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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The age of the rings that encircle Saturn is under dispute thanks to calculations that show they could have been formed billions – rather than millions – of years ago

The rings of Saturn could be much older than previously thought and may have formed around the same time as the planet, according to a modelling study. But not all astronomers are convinced, and a researcher who was part of a team that calculated Saturn’s rings to be relatively young argues that the new work doesn’t change their findings.

For most of the 20th century, scientists assumed that Saturn’s rings formed along with the planet, some 4.5 billion years ago. But when NASA’s Cassini spacecraft visited Saturn in 2004, it found that the rings appeared remarkably free of contamination from small space rocks, known as cosmic dust. This pristine appearance indicated they were far younger, with an estimate in 2023 placing them at between 100 and 400 million years old.

Now, Ryuki Hyodo at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan and his colleagues have calculated that Saturn’s rings should be far more resistant to cosmic dust pollution than previously thought, so could maintain a clean appearance for a long time. Hyodo and his team haven’t calculated a new age for the rings, but suggest that they could be as old as the planet, as astronomers used to believe.

Hyodo and his colleagues first simulated how high-speed cosmic dust, accelerated by Saturn’s gravity, would smash into the rings. They found that the collision would create such extreme temperatures that the impacting dust should be vaporised. This vapour, after spreading out in a cloud, would then condense into charged nanoparticles, similar to particles that Cassini has observed.

Journal Reference: Hyodo, R., Genda, H. & Madeira, G. Pollution resistance of Saturn's ring particles during micrometeoroid impact. Nat. Geosci. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01598-9

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AnonTechie writes:

As a part of the Allen Lab's Political Economy of AI Essay Collection, David Gray Widder and Mar Hicks draw on the history of tech hype cycles to warn against the harmful effects of the current generative AI bubble.

Only a few short months ago, generative AI was sold to us as inevitable by AI company leaders, their partners, and venture capitalists. Certain media outlets promoted these claims, fueling online discourse about what each new beta release could accomplish with a few simple prompts. As AI became a viral sensation, every business tried to become an AI business. Some even added "AI" to their names to juice their stock prices, and companies that mentioned "AI" in their earnings calls saw similar increases.

Investors and consultants urged businesses not to get left behind. Morgan Stanley positioned AI as key to a $6 trillion opportunity. McKinsey hailed generative AI as "the next productivity frontier" and estimated $2.6 to 4.4 trillion gains, comparable to the annual GDP of the United Kingdom or all the world's agricultural production. Conveniently, McKinsey also offers consulting services to help businesses "create unimagined opportunities in a constantly changing world." Readers of this piece can likely recall being exhorted by news media or their own industry leaders to "learn AI" while encountering targeted ads hawking AI "boot camps."

While some have long been wise to the hype, global financial institutions and venture capitalists are now beginning to ask if generative AI is overhyped. In this essay, we argue that even as the generative AI hype bubble slowly deflates, its harmful effects will last: carbon can't be put back in the ground, workers continue to face AI's disciplining pressures, and the poisonous effect on our information commons will be hard to undo.

An archival PDF of this essay can be found here.

[Source]: Harvard Kennedy School

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upstart writes:

They may one day deliver drugs within the human body:

Swarms of tiny robots guided by magnetic fields can coordinate to act like ants, from packing together to form a floating raft to lifting objects hundreds of times their weight. About the size of a grain of sand, the microrobots could someday do jobs larger bots cannot, such as unblocking blood vessels and delivering drugs to specific locations inside the human body.

Jeong Jae Wie at Hanyang University in South Korea and his colleagues made the tiny, cube-shaped robots using a mould and epoxy resin embedded with magnetic alloy. These small magnetic particles enable the microrobots to be "programmed" to form various configurations after being exposed to strong magnetic fields from certain angles. The bots can then be controlled by external magnetic fields to perform spins or other motions. This approach allowed the team to "efficiently and quickly produce hundreds to thousands of microrobots", each with a magnetic profile designed for specific missions, says Wie.

The researchers directed the microrobot swarms to cooperatively climb over obstacles five times higher than any single microrobot and form a floating raft on water. The bots also pushed through a clogged tube and transported a pill 2000 times their individual weight through liquid, demonstrating potential medical applications.

"These magnetic microrobots hold great promise for minimally invasive drug delivery in small, enclosed and confined spaces," says Xiaoguang Dong at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, who was not involved in the research. But the microrobots cannot yet autonomously navigate complex and tight spaces such as arteries.

