James Frey's Blog, page 16
September 2, 2024
Revisiting The Silk Road
The country’s archaeologists are striking out along the Silk Road to trace the reach of ancient Chinese civilization, disputing long-held beliefs
By Sha Hua
The Chinortepa dig site in Uzbekistan has yielded discoveries that cast new light on the ancient Yuezhi people.HINOR, UZBEKISTAN—China’s leader, Xi Jinping, says he is striving to make sure Chinese civilization wields global influence far into the future. One little-noticed part of that vision: an effort to expand its reach into the very distant past.
After decades of digging in their own backyard, Chinese archaeologists are now fanning out across the world, trying to unearth connections between Chinese civilization and pivotal moments in global history.
On the plains of southern Uzbekistan, a team of Chinese scientists is working to excavate burial sites they discovered in 2019. The tombs offer potential clues about the fate of a mysterious nomadic tribe with roots in what is now considered China that could rewrite the history of the Silk Road, the network of trade routes that connected the East and West over two millennia.
September 1, 2024
Dark Oxygen
Scientists have discovered that metallic nodules on the seafloor produce their own oxygen in the dark depths of the Pacific Ocean. These polymetallic nodules, generating electricity like AA batteries, challenge the belief that only photosynthetic organisms create oxygen, potentially altering our understanding of how life began on Earth.
By: NEWS WIRES
In the total darkness of the depths of the Pacific Ocean, scientists have discovered oxygen being produced not by living organisms but by strange potato-shaped metallic lumps that give off almost as much electricity as AA batteries.
The surprise finding has many potential implications and could even require rethinking how life first began on Earth, the researchers behind a new study said on Monday.
It had been thought that only living things such as plants and algae were capable of producing oxygen via photosynthesis — which requires sunlight.
But four kilometres (2.5 miles) below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, where no sunlight can reach, small mineral deposits called polymetallic nodules have been recorded making so-called dark oxygen for the first time.
August 31, 2024
AI Eats Electricity
Generative artificial intelligence tools, now part of the everyday user experience online, are causing stress on local power grids and mass water evaporation.
by REECE ROGERS
ILLUSTRATION: NOLIMIT46 / Getty ImagesRIGHT NOW, GENERATIVE artificial intelligence is impossible to ignore online. An AI-generated summary may randomly appear at the top of the results whenever you do a Google search. Or you might be prompted to try Meta’s AI tool while browsing Facebook. And that ever-present sparkle emoji continues to haunt my dreams.
This rush to add AI to as many online interactions as possible can be traced back to OpenAI’s boundary-pushing release of ChatGPT late in 2022. Silicon Valley soon became obsessed with generative AI, and nearly two years later, AI tools powered by large language models permeate the online user experience.
One unfortunate side effect of this proliferation is that the computing processes required to run generative AI systems are much more resource intensive. This has led to the arrival of the internet’s hyper-consumption era, a period defined by the spread of a new kind of computing that demands excessive amounts of electricity and water to build as well as operate.
August 30, 2024
Neandertal Neighbors
Detecting modern human–to-Neanderthal gene flow (H→N) and its consequences. Credit: Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adi1768Ever since the first Neanderthal bones were discovered in 1856, people have wondered about these ancient hominins. How are they different from us? How much are they like us? Did our ancestors get along with them? Fight them? Love them? The recent discovery of a group called Denisovans, a Neanderthal-like group who populated Asia and South Asia, added its own set of questions.
Now, an international team of geneticists and AI experts are adding whole new chapters to our shared hominin history. Under the leadership of Joshua Akey, a professor in Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, the researchers have found a history of genetic intermingling and exchange that suggests a much more intimate connection between these early human groups than previously believed.
“This is the first time that geneticists have identified multiple waves of modern human-Neanderthal admixture,” said Liming Li, a professor in the Department of Medical Genetics and Developmental Biology at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, who performed this work as an associate research scholar in Akey’s lab.
July 21, 2024
The Original Macro
With a new framework, researchers believe they could be close to explaining how regularities emerge on macro scales out of systems made up of uncountable constituent parts.
by Philip Ball
CLIP: EQUINOX GRAPHICSTHE ORIGINAL VERSION of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.
A few centuries ago, the swirling polychromatic chaos of Jupiter’s atmosphere spawned the immense vortex that we call the Great Red Spot.
From the frantic firing of billions of neurons in your brain comes your unique and coherent experience of reading these words.
As pedestrians each try to weave their path on a crowded sidewalk, they begin to follow one another, forming streams that no one ordained or consciously chose.
The world is full of such emergent phenomena: large-scale patterns and organization arising from innumerable interactions between component parts. And yet there is no agreed scientific theory to explain emergence. Loosely, the behavior of a complex system might be considered emergent if it can’t be predicted from the properties of the parts alone. But when will such large-scale structures and patterns arise, and what’s the criterion for when a phenomenon is emergent and when it isn’t? Confusion has reigned. “It’s just a muddle,” said Jim Crutchfield, a physicist at the University of California, Davis.
