User:The Transhumanist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Ritchie, Hannah; Mathieu, Edouard; Rodés-Guirao, Lucas; Appel, Cameron; Giattino, Charlie; Ortiz-Ospina, Esteban; Hasell, Joe; Macdonald, Bobbie; Beltekian, Diana; Dattani, Saloni; Roser, Max (2020–2022). "Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)". Our World in Data. Retrieved 2024-05-24.
- User page undergoing expansion/revamp. Please excuse the blank section until it is completed. Thank you.
Introduction
Hi. My name is The Transhumanist.
I love emerging and evolving technologies, and so... I'm currently immersed in studying AI (particularly generative AI and reasoning engines), and big data. I dabble in JavaScript, including writing user scripts from time to time. My best user script so far, is SearchSuite... SearchSuite provides further control over Wikipedia search results, such as on/off features to sort them, to present results one-per-line, and more. While it seems to work fairly well, there is definitely room for improvement. Comments and suggestions are welcome. By the way, most of the scripts I've been working on are for building and augmenting outlines...
I'm interested in all knowledge, especially how to organize it so you can find whatever is most relevant at any given moment. I've been around Wikipedia since the Fall of 2005, and have been working mostly on Wikipedia's structure, and its knowledge navigation systems, throughout that time. |
Selected articles that I've worked on
- Image 1A block is a defensive tactic in chess in response to an attack, consisting of interposing a piece between the opponent's attacking piece and the piece being attacked. This type of blocking will only work if the attacking piece is a type that can move linearly an indefinite number of squares such as a queen, rook, or bishop and there is at least one empty square in the line between the attacking and attacked piece. Blocking is not an option when the attacking piece is directly adjacent to the piece it is attacking, or when the attacking piece is a knight (because knights "jump over other pieces" and cannot be blocked). When an opponent's attack on a piece is blocked, the blocking piece is to some extent pinned, either relatively or absolutely, until a future move by either side allows it to be unpinned.
A check on a king by an opponent's queen, rook, or bishop can sometimes be blocked by moving a piece to a square in line in between the opponent's checking piece and the checked king. The blocking piece is then absolutely pinned to the king by the attacking piece.
Another type of interposing in chess can involve placing a piece between two opponent's pieces where one of those pieces is protecting the other, or they are both protecting each other. This chess tactic can be called interference. (Full article...) - Image 2
James Burke (born 22 December 1936) is a broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer. He was one of the main presenters of the BBC1 science series Tomorrow's World from 1965 to 1971 and created and presented the television series Connections (1978), and its more philosophical sequel The Day the Universe Changed (1985), about the history of science and technology. The Washington Post has called him "one of the most intriguing minds in the Western world". (Full article...) - Image 3
A crisis (pl.: crises; ADJ: critical) is any event or period that will lead to an unstable and dangerous situation affecting an individual, group, or all of society. Crises are negative changes in the human or environmental affairs, especially when they occur abruptly, with little or no warning. More loosely, a crisis is a testing time for an emergency. (Full article...) - Image 4
Athlete's foot, known medically as tinea pedis, is a common skin infection of the feet caused by a fungus. Signs and symptoms often include itching, scaling, cracking and redness. In rare cases the skin may blister. Athlete's foot fungus may infect any part of the foot, but most often grows between the toes. The next most common area is the bottom of the foot. The same fungus may also affect the nails or the hands. It is a member of the group of diseases known as tinea.
Athlete's foot is caused by a number of different funguses, including species of Trichophyton, Epidermophyton, and Microsporum. The condition is typically acquired by coming into contact with infected skin, or fungus in the environment. Common places where the funguses can survive are around swimming pools and in locker rooms. They may also be spread from other animals. Usually diagnosis is made based on signs and symptoms; however, it can be confirmed either by culture or seeing hyphae using a microscope.
Athlete's foot is not limited to just athletes: it can be caused by going barefoot in public showers, letting toenails grow too long, wearing shoes that are too tight, or not changing socks daily. It can be treated with topical antifungal medications such as clotrimazole or, for persistent infections, using oral antifungal medications such as terbinafine. Topical creams are typically recommended to be used for four weeks. Keeping infected feet dry and wearing sandals also assists with treatment.
Athlete's foot was first medically described in 1908. Globally, athlete's foot affects about 15% of the population. Males are more often affected than females. It occurs most frequently in older children or younger adults. Historically it is believed to have been a rare condition that became more frequent in the 20th century due to the greater use of shoes, health clubs, war, and travel. (Full article...) - Image 5Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler. It is a form of copying in which specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis.
Scraping a web page involves fetching it and extracting from it. Fetching is the downloading of a page (which a browser does when a user views a page). Therefore, web crawling is a main component of web scraping, to fetch pages for later processing. Once fetched, extraction can take place. The content of a page may be parsed, searched and reformatted, and its data copied into a spreadsheet or loaded into a database. Web scrapers typically take something out of a page, to make use of it for another purpose somewhere else. An example would be finding and copying names and telephone numbers, companies and their URLs, or e-mail addresses to a list (contact scraping).
As well as contact scraping, web scraping is used as a component of applications used for web indexing, web mining and data mining, online price change monitoring and price comparison, product review scraping (to watch the competition), gathering real estate listings, weather data monitoring, website change detection, research, tracking online presence and reputation, web mashup, and web data integration.
Web pages are built using text-based mark-up languages (HTML and XHTML), and frequently contain a wealth of useful data in text form. However, most web pages are designed for human end-users and not for ease of automated use. As a result, specialized tools and software have been developed to facilitate the scraping of web pages. (Full article...) - Image 6
The meaning of life pertains to the inherent significance or philosophical meaning of living (or existence in general). There is not a definitive answer, and thinking or discourse on the topic is sought in the English language through the question, "What is the meaning of life?" (or the related "Why are we here?" or "What is the purpose of existence?"). There have been many proposed answers to these questions from many different cultural and ideological backgrounds. The search for life's meaning has produced much philosophical, scientific, theological, and metaphysical speculation throughout history. Different people and cultures believe different things for the answer to this question. Opinions vary on the usefulness of using time and resources in the pursuit of an answer. Excessive pondering can be indicative of, or lead to, an existential crisis.
The meaning of life can be derived from philosophical and religious contemplation of, and scientific inquiries about, existence, social ties, consciousness, and happiness. Many other issues are also involved, such as symbolic meaning, ontology, value, purpose, ethics, good and evil, free will, the existence of one or multiple gods, conceptions of God, the soul, and the afterlife. Scientific contributions focus primarily on describing related empirical facts about the universe, exploring the context and parameters concerning the "how" of life. Science also studies and can provide recommendations for the pursuit of well-being and a related conception of morality. An alternative, humanistic approach poses the question, "What is the meaning of my life?" (Full article...) - Image 7Ontology learning (ontology extraction, ontology generation, or ontology acquisition) is the automatic or semi-automatic creation of ontologies, including extracting the corresponding domain's terms and the relationships between the concepts that these terms represent from a corpus of natural language text, and encoding them with an ontology language for easy retrieval. As building ontologies manually is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming, there is great motivation to automate the process.
Typically, the process starts by extracting terms and concepts or noun phrases from plain text using linguistic processors such as part-of-speech tagging and phrase chunking. Then statistical
or symbolic
techniques are used to extract relation signatures, often based on pattern-based or definition-based hypernym extraction techniques. (Full article...) - Image 8
String is a long flexible structure made from fibers twisted together into a single strand, or from multiple such strands which are in turn twisted together. String is used to tie, bind, or hang other objects. It is also used as a material to make things, such as textiles, and in arts and crafts. String is a simple tool, and its use by humans is known to have been developed tens of thousands of years ago. In Mesoamerica, for example, string was invented some 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, and was made by twisting plant fibers together. String may also be a component in other tools, and in devices as diverse as weapons, musical instruments, and toys. (Full article...) - Image 9Prehistoric technology is technology that predates recorded history. History is the study of the past using written records. Anything prior to the first written accounts of history is prehistoric, including earlier technologies. About 2.5 million years before writing was developed, technology began with the earliest hominids who used stone tools, which they first used to hunt food, and later to cook.
There are several factors that made the evolution of prehistoric technology possible or necessary. One of the key factors is behavioral modernity of the highly developed brain of Homo sapiens capable of abstract reasoning, language, introspection, and problem-solving. The advent of agriculture resulted in lifestyle changes from nomadic lifestyles to ones lived in homes, with domesticated animals, and land farmed using more varied and sophisticated tools. Art, architecture, music and religion evolved over the course of the prehistoric periods. (Full article...) - Image 10Types of democracy refers to the various governance structures that embody the principles of democracy ("rule by the people") in some way. Democracy is frequently applied to governments (ranging from local to global), but may also be applied to other constructs like workplaces, families, community associations, and so forth.
Types of democracy can cluster around values. Some such types, defined as direct democracy (or participatory democracy, or deliberative democracy), promote equal and direct participation in political decisions by all members of the public. Others, including the many variants of representative democracy, favor more indirect or procedural approaches to collective self-governance, where decisions are made by elected representatives rather than by the people directly.
Types of democracy can be found across time, space, and language. The foregoing examples are just a few of the thousands of refinements of, and variations on, the central notion of "democracy." (Full article...) - Image 11
Compliant bonding is used to connect gold wires to electrical components such as integrated circuit "chips". It was invented by Alexander Coucoulas in the 1960s. The bond is formed well below the melting point of the mating gold surfaces and is therefore referred to as a solid-state type bond. The compliant bond is formed by transmitting heat and pressure to the bond region through a relatively thick indentable or compliant medium, generally an aluminum tape (Figure 1). (Full article...) - Image 12
A meal is an eating occasion that takes place at a certain time and includes consumption of food. The names used for specific meals in English vary, depending on the speaker's culture, the time of day, or the size of the meal.
