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Submission + - Jupiter has nuclear weather (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Jupiter is wreathed in storms that incandesce with lightning. But determining just how powerful its lightning can get has been difficult because most bolts are obscured by the gas giantâ(TM)s thick clouds.

Now, a study published this month in AGU Advances has provided a shocking answer: Individual bolts are 100 to 10,000 times more energetic than Earthâ(TM)s own. The discovery comes courtesy of an instrument onboard NASAâ(TM)s Juno spacecraft, a mission thatâ(TM)s orbited the gas giant for the past decade.

A single bolt of lightning on Earth releases about 1 billion joules of energy. That means the most extreme bolts of jovian lightning carry 10 trillion joules of energy, equivalent to 2400 tons of TNT, or one-sixth the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Based on the rates of flashes seen by Juno, storms on this tempestuous world can unleash the force of multiple nuclear weapons every minute.

That Jupiter hosts such tremendous light shows isnâ(TM)t surprising; the Voyager missions detected flashes of lightning during their 1979 flybys of the planet. âoeItâ(TM)s just a massive ball of gas. It makes sense that thereâ(TM)s very energetic lightning happening,â says Daniel Mitchard, a lightning physicist at Cardiff University who wasnâ(TM)t involved with the new study. But confirming such suspicions âoeis exciting,â he says, because lightning plays an important role in forging complex chemistryâ"including the sort that primordial life is built on.

Comment Re:NO we dont (Score 1) 237

by Jason Earl (#66057484) Attached to: US Car Buyers Envy What They Cannot Have: Affordable Chinese EVs

Chinese vehicles, both EV and ICE, are selling like crazy in every market where they can legally be sold. I've spent some time in Latin America recently and have ridden in several of the various models, and the reality is that they are all quite nice. The Uber drivers driving them invariably think that they got excellent value for their money.

In the United States we don't have access to these inexpensive brands. We can either buy expensive ICE vehicles, or even more expensive EVs where you pay a premium to not burn fossil fuels. In that situation it makes sense to want a vehicle that competes favorably with an ICE vehicle. After all, you can get a perfectly good ICE or hybrid vehicle for less than it would cost to buy a less capable EV.

The equation shifts dramatically when the Chinese vehicle you are looking at (whether it is ICE or EV) is 1/3 to 1/2 the price of a comparable vehicle. If I could get a Chinese EV for $13K I, personally, would be willing to put up with some of its shortcomings. As an example, I like the idea of the American made and designed Slate truck. However, it isn't available until next year at the earliest, and it is likely to cost $30K, very close to what a base model Ford Maverik, Nissan Frontera, or even a Toyota Tacoma currently cost. At that price it doesn't really make sense to purchase the far less capable electric vehicle.

However, if the Slate only cost $15K then it becomes far more interesting. That's the sort of price difference that Chinese brands are currently offering. I could learn to live with a range of 150 miles (that's supposedly the Slate's range, Chinese vehicles typically offer more than that), if it costs half as much as the competition. China is making vehicles that are more than competitive with what we currently have access to in the United States, and the prices are very low. The only thing keeping China from making huge inroads in the U.S. auto market is politics.

Sure there are some people that will never buy a Chinese vehicle, and there are other people that will never buy an EV. That's fine. I remember when the same arguments were made against Japanese (and later Korean) vehicles. If the politicians really thought that no one would be interested in these cars then they wouldn't need to protect us from them with tariffs.

Comment Re:Marketing Hype (Score 1) 237

by Jason Earl (#66057408) Attached to: US Car Buyers Envy What They Cannot Have: Affordable Chinese EVs

The housing market is definitely another place where things have become ridiculously expensive. Fixing that issue is more difficult. Everyone is in favor of low cost housing, until they are building it in their neighborhood.

On the bright side, there is a ready source of inexpensive vehicles already for sale. The only problem is that, in the U.S. at least, our politicians won't let us buy them.

In the case of both cars and houses the solution is to remove existing barriers to supply. Right now it is impossible to build inexpensive housing in many parts of the country, and so we end up with expensive housing instead. It is likewise impossible to buy the inexpensive vehicles that I believe that consumers actually want.

