Lifeboat Foundation

Emotional maltreatment, also known as psychological violence, is difficult to recognize and record both in research and in practice. That is why researchers at the Leipzig University Faculty of Medicine carried out a highly elaborate study on the psychological effects that abuse, neglect and emotional maltreatment have on children and adolescents. Examples of emotional abuse include when parents subject their children to extreme humiliation, threaten to put them in a home, or blame them for their own psychological distress or suicidal thoughts.

Physical violence between parents observed by children also plays a crucial role. “Our study findings clearly show that emotional maltreatment is not only a very common form of maltreatment, but also one with psychiatric consequences that are similar to or even more severe than other forms of maltreatment,” explains study leader and last author Dr. Lars White, research group leader at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at Leipzig University Hospital.

In their study of 778 children, the Leipzig researchers, together with researchers from other German universities, found that 80 percent of the children and adolescents who reported having been maltreated had also experienced emotional maltreatment. This makes emotional maltreatment the most common form of child abuse.

The long-term impact of biodiversity loss in Madagascar has been modelled by researchers. Their work suggests that recovery from the current wave of extinctions could take as long as 23 million years.

Madagascar is one of the world’s most biodiverse hotspots. Following the breakup of the prehistoric supercontinent of Gondwana, the island country split away from the Indian subcontinent about 80 million years ago, allowing native plants and animals to evolve in relative isolation. Consequently, over 90% of its wildlife is endemic and found nowhere else on Earth.

New telescope imagery suggests that stars can survive encounters with black holes, a phenomenon that has been modeled but seldom observed, astronomers say. Using an X-ray telescope orbiting the Earth, astronomers peered 1 billion light-years into deep space and observed black holes partially destroying the same stars over and over, according to the European Space Agency.

Of course, all stars are hot compared with anything we’re used to here on Earth. But while the Sun’s surface chills at a steady 6,000 degrees Kelvin, these stars’ extreme temperatures range from 100,000 to 180,000 degrees.

These are “stars which are a little bit outside the canonical evolution,” Klaus Werner of the University of Tuebingen’s Kepler Centre for Astro and Particle Physics, a co-author of the paper, tells Inverse. “These stars are strange.”

Even among the ultra-hot white dwarfs known by the designation PG1159, the selection that cropped up in this survey lack the helium normally found in their atmosphere: instead, they’ve burned it all away, fusing it into a solar atmosphere of pure carbon and oxygen.

An international study 13 years in the making demonstrates for the first time that degradation in the way DNA is organized and regulated — known as epigenetics — can drive aging in an organism, independently of changes to the genetic code itself.

Researchers confirmed an exoplanet, a planet that orbits another star, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for the first time. Formally classified as LHS 475 b, the planet is almost exactly the same size as our own, clocking in at 99% of Earth’s diameter. The research team is led by Kevin Stevenson and Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, both of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

The planet is rocky and almost precisely the same size as Earth, but whips around its star in only two days.

The extent of losses faced by investors remains unknown so far.

FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that came crashing down in just a week in November last year, has now recovered assets worth $5 billion, its attorney told a U.S. court, BBC

Valued at over $32 billion just a year ago, the crypto exchange, with its head office in the Bahamas, faced a liquidity crunch. The founder, CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), filed for bankruptcy protection on November 11.

The company aims to hit a sales milestone of 1,000 electric trucks in 2023.

Tevva started commercial production of its medium-duty electric truck after it received the European Community Whole Vehicle Type Approval (ECWVTA). The British vehicle manufacturer will now be able to start mass production and sales of TEV75, its 7.5-tonne battery-electric truck. The critical regulatory approval, granted by the Vehicle Certification Agency (VCA) and the Swedish Transport Agency (STA), will enable Tevva to retail its product across the UK and Europe.

Continue reading “A British company starts mass production of its 7.5-tonne electric truck” »

As those who have read this column over time understand, I have a soapbox that involves authors, whether academics or consultants, pandering to management rather than teaching them. Sadly, Age of Invisible Machines.

The second, and larger issue was mentioned up top. Inventors have a habit, from long before Alfred Nobel, of ignoring the consequences of their inventions. The excuse is the same as scientists often give, that it’s not up to them to decide on the used and societal impact, they’re just discovering and inventing things. While that is true for theoretical science, it’s far past time for technologists focused on applications that directly impact society to give up that attempt to absolve themselves from societal impact.

The ethical AI movement is only an extension of regular movements in society, movements that try to understand how change impacts those societies and to do it from the beginning. Any good programmer looks at system issues from the design phase. Waiting until debugging is too late to create an effective system. Artificial intelligence will clearly impact society in major ways. It will redefine who can work and how society must address a change in the definition of work. It ties into the overvaluing of stocks because of the promise of solutions, in the lack of understanding of most people in what those solutions mean, and a real understanding, among a very few, of what that means.

Continue reading “Age Of Invisible Machines: An Impractical Guide To Hyperautomated Systems” »