“Poulanka is the center of Finland,” says Tommi Rajala, a Poulanka pessimist. “Here,” he continues, as he gestures his hand toward a rock with inscriptions. He looks back to the camera and says, “Poulanka is also the center of the world — the center of pessimism in the world.
Poulanka is a city in Finland which has become famous for its branding of pessimism.
It all began, according to long-time pessimist Riitta Nykänen, when they got jealous that all other places had their own respective events, but in Poulanka they had none.
“One man said, ‘nothing works out in Poulanka. Not even pessimism. What’s the use?’ So then we said, let’s do that. A pessimism event,” narrates Nykänen.
The pessimism association is still going strong after ten years ever since its foundation.
But what was the goal of the association? Find out over at BBC Reel.
This one-legged skeleton is believed to be Charles-Etienne Gudin, one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s generals, according to a French historian and former soldier.
The 200-year-old skeleton was discovered by a team of French and Russian archaeologists in July during an excavation in Smolensk, Russia, which lies about 250 miles west of Moscow.
Pierre Malinowski, who led the dig, told CNN that after he unearthed the remains he flew overnight with part of the skeleton's femur and teeth inside his suitcase from Moscow to Marseille to compare the DNA with that of the general's mother, brother and son.
"A professor in Marseille carried out extensive testing and the DNA matches 100%," Malinowski told CNN. "It was worth the trouble."
For some reason, kids view 911 as a go-to number when they need help. Well, they’re not wrong, but it seems that perhaps some parents don’t explain what kind of help shall they call 911 for. This perhaps explains why some kids call 911 to ask for helpwith their math homework.
Recently, police in a Phoenix suburb got a strange 911 call. It wasn’t an emergency, but rather a request. A 5-year-old boy just wanted to order a Happy Meal from McDonald’s.
In a follow-up call, the father, Randy Skabelund, told the dispatcher that there was no emergency and his son Charlie must have had his cellphone.
Nevertheless, a police officer responded to the young boy’s request.
Officer Randolph “Scott” Valdez arrived later at the family’s home for a welfare check.
He brought the requested meal, took time to teach Charlie about when it’s the right time to call police and even posed for a few photos.
The boy’s mother, Kim Skabelund, says Valdez handled the situation with “love and kindness.”
Melinda McDowell had used drugs ever since she was a teenager. She didn’t try methamphetamine, however, until one night in 2017 when her mother suddenly died of a stroke. That night, she went into her neighbor’s house, and the neighbor had crystal meth.
"I tried it and I was hooked from the first hit," McDowell says. "It was an explosion of the senses. It was the biggest high I'd ever experienced."
From here, McDowell’s life goes downhill.
...that big high started getting more elusive. But she kept using the drug frequently, and it took a toll. She went from 240 pounds to 110. Eventually, she lost custody of her children, who were put in foster homes. McDowell started having hallucinations.
She tried her best to stop using meth, and she tried many times. Unfortunately, after just stopping for a few days, she’d have severe panic attacks and start to shake uncontrollably.
One night, she remembers lying on her bathroom floor thinking that if she didn't get help, she'd die.
McDowell heard about a woman named Nancy Beste who had recently opened a treatment center called Road to Recovery, near where the former lived. McDowell says she begged the woman.
McDowell’s call came at a fortunate time, says Beste, who was a certified addiction counselor and physician assistant. Beste just came back from a conference where she learned a research about medication-assisted treatment, or MAT, for methamphetamine users.
Some early studies indicate that naltrexone, the same medication used to treat alcohol addiction and opioids, can work for some people addicted to methamphetamine.
Beste gave McDowell a prescription for naltrexone and signed her up for individual and group therapy…
Find out more about what happened next to McDowell, and find out more about naltrexone, over at NPR.
We love being young. It is the age where our bodies, and our performance, are at its peak. With that being said, we don’t like to get older, as we get weaker. Same goes with Jess McMillan. She doesn’t love getting older.
