• In a rare companywide memo from CFO Ruth Porat, Google kicked off “multi-year” employee service cuts.

• The company is also cutting back on laptops and equipment, according to more detailed internal documents viewed by CNBC.

Google’s finance chief Ruth Porat recently said in a rare companywide email that the company is making cuts to employee services.

“These are big, multi-year efforts,” Porat said in a Friday email titled: “Our company-wide OKR on durable savings.” Elements of the email were previously reported by the Wall Street Journal.

In separate documents viewed by CNBC, Google said it’s cutting back on fitness classes, staplers, tape, and the frequency of laptop replacements for employees.

One of the company’s important objectives for 2023 is to “deliver durable savings through improved velocity and efficiency.” Porat said in the email. “All PAs and Functions are working toward this,” she said, referring to product areas.

The latest cost-cutting measures come as Alphabet-owned Google continues its most severe era of cost cuts in its almost two decades as a public company. The company said in January that it was eliminating 12,000 jobs, representing about 6% of its workforce, to reckon with slowing sales growth following record headcount growth.

Cuts have shown up in other ways. The company declined to pay the remainder of laid-off employees’ maternity and medical leaves, CNBC previously reported.

In her recent email, Porat said the layoffs were “the hardest decisions we’ve had to make as a company.”

“This work is particularly vital because of our recent growth, the challenging economic environment, and our incredible investment opportunities to drive technology forward— particularly in AI,” Porat’s email said.

Porat referred to the year 2008 twice in her email.

“We’ve been here before,” Porat’s email stated. “Back in 2008, our expenses were growing faster than our revenue. We improved machine utilization, narrowed our real estate investments, tightened our belt on T&E budgets, cafes, micro kitchens and mobile phone usage, and removed the hybrid vehicle subsidiary.”

“Just as we did in 2008, we’ll be looking at data to identify other areas of spending that parents as effective as they should be, or that don’t scale to our size.”

In a statement to CNBC, a spokesperson said, “As we’ve publicly stated, we have a company goal to make durable savings through improved velocity and efficiency. As part of this, we’re making some practical changes to help us remain responsible stewards of our resources while continuing to offer industry-leading perks, benefits and amenities.”

Cutting down on desktop PCs and staplers

Among the equipment changes, Google is pausing refreshes for laptops, desktop PCs and monitors. It’s also “changing how often equipment is replaced,” according to internal documents viewed by CNBC.

Google employees who are not in engineering roles but require a new laptop will receive a Chromebook by default. Chromebooks are laptops made by Google and use a Google-based operating system called Chrome OS.

It’s a shift from the range of offerings, such as Apple MacBooks, that were previously available to employees. “It also provides the best opportunity across all of our managed devices to prevent external compromise,” one document about the laptop changes stated.

An employee can no longer expense mobile phones if one is available internally, the document also stated. Employees will need director “or above” approval if they need an accessory that costs more than $1,000 and isn’t available internally.

Under a section titled “Desktops and Workstations,” the company said CloudTop, the company’s internal virtual workstation, will be “the default desktop” for Googlers.

In February, CNBC reported Google asked its cloud employees and partners to share desks by alternating days and are expected to transition to relying on CloudTop for their workstations.

Google employees have also noticed some more extreme cutbacks to office supplies in recent weeks. Staplers and tape are no longer being provided to print stations companywide as “part of a cost effectiveness initiative,” according to a separate, internal facilities directive viewed by CNBC.

“We have been asked to pull all tape/dispensers through out the building,” a San Francisco facility directive stated. “If you need a stapler or tape, the receptionist desk has them to borrow.”

 A Google spokesperson said staplers and tape continue to be offered companywide but did not provide details.

‘We’ve baked too many muffins on a Monday’

Google’s also cutting some availability of employee services.

“We set a high bar for industry-leading perks, benefits and office amenities, and we will continue that into the future,” Porat’s email stated. “However, some programs need to evolve for how Google works today.”

“These are mostly minor adjustments,” stated a separate internal document from the company’s real estate and workplace team. The document said food, fitness, massage and transportation programs were designed for when Googlers were coming in five days a week.

“Now that most of us are in 3 days a week, we’ve noticed our supply/demand ratios are a bit out of sync: We’ve baked too many muffins on a Monday, seen GBuses run with just one passenger, and offered yoga classes on a Friday afternoon when folks are more likely to be working from home,” the document stated.

As a result, Google may close cafes on Mondays and Fridays and shut down some facilities that are “underutilized,” due to hybrid schedules, the document states.

As a part of the January U.S. layoffs, the company let go of more than two dozen on-site massage therapists.

Source

Ancient civilizations were often far more advanced than people give them credit for. There are many incredible technologies and feats of engineering that we still do not completely understand, but looking into these achievements can feel like a minefield as they have become the stuff of numerous modern-day conspiracy theories. 

The internet is awash with such narratives, but in most instances, they are completely false. Far from being mysteries, we actually know a great deal about how people like the ancient Egyptians performed their technological and engineering feats. We may not know the exact methods in all instances, but there is a substantial difference between not knowing for certain and not knowing at all. So let’s examine some of these wonders and address some of the more bogus claims surrounding them.

How were the Pyramids of Giza built? 

The Pyramids of Giza are not only a testament to ancient Egyptian culture but also to their incredible ingenuity. Archaeologists have studied these monuments for decades and have a pretty good idea about how they were built. Using tools and techniques that are familiar to modern engineers and construction workers – albeit simpler and more labor-intensive – the ancient Egyptians constructed them over long periods of time and with considerable human effort. 

Built some 4,500 years ago, these tombs were erected to house the remains of deceased pharaohs. After death, part of the pharaoh’s spirit was thought to remain with the body, so it required special care to ensure the deceased ruler could carry out their responsibilities as a god in the afterlife. Each Pyramid also provided a form of “storage”, as they were filled with the various possessions a former ruler would need in the next world. 

The largest and oldest pyramid at Giza belongs to Pharaoh Khufu and was built around 2550 BCE. It is estimated to be made of about 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing between 2.5 to 15 tons. The second pyramid was built by Khufu’s son, Khafre, circa 2520 BCE. Khafre’s necropolis, a large cemetery with elaborate tomb monuments, also includes the Sphinx, which guards the site. The third pyramid, the smallest, was built by Pharaoh Menkaure circa 2490 BCE.

Originally, each pyramid stood taller than today as they would have been encased in smooth white limestone. However, over the centuries, these casings have been removed and plundered, along with most of the grave goods the pyramids once contained.  

Although this is the focus of most conspiracy claims, the Egyptians actually created these monuments with a combination of rudimentary tools – plumb bobs, stings, rope, wood, stone hammers, sleds, copper chisels, and saws – and well-known mathematical and engineering techniques. Essentially, a pyramid is a cube where the sides meet in the center through a series of increasingly smaller rectangles stacked on top of one another. So to create a pyramid, you only needed a rectangle as a base to build from.  

Establishing this was pretty straightforward and could be achieved by using set squares to lay out and check right-angle triangles, while the plumb bob could measure vertical adjustments. Once the base was established, each subsequent layer became smaller, which required precision calculations. Then the outer stones had to be cut to create a smooth incline surface for the sides. The blocks were slid into place using wooden logs, and then masons chiseled them into shape with copper chisels. It is even possible to see the markings on some blocks where the chisels needed to be sharpened. 

It is also likely the Egyptians used a ramp and embankment method to position the blocks at higher points on the pyramid. Gangs of workers would haul each block up ramps using sleds, rollers, and levers. As the pyramid grew, more sand, bricks, and earth would be added to raise the embankments to support the ramps. There have been various suggestions on the exact configuration of the ramps, but evidence from recent archaeological finds shows that the Ancient Egyptians had experience using ramps to move heavy stone blocks. In fact, an experiment conducted in 2022 demonstrates how a group of 20 workers could easily pull a 2-ton limestone block across sand using ropes and a sled.

We also know exactly where they got these blocks from. In the same year, researchers found evidence that at the time of the pyramids' construction, a now-defunct branch of the river Nile used to pass near the site at Giza. This lost river branch was a vital conduit allowing the workers to transport the pyramids’ building blocks from quarries several kilometers away. 

There are also contemporary textual accounts of the construction of Khufu’s pyramid recorded by a middle-ranking inspector called Merer, who provided an explanation for where the stone came from. According to Merer's diary, written as the Khufu pyramid was nearing completion, limestone blocks were being quarried from Tura, on the opposite side of the Nile. These blocks were then loaded onto boats and transported to the construction site on a journey that took between two to three days to complete.  

This document has been extremely influential in confirming some long-held suspicions, Dr Nicky Nielsen, Senior Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Manchester, told IFLScience. “It doesn’t get much better than that, you know?” Nielsen said. Merer’s papyrus is “the closest thing we get to a smoking gun for how the pyramids were built.”  

Who built the pyramids and how did they know what to do?

The secret to the Egyptian’s ingenuity wasn’t in some spectacular and long-lost technology or arcane knowledge but in the size of their workforce and years of labor. 

We know from the historical record that the construction of these monuments took decades to complete. The Greek historian Herodotus stated that the “Great Pyramid”, Khufu’s pyramid, took 20 years to build and relied on over 100,000 men to finish. More recent evidence has suggested that this feat probably only needed some 20,000 workers (not slaves) to accomplish it, and archaeologists have now found the site of a town and barracks near Menkaure’s pyramid that would have supported these people. It appears that the town was by a harbor that served as a bustling point of social and industrial activity at the time. 

The level of power that an Old Kingdom Pharaoh had would make Kim Jong-un blush,

Dr Nicky Nielsen, Senior Lecturer in Egyptology

 

Although it is tempting to compare the construction of the pyramids to modern-day construction projects, and therefore draw parallels between the time and resources needed to complete them, this would be a mistake. Doing so can lead to the assumption there had to be some secret method of construction that we have not yet found, but this seems extremely unlikely. Instead, we should view Egyptian production through the lens of a heavily authoritarian society where the Pharaoh functioned as a god on Earth. With such total power comes the ability to hire a workforce and mobilize whatever resources you need to achieve your goals. 

“The level of power that an Old Kingdom Pharaoh had would make Kim Jong-un blush,” Nielsen explained. This is a point that many people forget when they romanticize the Ancient Egyptian world; a construction project like the pyramids “was only possible because there was this one person who had this unhealthy amount of power”.

Another point that is often overlooked is that the pyramids at Giza were not built overnight, nor were they the first of this type of monument. There are older pyramids of different designs, some more successful than others, that demonstrate how Egyptians experimented and developed their ideas over time. 

Before Khufu’s Great Pyramid, there was the potentially not-so-great pyramid of Pharaoh Sneferu (c. 2600 BC), which was built at Dashur, south of Cairo. Sneferu’s pyramid, now known as the Bent Pyramid, has a unique shape as the lower courses were built at an angle of 54 to 55 degrees, but the upper courses have a lower angle of 43 degrees. 

The Bent Pyramid. Image Credit: Nick Brundle Photography/Shutterstock.com

It is thought that the odd appearance was likely caused by faults in the original design that made it structurally unsound. It had started to crack before it was halfway through construction, which led Sneferu’s architects to reduce the angle for the upper courses. 

Despite the changes, Sneferu decided to have another pyramid – the so-called Red Pyramid – built using a more recognizable design a short distance away. The Bent Pyramid seems to represent a key step in the evolution of the pyramid, from the old step design used by King Djoser in Saqqara to the later smooth-faced pyramids at Giza. It also shows a process of learning, whereby the preferred methods for building these monuments were the outcome of trial and error.  

A good example of how things could go wrong can be seen in the Meidum pyramid, the “collapsed pyramid”, which has often been seen as a practice run for Sneferu’s pyramids. Though some have suggested the various changes to the Meidum pyramid were due to shifts in theology towards solar rather than stellar religions, which would have required alterations to the architecture and orientation of the ancient monument, it nevertheless demonstrates changes in style and thinking. 

The Meidum Pyramid. Image Credit: PRILL/Shutterstock.com

The abundance of time doesn’t just account for changes in the design and structure of the pyramids either, it also explains how Ancient Egyptians carved rock. This is another area that has been the subject of a lot of speculation and misinformation in recent years – how did the Egyptians cut through rock such as granite with simple tools? Well, the answer is mundane: they did so with lots of manpower over many days. 

Denys A Stock, an expert in Egyptian technology, has even reconstructed how you can cut stone as hard as granite and basalt with simple bronze saws that use sand as an abrasive. That Egyptian masons used such a technique is largely uncontroversial among academic researchers. Instead, the current debate seems to be over whether the masons used dry or wet sand, as illustrated by Stock in his experiments.  

Again, the secret here is time. “One thing I have to keep reminding my students is not to underestimate what you can do with time,” Nielson noted to IFLScience.  

“We're used to these very quick solutions, power tools and stuff like that. You can cut it with a piece of wood, some sand, and some water. That's all you need to score granite; the factor is time. You need resources in terms of humans, but you also just need oodles and oodles of time to do this. And it's perfectly doable. It just takes patience.” 

Old conspiracies and new 

Today, we hear all sorts of claims about Egyptian science that relate to alien interventions or some secret advanced technologies that were beyond anything we can imagine today. Although such ideas continue to appear online or in dubious Netflix series, their proponents often forget that they are simply carrying on a tradition that has a long heritage. 

