New research helps understand how plate tectonics powers life on Earth. Plate tectonics are responsible for the deep-carbon and deep-water cycles. Arrangement of continents has changed sea level in the past. The evolution of life is modified by tectonics — continents are rafts with evolvi.
The mechanisms that allow the computer to learn are directly embedded in its hardware structure—no extra AI software required.
😃
Canadian YouTuber Linus Sebastián reviewed SpaceX’s Starlink Internet on his Linus Tech Tips channel (video below). SpaceX currently operates approximately 1085 internet-beaming Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit that will be part of a constellation of over 4400 satellites designed to connect the planet to the world wide web. To connect to space-based internet Starlink customers use a dish antenna and Wi-Fi router device. The company says the dish antenna is more advanced than what is currently in-use aboard fighter jets. The dish features a phased-array antenna, capable of transmitting and receiving signal from all directions as the satellites move across the sky. This week SpaceX started to accept preorders of the service via Starlink.com.
Linus Tech Tips created a great review video in which he tests Starlink’s speed and also talks about important aspects of the Starlink constellation, including a brief discussion on how the network works. In the video, Linus unboxes the Starlink Kit that costs $499USD, it includes a dish antenna, mounting equipment, power supply, and Wi-Fi router/modem device. The Starlink broadband internet service has no data cap, priced at $99USD per month. Linus and his team install the dish outdoors on top of the roof and connect to the network. First, he used the service to play multiple 4K YouTube videos at once, with good results. He just noticed a small lag when trying to load YouTube thumbnails and comments as four high-definition videos played simultaneously. Then Linus ran an online speed test, Starlink provided him with internet download speed of around 138 megabits per second (Mbps) and latency of 27 milliseconds (ms).
Facebook says that political content currently constitutes only 6% of what people see on the platform. It will begin running experiments to reduce that amount for a small percentage of people in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia immediately, with tests in the U.S. in weeks to come.
The company said it isn’t removing political content but rather exploring ways to reduce the exposure for users who would prefer not to see it. In practice, that means Facebook will still allow users to post about politics and argue among friends, but its algorithms will de-prioritize those conversations and spread them less widely across the network.
Facebook says it is beginning to reduce how much political content users see on its main platform, potentially diminishing the role that the world’s largest social network plays in elections and civil discourse more broadly.
CRISPR/Cas9 treatment allowed mice to live 25% longer and be physically stronger. Biologists see these results being relatively easy to reproduce on humans in a clinical setting.
Cell-Intrinsic Learning And Memory Storage Dynamics — Dr. David Glanzman Ph.D., Professor, in the Department Integrative Biology and Physiology, at UCLA College of the Life Sciences.
Dr. David Glanzman is Professor, in the Department Integrative Biology and Physiology, at UCLA College of the Life Sciences, Professor in the Department of Neurobiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine, and Member, Brain Research Institute.
In the awful wake of an oil spill, it’s typically the smallest of organisms who do most of the cleaning up. Surprisingly, scientists know very little about the tools these tiny clean-up crews have at their disposal.
The most distant known object in the Solar System is now confirmed. FarFarOut, a large chunk of rock found in 2018 at a whopping distance of around 132 astronomical units from the Sun, has been studied and characterised, and we now know a lot more about it, and its orbit.
It’s about 400 kilometres (250 miles) across, which is on the low end of the dwarf planet scale, and initial observations suggest it has an average orbital distance of 101 astronomical units — that’s 101 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
Since Pluto has an average orbital distance of around 39 astronomical units, FarFarOut is very, well, far out indeed. It has been given the provisional designation 2018 AG37, and its proper name, in accordance with International Astronomical Union guidelines, is still pending.
The giant Martian sandstorm of 2018 wasn’t just a wild ride — it also gave us a previously undetected gas in the planet’s atmosphere. For the first time, the ExoMars orbiter sampled traces of hydrogen chloride, composed of a hydrogen and a chlorine atom.
This gas presents Mars scientists with a new mystery to solve: how it got there.
“We’ve discovered hydrogen chloride for the first time on Mars,” said physicist Kevin Olsen of the University of Oxford in the UK.
After tracing the origins of schizophrenia to genes expressed in the placenta while in utero, scientists have now zeroed in on the combination of risk factors that could predict which infants are at greatest risk of developing the condition later in life.
The findings reinforce an emerging picture of schizophrenia as a genetic disorder, with a fate determined by complications that can arise during pregnancy.
Researchers from the Lieber Institute for Brain Development at Johns Hopkins University and the University of North Carolina in the US analysed the relationship between key genes and cognitive development in the first few years after birth.