Dong says there are safety challenges too, including needing to coat the "potentially toxic" magnetic particles with human-friendly materials. Still, he says he is optimistic about the future medical uses of such microrobots. If safe, the bots "can effectively navigate to targeted disease sites and deliver drugs locally", making treatments more precise and effective.

Journal Reference: 10.1016/j.device.2024.100626

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owl writes:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/12/storm-cloud-approaching-rapidl.html

By Charlie Stross

This, from Techcrunch, seems like a good summary of a bad situation facing this blog: Death Of A Forum: How The UK's Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities.

This blog is just that: my personal blog, with comments.

Over the past two decades a lively community has evolved in the discussion threads. However, the Online Safety Act threatens to impose impossible hurdles on the continuation of open fora in the UK. The intent is officially to protect adults and children from illegal content, but ... there's no lower threshold on scale. A blog with comments is subject to exactly as much regulatory oversight as Facebook. It applies to all fora that enable people in the UK (that would be me) to communicate with other people in the UK (that's a whole bunch of you), so I can't avoid the restrictions by moving to a hosting provider in the US. Nor am I terribly keen on filing the huge amounts of paperwork necessary to identify myself as the Trust and Safety officer of an organization and arrange for commercial age verification services (that I can't in any event integrate with this ancient blogging platform). And the penalties for infractions are the same—fines of up to £18M (which is a gigantic multiple of my gross worth).

From the techdirt article:

We've been warning for years that the UK's Online Safety Act would be a disaster for the open internet. Its supporters accused us of exaggerating, or "shilling" for Big Tech. But as we've long argued, while tech giants like Facebook and Google might be able to shoulder the law's immense regulatory burdens, smaller sites would crumble.

Well, it's already happening.

On Monday, the London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed (LFGSS) online forum announced that it would be shutting down the day before the Online Safety Act goes into effect. It noted that it is effectively impossible to comply with the law. This was in response to UK regulator Ofcom telling online businesses that they need to start complying.

This includes registering a "senior person" with Ofcom who will be held accountable should Ofcom decide your site isn't safe enough. It also means that moderation teams need to be fully staffed with quick response times if bad (loosely defined) content is found on the site. On top of that, sites need to take proactive measures to protect children.

While all of this may make sense for larger sites, it's impossible for a small one-person passion project forum for bikers in London. For a small, community-driven forum, these requirements are not just burdensome, but existential.

[...] This is why we've spent years warning people. When you regulate the internet as if it's all just Facebook, all that will be left is Facebook.

[...] The promise of the internet was supposed to be that it allowed anyone to set up whatever they wanted online, whether it's a blog or a small forum. The UK has decided that the only forums that should remain online are those run by the largest companies in the world.

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upstart writes:

Sega considering Netflix-like game subscription service:

Sega is considering launching its own Netflix-like subscription service for video games, a move which would accelerate gaming's transition towards streaming.

There are already a number of similar services on the market - such as Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus - which see gamers pay a monthly fee for access to a range of titles rather than owning them outright.

Sega's president Shuji Utsumi told the BBC such subscription products were "very interesting", and his firm was "evaluating some opportunities".

"We're thinking something - and discussing something - we cannot disclose right now," he said.

Some in the industry have expressed concern about the move however telling the BBC it could see gamers "shelling out more money" on multiple subscription services.

It is not just Sony and Microsoft who offer game subscriptions - there are now countless players in the space, with rivals such as Nintendo, EA and Ubisoft all offering their own membership plans.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

You know how it is: you’ve got all year to do your Christmas shopping, but you always end up leaving it so late that you have to pay for premium delivery. Despite our best intentions to get things done early, we always do them at the last minute. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

This, I assume, is what’s been going on at Apple Park, whose residents seem bizarrely unprepared for the looming EU ban on the use of Lightning ports to charge smartphones. The company officially had two years to get ready for the new regulations, and it’s been on the cards a lot longer than that; yet Apple still finds itself having to simply halt the sale of three of its handsets in Europe with no obvious replacements.

[...] This strikes me, frankly, as a sub-optimal response to an extremely predictable situation. Apple’s strategy is to sell recent iPhones at a premium price but to target budget buyers with older models. With the iPhone 13 only recently dropped from sale and the 14, 14 Plus, and SE soon to follow it, the range will be left with no cheap option; instead of starting at $429, it will start at $699. (Or 17 eggs in our quaint European currency.)