In 1998, American politician Ben Carson claimed the pyramids had been built by the biblical figure, Joseph, to store grain. While this idea may seem ridiculous, the idea actually has roots in the Old Testament and was made more popular by Saint Gregory of Tours, a sixth-century historian and bishop, who wrote that the pyramids were “wide at the base and narrow at the top in order that the wheat might be cast into them through a tiny opening, and these granaries are to be seen to the present day." 

The beliefs are very much bogus by today’s standards, but they show how the pyramids have long been the source of speculation and guesswork. While grain storage is understandable – if you’ve never actually seen the pyramids – other more unusual ideas link “odd” thinking to political ideologies. 

In the late 19th century, anxiety swept across Britain when contemporary “Euro-skeptics” feared that the traditional British imperial weights and measures system was to be ousted in favor of the French metric system. As was the case with the more recent panic about the introduction of the Euro in the early 2000s, the fear of European influence on a British system manifested in unusual ways related to a perceived loss of identity. 

What does this have to do with the pyramids? Well, one group opposed to the metric system espoused the belief that the imperial inch was a divine and God-given unit of measurement. According to this notion, the Great Pyramids were not tombs to ancient rulers, but rather the storehouses for divinely-inspired metrological measurements and, more importantly, a sign that the British (and the Anglo-Saxon race) had inherited it. 

These metrologists argued that the ancient monuments had been constructed using the Hebrew “sacred cubit”, which more or less equaled the British inch. This might seem illogical to us now, but the ideas were extremely popular at the time and were hotly debated among scientific and religious groups, learned societies, and public forums. They were so influential that they managed to stave off the introduction of the metric system for some time.    

Ancient aliens and pseudoarchaeology 

The subject of ancient civilizations has become a popular vista of speculation for fringe believers and various far-right conspiracists. In these alternative narratives, the supposed “unknowns” surrounding ancient civilizations – especially the Ancient Egyptians – provide proof of either some long-lost technologically advanced (and usually “white”) civilization or evidence of extra-terrestrial intervention in human history. 

The idea that aliens either built or advised the construction of pyramids only dates back to the late 19th century and is more or less the result of fan fiction. In 1897, HG Wells published The War of the Worlds, which started a run of similar sci-fi books. In particular, in 1898, there was American astronomer and writer Garrett P Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars, in which the protagonist discovers that the Ancient Egyptians were actually Martians. Although the book was a work of fiction, it was the first to link the ancient civilization to alien races. Then, in 1968, Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past popularized the idea that alien visitors, who were mistaken as gods, influenced the Egyptian religion, culture, and technology.

I think that fundamentally, it's because part of us really has a hard time believing that you would go to that amount of trouble just to bury one guy. I think part of the human mind goes ‘yeah, there’s got to be a better explanation than that’.

Dr Nicky Nielsen

 

The belief in alien interference remains remarkably strong but it is still evolving. “With these kinds of conspiracy theories, one follows the other based on what is kind of in the zeitgeist at the time,” Nielson explained. “I think that fundamentally, it's because part of us really has a hard time believing that you would go to that amount of trouble just to bury one guy... I think part of the human mind goes ‘yeah, there’s got to be a better explanation than that’.”  

Many of these ideas rely on pseudoarchaeology, which rejects scientific methodologies, accepted evidence, and data analysis in favor of selective storytelling to promote biased narratives. In this situation, agreed evidence and interpretations are either ignored or otherwise torn from their context and (re)presented to bolster views that are historically and culturally appropriated. Often, these ideas are directly or indirectly tied to modern racist and nationalist ideologies and prejudices. At their heart, they deny that non-European ancient civilizations – from Egyptians to Maya – could possibly be so advanced. It strips away their achievements and ignores the fact their contributions to our history are impressive and inspiring without recourse to mysterious influences.  

“I think that, for the public, the most important thing to consider when they read these things is not to underestimate ancient people and not to assume that ancient equals stupid,” Nielson said. “That is not the case; in terms of ability, in terms of capacity for innovation, there is no difference between you and me and an ancient Egyptian 6,000 years ago, or an ancient Roman. They have – we all have – the same capacity for very creative and innovative problem-solving.”

Source

In another sign of the formerly government-owned carrier's whirlwind transformation under its new owner Tata Group, Air India is testing ChatGPT, OpenAI's popular chatbot, to replace paper-based practices.

The push to modernise underscores the decay left by years of under-investment as Air India looks to shed decades-old bureaucratic processes and recapture customers from Dubai's Emirates and powerful domestic rival IndiGo INGL.NS.

"Frankly the system is almost so bad it's good," Chief Executive Officer Campbell Wilson told Indian airline executives last week, adding that this offered the chance to start from scratch rather than "jury-rig" existing architecture.

Air India is not only reworking every aspect of operations - from systems to supply chains - but integrating four Tata-related airlines, with Air India due to merge with Vistara while low-cost Air India Express and AirAsia India also converge.

Some areas, such as technology, allow for a clean-sheet approach, the 52-year-old New Zealander said, which is why he is putting artificial intelligence (AI) and other tools at the centre of Air India's reboot.

Modern "revenue management" software aims to stay one step ahead of demand, continuously anticipating where people want to go and how much each individual flyer is prepared to pay, rather than the old method of having one fare for each block of seats.

The result is higher revenue per flight, making it low-hanging fruit in the company's transformation.

Fixing the fleet

Wilson faces a tangle of fleets and staff as daunting as Delhi's zig-zagging traffic, leaving the airline's path to profit strewn with obstacles.

"Complexity is the curse of airlines," said Keith McMullan, partner at UK-based consultancy Aviation Strategy, who has experience in the Indian market.

"What they are saying is absolutely right - they should go back to a blank piece of paper, but saying it and actually doing it are two very different things," he said. "The danger is that you keep on fighting legacy-related fires."

Air India's success is critical for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government, which wants to harness its scale and reach to turn India into a global aviation force like Dubai or Singapore.

Wilson's immediate game plan is to tackle pressing problems to get idle planes flying before Air India starts receiving the 470 jets ordered in a record deal last month.

For instance, it is working with Tata Technologies to build locally some plastic components for economy-class seats instead of waiting for suppliers to deliver the obsolete parts.

And it is grabbing what planes it can find on lease while reworking its network strategy to attract Indians overseas.

Any inconsistencies can be ironed out as the turnaround gathers momentum, Wilson said in an interview on the sidelines of the CAPA India conference last week.

"This is a transformation as well as a startup," said Wilson who was appointed to lead the turnaround last year by Tata after it regained control of the carrier.

"In a startup, you just do what you need to do to get going and then you refine along the way," he told Reuters, drawing from this experience of being the founding chief of Singapore Airlines' SIAL.SI budget carrier Scoot.

But he said a clean-sheet approach cannot and should not be applied everywhere.

Merger challenges

Analysts say Wilson's staggered turnaround plans will be severely tested as Air India executes the twin mergers.

Airline mergers in India have had little success with Air India still hobbled by the botched integration of Indian Airlines in 2007. Jet Airways' takeover of Sahara and Kingfisher's merger with Air Deccan hurt them for years.

Jet and Kingfisher are now bankrupt.

Air India's planes are already a mix of Airbus AIR.PA and Boeing BA.N jets with multiple cabin configurations. This will be further complicated when it absorbs the new carriers.

"Managing mixed fleets is a nightmare and given a choice no airline would want to do it," Vinod Kannan, chief executive of Tata-Singapore Airlines joint-venture Vistara, told Reuters.

Once an inspiration for Singapore Airlines, Air India is now far behind, especially on service and punctuality - areas it must improve swiftly if it wants to reclaim share from the Gulf carriers, who carry most of India's international traffic.

There are some early signs of success: Air India's international traffic was up 28 percent in the Oct-Dec quarter versus April-June and its domestic share rose to 9 percent at the end of February from 7.5 percent in mid-2022, according to government data.

Those figures should jump significantly when Air India combines with Vistara, but that deal brings new challenges.

"You can get everything right but the people and the culture ... it is not easy to get that right," Kannan said during an interview at Vistara's office near Delhi where the average age of staff is 29 years.

At Air India it is 50-plus.

"The intent is very much there," Kannan said of the combination, due to be completed by March 2024. "It's now just a matter of execution, which is not easy, but we'll get there."

Source

TOKYO – About 14 storeys beneath bustling Tokyo, or 42m underground, lies a cavern of tunnels and vaults that temporarily stores swelling rainwater to prevent flooding above ground.

Climate change has, however, drastically increased the risks of inundation, given higher odds of stronger typhoons and prolonged bouts of heavy rainfall.

Plans are under way to further grow the city’s operational reservoir capacity to 3.6 million cubic metres – from the current 2.64 million cubic metres – by the end of this decade, with the construction of more underground facilities, officials from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) told The Straits Times on Friday.

On top of that, another 1.5 million cubic metres of reservoir storage is expected to be under construction in 2030, with Tokyo aiming for a total planned capacity of 5.1 million cubic metres, which is enough for 2,040 Olympic-size pools.

ST understands that this number will be reviewed again in fiscal 2023, which begins on Saturday.

This is part of a 6.6 trillion yen (S$66 billion) plan to strengthen the capital’s resilience against flooding, alongside plans to raise coastal sea walls and river embankments.

While Tokyo started out building conventional in-ground reservoirs, land scarcity and sky-high land prices in the capital drove urban planners to dig deep.

The current system of 28 so-called “regulating reservoirs”, with a capacity enough for 1,056 Olympic-size pools, comprises 16 in-ground reservoirs, nine underground vaults, and three underground tunnels.

But Tokyo’s urban planners are increasingly concerned that this existing network is not robust enough to cope with extreme weather events.

Mr Tetsuro Fujisaki, TMG’s director for urban resilience, told ST that Tokyo had a close shave when Typhoon Hagibis slammed directly into the capital in October 2019, bringing a record-breaking total precipitation of 650mm.

While the network of underground vaults and tunnels kept flooding to within 0.85 sq km – with damage to about 600 buildings – it was brought nearly to the brink: One vault was 98 per cent full, while another tunnel, 91 per cent.

“Typhoons and torrential downpours are expected to become increasingly frequent and severe due to climate change,” Mr Fujisaki said, citing the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts of a rise in temperatures by 2 deg C by 2100. TMG’s forecasts show that this will bring 1.1 times more rainfall and a 60cm increase in sea levels to the capital.

Tokyo is sharing its expertise of using underground space to manage flooding risks with regional capitals such as Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta.

A view of the cavernous Kanda River/Ring Road No. 7 underground regulating reservoir. ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM

ST also reported in January that Singapore’s national water agency PUB is exploring the use of underground space to combat inland and coastal flooding.

The buttressing of anti-flooding measures is one of five pillars under the Tokyo Resilience Project announced by the city’s Governor Yuriko Koike in December 2022, ahead of the centennial of the Great Kanto Earthquake on Sept 1, 1923, that flattened Tokyo and killed more than 100,000 people.

The other four pillars of the project, with an overall budget of 15 trillion yen and expected to run into the 2040s, include measures against earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, power and communication disruptions, and infectious diseases.

On a recent visit to the Kanda River/Ring Road No. 7 underground regulating reservoir, Mr Kimihito Mukoyama of the TMG’s Bureau of Construction told ST that the facility has taken in water 44 times since it became operational in 1997.

He compared two typhoons – one in August 1993 and another in October 2004 – to show its impact.

Mr Kimihito Mukoyama of the TMG’s Bureau of Construction in one of the underground reservoirs. ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM

While the 1993 typhoon brought 288mm of rainfall and flooding to an area of 85ha, flooding from the 2004 typhoon was capped at 4ha despite similar precipitation of 284mm.

ST understands that despite measures to reduce flooding damage, TMG officials believe it is next to impossible to eradicate flooding completely during heavy downpours given the capital’s concrete terrain, as some inland areas are far from river drainage systems.

And while in-ground reservoirs are easier and faster to build, Tokyo dug deep underground – the vaults and tunnels run even deeper than its subway lines – especially in central Tokyo’s 23 wards.

At the Kanda River/Ring Road No. 7 facility, it takes about one minute by elevator to reach the reservoir 42m below ground.

The underground tunnel – 4.5km long and with a 12.5m inner diameter – was built over two phases from 1988, and can store about 540,000 cubic metres of water – or enough to fill 216 Olympic-size pools.

When river water threatens to reach a “danger” level during a typhoon or downpour, the gates to the facility will open to allow water to flow underground.

A view of gates at the Zenpukuji River in Tokyo, Japan. ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM

This is pumped back up above ground and into the river, where it will flow into the ocean after the rain stops and the river water level ebbs.

Construction is under way to link the Ring Road No. 7 reservoir with another 3.2km facility at Shirako River in north-western Tokyo through a connecting tunnel.

When completed, the overall facility will measure 13.1km in length and have a total capacity of 1.43 million cubic metres.

TMG is considering further expanding the facility to include rivers such as the Meguro River in the south-east.

A view of a demonstration model of the system at the Zenpukuji River Intake Facility. ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM

Mr Mukoyama told ST that the Kanda River/Ring Road No. 7 reservoir has uses beyond flood prevention.

In the drier months of December to May, about 60,000 cubic metres of water is stored in the reservoir for emergency use in case of water supply disruptions during such disasters as earthquakes.