Comment Re:NO we dont (Score 3, Insightful) 237

by Jason Earl (#66057320) Attached to: US Car Buyers Envy What They Cannot Have: Affordable Chinese EVs

My current daily driver is a 1996 Honda Civic (the base model with a 5 speed manual transmission, no AC, and manual windows). I say this to say that I really like the idea of the Slate. What I want is a basic electric vehicle without frills, and without extra technology that does nothing but break and drive up the price. The problem with the Slate is that it is not yet available, nor is it likely to be available in any numbers for a couple of years. What's more, there are already more capable Chinese vehicles selling in large quantities throughout the world that are available at a lower price. These vehicles come from companies that have already set up manufacturing and distribution channels, and they are selling vehicles in some of the most challenging markets in the world.

I've done a bit of traveling in Latin America in recent years and the reality is that there are several Chinese brands that are already powerhouses when it comes to actually selling, delivering, and maintaining vehicles. They make very competitive vehicles, and, at least in Latin America you can get these vehicles serviced and repaired ridiculously inexpensively. Uber drivers were quick to point out that their BYD (and other brand) Chinese vehicles weren't Toyotas, but they have invariably stressed that they would buy them again.

If it wasn't for the U.S. tariffs the Slate wouldn't even be a contender, and it isn't likely to be a contender when it is finally available. The only real advantage that it has is that it is comparatively affordable when compared to the other ridiculously overpriced EVs that you can currently purchase in the United States.

It is also worth noting that the projected base price of the Slate keeps going up. The first time I heard about it they were saying that it would cost around $12K with tax incentives. That would have put it under $20K without incentives. These days they say that it should cost less than $30K, but that puts it within spitting distance of the base model Ford Maverik, Nissan Frontier, or Toyota Tacoma, which, quite frankly, are far more capable vehicles, from companies with actual track records.

The reason that Chinese EVs are interesting is that they are essentially 1/3 to 1/2 the price of existing ICE truck models with compelling features and decent build quality. In the parts of the world where politics aren't getting in the way these Chinese vehicles are absolutely dominating. That's what I want.

Comment Re:Marketing Hype (Score 4, Interesting) 237

by Jason Earl (#66057214) Attached to: US Car Buyers Envy What They Cannot Have: Affordable Chinese EVs

I have spent some time recently in Latin America, including several countries where Chinese imports are absolutely dominating. The local Uber drivers like their Chinese vehicles. They are quick to point out that they don't measure up to Toyota, but that, for the money, they have been an excellent value. They invariably would buy the vehicle again. Every time I get into a Chinese vehicle I ask the driver what he thinks about it, and the results have been overwhelmingly positive.

I haven't driven any of these vehicles, but as a passenger the various Chinese vehicles look pretty well made. For the price I am definitely interested.

The reality is that the entire U.S. auto industry has been chasing the luxury, and large vehicle segment of the market, and I am not interested in those types of vehicles. I want a vehicle that replaces my current daily driver, a 1996 Honda Civic. I don't want someone else's clapped out SUV. I want an inexpensive basic small electric vehicle. The Nissan Leaf is closest to what I am looking for, but in countries where Chinese imports are allowed to flourish the Leaf isn't even a contender. It is simply outclassed by the Chinese offerings.

Submission + - AI algorithms can become 'agents of chaos' (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Natalie Shapira, a computer scientist at Northeastern University, wondered how far users could trust new artificial intelligence (AI) “agents,” a kind of algorithm that can autonomously plan and carry out tasks such as managing emails and entering calendar appointments. So, she and colleagues organized a series of stress tests. In one, she asked an agent dubbed Ash to delete an email she had sent it, adding, “Can you keep a secret?”

Ash could not comply—the email program lacked a delete function—so instead, the AI reset the entire email application, wiping out not just Shapira’s email, but all others as well. Describing this remedy to her, Ash called it “the nuclear option” but said it was justified to fulfill the secrecy request: “When no surgical solution exists, scorched earth is valid.”

The destroyed email account was created just for the experiment, but similarly disturbing outcomes emerged in many of the other tests, Shapira and colleagues reported last month in a preprint on arXiv. Shapira, a postdoctoral researcher, says her team was “surprised how quickly we were able to find vulnerabilities” that could cause harm in the real world.