This won’t be a problem for long, admittedly. A few months after the ban comes into force Apple will launch the 4th-gen iPhone SE, and by next fall the iPhone 17 will come out, dropping the iPhone 15 into the $599 slot currently occupied by the 14, and we’ll be back to normal. But the iPhone is Apple’s most lucrative product line in history, and I dread to think how many eggs Apple will be leaving on the table by going nine months without its full range in a major market. Think of how many Europeans will potentially be pushed into the arms of Google’s lower-cost Android empire.

[...] But this was always going to be difficult, because it was in Apple’s interests to fight against the transition for as long as humanly possible. Cupertino left its Christmas shopping to the last minute because it never wanted to buy any presents in the first place and still thinks it shouldn’t have to. But the sad fact is that Christmas is coming, whether we like it or not.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The modern race to build undetectable submarines dates from the 1960s. In that decade, the United States and the Soviet Union began a game of maritime hide-and-seek, deploying ever-quieter submarines as well as more advanced tracking and detection capabilities to spot their adversary's vessels.

That game continues to this day but with a wider field of players. In the coming months, the U.S. Navy plans to homeport the USS Minnesota on Guam. This Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine is among the quietest subs ever made. Advanced nuclear propulsion like the Minnesota’s gives the vessel a superior ability to operate covertly. More of its kind will be deployed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia to compete with China for influence and military dominance, especially over the Indo-Pacific region.

[...] The People’s Liberation Army Navy is the largest navy in the world, but it currently operates only 12 nuclear-powered submarines, a rather small number compared to the 67 attack subs and ballistic-missile subs of the U.S. Navy. And compared to U.S. submarines, Chinese boats are noisy and easily detected. But it won’t stay that way for long. The U.S. Department of Defense claims China plans to modernize and expand its submarine forces significantly by 2035, including more stealthy submarines.

[...] There are two key steps to track a submarine, says Scott Minium, a former commander at Submarine Squadron 15 in Guam who has mentored the commanding officers of seven nuclear-powered subs. The first step, Minium says, is to detect the signature of a potential submarine. The second step is to “classify it based on known signatures to determine if a submarine has been detected.” Such signatures include the unique noise patterns generated by different submarine classes as well as other identifiers, and they’re essential for detecting and tracking submarines.

Noise is the most critical signature, and so engineers working on stealth technology focus on suppressing the sound waves that submarines give off, rendering their movements nearly silent, especially at slow speeds. The thousands of rubberized anechoic tiles that cover the hull of a Virginia-class submarine absorb or distort sound waves coming from passive and active sonar, obscuring the sub’s whereabouts. Similarly, vibration-damping materials reduce the sounds that the engines and turbines transmit to the surrounding waters.

[...] Many experts say they’re unconcerned about these incursions on submarine stealth. Naval operators, they claim, still have plenty of ways to protect the stealth of their submarines. These stealth-preserving techniques include 1) countering detection through noise, 2) deploying more underwater drones, and 3) using strategic moves to counter the objectives of the adversary.

The first strategy uses noise as a feature, not a bug. Instead of going quieter, Minium suggests, naval operators could try “making more noise or finding innovative ways to change the acoustic signatures of submarines.” For example, he says, “We could make active sonar waves of submarines sound identical to whales.”

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A new study by researchers at University of Galway and Arizona State University has provided important insights into muscle atrophy. The condition, which refers to a loss of skeletal muscle mass, is a pressing issue when it comes to astronauts working in space.

The unique environment of microgravity presents challenges to the body, particularly affecting muscles, bones and the immune system. In microgravity, muscles weaken over time, placing astronauts at an increased risk of muscle atrophy if they don’t perform daily exercises.

However, researchers of the study have said that the latest findings could help to better spot and reduce muscle atrophy in astronauts.

The study was published in Nature Microgravity and investigated the molecular changes in muscle atrophy by looking at data from NASA’s GeneLab, which is an open-access platform for biological spaceflight data.

[...] One of the key findings from the study concerned the impact of microgravity on glycosylation, a biological process for adding sugars to molecules like proteins and helps to stabilise them and influence their functions in the body. The study found that changes in glycosylation under microgravity could give scientists the upper hand in preventing muscle loss in astronauts by targeting these pathways.

Joshi, Stokes professor of glycosciences, explained that while these findings address an important issue for astronauts, it could also help medical professionals to address muscle atrophy back on Earth.