In such a scenario, the water can be pumped back up to the surface using back-up generators for public use, he said.

Source

SpaceX launched a set of advanced new satellites for the U.S. Space Force Sunday (April 2) after days of delay caused by a last-second abort last week.

A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 10 spacecraft for the Space Force's Space Development Agency (SDA) lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base Sunday at 10:29 a.m. EDT (1429 GMT; 7:29 a.m. local California time). The rocket's first stage booster then returned to Earth safely, touching down at Vandenberg's Landing Zone 4 just under eight minutes after liftoff. 

"This was the second launch and landing for this specific booster and our 183rd overall successful recovery of an orbital class rocket," SpaceX production engineer Jessie Anderson said during live commentary. The rocket previously helped launch a batch of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites to orbit, according to a SpaceX mission description(opens in new tab).

SpaceX did not show live views of the launch or payload fairing separation from the Falcon 9's second stage at the request of the Space Development Agency, with the company ending its livestream shortly after its booster landing.

SpaceX's mission description did not detail when the Tranche 0 spacecraft are scheduled to be deployed. That's not terribly surprising; details about national security missions such as this one are often hard to come by.

We do know a bit about the Tranche 0 spacecraft, however. For example, they are the first members of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA), a constellation the SDA will assemble in low Earth orbit.

"Under the plan, the Space Force will have hundreds of small satellites, with new ones launched every few years to increase resilience and capabilities in orbit," Air and Space Forces Magazine wrote about the PWSA(opens in new tab).

Another Tranche 0 satellite batch is expected to launch in June, according to Air and Space Forces Magazine.

"The entire tranche consists of 28 satellites — 20 for data transport and eight for missile tracking," the outlet wrote. 

Source

Xi Jinping is building a track record of overreaching in his foreign policies. Chinese attempts to gain influence among the Pacific island states fit this increasingly familiar pattern.

Last year, the security agreement that Beijing reached with the Solomon Islands stunned the larger liberal democratic countries upon which the Pacific island states have traditionally relied for help: the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

However, a few months into 2023, we have a better perspective on China’s drive for influence in the Pacific. The full picture suggests Beijing’s attempt to make the Pacific a Chinese lake has stalled and will face strong counter-currents for the foreseeable future. Much of the opposition Beijing faces in the Pacific is stimulated by the Chinese government’s own actions — a classic characteristic of overreach.

The situation is underscored by a statement released this month by David Panuelo, the outgoing president of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). Panuelo accuses the People’s Republic of China of bribery, bullying and “direct threats against my personal safety” as part of Beijing’s effort to bend FSM to the Chinese agenda. Panuelo is using his few remaining weeks in office to warn his fellow island states that the costs of partnership with Beijing outweigh the benefits.

To be sure, the year 2022 saw two important Chinese policy successes in the Pacific. One was the security agreement that Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare signed with Beijing. Although the official text was not made public, in a leaked draft the Solomons invite Chinese security forces to keep order on the islands and welcome regular visits by PRC warships.

From left to right, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, Solomon Islands Foreign Minister Jeremiah Manele, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi attend a signing ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, October 9, 2019. Photo: Thomas Peter / Pool

Deployment of Chinese police would usurp Australia’s past role of supplying police reinforcements to the Solomons when needed. Routine stopovers by the Chinese Navy would help fulfill China’s objective of getting a de facto naval base in the Pacific, which could potentially restrict Australia’s freedom of strategic maneuver.

Secondly, China expanded its influence in Kiribati, which like the Solomons switched its diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China (Taiwan) to the PRC in 2019.  In 2022, Kiribati made an exception to its strict Covid rules to allow a visit by PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi and the 20 members of his delegation. Wang’s group and the Kiribati government signed 10 non-transparent trade deals.

Observers fear China is gaining exclusive fishing rights in the Kiribati-administered Phoenix Islands Protected Area, a marine preserve the size of California. In July 2022, Kiribati announced it would leave an important regional organization, the Pacific Islands Forum, isolating Kiribati from neighboring governments that might counsel against excess engagement with China. The PRC has proposed upgrading a World War II-era airstrip in Kiribati, raising concerns it could also serve as a Chinese military air base.

Overall, however, the PRC arguably lost ground in the Pacific in 2022 and 2023. Chinese infrastructure building in the Pacific reflects a larger problem with the Belt and Road Initiative, which is proving burdensome for Beijing as indications emerge it may be losing money on the total package of its global loans. The momentum of Chinese economic activity in the Pacific showed signs of slowing in 2022.

China’s development aid to the Pacific peaked in 2016 and has declined annually since then. Actual PRC performance in the delivery of assistance often falls short of initial promises.  Some projects are proving difficult to finish. A 2017 deal in which China would build US$4 billion worth of roads in Papua New Guinea, for example, remains in limbo.

Along with the successes, Beijing has suffered some recent setbacks. In May 2022, PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited the region. PRC officials attempted to restrict local media access severely, much the same way the PRC government manages the press inside China.

Wang pitched a sweeping economic, security and training agreement to 10 Pacific states. It included affirmation of the PRC’s “one China” and “non-interference” principles. The response by the Pacific island governments was largely negative, prompting Wang to withdraw the proposal.

In January of this year, Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka said his country was terminating an agreement whereby China trained Fijian police. “Our system of democracy and justice systems are different” from China’s, he said, “so we will go back to those that have similar systems with us,” such as Australia and New Zealand.

Largely in reaction to the China-Solomons agreement, the opponents of expanded PRC influence in the Pacific raised their game in 2022. Both the New Zealand and Australian governments increased their development aid to the region. Australia signed a security deal with Vanuatu to head off China from possibly doing the same.

US President Joe Biden hosted Pacific leaders at a US-Pacific Island Country Summit, a first. The US government announced $810 million in new US assistance to the region; plans to open embassies in the Solomon Islands, Kiribati and Tonga; and the resumption of Peace Corps volunteer operations in Fiji, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) said it will re-establish a mission in Fiji.

Meanwhile, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, comprised of the US, Japan, Australia and India, announced a Maritime Domain Awareness program to augment the capacity of Pacific island states to combat illegal fishing. This Partners in the Blue Pacific initiative, announced in June 2022, aims to coordinate action among the US and its allies to counter what they consider negative PRC activity in the region.

The longer term does not look promising for China in the Pacific. The PRC is at a massive soft power disadvantage vis-à-vis the United States. Pacific island societies are traditionally Christian and favorably inclined toward democratic political systems. 

China, of course, falls flat on both of those counts. Pacific islands have significant diaspora communities in the US, but not in China. Given that rising sea levels are a life-or-death issue for much of the Pacific, China earns no extra points for being the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases (though the US ranks second.)

Photo: Go Greener Oz

Pacific islanders are aware that China’s interest in the Pacific is essentially exploitative. Increasing numbers of islanders are concerned about the downsides of engagement with China: environmental damage, indebtedness, lack of benefit to the local population, worsening of corruption in their countries’ political systems and loss of sovereignty.

Recent research reveals that university students in Papua New Guinea and Fiji — the future elite of their countries — mostly oppose taking additional Chinese aid.

Making non-transparent deals with China goes against the region’s political culture of seeking consensus among the “Pacific family.” The region does not want to become an arena of US-China conflict and tends to blame the new influx of Chinese influence for this danger more than it blames longstanding US influence.

Ironically, Xi-led China has acted more like a neocolonial power than the alleged neocolonial powers of the United States, Australia and New Zealand. These Western democracies now have more than a fair opportunity to shore up their historically close relationships with the Pacific island states.

Source

Space archaeologists are charting humanity’s furthest frontier

Our universe is about 13.8 billion years old, and the observable bubble of that cosmos has a diameter of about 93 billion light-years across. And we all know the famous maxim from Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity: nothing can travel faster than light.

Taken together, this presents us with a perplexing riddle about the nature of the cosmos itself: How can the universe get so mind-bogglingly big in such a short amount of time?

What Does "Faster Than Light" Mean?

There are two ways to answer this question. The two ways are perfectly equivalent mathematically, but one or the other might make more sense to you.

Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity

The first way is to point out that Einstein’s special theory of relativity is a local theory of physics. It tells you that if a rocket were to blast off in front of your face, you will never, ever record its speed as going faster than light.

The very concept of “speed” is only something that you can measure nearby your current position. Special relativity is absolutely silent about the behavior of objects on the far side of the universe – concepts like the speed of light limit simply don’t apply to them, because they’re too far away and special relativity no longer applies.

Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity

To grapple with distant objects, you have to employ a broader, more general theory, like Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes how gravity influences the fabric of space-time.

In other words, the most distant galaxies can apparently go faster than the speed of light because, essentially, the universe doesn’t have to care about the speed of light.

An Expanding Universe

And it’s in general relativity that we get our second way to solve the riddle. According to this model, which is how we currently understand the cosmos, we live in an expanding universe. Every day, our cosmos gets bigger and bigger, with the average distance between galaxies always getting larger.

So far, so good, right? But that expansion isn’t caused by galaxies moving in the universe, but rather the space between the galaxies expanding.

If you were to attach an accelerometer to every galaxy, they would register zero movements (except for small, local motions here and there.)

Locally, no galaxy is moving. But the space between them is. So there are no restrictions here based on the speed of light because they’re literally not moving. There’s no limit to how quickly space can expand (because “expanding” isn’t a motion as far as relativity is concerned) and so the universe can grow as quickly as it pleases.

How Big Is the Observable Universe?

Essentially, the universe is so big because it can expand faster than light. In fact, it’s doing so today. We measure the present-day expansion rate of the universe with something called the Hubble constant, which is around 68 kilometers per second per megaparsec.

That means for every megaparsec in distance you get away from the Milky Way, the universe’s expansion speed will increase by 68 km/s. A galaxy two megaparsecs away appears to recede at 136 km/s, a galaxy ten megaparsecs away will recede at 680 km/s, and so on.

The Hubble constant guarantees that once you reach a certain distance — about 13 billion light-years (a distance known as the Hubble radius) — galaxies will appear to move away from us faster than light.

The same would be true if you and I were to stand on opposite ends of a stretchy rubber band. As long as the rubber band didn’t break, as long as the stretching maintained a constant speed, at some point we would appear to be moving away from each other faster than light. (And yet, once again to emphasize this point, if we were to draw an “X” at our feet, we wouldn’t have moved away from those spots).

Distant Galaxies

The light from galaxies beyond the Hubble radius was released billions of years ago and is only just now reaching the Earth. We calculate where these galaxies are right now based on our understanding of cosmology, and that’s how we’re able to estimate the size of the universe. The fact that they appeared to move faster than light means that any light that they send now will never reach us — because that light will not be able to overcome the expansion of the universe.

Since most of the universe is beyond the Hubble radius, all those galaxies are forever out of reach. As time goes on, those galaxies will, one by one, disappear entirely from view. Not through any cheating of the laws of physics, but through simple (and inevitable) stretching.

Source

At the time, Tesla did contest the finding, stating that there was nothing stopping Tesla workers from joining a union, therefore this can not be considered as a threat, but the courts sided with the NLRB, stating the following:

"Because stock options are part of Tesla's employees' compensation, and nothing in the tweet suggested that Tesla would be forced to end stock options or that the UAW would be the cause of giving up stock options, substantial evidence supports the NLRB's conclusion that the tweet is as an implied threat to end stock options as retaliation for unionization."

The court also ordered that the tweet be deleted, and upheld an order that Tesla should reinstate a worker that was previously sacked for organising a union drive at its factory in Fremont, California, and must provide backpay from when they were dismissed in April 2022 up until the date they are reinstated.

This isn't the first time that Elon Musk and Tesla have found themselves in difficulty regarding its handling of human resources within the company. The NLRB also ruled against Tesla last year when it prevented staff members from wearing clothing with any union logos or badges.

Source: Business Insider

Source

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Sunday successfully carried out the landing experiment of the Reusable Launch Vehicle-Technology Demonstration (RLV-TD) programme at the Aeronautical Test Range in Challakere, Chitradurga.

An Indian Air Forces (IAF) Chinook helicopter was used to drop the RLV-TD from a 4.5 km altitude and ISRO executed the landing experiment of the RLV-TD as planned.

“The RLV took off at 7:10 a.m. by a Chinook helicopter of the IAF as an underslung load and flew at a height of 4.5 km. Once the predetermined pillbox parameters were attained, based on the RLV’s Mission Management and Computer command, the RLV has released mid-air, at a down range of 4.6 km,” ISRO said.

It further added that the release of the RLV was autonomous as it performed approach and landing maneuvers using Integrated Navigation, Guidance, and control system and completed an autonomous landing on the airstrip at 7:40 am.

The space agency also said that in a first in the world, a winged body has been carried to an altitude of 4.5 km by helicopter and released for carrying an autonomous landing on a runway.

According to ISRO the configuration of RLV-TD is similar to that of an aircraft and combines the complexity of both launch vehicles and aircraft.

    RLV's autonomous approach and landing pic.twitter.com/D4tDmk5VN5

    — ISRO (@isro) April 2, 2023

“The winged RLV-TD has been configured to act as a flying test bed to evaluate various technologies, namely, hypersonic flight, autonomous landing, and powered cruise flight. In the future, this vehicle will be scaled up to become the first stage of India’s reusable two-stage orbital launch vehicle,” ISRO said.

