Maybe it's a bit exaggerated but we are crossing the threshold from fiction into reality as artificial intelligence becomes more and more sophisticated and advanced. We might even be able to develop technology where computers would have an autonomous decision-making process far beyond its programming.

Despite certain doubts that computers will take over the world, it would probably be best to preempt and prevent that from ever happening without compromising our advancement in technology. In other words, we need to maintain our control over computers without their hatching a plan of an uprising.

There are several solutions that different groups of researchers and scientists have developed. A new app developed by Princeton University scientists allows one to be notified if their smart speaker is spying on them. Yes, the internet of things can be used for that purpose considering that tech giants are being given leeway over consumer data.

The app, called the Princeton IoT Inspector, uses a common hacking technique called ARP spoofing, according to a slideshow that the team published along with their app. That technique lets the app intercept all of the activity on a WiFi network to track what information is being sent to whom. For instance, the app could track which TV networks and ad agencies see the shows you watch on a smart TV or how much of your personal data gets sent out by a smart speaker.

On the other hand, computer scientists and engineers in MIT say that we need to consider studying machine behavior. A simple counter-strategy, if machines learn about our behavior, so can we.

“We’re seeing the rise of machines with agency, machines that are actors making decisions and taking actions autonomously,” MIT’s Iyad Rahwan said in a blog post. “This calls for a new field of scientific study that looks at them not solely as products of engineering and computer science, but additionally as a new class of actors with their own behavioral patterns and ecology.”

Rahwan and colleagues call this new field “machine behaviour” — and it could ensure we reap the potential benefits of AI while avoiding the pitfalls.

If you've seen films bearing elements of machines acting out on their own, then you would know that despite the rational behavior of these computers, there are limitations still, since nothing can be totally perfect without flaws, not even computers which have the capacity to learn and adapt based on new data and information.

Finally, we turn to a rabbi who is fighting back against this "AI revolution". The rabbi echoes the same sentiments with regard to harnessing AI for human flourishing instead of human destruction.

“The development of AI has the potential to be the source of enormous blessing for our world by augmenting human capacity, and not by replacing it,” Ephraim Mirvis, Chief Rabbi in the Commonwealth, said on BBC Radio, per Jewish News. “But it is imperative that this technology be harnessed to serve us, rather than the reverse.”

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Much is still unknown about the Chernobyl accident, mostly because of all the cover-up that has been done to keep the details of the event hidden from the world. But the effects of that event still haunt many today. Even the site of Chernobyl lingers with remnants of nuclear contamination.

Some writers tried to shed light on Chernobyl but details of the actual event - the backstory, the response, and the cleanup - were scant until several people came out with books that tackled the underlying sequence of events that surrounded Chernobyl.

Over the years, a few chronicles of the disaster by Soviet writers have reached Western readers, most notably “The Truth About Chernobyl,” by Grigori Medvedev, a former engineer at the plant, published in 1991. But aside from Piers Paul Read’s 1993 “Ablaze,” good reads by Western writers have been scant.

That began to change last year when Serhii Plokhy, a Harvard historian, weighed in with “Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe.” But Plokhy’s work focused more on the political aftermath, including the downfall of the Soviet Union that followed just five years later, than on the details of the accident.

Higginbotham, a British journalist, takes account of the political fallout as well, but the bulk of his book is about the accident and the response and cleanup — primarily the first seven months, which culminated with the rushed completion of the concrete-and-steel sarcophagus that entombed the remains of Unit 4.

In Higginbotham's book, he recounts the interviews he had with the central people who were concerned in Chernobyl, not just within the context of the accident but also outside it such as Maria Protsenko who was associated with Chernobyl for being the architect of the nuclear city of Pripyat.

Like most of the Soviet Union’s privileged atomic cities, Pripyat was a clean, comfortable place, a glorious testament to the Soviet system, and Protsenko’s job for seven years had been to make it even more glorious.

