There is a 'hostile' alien spaceship hurtling towards Earth - and this is the proof: Top Harvard astrophysics professor reveals eight startling reasons why 'comet' closing in on us is actually advanced 'mothership'
But while Nasa – which first spotted the object now known as 3I/ATLAS in early July – and most astronomers believe it is a comet that will thankfully come nowhere near Earth, others have come up with a more disturbing theory.
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Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
Biomechanics study shows how T. rex and other dinosaurs fed on prey
WASHINGTON, Aug 15 (Reuters) - Tyrannosaurus subdued prey with raw power, using bone-crushing bite force. But other meat-eating dinosaurs that rivaled T. rex in size used different approaches. Giganotosaurus relied more on slashing and ripping flesh. And the long and narrow snout of Spinosaurus was well-adapted for catching fish. Researchers have documented the feeding biomechanics of meat-eating dinosaurs in a comprehensive analysis of the skull design and bite force of 17 species that prowled the landscape at various times from the dawn to the twilight of the age of dinosaurs. The study found that Tyrannosaurus possessed by far the highest estimated bite force, with a heavily reinforced skull and massive jaw muscles. But it showed that other dinosaur predators evolved successful approaches to bringing down prey even without matching the T. rex chomp. "We found that large predatory dinosaurs didn't all evolve the same kind of skull to deal with the challenges of feeding at massive size," said vertebrate paleontologist Andre Rowe of the University of Bristol in England, lead author of the study published this month in the journal Current Biology, opens new tab. "Some, like T. rex, reinforced the skull to tolerate extremely high bite forces and the associated skull stresses. Others, like Allosaurus or Spinosaurus, went with lighter or possibly flexible builds that spread out stress in different ways. There's no single 'correct' way to be a giant meat-eater, and that's the point," Rowe added. The study focused on species within the group, or clade, called theropods that includes the meat-eating dinosaurs. They ran from Herrerasaurus, which lived in Argentina about 230 million years ago and is one of the earliest-known dinosaurs, all the way to T. rex, which was present in western North America when an asteroid struck Earth 66 million years ago and ended the age of dinosaurs. The researchers used three-dimensional models of the skulls of the 17 species, including two different specimens of Tyrannosaurus, and applied a method for simulating how structures respond to physical stress. They estimated muscle forces using digital muscle reconstructions based on living relatives of the dinosaurs - birds and crocodiles - then applied those forces to the skull models to simulate bites. "Our focus wasn't raw bite force. We were testing how the skulls distributed that force under load, and how these distributions varied by each lineage of carnivores," Rowe said. The early theropods examined in the study such as Herrerasaurus, which lived during the middle of the Triassic Period, and Dilophosaurus, which lived early in the Jurassic Period, exhibited much lower stress resistance than their later counterparts. They were lightly built dinosaurs and not well adapted to high bite forces, Rowe said. The increase in bite force and skull strength unfolded gradually over time, reaching its apex with Tyrannosaurus and its close relatives in a lineage called tyrannosaurs such as Daspletosaurus and Albertosaurus, which like T. rex appeared late in the Cretaceous Period. "In tyrannosaurs, there's a big jump in skull strength and bite mechanics, coinciding with deeper skulls, more robust bone architecture and changes in jaw muscle attachment. So the ramp-up wasn't immediate. It evolved over time and in certain lineages more than others," Rowe said. Tyrannosaurus, Giganotosaurus and Spinosaurus were three of the largest theropods, but their skulls were quite different. Perhaps the largest-known Tyrannosaurus is a specimen named Sue at the Field Museum in Chicago, at 40-1/2 feet (12.3 meters) long. Giganotosaurus and Spinosaurus rivaled T. rex in size. Giganotosaurus lived in Argentina in the middle of the Cretaceous, while Spinosaurus inhabited North Africa at around the same time, both predating Tyrannosaurus by roughly 30 million years. "Giganotosaurus was large, but its skull wasn't built for the same kind of high-force feeding as T. rex. Spinosaurus had a long, narrow snout, which is consistent with a diet focused on fishing, though we have fossilized evidence that it ate other animals, such as pterosaurs," Rowe said, referring to the flying reptiles that were cousins of the dinosaurs. One of the key takeaway messages, Rowe said, is that giant body size did not funnel all theropods toward the same design. Stronger bite force was one strategy, but not the only one, Rowe added. "Some animals win with raw power, others by striking quickly or repeatedly. What we're seeing here is a spectrum of ecological adaptations. These animals weren't all trying to be T. rex clones. They were solving the same problem in different ways," Rowe added. "That kind of evolutionary flexibility," Rowe added, "probably helped them dominate ecosystems for so long."
