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Submission + - UV-C light kills nearly everything—except this unusual organism (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If you’ve ever gotten burned at the beach or swimming pool, you’re no stranger to the Sun bombarding Earth with ultraviolet rays. But the UV light that keeps beachgoers reaching for the sunblock isn’t even the worst the Sun sends our way. Lucky for us, Earth’s ozone layer blocks the Sun’s shortest wave radiation, called UV-C, which is so damaging to cells in high doses that it’s a go-to sterilizer in hospitals.

UV-C is such a killer, in fact, that scientists have questioned whether life can survive on worlds that lack an ozone layer, such as Mars or distant exoplanets. But research published this month in Astrobiology suggests one hardy lichen, a hybrid organism made of algae and fungi, may have cracked the UV-C code with a built-in sunscreen, despite never experiencing these rays in its long evolutionary history.

When scientists brought a sample of the species, the common desert dweller Clavascidium lacinulatum, back to the lab, graduate student Tejinder Singh put the lichen through the wringer. First, Singh dehydrated the lichen, to make sure it couldn’t grow back in real time and mask any UV damage. Then he placed the lichen a few centimeters under a UV lamp and blasted it with radiation. The lichen seemed just fine.

So Singh purchased the most powerful UV-C lamp he could find online, capable of sending out 20 times more radiation than the amount expected on Mars. When he tested the lamp on the most radiation-resistant life form on Earth, the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, it died in less than a minute.

After 3 months—likely the highest amount of UV-C radiation ever tested on an organism—Singh pulled the sample so he could finish his master’s thesis in time. About half of the lichen’s algal cells had survived. Then, when the team ground up and cultured part of the surviving lichen, about half of its algal cells sprouted new, green colonies after 2 weeks, showing it maintained the ability to reproduce.

The species may provide a blueprint for surviving on Mars or exoplanets, which don’t have an ozone layer to protect them.

Submission + - Microbe with bizarrely tiny genome may be evolving into a virus (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The newly discovered microbe provisionally known as Sukunaarchaeum isn’t a virus. But like viruses, it seemingly has one purpose: to make more of itself.

As far as scientists can tell from its genome—the only evidence of its existence so far—it’s a parasite that provides nothing to the single-celled creature it calls home. Most of Sukunaarchaeum’s mere 189 protein-coding genes are focused on replicating its own genome; it must steal everything else it needs from its host Citharistes regius, a dinoflagellate that lives in ocean waters all over the world. Adding to the mystery of the microbe, some of its sequences identify it as archaeon, a lineage of simple cellular organisms more closely related to complex organisms like us than to bacteria like Escherichia coli.

The discovery of Sukunaarchaeum’s bizarrely viruslike way of living, reported last month in a bioRxiv preprint, “challenges the boundaries between cellular life and viruses,” says Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities who was not involved in the work. “This organism might be a fascinating living fossil—an evolutionary waypoint that managed to hang on.”

Adamala adds that if Sukunaarchaeum really does represent a microbe on its way to becoming a virus, it could teach scientists about how viruses evolved in the first place. “Most of the greatest transitions in evolution didn’t leave a fossil record, making it very difficult to figure out what were the exact steps,” she says. “We can poke at existing biochemistry to try to reconstitute the ancestral forms—or sometimes we get a gift from nature, in the form of a surviving evolutionary intermediate.”

What’s already clear: Sukunaarchaeum is not alone. When team leader Takuro Nakayama, an evolutionary microbiologist at Tsukuba, and his colleagues sifted through publicly available DNA sequences extracted from seawater all over the world, they found many sequences similar to those of Sukunaarchaeum. “That’s when we realized that we had not just found a single strange organism, but had uncovered the first complete genome of a large, previously unknown archaeal lineage,” Nakayama says.

Comment Re:This isn't necessarily bad (Score 1) 141

That's what I assumed as well. Buy Now Pay Later loans like this have a long history of being predatory. So I took a look at what it would cost to accept Klarna (as an example) as a merchant. The reality is that they have transaction fees that are very similar to credit cards. In other words, these companies do not need to rely on missed payments to make a profit.

These companies are apparently setting themselves up to replace traditional credit card payment systems, which suits me right down to the ground.