RLV-TD consists of a fuselage (body), a nose cap, double delta wings, and twin vertical tails. It also features symmetrically placed active control surfaces called Elevons and Rudder.

RLV-TD was successfully flight tested on May 23, 2016, from Sriharikota validating the critical technologies such as autonomous navigation, guidance and control, reusable thermal protection system, and re-entry mission management.

During this mission the vehicle landed ona hypothetical runway over the Bay of Bengal.

Sunday’s early morning landing experiment is the second in the series of experimental flights of the programme.

One of the key objectives of mastering the RLV technology is to achieve low cost access to space.

• ISRO) on Sunday successfully carried out the landing experiment of the Reusable Launch Vehicle-Technology Demonstration (RLV-TD) programme at the Aeronautical Test Range in Challakere, Chitradurga.

• The space agency also said that in a first in the world, a winged body has been carried to an altitude of 4.5 km by helicopter and released for carrying an autonomous landing on a runway.

• One of the key objectives of mastering the RLV technology is to achieve low cost access to space.

Source

Overall, 85% of Americans say they go online on a daily basis. That figure includes the 31% who report going online almost constantly, as well as 48% who say they go online several times a day and 6% who go online about once a day. Some 8% go online several times a week or less often, while 7% of adults say they do not use the internet at all.

How we did this

Pew Research Center has a history of studying internet usage. This report focuses on how often Americans go online. The Center surveyed 1,502 U.S. adults from Jan. 25 to Feb. 8, 2021, by cellphone and landline phone. The survey was conducted by interviewers under the direction of Abt Associates and is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, education and other categories. Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

Adults under the age of 50 are at the vanguard of the constantly connected: 44% of 18- to 49-year-olds say they go online almost constantly. By comparison, just 22% of those ages 50 to 64 and even smaller shares of those 65 and older (8%) say they use the internet at this frequency.

While the share of 18- to 29-year-olds who say they use the internet almost constantly has risen 9 percentage points since 2018, it remains unchanged since 2019. Meanwhile, the share of constantly online Americans ages 30 to 49 has risen 14 points since 2015, and the share of 50- to 64-year-olds has risen from 12% in 2015 to 22% in 2021. The share of Americans ages 65 and older saying this has not grown since the Center began asking this question in 2015.

Other demographic groups that report almost always going online include college-educated adults, adults who live in higher-income households and urban residents.

Some 42% of adults with a college degree or more education go online almost constantly, compared with 23% of adults with a high school diploma or less education. At the same time, the shares of White, Black and Hispanic adults who report using the internet almost constantly are statistically the same. Some 37% of Black adults say this, while 36% of Hispanic adults and 28% of White adults report going online on an almost-constant basis. The share of Hispanic adults who are almost always online has risen 17 points since 2015, while there has been no growth for White and Black adults during this time period.

While 40% of adults with an annual household income of $75,000 or more say they use the internet almost constantly, this is true for just 27% of those living in households earning less than $30,000 a year. Adults who live in urban areas are the most likely to say they go online almost constantly, compared with suburban residents and an even smaller share of those who live in rural areas.

CORRECTION (March 2021): A previous version of this post incorrectly listed partisan affiliation as a way in which the survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. population. None of the study findings or conclusions are affected.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published on Dec. 8, 2015, and later updated on July 25, 2019, by Andrew Perrin and Madhu Kumar. Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

Source

Physical labour is exhausting. A long run or a hard day’s sweat depletes the body’s energy stores, resulting in a sense of fatigue. Mental labour can also be exhausting. Even resisting that last glistening chocolate-chip cookie after a long day at a consuming desk job is difficult. Cognitive control, the umbrella term encompassing mental exertion, self-control and willpower, also fades with effort. But unlike the mechanism of physical fatigue, the cause of cognitive fatigue has been poorly understood.

Previous accounts were incomplete. One of the most widely known, the biological one, draws from what is known about muscular fatigue. It posits that exerting cognitive control uses up energy in the form of glucose. At the end of a day spent intensely cogitating, the brain is metaphorically running on fumes. The problem with this version of events is that the energy cost associated with thinking is minimal. One analysis of previous studies suggests that cognitively overworked and “depleted” brains use less than one-tenth of a Tic-Tac’s worth of additional glucose.

If cognitive fatigue is not caused by a lack of energy, then what explains it? A team of scientists led by Antonius Wiehler of Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital, in Paris, looked at things from what is termed a neurometabolic point of view. They hypothesise that cognitive fatigue results from an accumulation of a certain chemical in the region of the brain underpinning control. That substance, glutamate, is an excitatory neurotransmitter that abounds in the central nervous systems of mammals and plays a role in a multitude of activities, such as learning, memory and the sleep-wake cycle.

In other words, cognitive work results in chemical changes in the brain, which present behaviourally as fatigue. This, therefore, is a signal to stop working in order to restore balance to the brain. In their new paper in Current Biology, the researchers describe an experiment they undertook to explain how all this happens.

To induce cognitive fatigue, a group of participants were asked to perform just over six hours of various tasks that involve thinking. Half were assigned easy things to do and half hard ones. For example, in one task, letters were displayed on a computer screen every second or so. Those in the easy group had to remember whether the current letter matched the previous letter or, for the hard group, the one shown three letters earlier.

Periodically, throughout the experiment, participants were asked to make decisions that could reveal their cognitive fatigue. They might be asked whether they would want to earn €50 ($52) for cycling on an exercise bike for 30 minutes at power level six (a high-cost, high-reward task) or €37 for 30 minutes at power level two (low-cost, low-reward). Participants who were assigned the more challenging cognitive-control tasks were more likely to opt for the low-cost, low-reward options, especially towards the end of the six hours. In addition, the hard-task participants invested less effort in making that decision. Their eyes were the clue. The pupil initially constricts when participants are shown the two options.

The time it takes for the pupil to subsequently dilate reflects the amount of mental exerted. The pupil-dilation times of participants assigned hard tasks fell off significantly as the experiment progressed.

During the experiment the scientists used a technique called magnetic-resonance spectroscopy to measure biochemical changes in the brain. In particular, they focused on the lateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain associated with cognitive control. If their hypothesis was to hold, there would be a measurable chemical difference between the brains of hard- and easy-task participants. And indeed, that is what they found. Their analysis indicated higher concentrations of glutamate in the synapses of a hard-task participant’s lateral prefrontal cortex. Thus showing cognitive fatigue is associated with increased glutamate in the prefrontal cortex. Dr Wiehler speculates that this is the result of a mechanism in the brain that is computing a sort of cost-benefit analysis, with fatigue and increased glutamate adding to the cost of mental effort.

There may well be ways to reduce the glutamate levels, and no doubt some researchers will now be looking at potions that might hack the brain in a way to artificially speed up its recovery from fatigue. Meanwhile, the best solution is the natural one: sleep.

Source

When innovation goes south: The tech that never quite worked out

Sunday, April 2

• Sunday is the busiest day of the week this time, with three launches planned. The first mission is Space Pioneer’s Tianlong 2 rocket which is launching on its first flight carrying several CubeSats, including one called Jinta. The Jinta CubeSat will have remote sensing capabilities and will be used to verify important technologies. The mission will launch at 2:50 a.m. UTC from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre.
• The second launch of the day comes from another private Chinese company called iSpace. It will be launching its Hyperbola SQX-1 rocket with an unknown payload, also from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre, but a few hours later at 5:00 a.m. UTC.
• Lastly, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying 10 Tranche 0 demo satellites for the US military’s Space Development Agency. These demo satellites will lay the foundations of a future satellite constellation of military missile tracking and data relay satellites. This mission will launch from Vandenberg AFB at 2:29 p.m. UTC.

Wednesday, April 5

• We have just one mission locked in on Wednesday and it’s from a private Chinese company called ExPace. It will be launching a Kuaizhou 1A rocket with an unknown payload. It’s due to take off at 4:00 a.m. UTC from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre.

Friday, April 7

• The last launch of the week is another Falcon 9 from SpaceX, this time carrying the Intelsat 40e communications satellite for Intelsat. It will provide coverage across North and Central America to Intelsat customers so they can benefit from in-flight connectivity and mobile communications services. The mission takes off at 4:39 a.m. UTC from Cape Canaveral.

Recap

• The first mission last week was the launch of a GSLV Mk-III rocket carrying 36 OneWeb satellites to space where they’ll provide internet connectivity on Earth.

• Next, Israel launched a Shavit-2 rocket carrying the Ofek-13 satellite from the Palmachim Airbase. The satellite will provide metre observation capabilities and enable all-weather Earth observation for the country’s Ministry of Defence.

• On Wednesday, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying 56 Starlink satellites which will beam internet to Earth. It also landed the first stage of the Falcon 9.

• Next, we saw the launch of a Long March 2D carrying four PIESAT-1 satellites. They will provide commercial remote sensing data services.

• The final launch was a Long March 4C carrying a Yaogan-34 remote sensing satellite which will help to do land surveys, urban planning, crop yield estimations, and disaster prevention and mitigation.

That’s all for this week, check in next time!

TWIRL 108: SpaceX Falcon 9 to launch demo satellites for US Space Development Agency

Deployment of LSPM junction box 1.

IN2P3/CNRS

 

In 1962, one of the world's first underwater research laboratories and human habitats was established off the coast of Marseilles, France, at a depth of 10 meters. The Conshelf 1 project consisted of a steel structure that hosted two men for a week.

 

Now, more than 60 years later, another underwater laboratory is being set up not far from Marseilles, this time to study both the sea and sky. Unlike the Conshelf habitat, the Laboratoire Sous-marin Provence Méditerranée (LSPM) won't be manned by humans. Located 40 km off the coast of Toulon at a depth of 2,450 meters, it is Europe’s first remotely operated underwater laboratory.

Physics under the sea

Currently, three junction boxes capable of powering several instruments and retrieving data are at the heart of LSPM. The boxes, each measuring 6 meters long and 2 meters high, are connected to a power system on land via a 42-kilometer-long electro-optical cable. The optical portion of this cable is used to collect data from the junction boxes.

 

Two of the junction boxes are dedicated to the ORCA section of the Kilometer Cube Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT). ORCA comprises a three-dimensional array of 2,070 spheres, each containing 31 detectors called photomultiplier tubes. These spheres will be arranged on 115 lines anchored to the ocean floor and held taut by submerged floats. Currently, 15 lines have been installed.

 

ORCA’s twin site, ARCA, is located off the coast of Sicily at a depth of 3,400 meters. Collectively, the ORCA and ARCA sites occupy more than one cubic kilometer of water.

 

“These gigantic arrays of detectors can detect neutrinos emanating from the Southern Hemisphere sky. On the rare occasions [the neutrinos] interact with water molecules, they produce a bluish flash of light in the darkness of the ocean abyss,” Paschal Coyle, director of research at the Centre de Physique des Particules de Marseille and director of LSPM told Ars Technica. “Detecting this light allows us to measure the directions and energies of the neutrinos.”

Sensing sound

The third junction box is dedicated to marine science studies, including the so-called Albatross line, which consists of two 1-km-long inductive cables anchored to the ocean floor. These cables carry sensors to measure water temperature and sea currents, as well as oxygen and pH levels.

 

The Geoazur Laboratory, an earth science institute based near Cannes, has developed a broadband seismograph that has been placed in the sediment on the ocean floor, allowing real-time acquisition of seismological data. Besides the seismograph, the Geoazur researchers have transformed one of the optical fibres of the 42-km-long main electro-optical cable into a giant array of seismo-acoustic sensors.

 

These aren’t conventional sensorsbut rather defects in the glass that arise during the manufacturing of the optical fibre. “These defects exist in the lattice of all optical fibres. This is due to the processes of heating and pulling of the glass. As a result of these defects, some part of the light gets sent back toward the transmitter,” Anthony Sladen of Geoazur laboratory said. He added that a seismic or acoustic wave either stretches or shrinks the optical fibre, thereby altering the path of the light inside it. “By measuring this change, we can measure both seismic and acoustic waves,” Sladen said.

 

Sladen and his team have turned the defects in the glass lattice into 6,000 virtual sensors that can provide data on earthquakes and underwater noise generated by ships and waves in real time.

 

Another instrumentation consists of an array of hydrophones that can detect and record the sounds of whales and dolphins at different frequencies. The data will help scientists understand how often these cetaceans frequent the site, as well as their vocal behavior.

More to come

While the above instruments are operational, the laboratory’s other devices, which have already been installed on the ocean floor, are expected to be up and running by this summer.

 

Prominent among them is a robot called BathyBot, developed by the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography, which can move on the ocean floor thanks to caterpillar tracks. BathyBot is equipped with sensors to measure temperature, oxygen, carbon dioxide concentrations, current speed, and direction, as well as salinity and particle concentration.

 

Controlled from the shore and guided by an integrated camera, the robot will also be able to climb a 2-meter-high artificial reef and measure the properties of the water away from the ocean floor sediment.

 

Other instruments expected to start operating around the same timeframe include a gamma-ray spectrometer for monitoring radioactivity levels and a single-photon stereo camera to measure bioluminescence of deep-sea organisms.

 

According to Coyle, since the deep sea is poorly understood, “installations such as LSPM can enhance our understanding of many different phenomena.”

 

“A key thing to study is the long-term effect of global warming. The LSPM observations already indicate a rise in sea temperature and decrease of oxygen levels even at these depths,” he said.