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Memes have been deeply integrated as an identifying feature of internet culture as consumers of content themselves become creators by adding wit or silliness into otherwise neutral or even serious settings or online pieces.

No doubt, it helps bring some fun but some say that it may reduce the significance of historical events especially iconic photos of the same.

For example, scholars looked at over thirty examples of the so-called “Accidental Napalm” meme, which uses the famous image photographed by Nick Ut featuring the Vietnam War napalm girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, in 1972.

In analyzing several specific examples, the scholars took note of how “some memes may actually dissolve the original significance of iconic photographs and potentially degrade, rather than enhance, public culture.”

For many who were born during the time when the internet has become an ubiquitous part of daily life, we would most likely be introduced to historical events either in books or the more probable source, the internet.

Though memes may distort or degrade the original meaning of some iconic photos, the act of editing or manipulating these images to satisfy a particular narrative has been done for the longest time.

Not to downplay the effects that memes may have on these historical events, but I would argue that it is up to people to do their due diligence regarding these photos and try to preserve the significance of the event without completely tarnishing or erasing the original.

At the end of the day, in an age where everything is shared online and meanings become more fluid, there is no impeding people from doing what they want with these content.

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One could say that the consciousness is the network of neural connections that enables us to form our thoughts, memories, and other cognitive activities. On the other hand, others would say that our consciousness is directly linked to the spiritual aspect of the soul.

In either case, we cannot deny the fact that as our physical bodies decay so does our mental faculties and with it our consciousness. So scientifically, it would be sound to think that once we die, we would no longer have much awareness of what happens afterward.

However, there was one psychiatrist who studied on the principles of reincarnation and how our consciousness can somehow survive after our death. His name was Dr. Ian Stevenson and he worked for 50 years at the University of Virginia's School of Medicine culminating in his life's work titled "Division of Perceptual Studies" along with several books about the subject of reincarnation.

In his book, Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation, Stevenson observed that:

"The most frequently occurring event or common denominator relating to rebirth is probably that of a child remembering a past life. Children usually begin to talk about their memories between the ages of two and four. Such infantile memories gradually dwindle when the child is between four and seven years old. There are of course always some exceptions, such as a child continuing to remember its previous life but not speaking about it for various reasons.

Most of the children talk about their previous identity with great intensity and feeling. Often they cannot decide for themselves which world is real and which one is not. They often experience a kind of double existence where at times one life is more prominent, and at times the other life takes over. This is why they usually speak of their past life in the present tense saying things like, 'I have a husband and two children who live in Jaipur.' Almost all of them are able to tell us about the events leading up to their death."

-via The Daily Grail

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Nothing brings delight to a book lover's heart more than a charming library. Not only should it have an amazing and vast collection of books to peruse, but they also need to look elegant, from the shelves to the ceilings and even to the interior decoration.

The community of readers at Atlas Obscura sent in their recommendations for some of the finest and most beautiful libraries you will ever see. Check them out here.

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Time exists but the movement of time or its flow is subjective. It is something that depends only on our perception. That's what Max Tegmark, physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains in his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality.

It certainly feels to us like time is flowing. Yet that’s not the only way of looking at this reality. I could say that 10 to the power of 29 particles constitute me, and they are moving around in some very complicated patterns. Einstein pointed out that the most elegant way of describing this mathematically is to say, Let’s look at where each particle is in the three-dimensional space at each time, and draw this in a four-dimensional spacetime, where time is the fourth dimension.

In every instance of the illustration, we see that all of these elements exist still in a four-dimensional pattern. Time doesn't flow, but everything within the boundaries of time moves and so it sort of feels like time is moving to the observer inside that dimension.

Furthermore, things became more complicated when quantum mechanics emerged but according to Tegmark, the math is not entangled in these web of complications. It is "beautiful and clean".

Randomness is fundamentally an illusion because there is no randomness in the math, even though it might feel random. I’m saying the same thing about time. Even though the flow of time is fundamentally an illusion, there is nothing flowing about the math, the equations aren’t changing, there is just a single four-dimensional pattern, albeit a very complicated and beautiful one, in spacetime.