“Turning 40 was terrible,” she says. She’s worried that her day job, as the events coordinator at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Wyoming, is eating into her ski time, and at 41, she knows she has to work a little harder to keep in shape for her annual big ski trips.
McMillan is most successful freeskier of all time. Now, she travels the world and appears in videos by Warren Miller Entertainment.
“My favorite thing is to always try something new,” McMillan says. “Explore a different part of skiing. Challenge yourself.”
How does she keep her body in shape throughout the year? Find out on Outside.
One of the least engaging aspects of modern economy is the mania to quantify and rank the performance of individuals and groups of people.
“Rankings send out powerful signals, which lead to identify the actions of top performers as the ‘best practices’ that others should also adopt,” says Giacomo Livan, the author of a study in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
Many of us have given in to “adopt and adapt” at some point in our careers, and not always comfortably.
You’re sitting in front of a manager for an annual review, thinking: well, how’s this going to work? The manager in question is universally regarded as average, but he’s the one that gets to rate you, and the shortest path to a better ranking is probably to follow his advice.
Such thoughts have finally been given voice by Livan, whose research suggests that ranking performance reduces meritocracy.
Check out Cosmos Magazine to know more about Livan’s research.
Imagine this scenario for a moment: You’re running a cockroach farm. You have cameras all over the place, and all the cameras are equipped with advanced image recognition technology. It is a rather boring day, until you reviewed the logs at the end of your shift. While the system showed that it has recorded zero instances escaping into the staff-only areas, it showed that it has recorded seven instances of giraffes. Curious about what happened, you decide to review the camera footage.
You are just beginning to play the first “giraffe” time stamp when you hear the skittering of millions of tiny feet.
What happened?
Your image recognition algorithm was fooled by an adversarial attack. With special knowledge of your algorithm’s design or training data, or even via trial and error, the cockroaches were able to design tiny note cards that would fool the A.I. into thinking it was seeing giraffes instead of cockroaches. The tiny note cards wouldn’t have looked remotely like giraffes to people—they’d be just a bunch of rainbow-colored static. And the cockroaches didn’t even have to hide behind the cards—all they had to do was keep showing the cards to the camera as they walked brazenly down the corridor.
While this scenario is entirely fictitious, it has some truth in it: image recognition systems can be fooled, and they can be deceived easily.
Researchers have demonstrated that they could show an image recognition algorithm a picture of a lifeboat (which it identifies as a lifeboat with 89.2 percent confidence), then add a tiny patch of specially designed noise way over in one corner of the image. A human looking at the picture could tell that this is obviously a picture of a lifeboat with a small patch of rainbow static over in one corner. The A.I., however, identifies the lifeboat as a Scottish terrier with 99.8 percent confidence.
I wonder: when will recognition systems be perfected?
When you go for a stroll in the forest, you’ll feel that the air is fresh. People often associate the fresh air to the purifying abilities of plants and trees. As they inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, they remove the pollutants in the air. Could it be the same case for the air inside our houses?
For decades, humans have installed to their homes ferns, peace lilies, and other types of plants, to try to bring the forest to their houses. We have assumed that these plants will grant us cleaner air at our homes because of the plant respiration. Scientists, however, say otherwise.
To clear out the chemical compounds wafting through our homes, we’d need to install a literal jungle, according to two Drexel University researchers.
To purify your air with houseplants, you’d need anywhere from 10 to 100 plants per square meter — enough that you could get lost in your own apartment. That means those windowsill succulents and that drooping snake plant your sister gave you are little more than aspirational ornaments.
While the plants we have at home may not give us clean air, at least they are beautiful.
The brain receives far more memories than it can keep everyday. It absorbs lots of new information throughout the course of the day, but it only retains some of them overnight. It is said that sleep seems to be a crucial factor in keeping this balance of learning and forgetting, reinforcing some memories and destroying others through the brain’s patterns of electrical signaling. However, the mechanisms that are at work at the brain have been unclear.
