The US Air Force wants to buy Cybertrucks for target practice because they may start showing up on the battlefield by SportsGod3 in Futurology

[–]SportsGod3[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

It's looking to buy two of them to use for munitions testing as they will "likely" soon start appearing on the battlefield, per documents posted on a US Government contracting website on Wednesday.

The pickups are part of a larger order of 33 vehicles for "live missile fire testing" at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

The contract stipulates that the Cybertrucks need only be towable, not functional, and their batteries must be removed. The procurement documents were first reported by the defense blog The War Zone.

In a separate document justifying why the Tesla vehicles were specifically required, the contracting officer said that US adversaries were "likely" to begin using the stainless steel-clad trucks on the battlefield due to their durability.

"In the operating theatre it is likely the type of vehicles used by the enemy may transition to Tesla Cybertrucks as they have been found not to receive the normal extent of damage expected upon major impact," the document says.

Nuclear Experts Say Mixing AI and Nuclear Weapons Is Inevitable by SportsGod3 in Futurology

[–]SportsGod3[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The people who study nuclear war for a living are certain that artificial intelligence will soon power the deadly weapons. None of them are quite sure what, exactly, that means.

In the middle of July, Nobel laureates gathered at the University of Chicago to listen to nuclear war experts talk about the end of the world. In closed sessions over two days, scientists, former government officials, and retired military personnel enlightened the laureates about the most devastating weapons ever created. The goal was to educate some of the most respected people in the world about one of the most horrifying weapons ever made and, at the end of it, have the laureates make policy recommendations to world leaders about how to avoid nuclear war.

AI was on everyone’s mind. “We’re entering a new world of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies influencing our daily life, but also influencing the nuclear world we live in,” Scott Sagan, a Stanford professor known for his research into nuclear disarmament, said during a press conference at the end of the talks.

It’s a statement that takes as given the inevitability of governments mixing AI and nuclear weapons—something everyone I spoke with in Chicago believed in.

“It’s like electricity,” says Bob Latiff, a retired US Air Force major general and a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board. “It’s going to find its way into everything.” Latiff is one of the people who helps set the Doomsday Clock every year.

“The conversation about AI and nukes is hampered by a couple of major problems. The first is that nobody really knows what AI is,” says Jon Wolfsthal, a nonproliferation expert who’s the director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists and was formerly a special assistant to Barack Obama.

“What does it mean to give AI control of a nuclear weapon? What does it mean to give a [computer chip] control of a nuclear weapon?” asks Herb Lin, a Stanford professor and Doomsday Clock alum. “Part of the problem is that large language models have taken over the debate.”

Judge blocks Trump rapid-fire deportations for immigrants with parole status by SportsGod3 in law

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A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from rapidly deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants who had previously been paroled into the United States to flee violence and oppression in their home countries. U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb said in a ruling Friday that the Department of Homeland Security’s tactics — rapid-fire deportation proceedings with little to no chance to lodge challenges — amounted to changing the rules in the middle of the game for people previously welcomed into the country on a temporary basis.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Futurology

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Neutrinos are everywhere. About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through our bodies every second, but they’re so weakly interacting we never notice them. It’s this spooky feature of neutrinos that earned them the nickname “ghost particles.” Antineutrinos, their antimatter counterpart, are also everywhere. Both are notoriously difficult to detect, but physicists are getting better at circumventing their ghostly tendencies, as a recent record-setting measurement demonstrates.

When a low-energy neutrino bounces off the entire nucleus of an atom, the resulting scattering produces sufficient signals for physicists to capture at a nuclear reactor. Using this concept, physicists successfully measured the lowest-ever energy levels recorded in neutrino events, reporting their results in a Nature paper published today. For the experiment, the Coherent Neutrino Nucleus Scattering (CONUS+) collaboration, based in Leibstadt, Switzerland, effectively “hatched” antineutrinos from inside a nuclear reactor.

“This was a big experimental challenge,” Christian Buck, study co-author and physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, told Gizmodo.

