183163198
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sciencehabit writes:
Cold War spies planted bugs in walls, lamps, and telephones. Now, scientists warn, the cables themselves could listen in. A fiber optic technique used to detect earthquakes can also pick up the faint vibrations of nearby speech, researchers reported this week here at the general assembly of the European Geosciences Union. Freely available artificial intelligence (AI) software turned the fiber optic data into intelligible, real-time transcripts.
“Not many people realize that [fiber optic cables] can detect acoustic waves,” says Jack Lee Smith, a geophysicist at the University of Edinburgh who presented the result. “We show that in almost every case where you use these fibers, this could be a privacy concern.”
Fiber optics can pick up on sound through a technique called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). Using a machine called an interrogator, researchers fire laser pulses down a cable and record the pattern of reflections coming back from tiny glass defects along the length of the fiber optic. When an earthquake’s seismic wave crosses a section of the fiber, it stretches and squeezes the defects, leading to shifts in the reflected light that researchers can use to build a picture of an earthquake.
DAS essentially turns a fiber cable into a long chain of seismometers that can detect not only earthquakes, but also the rumblings of volcanoes, cars, and college marching bands. And although scientists set up dedicated fiber lines specifically for research, DAS can also be performed on “dark fiber”—unused strands in the web of fiber optics that runs through cities and across oceans, carrying the world’s internet traffic.
DAS can also be used to eavesdrop, the work of Smith and his colleagues shows. They conducted a field test using an existing DAS setup used to study coastal erosion. They set a speaker next to the cable and played pure tones, music, and speech.
Human speech contains frequencies ranging from a few hundred to several thousand hertz. The low end of the range could be pulled out of the data “even without any preprocessing,” Smith says. “You can easily see acoustic waves.” Getting higher frequency speech took a bit of postprocessing, but it was possible. Dumping the data directly into Whisper, a free AI transcription tool, provided accurate real-time transcription.
183093652
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sciencehabit writes:
Was it real? The clip showed a downward streak of black through a clear blue sky, the silhouette of a U.S. Tomahawk missile like a metallic bird of prey diving for the kill. Then the impact, a plume of black smoke rising over buildings, palm trees, and electrical wires. By the time the video arrived in Hany Farid’s inbox on a Sunday morning in March, experts had already confirmed the scene showed Minab, the city in southern Iran where a missile strike had killed more than 150 people at a girls’ elementary school a week earlier. The U.S. government had denied responsibility, claiming a rogue Iranian missile was to blame. But the video, released overnight by an Iranian news agency, told a different story. Journalists had emailed Farid’s company, GetReal Security, asking him to verify the footage.
Farid, a specialist at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, is one of the world’s leading experts in determining whether a photo or video has been manipulated. Since helping to found the field of digital forensics more than 20 years ago, he has kept pace with massive technological change. “I would consider him to be sort of the dean of digital forensics, because he’s been at it for so long,” says Santiago Lyon, former director of photography at the Associated Press, who now works on online safety at Adobe. In artificial intelligence (AI), Farid is facing his biggest challenge yet.
That Sunday morning, settling in front of a computer with his wife, Emily Cooper, in their home in the hills over Berkeley, Farid went to work. His first impulse was to be suspicious. The war in Iran had already produced a firehose of AI-generated images. Why had it taken a week for this video to become public? The low resolution of the footage did not help his confidence either.
By analyzing it frame by frame, Hany Farid determined this March video of a U.S. attack on a school in Minab, Iran, was real.
Farid first examined the explosion. AI explosions tend to be overly dramatic, he says, with a lot of fire and very billowy smoke—but this one seemed realistic. (Just days earlier, he had finished writing a paper with his colleague Sarah Barrington about what AI gets wrong about explosions). The crucial question, however, was the Tomahawk missile. Flipping through the video frame by frame in his office in UC Berkeley’s South Hall 2 days later, Farid pointed out the shape visible in five consecutive frames. “One, two, three, four, five, boom. That’s all you have,” he said. Adding the small silhouette to real footage of the explosion would not have been hard. “You don’t need AI for that,” Farid says. “That’s 10 minutes in Photoshop.”
Getting the physics right, however, would be much trickier, even for AI. Tomahawks are self-propelled, but over the short distance seen in the video, the missile should be plummeting in a straight line, he says. When Farid laid the five frames on top of each other digitally and aligned them, the missile fell as expected. After about an hour of working on the problem that Sunday morning, Farid sent the journalists his first assessment: The video seemed likely to be real. But he wasn’t satisfied.
Farid and Cooper, a computer vision scientist also based at UC Berkeley, had recently studied how people judge whether videos are fake. They found that we’re better at identifying a video as AI-generated if we have more time to watch it, because we’re more likely to pick up on some small giveaway. But for a real video, more time doesn’t make us any better at making the right call. What’s more: Even if we make the right call, our confidence does not increase over time. “If something is real, you’re just looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, and you never see the artifact and so you never get up to the high confidence point,” Cooper says. She saw Farid go through this process that Sunday. “Analysis after analysis, he was looking for the artifact, but somehow the absence of the artifact never pushed his confidence up.”