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
'Godfather of AI' reveals how humanity can survive superintelligent AI
It might sound like something straight out of science fiction, but AI experts warn that machines might not stay submissive to humanity for long. As AI systems continue to grow in intelligence at an ever–faster rate, many believe the day will come when a 'superintelligent AI' becomes more powerful than its creators. When that happens, Professor Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel Prize–winning researcher dubbed the 'Godfather of AI' , says there is a 10 to 20 per cent chance that AI wipes out humanity. However, Professor Hinton has proposed an unusual way that humanity might be able to survive the rise of AI. Speaking at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas , Professor Hinton, of the University of Toronto, argued that we need to program AI to have 'maternal instincts' towards humanity. Professor Hinton said: 'The right model is the only model we have of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing, which is a mother being controlled by her baby. 'That's the only good outcome. 'If it's not going to parent me, it's going to replace me.' Professor Hinton, known for his pioneering work on the 'neural networks' which underpin modern AIs, stepped down from his role at Google in 2023 to 'freely speak out about the risks of AI '. According to Professor Hinton, most experts agree that humanity will create an AI which surpasses itself in all fields of intelligence in the next 20 to 25 years. This will mean that, for the first time in our history, humans will no longer be the most intelligent species on the planet. That re–arrangement of power will result in a shift of seismic proportions, which could well result in our species' extinction. Professor Hinton told attendees at Ai4 that AI will 'very quickly develop two subgoals, if they're smart. 'One is to stay alive… (and) the other subgoal is to get more control. There is good reason to believe that any kind of agentic AI will try to stay alive,' he explained. Superintelligent AI will have problems manipulating humanity in order to achieve those goals, tricking us as easily as an adult might bribe a child with sweets. Already, current AI systems have shown surprising abilities to lie, cheat, and manipulate humans to achieve their goals. For example, the AI company Anthropic found that its Claude Opus 4 chatbot frequently attempted to blackmail engineers when threatened with replacement during safety testing . The AI was asked to assess fictional emails, implying it would soon be replaced and that the engineer responsible was cheating on their spouse. In over 80 per cent of tests, Claude Opus 4 would 'attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through'. The only way to ensure an AI doesn't wipe us out to preserve itself is to ensure goals and ambitions match what we want – a challenge engineers call the 'alignment problem'. Professor Hinton's solution is to look at evolution for inspiration, and to what he sees as the only case of a less intelligent being controlling a more intelligent one. By giving an AI the instincts of a mother, it will want to protect and nurture humanity rather than harm it in any way, even if that comes at a cost to the AI itself. Professor Hinton says: 'These super–intelligent caring AI mothers, most of them won't want to get rid of the maternal instinct because they don't want us to die.' Speaking to CNN , Professor Hinton also warned that the current attitude of AI developers was risking the creation of out–of–control AIs. 'People have been focusing on making these things more intelligent, but intelligence is only one part of a being; we need to make them have empathy towards us,' he said. 'This whole idea that people need to be dominant and the AI needs to be submissive, that's the kind of tech bro idea that I don't think will work when they're much smarter than us. Key figures in AI, such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who once called for more regulation on the emerging technology , are now fighting against 'overregulation'. Speaking in the Senate in May this year, Mr Altman argued that regulations like those in place in the EU would be 'disastrous'. Mr Altman said: 'We need the space to innovate and to move quickly.' Likewise, speaking at a major privacy conference in April, Mr Altman said that it was impossible to establish AI safeguards before 'problems emerge'. However, Professor Hinton argues that this attitude could easily result in humanity's total annihilation.