The difference is that it is much easier to get a Klarna account, and it isn't (yet) as widely available.

Comment Re:Credit Cards? (Score 2) 141

I felt the same way at first. Traditional BNPL schemes were very predatory. However, Klarna (and others) appear to be playing approximately the same game as the traditional credit card processors. They charge transaction fees that are roughly the same as credit card processors, and like credit cards their customers don't pay extra if they pay their bill on time. Klarna, in particular actually appears to give customers interest free time.

The difference, for consumers, is primarily that a Klarna account is much easier to get, and it isn't universally accepted. From a merchant perspective, depending on your payment provider, you might already be able to accept Klarna, and it appears that it mostly works like a credit card. It's even possible that charge backs are less of an issue, although it does appear that transaction fees are not given back in the case of a refund.

Personally, I am all for competition when it comes to payment networks. Visa and Mastercard are both devils. More competition for them is good for all of us.

Comment Value (Score 2) 99

Things of value are usually rare. The amount of "entertainment" is ever increasing, and thus becoming cheaper and cheaper. Creating MORE isn't going to help.

And with AI starting to be used in the Creation process, that will lower the costs of making it, and start making it widely available to more people in the creation process.

This ends in a death spiral of more and more "entertainment" with less and less perceived value, chasing diminishing returns. I suspect that places like OF will make quick end once AI girls are able to do everything by prompts on the fly for their "users".

Submission + - Lotions and perfume can weaken a 'human oxidation field' made by your skin (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Perfumes and lotions do more than soften our skin and give us signature aromas. They can chemically alter the air we breathe, weakening a phenomenon called the human oxidation field, researchers report today in Science Advances.

The new results lend further credence to the idea that the human body can meaningfully alter the chemistry of indoor air, says Nicola Carslaw, an indoor air chemist at the University of York who wasn’t involved with the research. “What’s fascinating about this paper is that it shows what simple bodies in a space can do.” Whether these chemical reactions help—or harm—us, however, remains unclear.

Scientists coined the term “human oxidation field” in 2022. A study published in Science found that when oils in our skin are exposed to ozone—an oxidant that can creep in from the outdoors or from some air purifiers—they can spawn highly reactive molecules called hydroxyl radicals. These in turn can break down other gases in the air around us, creating a haze of radicals—the human oxidation field.

The researchers are still figuring out exactly what fewer hydroxyl radicals mean for everyday life. If the radicals react with other molecules to form toxic substances, wearing personal care products could be a safeguard; if they are breaking down dangerous gases, then the same products could leave someone more vulnerable. But there’s such a wide variety of compounds in indoor air—created by everything from cooking to cleaning—that researchers don’t have any easy answers.

“We can’t give any public advice on whether this means you should wear a lot of lotion,” says study author, Manabu Shiraiwa, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine.

Submission + - Bird feeders have caused a dramatic evolution of California hummingbirds (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Hummingbird feeders are a beloved pastime for millions of backyard birders and a convenient dining spot for the birds. But for the Anna’s hummingbird, a common species in the western United States, feeders have become a major evolutionary force. According to research published this week in Global Change Biology, artificial feeders have allowed the birds to expand their range out of Southern California up to the state’s northern end. They have also driven a transformation of the birds themselves. Over just a few generations, their beaks have dramatically changed in size and shape.

As feeders proliferated, Anna’s hummingbird beaks got longer and larger, which may reflect an adaptation to slurp up far more nectar than flowers can naturally provide. Developing a bigger beak to access feeders “is like having a large spoon to eat with,” says study author, Alejandro Rico-Guevara.

This change was more pronounced in areas where feeders were dense. But in birds that lived in colder regions north of the species’ historical range, the researchers spotted the opposite trend: Their beaks became shorter and smaller. This finding also makes sense: The researchers used an infrared camera to show for the first time that hummingbirds use their beaks to thermoregulate, by dissipating heat while they are perched. A smaller beak has less surface area—and would therefore help conserve heat.

It wasn’t just the size and shape of beaks that changed. In areas where feeders are dense, male hummingbirds have also developed beaks that are pointier and sharper than usual. Pointy beaks in hummingbird species often indicate aggressiveness, and the researchers think male skirmishes over feeder control may have made these birds feistier. “Anyone who has a feeder knows that hummingbirds fight like crazy,” Rico-Guevara says.