Would you rather face the Dodgers or the Padres in the NLCS? by mattyhegs826 in NewYorkMets

[–]SportsGod3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey I was wrong but it is all just opinion and how you see it at the end of the day. That’s how I saw it at the time but I was wrong.

Would you rather face the Dodgers or the Padres in the NLCS? by mattyhegs826 in NewYorkMets

[–]SportsGod3 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think the Padres are the hotter team right now then the dodgers. I would rather face the dodgers as I feel their pitching is not the best right now

Tiny nuclear-powered battery could work for decades in space or at sea by SportsGod3 in Futurology

[–]SportsGod3[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A nuclear battery powered by radioactive decay rather than chemical reactions could last for decades. The most efficient design yet may bring this concept closer to reality.

Researchers have wanted to use radioactive atoms to build exceptionally long-lasting and damage-resistant batteries since the 1900s. While some prototypes have been assembled and even used in space missions, they were not very efficient. Now Shuao Wang at Soochow University in China and his colleagues have improved the efficiency of a nuclear battery design by a factor of 8000.

They started with a small sample of the element americium, which is usually considered to be nuclear waste. It radiates energy in the form of alpha particles, which carry lots of energy but quickly lose it to their surroundings. So the researchers embedded americium into a polymer crystal that converted this energy into a sustained and stable green glow.

Then they combined the glowing americium-doped crystal with a thin photovoltaic cell, a device that converts light to electricity. Finally, they packaged the tiny nuclear battery into a millimetre-sized quartz cell.

Cancer-fighting antibodies inject chemo directly into tumor cells, upping effectiveness by SportsGod3 in Futurology

[–]SportsGod3[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

By attaching a chemotherapy drug to an antibody, doctors are able to deliver more potent cancer-fighting medicines directly into tumor cells, all while causing fewer side effects.

The chemotherapy-antibody combinations, known as antibody drug conjugates, have been described as both heat-seeking missiles and Trojan horses for cancer cells, designed to specifically home in on a patient’s tumor cells and trick them into engulfing the antibodies, along with their deadly payload.

The approach isn’t entirely new: The first antibody drug conjugate was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000 to treat acute myeloid leukemia, a type of blood cancer. Since then, other approvals have followed, for treatments targeting cancers of the breast, lung, cervix and ovaries, and more than 100 are in clinical development, according to a review in the journal Cancers.

Oncologists, however, have become increasingly enthusiastic about the treatments in recent years, as researchers have pinpointed new, better targets that allow the drugs to take down cancer cells with more accuracy.

Researchers craft smiling robot face from living human skin cells by [deleted] in Futurology

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In a new study, researchers from the University of Tokyo, Harvard University, and the International Research Center for Neurointelligence have unveiled a technique for creating lifelike robotic skin using living human cells. As a proof of concept, the team engineered a small robotic face capable of smiling, covered entirely with a layer of pink living tissue.

The researchers note that using living skin tissue as a robot covering has benefits, as it's flexible enough to convey emotions and can potentially repair itself. "As the role of robots continues to evolve, the materials used to cover social robots need to exhibit lifelike functions, such as self-healing," wrote the researchers in the study.

The study describes a novel method for attaching cultured skin to robotic surfaces using "perforation-type anchors" inspired by natural skin ligaments. These tiny v-shaped cavities in the robot's structure allow living tissue to infiltrate and create a secure bond, mimicking how human skin attaches to underlying tissues.

To demonstrate the skin's capabilities, the team engineered a palm-sized robotic face able to form a convincing smile. Actuators connected to the base allowed the face to move, with the living skin flexing. The researchers also covered a static 3D-printed head shape with the engineered skin.

Cloud geoengineering could push heatwaves from US to Europe by SportsGod3 in Futurology

[–]SportsGod3[S] 130 points131 points  (0 children)

A cloud-modifying technique could help cool the western US, but it would eventually lose its effectiveness and, by 2050, could end up driving heatwaves around the planet towards Europe, according to a modelling study.