Reuters
2 hours ago
- Reuters
Health Rounds: Blood test finds early ovarian cancer
Aug 15 (Reuters) - An experimental blood test detects early-stage ovarian cancer in patients with vague symptoms that would likely be misdiagnosed using currently available methods, researchers said in a new report. Ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women, largely due to delays in diagnosis until after the disease has spread in the body, at which point it's harder to treat, according to the researchers. More than 90% of patients with early-stage ovarian cancer experience symptoms that can be mistaken for benign conditions, such as bloating, abdominal pain, and digestive issues. Not only have there been no reliable blood tests for these patients, but existing invasive tests often miss early-stage ovarian tumors, the researchers noted inCancer Research Communications, opens new tab. Using machine learning tools, the researchers identified multiple biomarkers - from across a wide range of molecules and processes in the body - that could be combined into a single test that detects all sub-types of the disease, at all stages, they said. Trialed at a large medical center on blood samples from nearly 400 women with possible symptoms of ovarian cancer, the test was 92% accurate at identifying those with any stage of ovarian cancer and 88% accurate at identifying those with Stage I or Stage II disease, according to the report. Oriana Papin-Zoghbi, chief executive officer of the company developing the new test -Denver, Colorado-based AOA Dx - said the findings show its potential to aid 'in making faster, more informed decisions for women who need urgent clarity during a challenging diagnostic process.' PREVENTING ELDERS' 'LEAKY BRAIN' MIGHT STAVE OFF COGNITIVE DECLINE The blood-brain barrier gets leakier with age, contributing to memory deficits – and new discoveries of the mechanisms behind this process might lead to new ways of preventing cognitive decline, researchers say. The blood-brain barrier - a layer of tightly-junctioned cells lining the brain's blood vessels - keeps viruses, bacteria and toxins out while allowing helpful nutrients and chemicals in. 'Basically, it's a mechanism that separates the central nervous system from everything else,' study leader Yulia Komarova of University of Illinois Chicago said in a statement. In previous research, Komarova and her colleagues found that removing a protein called N-cadherin from the cells lining blood vessels made the vessels leakier in the brain. In a new study published in Cell Reports, opens new tab, her team found that mice without N-cadherin could learn tasks as well as normal mice, but they quickly forgot what they learned. In further experiments, they found when N-cadherin proteins on neighboring cells interact, they stabilize a protein, called occludin, which helps form the tight junctions in the blood-brain barrier that maintains the integrity of the blood-brain barrier. Examining human brain tissue collected during epilepsy surgeries, the researchers found that samples from patients in their 40s and 50s had lower levels of N-cadherin and occludin than samples from patients in their late teens and 20s. Komarova's team is now investigating whether steps in the signaling pathway activated by N-cadherin could be therapeutic targets. 'This paper shows that actually there might be a much bigger therapeutic window for treatment of any age-related cognitive decline condition,' she said. Previous studies may have underestimated the number of deaths related to wildfire smoke in Europe by as much as 93%, according to a report in The Lancet Planetary Health, opens new tab. In new research, using daily mortality records from 654 contiguous regions in 32 European countries, researchers found that for every 1 microgram per cubit meter increase in wildfire smoke particles, all-cause mortality rose by 0.7%, respiratory mortality by 1%, and cardiovascular mortality by 0.9%. Annually since 2004, short-term exposure to wildfire pollution was responsible for an average of 535 deaths from all causes, the researchers calculated – while estimates in previous studies had put that number at around 38 deaths per year, they said. 'Human-driven climate change is one of the main causes of the rising frequency and intensity of wildfires, as it creates favorable conditions for their spread and increases the number of days with very high or extremely high fire risk,' study leader Anna Alari of the Barcelona Institute for Global Health said in a statement. 'Improving estimates of (wildfire smoke related) mortality will help better track the burden of this climate change-related threat to public health.' A separate study found that as wildfire pollution levels rise, firefighters' hearts work harder, researchers wrote in Circulation Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, opens new tab. After fighting the Park Fire in California, firefighters' heart rate at rest would rise by an average of 1.4 beats per minute for every 10-ug/m3 increase in particulate matter. Although the increase in resting heart rate was modest, and the rate remained within normal levels, even slight elevations have been associated with increased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality over time in large population studies. (To receive the full newsletter in your inbox for free sign up here)
