He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who faced international condemnation in 2018 for creating the first gene-edited children, has presented a new research proposal involving modifying human embryos to address the challenges of the ageing population. He, who was sentenced to three years in prison in 2019 for “illegal medical practices,” resurfaced last year and announced the opening of a research lab in Beijing.
When you turn on a lamp to brighten a room, you are experiencing light energy transmitted as photons, which are small, discrete quantum packets of energy. These photons must obey the sometimes strange laws of quantum mechanics, which, for instance, dictate that photons are indivisible, but at the same time, allow a photon to be in two places at once.
Similar to the photons that make up beams of light, indivisible quantum particles called phonons make up a beam of sound. These particles emerge from the collective motion of quadrillions of atoms, much as a “stadium wave” in a sports arena is due to the motion of thousands of individual fans. When you listen to a song, you’re hearing a stream of these very small quantum particles.
Every citizen should watch this. It’s brilliant.
This film was made to sell to high school media departments who purchased it to show to their juniors and seniors. Students in public high schools were being exposed to the concept of propaganda, especially given the context of World War II and the early Cold War. At this time there was an emphasis on educating citizens, including school children, about the role of propaganda. Would anyone make a film like this to run in schools involving media fake media or not?
Propaganda from all sides was studied including in history or social studies classes. Teachers used examples from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or Imperial Japan to illustrate how propaganda was used to control information and manipulate public opinion during the war.
Warren Buffett has hailed artificial intelligence as a potential game-changer, but warned it could be disruptive, divisive, and dangerous.
AI promises to replace workers and harness new types of knowledge, generating lots of value and giving people more leisure time, the famed investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO has said in interviews and during shareholders meetings in recent years, according to CNBC’s Warren Buffett Archive.
However, the nascent technology could also cause massive upheaval if it causes huge numbers of job losses, and could do enormous damage to the world if it’s used for the wrong reasons, Buffett cautioned.
Generative artificial intelligence technology such as ChatGPT could boost productivity for many workers in the years ahead. But some people are likely to lose their jobs in the process.
That’s according to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Altman said in June that AI’s development could provide the “most tremendous leap forward” for people’s quality of life. But he also said in March it’d be “crazy not to be a little afraid of AI” and its potential to create” disinformation problems or economic shocks.”
In a troubling indicator of the state of science denialism, James Webb Space Telescope findings were twisted to undermine the Big Bang theory.
A post on the Croppie website, for crop circle enthusiasts, described the new pictogram as a ‘reproduction, remaster, even, of the most iconic crop circle of all time’ Cover versions might never quite be as good as the original – but this remaster of a rock classic looks just like the real thing.
A meteor has exploded over the Atlantic Ocean with the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It’s one of the ways that civilisation as we know it could end, with an asteroid impact sending the human race the way of the dinosaurs. It’s a terrifying prospect, and the film Don’t Look Up with Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio really didn’t help matter with its demonstration of the paralysis and greed which could doom humanity.
It’s surprisingly reassuring. Aside from “breathing”, “sleeping”, and “putting on Troy McClure’s accent every time you say his name”, I reckon panicking about death is one of the most universal human experiences. Obviously, part of the problem of wondering what happens when you die is that nobody with any real qualifications can answer you.
