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Category: existential risks – Page 36

For a few tense days this January, a roughly 70-metre asteroid became the riskiest observed in over a decade. Despite the Moon’s attempt to scupper observations, the asteroid is now known to be entirely safe.

*Join ESA, NASA and Asteroid Day LIVE from 19:00 CET this evening in “Killing asteroids — with the experts”, to find out more*.

Initial observations of an asteroid dubbed ‘2022 AE1’ showed a potential Earth impact on 4 July 2023 – not enough time to attempt deflection and large enough to do real damage to a local area should it strike.

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An updated metric for prioritizing species’ conservation that incorporates scientific uncertainty and complementarity between species, in addition to extinction risk and evolutionary distinctiveness, has been published on February 28 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, authored by Rikki Gumbs from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), U.K., and colleagues.

In 2007, ZSL established the Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) metric to prioritize species for conservation based on preserving embodied within . The approach allocates each species a score based on the evolutionary distance, measured in millions of years, that separates a species from its closest living relatives, and its conservation status in the IUCN Red List.

EDGE has since been applied to mammals, amphibians, birds, sharks and rays, corals, and flowering plants, and is used to allocate conservation funding. To update the EDGE metric to incorporate recent advances in and conservation, ZSL hosted a workshop for conservation scientists and practitioners, who reached a consensus on EDGE2—an updated metric that includes the of closely related species and uncertainty in species’ relationships and conservation status.

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The ability to extinguish fear memories when threats are no longer present is critical for adaptive behavior. Fear extinction represents a new learning process that eventually leads to the formation of extinction memories. Understanding the neural basis of fear extinction has considerable clinical significance as deficits in extinction learning are the hallmark of human anxiety disorders. In recent years, the dopamine (DA) system has emerged as one of the key regulators of fear extinction. In this review article, we highlight recent advances that have demonstrated the crucial role DA plays in mediating different phases of fear extinction. Emerging concepts and outstanding questions for future research are also discussed.

Learning to associate stimuli and situations with danger or safety is critical for survival and adaptive behavior. In the laboratory, these forms of learning are typically studied using Pavlovian fear conditioning and extinction. Fear conditioning is an example of associative learning in which an initially neutral stimulus such as a tone (conditioned stimulus, CS) comes to elicit fear responses after being paired in time with an aversive outcome such as a foot shock (unconditioned stimulus, US). Once the CS-US association is learned, subsequently repeated presentations of the CS in the absence of the aversive US result in a gradual decrease in conditioned fear responses, a process known as fear extinction. In the last decades, fear extinction has attracted much interest in part because deficits in extinction learning are thought to underlie human anxiety disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and phobias (Graham and Milad, 2011; Pitman et al., 2012; Craske et al.

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For species classified as “extinct in the wild”, the zoos and botanical gardens where their fates hang by a thread are as often anterooms to oblivion as gateways to recovery, new research has shown.

Re-wilding what are often single-digit populations faces the same challenges that pushed these to the cusp of in the first place, including a lack of genetic diversity. But without , experts say, chances of these species surviving would be even smaller.

Since 1950, nearly 100 animal and plant species vanquished from nature by hunting, pollution, deforestation, invasive lifeforms and other drivers of extinction have been put into by scientists and conservationists, according to the findings.

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Artificial Intelligence or AI more specifically strong AI or artificial superintelligence could possibly be the answer or the solution to the Fermi paradox. The Fermi paradox, named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and various high estimates for their probability of existence. The conundrum for the existence of aliens and more categorically intelligent aliens could be a much simpler solution that we’ve previously thought. To more broadly answer the question of intelligent aliens, we first have to think about whether it’s possible that we are a just a tiny spec in the vastness of space, the only place in the universe where intelligent life found its way to manifest Or maybe there is an abundance of intelligent life out there and we just haven’t found it yet. The search for extraterrestrial life is arguably one of the most all-encompassing scientific quest endeavours of our time. How would we know if we had found alien life? It would be interesting to find something that looks like intelligent alien life, but is not actually alive. It could be a space probe. Or a satellite. We often imagine extraterrestrial life as having a face, because we can’t figure out what it would look like. But if we were to find intelligent alien life, we might not immediately know what it is. Our guesses till recently were random mixtures of biological forms. An advanced civilization however could also be able to engineer machines or digital living forms with the exact same properties as biological forms. A growing number of scientists believe that the aliens we are looking for are in fact AI. It is quite possible that some civilizations could have transcended biology all together to become artificial superintelligence.

#Aliens #AI #ScienceTime.

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https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab8225

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Peptide chain formation from amino acids such as glycine is a key step in the emergence of life. Unlike their synthesis by living systems, how peptide chains grow under abiotic conditions is an open question given the variety of organic compounds discovered in various astrophysical environments, comets and meteorites. We propose a new abiotic route in the presence of protonated molecular dimers of glycine in a cold gaseous atmosphere without further need for a solid catalytic substrate. The results provide evidence for the preferential formation of mixed protonated dimers of glycine consisting of a dipeptide and a glycine molecule instead of pure protonated glycine dimers. Additional measurements mimicking a cosmic-ray impact in terms of internal excitation show that a single gas-phase collision induces polymerization via dehydration in both the mixed and pure dimer ions.

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