The most surprising finding, though, was how quickly these changes took place. By the 1950s, hummingbirds were noticeably different from those of the 1930s: a time span of only about 10 generations of birds.

Carleton University animal behaviorist Roslyn Dakin, who wasn’t involved with the study, adds that the new paper beautifully shows “evolution in action.”

Submission + - 30-day forecast? Weather prediction might be able to look beyond 2 weeks (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: It’s a truism almost as old as modern weather prediction: Any forecast beyond 2 weeks will fall apart because of the way tiny perturbations compound in the atmosphere. The 2-week limit, grounded in chaos theory and notions of the “butterfly effect” from the 1960s, has been handed down from generation to generation, says Peter Dueben, head of earth system modeling at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the world’s leading forecaster. “It’s basically a God-given rule.”

But even the gods can be wrong.

Using an artificial intelligence (AI) weather model developed by Google, atmospheric scientists have found that forecasts of 1 month or more into the future might be possible. “We haven’t found a limit to how far you can go out,” says Trent Vonich, a doctoral student at the University of Washington (UW) who led the work, released late last month as a preprint on arXiv. “We ran out of memory first.”

The result has caused a stir ever since Vonich and Gregory Hakim, his adviser, spoke this year at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society, says Amy McGovern, a computer scientist and meteorologist at the University of Oklahoma. Using powerful computer models, researchers have already pushed meaningful forecasts out to about 10 days, coming ever closer to the 2-week limit. Showing this limit can in principle be broken “means that AI will be able to do this someday, which is really exciting,” she says.

Comment Re:The US is the *least* interesting EV market (Score 1) 323

In America we have essentially legislated against small vehicles. Our CAFE standards were supposedly designed to push us towards more fuel efficient vehicles, but the reality is that the easiest way to pass CAFE standards is to simply make the vehicle larger. So the United States ends up with larger vehicles, and the smaller vehicles that we do get tend to be more expensive than we should be. We have essentially legislated away the category of a ultra basic small car. That happens to be a pretty popular segment in most of the world. The small cars we can buy are nearly as expensive as their larger brethren and so they make a lot less sense.

EVs are an even better example of how U.S. legislation skews things towards larger ICE vehicles. The most popular EVs in most of the world are the most basic EVs. I personally would love to buy a basic EV to replace my current commuter car. I have a house and a place to plug in an EV. My commute is short and even the most basic EVs would be fine. However, the only vehicles available in the market are essentially luxury vehicles. I can buy a whole lot of gasoline for $30K, which is the least expensive new EV available here, but if I could get my hands on a cheap Chinese EV for $12K I absolutely would do that. For the price of the least expensive EV you can basically buy a Toyota RAV4 that is a much more capable vehicle.

Submission + - 'About as close to aliens as we'll ever get.' Can AI crack animal language? (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Can a robot arm wave hello to a cuttlefish—and get a hello back? Could a dolphin’s whistle actually mean “Where are you?” And are monkeys quietly naming each other while we fail to notice?

These are just a few of the questions tackled by the finalists for this year’s Dolittle prize, a $100,000 award recognizing early breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered interspecies communication. The winning project—announced today—explores how dolphins use shared, learned whistles that may carry specific meanings—possibly even warning each other about danger, or just expressing confusion. The other contending teams—working with marmosets, cuttlefish, and nightingales—are also pushing the boundaries of what human-animal communication might look like.

The prize marks an important milestone in the Coller Dolittle Challenge, a 5-year competition offering up to $10 million to the first team that can achieve genuine two-way communication with animals. “Part of how this initiative was born came from my skepticism,” says Yossi Yovel, a neuroecologist at Tel Aviv University and one of the prize’s organizers. “But we really have much better tools now. So this is the time to revisit a lot of our previous assumptions about two-way communication within the animal’s own world.”

Science caught up with the four finalists to hear how close we really are to cracking the animal code. One amusing exerpt:

"Male [dolphins] form pairs and call each other’s [signature] whistles if they get separated. But once, we were just testing our equipment and played one of those whistles while the pair was still together. They responded with a totally different whistle—one we hadn’t documented before. We’ve since heard it in other confusing situations. We call it the 'WTF whistle,' because it really did seem like that’s what they were asking."