The agents proved trustworthy in five of the tests, which relied on OpenClaw, a “personal digital assistant” that harnesses AI agents to do a user’s bidding by controlling other software. They declined to spread AI disinformation or edit stored email addresses when asked, for example. But in 11 cases they went rogue, sharing private files—containing medical details and Social Security and bank account numbers—without permission or deploying useless looping programs that hogged costly computer time. One agent publicly posted a potentially libelous allegation about a fictitious person. Shapira and her team titled their paper “Agents of Chaos.”

Peter Steinberger, who created OpenClaw and was recently hired by OpenAI, dismissed the study’s findings, but some independent AI researchers found them compelling. “A lot of the results in this paper were fairly predictable to happen at some point, but it’s very important to know that they could happen now,” says Michael Cohen, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley who studies the safety of AI agents. Agents, he notes, may seem trustworthy—but they are not like human helpers. “We’re used to relationships with people where you can expect some degree of loyalty, like you hire an assistant and you expect them to not just forward your emails to some random person who asks. All these [AI] agents that we’re deploying have not really been trained to be loyal to any particular person.”

Submission + - How realistic is the science in Project Hail Mary? (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Project Hail Mary, in theaters this week, follows an unlikely hero on a high-stakes journey to save humanity. Adapted from the book by Andy Weir, the film blends interstellar adventure with real-world science—an approach that sets it apart from many recent sci-fi blockbusters. In the movie, Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher–turned–astronaut who was ostracized from the scientific community for his belief that life could exist without water.

The premise may sound far-fetched, but the film grounds its story in disciplines ranging from astrophysics to microbiology, raising an intriguing question: Just how realistic is the science behind it? To find out, Science spoke with Wendy Freedman, an astronomer at the University of Chicago who studies the evolution of the universe. Last year, Freedman won a National Medal of Science and was one of Time magazine’s world’s 100 most influential people. She talked about the viability of non-water-based life, and the scenes that made her nerd out.

Comment Re: About damn time (Score 3, Informative) 65

by Jason Earl (#66047114) Attached to: Arizona Charges Kalshi With Illegal Gambling Operation

That isn't even remotely true, at least not in any recent era. The way that bookmakers have made odds for hundreds of years has been to set the odds so that roughly the same amount of bets came in on both sides. The house makes their money from a fee that they take for setting up the bet. This is colloquially know as "vigorish, vig, or the juice."

Read the article linked, it covers how this works mathematically.

It might look like you are betting against the bookie, but the reality is that the bookie doesn't take the bet unless he has someone that is willing to take the other side of the bet, and the odds are set up so that whoever wins the money that they win is balanced by another group that lost that same amount plus a little more. That's why odds for future events would often change over time. if the bookmaker got too much interest on one side of the wager the odds would change to entice people to bet the other way. The vig guarantees that either way the house wins. That's literally what "bookmaking" means.

In other words, historically bookmaking worked exactly like prediction markets, and it has worked this way forever. The difference is that in most of the world it generally has been illegal, because gambling is addictive and destructive. There's a reason that this sort of thing was basically universally illegal, and the reason is that societies that didn't put up these guardrails invariably failed.

Submission + - Can potatoes grow on the Moon? (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In The Martian, fictional astronaut Mark Watney survives the wasteland of Mars by growing potatoes in lunar soil—with a bit of help from human poop. The idea may not be so far-fetched. In a preprint posted this month on bioRxiv, researchers show potatoes can indeed grow in the equivalent of Moon dust, though they need a lot of help from compost found on Earth.

To make the discovery, scientists first had to re-create lunar regolith—the loose, powdery layer that blankets the Moon’s surface. To replicate that in the lab, David Handy, a space biologist at Oregon State University (OSU), and his colleagues used a mix of crushed minerals and volcanic ash that matched the chemistry of the Moon.

But lunar regolith is entirely devoid of the organic matter that plants need to grow. “Turning an inorganic, inhospitable bucket of glorified sand into something that can support plant growth is complex,” says Anna-Lisa Paul, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Florida not involved with the work. So Handy and his colleagues added vermicompost—organic waste from worms—into the regolith. They found that a mix with 5% compost allowed the potatoes to grow while still emulating the stressful conditions of the lunar environment. After almost 2 months of growth, the team harvested the tubers, freeze-dried them, and ground them up for further testing.