 

Dhananjay Khadilkar is a journalist based in Paris.

 

A remotely operated lab is taking shape 2.5 km under the sea

On the Friday afternoon after Thanksgiving, Randal Quran Reid was driving his white Jeep to his mother’s home outside Atlanta when he was pulled over on a busy highway. A police officer approached his vehicle and asked for his driver’s license. Mr. Reid had left it at home, but he volunteered his name. After asking Mr. Reid if he had any weapons, the officer told him to step out of the Jeep and handcuffed him with the help of two other officers who had arrived.

“What did I do?” Mr. Reid asked. The officer said he had two theft warrants out of Baton Rouge and Jefferson Parish, a district on the outskirts of New Orleans. Mr. Reid was confused; he said he had never been to Louisiana.

Mr. Reid, a transportation analyst, was booked at the DeKalb County jail, to await extradition from Georgia to Louisiana. It took days to find out exactly what he was accused of: using stolen credit cards to buy designer purses.

“I’m locked up for something I have no clue about,” Mr. Reid, 29, said.

His parents made phone calls, hired lawyers and spent thousands of dollars to figure out why the police thought he was responsible for the crime, eventually discovering it was because Mr. Reid bore a resemblance to a suspect who had been recorded by a surveillance camera. The case eventually fell apart and the warrants were recalled, but only after Mr. Reid spent six days in jail and missed a week of work.

Mr. Reid’s wrongful arrest appears to be the result of a cascade of technologies — beginning with a bad facial recognition match — that are intended to make policing more effective and efficient but can also make it far too easy to apprehend the wrong person for a crime. None of the technologies are mentioned in official documents, and Mr. Reid was not told exactly why he had been arrested, a typical but troubling practice, according to legal experts and public defenders.

“In a democratic society, we should know what tools are being used to police us,” said Jennifer Granick, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union.

A Contract With Clearview AI

In a panic, Mr. Reid’s family immediately retained an Atlanta lawyer from the Cochran Firm. He could not get Mr. Reid out of jail, and he struggled to gather more information. He suggested that the family members hire someone in Louisiana, so they cold-called law firms in Jefferson Parish and Baton Rouge until they found Thomas Calogero, a criminal defense lawyer. They retained him that Sunday.

Mr. Calogero found out that Mr. Reid was accused of the summer thefts of two Chanel purses and a brown Louis Vuitton bag, collectively worth almost $13,000, from Second Act, a consignment store on the outskirts of New Orleans. Mr. Calogero went to the store and talked to the owner, who showed him a still from a surveillance camera. He realized that one of the alleged fraudsters looked like Mr. Reid, but the man was heavier.

“The guy had big arms, and my client doesn’t,” Mr. Calogero said. A Jefferson Parish sheriff’s officer insisted it was a “positive match,” language that made Mr. Calogero believe that facial recognition technology had been used, and he spoke to the New Orleans news outlet NOLA.com about what he believed had happened.

A person with direct knowledge of the investigation confirmed to The New York Times that facial recognition technology had been used to identify Mr. Reid. Yet none of the documents used to arrest him disclosed that.

Andrew Bartholomew, the Jefferson Parish financial crimes detective who sought the warrant to arrest Mr. Reid, wrote in an affidavit only that he had been “advised by a credible source” that the “heavyset black male” was Mr. Reid. Reached by phone, Detective Bartholomew declined to comment.

“It’s untenable to me as a matter of basic criminal procedure that people who are subject to arrest are not informed of what got them there,” said Barry Friedman, a constitutional law professor at New York University.

The Sheriff’s Office has a contract with one facial recognition vendor: Clearview AI, which it pays $25,000 a year. According to documents obtained by The Times in a public records request, the department first signed a contract with Clearview in 2019.

Clearview scraped billions of photos from the public web, including social media sites, to create a face-based search engine now used by law enforcement agencies. Mr. Reid has many public photos on the web linked to his name, including on LinkedIn and Facebook. The public information office for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office did not respond to requests for comment about the use of Clearview AI.

The company’s chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, said an arrest should not be based on a facial recognition search alone.

“Even if Clearview AI came up with the initial result, that is the beginning of the investigation by law enforcement to determine, based on other factors, whether the correct person has been identified,” he said. “More than one million searches have been conducted using Clearview AI. One false arrest is one too many, and we have tremendous empathy for the person who was wrongfully accused.”

Detective Bartholomew’s identification of Mr. Reid led to a second warrant for his arrest in East Baton Rouge Parish, where, according to a police report, the man he resembled had used a stolen credit card to buy a $2,800 Chanel bag at another consignment store.

The Baton Rouge Police Department “trusted the information” from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, a department spokesman, Sgt. L’Jean McKneely, said. “What methods they used, we do not know,” he added.

Law enforcement officers generally say they do not need to mention the use of facial recognition technology because it is only a lead in a case and not the sole reason for someone’s arrest, protecting it from exposure as if it were a confidential informant. But according to Clare Garvie, an expert on the police use of facial recognition, there are four other publicly known cases of wrongful arrests that appear to have involved little investigation beyond a face match, all involving Black men. She has come across a handful of other examples across the country, she said, in her work with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

For Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, a racial justice advocacy group, the technology exacerbates the problems of what he called “racist policing.”

“If facial recognition was misclassifying white people, white men or white women, it would not be on the shelf,” he said. “Some of us and some of our communities are expendable.”

‘Rubber-Stamping Warrants’

To get a warrant to arrest someone, an officer must convince a judge there is probable cause — meaning, essentially, there is a good reason to do so — and get the judge’s signature. In the past, that meant an officer had to go to court, or even meet a judge at a diner in the middle of the night if the case was urgent. That is a moment when questions are asked about the strength of the evidence, legal experts say.

But the friction of getting a warrant has been eased by technology. The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office uses an “eWarrant” service, CloudGavel, for which it paid $39,800 last year. It’s an app that allows officers to request digital signatures from judges. “Law enforcement officers can now get an arrest warrant approved in minutes,” the company’s website states.

Many civil liberties advocates actually favor electronic warrants; they allow judges to more easily review decisions made by the police and eliminate a complaint from officers that it’s too hard to get a warrant. But advocates said it would be worrisome if judges were simply clicking a button without asking questions or providing sufficient scrutiny.

“There are real questions about whether it increases the incidence of judges rubber-stamping warrants,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a deputy director with the A.C.L.U.’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

A criminal court judge signed off on Mr. Reid’s arrest warrant at 4:28 p.m. on July 18. CloudGavel “accommodates” judicial scrutiny, said Casey Roussel, the president and chief operating officer of CloudGavel’s parent company, FusionStak, in an email. He said judges could “connect with the officer via phone or video to discuss any concerns the judge may have about the warrant.”

In Mr. Reid’s case, it is unclear if the detective spoke with the judge or explained the nature of the “credible source.” The judge declined to comment.

A ‘Random Query’

“I was driving the normal speed, and I wasn’t doing anything crazy,” Mr. Reid said of the day of his arrest.

Body camera footage obtained by The Times reveals that four police vehicles were involved in pulling him over. The two warrants for his arrest asked for “full extradition.” To the law enforcement officers in Georgia, Mr. Reid would have appeared to be a fugitive from Louisiana justice.

Why exactly Mr. Reid and his white Jeep attracted the DeKalb County police’s attention that day is unclear. The arresting officer wrote in an incident report that he had learned about Mr. Reid’s warrants from a “random GCIC/NCIC query of the vehicle tag,” referring to the National Crime Information Center, an F.B.I. repository of wanted persons and vehicles, and the Georgia Crime Information Center. It’s possible the officer saw Mr. Reid driving by and, for some reason, decided to run his license plate.

But Molly Kleinman, the director of a technology policy research center at the University of Michigan, said many kinds of surveillance technologies on the highway could have alerted the officer to Mr. Reid’s presence on the “hot list,” including toll pass readers and automated license plate readers, which Atlanta has in the hundreds on roads and police vehicles. (A spokesman for the DeKalb County police said a license plate reader was not used.)

“There’s a lot of secrecy about all of these surveillance technologies and the ways that they’re used,” Ms. Kleinman said. “This case is a perfect example that even when the tool works as intended, if the underlying data is flawed it can still harm innocent people.”

Not Involved

Mr. Reid sat in DeKalb County jail for nearly a week. He could not be released on bond because he was supposed to be held until Louisiana officers came to pick him up for prosecution in their state. His Jeep was towed and impounded.

“Imagine you’re living your life and somewhere far away says you committed a crime,” Mr. Reid said. “And you know you’ve never been there.”

His lawyer, Mr. Calogero, gathered photos and videos of Mr. Reid from his family, hoping to more clearly show the Louisiana police what Mr. Reid looks like, and sent them to the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday, Nov. 30, five days after the arrest. An hour later, Mr. Calogero said, an officer called to inform him that the police were withdrawing the warrant because they had noticed a mole on Mr. Reid’s face that the alleged purse thief did not have.

Mr. Reid’s detainment was “unfortunate by all means,” Sheriff Joseph P. Lopinto III of Jefferson Parish said. “As soon as we realized it wasn’t him, we moved mountains in order to get him out of jail.”

A Jefferson Parish judge recalled the warrant on Wednesday afternoon. “After further investigation, it was learned Randal Reid was not involved in the crimes committed,” the recall said. Mr. Reid was released late Thursday night, almost a full week after being pulled over. He is considering filing a wrongful-arrest lawsuit.

“Thousands of dollars for something I didn’t do,” he said.

Mr. Robinson, the Color of Change president, said most people in the United States did not have thousands of dollars to clear their names. These people will have “names and stories we will never know,” he said. “They will languish in jails and prisons.”

Source

Q: Whenever I’m trying to fall asleep at night, a bunch of anxious thoughts and embarrassing memories come racing into my mind, preventing me from drifting off. Why does this happen and is there anything I can do about it?

Whether you’re ticking through tomorrow’s to-do list or dwelling on past regrets, it’s normal for worries and fears to surface at night, experts say.

According to an October 2022 survey of 3,192 of adults in the United States, for instance, 34 percent of respondents reported feeling anxious or nervous within the past month. And 32 percent said that their stress had led to changes in their sleeping habits, including difficulties with falling asleep.

There’s an evolutionary purpose to evening anxiety, said Dr. Rafael Pelayo, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in sleep medicine at Stanford Medicine and author of the book, “How to Sleep.” “Sleep is the most dangerous thing we can do,” he said, and being hyper-aware of our surroundings allowed our ancestors to spot any incoming threats.

But when your anxiety keeps you awake, you not only miss out on the health benefits of sleep, you might kick off a vicious cycle of poor sleep and increased anxiety that can be hard to break.

“Sleep loss is often a precursor for anxiety disorders, and anxiety leads to sleep loss,” said Dr. Sarah Chellappa, a neuroscientist at the University of Cologne in Germany.

Here’s what the experts say you can do if your overactive mind is keeping you awake.

The cruel connection between anxiety and sleep

Anxiety can surface at any time, but there are a few reasons it may feel more intense at bedtime, said Candice Alfano, director of the Sleep and Anxiety Center of Houston at the University of Houston. “Most of us are incredibly busy during the waking hours; our attention is pulled in many different directions, so we have limited time to think about our worries,” she said. “But at night, while we lie in bed, there are few distractions from the thoughts that make us anxious.”

This can lead to a frustrating conundrum: We can’t sleep because those anxious thoughts are making us think we are unsafe, which makes us more alert by raising our heart rates and tightening our muscles.

Essentially, the body can’t quite tell if the source of our troubles is a physical threat, like a tiger about to pounce, or an upcoming presentation you’re nervous about making at work — it just gets the memo to stay awake.

“At a basic level,” Dr. Pelayo said, “feeling in danger or under stress are the same to the brain.”

Worse, sleep loss has been shown to beget more anxious thoughts. In a 2019 review of 13 studies published in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews, researchers concluded that insomnia was a significant predictor of anxiety, among other mental health conditions. The researchers explained that sleep helps us distinguish between what’s threatening and what’s safe, so without adequate shut-eye, we aren’t as good at responding to stress, fear and anxiety. This could, in turn, mean more negative thoughts that can interfere with sleep.

The good news is that solid sleep can also make your anxiety better over time, experts say.

How to slow anxious thoughts at night

Since better sleep helps decrease anxiety, general good sleep hygiene practices — like going to bed and waking up at the same times every day and avoiding screens before bedtime — can help on both fronts, Dr. Alfano said.

The tips below, however, might help you reduce anxious bedtime thinking.

Establish a caffeine cut-off. Caffeine’s half-life is approximately five hours, meaning if you have an eight-ounce cup of coffee at 4 p.m., you’ll still have half that cup’s caffeine in your system by 9 p.m. That’s a problem because caffeine not only keeps you awake, it’s also known for making anxiety symptoms worse, Dr. Chellappa said. Instead, consider sipping your last cup of coffee at least 10 hours before your bedtime.

Put your worries onto paper. If you’re prone to overthinking at night, both Dr. Alfano and Dr. Pelayo recommended writing in a journal at the end of the day.

If your ballooning to-do list is making you stressed, Dr. Pelayo said, try writing down all of your competing thoughts and tasks, like: “I need to buy milk.” “I need a new job.” “I never thanked Uncle Joe for a birthday present five years ago.” Doing so can keep the thoughts from creeping up later and, if they do pop up at night, you now have a calming response: Everything important is already captured in the journal.