Later that day, Farid decided to check one more thing: Was the missile the right size? A Tomahawk is about 5 or 6 meters long. In the video, it extended for 46 pixels. Assuming the video was shot on a standard phone camera, Farid calculated it would have been taken about 100 meters away from the missile, a realistic distance. He then measured the gap between the moment the viewer sees the missile strike and the crash of the explosion, caused by the sound’s travel time. It was one-third of a second—again giving a distance of about 100 meters. Getting the movement of a faked missile right on the shaky video and ensuring its size matched the distance would have required serious expertise. “I’ve seen lots of disinformation out of the Iranian news agency. They’re not that sophisticated.”
What stood out to Cooper from the investigation that day was just how long it took Farid to feel certain the footage was real. “This was the first time I had seen him really struggle,” Cooper said. It’s not just Farid. With deepfakes and other AI-generated images getting better and better, she says, “It’s really hard to convince yourself that something is real.”
183093610
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sciencehabit writes:
Of the hundreds of types of amino acids found on Earth, it’s a mystery why life settled on 20 as the building blocks for all its proteins. Although certain species can use more—some microbes employ up to 22—no one’s ever found one using fewer.
But now scientists are closer to creating such an organism, after partially eliminating one of the 20 amino acids from the bacterium Escherichia coli. The research, published today in Science, used artificial intelligence (AI) to propose alternatives to the amino acid isoleucine in dozens of proteins making up bacterial ribosomes—the protein factories of the cell. The findings offer a glimpse into how earlier, simpler life forms might have lived and suggest new ways to synthesize proteins with bespoke functions in medicine and biotechnology.
Organisms with a reduced dependence on particular amino acids might better survive hostile environments or resist infections by viruses. Removing an amino acid entirely also “frees up” the specific DNA sequences that typically code for it—so those sequences could be reassigned to encode other, perhaps synthetic amino acids to create new drugs or other molecules.
181157238
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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.
181088280
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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.”
181050848
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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.
181020212
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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.
180898958
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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.”
180867708
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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.
180863376
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sciencehabit writes:
For decades, planetary scientists have pored over a mystery hidden within the Moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and ’70s. Minerals in the rocks record the imprint of a magnetic field, nearly as powerful as Earth’s, that existed more than 3.5 billion years ago and seemed to persist for millions of years. But generating a magnetic field requires a dynamo—a churning, molten core—and most researchers believed the Moon’s tiny core would have long since cooled off, 1 billion years after it formed. Corroborating that picture are other ancient Moon rocks of about the same age that suggest the field was weak—leaving planetary scientists baffled.
Now, researchers are proposing a new way to solve the puzzle. A paper published today in Nature Geoscience theorizes that between 3.5 billion and 4 billion years ago, blobs of titanium-rich magma melted episodically just above the core, rising in plumes that drove volcanic eruptions on the surface. By intermittently stirring up the Moon’s core, these bouts of melting would have caused the Moon’s magnetic field to flicker on in short, powerful bursts. The paper “links a few different concepts that people were thinking about separately, but hadn’t actually brought together,” says Sonia Tikoo, a planetary geophysicist at Stanford University who was not involved in the study.
180863350
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sciencehabit writes:
In James Cameron’s movie Avatar, trees glow with a mesmerizing bluish hue. For half a century, researchers suspected treetops on Earth might also glow—albeit because of thunderstorms, not Pandoran bioluminescence. But the phenomenon, an electric outburst called a corona, had only ever been spotted in the lab.
Now, a team of meteorologists has captured the first observations of faintly glowing trees in nature, they reported earlier this month in Geophysical Research Letters. The researchers caught a twinkling surrounding the tips of leaves at ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths. They hope the work will shed light on how thunderstorms electrify the landscape and produce lightning. These “are some of the biggest problems in the atmospheric sciences,” says Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire who was not involved in the study. “This was not an easy measurement to make.”
180690488
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It was the middle of the night in 2017 when biologist Dikansh Parmar received an unexpected phone call from an anxious railway employee in India’s Gujarat state. “Can you please come immediately,” the station attendant begged. “It is very, very urgent.” An Indian cobra (Naja naja) was on a train and passengers were panicking. “I was like, ‘OK, fine, no problem,’” recalls Parmar, who was a volunteer with an animal rescue organization. He sped to the train, captured the 1.5-meter-long reptile with a hook, stuffed it in a sturdy canvas bag, and went back home to bed.
