alien Invasions.

Listen or Download the audio of this episode from Soundcloud: Episode’s Audio-only version: https://soundcloud.com/isaac-arthur-148927746/journey-to-alpha-centauri.
Episode’s Narration-only version: https://soundcloud.com/isaac-arthur-148927746/journey-to-alp…ation-only.

Credits:
Surviving An Apocalypse.
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur.
Episode 385a, March 12, 2023
Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur.

Editors:

Continue reading “Surviving An Apocalypse” | >

Record room-temperature superconductor could boost quantum computer chips

Companies could one day make superconductive quantum computer chips that function at room temperature thanks to a new material from researchers in the US. Ranga Dias from the University of Rochester and colleagues made a material superconductive at 21°C and pressures less than 1% of those used for existing high-temperature superconductors. ‘The most exciting part is the pressure,’ Dias tells Chemistry World. ‘Even I didn’t think this was possible.’

Together with Ashkan Salamat’s team at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the scientists say that electrical resistance in their nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride falls to zero at room temperature. Making room-temperature zero-resistance materials is a chemistry ‘holy grail’ and could fight climate change by reducing the 5% of electricity lost as heat while flowing through the grid.

However, Dias and Salamat’s team hasn’t been able to fully confirm the new material’s structure. As hydrogen atoms are so small they don’t easily diffract the x-rays used to work out the material’s composition. And this is an important reservation, considering the publisher of the team’s previous high-temperature superconductor paper retracted it.