If we were to think about it, Tegmark makes a point. Our perception of time feels like it's lurching forward every second of every hour of every day. But the thing is, time doesn't move at all. We're the ones constantly in motion and perhaps the patterns that exist in nature are merely markers we use in order to keep track of where we are and where we've been.

We mark time simply for our benefit, to make things easier for us to know, say, how productive we have been or to remember certain appointments that we have had. And even that doesn't contradict the concept that time does not flow.

-via The Daily Grail

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Whenever there have been sightings of strange goings on in the airspace, with aircraft exhibiting bizarre activity patterns or lights flashing about in the sky with no way of recognizing or identifying whose aircraft it is, we often dismiss these as UFO phenomena.

But the US Navy has been receiving a number of strange sightings such as that would spring them into action by laying out new guidelines on how to report these "unexplained aerial phenomena" as they now call it. No longer will these occurrences be "unidentified flying objects" as there must be some scientific basis behind them.

"There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years," the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO. "For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.

"As part of this effort," it added, "the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."

Moreover, the Navy will approach the phenomena with the objective of breaking down the myths and destigmatizing them. The questions remain however, whether these sightings are mere folly or if there are more sinister schemes afoot. The view that these may be extraterrestrial beings with more highly advanced technology is not within the explanations being considered.

“Right now, we have situation [sic] in which UFOs and UAPs are treated as anomalies to be ignored rather than anomalies to be explored,” he said. “We have systems that exclude that information and dump it.”

The development comes amid growing interest from members of Congress following revelations by POLITICO and the New York Times in late 2017 that the Pentagon established a dedicated office inside the Defense Intelligence Agency to study UAPs at the urging of several senators who secretly set aside appropriations for the effort.

-via The Daily Grail

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There have been efforts to allow people who have been paralyzed or those who have lost their ability to speak such that they may regain that ability once again, though artificially.

This time, a team from UCSF are conducting a study on decoding brain signals which a computer will process in order to synthesize speech.

It's somewhat similar to how the late Dr. Stephen Hawking communicated but this time, they are trying eliminate the need for typing such that there is a direct vocal output from the brain signals, thus speeding up the communication process.

But spelling out letters "is not the most efficient way to communicate," says Dr. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at UCSF and an author of the study. That approach allows a person to type fewer than 10 words a minute, compared with speaking about 150 words per minute with natural speech.

So Chang and a team of scientists have been looking for a way to let paralyzed patients produce entire words and sentences as if they were talking. The team studied five volunteers with severe epilepsy. As part of their treatment, these patients had electrodes temporarily placed on the surface of their brains.

The volunteers then read sentences out loud and a computer processed the data from the signals and used that to speak.

Chang was "shocked" at how intelligible and natural the simulated speech was. And a test on volunteers found that they could understand what the computer was saying most of the time. The technology doesn't try to decode a person's thoughts. Instead it decodes the brain signals produced when a person actually tries to speak.

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If you haven't tried eating black beans before, then you are in for a treat. Here's a recipe that would make you, according to the author, forget about meat, or the lack thereof in the dish. It involves braising the beans and combining them with whatever you fancy, whether it be tortillas, rice, or even toast.

(Image credit: Badagnani/Wikimedia Commons)

It must be a delight for any bibliophile to be surrounded by books every hour of every single day, but there are certainly drawbacks to working in a bookstore and any book lover would know exactly what they are.

Steph Coelho sums it up with five points in which she tries to convince one why they shouldn't work at a bookstore. Half-jokingly, she enumerates these reasons based on her own experiences of working at a bookstore. Here's one of them:

FOMO

You’ll spend your days wondering how in the world you’re going to be able to read all those books. You look at the tall shelves surrounding you and quickly realize that the truth is you’ll never read all the books, and you panic and fall into a hole of existential dread.