Just focusing on your responsibilities might help make sleep a little easier. In a 2019 study, researchers found that those without clinical anxiety who spent five minutes writing to-do lists before going to sleep, fell asleep faster than those who wrote in their journals about completed tasks.

Give yourself something to look forward to. “If you lie in bed thinking, I hate my job, I hate my commute, then of course you’re not going to sleep well,” Dr. Pelayo said. But if you can give yourself something to look forward to in the morning — a nice breakfast, a walk, your favorite podcast — you have positive thoughts to draw on, he explained, which can replace some of the more negative ones keeping you awake.

Optimism in general has been linked with better sleeping. In a 2019 study of 3,548 young adults, for instance, researchers found that people who scored higher on a questionnaire that measured optimism were more likely to report better sleep quality than those with lower scores.

Incorporating a few of these suggestions might help quiet your bedtime thoughts, experts explained, but if you’re consistently waking up tired, ask your doctor to refer you to a sleep medicine specialist who can help you explore potential causes. And, if your sleeplessness is stressing you out, Dr. Pelayo had some words of comfort: “I want people to know that they don’t have to feel this way,” he said. “I tell my patients all the time, ‘If you’ve ever slept well, you can sleep well again.’”

Source

Fermented foods like yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut and kombucha have long been dietary staples in many parts of the world. Indeed, for thousands of years, different cultures relied on fermentation to produce bread and cheese, preserve meats and vegetables, and enhance the flavors and textures of many foods.

Now scientists are discovering that fermented foods may have intriguing effects on our gut. Eating these foods may alter the makeup of the trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that inhabit our intestinal tracts, collectively known as the gut microbiome. They may also lead to lower levels of body-wide inflammation, which scientists increasingly link to a range of diseases tied to aging.

The latest findings come from a study published in the journal Cell that was carried out by researchers at Stanford University. They wanted to see what impact fermented foods might have on the gut and immune system, and how it might compare to eating a relatively healthy diet full of fruits, vegetables, beans, whole grains and other fiber-rich foods.

For the study, the researchers recruited 36 healthy adults and randomly split them into groups. One group was assigned to increase their consumption of fiber-rich plant foods, while a second group was instructed to eat plenty of fermented foods, including yogurt, sauerkraut, kefir, kombucha and kimchi. These foods are made by combining milk, vegetables and other raw ingredients with microorganisms like yeast and bacteria. As a result, fermented foods are often teeming with live microorganisms, as well as byproducts of the fermentation process that include various vitamins and lactic and citric acids.

The participants followed the diets for 10 weeks while the researchers tracked markers of inflammation in their blood and looked for changes in their gut microbiomes. By the end of the study, the first group had doubled their fiber intake, from about 22 grams per day to 45 grams daily, which is roughly triple the average American intake. The second group went from consuming almost no fermented foods to eating about six servings a day. Although six servings might sound like a lot, it does not take much to get there: One cup of yogurt for breakfast, a 16-ounce bottle of kombucha tea at lunch, and a cup of kimchi at dinner amounts to six daily servings.

After the 10-week period, neither group had significant changes in measures of overall immune health. But the fermented food group showed marked reductions in 19 inflammatory compounds. Among the compounds that showed declines was interleukin-6, an inflammatory protein that tends to be elevated in diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. The high-fiber group, in contrast, did not show an overall decrease in the same inflammatory compounds.

For people in the fermented foods group, the reductions in inflammatory markers coincided with changes in their guts. They began to harbor a wider and more diverse array of microbes, which is similar to what other recent studies of people who eat a variety of fermented foods have shown. The new research found that the more fermented foods people ate, the greater the number of microbial species that bloomed in their guts. Yet, surprisingly, just 5 percent of the new microbes that were detected in their guts appeared to come directly from the fermented foods that they ate.

“The vast majority came from somewhere else, and we don’t know where,” said Justin Sonnenburg, an author of the new study and a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford. “I think there were either low level microbes below the level of detection that bloomed, or the fermented foods did something that allowed for the rapid recruitment of other microbes into the gut environment.”

Higher levels of gut microbiome diversity are generally thought to be a good thing. Studies have linked it to lower rates of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, metabolic disease and other ills. People who live in industrialized nations tend to have less microbial diversity in their guts than those living in more traditional, nonindustrialized societies. Some scientists speculate that modern lifestyle factors like  diets high in processed foods, chronic stress and physical inactivity may suppress the growth of potentially beneficial gut microbes. Others argue that the correlation between diverse microbiomes and good health is overblown, and that the low levels of microbiome diversity typically seen in people living in developed nations may be suitably adapted to a modern world.

One subject on which there is usually little disagreement among nutrition experts is the benefits of a high-fiber diet. In large studies, people who consume more fruits, vegetables, nuts and other fiber-rich foods tend to have lower rates of mortality and less chronic disease. Fiber is considered good for gut health: Microbes in the gut feed on fiber and use it to produce beneficial byproducts like short-chain fatty acids, which can reduce inflammation. Some studies also suggest that eating a lot of fiber promotes a diverse microbiome.

The Stanford researchers expected that consuming a high-fiber diet would have a big impact on the makeup of the microbiome. Instead, the high-fiber group tended to show few changes in their microbial diversity. But when the scientists looked closer, they discovered something striking. People who started out with higher levels of microbial diversity had reductions in inflammation on the high-fiber diet, while those who had the least microbial diversity had slight increases in inflammation when they ate more fiber.

The researchers said they suspect that the people with low microbiome diversity may have lacked the right microbes to digest all the fiber they consumed. One finding that supports this: The high-fiber group had unexpectedly large amounts of carbohydrates in their stool that had not been degraded by their gut microbes. One possibility is that their guts needed more time to adapt to the high-fiber diet. But ultimately this finding could explain why some people experience bloating and other uncomfortable gastrointestinal issues when they eat a lot of fiber, said Christopher Gardner, another author of the study.

“Maybe the challenges that some people have with fiber is that their microbiomes aren’t prepared for it,” said Dr. Gardner, the director of nutrition studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center.

One question that the researchers hope to answer in the future is what would happen if people simultaneously ate more fermented foods as well as more fiber. Would that increase the variety of microbes in their guts and improve their ability to digest more fiber? Would the two have a synergistic effect on inflammation?

Suzanne Devkota, the director of Microbiome Research at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the new study, said it has long been assumed that eating fermented foods had health benefits but that the new research provides some of the first “hard evidence” that it can influence the gut and inflammation. “We were always a little reluctant to make comments about fermented foods being beneficial, particularly from an inflammatory standpoint, because there was really no data behind that,” she said.

Dr. Devkota cautioned that the findings should not deter anyone from eating fiber-rich foods, because fiber has so many health benefits beyond its impact on the gut. She consumes a lot of fiber and fermented foods herself and often recommends that patients at Cedars-Sinai who have conditions like inflammatory bowel disease do the same. “This doesn’t change what I’ve been recommending,” she added. “But I’d probably switch a little more toward encouraging people to consume fermented foods because now I have data to point to that suggests there’s some anti-inflammatory properties.”

Dr. Devkota said more research was needed to better understand the links between fermented foods and overall health. But she suggested that one reason fermented foods may be beneficial is because the microorganisms they contain are constantly producing many nutrients during the fermentation process. “A jar of sauerkraut is a living food with stuff that is actively being produced, like vitamins,” she said. “When you eat a fermented food, you’re consuming all of those microbially produced chemicals that are good for you.”

Source

I first met Sam Altman in the summer of 2019, days after Microsoft agreed to invest $1 billion in his three-year-old start-up, OpenAI. At his suggestion, we had dinner at a small, decidedly modern restaurant not far from his home in San Francisco.

Halfway through the meal, he held up his iPhone so I could see the contract he had spent the last several months negotiating with one of the world’s largest tech companies. It said Microsoft’s billion-dollar investment would help OpenAI build what was called artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.

Later, as Mr. Altman sipped a sweet wine in lieu of dessert, he compared his company to the Manhattan Project. As if he were chatting about tomorrow’s weather forecast, he said the U.S. effort to build an atomic bomb during the Second World War had been a “project on the scale of OpenAI — the level of ambition we aspire to.”

He believed A.G.I. would bring the world prosperity and wealth like no one had ever seen. He also worried that the technologies his company was building could cause serious harm — spreading disinformation, undercutting the job market. Or even destroying the world as we know it.

“I try to be upfront,” he said. “Am I doing something good? Or really bad?”

In 2019, this sounded like science fiction.

In 2023, people are beginning to wonder if Sam Altman was more prescient than they realized.

Now that OpenAI has released an online chatbot called ChatGPT, anyone with an internet connection is a click away from technology that will answer burning questions about organic chemistry, write a 2,000-word term paper on Marcel Proust and his madeleine or even generate a computer program that drops digital snowflakes across a laptop screen — all with a skill that seems human.

As people realize that this technology is also a way of spreading falsehoods or even persuading people to do things they should not do, some critics are accusing Mr. Altman of reckless behavior.

This past week, more than a thousand A.I. experts and tech leaders called on OpenAI and other companies to pause their work on systems like ChatGPT, saying they present “profound risks to society and humanity.”

And yet, when people act as if Mr. Altman has nearly realized his long-held vision, he pushes back.

“The hype over these systems — even if everything we hope for is right long term — is totally out of control for the short term,” he told me on a recent afternoon. There is time, he said, to better understand how these systems will ultimately change the world.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, whose company created an online chatbot called ChatGPT, and has received more than $13 billion in investment from Microsoft.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Many industry leaders, A.I. researchers and pundits see ChatGPT as a fundamental technological shift, as significant as the creation of the web browser or the iPhone. But few can agree on the future of this technology.

Some believe it will deliver a utopia where everyone has all the time and money ever needed. Others believe it could destroy humanity. Still others spend much of their time arguing that the technology is never as powerful as everyone says it is, insisting that neither nirvana nor doomsday is as close as it might seem.

Mr. Altman, a slim, boyish-looking, 37-year-old entrepreneur and investor from the suburbs of St. Louis, sits calmly in the middle of it all. As chief executive of OpenAI, he somehow embodies each of these seemingly contradictory views, hoping to balance the myriad possibilities as he moves this strange, powerful, flawed technology into the future.

That means he is often criticized from all directions. But those closest to him believe this is as it should be. “If you’re equally upsetting both extreme sides, then you’re doing something right,” said OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman.

To spend time with Mr. Altman is to understand that Silicon Valley will push this technology forward even though it is not quite sure what the implications will be. At one point during our dinner in 2019, he paraphrased Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project, who believed the atomic bomb was an inevitability of scientific progress. “Technology happens because it is possible,” he said. (Mr. Altman pointed out that, as fate would have it, he and Oppenheimer share a birthday.)

He believes that artificial intelligence will happen one way or another, that it will do wonderful things that even he can’t yet imagine and that we can find ways of tempering the harm it may cause.

It’s an attitude that mirrors Mr. Altman’s own trajectory. His life has been a fairly steady climb toward greater prosperity and wealth, driven by an effective set of personal skills — not to mention some luck. It makes sense that he believes that the good thing will happen rather than the bad.

But if he’s wrong, there’s an escape hatch: In its contracts with investors like Microsoft, OpenAI’s board reserves the right to shut the technology down at any time.

The Vegetarian Cattle Farmer

The warning, sent with the driving directions, was: “Watch out for cows.”

Mr. Altman’s weekend home is a ranch in Napa, Calif., where farmhands grow wine grapes and raise cattle.

During the week, Mr. Altman and his partner, Oliver Mulherin, an Australian software engineer, share a house on Russian Hill in the heart of San Francisco. But as Friday arrives, they move to the ranch, a quiet spot among the rocky, grass-covered hills. Their 25-year-old house is remodeled to look both folksy and contemporary. The Cor-Ten steel that covers the outside walls is rusted to perfection.

As you approach the property, the cows roam across both the green fields and gravel roads.

Mr. Altman is a man who lives with contradictions, even at his getaway home: a vegetarian who raises beef cattle. He says his partner likes them.

On a recent afternoon walk at the ranch, we stopped to rest at the edge of a small lake. Looking out over the water, we discussed, once again, the future of A.I.

His message had not changed much since 2019. But his words were even bolder.

He said his company was building technology that would “solve some of our most pressing problems, really increase the standard of life and also figure out much better uses for human will and creativity.”

He was not exactly sure what problems it will solve, but he argued that ChatGPT showed the first signs of what is possible. Then, with his next breath, he worried that the same technology could cause serious harm if it wound up in the hands of some authoritarian government.

Mr. Altman tends to describe the future as if it were already here. And he does so with an optimism that seems misplaced in today’s world. At the same time, he has a way of quickly nodding to the other side of the argument.

Kelly Sims, a partner with the venture capital firm Thrive Capital who worked with Mr. Altman as a board adviser to OpenAI, said it was like he was constantly arguing with himself.

“In a single conversation,” she said, “he is both sides of the debate club.”

He is very much a product of the Silicon Valley that grew so swiftly and so gleefully in the mid-2010s. As president of Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up accelerator and seed investor, from 2014 to 2019, he advised an endless stream of new companies — and was shrewd enough to personally invest in several that became household names, including Airbnb, Reddit and Stripe. He takes pride in recognizing when a technology is about to reach exponential growth — and then riding that curve into the future.