This wasn’t a freak event. More and more reports of snakes on trains have hit the headlines in India in recent years, although the uptick in media attention may be due to the rise of cellphone cameras. Now, a study by Parmar and colleagues suggests that even some king cobras, the longest venomous snake in the world, may be traveling on trains in India. The inadvertent hitchhiking appears to be transporting these deadly snakes into places they don’t normally occur, the team reports this week in Biotropica. That includes cities, raising the risk of harm to people and the snakes as well.
180339603
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sciencehabit writes:
Standing in a garden on the remote German island of Helgoland one day in June, two theoretical physicists quibble over who—or what—constructs reality. Carlo Rovelli, based at Aix-Marseille University, insists he is real with respect to a stone on the ground. He may cast a shadow on the stone, for instance, projecting his existence onto their relationship. Chris Fuchs of the University of Massachusetts Boston retorts that it’s preposterous to imagine the stone possessing any worldview, seeing as it is a stone. Although allied in their belief that reality is subjective rather than absolute, they both leave the impromptu debate unsatisfied, disagreeing about whether they agree.
Such is the state of theoretical quantum mechanics, scientists’ deepest description of the atomic world. The theory was developed 100 years ago on Helgoland, where a 23-year-old Werner Heisenberg retreated to escape a bout of hay fever—and to reimagine what an atom looks like. The leading picture at the time featured electrons hopping in discrete, or quantized, leaps of energy between fixed orbits around the nucleus. It explained the behavior of hydrogen but failed for bigger atoms. On blustery walks and cold swims in the North Sea, Heisenberg abandoned the simplistic orbital picture, instead developing a new mathematical language that would work for any atom. Later in 1925, Erwin Schrödinger conjured up a complementary lens—his eponymous wave equation—which describes the positions of electrons in probabilistic terms.
Within a few years, their calculations would reveal a disturbingly fuzzy picture of reality, one in which certain properties are inherently unknowable and others take on different values depending on how they’re measured. “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” Heisenberg wrote after winning the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics.
This year, hundreds of physicists convened on Helgoland to commemorate the birth of quantum mechanics. It has certainly earned its keep over the past century, not only by predicting experimental outcomes with immaculate precision, but also by enabling technologies such as lasers, transistors, and atomic clocks. Yet even today, scientists struggle to interpret what the theory implies about nature. Central to the confusion is how the act of measurement pins down the indeterminate behavior of atoms. The standard framing has an unsettling anthropocentric flavor, suggesting humans play some special role in shaping the universe. Now, bolstered by a string of recent experiments, theorists such as Fuchs and Rovelli are leaning into the discomfort, emphasizing how observers do indeed create the world they inhabit. What’s at stake is nothing less than reality itself.
“We don’t need to fix quantum mechanics to make it compatible with what we observe; we need to recognize that there are alternative ways of looking at the world,” says Alyssa Ney, a philosopher of physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Quantum theory compels physicists to “make room for different notions of what it means to be real.”
180106049
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sciencehabit writes:
In September, three dozen leaders from institutions funding work to help protect the world from the next disaster like COVID-19—or worse—gathered in Ottawa, Canada, to coordinate their efforts. Countries on four continents were represented, as well as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the roundtable’s co-organizer, the nonprofit Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). But one major player turned down the invitation: the United States.
Its absence represents a rapid, historic retreat. Not so long ago, the U.S. had resolved to learn from the trauma and tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic’s early months, when humanity had no effective vaccine or treatment to throw at the disease and thousands were dying every day. The country embarked on an urgent search for countermeasures, not just for COVID-19, but for a wide range of potential pandemic threats. It set out to spend billions searching for broad-spectrum antiviral drugs and vaccines that could work against known viruses and others yet to emerge.
Yet in the past 10 months, President Donald Trump’s secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has abruptly dismantled those efforts—along with parallel initiatives to spot emerging viral threats. Cuts to specific programs are difficult to track. But it’s clear that more than $1 billion in drug and vaccine development investments have been scuttled and more than $1 billion in anticipated funding is in limbo. “What they’re doing is incredibly damaging to our level of preparedness in the U.S.,” says virologist Cristina Cassetti, who helped oversee what for years has been the world’s largest portfolio of pandemic preparedness R&D at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) until she quit in April. “The U.S. is leaving a huge gap.”
180054758
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sciencehabit writes:
The long road to building a fully functioning quantum computer may have shortened thanks to a new version of a gizmo called a superconducting qubit. The new qubit can maintain its delicate quantum states for more than 1 millisecond, three times the previous best for such a device. Reported in Nature, the result suggests a full-fledged quantum computer may need far fewer qubits than previously thought. Most important, the advance was made not by redesigning the qubit, but by improving the materials from which it was fashioned.
“This is great for the field and I’m glad that they published enough data that we really know how [the qubit] is working,” says John Martinis, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who in October shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating quantum effects in electrical circuits. “To me, that’s the best part.”