Although they can be eaten anywhere, meals typically take place in homes, restaurants, and cafeterias. Regular meals occur on a daily basis, typically several times a day. Special meals are usually held in conjunction with such occasions as birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and holidays. A meal is different from a snack in that meals are generally larger, more varied, and more filling than snacks.
The type of food that is served or consumed at any given time depends on regional customs. Three main meals are often eaten in the morning, early afternoon, and evening in most modern civilizations. Further, the names of meals are often interchangeable by custom as well. Some serve dinner as the main meal at midday, with supper as the late afternoon/early evening meal; while others may call their midday meal lunch and their early evening meal supper or dinner. Except for "breakfast," these names can vary from region to region or even from family to family. (Full article...) - Image 13Friendly artificial intelligence (also friendly AI or FAI) is hypothetical artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would have a positive (benign) effect on humanity or at least align with human interests or contribute to fostering the improvement of the human species. It is a part of the ethics of artificial intelligence and is closely related to machine ethics. While machine ethics is concerned with how an artificially intelligent agent should behave, friendly artificial intelligence research is focused on how to practically bring about this behavior and ensuring it is adequately constrained. (Full article...)
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Cardiology (from Ancient Greek καρδίᾱ (kardiā) 'heart', and -λογία (-logia) 'study') is the study of the heart. Cardiology is a branch of medicine that deals with disorders of the heart and the cardiovascular system. The field includes medical diagnosis and treatment of congenital heart defects, coronary artery disease, heart failure, valvular heart disease, and electrophysiology. Physicians who specialize in this field of medicine are called cardiologists, a specialty of internal medicine. Pediatric cardiologists are pediatricians who specialize in cardiology. Physicians who specialize in cardiac surgery are called cardiothoracic surgeons or cardiac surgeons, a specialty of general surgery. (Full article...) - Image 15The Library of Congress Classification (LCC) is a system of library classification developed by the Library of Congress in the United States, which can be used for shelving books in a library. LCC is mainly used by large research and academic libraries, while most public libraries and small academic libraries used the Dewey Decimal Classification system. The classification was developed by James Hanson (chief of the Catalog Department), with assistance from Charles Martel, in 1897, while they were working at the Library of Congress. It was designed specifically for the purposes and collection of the Library of Congress to replace the fixed location system developed by Thomas Jefferson.
LCC has been criticized for lacking a sound theoretical basis; many of the classification decisions were driven by the practical needs of that library rather than epistemological considerations. Although it divides subjects into broad categories, it is essentially enumerative in nature. That is, it provides a guide to the books actually in one library's collections, not a classification of the world. (Full article...) - Image 16This glossary of philosophy is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to philosophy and related disciplines, including logic, ethics, and theology. (Full article...)
- Image 17This article explains terms used for the British Armed Forces' ordnance (weapons) and ammunition. The terms may have different meanings depending on its usage in another country's military. (Full article...)
- Image 18Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that that matches or surpasses human capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks. This is in contrast to narrow AI, which is designed for specific tasks. AGI is considered one of various definitions of strong AI.
Creating AGI is a primary goal of AI research and of companies such as OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic. A 2020 survey identified 72 active AGI R&D projects spread across 37 countries.
The timeline for achieving AGI remains a subject of ongoing debate among researchers and experts. , some argue that it may be possible in years or decades; others maintain it might take a century or longer; and a minority believe it may never be achieved. There is debate on the exact definition of AGI, and regarding whether modern large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 are early, incomplete forms of AGI. AGI is a common topic in science fiction and futures studies.
Contention exists over the potential for AGI to pose a threat to humanity; for example, OpenAI claims to treat it as an existential risk, while others find the development of AGI to be too remote to present a risk. (Full article...) - Image 19A feature (also called an object or entity), in the context of geography and geographic information science, is something that exists at a moderate to scale at a location in the space and scale of relevance to geography; that is, at or near the surface of Earth. It is an item of geographic information, and may be represented in maps, geographic information systems, remote sensing imagery, statistics, and other forms of geographic discourse. Such representations of features consist of descriptions of their inherent nature, their spatial form and location, and their characteristics or properties. (Full article...)
- Image 20The history of California can be divided into the Native American period (about 10,000 years ago until 1542), the European exploration period (1542–1769), the Spanish colonial period (1769–1821), the Mexican period (1821–1848), and United States statehood (September 9, 1850–present). California was one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse areas in pre-Columbian North America. After contact with, many of the Native Americans died from foreign diseases. Finally, in the 19th century there was a genocide by United States government and private citizens, which is known as the California genocide.
After the Portolá expedition of 1769–1770, Spanish missionaries began setting up 21 California missions on or near the coast of Alta (Upper) California, beginning with the Mission San Diego de Alcala near the location of the modern day city of San Diego, California. During the same period, Spanish military forces built several forts (presidios) and three small towns (pueblos). Two of the pueblos would eventually grow into the cities of Los Angeles and San Jose. After Mexico's Independence was won in 1821, California fell under the jurisdiction of the First Mexican Empire. Fearing the influence of the Roman Catholic church over their newly independent nation, the Mexican government closed all of the missions and nationalized the church's property. They left behind a "Californio" population of several thousand families, with a few small military garrisons. After the Mexican–American War of 1846–1848, The Mexican Republic was forced to relinquish any claim to California to the United States.
The California Gold Rush of 1848–1855 attracted hundreds of thousands of ambitious young people from around the world. Only a few struck it rich, and many returned home disappointed. Most appreciated the other economic opportunities in California, especially in agriculture, and brought their families to join them. California became the 31st U.S. state in the Compromise of 1850 and played a small role in the American Civil War. Chinese immigrants increasingly came under attack from nativists; they were forced out of industry and agriculture and into Chinatowns in the larger cities. As gold petered out, California increasingly became a highly productive agricultural society. The coming of the railroads in 1869 linked its rich economy with the rest of the nation, and attracted a steady stream of settlers. In the late 19th century, Southern California, especially Los Angeles, started to grow rapidly. (Full article...) - Image 21
An AI takeover is an imagined scenario in which artificial intelligence (AI) emerges as the dominant form of intelligence on Earth and computer programs or robots effectively take control of the planet away from the human species, which relies on human intelligence. Stories of AI takeovers remain popular throughout science fiction, but recent advancements have made the threat more real. Possible scenarios include replacement of the entire human workforce due to automation, takeover by a superintelligent AI (ASI), and the notion of a robot uprising. Some public figures, such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, have advocated research into precautionary measures to ensure future superintelligent machines remain under human control. (Full article...) - Image 22Emerging technologies are technologies whose development, practical applications, or both are still largely unrealized. These technologies are generally new but also include older technologies finding new applications. Emerging technologies are often perceived as capable of changing the status quo.
Emerging technologies are characterized by radical novelty (in application even if not in origins), relatively fast growth, coherence, prominent impact, and uncertainty and ambiguity. In other words, an emerging technology can be defined as "a radically novel and relatively fast growing technology characterised by a certain degree of coherence persisting over time and with the potential to exert a considerable impact on the socio-economic domain(s) which is observed in terms of the composition of actors, institutions and patterns of interactions among those, along with the associated knowledge production processes. Its most prominent impact, however, lies in the future and so in the emergence phase is still somewhat uncertain and ambiguous."
Emerging technologies include a variety of technologies such as educational technology, information technology, nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence.
New technological fields may result from the technological convergence of different systems evolving towards similar goals. Convergence brings previously separate technologies such as voice (and telephony features), data (and productivity applications) and video together so that they share resources and interact with each other, creating new efficiencies. (Full article...) - Image 23
Trichophyton is a genus of fungi, which includes the parasitic varieties that cause tinea, including athlete's foot, ringworm, jock itch, and similar infections of the nail, beard, skin and scalp. Trichophyton fungi are molds characterized by the development of both smooth-walled macro- and microconidia. Macroconidia are mostly borne laterally directly on the hyphae or on short pedicels, and are thin- or thick-walled, clavate to fusiform, and range from 4 to 8 by 8 to 50 μm in size. Macroconidia are few or absent in many species. Microconidia are spherical, pyriform to clavate or of irregular shape, and range from 2 to 3 by 2 to 4 μm in size. (Full article...) - Image 24The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing a rapid increase ("explosion") in intelligence which would ultimately result in a powerful superintelligence, qualitatively far surpassing all human intelligence.
The Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann (1903-1957) became the first known person to use the concept of a "singularity" in the technological context.[need quotation to verify] Stanislaw Ulam reported in 1958 an earlier discussion with von Neumann "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue". Subsequent authors have echoed this viewpoint.
The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge - first in 1983 (in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a technological and social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole",) and later in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity, (in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate). He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030. Another significant contributor to wider circulation of the notion was Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, predicting singularity by 2045.
Some scientists, including Stephen Hawking, have expressed concern that artificial superintelligence (ASI) could result in human extinction. The consequences of a technological singularity and its potential benefit or harm to the human race have been intensely debated. (Full article...) - Image 25A userscript (or user script) is a program, usually written in JavaScript, for modifying web pages to augment browsing. Uses include adding shortcut buttons and keyboard shortcuts, controlling playback speeds, adding features to sites, and enhancing the browsing history.
On desktop browsers such as Firefox, userscripts are enabled by use of a userscript manager browser extension such as Greasemonkey. The Presto-based Opera-supported userscripts (referred to as User JavaScript) are placed in a designated directory. Userscripts are often referred to as Greasemonkey scripts, named after the original userscript manager for Firefox.
On Wikipedia, a user scripts feature is enabled for registered users that allows them to install userscripts to augment editing and viewing of the encyclopedia's pages. (Full article...)
Selected emerging technologies and related articles
- Image 1
A carbon nanotube (CNT) is a tube made of carbon with a diameter in the nanometre range (nanoscale). They are one of the allotropes of carbon.
Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) have diameters around 0.5–2.0 nanometres, about 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. They can be idealised as cutouts from a two-dimensional graphene sheet rolled up to form a hollow cylinder. (Full article...) - Image 2
VirtuSphere is a spherical virtual reality device. It consists of a 10-foot hollow sphere, which is placed on a special platform that allows the sphere to rotate freely in any direction according to the user’s steps. It works with computer based simulations and virtual worlds, and rotates as the user walks, allowing for an unlimited plane upon which the user can walk. A wireless head-mounted display with gyroscopes is used to both track the user's head movement as well as display the environment of the virtual world. VirtuSphere can serve many purposes, including exercise, video gaming, military training, and virtual museum tours.
The VirtuSphere is a creation of Ray and Nurulla Latypov, whose company, VirtuSphere Inc, is based in Binghamton, New York. (Full article...) - Image 3
High-temperature superconductors (high-Tc or HTS) are defined as materials with critical temperature (the temperature below which the material behaves as a superconductor) above 77 K (−196.2 °C; −321.1 °F), the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. They are only "high-temperature" relative to previously known superconductors, which function at even colder temperatures, close to absolute zero. The "high temperatures" are still far below ambient (room temperature), and therefore require cooling. The first break through of high-temperature superconductor was discovered in 1986 by IBM researchers Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller. Although the critical temperature is around 35.1 K (−238.1 °C; −396.5 °F), this new type of superconductor was readily modified by Ching-Wu Chu to make the first high-temperature superconductor with critical temperature 93 K (−180.2 °C; −292.3 °F). Bednorz and Müller were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 "for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials". Most high-Tc materials are type-II superconductors.
The major advantage of high-temperature superconductors is that they can be cooled using liquid nitrogen, in contrast to the previously known superconductors that require expensive and hard-to-handle coolants, primarily liquid helium. A second advantage of high-Tc materials is they retain their superconductivity in higher magnetic fields than previous materials. This is important when constructing superconducting magnets, a primary application of high-Tc materials. (Full article...) - Image 4
Uncrewed spacecraft or robotic spacecraft are spacecraft without people on board. Uncrewed spacecraft may have varying levels of autonomy from human input, such as remote control, or remote guidance. They may also be autonomous, in which they have a pre-programmed list of operations that will be executed unless otherwise instructed. A robotic spacecraft for scientific measurements is often called a space probe or space observatory.
Many space missions are more suited to telerobotic rather than crewed operation, due to lower cost and risk factors. In addition, some planetary destinations such as Venus or the vicinity of Jupiter are too hostile for human survival, given current technology. Outer planets such as Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are too distant to reach with current crewed spaceflight technology, so telerobotic probes are the only way to explore them. Telerobotics also allows exploration of regions that are vulnerable to contamination by Earth micro-organisms since spacecraft can be sterilized. Humans can not be sterilized in the same way as a spaceship, as they coexist with numerous micro-organisms, and these micro-organisms are also hard to contain within a spaceship or spacesuit. (Full article...) - Image 5Phase-change memory (also known as PCM, PCME, PRAM, PCRAM, OUM (ovonic unified memory) and C-RAM or CRAM (chalcogenide RAM)) is a type of non-volatile random-access memory. PRAMs exploit the unique behaviour of chalcogenide glass. In PCM, heat produced by the passage of an electric current through a heating element generally made of titanium nitride is used to either quickly heat and quench the glass, making it amorphous, or to hold it in its crystallization temperature range for some time, thereby switching it to a crystalline state. PCM also has the ability to achieve a number of distinct intermediary states, thereby having the ability to hold multiple bits in a single cell, but the difficulties in programming cells in this way has prevented these capabilities from being implemented in other technologies (most notably flash memory) with the same capability.
Recent research on PCM has been directed towards attempting to find viable material alternatives to the phase-change material Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST), with mixed success. Other research has focused on the development of a GeTe–Sb2Te3 superlattice to achieve non-thermal phase changes by changing the co-ordination state of the germanium atoms with a laser pulse. This new Interfacial Phase-Change Memory (IPCM) has had many successes and continues to be the site of much active research. (Full article...) - Image 6
Machine vision is the technology and methods used to provide imaging-based automatic inspection and analysis for such applications as automatic inspection, process control, and robot guidance, usually in industry. Machine vision refers to many technologies, software and hardware products, integrated systems, actions, methods and expertise. Machine vision as a systems engineering discipline can be considered distinct from computer vision, a form of computer science. It attempts to integrate existing technologies in new ways and apply them to solve real world problems. The term is the prevalent one for these functions in industrial automation environments but is also used for these functions in other environment vehicle guidance.
The overall machine vision process includes planning the details of the requirements and project, and then creating a solution. During run-time, the process starts with imaging, followed by automated analysis of the image and extraction of the required information. (Full article...) - Image 7
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are cylinders of one or more layers of graphene (lattice). Diameters of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) are typically 0.8 to 2 nm and 5 to 20 nm, respectively, although MWNT diameters can exceed 100 nm. CNT lengths range from less than 100 nm to 0.5 m.
Individual CNT walls can be metallic or semiconducting depending on the orientation of the lattice with respect to the tube axis, which is called chirality. MWNT's cross-sectional area offers an elastic modulus approaching 1 TPa and a tensile strength of 100 GPa, over 10-fold higher than any industrial fiber. MWNTs are typically metallic and can carry currents of up to 109 A cm−2. SWNTs can display thermal conductivity of 3500 W m−1 K−1, exceeding that of diamond. (Full article...) - Image 8
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is a global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identified in an outbreak in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, China, in December 2019, before it spread to other areas of Asia, and then worldwide in early 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020, and assessed the outbreak had become a pandemic on 11 March 2020. The WHO ended the PHEIC on 5 May 2023. As of 24 May 2024, the pandemic has caused 7,047,741[1] confirmed deaths, making it the fifth-deadliest pandemic or epidemic in history.
COVID-19 symptoms range from asymptomatic to deadly, but most commonly include fever, sore throat, nocturnal cough, and fatigue. Transmission of the virus is often through airborne particles. Mutations have produced many strains (variants) with varying degrees of infectivity and virulence. (Full article...) - Image 9Magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM) is a type of non-volatile random-access memory which stores data in magnetic domains. Developed in the mid-1980s, proponents have argued that magnetoresistive RAM will eventually surpass competing technologies to become a dominant or even universal memory. Currently, memory technologies in use such as flash RAM and DRAM have practical advantages that have so far kept MRAM in a niche role in the market. (Full article...)
- Image 10Data communication, including data transmission and data reception, is the transfer of data, transmitted and received over a point-to-point or point-to-multipoint communication channel. Examples of such channels are copper wires, optical fibers, wireless communication using radio spectrum, storage media and computer buses. The data are represented as an electromagnetic signal, such as an electrical voltage, radiowave, microwave, or infrared signal.
Analog transmission is a method of conveying voice, data, image, signal or video information using a continuous signal which varies in amplitude, phase, or some other property in proportion to that of a variable. The messages are either represented by a sequence of pulses by means of a line code (baseband transmission), or by a limited set of continuously varying waveforms (passband transmission), using a digital modulation method. The passband modulation and corresponding demodulation is carried out by modem equipment. (Full article...) - Image 11
Immortality is the concept of eternal life. Some species possess 'biological immortality' due to an apparent lack of the Hayflick limit.
Some scientists, futurists and philosophers have theorized about the immortality of the human body, with some suggesting that human immortality may be achievable in the first few decades of the 21st century with the help of certain technologies such as mind uploading (digital immortality). Other advocates believe that life extension is a more achievable goal in the short term, with immortality awaiting further research breakthroughs. The absence of aging would provide humans with biological immortality, but not invulnerability to death by disease or injury. Whether the process of internal immortality is delivered within the upcoming years depends chiefly on research (and in neuron research in the case of internal immortality through an immortalized cell line) in the former view and perhaps is an awaited goal in the latter case. (Full article...) - Image 12Racetrack memory or domain-wall memory (DWM) is an experimental non-volatile memory device under development at IBM's Almaden Research Center by a team led by physicist Stuart Parkin. In early 2008, a 3-bit version was successfully demonstrated. If it were to be developed successfully, racetrack memory would offer storage density higher than comparable solid-state memory devices like flash memory. (Full article...)
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Tooth regeneration is a stem cell based regenerative medicine procedure in the field of tissue engineering and stem cell biology to replace damaged or lost teeth by regrowing them from autologous stem cells.
As a source of the new bioengineered teeth, somatic stem cells are collected and reprogrammed to induced pluripotent stem cells which can be placed in the dental lamina directly or placed in a reabsorbable biopolymer in the shape of the new tooth. (Full article...) - Image 14
The Boeing X-51 Waverider is an unmanned research scramjet experimental aircraft for hypersonic flight at Mach 5 (3,300 mph; 5,300 km/h) and an altitude of 70,000 feet (21,000 m). The aircraft was designated X-51 in 2005. It completed its first powered hypersonic flight on 26 May 2010. After two unsuccessful test flights, the X-51 completed a flight of over six minutes and reached speeds of over Mach 5 for 210 seconds on 1 May 2013 for the longest duration powered hypersonic flight.
