Warmer air can hold more water, so humidity increases. It also drives stronger winds...

the researchers deposited carbon derived from cassava plants onto metal surfaces using a low-cost high-temperature biowaste treatment process. Once the carbon bonded to the metal, it had the footprint of graphene, a material consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms. This material filled in the grooves caused by wear, creating graphene-only contact points that protected the metal beneath.

Interesting stuff, not a lubricant in the traditional sense, more of a polish to get surfaces very smooth

I'm in favour of a Land Value Tax, this means hoarding land becomes expensive. It also means grouse moores and golf courses become expensive (good things in my mind)

When we again weigh each sensitivity by the percent-area for the Earth, our global average ECS is 7.2 °C per doubling of CO2, much higher than the most recent IPCC estimates of 2.3 to 4.5 °C and consistent with some of the latest state-of-the-art models which suggest ca. 5.2 °C

2.3c means crop failures and food shortages globally. 5.2c means the end of our civilisation. 7.2c means the end of our species.

I assume it will be an expensive treatment

I left reddit after the API nonsense (which was to stop AI companies scraping their content), and I could see them selling their content for AI (or creating their own AI) coming a mile off. It's only ever about money

Brain is about 1 million mm3, so yeah, 1.4 zettabytes

Apologies, I've edited the post to take these out. I just copy and pasted from top to bottom

I can see the rich pouring money into this tech to grow organs for themselves. The clones would need to be segregated though, as otherwise there might be issues with property rights etc. They could be put on an island, the rich have a few spare I'm sure. We could tell the clones that the rest of the world was too damaged for humans to live there. It would need to be hidden perhaps as there would be moral outrage if it was discovered the clones were intended to have organs harvested from them. God help then if one of the clones escapes though.

Wait, no, thats the plot to The Island with Ewan McGregor... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film)

A supercomputer capable of simulating, at full scale, the synapses of a human brain is set to boot up in Australia next year, in the hopes of understanding how our brains process massive amounts of information while consuming relatively little power.

The machine, known as DeepSouth, is being built by the International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems (ICNS) in Sydney, Australia, in partnership with two of the world’s biggest computer technology manufacturers,…

Intel and Dell. Unlike an ordinary computer, its hardware chips are designed to implement spiking neural networks, which model the way synapses process information in the brain.

Such neuromorphic computers, as they are known, have been built before, but DeepSouth will be the largest yet, capable of 228 trillion synaptic operations per second, which is on par with the estimated number of synaptic operations in a human brain.

“For the first time we will be able to simulate the activity of a spiking neural network the size of the human brain in real time,” says Andre van Schaik at ICNS, who is leading the project. While DeepSouth won’t be more powerful than existing supercomputers, it will help advance our understanding of neuromorphic computing and biological brains, he says. “We need this ability to better learn how brains work and how they do what they do so well.”

Existing supercomputers are becoming one of the biggest consumers of energy on the planet, whereas a human brain uses barely more power than a light bulb. At least part of this difference is down to differing ways of processing data – traditional computers process information in fast sequence, constantly moving data between the processor and the memory, while a neuromorphic architecture performs many operations in parallel with significantly reduced movement of data. As the movement of data is one of the most power-hungry parts of the computation, the neuromorphic approach offers significant power savings.

In addition, spiking neural networks are event-driven, meaning the neuromorphic system responds to changes in input rather than continuous running in the background like a traditional computer, resulting in further power savings.

As well as potentially helping to build new types of computers, Ralph Etienne-Cummings at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, who is not involved in the work, says DeepSouth will advance the study of neuroscience more quickly as he and other researchers will be able to repeatedly test models of the brain.

“If you are trying to understand the brain this will be the hardware to do it on,” he says. “At the end of the day there’s two types of researchers who will be interested in this – either those studying neuroscience or those who want to prototype new engineering solutions in the AI space.”

DeepSouth could pave the way for much higher energy efficiency in computing, says Etienne-Cummings, and if the technology can be miniaturised it will help make drones and robots more autonomous.

There is no proof that black holes contain singularities when they are generated by real physical bodies. Roger Penrose claimed sixty years ago that trapped surfaces inevitably lead to light rays of finite affine length (FALL's). Penrose and Stephen Hawking then asserted that these must end in actual singularities. When they could not prove this they decreed it to be self evident. It is shown that there are counterexamples through every point in the Kerr metric. These are asymptotic to at least one event horizon and do not end in singularities.

As always the Tories leak a few ideas (like scrapping inheritance tax) to see what people say (it's a bloody awful idea) then implement something different when people say it's a disaster.