Earlier this month, a research paper reported that scientists have chipped away at the mystery. The research isolated the opposing functions of two kinds of brain waves: one that strengthens memories and the other that weakens them.
Simply by distinguishing these brain waves from each other, the researchers began to form an explanation that reconciles competing theories about how the brain processes memories to retain some and lose others. There was a gap in our understanding of how sleep could be important both for remembering and forgetting, said Karunesh Ganguly, an associate professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, and the senior author on the study.
Theories about memory consolidation generally fall into one of two camps, and some evidence supports each of them. One attributes long-term learning to patterns of brain activity that are reenacted during sleep. These ensembles of neural firing mimic the signals involved in the original learning, and that repetition strengthens the synaptic connections between the neurons to ingrain the memory. Without reactivation, other connections are in theory not fortified, and those memories should wither away.
As an alternative, many researchers put stock in the idea of “synaptic downscaling,” in which the brain more actively clears itself of less useful memories. Because learning involves neural activity that strengthens brain connections, it becomes an energy drain. During sleep, less energy goes into the connections, allowing those with less long-term importance to weaken. Removing this background noise from unneeded memories clarifies the brain’s signals and keeps it more efficient.
The gap between these theories is bridged by the new research, which looks at the roles in memory retention of different brain patterns that are linked with sleep.
On April 9, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, Faith Birol, went up on stage at a conference hall in Berlin filled with people. It was the Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue (BETD), an event hosted every year by the German government which evaluates the ongoing transformation of the global energy sector. This year, Birol’s diagnosis was grim. While he admitted that renewable energy was getting cheaper by the day, and that its use was expanding as never before (according to his research), Birol warns that renewables weren’t being built fast enough to keep pace with CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.
“There is a growing disconnect,” Birol said, “between political statements, targets, and what is happening in real life.”
That disconnect ran like an electric current through the conference, buzzing in the subtext of every pronouncement and lighting up every networking lunch. The BETD attracts a wide range of energy- and climate-policy wonks—including fifty ministers and state secretaries from around the world—and no one involved in such work in 2019 could be unaware of the mounting climate chaos. Only months earlier, in late 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the committee charged with providing governments with scientific information about climate change, issued a special report on the environmental and socioeconomic consequences of global warming proceeding past 1.5 degrees. Breaking with the restraint that often characterizes scientific writing, the report baldly asserted that, without “rapid and far-reaching transitions” in, among other things, energy and industrial systems, a cascading array of disasters awaited that would make the current state of affairs—record-breaking heat across Europe, water-scarce Indian cities, the apocalyptic cataclysm of wildfires in Cali fornia and western Canada—seem like a tepid prelude. Humanity was running out of time to act.
It is now an inescapable fact that our time remaining on Earth is very short, and we will all die, unless we act. But how should we view the fact that we’re doomed?
Chris Turner believes that there is hope, and he is optimistic about the future. Find out why over at The Walrus.
Have you ever gone to a forest? What did you notice upon going there? The thick trunks? The canopy? The artfully protruding roots? The fallen leaves? These are indeed, some beautiful things that you can find in a forest. But below the trees, into the earth, hidden from the eyes of man, is a vast underworld that is as beautiful.
For the past two decades, Suzanne Simard, a professor in the Department of Forest & Conservation at the University of British Columbia, has studied that unappreciated underworld. Her specialty is mycorrhizae: the symbiotic unions of fungi and root long known to help plants absorb nutrients from soil. Beginning with landmark experiments describing how carbon flowed between paper birch and Douglas fir trees, Simard found that mycorrhizae didn’t just connect trees to the earth, but to each other as well.
Simard went on to show how the mycorrhizae-linked trees form networks and exchange nutrients and water “in a literally pulsing web that includes not only trees but all of a forest’s life.” It can be said that it is highly similar to the internet and how we exchange information through the platform.