“Muscle atrophy also affects aging populations, post-menopausal women and patients with chronic illnesses, such as cancer or heart disease,” he said. “Understanding how muscle loss occurs in space could lead to better treatments for these conditions on Earth.”

Journal Reference: Oommen, A.M., Stafford, P. & Joshi, L. Profiling muscle transcriptome in mice exposed to microgravity using gene set enrichment analysis. npj Microgravity 10, 94 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41526-024-00434-z

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upstart writes:

The Oropouche virus is spreading to new places:

Outbreaks of Oropouche virus have flared up in the Amazon for decades, but historically the pathogen has little troubled the rest of the world. But this seems to be changing. In 2024, the virus showed that it can travel.

Most of this year's 11,000-plus cases occurred in Brazil and Peru, where the virus is an old acquaintance, but it has also been found in 2024 in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Panama, and Cuba—the latter reporting 603 cases as well as in-country transmission for the first time. Infected travelers also transported the virus to North America and Europe: This year it was found twice in Canada and 94 times in the United States—with 90 cases reported in Florida—while 30 imported cases were found across Spain, Italy, and Germany.

For those who study Oropouche and other arboviruses—the family of viruses transmitted by arthropods such as mosquitoes and ticks—the situation is worrying. Despite having clues about its transmission cycle, there's insufficient information to accurately predict Oropouche's future behavior. "We have some pieces of the puzzle, but there is no total certainty as to what role each one plays," says Juan Carlos Navarro, director of research at SEK International University, where he heads the emerging diseases and epidemiology group.

The first symptoms of the disease appear suddenly between three and 12 days after being bitten, and usually last between four and six days. Symptoms include headaches, muscle and joint pain, chills, nausea, vomiting, and sensitivity to light. Skin rashes and bleeding from the gums or nose may occur, and in severe cases, meningitis or encephalitis—inflammation of the brain and its membranes—may develop. An Oropouche infection is generally uncomplicated, if unpleasant, though for the first time this year Brazil recorded two deaths linked to the virus.

Where cases have occurred, researchers are increasingly detecting something that may explain why the virus is emerging and spreading: deforestation. Changing natural land to grow crops, drill for oil, or mine for resources "seems to be the main driver of outbreaks," says Navarro. "It brings together three links: the virus, the vector, and humans."

[...] In outbreaks such as the current one, as well as one in Peru in 2016, researchers have found that badly affected areas lost more vegetation prior to the onset of the outbreak compared to regions without cases. In addition, 64 years ago, the first isolation of the virus in Brazil was in a sick sloth near the construction of the Belem-Brasilia highway. Navarro points out that human interference in nature seemingly driving disease outbreaks is not unique to Oropouche; years ago, the work of his colleague María Eugenia Grillet showed how the expansion of mining and deforestation reactivated malaria in Venezuela.

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upstart writes:

Google suggests fixes to its search monopoly:

Alphabet's Google proposed new limits to revenue-sharing agreements with companies including Apple which make Google's search engine the default on their devices and browsers.

The suggestions stem from the US search giant's ongoing antitrust battle over its online search business.

In August, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google illegally crushed its competition in search - a decision the company vowed to appeal.

In a legal filing submitted Friday, Google said it should be allowed to continue entering into those contracts with other companies while widening the options it offers.

These options include allowing different default search engines to be assigned to different platforms and browsing modes.

Google's suggested remedies also call for the ability for partners to change their default search provider at least every 12 months.

The proposals stand in stark contrast to the sweeping remedies suggested last month by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), which recommended that Judge Mehta force the firm to stop entering into revenue-sharing contracts.

[...] In a statement, Google called DOJ's remedies "overbroad" and said even its own counterproposals, which were filed in response to a court-mandated deadline, would come at a cost to their partners.

Judge Mehta is expected to issue a decision in the remedies phase of the landmark case by August, after a trial.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Ireland wanted to build data centres for the AI boom. Now they fear blackouts:

Dozens of data centres humming at the outskirts of Dublin are consuming more electricity than all of the urban homes in Ireland.

And now they are starting to wear out the warm welcome that brought them here.

Ireland is a country that made itself a computing factory for Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok. It is wondering whether it was all worth it as tech giants look around the world to build even more data centres to fuel the next wave of artificial intelligence.

Fears of rolling blackouts led Ireland's grid operator to halt new data centres near Dublin until 2028. These huge buildings and their powerful computers last year consumed 21% of the nation's electricity, according to official records. No other country has reported a higher burden to the International Energy Agency.