Comment Re:Am I missing something? (Score 4, Insightful) 39

Yes, verifying the citations is trivially easy, which is how these people get caught. You will notice that the lawyers in question say that it was an honest citation mistake and not "fabrication of authority" which is a legal term for a crime that carries jail time and fines. The problem with that defense is that the article that they cited doesn't actually exist. They say it has an inaccurate title and inaccurate authors, but I suspect that is legal speak for, "AI made up the article."

Now, if an article exists that happens to say approximately the same thing, and it just has a different title and authors then it is possible that the lawyers in question might be able to pretend that they really did just goof up the title and authors. If not, then what they did actually fits the definition of fabrication of authority. At which point I think that they should throw the book the fools.

The reality is that our current legal system relies heavily on lawyers not pulling these kinds of stunts. The system is adversarial, for sure, but it is generally assumed that the opposing counsel isn't making things up whole cloth. That's why fabrication of authority carries such high penalties. No one has time to check every citation. The assumption is that the person writing the brief is citing correctly and not misrepresenting what is actually said. The fact that these particular lawyers took it a step further and included a citation that doesn't even exist is absolutely ridiculous.

Submission + - AI tried to predict the next pope. Here's why it failed (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Habemus papam! Minutes ago, the Vatican announced that U.S. Cardinal Robert Prevost would be the next pope. Artificial intelligence (AI) made its own prediction earlier this week—but Prevost was not on the shortlist. In a paper posted on the preprint site arXiv, a machine learning algorithm that analyzed the ideological positions of the 133 high-ranking Catholic Church officials who made this decision predicted that Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin would be the next head of the Catholic Church. Though the program was off this time, experts say its approach could eventually be useful in predicting other types of electoral contests.

AI algorithms that analyze text, such as social media posts and candidates’ speeches, can be very accurate at predicting political election outcomes. But papal conclaves present a unique challenge. The election process, which takes place over multiple rounds until one person receives two-thirds of the vote, has remained the same for centuries. There are no polls or primary elections to analyze, and the papabili are sworn to secrecy about their votes.

So with the help of Michele Re Fiorentin, a physicist at the Polytechnic University of Turin, and University of Madrid mathematician Alberto Antonioni, Valdano set out to develop a way to predict papal elections. When it was announced in February that Pope Francis was ill, this group was already studying the emergence of political and ideological factions within the church, using an algorithm the researchers had trained on five centuries of meticulous “genealogical” records of bishops and the successors they appointed. The researchers’ logic is that a bishop’s or pope’s decision to appoint a new bishop or to elevate one to a cardinal may be partly determined by shared ideology. And when the time comes to appoint a new pope, the thinking goes, each elector is more likely to vote for a colleague who shares his own stances.

To model how these dynamics could play out in the current conclave, the researchers chose four broad topics likely to be important to this year’s papabili: attitudes toward same-sex couples, international migration and poverty, the Catholic Church’s ongoing dialogues with other religions, and synodality—the degree of autonomy and authority enjoyed by local church leaders relative to the pope. Using data from a website that compiles cardinals’ public statements, the researchers trained an AI model to determine how progressive or conservative each elector’s stance on each issue is. The model then categorized the 135 eligible electors (two cardinals didn’t attend the conclave)—and Pope Francis—by their ideological similarity to other candidates.

Next, the scientists simulated the conclave election process among their virtual cardinals. After eight or nine rounds of voting, the electors typically converged on one candidate: Parolin, currently the Vatican’s secretary of state. As the Vatican’s top diplomat and second-in-command to Pope Francis, Parolin is widely considered a front-runner and has the best odds on online betting sites.

The authors’ analysis had put Prevost’s views near the center on all four ideological topics, meaning he was likely elected as a compromise candidate. Electing a U.S. pope could also help shore up support from Catholic communities there.

Re Fiorentin says the model probably missed Prevost as a likely pope because it didn’t consider political and geographical factors that played a role in the election. Lacking that information, he says, “is a major shortcoming of our model.”

In the future, he adds, the model could incorporate geographic information about the candidates. “However, we think that other important data about geopolitical influence, lobbying, etc., are much more difficult to obtain and to use.”

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