“Forever chemicals” have been identified in water systems that serve about 9.5 million people in just six states, according to a new analysis of state data by a congressional watchdog.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report this week saying that the toxic chemicals had been found in at least 18 percent of water systems in Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio and Vermont.
Most scientists believe that the structure of the adult brain is generally rigid and incapable of rapid changes. However, new research has now revealed that this is not true. In a new study, German scientists have shown that in-patient treatment for depression can lead to an increase in brain connectivity. Moreover, those individuals who respond well to this treatment show a greater increase in connectivity than those who don’t.
Presenting the work at the European College for Neuropsychopharmacology Congress in Vienna, lead researcher, Professor Jonathan Repple said:
“This means that the brain structure of patients with serious clinical depression is not as fixed as we thought, and we can improve brain structure within a short time frame, around 6 weeks. We found that if this treatment leads to an increase in brain connectivity, it is also effective in tackling depression symptoms. This gives hope to patients who believe nothing can change and they have to live with a disease forever, because it is “set in stone” in their brain.”
The GSA is an independent agency of the United States government established in 1949 to help manage and support the basic functioning of various federal agencies, supplying products and communications for U.S. government offices, providing transportation and office space to federal employees, and developing government-wide cost-minimizing policies and other management tasks.
Of their yearly balance of about €3 million, nearly the entirely is spent on the main congress and other events and conferences. Over the last few years, addressing geography, generation, and gender equities (3G), the International Astronautical Federation established itself as the youngest and most diverse space organization in the world. Over the same period, the IAF President Pascale Ehrenfreund, has pushed her excellent Global Innovation Agenda which “has brought emerging countries to our space family through conferences, expanded work with partner organizations, and created innovative systems for sharing information among members” [1].In his first newsletter [2] the incumbent President, Clay Mowry, communicated the IAF agenda for next 3 years: “Sustainability, Investment and Security”. According to Mowry, “the IAF should seek to influence conversations around the sustainability of the space environment. Securing orbits, spacecraft, frequencies, and physical resources is critical to the future viability of space exploration.” And: “The coming three years will see a shift towards the commercial development of low Earth orbit and major push to field systems in lunar orbits and on the surface of the Moon. We must be prepared to tackle the challenges of growing investment in the space sector head-on. Security refers to the freedom to operate safely in the space domain. Without it, investors and nation states can hardly be expected to pour the continued resources and attention required to secure humanity’s future beyond Earth.”
An agenda oriented to civilian space development? We may say yes, moderately. We want to encourage and further develop this orientation, and we’ll do our best to move IAF more on the side of human expansion into the Geo-Lunar space and the Solar System.
The Biden administration unveiled a set of far-reaching goals Tuesday aimed at averting harms caused by the rise of artificial intelligence systems, including guidelines for how to protect people’s personal data and limit surveillance.
The Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights notably does not set out specific enforcement actions, but instead is intended as a White House call to action for the U.S. government to safeguard digital and civil rights in an AI-fueled world, officials said.
“This is the Biden-Harris administration really saying that we need to work together, not only just across government, but across all sectors, to really put equity at the center and civil rights at the center of the ways that we make and use and govern technologies,” said Alondra Nelson, deputy director for science and society at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “We can and should expect better and demand better from our technologies.”
Tesla is considering several sites in Canada for its next Gigafactory according to reports. This comes as Francois-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s industry and innovation minister, recently confirmed talks with Tesla over a new factory. He stated the following (via Reuters):
“Yes, I’m talking to them,” Champagne said, in response to a question about reports of Tesla looking to build a factory in Canada. “I’m talking also to all the automakers around the world.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has hinted at a Canadian Gigafactory on numerous occasions, most recently at the automaker’s annual shareholders’ meeting last month. And now reports from Canada suggest representatives from Tesla have already visited numerous locations in Ontario and Quebec. Moreover, Tesla is currently looking for a high-volume recruiter in the Quebec area, indicating the automaker could be on the verge of hiring several thousand Canadian workers.
Is Director, Research & Innovation, at Jaguar Land Rover (https://www.jaguarlandrover.com/innovation), where he is focused on heading the global research department, spearheading cutting edge research (collaborating with the tech industry, government, regulators and academia), as well as product design, innovation, and strategy, helping to drive the latest technologies and innovations into their products and services.
Aram also serves as a Visiting Professor in Technology Innovation at King’s College London.
The National research center for Cybersecurity ATHENE has found a way to break one of the basic mechanisms used to secure internet traffic. The mechanism, called RPKI, is actually designed to prevent cybercriminals or government attackers from diverting traffic on the internet.
Such redirections are surprisingly common on the internet, for example, for espionage or through misconfigurations. The ATHENE scientist team of Prof. Dr. Haya Shulman showed that attackers can completely bypass the security mechanism without the affected network operators being able to detect this. According to analyses by the ATHENE team, popular implementations of RPKI worldwide were vulnerable by early 2021.
The team informed the manufacturers, and now presented the findings to the international expert public.
In July, particle physicists in the US completed the Snowmass process—a decadal community planning exercise that forges a vision of scientific priorities and future facilities. Organized by the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society, this year’s Snowmass meetings considered a range of plans including neutrino experiments and muon colliders. One new idea that generated buzz was the Cool Copper Collider (or C3 for short). This proposal calls for accelerating particles with conventional, or “normal-conducting,” radio frequency (RF) cavities—as opposed to the superconducting RF cavities used in modern colliders. This “retro” design could potentially achieve 500 GeV collision energies with an 8-km-long linear collider, making it significantly smaller and presumably less expensive than a comparable superconducting design.
The goal of the C3 project would be to operate as a Higgs factory, which—in particle-physics parlance—is a collider that smashes together electrons and their antimatter partners, called positrons, at energies above 250 GeV. Such a facility would make loads of Higgs bosons with less of the mess that comes from smashing protons and antiprotons together—as is done at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. A Higgs factory would give more precise measurements than the LHC of the couplings between Higgs bosons and other particles, potentially uncovering small discrepancies that could lead to new theories of particle physics. “I think the Higgs is the most interesting particle that’s out there,” says Emilio Nanni from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. “And we should absolutely build a machine that’s dedicated to studying it with as much precision as possible.”
But an outsider might wonder why another Higgs-factory proposal is being added to the particle-physics menu. A similar factory design—the International Linear Collider (ILC)—has been in the works for years, but that project is presently stalled, as the Japanese government has not yet confirmed its support for building the facility in Japan. Waiting in the wings are several other large particle-physics proposals, including CERN’s Future Circular Collider and China’s Circular Electron Positron Collider.
Once the first artificial super intelligence is created it will help us recursively improve ourselves and then the post human millennium will begin.
Thinking this will prevent war, the US government gives an impenetrable supercomputer total control over launching nuclear missiles. But what the computer does with the power is unimaginable to its creators.