“Philosophers have long been arguing about emergence, and going round in circles,” said Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in England. The problem, according to Seth, is that we haven’t had the right tools—“not only the tools for analysis, but the tools for thinking. Having measures and theories of emergence would not only be something we can throw at data but would also be tools that can help us think about these systems in a richer way.”
July 12, 2024
July 11, 2024
Shelley Duvall At Peace
She starred in several Robert Altman films, including “Thieves Like Us,” “Nashville, “Popeye,” “Three Women” and “McCabe & Ms. Miller”
By Jake Coyle | Associated Press
Shelley Duvall, the intrepid, Texas-born movie star whose wide-eyed, winsome presence was a mainstay in the films of Robert Altman and who co-starred in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” has died. She was 75.
Duvall died Thursday in her sleep at her home in Blanco, Texas, her longtime partner, Dan Gilroy, announced. The cause was complications of diabetes, said her friend, the publicist Gary Springer.
“My dear, sweet, wonderful life, partner, and friend left us last night,” Gilroy said in a statement. “Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away beautiful Shelley.”
Duvall was attending junior college in Texas when Altman’s crew members, preparing to film “Brewster McCloud,” encountered her as at a party in Houston in 1970. They introduced her to the director, who cast her “Brewster McCloud” and made her his protege.
Duvall would go on to appear in Altman films including “Thieves Like Us,” “Nashville, “Popeye,” “Three Women” and “McCabe & Ms. Miller.”
“He offers me damn good roles,” Duvall told The New York Times in 1977. “None of them have been alike. He has a great confidence in me, and a trust and respect for me, and he doesn’t put any restrictions on me or intimidate me, and I love him. I remember the first advice he ever gave me: ‘Don’t take yourself seriously.’”
July 10, 2024
Dead Alive Again
By Mikael Wood, Pop Music Critic
LAS VEGAS —
Four hours or so before they’re due beneath the massive wraparound video screen at Sphere, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and John Mayer amble into a backstage production office like three guys showing up — again — for the work of blowing 17,000 minds.
“Nice to meet you,” Mayer says, grinning as he extends a hand. “John Mayer, Mayer Industries.”
As original members of the Grateful Dead, guitarist Weir, 76, and percussionist Hart, 80, are jam-band royalty; Mayer, 46, is the singer and guitarist known for pop hits like “Gravity” and “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” Together they represent the nucleus of Dead & Company, which on this recent afternoon has just passed the halfway mark of a 30-date summer residency at Sphere, the state-of-the-art dome-shaped venue behind the Venetian resort on the Las Vegas Strip.
July 9, 2024
Astronaut Robots Coming
Labor-intensive manufacturing has limited the use of lighter, stronger composites but that may change with emerging techniques
There have been only a handful of ages of new materials in the history of humankind—ceramics, steel and plastics come to mind—and we are now on the cusp of the next one: composites.
When we talk of composites, we’re speaking about such things as the carbon-fiber ones in wind turbines, race cars and the Boeing 787. Such materials have the advantage of being far lighter than the metal parts they typically replace, while being just as strong, and requiring fewer resources to make.
Materials scientists have had limited success making composites affordable and accessible for decades, or possibly millennia—technically, they were invented by the Mesopotamians. The labor-intensive nature of their manufacturing has made them expensive, which has limited their application to a handful of areas where their advantages outweigh their costs, such as the aerospace industry.
Now, thanks to new manufacturing techniques that can churn out composite parts quickly and cheaply, all of that is changing, and the results could be both profound and exciting.
July 8, 2024
Our Slowing Core
By Mindy Weisberger, CNN
New research confirms the rotation of Earth’s inner core has been slowing down as part of a decades-long pattern. How this slowdown might affect our planet remains an open question. Edward Sotelo/Courtesy USCDeep inside Earth is a solid metal ball that rotates independently of our spinning planet, like a top whirling around inside a bigger top, shrouded in mystery.
This inner core has intrigued researchers since its discovery by Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann in 1936, and how it moves — its rotation speed and direction — has been at the center of a decades-long debate. A growing body of evidence suggests the core’s spin has changed dramatically in recent years, but scientists have remained divided over what exactly is happening — and what it means.
Part of the trouble is that Earth’s deep interior is impossible to observe or sample directly. Seismologists have gleaned information about the inner core’s motion by examining how waves from large earthquakes that ping this area behave. Variations between waves of similar strengths that passed through the core at different times enabled scientists to measure changes in the inner core’s position and calculate its spin.
James Frey's Blog
- James Frey's profile
- 3309 followers