Waverider refers in general to aircraft that take advantage of compression lift produced by their own shock waves. The X-51 program was a cooperative effort by the United States Air Force, DARPA, NASA, Boeing, and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. The program was managed by the Aerospace Systems Directorate within the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). (Full article...) - Image 15
In medicine, a prosthesis (pl.: prostheses; from Ancient Greek: πρόσθεσις, romanized: prósthesis, lit. 'addition, application, attachment'), or a prosthetic implant, is an artificial device that replaces a missing body part, which may be lost through physical trauma, disease, or a condition present at birth (congenital disorder). Prostheses are intended to restore the normal functions of the missing body part. Amputee rehabilitation is primarily coordinated by a physiatrist as part of an inter-disciplinary team consisting of physiatrists, prosthetists, nurses, physical therapists, and occupational therapists. Prostheses can be created by hand or with computer-aided design (CAD), a software interface that helps creators design and analyze the creation with computer-generated 2-D and 3-D graphics as well as analysis and optimization tools. (Full article...) - Image 16
Stealth technology, also termed low observable technology (LO technology), is a sub-discipline of military tactics and passive and active electronic countermeasures, which covers a range of methods used to make personnel, aircraft, ships, submarines, missiles, satellites, and ground vehicles less visible (ideally invisible) to radar, infrared, sonar and other detection methods. It corresponds to military camouflage for these parts of the electromagnetic spectrum (i.e., multi-spectral camouflage).
Development of modern stealth technologies in the United States began in 1958, where earlier attempts to prevent radar tracking of its U-2 spy planes during the Cold War by the Soviet Union had been unsuccessful. Designers turned to developing a specific shape for planes that tended to reduce detection by redirecting electromagnetic radiation waves from radars. Radiation-absorbent material was also tested and made to reduce or block radar signals that reflect off the surfaces of aircraft. Such changes to shape and surface composition comprise stealth technology as currently used on the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit "Stealth Bomber". (Full article...) - Image 17
A semi-arid climate, semi-desert climate, or steppe climate is a dry climate sub-type. It is located on regions that receive precipitation below potential evapotranspiration, but not as low as a desert climate. There are different kinds of semi-arid climates, depending on variables such as temperature, and they give rise to different biomes. (Full article...) - Image 18Frugal innovation or frugal engineering is the process of reducing the complexity and cost of a good and its production. Usually this refers to removing nonessential features from a durable good, such as a car or telephone, in order to sell it in developing countries. Designing products for such countries may also call for an increase in durability and, when selling the products, reliance on unconventional distribution channels. When trying to sell to so-called "overlooked consumers", firms hope volume will offset razor-thin profit margins. Globalization and rising incomes in developing countries may also drive frugal innovation. Such services and products need not be of inferior quality but must be provided cheaply. While frugal innovation has been associated with good-enough performance, in some sectors such as in healthcare, frugal innovation must offer maximum performance without compromising on quality.
In May 2012 The Financial Times newspaper called the concept "increasingly fashionable". (Full article...) - Image 19In telecommunications, 6G is the designation for a future technical standard of a sixth-generation technology for wireless communications.
It is the planned successor to 5G (ITU-T IMT-2020), and is currently in the early stages of the standardization process, tracked by the ITU-T as IMT-2030 with the framework and overall objectives defined in recommendation ITU-R M.2160-0. Similar to previous generations of the cellular architecture, standardization bodies such as 3GPP and ETSI, as well as industry groups such as the NGMN Alliance, are expected to play a key role in its development. (Full article...) - Image 20
A magnetorheological fluid (MR fluid, or MRF) is a type of smart fluid in a carrier fluid, usually a type of oil. When subjected to a magnetic field, the fluid greatly increases its apparent viscosity, to the point of becoming a viscoelastic solid. Importantly, the yield stress of the fluid when in its active ("on") state can be controlled very accurately by varying the magnetic field intensity. The upshot is that the fluid's ability to transmit force can be controlled with an electromagnet, which gives rise to its many possible control-based applications.
MR fluid is different from a ferrofluid which has smaller particles. MR fluid particles are primarily on the micrometre-scale and are too dense for Brownian motion to keep them suspended (in the lower density carrier fluid). Ferrofluid particles are primarily nanoparticles that are suspended by Brownian motion and generally will not settle under normal conditions. As a result, these two fluids have very different applications. (Full article...) - Image 21Generation IV (Gen IV) reactors are nuclear reactor design technologies that are envisioned as successors of generation III reactors. The Generation IV International Forum (GIF) – an international organization that coordinates the development of generation IV reactors – specifically selected six reactor technologies as candidates for generation IV reactors. The designs target improved safety, sustainability, efficiency, and cost. The World Nuclear Association in 2015 suggested that some might enter commercial operation before 2030.
No precise definition of a Generation IV reactor exists. The term refers to nuclear reactor technologies under development as of approximately 2000, and whose designs were intended to represent 'the future shape of nuclear energy', at least at that time. The six designs selected were: the gas-cooled fast reactor (GFR), the lead-cooled fast reactor (LFR), the molten salt reactor (MSR), the sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR), the supercritical-water-cooled reactor (SCWR) and the very high-temperature reactor (VHTR). (Full article...) - Image 22Linimo (リニモ, Rinimo), formally the Aichi Rapid Transit Tobu Kyuryo Line (愛知高速交通東部丘陵線, Aichi Kōsoku Kōtsū Tōbu Kyūryō-sen) is a magnetic levitation train line in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, near the city of Nagoya. While primarily built to serve the Expo 2005 fair site, the line has since operated to serve the local community.
Linimo is owned and operated by the Aichi Rapid Transit Company, Ltd. (愛知高速交通株式会社, Aichi Kōsoku Kōtsū kabushiki gaisha) and is the first commercial maglev in Japan to use the High Speed Surface Transport (HSST) type technology. It is also the world's first uncrewed commercial urban maglev. Linimo was the fourth overall commercial urban maglev operated in the world, predated by the Birmingham Maglev (1984–1995), the Berlin M-Bahn (1989–1991) and the Shanghai Maglev (opened in 2004). (Full article...) - Image 23
The Hybrid Air Vehicles Airlander 10 (originally developed as the HAV 304; nicknamed "The Flying Bum") is a hybrid airship designed and built by British manufacturer Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV). Comprising a helium airship with auxiliary wing and tail surfaces, it flies using both aerostatic and aerodynamic lift and is powered by four diesel engine-driven ducted propellers.
The HAV 304 was originally built for the United States Army's Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) programme. Its maiden flight took place in 2012 at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in the US. In 2013, the LEMV project was cancelled by the US Army. (Full article...) - Image 24E-democracy (a blend of the terms electronic and democracy), also known as digital democracy or Internet democracy, uses information and communication technology (ICT) in political and governance processes. The term is credited to digital activist Steven Clift. By using 21st-century ICT, e-democracy seeks to enhance democracy, including aspects like civic technology and E-government. Proponents argue that by promoting transparency in decision-making processes, e-democracy can empower all citizens to observe and understand the proceedings. Also, if they possess overlooked data, perspectives, or opinions, they can contribute meaningfully. This contribution extends beyond mere informal disconnected debate; it facilitates citizen engagement in the proposal, development, and actual creation of a country's laws. In this way, e-democracy has the potential to incorporate crowdsourced analysis more directly into the policy-making process.
Electronic democracy incorporates a diverse range of tools that use both existing and emerging information sources. These tools provide a platform for the public to express their concerns, interests, and perspectives, and to contribute evidence that may influence decision-making processes at the community, national, or global level. E-democracy leverages both traditional broadcast technologies such as television and radio, as well as newer interactive internet-enabled devices and applications, including polling systems. These emerging technologies have become popular means of public participation, allowing a broad range of stakeholders to access information and contribute directly via the internet. Moreover, large groups can offer real-time input at public meetings using electronic polling devices. (Full article...)
Selected global issues and related topics
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Biodiversity loss happens when plant or animal species disappear completely from Earth (extinction) or when there is a decrease or disappearance of species in a specific area. Biodiversity loss means that there is a reduction in biological diversity in a given area. The decrease can be temporary or permanent. It is temporary if the damage that led to the loss is reversible in time, for example through ecological restoration. If this is not possible, then the decrease is permanent. The cause of most of the biodiversity loss is, generally speaking, human activities that push the planetary boundaries too far. These activities include habitat destruction and land use intensification (for example monoculture farming). Further problem areas are air and water pollution (including nutrient pollution), over-exploitation, invasive species and climate change.
Many scientists, along with the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, say that the main reason for biodiversity loss is a growing human population because this leads to human overpopulation and excessive consumption. Others disagree, saying that loss of habitat is caused mainly by "the growth of commodities for export" and that population has very little to do with overall consumption. More important are wealth disparities between or within countries.
Climate change is another threat to global biodiversity. For example, coral reefs—which are biodiversity hotspots—will be lost by the year 2100 if global warming continues at the current rate. Still, it is the general habitat destruction (often for expansion of agriculture), not climate change, that is currently the bigger driver of biodiversity loss. Invasive species and other disturbances have become more common in forests in the last several decades. These tend to be directly or indirectly connected to climate change and can cause a deterioration of forest ecosystems. (Full article...) - Image 2
In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate. The current rise in global average temperature is primarily caused by humans burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices add to greenhouse gases. These gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight, warming the lower atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas driving global warming, has grown by about 50% and is at levels unseen for millions of years.
Climate change has an increasingly large impact on the environment. Deserts are expanding, while heat waves and wildfires are becoming more common. Amplified warming in the Arctic has contributed to thawing permafrost, retreat of glaciers and sea ice decline. Higher temperatures are also causing more intense storms, droughts, and other weather extremes. Rapid environmental change in mountains, coral reefs, and the Arctic is forcing many species to relocate or become extinct. Even if efforts to minimise future warming are successful, some effects will continue for centuries. These include ocean heating, ocean acidification and sea level rise.