It’s not just nutrient flows that Simard describes. It’s communication. She—and other scientists studying roots, and also chemical signals and even the sounds plant make—have pushed the study of plants into the realm of intelligence. Rather than biological automata, they might be understood as creatures with capacities that in animals are readily regarded as learning, memory, decision-making, and even agency.
April 15, 2019. It was a sorrowful day for the world, as the Notre Dame was engulfed in flames. “I feel sad tonight to see this part of us burn,” said French president Emmanuel Macron in a tweet. Official sources stated that the fire was accidental, and it was most likely due to a technological malfunction. But it was only a matter of time before conspiracy theories about the event would circulate around the Internet.
Even before the fire was extinguished, conspirational websites such as 4chan began alleging that the fire had been started by the French government, Jews, or an Islamic terrorist group. Almost instantly, the charges spread to a receptive audience worldwide. It was the expected course of events. Big, impactful and shocking social events – a fire, a flood, a terrorist strike, a war, and so on – typically elicit conspiracy theories among large groups of citizens who question the official reading of the news.
But why do conspiracy theories seem to come up naturally when shocking events happen? How does it relate in the human life? Find out the answers over at Aeon.
This time, hackers can now use lasers to hack any computer that receives voice commands.
In the spring of 2018, Takeshi Sugawara, a cybersecurity researcher, walked into the lab of the professor he was visiting at the University of Michigan. The professor was Kevin Fu. Sugawara wanted to show off something interesting.
Sugawara pointed a high-powered laser at the microphone of his iPad—all inside of a black metal box, to avoid burning or blinding anyone—and had Fu put on a pair of earbuds to listen to the sound the iPad's mic picked up. As Sugawara varied the laser's intensity over time in the shape of a sine wave, fluctuating at about 1,000 times a second, Fu picked up a distinct high-pitched tone. The iPad's microphone had inexplicably converted the laser's light into an electrical signal, just as it would with sound.
Six months later, Sugawara along with Fu and a group of University of Michigan researchers have honed this quirk into something deadlier. Using lasers, they can now hack to any computer that receives voice commands — from Amazon Echo speakers to your smartphone.
That spy trick lets them send "light commands" from hundreds of feet away; they can open garages, make online purchases, and cause all manner of mischief or malevolence. The attack can easily pass through a window, when the device's owner isn't home to notice a telltale flashing speck of light or the target device's responses.
"It’s possible to make microphones respond to light as if it were sound," says Sugawara. "This means that anything that acts on sound commands will act on light commands."
During a livestream on YouTube and Twitch last January, professional StarCraft II player Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz from Poland showed everyone what humans are capable of when he defeated a multi-million-dollar artificial intelligence agent known as AlphaStar, which is specifically designed to crush human players in the popular real-time strategy game.
The public loss in front of tens of thousands of eSports fans was a blow for Google parent company Alphabet’s London-based artificial intelligence subsidiary, DeepMind, which developed AlphaStar.
The A.I. may have lost battle. However, it had already won the war. A previous version of the A.I. had already beaten Komincz five times in a row and defeated Komincz's teammate, Dario “TLO” Wünsch, as well. This shows that AlphaStar has sufficiently mastered the video game that machine learners have picked as a benchmark of A.I. progress.
In the months since, AlphaStar has only grown stronger and is now able to defeat 99.8 percent of StarCraft II players online, achieving Grandmaster rank in the game on the official site Battle.net, a feat described today in a new paper in the journal Nature.
The development of A.I. in games goes back in 1992, when IBM first developed a rudimentary A.I. which learned backgammon through trial and error. Over the course of time, new A.I. agents have slowly but surely conquered the gaming world, and mastery over our cherished strategy games has become one of the major ways artificial intelligence is assessed.
Know more about the development of A.I over at Smithsonian.com.
Personally, I think it is a scary thing to know that an A.I. had mastered a real-time strategy game which consists of trillions upon trillions of possibilities which are all conducted in real time. But hey, it’s just a game, right? What are your thoughts?