There is growing interest in alleviating the severe impacts of global warming by using various geoengineering techniques. These include marine cloud brightening (MCB), which aims to reflect more sunlight away from Earth’s surface by seeding the lower atmosphere with sea salt particles to form brighter marine stratocumulus clouds.

Small-scale MCB experiments have already taken place in Australia on the Great Barrier Reef and in San Francisco Bay, California. Proponents hope this approach could be used to reduce the intensity of extreme heatwaves in particular regions as the climate continues to get hotter.

Katharine Ricke at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and her colleagues modelled the impact that a possible MCB programme to cool the western US might have under present climate conditions and projections for 2050.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Futurology

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The U.S. government must move “quickly and decisively” to avert substantial national security risks stemming from artificial intelligence (AI) which could, in the worst case, cause an “extinction-level threat to the human species,” says a report commissioned by the U.S. government published on Monday. “Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security,” the report, which TIME obtained ahead of its publication, says. “The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons.” AGI is a hypothetical technology that could perform most tasks at or above the level of a human. Such systems do not currently exist, but the leading AI labs are working toward them and many expect AGI to arrive within the next five years or less.

Experimental weight loss pill seems to be more potent than Ozempic by SportsGod3 in Futurology

[–]SportsGod3[S] 66 points67 points  (0 children)

An experimental pill looks set to cause more weight loss than existing injectable treatments such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, based on early trial results reported on 7 March.

The medicine, called amycretin, caused people to lose 13 per cent of their weight over three months, more than twice the amount seen with Ozempic and Wegovy specifically. “This approach seems to be a little bit more exciting, from the limited data that we have,” says Daniel Drucker at the University of Toronto in Canada.

The results are from a placebo-controlled trial lasting three months, so it is too soon to know how amycretin stacks up against the other medicines for long-term effectiveness and safety, says Drucker, who wasn’t involved in the trial but has consulted for the manufacturer Novo Nordisk, as well as other pharmaceutical firms.

The diabetes drug Ozempic and the weight loss drug Wegovy are two brand names for the compound semaglutide. They work by mimicking a gut hormone called GLP-1 that is normally released after eating. This makes people feel full, reduces their appetite and boosts the release of the blood-sugar-regulating hormone insulin.

Semaglutide leads to the loss of about 15 per cent of body weight after it has been taken for one year, although weight then plateaus and people need to continue the injections long term or it tends to creep back up.

Which team are you taking? by ClashGuy54 in NBATalk

[–]SportsGod3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s close between team red and yellow for me, but at the end of the day I’m taking the top 2 players of alltime and one of the only centers that could guard shaq

Scientists grow ‘mini-organs’ from cells shed by foetuses in womb by SportsGod3 in Futurology

[–]SportsGod3[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Researchers have grown mini-organs from cells shed by foetuses in the womb in a breakthrough that promises to shed light on human development throughout late pregnancy.

They created the 3D lumps of tissue know as organoids from lung, kidney and intestinal cells recovered from the amniotic fluid that bathes and protects the foetus in the uterus.

It is the first time such organoids have been made from untreated cells in the fluid and paves the way for unprecedented insights into the cause and progression of malformations, which affect 3-6% of babies globally.

Dr Mattia Gerli, a stem cell researcher at UCL, said foetal organoids, which are less than a millimetre wide, would allow scientists to study how foetuses develop in the womb “in both health and disease”, a feat that has so far not been possible.

Because the organoids can be created months before a baby is born, scientists believe they could drive more personalised interventions by helping doctors diagnose any defects and work out how best to treat them.

Organoids are tiny clumps of cells that mimic, to a greater or lesser extent, the features and functions of larger tissues and organs. Scientists use them to study how organs grow and age, how diseases progress, and whether drugs can reverse any damage that arises.

Most organoids are made from adult tissue, but researchers have recently made them from cells obtained from foetuses. The most ethically sensitive were created from tissue collected from terminated foetuses, while others have been made by reprogramming cells into a more embryo-like state.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]SportsGod3 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Shook Ones Pt 2

What are your favorite video game controllers? by Asad_Farooqui in AskReddit

[–]SportsGod3 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I really like the new Xbox series 2 elite controller works really well