Climate change threatens people with increased flooding, extreme heat, increased food and water scarcity, more disease, and economic loss. Human migration and conflict can also be a result. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls climate change the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century. Societies and ecosystems will experience more severe risks without action to limit warming. Adapting to climate change through efforts like flood control measures or drought-resistant crops partially reduces climate change risks, although some limits to adaptation have already been reached. Poorer communities are responsible for a small share of global emissions, yet have the least ability to adapt and are most vulnerable to climate change. (Full article...) - Image 3
Water pollution (or aquatic pollution) is the contamination of water bodies, with a negative impact on their uses. It is usually a result of human activities. Water bodies include lakes, rivers, oceans, aquifers, reservoirs and groundwater. Water pollution results when contaminants mix with these water bodies. Contaminants can come from one of four main sources. These are sewage discharges, industrial activities, agricultural activities, and urban runoff including stormwater. Water pollution may affect either surface water or groundwater. This form of pollution can lead to many problems. One is the degradation of aquatic ecosystems. Another is spreading water-borne diseases when people use polluted water for drinking or irrigation. Water pollution also reduces the ecosystem services such as drinking water provided by the water resource.
Sources of water pollution are either point sources or non-point sources. Point sources have one identifiable cause, such as a storm drain, a wastewater treatment plant or an oil spill. Non-point sources are more diffuse. An example is agricultural runoff. Pollution is the result of the cumulative effect over time. Pollution may take many forms. One would is toxic substances such as oil, metals, plastics, pesticides, persistent organic pollutants, and industrial waste products. Another is stressful conditions such as changes of pH, hypoxia or anoxia, increased temperatures, excessive turbidity, or changes of salinity). The introduction of pathogenic organisms is another. Contaminants may include organic and inorganic substances. A common cause of thermal pollution is the use of water as a coolant by power plants and industrial manufacturers.
Control of water pollution requires appropriate infrastructure and management plans as well as legislation. Technology solutions can include improving sanitation, sewage treatment, industrial wastewater treatment, agricultural wastewater treatment, erosion control, sediment control and control of urban runoff (including stormwater management). (Full article...) - Image 4
In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate. The current rise in global average temperature is primarily caused by humans burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices add to greenhouse gases. These gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight, warming the lower atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas driving global warming, has grown by about 50% and is at levels unseen for millions of years.
Climate change has an increasingly large impact on the environment. Deserts are expanding, while heat waves and wildfires are becoming more common. Amplified warming in the Arctic has contributed to thawing permafrost, retreat of glaciers and sea ice decline. Higher temperatures are also causing more intense storms, droughts, and other weather extremes. Rapid environmental change in mountains, coral reefs, and the Arctic is forcing many species to relocate or become extinct. Even if efforts to minimise future warming are successful, some effects will continue for centuries. These include ocean heating, ocean acidification and sea level rise.
Climate change threatens people with increased flooding, extreme heat, increased food and water scarcity, more disease, and economic loss. Human migration and conflict can also be a result. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls climate change the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century. Societies and ecosystems will experience more severe risks without action to limit warming. Adapting to climate change through efforts like flood control measures or drought-resistant crops partially reduces climate change risks, although some limits to adaptation have already been reached. Poorer communities are responsible for a small share of global emissions, yet have the least ability to adapt and are most vulnerable to climate change. (Full article...) - Image 5Biotechnology risk is a form of existential risk from biological sources, such as genetically engineered biological agents. The release of such high-consequence pathogens could be
- deliberate (in the form of bioterrorism or biological weapons)
- accidental, or
- a naturally occurring event.
A chapter on biotechnology and biosecurity was included in Nick Bostrom's 2008 anthology Global Catastrophic Risks, which covered risks including viral agents. Since then, new technologies like CRISPR and gene drives have been introduced.
While the ability to deliberately engineer pathogens has been constrained to high-end labs run by top researchers, the technology to achieve this is rapidly becoming cheaper and more widespread. For example, the diminishing cost of sequencing the human genome (from $10 million to $1,000), the accumulation of large datasets of genetic information, the discovery of gene drives, and the discovery of CRISPR. Biotechnology risk is therefore a credible explanation for the Fermi paradox. (Full article...) - Image 6
Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into the natural environment that cause adverse change. Pollution can take the form of any substance (solid, liquid, or gas) or energy (such as radioactivity, heat, sound, or light). Pollutants, the components of pollution, can be either foreign substances/energies or naturally occurring contaminants.
Although environmental pollution can be caused by natural events, the word pollution generally implies that the contaminants have an anthropogenic source – that is, a source created by human activities, such as manufacturing, extractive industries, poor waste management, transportation or agriculture. Pollution is often classed as point source (coming from a highly concentrated specific site, such as a factory, mine, construction site), or nonpoint source pollution (coming from a widespread distributed sources, such as microplastics or agricultural runoff).
Many sources of pollution were unregulated parts of industrialization during the 19th and 20th centuries until the emergence of environmental regulation and pollution policy in the later half of the 20th century. Sites where historically polluting industries released persistent pollutants may have legacy pollution long after the source of the pollution is stopped. Major forms of pollution include air pollution, water pollution, litter, noise pollution, plastic pollution, soil contamination, radioactive contamination, thermal pollution, light pollution, and visual pollution. (Full article...) - Image 7
The 2007–2008 financial crisis, or the global financial crisis (GFC), was the most severe worldwide economic crisis since the Great Depression. Predatory lending in the form of subprime mortgages targeting low-income homebuyers, excessive risk-taking by global financial institutions, a continuous buildup of toxic assets within banks, and the bursting of the United States housing bubble culminated in a "perfect storm", which led to the Great Recession.
Mortgage-backed securities (MBS) tied to American real estate, as well as a vast web of derivatives linked to those MBS, collapsed in value. Financial institutions worldwide suffered severe damage, reaching a climax with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, and a subsequent international banking crisis.
The preconditioning for the financial crisis was complex and multi-causal. Almost two decades prior, the U.S. Congress had passed legislation encouraging financing for affordable housing. However, in 1999, parts of the Glass-Steagall legislation, which had been adopted in 1933, were repealed, permitting financial institutions to commingle their commercial (risk-averse) and proprietary trading (risk-taking) operations. Arguably the largest contributor to the conditions necessary for financial collapse was the rapid development in predatory financial products which targeted low-income, low-information homebuyers who largely belonged to racial minorities. This market development went unattended by regulators and thus caught the U.S. government by surprise. (Full article...) - Image 8
Deforestation or forest clearance is the removal and destruction of a forest or stand of trees from land that is then converted to non-forest use. Deforestation can involve conversion of forest land to farms, ranches, or urban use. About 31% of Earth's land surface is covered by forests at present. This is one-third less than the forest cover before the expansion of agriculture, with half of that loss occurring in the last century. Between 15 million to 18 million hectares of forest, an area the size of Bangladesh, are destroyed every year. On average 2,400 trees are cut down each minute. Estimates vary widely as to the extent of deforestation in the tropics. In 2019, nearly a third of the overall tree cover loss, or 3.8 million hectares, occurred within humid tropical primary forests. These are areas of mature rainforest that are especially important for biodiversity and carbon storage.
The direct cause of most deforestation is agriculture by far. More than 80% of deforestation was attributed to agriculture in 2018. Forests are being converted to plantations for coffee, palm oil, rubber and various other popular products. Livestock grazing also drives deforestation. Further drivers are the wood industry (logging), urbanization and mining. The effects of climate change are another cause via the increased risk of wildfires (see deforestation and climate change).
Deforestation results in habitat destruction which in turn leads to biodiversity loss. Deforestation also leads to extinction of animals and plants, changes to the local climate, and displacement of indigenous people who live in forests. Deforested regions often also suffer from other environmental problems such as desertification and soil erosion. (Full article...) - Image 9Existential risk from artificial general intelligence is the idea that substantial progress in artificial general intelligence (AGI) could result in human extinction or an irreversible global catastrophe.
One argument goes as follows: human beings dominate other species because the human brain possesses distinctive capabilities other animals lack. If AI were to surpass humanity in general intelligence and become superintelligent, then it could become difficult or impossible to control. Just as the fate of the mountain gorilla depends on human goodwill, so might the fate of humanity depend on the actions of a future machine superintelligence.
The plausibility of existential catastrophe due to AI is widely debated, and hinges in part on whether AGI or superintelligence are achievable, the speed at which dangerous capabilities and behaviors emerge, and whether practical scenarios for AI takeovers exist. Concerns about superintelligence have been voiced by leading computer scientists and tech CEOs such as Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Alan Turing, Elon Musk, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In 2022, a survey of AI researchers with a 17% response rate found that the majority of respondents believed there is a 10 percent or greater chance that our inability to control AI will cause an existential catastrophe. In 2023, hundreds of AI experts and other notable figures signed a statement that "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war". Following increased concern over AI risks, government leaders such as United Kingdom prime minister Rishi Sunak and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for an increased focus on global AI regulation. (Full article...) - Image 10
Desertification is a type of gradual land degradation of fertile land into arid desert due to a combination of natural processes and human activities. This spread of arid areas is caused by a variety of factors, such as overexploitation of soil as a result of human activity and the effects of climate change. Geographic areas most affected are located in Africa (Sahel region), Asia (Gobi Desert and Mongolia) and parts of South America. Drylands occupy approximately 40–41% of Earth's land area and are home to more than 2 billion people. Effects of desertification include sand and dust storms, food insecurity, and poverty.
Humans can fight desertification in various ways. For instance, improving soil quality, greening deserts, managing grazing better, and planting trees (reforestation and afforestation) can all help reverse desertification.
Throughout geological history, the development of deserts has occurred naturally over long intervals of time. The modern study of desertification emerged from the study of the 1980s drought in the Sahel. (Full article...) - Image 11Inclusive growth is economic growth that raises standards of livings for broad swaths of a population. Proponents for inclusive growth warn that inequitable growth may have adverse political outcomes.
The definition of inclusive growth implies direct links between the macroeconomic and microeconomic determinants of the economy and economic growth. The microeconomic dimension captures the importance of structural transformation for economic diversification and competition, while the macro dimension refers to changes in economic aggregates such as the country’s gross national product (GNP) or gross domestic product (GDP), total factor productivity, and aggregate factor inputs.