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It's spring and floral shirts seem to be in style especially for men. Though they are usually associated with feminine appeal, men can wear them too. Some women even think it looks cool on men.

Twitter user Sarah Kelly has this to say about floral shirts:

One of the perks of wearing a floral shirt is that it generally goes well with any type of clothing so you can mix and match them without have to worry about your clothes not matching.

Like lavender or pink, florals have a traditionally feminine reputation in fashion and design, so they look especially modern with the most masculine stuff in your closet. Leather jacket? 100 percent. Perfectly worn-in brown suede boots? Yes, please. Black jeans, suits, beards, tattoos, Oh baby yes—they all look amazing with a floral shirt.

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"Would you rather be a dog or a ghost?"

Just with this one question, without having any context whatsoever, you will know more about the person you are talking to and strike up some interesting small talk with them.

Of course, the interesting part of this question is that the respondent would know just as much about themselves in thinking about their answer more than anything.

According to Tomer Ullman, a professor at MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, answers to this question (and all far-fetched Would You Rather-type choices) are barely at all affected by a person’s personality, or any demographic information.

The most exciting conclusion of Ullman’s study is the self-revelatory consequences of answering dog or ghost: That we learn more about ourselves upon answering.

There is a mechanism that works in our psyche that steers us toward one answer or another and we are usually not aware of it but this "black box" mechanism as Ullman says, processes those inputs instinctively to arrive at an output.

The most exciting conclusion of Ullman’s study is the self-revelatory consequences of answering dog or ghost: That we learn more about ourselves upon answering. Upon answering, we learn something about this unknowable mechanism within us, and thus we learn something about the inscrutable inner workings of our psyche.

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Work cultures in many parts of Asia are starkly different from those in the West so it might be surprising to many that there are people who work 12 hours or even 16 hours a day, every day, without launching any grievances.

However, a new protest against the so-called 996 schedule may be the first step to change the culture already embedded. '996' means '9 AM to 9 PM, six days a week'. In regards to this, a group of Microsoft employees are supporting Chinese tech workers who wrote a petition on GitHub.

"The "996.ICU" repository was established in March by Chinese tech workers who were protesting extreme overwork," said the report. The "996" philosophy has been endorsed by the tech billionaire and Alibaba Founder Jack Ma.

Several local Chinese browsers have already blocked access to 996.ICU, including Tencent, Alibaba, Xiaomi, and Qihoo 360. Microsoft, that owns GitHub, has not blocked the repository till now.

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Amendments have been proposed to the recently legislated California Consumer Privacy Act which could give tech giants more leeway as to what they are able to do with the data they get from consumers. Moreover, the amendments open up loopholes that could be exploited by tech companies to the detriment of consumers.

In most cases, the amendments seek to add carefully worded exemptions to the law that would benefit business at the cost of consumer rights. But most upsetting to privacy folk is the withdrawal of an amendment by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-15th District) that incorporated changes that would enhance consumer data privacy rights.

Wicks' proposal would have given consumers more of a say of what is done with their personal data and more power to sue companies that break the rules. But the Assemblymember pulled the measure the day before the hearing because it was not going to get the necessary votes. If a measure is voted down it cannot be reintroduced in that legislative session.

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Despite the anomaly that happened with SpaceX Dragon's spacecraft a few days ago, NASA will push through with its launch of a cargo version of Dragon. It will head for the International Space Station next week while the investigation continues on the Crew Dragon spacecraft.

NASA provided no updates during the briefing about the April 20 Crew Dragon anomaly that took place while testing the SuperDraco thrusters that are part of that spacecraft’s abort system.

The fact that NASA is, for now, proceeding with the cargo Dragon mission suggests the problem is isolated to the SuperDraco thrusters, which are not used on the cargo version of Dragon. However, industry sources say that the CRS-17 mission could still be delayed depending on what the ongoing investigation might turn up in the coming days, as well as any concerns raised by the station’s international partners.

(Image credit: NASA/Wikimedia Commons)