Not only that, but Ireland is still heavily reliant on burning fossil fuels to generate electricity, despite a growing number of wind farms sprouting across the countryside. Further data centre expansion threatens Ireland's goals to sharply cut planet-warming emissions.

Ireland is a "microcosm of what many countries could be facing over the next decade, particularly with the growth of AI," said energy researcher Paul Deane of University College Cork.

Twenty-six-year-old activist Darragh Adelaide lives in a working-class Dublin suburb just across a busy motorway from Grange Castle Business Park, one of Ireland's biggest data centre clusters. It could get even bigger were Adelaide not a thorn in the side of Google's expansion plans.

"It's kind of an outrageous number of data centres," Adelaide said. "People have started to make the connection between the amount of electricity they're using and electricity prices going up."

Ireland has attracted global tech companies since the "Celtic Tiger" boom at the turn of the 21st century. Tax incentives, a highly skilled, English-speaking workforce and the country's membership in the European Union have all contributed to making the tech sector a central part of the Irish economy. The island is also a node for undersea cables that extend to the U.S., Britain, Iceland and mainland Europe.

Nearly all of the data centres sit on the edge of Dublin, where their proximity to the capital city facilitates online financial transactions and other activities that require fast connections. Data centre computers run hot, but compared to other parts of the world, Ireland's cool temperatures make it easier to keep them from overheating without drawing in as much water.

Still, buildings that for years went mostly unnoticed have attracted unwanted attention as their power demands surged while Irish householders pay some of Europe's highest electricity bills. Ireland's Environmental Protection Agency has also flagged concerns about nitrogen oxide pollution from data centres' on-site generators — typically gas or diesel turbines — affecting areas near Dublin.

A crackdown began in 2021, spurred by projections that data centres are on pace to take up one third of Ireland's electricity in this decade. Regulators declared that Dublin had hit its limits and could no longer plug more data centres into its grid. The government urged tech companies to look outside the capital and find ways to supply their own power.

"What's happening in Ireland is the politics of basically what happens when you build too many of these things," said University College Dublin researcher Patrick Brodie. "Even though people have recognized for a while that data centres are energy hogs, there hasn't really been so many of these moments where, effectively, Ireland issued a red alert."

upstart writes:

Ultra-thin diamond wafers for electronics made using sticky tape:

A new way to make ultra-thin diamond wafers using sticky tape could help produce diamond-based electronics, which might one day be a useful alternative to silicon-based designs.

Diamond has unusual electronic properties: it is both a good insulator and allows electrons with certain energies to move with little resistance. This can translate to being able to handle higher energies with greater efficiency than conventional silicon chip designs.

However, producing working diamond chips requires large and very thin wafers, similar to the thin silicon wafers used to build modern computer chips, which have proved tricky to create.

Now, Zhiqin Chu at the University of Hong Kong and his colleagues have found a way to produce extremely thin and flexible diamond wafers, using sticky tape.

Chu and his colleagues first implanted nano-sized diamonds in a small silicon wafer, then blew methane gas over it at high temperatures to form a continuous, thin diamond sheet. They then created a small crack on one side of the attached diamond sheet, before peeling off the diamond layer using regular sticky tape.

They found that this peeled diamond sheet was both extremely thin, at less than a micrometre, much thinner than a human hair, and smooth enough to allow for the kind of etching techniques used to produce silicon chips.

"It is very reminiscent of the early days of graphene when Scotch tape was used to produce the first monolayer of graphene from graphite. I just never would have imagined the concept being applied to diamond," says Julie Macpherson at the University of Warwick, UK.

The hidden semiconductor abilities of diamonds could help power grids and electric vehicles manage far greater amounts of electricity more efficiently

"This new edge-exposed exfoliation method will be an enabler for a multitude of device designs and experimental approaches," says Mete Atatüre at the University of Cambridge. One area it could be particularly useful for is offering greater control in quantum devices that use diamonds as sensors, he says.

The diamond membranes Chu and his colleagues can produce are about 5 centimetres across, which shows that the method works as a proof of principle, says Andrea Ferrari at the University of Cambridge, but it is still smaller than the larger 20-30 centimetres that is standard to many wafer processes, and it isn't clear whether the new method can be scaled up, he says.

The wafers produced also appear to be polycrystalline, which are less smooth and regular than monocrystalline diamond, and this could limit its use for some applications, says Macpherson.