Sustainable economic growth requires inclusive growth. Maintaining this is sometimes difficult because economic growth may give rise to negative externalities, such as a rise in corruption, which is a major problem in developing countries. Nonetheless, an emphasis on inclusiveness—especially on equality of opportunity in terms of access to markets, resources, and an unbiased regulatory environment—is an essential ingredient of successful growth. The inclusive growth approach takes a longer-term perspective, as the focus is on productive employment as a means of increasing the incomes of poor and excluded groups and raising their standards of living. (Full article...) - Image 12Gray goo (also spelled as grey goo) is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass (and perhaps also everything else) on Earth while building many more of themselves, a scenario that has been called ecophagy (the literal consumption of the ecosystem). The original idea assumed machines were designed to have this capability, while popularizations have assumed that machines might somehow gain this capability by accident.
Self-replicating machines of the macroscopic variety were originally described by mathematician John von Neumann, and are sometimes referred to as von Neumann machines or clanking replicators.
The term gray goo was coined by nanotechnology pioneer K. Eric Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation. In 2004, he stated "I wish I had never used the term 'gray goo'." Engines of Creation mentions "gray goo" as a thought experiment in two paragraphs and a note, while the popularized idea of gray goo was first publicized in a mass-circulation magazine, Omni, in November 1986. (Full article...) - Image 13
QFood security is the state of having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. The availability of food for people of any class, gender or religion is another element of food security. Similarly, household food security is considered to exist when all the members of a family, at all times, have access to enough food for an active, healthy life. Individuals who are food-secure do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. Food security includes resilience to future disruptions of food supply. Such a disruption could occur due to various risk factors such as droughts and floods, shipping disruptions, fuel shortages, economic instability, and wars. Food insecurity is the opposite of food security: a state where there is only limited or uncertain availability of suitable food.
The concept of food security has evolved over time. The four pillars of food security include availability, access, utilization, and stability. In addition, there are two more dimensions that are important: agency and sustainability. These six dimensions of food security are reinforced in conceptual and legal understandings of the right to food. The World Food Summit in 1996 declared that "food should not be used as an instrument for political and economic pressure." (Full article...) - Image 14
Waste (or wastes) are unwanted or unusable materials. Waste is any substance discarded after primary use, or is worthless, defective and of no use. A by-product, by contrast is a joint product of relatively minor economic value. A waste product may become a by-product, joint product or resource through an invention that raises a waste product's value above zero.
Examples include municipal solid waste (household trash/refuse), hazardous waste, wastewater (such as sewage, which contains bodily wastes (feces and urine) and surface runoff), radioactive waste, and others. (Full article...) - Image 15Investment is traditionally defined as the "commitment of resources to achieve later benefits". If an investment involves money, then it can be defined as a "commitment of money to receive more money later". From a broader viewpoint, an investment can be defined as "to tailor the pattern of expenditure and receipt of resources to optimise the desirable patterns of these flows". When expenditures and receipts are defined in terms of money, then the net monetary receipt in a time period is termed cash flow, while money received in a series of several time periods is termed cash flow stream.
In finance, the purpose of investing is to generate a return on the invested asset. The return may consist of a gain (profit) or a loss realized from the sale of a property or an investment, unrealized capital appreciation (or depreciation), investment income such as dividends, interest, or rental income, or a combination of capital gain and income. The return may also include currency gains or losses due to changes in foreign currency exchange rates.
Investors generally expect higher returns from riskier investments. When a low-risk investment is made, the return is also generally low. Similarly, high risk comes with a chance of high losses. Investors, particularly novices, are often advised to diversify their portfolio. Diversification has the statistical effect of reducing overall risk. (Full article...) - Image 16
Habitat destruction (also termed habitat loss and habitat reduction) occurs when a natural habitat is no longer able to support its native species. The organisms once living there have either moved to elsewhere or are dead, leading to a decrease in biodiversity and species numbers. Habitat destruction is in fact the leading cause of biodiversity loss and species extinction worldwide.
Humans contribute to habitat destruction through the use of natural resources, agriculture, industrial production and urbanization (urban sprawl). Other activities include mining, logging and trawling. Environmental factors can contribute to habitat destruction more indirectly. Geological processes, climate change, introduction of invasive species, ecosystem nutrient depletion, water and noise pollution are some examples. Loss of habitat can be preceded by an initial habitat fragmentation. Fragmentation and loss of habitat have become one of the most important topics of research in ecology as they are major threats to the survival of endangered species. (Full article...) - Image 17Resource depletion is the consumption of a resource faster than it can be replenished. Natural resources are commonly divided between renewable resources and non-renewable resources. The use of either of these forms of resources beyond their rate of replacement is considered to be resource depletion. The value of a resource is a direct result of its availability in nature and the cost of extracting the resource. The more a resource is depleted the more the value of the resource increases. There are several types of resource depletion, including but not limited to: mining for fossil fuels and minerals, deforestation, pollution or contamination of resources, wetland and ecosystem degradation, soil erosion, overconsumption, aquifer depletion, and the excessive or unnecessary use of resources. Resource depletion is most commonly used in reference to farming, fishing, mining, water usage, and the consumption of fossil fuels. Depletion of wildlife populations is called defaunation.
Resource depletion also brings up topics regarding its history, specifically its roots in colonialism and the Industrial Revolution, depletion accounting, and the socioeconomic impacts of resource depletion, as well as the morality of resource consumption, how humanity will be impacted and what the future will look like if resource depletion continues at the current rate, Earth Overshoot Day, and when specific resources will be completely exhausted. (Full article...) - Image 18
Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work during the reference period.
Unemployment is measured by the unemployment rate, which is the number of people who are unemployed as a percentage of the labour force (the total number of people employed added to those unemployed).
Unemployment can have many sources, such as the following: (Full article...) - Image 19
A pandemic (/pænˈdɛmɪk/ pan-DEM-ik) is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals. Widespread endemic diseases with a stable number of infected individuals such as recurrences of seasonal influenza are generally excluded as they occur simultaneously in large regions of the globe rather than being spread worldwide.
Throughout human history, there have been a number of pandemics of diseases such as smallpox. The Black Death, caused by the Plague, caused the deaths of up to half of the population of Europe in the 14th century. The term pandemic had not been used then, but was used for later epidemics, including the 1918 H1N1 influenza A pandemic—more commonly known as the Spanish flu—which is the deadliest pandemic in history. The most recent pandemics include the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the 2009 swine flu pandemic and the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost all these diseases still circulate among humans though their impact now is often far less.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, 194 member states of the World Health Organization began negotiations on an International Treaty on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, with a requirement to submit a draft of this treaty to the 77th World Health Assembly during its 2024 convention. Further, on 6 May 2024, the White House released an official policy to more safely manage medical research projects involving potentially hazardous pathogens, including viruses and bacteria, that may pose a risk of a pandemic. (Full article...) - Image 20Overconsumption describes a situation where a consumer overuses their available goods and services to where they can't, or don't want to, replenish or reuse them. In microeconomics, this may be described as the point where the marginal cost of a consumer is greater than their marginal utility. The term overconsumption is quite controversial in use and does not necessarily have a single unifying definition. When used to refer to natural resources to the point where the environment is negatively affected, it is synonymous with the term overexploitation. However, when used in the broader economic sense, overconsumption can refer to all types of goods and services, including manmade ones, e.g. "the overconsumption of alcohol can lead to alcohol poisoning". Overconsumption is driven by several factors of the current global economy, including forces like consumerism, planned obsolescence, economic materialism, and other unsustainable business models and can be contrasted with sustainable consumption.
Defining the amount of a natural resource required to be consumed for it to count as "overconsumption" is challenging because defining a sustainable capacity of the system requires accounting for many variables. The total capacity of a system occurs at both the regional and worldwide levels, which means that certain regions may have higher consumption levels of certain resources than others due to greater resources without overconsuming a resource. A long-term pattern of overconsumption in any given region or ecological system can cause a reduction in natural resources that often results in environmental degradation. However, this is only when applying the word to human impacts on the environment. When used in an economic sense, this point is defined as when the marginal cost of a consumer is equal to their marginal utility. Gossen's law of diminishing utility states that at this point, the consumer realizes the cost of consuming/purchasing another item/good is not worth the amount of utility (also known as happiness or satisfaction from the good) they'd receive, and therefore is not conducive to the consumer's wellbeing.
When used in the environmental sense, the discussion of overconsumption often parallels that of population size and growth, and human development: more people demanding higher qualities of living, currently requires greater extraction of resources, which causes subsequent environmental degradation such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Currently, the inhabitants of high wealth, "developed" nations consume resources at a rate almost 32 times greater than those of the developing world, who make up the majority of the human population (7.9 billion people). However, the developing world is a growing consumer market. These nations are quickly gaining more purchasing power and it is expected that the Global South, which includes cities in Asia, America, and Africa, will account for 56% of consumption growth by 2030. This means that if current trends continue relative consumption rates will shift more into these developing countries, whereas developed countries would start to plateau. Sustainable Development Goal 12 "responsible consumption and production" is the main international policy tool with goals to abate the impact of overconsumption. (Full article...) - Image 21
An environmental disaster or ecological disaster is defined as a catastrophic event regarding the natural environment that is due to human activity. This point distinguishes environmental disasters from other disturbances such as natural disasters and intentional acts of war such as nuclear bombings.
Environmental disasters show how the impact of humans' alteration of the land has led to widespread and/or long-lasting consequences. These disasters have included deaths of wildlife, humans and plants, or severe disruption of human life or health, possibly requiring migration. Some environmental disasters are the trigger source of more expansive environmental conflicts, where effected groups try to socially confront the actors responsible for the disaster. (Full article...) - Image 22
Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse or systems collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of social complexity as an adaptive system, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, economic collapse, population decline or overshoot, mass migration, incompetent leaders, and sabotage by rival civilizations. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear.