But he is also the product of a strange, sprawling online community that began to worry, around the same time Mr. Altman came to the Valley, that artificial intelligence would one day destroy the world. Called rationalists or effective altruists, members of this movement were instrumental in the creation of OpenAI.

The question is whether the two sides of Sam Altman are ultimately compatible: Does it make sense to ride that curve if it could end in diaster? Mr. Altman is certainly determined to see how it all plays out.

He is not necessarily motivated by money. Like many personal fortunes in Silicon Valley that are tied up in a wide variety of public and private companies, Mr. Altman’s wealth is not well documented. But as we strolled across his ranch, he told me, for the first time, that he holds no stake in OpenAI. The only money he stands to make from the company is a yearly salary of around $65,000 — “whatever the minimum for health insurance is,” he said — and a tiny slice of an old investment in the company by Y Combinator.

His longtime mentor, Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, explained Mr. Altman’s motivation like this:

“Why is he working on something that won’t make him richer? One answer is that lots of people do that once they have enough money, which Sam probably does. The other is that he likes power.”

‘What Bill Gates Must Have Been Like’

In the late 1990s, the John Burroughs School, a private prep school named for the 19th-century American naturalist and philosopher, invited an independent consultant to observe and critique daily life on its campus in the suburbs of St. Louis.

The consultant’s review included one significant criticism: The student body was rife with homophobia.

In the early 2000s, Mr. Altman, a 17-year-old student at John Burroughs, set out to change the school’s culture, individually persuading teachers to post “Safe Space” signs on their classroom doors as a statement in support of gay students like him. He came out during his senior year and said the St. Louis of his teenage years was not an easy place to be gay.

Georgeann Kepchar, who taught the school’s Advanced Placement computer science course, saw Mr. Altman as one of her most talented computer science students — and one with a rare knack for pushing people in new directions.

“He had creativity and vision, combined with the ambition and force of personality to convince others to work with him on putting his ideas into action,” she said. Mr. Altman also told me that he had asked one particularly homophobic teacher to post a “Safe Space” sign just to troll the guy.

Mr. Graham, who worked alongside Mr. Altman for a decade, saw the same persuasiveness in the man from St. Louis.

“He has a natural ability to talk people into things,” Mr. Graham said. “If it isn’t inborn, it was at least fully developed before he was 20. I first met Sam when he was 19, and I remember thinking at the time: ‘So this is what Bill Gates must have been like.’”

The two got to know each other in 2005 when Mr. Altman applied for a spot in Y Combinator's first class of start-ups. He won a spot — which included $10,000 in seed funding — and after his sophomore year at Stanford University, he dropped out to build his new company, Loopt, a social media start-up that let people share their location with friends and family.

He now says that during his short stay at Stanford, he learned more from the many nights he spent playing poker than he did from most of his other college activities. After his freshman year, he worked in the artificial intelligence and robotics lab overseen by Prof. Andrew Ng, who would go on to found the flagship A.I. lab at Google. But poker taught Mr. Altman how to read people and evaluate risk.

It showed him “how to notice patterns in people over time, how to make decisions with very imperfect information, how to decide when it was worth pain, in a sense, to get more information,” he told me while strolling across his ranch in Napa. “It’s a great game.”

After selling Loopt for a modest return, he joined Y Combinator as a part-time partner. Three years later, Mr. Graham stepped down as president of the firm and, to the surprise of many across Silicon Valley, tapped a 28-year-old Mr. Altman as his successor.

Mr. Altman is not a coder or an engineer or an A.I. researcher. He is the person who sets the agenda, puts the teams together and strikes the deals. As the president of “YC,” he expanded the firm with near abandon, starting a new investment fund and a new research lab and stretching the number of companies advised by the firm into the hundreds each year.

He also began working on several projects outside the investment firm, including OpenAI, which he founded as a nonprofit in 2015 alongside a group that included Elon Musk. By Mr. Altman’s own admission, YC grew increasingly concerned he was spreading himself too thin.

He resolved to refocus his attention on a project that would, as he put it, have a real impact on the world. He considered politics, but settled on artificial intelligence.

He believed, according to his younger brother Max, that he was one of the few people who could meaningfully change the world through A.I. research, as opposed to the many people who could do so through politics.

In 2019, just as OpenAI’s research was taking off, Mr. Altman grabbed the reins, stepping down as president of Y Combinator to concentrate on a company with fewer than 100 employees that was unsure how it would pay its bills.

Within a year, he had transformed OpenAI into a nonprofit with a for-profit arm. That way he could pursue the money it would need to build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.

Raising ‘10 Bills’

In the mid-2010s, Mr. Altman shared a three-bedroom, three-bath San Francisco apartment with his boyfriend at the time, his two brothers and their girlfriends. The brothers went their separate ways in 2016 but remained on a group chat, where they spent a lot of time giving one another guff, as only siblings can, his brother Max remembers. Then, one day, Mr. Altman sent a text saying he planned to raise $1 billion for his company’s research.

Within a year, he had done so. After running into Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, at an annual gathering of tech leaders in Sun Valley, Idaho — often called “summer camp for billionaires” — he personally negotiated a deal with Mr. Nadella and Microsoft’s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott.

A few years later, Mr. Altman texted his brothers again, saying he planned to raise an additional $10 billion — or, as he put it, “10 bills.” By this January, he had done this, too, signing another contract with Microsoft.

Mr. Brockman, OpenAI’s president, said Mr. Altman’s talent lies in understanding what people want. “He really tries to find the thing that matters most to a person — and then figure out how to give it to them,” Mr. Brockman told me. “That is the algorithm he uses over and over.”

The agreement has put OpenAI and Microsoft at the center of a movement that is poised to remake everything from search engines to email applications to online tutors. And all this is happening at a pace that surprises even those who have been tracking this technology for decades.

Amid the frenzy, Mr. Altman is his usual calm self — though he does say he uses ChatGPT to help him quickly summarize the avalanche of emails and documents coming his way.

Mr. Scott of Microsoft believes that Mr. Altman will ultimately be discussed in the same breath as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

“These are people who have left an indelible mark on the fabric of the tech industry and maybe the fabric of the world,” he said. “I think Sam is going to be one of those people.”

The trouble is, unlike the days when Apple, Microsoft and Meta were getting started, people are well aware of how technology can transform the world — and how dangerous it can be.

The Man in the Middle

In March, Mr. Altman tweeted out a selfie, bathed by a pale orange flash, that showed him smiling between a blond woman giving a peace sign and a bearded guy wearing a fedora.

The woman was the Canadian singer Grimes, Mr. Musk’s former partner, and the hat guy was Eliezer Yudkowsky, a self-described A.I. researcher who believes, perhaps more than anyone, that artificial intelligence could one day destroy humanity.

The selfie — snapped by Mr. Altman at a party his company was hosting — shows how close he is to this way of thinking. But he has his own views on the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Mr. Yudkowsky and his writings played key roles in the creation of both OpenAI and DeepMind, another lab intent on building artificial general intelligence.

He also helped spawn the vast online community of rationalists and effective altruists who are convinced that A.I. is an existential risk. This surprisingly influential group is represented by researchers inside many of the top A.I. labs, including OpenAI. They don’t see this as hypocrisy: Many of them believe that because they understand the dangers clearer than anyone else, they are in the best position to build this technology.

Mr. Altman believes that effective altruists have played an important role in the rise of artificial intelligence, alerting the industry to the dangers. He also believes they exaggerate these dangers.

As OpenAI developed ChatGPT, many others, including Google and Meta, were building similar technology. But it was Mr. Altman and OpenAI that chose to share the technology with the world.

Many in the field have criticized the decision, arguing that this set off a race to release technology that gets things wrong, makes things up and could soon be used to rapidly spread disinformation. On Friday, the Italian government temporarily banned ChatGPT in the country, citing privacy concerns and worries over minors being exposed to explicit material.

Mr. Altman argues that rather than developing and testing the technology entirely behind closed doors before releasing it in full, it is safer to gradually share it so everyone can better understand risks and how to handle them.

He told me that it would be a “very slow takeoff.”

When I asked Mr. Altman if a machine that could do anything the human brain could do would eventually drive the price of human labor to zero, he demurred. He said he could not imagine a world where human intelligence was useless.

If he’s wrong, he thinks he can make it up to humanity.

He rebuilt OpenAI as what he called a capped-profit company. This allowed him to pursue billions of dollars in financing by promising a profit to investors like Microsoft. But these profits are capped, and any additional revenue will be pumped back into the OpenAI nonprofit that was founded back in 2015.

His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. and then redistribute this wealth to the people. In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.

If A.G.I. does create all that wealth, he is not sure how the company will redistribute it. Money could mean something very different in this new world.

But as he once told me: “I feel like the A.G.I. can help with that.”

Source

For Muslims across Indonesia, the sound of the Maghrib or dusk call to prayers during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan is perhaps the most welcome sound of the day. It marks the end of the daytime fasting observed during this time of year.

As one of the five pillars of Islam, fasting is practiced by the faithful to draw nearer to God, atone for past sins and empathize with the needy, among other goals. Less highlighted are the health benefits of fasting, practiced intermittently from dusk till dawn.

What to eat

The healthline.com medical website has found that intermittent fasting, like that practiced during Ramadan, can control blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol, as well as the inflammation that causes heart attacks and cancer. Health practitioners assert that a balanced diet and fasting are key.

“Fasting’s health benefits include rejuvenating skin cells, nerves and organs. These include the brain, to reduce the risk of diseases like Alzheimer’s and bolster one’s energy and mood,” said Nurul Oktanio, a private medical practitioner in South Jakarta. “Fasting can also help the heart by reducing LDL cholesterol levels, increasing HDL cholesterol levels and reducing blood pressure. The practice can increase insulin sensitivity in the pancreas, reduce blood sugar levels, and improve fertility in the reproductive systems,” she added

Nurul asserted that other benefits included reducing GERD reflux and gastrointestinal inflammation in the intestines, reducing the risk of cancer in the immune system, reducing inflammation and pain in one’s bones and mitigating muscle aches.

Nurul said that how one ends the fast is as essential as abstaining from food and drink.

“One should break the fast by drinking one or two cups of water, maybe add a tablespoon of lemon to prevent gastric acid, before eating different types of fruit and vegetables to aid enzymes for digestion,” she said. Nurul suggested consuming probiotic foods such as tempeh or soybean to improve gut health and probiotic foods in fruits and vegetables like bananas, onions or garlic.

“Aside from consuming fruit and vegetables, one should consume easily digestible proteins such as beans and fish. One should also eat ‘complex’ carbohydrates such as red rice, oats and potatoes instead of ‘simple’ carbohydrates like rice or noodles, and avoid consuming whole meats and fritters.”

She added that refraining from the latter and any sweet foods like those found in porridges or snacks help keep off the frequent weight gain experienced by those who carry out the Ramadan fast.

University of Indonesia Medical School gastroenterology-hepatology expert Kaka Renaldi reiterated her findings. He asserted that calorie intake is vital in getting the best results from fasting.

“One’s calorie requirements vary according to gender, weight and level of activities. An average adult will need between 1,200 and 2,000 calories daily. The calorie requirements should be about 30 to 40 percent for the sahur predawn meal, 40 to 50 percent for breaking of the fast and 10 percent for healthy snacks,” he said.

Food for the soul: A plate of dates and a copy of the Quran (Pexels/Khats Cassim) (Pexels/Khats Cassim)

“Do not immediately eat substantial meals at the breaking of the fast, as this will cause acid reflux in the stomach. Instead, try to eat sufficient portions and take [additional helpings in moderation] if one gets hungry again.” Kaka recommended reducing the amount of salty or fatty foods and using the opportunity this time of year to quit smoking.

Kaka attributed weight gain during Ramadan fasting to “excessive consumption of foods high in calories and fats, such as sweet dishes, during fast breaking and sahur, as well as reduced physical activity. One should also chew food more slowly to make it more digestible and drink more water to become full,” he suggested. “Aside from reducing sweet foods and [high calorie] deep-fried foods, replace them with foods that are boiled, grilled and steamed, or fried with a minimum amount of oil. One should also maintain one’s level of physical activity.”

Kaka warned against the dangers of dehydration during the limited time window to eat and drink during Ramadan.

“The Health Ministry recommends drinking eight glasses a day as one wakes up for sahur and after that meal, fast-breaking, after dinner and before going to bed, among other times, but not in large quantities at any one time, as this can upset the balance of one’s electrolytes.

Consuming vegetable soups or broths is also recommended,” he said.

“The number of caffeinated drinks like tea or coffee should be reduced because of their diuretic nature and tendency to disrupt sleep. Physical activities, with adjustments, should be resumed, with lighter activities like walking in the daytime, while exercise can be deferred to after breaking of the fast.”

Fasting for better sleep and mental health

Nurul asserted that quality sleep helps make the most of fasting, despite limitations imposed by sahur and other factors.

“One should sleep at least an hour earlier and try to wake up at one’s normal time, so five or six hours of sleep should be sufficient. Try to create an environment conducive to sleep by turning off the lights or TV, keep smartphones out of reach, and do not consume heavy meals or coffee before bedtime, as the latter can cause insomnia,” she said. “Naps lasting about 15 to 30 minutes during the daytime also have benefits, as they can reset organ functions.”

