Lifeboat Foundation

Underwater robots that peered under Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, nicknamed the “Doomsday Glacier,” saw that its doom may come sooner than expected with an extreme spike in ice loss. A detailed map of the seafloor surrounding the icy behemoth has revealed that the glacier underwent periods of rapid retreat within the last few centuries, which could be triggered again through melt driven by climate change.

Thwaites Glacier is a massive chunk of ice — around the same size as the state of Florida in the U.S. or the entirety of the United Kingdom — that is slowly melting into the ocean off West Antarctica (opens in new tab). The glacier gets its ominous nickname because of the “spine-chilling” implications of its total liquidation, which could raise global sea levels between 3 and 10 feet (0.9 and 3 meters), researchers said in a statement (opens in new tab). Due to climate change, the enormous frozen mass is retreating twice as fast as it was 30 years ago and is losing around 50 billion tons (45 billion metric tons) of ice annually, according to the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (opens in new tab).

The Thwaites Glacier extends well below the ocean’s surface and is held in place by jagged points on the seafloor that slow the glacier’s slide into the water. Sections of seafloor that grab hold of a glacier’s underbelly are known as “grounding points,” and play a key role in how quickly a glacier can retreat.

The paper argues that AI may want to take control and do its own thing.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been making impressive progress and has, in many ways, improved the world. But could it become dangerous? A new paper co-authored by the University of Oxford and Google DeepMind researchers published last month in the peer-reviewed AI Magazine.

Devrimb/iStock.

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For the first time, volcanologists reveal to IE real-time observations of the deepest parts of a volcanic system.

Scientists from the University of Iceland and the Icelandic Meteorological Office, Reykjavik, have presented unexpected observations of seismic activity and magma movements before and during the 2021 Fagradalsfjall volcanic eruption, according to a pair of papers published in Nature.

The insights could provide a boost in understanding the processes that drove the unusually ‘silent’ eruption and for future monitoring of volcanic activity. This is critical for creating warnings to prevent loss of life and damage to infrastructure. Beboy_ltd.

ROBOTS could one day overthrow humans in an ‘apocalyptic’ takeover, a tech expert has predicted.

Aidan Meller, the creator of the Ai-Da robot, believes that within three years artificial intelligence (AI) could overtake humanity, per The Daily Star.

He also backs Elon Musk’s belief that advances in AI could impact mankind more than nuclear war.

An exploration of the technological singularity and whether it will happen and what implications it has on astrobiology and solving the Fermi Paradox.

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Continue reading “Fermi Paradox: The Singularity and Dormant Civilizations” »

Circa 2019 face_with_colon_three

By Tyler Benster.

Neuroscientists have a dizzying array of methods to listen in on hundreds or even thousands of neurons in the brain and have even developed tools to manipulate the activity of individual cells. Will this unprecedented access to the brain allow us to finally crack the mystery of how it works? In 2017, Jonas and Kording published a controversial research article, “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?” that argues maybe not. To make their point, the authors turn to their “model organism” of choice: a MOS 6502 processor as popularized by the Apple I, Commodore 64, and Atari Video Game System. Jonas and Kording argue that for an electrical engineer, a satisfying description of the processor would break it into modules, like an adder or subtractor, and submodules, like the transistor, to form a hierarchy of information processing. They suggest that, while popular methods from neuroscience might reveal interesting structure in the activity of the brain, researchers often use techniques that would fail to reveal a hierarchy of information processing if applied to the (presumably much simpler) computer processor.

Continue reading “Can we reverse engineer the brain like a computer?” »

https://youtu.be/pDSEjaDCtOU?t=2526

Ian Hutchinson’s concerns for existential risk after minute 42.

Ian Hutchinson is a nuclear engineer and plasma physicist at MIT. He has made a number of important contributions in plasma physics including the magnetic confinement of plasmas seeking to enable fusion reactions, which is the energy source of the stars, to be used for practical energy production. Current nuclear reactors are based on fission as we discuss. Ian has also written on the philosophy of science and the relationship between science and religion.

Continue reading “Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion” »

Scientists have shed new light on the timing and likely cause of major volcanic events that occurred millions of years ago and caused such climatic and biological upheaval that they drove some of the most devastating extinction events in Earth’s history.

Surprisingly, the new research, published today in Science Advances, suggests a slowing of continental plate movement was the critical event that enabled magma to rise to the Earth’s surface and deliver the devastating knock-on impacts.

Earth’s history has been marked by major volcanic events, called large igneous provinces (LIPs)—the largest of which have caused major increases in atmospheric carbon emissions that warmed Earth’s climate, drove unprecedented changes to ecosystems, and resulted in mass extinctions on land and in the oceans.