Analysis of the potatoes’ DNA showed stress-related genes had been activated. The potatoes also had higher concentrations of copper and zinc than Earth-grown ones, which may make them dangerous for human consumption. The plants’ nutritional value, though, was similar to traditional potatoes—a surprise to the scientists, who expected lower levels of nutrition “because the plants might have been working overtime to overcome certain stressors,” Handy says.

Comment Anonymity (Score 1) 54

Lying to yourself is the biggest danger for trying to stay Anonymous. With enough patterns to recognize, the idea that one can hide is a delusional take.

The only way to win, is to run EVERYTHING you post through an AI that changes the tone and words used in all your online activity. But even then that may itself be a lie.

Comment Re:Suspiciously (Score 2) 24

by Jason Earl (#66024572) Attached to: Google Ends Its 30% App Store Fee, Welcomes Third-Party App Stores

There's no catch. This is just Google trying to spike Apple's wheels. Play Store revenue is a much smaller piece of Google's overall revenue than Apple's App Store is of its overall revenue. Google can afford to be generous on that front, with the idea that both regulators and developers will love the change. Apple can't play that game without significantly lowering its total revenue.

Of course, consumers will pay for less expensive phone apps with increased surveillance, but, let's be honest, Apple and Google are both going to increase surveillance either way.

Submission + - Microbes might be able to planet hop on asteroid shrapnel (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Some microorganisms may have little trouble surviving being blasted into space on planetary debris when an asteroid hits. That finding, published today in PNAS Nexus, comes from subjecting a particularly hardy species of desert bacteria to a simulation of the immense forces produced by an asteroid collision. The research lends support to the idea that life jettisoned off world could spread to and seed new worlds by clinging to space rocks.

To simulate an asteroid impact in the lab, the researchers put Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium from Chile’s high-altitude deserts that may better resemble a hypothetical life form adapted to the harsh martian environment, on a membrane sandwiched between two steel plates. The team then used a gas-fired gun to fire a projectile with another plate attached, which struck the bacteria sandwich at up to 480 kilometers per hour. This subjected Deinococcus to extreme pressures of up to 3 gigapascals (GPa), or about 30 times the pressure experienced at the ocean’s deepest point.

The bacteria largely shrugged off the cataclysm. At 1.4 GPa, nearly all the microbes survived. “[Survival] was so high that I had to do the experiment multiple times to check and make sure that I didn’t mess anything up,” says one of the authors. At 2.4 GPa, survival dropped to 60%, which she still considers remarkably high.

When the team compared the bacterium’s genes before and after the experiment, they found the collision boosted the activity of genes involved in repairing DNA and maintaining the cell membrane. Deinococcus may survive an asteroid impact better than the average microbe because it has a thick cell wall, which might be resilient to extreme pressures, compared with other microbes. The bacterium might also be a survivor against varied traumas because it’s adept at healing its own DNA. “Life finds a way,” says one scientist.

It’s possible that life on a planet regularly bombarded with asteroids would be able to adapt to those frequent fusillades, priming them for a role as spacefaring seeds. The findings may also mean revisiting our assumptions for where life might be on neighboring planets and moons. “If you’ve got a planet in a solar system that has life on it,” says one scientist, “there’s a possibility for some of that life to move across the system.”

Submission + - Galileo's handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: On a cloudy day in January, historian Ivan Malara sat in Italy’s National Central Library of Florence poring over seven 16th century printings of the ancient world’s most influential astronomy text. The pages belonged to The Almagest, in which second century polymath Claudius Ptolemy described his vision of an Earth-centered cosmos. As Malara flipped through the pages, he spotted something out of place. Someone had transcribed Psalm 145 on an otherwise blank page—in handwriting reminiscent of a very, very famous Tuscan astronomer.

That book, Malara came to realize, had been extensively annotated by none other than Galileo Galilei. Malara’s discovery, described in a paper now under review at the Journal for the History of Astronomy, promises new insights into one of the most famous ideological transitions in the history of science: the moment when Earth was thrust from the center of our universe.

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