Kaka also agreed with taking power naps of about 20 minutes in the daytime. “But naps should be no longer than [20 to 30 minutes], as they can cause fatigue.”

Aside from biological factors, fasting can have positive effects on mental health.

“If done correctly, routinely, intermittent fasting is linked with improved memory, reducing the risk of dementia. It also trains our mental capacities to restrain and regulate ourselves,” said University of Indonesia psychologist Vera Itabiliana. “The latter is particularly beneficial for those diagnosed with depression or schizophrenia and other issues, though there has yet to be research to prove that fasting can treat or reduce symptoms of these and other mental disorders. Fasting to regulate or manage our emotions, quality time with loved ones, especially during fast breaking and sahur, and the focus on religion and spirituality can help. However, this depends on the condition or degree of the disorder in the individual.”

She pointed out that mental well-being is integral to fasting during Ramadan.

“One of the tenets of fasting during Ramadan is controlling one’s emotions along with hunger and thirst, which can be challenging initially, especially when one’s resolve is not that strong. Fasting [during Ramadan] gives one a whole month to manage emotions, with the hope that it can be applied for the rest of the year,” Vera asserted. “This can be developed into new habits that our minds can adjust to, even when not fasting. However, this is relative to the individual and how deep the meaning of this ritual is to them.”

Source

SINGAPORE - A major ocean circulation that forms around Antarctica could be headed for collapse, risking significant changes to the world’s weather, sea levels and the health of marine ecosystems, scientists say, offering a stark warning about the growing impacts of climate change.

Global warming is accelerating the melting of ice in Antarctica, and the increased amount of fresh water flooding into the ocean is disrupting the flow of the Antarctic overturning circulation, according to a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The Antarctic overturning circulation is part of a global network of currents that shift heat, oxygen and nutrients around the globe.

Near Antarctica, cold salty water sinks to depths of more than 4,000m. The sinking of dense, oxygenated water helps drive the deepest flow of the overturning circulation. The water flows north, carrying oxygen and nutrients to the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans. A similar process also occurs off Greenland.

“Changes that happen in one location, such as Antarctica, can then have a global influence because those waters move all throughout the planet,” said study co-author Adele Morrison, a research fellow from the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra.

But there are signs the overturning circulation is slowing, disrupted by the increasing amount of meltwater from Antarctica that is making the waters less salty, and therefore less dense and not sinking with the same force.

And the melting is increasing as growing amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, are heating up the atmosphere and oceans.

“Our modelling shows that if global carbon emissions continue at the current rate, then the Antarctic overturning will slow by more than 40 per cent in the next 30 years – and on a trajectory that looks headed towards collapse,” said co-author Matthew England, deputy director of the ARC Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

The international team of scientists modelled the amount of Antarctic deep water produced under a high-emissions greenhouse scenario until 2050.

A collapse of the deep ocean current would cause the oceans below 4,000m to stagnate.

“This would trap nutrients in the deep ocean, reducing the nutrients available to support marine life near the ocean surface,” Professor England said in a statement.

Meaning, marine ecosystems at the surface would slowly starve.

Melting of polar ice in Antarctica and Greenland will also accelerate sea-level rise.

“Our study shows that melting of the ice affects the ocean in a way that can accelerate the pace of sea-level rise, that is, a positive feedback,” co-author Steve Rintoul told The Straits Times.

“As the fresh water added by melting ice slows the formation of cold, dense bottom water, warmer water at shallower depths shifts south to replace it. The shift of warm waters closer to Antarctica means more heat is available to drive even more melting,” said Dr Rintoul, an oceanographer and climate scientist at Australia’s national science agency CSIRO in Hobart.

Other impacts from a slowdown mean less heat and carbon could be stored in the ocean, driving more rapid climate change.

“The effects can extend far from Antarctica; other studies have shown that a slowdown of the Antarctic overturning shifts tropical rain bands away from their usual position,” he said.

The world’s oceans store vast amounts of heat, absorbing more than 90 per cent of the warming that has occurred in recent decades due to increasing greenhouse gases. Much of the heat is in the top surface layers, but the deep ocean is slowly warming up as well. The oceans also absorb about a quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions from human activity.

“The study shows that climate change is already affecting all of the globe, even Antarctica and the deepest parts of the ocean,” said Dr Rintoul, adding that the changes to the deep ocean were surprisingly large and rapid.

Decisions to make deep and rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions can limit the damage.

“If emissions are lower, the impacts will be lower, and this is an important point,” Dr Rintoul said.

“Every 0.1 deg C of warming we can avoid lowers the risk of damaging changes to climate. The sooner and stronger we act, the lower the risk,” he said.

Source

•     The rise in generative AI tools like ChatGPT has created a hot market for "prompt engineers."

•     "Prompt engineers" train AI chatbots to improve their responses.

•     The gigs pay up to $335,000 a year and don't always require a tech degree.

Tech is known for high-paying jobs — and for one new hot job in the industry, you don't even need a degree in STEM.

The rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT is creating a need for "prompt engineers," people who write questions and prose for AI chatbots to test and improve their answers. Some of these roles have salaries as high as $335,000 and don't require degrees in tech.

Anthropic, an artificial intelligence safety and research company, currently has an open role for a "prompt engineer and librarian" with a salary range between $175,000 and $335,000, as first reported by Bloomberg.

The post says the role involves building "a library of high quality prompts or prompt chains to accomplish a variety of tasks, with an easy guide to help users search for the one that meets their needs," and building "a set of tutorials and interactive tools that teach the art of prompt engineering to our customers."

7 ways to use ChatGPT at work to boost your productivity, make your job easier, and save a ton of time

•    ChatGPT won't replace your job anytime soon. But it can make it a little bit easier.
•    With its impressive functions, the buzzy AI chatbot could give some workers a "productivity

Applicants who have basic programming skills and "a high level" of familiarity with large language models would make a good fit, per the posting, but Anthropic says it wants people to apply "even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification."

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has spoken about the need for prompt engineers. In February, he tweeted that "writing a really great prompt for a chatbot persona is an amazingly high-leverage skill."

Anna Bernstein, a prompt engineer at Copy.ai, was a freelance writer and historical research assistant before she started working with AI tools.

"I love the 'mad scientist' part of the job where I'm able to come up with a dumb idea for a prompt and see it actually work," Bernstein told Insider. "As a poet, the role also feeds into my obsessive nature with approaching language. It's a really strange intersection of my literary background and analytical thinking."

The market for prompt engineers is growing. PromptBase, a prompt marketplace that launched last June, allows people to hire prompt engineers or sell their prompts.

Despite the opportunities in prompt engineering for people without tech backgrounds, most high-paying roles do require people with more experience and higher levels of education in tech-focused areas, recruiters told Bloomberg.

"Salaries start at £40,000, but we've got candidates on our database looking for £200,000 to £300,000 a year," Mark Standen, who works at Hays, a recruitment agency in the UK and Ireland, told Bloomberg. "Expert prompt engineers can name their price."

While the market for prompt engineers is growing quickly, some are warning that it might not necessarily be the hottest role in the long run.

"I have a strong suspicion that 'prompt engineering' is not going to be a big deal in the long-term & prompt engineer is not the job of the future," Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School, tweeted in February.

While being able to interact with generative AI tools through prompts "is of high value," Adrian Weller, a director of research in machine learning at the University of Cambridge, told Bloomberg that, "I wouldn't be so sure that it will continue for a long time. Don't dwell too much on the current state of prompt engineering. It's starting to evolve quite quickly."

Source

Look carefully! Mathematicians have invented a new 13-sided shape that can be tiled infinitely without ever repeating a pattern. They call it "the einstein."

For decades, mathematicians wondered if it was possible to find a single special shape that could perfectly tile a surface, without leaving any gaps or causing any overlaps, with the pattern never repeating. Of course, this is trivial to do with a pattern that repeats — just look at a bathroom or kitchen floor, which is probably made up of simple rectangular tiles. If you were to pick up your floor and move it (called a "translation" in mathematics), you could find a position where the floor looks exactly the same as before, proving that it's a repeating pattern.

In 1961, mathematician Hao Wang conjectured that aperiodic tilings, or tilings that never become a repeating pattern, were impossible. But his own student, Robert Berger, outwitted him, finding a set of 20,426 shapes that, when carefully arranged, never repeated. He then slimmed that down to a set of 104 tiles. That means that if you were to buy a set of those tiles, you could arrange them on your kitchen floor and never find a repeating pattern.

In the 1970s, Nobel prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose found a set of only two tiles that could be arranged together in a nonrepeating pattern, now known as a Penrose tiling.

Here we see the first four iterations of the H metatile and its supertiles. (Image credit: Smith el at. (2023))

Since then, mathematicians around the world have searched for the aperiodic tiling holy grail, called "the einstein." The word doesn't come from the famous Albert but from the German translation of his last name: one stone. Could a single tile — one "stone" — fill a two-dimensional space without ever repeating the pattern it creates?

The answer was just discovered by David Smith, a retired printing technician from East Yorkshire, England. How did he come across this remarkable solution? "I'm always messing about and experimenting with shapes," Smith told The New York Times (opens in new tab). “It's always nice to get hands-on. It can be quite meditative."

Smith and his co-authors dubbed the new shape "the hat," mostly because it vaguely resembles a fedora. Although mathematicians have known about the shape, which has 13 sides, they had never considered it a candidate for aperiodic tiling.

"In a certain sense, it has been sitting there all this time, waiting for somebody to find it," Marjorie Senechal (opens in new tab), a mathematician at Smith College who was not part of the study, told The Times.

Smith worked closely with two computer scientists and another mathematician to develop two proofs showing that "the hat" is an aperiodic monotile — an einstein. One proof relied on building larger and larger hierarchical sets of the tiles, showing how the pattern never repeats as the surface area grows. The other proof relied on the team's discovery that there wasn't just one of these tiles, but an infinite set of related shapes that could all do the trick. The team's paper is available on the preprint server arXiv (opens in new tab) but has not yet been peer-reviewed, and the proofs have not yet been scrutinized.

These kinds of aperiodic tilings are more than mathematical curiosities. For one, they serve as a springboard for works of art, like the Penrose tiling found at the Salesforce Transit Center (opens in new tab) in San Francisco, and reveal that some medieval Islamic mosaics employed similar nonrepeating patterns.

Aperiodic tilings also help physicists and chemists understand the structure and behavior of quasicrystals, structures in which the atoms are ordered but do not have a repeating pattern.

Source

Future generations will acknowledge the vibe shift. It happened last weekend, when all of a sudden social media feeds filled with images of Pope Francis, typically a pious and plain dude, looking like a boss in a sleek white puffer coat. It was instantly a meme, a LOL in a sea of bad news. It was also not real. Someone created the image using the artificial intelligence tool Midjourney. But it fooled a lot of people—so many that news outlets began calling it “one of the first instances of wide-scale misinformation stemming from artificial intelligence.”

Just typing that sentence feels haunting. Like the first time you see someone in a red cloak in The Handmaid’s Tale. Not that this portends dystopia. It was, after all, just one image of the pope looking fly. But what if it was an image declaring itself to be a battlefield in the war in Ukraine? Or of President Biden taking some kind of secret meeting? The possibilities of AI generating that kind of misinformation are daunting.

Getting scores of people to fall for a disastrous deepfake of Volodymyr Zelensky takes a little more work than misleading them with a goofy picture of a pontiff, of course. As Charlie Warzel pointed out in The Atlantic this week, everyone uses “different heuristics to try to suss out truth,” and it’s easier to believe Pope Francis would wear a puffer than that, say, those AI images of former president Donald Trump getting arrested are real. So it’s not hard to see why so many just saw them, giggled, and kept scrolling without questioning their authenticity.

But this does set a troubling precedent. The creator of the Pope Coat image wasn’t attempting to mislead anyone. In fact, he told BuzzFeed News he was just tripping on shrooms and trying to think of funny images. But what if it was part of a misinformation campaign? A lot of AI-generated content is already so clean that it’s hard for human eyes and ears to detect its origins.

Viewers would probably never have known that Anthony Bourdain’s voice was faked in the documentary Roadrunner if director Morgan Neville hadn’t told The New Yorker. Deepfakes are already being used as political tools. As it is, skeptics can consult trusted news sources if they suspect an image is fake, but trust in the news media is already approaching record lows. If anyone can now generate an image of anything, and faith in any source that might debunk that image is at an all-time low, who is going to believe their lying eyes?

A few days after the AI-generated images of Pope Francis went viral, the pontiff was taken to a hospital in Rome for a respiratory infection. He’s been improving ever since, but as that (real) news spread, it got a bit lost amidst stories of the fake image. The pope was trending for two very different reasons, and at first glance it was hard to determine which was the one of substance.

The era of social media has transformed the Very Online into pretty good sleuths. Skepticism reigns. But so do conspiracy theories. Beyond the post-truth era is a time when convincing images, text, and even video can be generated from thin air. One of the internet’s great promises was that anyone could broadcast information to a much larger audience than before. For years, the liars have been easier to spot: bad URLs, shitty photoshop, typos—all these things gave the scoundrels away. AI can smooth their mistakes. I’m not Chicken Little, but maybe I just haven’t yet been fooled by an image of the falling sky.

Source