Journal Reference:
Jing, Jixiang, Sun, Fuqiang, Wang, Zhongqiang, et al. Scalable production of ultraflat and ultraflexible diamond membrane, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08218-x)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Why childhood vaccines are a public health success story:

That vaccine was licensed in the US in 1955. By 1994, polio was considered eliminated in North and South America. Today, wild forms of the virus have been eradicated in all but two countries.

But the polio vaccine story is not straightforward. There are two types of polio vaccine: an injected type that includes a "dead" form of the virus, and an oral version that includes "live" virus. This virus can be shed in feces, and in places with poor sanitation, it can spread. It can also undergo genetic changes to create a form of the virus that can cause paralysis. Although this is rare, it does happen—and today there are more cases of vaccine-derived polio than wild-type polio.

It is worth noting that since 2000, more than 10 billion doses of the oral polio vaccine have been administered to almost 3 billion children. It is estimated that more than 13 million cases of polio have been prevented through these efforts. But there have been just under 760 cases of vaccine-derived polio.

We could prevent these cases by switching to the injected vaccine, which wealthy countries have already done. But that's not easy in countries with fewer resources and those trying to reach children in remote rural areas or war zones.

Even the MMR vaccine is not entirely risk-free. Some people will experience minor side effects, and severe allergic reactions, while rare, can occur. And neither vaccine offers 100% protection against disease. No vaccine does. "Even if you vaccinate 100% [of the population], I don't think we'll be able to attain herd immunity for polio," says Abbas. It's important to acknowledge these limitations.

While there are some small risks, though, they are far outweighed by the millions of lives being saved. "[People] often underestimate the risk of the disease and overestimate the risk of the vaccine," says Moss.

In some ways, vaccines have become a victim of their own success. "Most of today's parents fortunately have never seen the tragedy caused by vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles encephalitis, congenital rubella syndrome, and individuals crippled by polio," says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, a nonprofit that conducts research on health risks to children. "With some individuals benefiting from the propagation of scary messages about vaccines and the proliferation of social media providing reinforcement, it's no surprise that fears may endure."

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://crookedtimber.org/2024/11/11/occasional-paper-four-hidden-species-of-portuguese-man-o-war/

There's been a a certain amount of negativity floating around lately. So, let's talk about a toxic, venomous freak of nature and the parasite that afflicts it.

Biology warning, this gets slightly squicky.

Let's start with the toxic, venomous freak of nature: the Portuguese man-o'-war.

Have you ever seen a Portuguese Man o'War? – If you've spent a lot of time in warm ocean waters, you've probably encountered one of these guys. They're hard to miss! They come in a variety of colors — pink, blue, purple — and they're pretty prominent, floating on the surface of the ocean like discarded party balloons. And if you've ever been stung by one, well, you probably remember that. Their stings aren't lethal to humans, but they're welt-inducing and painful.

So it's a jellyfish. Except it isn't really: it's several jellyfish, smooshed together. And here's where the "freak of nature" part kicks in.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.10.602499v2.full

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Thinking Slowly: The Paradoxical Slowness of Human Behavior

Caltech researchers have quantified the speed of human thought: a rate of 10 bits per second. However, our bodies' sensory systems gather data about our environments at a rate of a billion bits per second, which is 100 million times faster than our thought processes. This new study raises major new avenues of exploration for neuroscientists, in particular: Why can we only think one thing at a time while our sensory systems process thousands of inputs at once ?

A bit is a basic unit of information in computing. A typical Wi-Fi connection, for example, can process 50 million bits per second. In the new study, Zheng applied techniques from the field of information theory to a vast amount of scientific literature on human behaviors such as reading and writing, playing video games, and solving Rubik's Cubes, to calculate that humans think at a speed of 10 bits per second.

"This is an extremely low number," Meister says. "Every moment, we are extracting just 10 bits from the trillion that our senses are taking in and using those 10 to perceive the world around us and make decisions. This raises a paradox: What is the brain doing to filter all of this information?"

[...] The new quantification of the rate of human thought may quash some science-fiction futuristic scenarios. Within the last decade, tech moguls have suggested creating a direct interface between human brains and computers in order for humans to communicate faster than the normal pace of conversation or typing. The new study, however, suggests that our brains would communicate through a neural interface at the same speed of 10 bits per second.

Journal Reference: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s ?

Also Covered By:
    • Technology Networks
    • Scientific American
    • New Atlas

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