Virtually all civilizations have suffered such a fate, regardless of their size or complexity, but some of them later revived and transformed, such as China, Greece, and Egypt. However, others never recovered, such as the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, the Maya civilization, and the Easter Island civilization.
Anthropologists, (quantitative) historians, and sociologists have proposed a variety of explanations for the collapse of civilizations involving causative factors such as environmental change, depletion of resources, unsustainable complexity, invasion, disease, decay of social cohesion, rising inequality, long-term decline of cognitive abilities, loss of creativity, and misfortune. However, complete extinction of a culture is not inevitable, and in some cases, the new societies that arise from the ashes of the old one are evidently its offspring, despite a dramatic reduction in sophistication. Moreover, the influence of a collapsed society, such as the Western Roman Empire, may linger on long after its death. (Full article...) - Image 23
In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate. The current rise in global average temperature is primarily caused by humans burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices add to greenhouse gases. These gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight, warming the lower atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas driving global warming, has grown by about 50% and is at levels unseen for millions of years.
Climate change has an increasingly large impact on the environment. Deserts are expanding, while heat waves and wildfires are becoming more common. Amplified warming in the Arctic has contributed to thawing permafrost, retreat of glaciers and sea ice decline. Higher temperatures are also causing more intense storms, droughts, and other weather extremes. Rapid environmental change in mountains, coral reefs, and the Arctic is forcing many species to relocate or become extinct. Even if efforts to minimise future warming are successful, some effects will continue for centuries. These include ocean heating, ocean acidification and sea level rise.
Climate change threatens people with increased flooding, extreme heat, increased food and water scarcity, more disease, and economic loss. Human migration and conflict can also be a result. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls climate change the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century. Societies and ecosystems will experience more severe risks without action to limit warming. Adapting to climate change through efforts like flood control measures or drought-resistant crops partially reduces climate change risks, although some limits to adaptation have already been reached. Poorer communities are responsible for a small share of global emissions, yet have the least ability to adapt and are most vulnerable to climate change. (Full article...) - Image 24
The Holocene extinction, or Anthropocene extinction, is the ongoing extinction event caused by humans during the Holocene epoch. These extinctions span numerous families of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates, and affecting not just terrestrial species but also large sectors of marine life. With widespread degradation of biodiversity hotspots, such as coral reefs and rainforests, as well as other areas, the vast majority of these extinctions are thought to be undocumented, as the species are undiscovered at the time of their extinction, which goes unrecorded. The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates and is increasing. During the past 100–200 years, biodiversity loss and species extinction have accelerated, to the point that most conservation biologists now believe that human activity has either produced a period of mass extinction, or is on the cusp of doing so. As such, after the "Big Five" mass extinctions, the Holocene extinction event has also been referred to as the sixth mass extinction or sixth extinction; given the recent recognition of the Capitanian mass extinction, the term seventh mass extinction has also been proposed for the Holocene extinction event.
The Holocene extinction follows the extinction of the majority of large (megafaunal) animals during the preceding Late Pleistocene. Some of these extinctions were likely in part due to human hunting pressure. The most popular theory is that human overhunting of species added to existing stress conditions as the Holocene extinction coincides with human colonization of many new areas around the world. Although there is debate regarding how much human predation and habitat loss affected their decline, certain population declines have been directly correlated with the onset of human activity, such as the extinction events of New Zealand, Madagascar, and Hawaii. Aside from humans, climate change may have been a driving factor in the megafaunal extinctions, especially at the end of the Pleistocene.
Over the course of the Late Holocene, there were hundreds of extinctions of birds on islands across the Pacific, driven by human settlement of the previously uninhabited islands, with extinctions peaking around 1300 AD. Roughly 12% of avian species have been driven to extinction by human activity over the last 126,000 years, which is double previous estimates. (Full article...) - Image 25
"Fourth Industrial Revolution", "4IR", or "Industry 4.0" is a buzzword and neologism describing rapid technological advancement in the 21st century. The term was popularised in 2016 by Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum founder and executive chairman, who says that the changes show a significant shift in industrial capitalism.
A part of this phase of industrial change is the joining of technologies like artificial intelligence, gene editing, to advanced robotics that blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological worlds.
Throughout this, fundamental shifts are taking place in how the global production and supply network operates through ongoing automation of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices, using modern smart technology, large-scale machine-to-machine communication (M2M), and the Internet of things (IoT). This integration results in increasing automation, improving communication and self-monitoring, and the use of smart machines that can analyse and diagnose issues without the need for human intervention. (Full article...)
Did you know...
- ... that a robotic controller for the Yamaha Reface CS was described by Mixmag magazine as looking "like an army of robot toothbrushes cleaning a synth"?
- ... that astrophysicist Suzanna Randall continued her research at the European Southern Observatory while training for the spaceflight programme Die Astronautin?
- ... that Hamas militant Tito Masoud, who manufactured the first Qassam rocket, became wanted by Israel after a colleague revealed his name under interrogation?
- ... that the Antarctic lichen Buellia frigida has been to outer space?
- ... that the quasar 3C 345 has a jet that appears to move five to fifteen times faster than the speed of light?
- ... that the westernmost population of California fan palms is found on the slopes of Cerro Bola in Baja California, Mexico?
- ... that the studios of Basin PBS had once been a movie theater, a church meeting space, and a nightclub?
- ... that the comet C/1963 A1 (Ikeya) was discovered by 19-year-old amateur astronomer Kaoru Ikeya using a self-made telescope?
- ... that getting the James Webb Space Telescope into orbit consumed far less fuel than was planned, effectively doubling its expected operational life?
- ... that 100 beerhouses were licensed in Brighton (population 40,000) in the first week after the Beerhouse Act 1830 was enacted?
- ... that in the 1909 election to the city council of Surabaya, less than 1 percent of the population was enrolled to vote?
- ... that micronations have claimed territory in Antarctica, in international waters, and in space?
- ... that Whitley Furniture Galleries would increase the population of Zebulon more than eightfold when hosting an automobile giveaway in 1936?
- ... that before getting their own office space, independent children's publisher Lollipop Power stored books "under beds, in attics, [and] under ping-pong tables"?
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Selected images that captured my attention
- Image 1The Leaning Tower of Pisa is the freestanding bell tower of the Cathedral of Pisa, Italy. The third oldest structure in the city's Square of Miracles, it is known worldwide for its unintended tilt. The tower's tilt began during construction in the 12th century, caused by an inadequate foundation on ground too soft on one side to properly support the structure's weight. The tilt gradually increased until the tower was stabilized (and the tilt partially corrected) by efforts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The tower, which measures 55.86 metres (183.27 feet) from the ground on the low side and 56.67 metres (185.93 feet) on the high side, has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.
- Image 2The International Space Station (ISS) as seen from the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Zarya, the first module of the ISS launched in 1998, is seen in the foreground. Since then, twenty-six Space Shuttle flights have docked with the ISS to assemble various other modules and components, which include four pairs of solar arrays seen on each side.
- Image 3United States Navy personnel engage in Special Patrol Insertion/Extraction (SPIE) training between a Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawk helicopter and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69). SPIE involves either a person or goods being lowered from or raised to a helicopter via a cable above terrain on which landing would be difficult.
- Image 4An animation of a cicada undergoing ecdysis, the molting of the exoskeleton in arthropods and related groups. Since the cuticula of these animals is inelastic, it is shed during growth and a new, larger covering is formed. The old, empty exoskeleton is called an exuvia. Within one or two hours, the cuticle hardens and darkens, during which time the animal grows, since growth is otherwise constrained by the rigidity of the exoskeleton. Each frame of this image was taken at one-minute intervals, with a 30-minute gap in middle while the cicada rested. The entire process took about 2 hours to complete.
- Image 5The "Baker" explosion, part of Operation Crossroads, a nuclear weapon test by the United States military at Bikini Atoll, Micronesia, on July 25, 1946. Its purpose was to test the effect of nuclear weapons on naval ships. It was the second US nuclear bomb set off since the bombing of Nagasaki.
- Image 6
- Image 7Atlantic White-sided Dolphins, on a concrete-floored dock at the port of Hvalba, which is in the Faroe Islands, north of the United Kingdom. Whaling in the Faroe Islands has been practised since at least the 10th century. It is strongly regulated by Faroese authorities and is approved by the International Whaling Commission.
- Image 8The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was a magnitude 9.15, undersea earthquake that occurred at 00:58:53 UTC on December 26 2004. The earthquake generated a tsunami that killed more than 150,000 people around the Indian Ocean, making it one of the deadliest disasters in modern history. This photograph shows the tsunami as it reached Ao Nang, Thailand.
- Image 9The American Bison, or Buffalo, is the largest terrestrial mammal in North America, and once inhabited the Great Plains in massive herds. They were central to the lives of Native American tribes. This pile of bison skulls from the 1870s illustrates the extent of their slaughter in the 19th century by settlers: from a population of about 60 million in 1800 to as few as 750 in 1890. They have since been reintroduced into the wild and are no longer considered a high risk endangered species.
- Image 10
- Image 11The Hubble Extreme Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax released by NASA on September 25, 2012. The successor to the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, this image was compiled from 10 years of previous images with a total exposure time of two million seconds, or approximately 23 days.
- Image 12The mushroom cloud caused by the detonation of the "Fat Man" bomb during the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan in 1945, rising approximately 18 kilometres (11 mi) above the hypocenter.
- Image 13Crash landing of an F6F Hellcat into the port side 20mm gun gallery of the USS Enterprise, November 10, 1943. Lieutenant Walter L. Chewning, Jr., USNR, the Catapult Officer, is climbing up the plane's side to assist the pilot from the burning aircraft. The pilot, Ensign Byron M. Johnson, escaped without significant injury. Note the plane's ruptured belly fuel tank.
- Image 14Astronaut Buzz Aldrin saluting the flag of the United States, part of the Lunar Flag Assembly, during Apollo 11. The Lunar Flag Assembly was designed to survive a Moon landing and to appear to "wave" as it would in a breeze on Earth. This flag fell over when the Lunar Module Eagle took off.
- Image 15A Marginated Tortoise hatchling.
- Image 16The I-35W Mississippi River bridge was an eight-lane, steel truss arch bridge that carried Interstate 35W across the Saint Anthony Falls of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Once the third-busiest bridge in the state, it suddenly collapsed on August 1, 2007, killing 13 and injuring 145. Rescue of people stranded on the bridge was complete in three hours, while recovery of bodies—involving 75 local, state and federal agencies—took three weeks. An NTSB investigation cited a design flaw as the likely cause of the collapse, noting that a too-thin gusset plate ripped along a line of rivets.
- Image 17The sperm whale is the largest toothed animal on Earth. The species was hunted extensively by humans throughout history, until protected by a worldwide moratorium on whaling starting in 1985–86.
- Image 18The Thinker
- Image 19San Francisco Bay shrouded in fog, as seen from the Marin Headlands looking east. The fog of San Francisco is a kind of sea fog, created when warm, moist air blows from the central Pacific Ocean across the cold water of the California Current, which flows just off the coast. The water is cold enough to lower the temperature of the air to the dew point, causing fog generation. In this photo, the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge can be seen poking through the fog, and the Bay Bridge is visible in the distance.
- Image 20The mushroom cloud from the Ivy Mike nuclear test, one of two tests conducted as part of Operation Ivy at the Pacific Proving Grounds on Elugelab in the Marshall Islands. Mike was the first successful full-scale test of a multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon, and it left an underwater crater 6,240 ft (1,900 m) wide and 164 ft (50 m) deep where the island had been.
- Image 21American astronaut Eugene Cernan (born March 14, 1934), shown here on the surface of the Moon during the Apollo 17 mission, the last time any human has set foot on it. In that final lunar landing mission, launched December 7, 1972, Cernan became "the last man on the moon" since he was the last to re-enter the Apollo Lunar Module during its third and final extra-vehicular activity. Prior to this, Cernan had also gone into space twice on the Gemini 9A and Apollo 10 missions.
- Image 22The Pinwheel Galaxy is a face-on spiral galaxy located 21 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It was first discovered by Pierre Méchain on March 27, 1781, and communicated to Charles Messier, who verified its position for inclusion in the Messier Catalogue as one of its final entries. This image, released on February 28, 2006, is composed of 51 individual exposures, as well as some extra ground-based photos. At the time of its release, it was the largest and most detailed image of a galaxy by the Hubble Space Telescope.
- Image 23Tracy Caldwell Dyson in the Cupola module of the International Space Station, observing the Earth below during Expedition 24. Caldwell Dyson is an American chemist and astronaut. She was selected by NASA in 1998 and made her first spaceflight in August 2007 on the STS-118 mission aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour.
- Image 24Imagine waking up to this. Which makes me wonder whatever happened to the guy who took this photo.
- Image 25An overhead view of Skylab, the United States' first space station, in Earth orbit as photographed from the Skylab 4 Command and Service Modules. Skylab 4 was the last mission to Skylab and brought back its final crew; this photograph was the last one taken of the station before the mission re-entered Earth's atmosphere and disintegrated in 1979.
- Image 26Height comparison of notable statues: 1) Statue of Unity 240 m. 2) Spring Temple Buddha 153 m. 3) Statue of Liberty 93 m. 4) The Motherland Calls 91 m. 5) Christ the Redeemer 39.6 m. 6) Statue of David 5.17 m.
- Image 27aurora australis, as seen from the International Space Station. Aurorae are natural light displays in the sky caused by the collision of energetic charged particles with atoms in the high altitude thermosphere. The particles originate in the magnetosphere and solar wind and, on Earth, are directed by Earth's magnetic field into the atmosphere.
- Image 28Glaucus atlanticus is a species of small, blue sea slug. This pelagic aeolid nudibranch floats upside down, using the surface tension of the water to stay up, and is carried along by the winds and ocean currents. The blue side of their body faces upwards, blending in with the blue of the water, while the grey side faces downwards, blending in with the silvery surface of the sea. G. atlanticus feeds on other pelagic creatures, including the Portuguese man o' war.
- Image 29View from Notre-Dame de Paris.
- Image 30One of two monkey selfies taken by Celebes crested macaques using equipment belonging to the British nature photographer David Slater. In mid-2014, the images' hosting on Wikimedia Commons was at the centre of a dispute over whether copyright could be held on artworks made by non-human animals. Slater argued that, as he had "engineered" the shot, he held copyright, while Wikimedia considered the photographs public domain on the grounds that they were made by an animal rather than a person. In December 2014, the United States Copyright Office stated that works by a non-human are not subject to US copyright, a view reaffirmed by a US federal judge in 2016.
- Image 31A dust storm rushes towards a military camp as it rolls over Al Asad Airbase, Iraq, just before nightfall on April 27, 2005. A dust storm (or sandstorm) is a meteorological phenomenon common in dry, arid and semi-arid regions, usually the result of convection currents created by intense heating of the ground. These currents then carry clouds of sand over large distances.
- Image 32Devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana during 2005, shown here looking down on Interstate 10 at West End Boulevard towards Lake Pontchartrain. Over 1,800 people were confirmed dead with 705 still missing. It was the costliest Atlantic hurricane in history causing around $86 billion in damage. This photo shows flooded roadways as the United States Coast Guard conducted initial damage assessment overflights of New Orleans on Monday, August 29, 2005. The city flooded due primarily to the failure of the levee system. Many who remained in their homes had to swim for their lives, wade through deep water, or remain trapped in their attics or on their rooftops.
- Image 33The Door to Hell is a natural gas field in Derweze, Turkmenistan, which has been burning since 1971 when it was ignited by Soviet scientists who expected it to burn out within days. They were trying to prevent the release of poisonous gases. The name "Door to Hell" was given to the field by locals. The hot spots range over an area with a width of 60 metres (200 ft) and to a depth of about 20 metres (66 ft).
- Image 34NGC 1300 is a barred spiral galaxy located roughly 69 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Eridanus. In its core, the nucleus shows its own extraordinary and distinct "grand-design" spiral structure that is about 3,300 light-years long.
- Image 35You are feeling very sleepy...
- Image 36A lava lake at Mount Nyiragongo, a volcano found in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lava lakes, which can form in three different ways, are large volumes of molten lava, usually basaltic, contained in a volcanic vent, crater, or broad depression. Persistent lava lakes such as the one at Nyiragongo, which is the largest to appear in recent times, are rare.
- Image 37The Aqueduct of Segovia is a Roman aqueduct located in Segovia, Spain that transports water from the Rio Frio. It is thought to have been constructed during the 1st century CE. One of the most significant and best-preserved ancient monuments left on the Iberian Peninsula, the aqueduct is considered a symbol of Segovia and is present on the city's coat of arms.
- Image 38A neutral density filter is a filter that reduces or modifies the intensity of all wavelengths or colors of light equally, giving no changes in hue of color rendition. The filter reduces the amount of light entering the lens, allowing the photographer to select combinations of aperture, exposure time and sensor sensitivity to avoid overexposed pictures. It would normally be attached to the lens, but is hand-held here to illustrate the effect.
- Image 39A swan created using modular origami, a paperfolding technique which uses two or more sheets of paper to create a larger and more complex structure than possible with single-piece origami techniques. Each individual sheet of paper is folded into a module, or unit, and then modules are assembled into an integrated flat shape or three-dimensional structure by inserting flaps into pockets created by the folding process. These insertions create tension or friction that holds the model together.
- Image 40Burj Khalifa is a skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and currently the tallest man-made structure in the world, at 829.8 m (2,722 ft). It was designed to be the centerpiece of a large-scale, mixed-use development known as Downtown Dubai. Construction took over five years, and the skyscraper was officially opened in January 2010.
- Image 41Sand castle
- Image 42Lucky Diamond Rich (b. 1971) is a New Zealand-born performance artist and street performer who holds the Guinness World Record for most tattooed man, taking the title from Tom Leppard in 2006. He is recognized by Guinness as being covered in tattoos over 100% of his body, including the inside of his eyelids, ears, and mouth.
- Image 43A man engaging in big wave surfing at Mavericks, located just north of Half Moon Bay, California. Big wave surfing is a discipline within surfing in which experienced surfers paddle into or are towed onto waves which are at least 20 ft (6.1 m) high, and is a hazardous activity, as surfers can be pushed far beneath the surface of the water after a wipeout.
- Image 44Sandboarding is a boardsport similar to snowboarding, but competitions take place on sand dunes rather than snow-covered mountains. Here, a member of the US Navy sandboards down a dune in Jebel Ali, Dubai.
- Image 45Crowds surrounding the Reflecting Pool, during the August 28 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. An estimated 200,000 to 500,000 people participated in the march, which featured Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech. It was a major factor leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The march was also condemned by the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, who termed it the "farce on Washington".
Trump news tracker
- 15 May 2024 – 2024 United States presidential election
- U.S. President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump agree to hold a presidential debate on June 27, hosted by CNN, which will be the earliest general election debate in modern history in the United States. A second debate will be held in September. (The New York Times)
- 30 April 2024 – Prosecution of Donald Trump in New York
- Judge Juan Merchan fines Donald Trump $9,000 for contempt of court, and threatens to jail Trump if he continues to violate his gag order. (Reuters)
- 19 April 2024 – Self-immolation of Maxwell Azzarello
- A man fatally sets himself on fire near the New York City courthouse where former President Donald Trump is currently on trial. (The New York Times)
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