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Human activities affecting oceans
Computers ‘to match human brains by 2030’
TRENDS This Universe I have heard that at one time the world famous scientist Albert Einstein made a statement “God does not play dice”. What provoked him to say so? Prof Yash Pal |
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Human activities affecting oceans
Human activities are affecting every square mile of the world’s oceans, according to a study by a team of American, British and Canadian researchers who mapped the severity of the effects from pole to pole.
The analysis of 17 global data sets, led by Benjamin S. Halpern of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, Calif., illustrates the extent to which humans are reshaping the seas through overfishing, air pollution and commercial shipping. The study, published in the journal Science, examines the impacts on nearly two dozen marine ecosystems, including coral reefs and continental shelves. “For the first time we can see where some of the most threatened marine ecosystems are and what might be degrading them,” said Elizabeth Selig, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a co-author, in a statement. “This information enables us to tailor strategies and set priorities for ecosystem management. And it shows that while local efforts are important, we also need to be thinking about global solutions.” The team of scientists analysed factors, including warming ocean temperatures due to greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient runoff and fishing. They found that the areas under the most stress included are “the North and Norwegian seas, South and East China seas, Eastern Caribbean, North American eastern seaboard, Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, Bering Sea, and the waters around Sri Lanka.” Some marine ecosystems are under acute pressure, the scientists concluded, including sea mounts, mangrove swamps, seagrass and coral reefs. Almost half of all coral reefs, they wrote, “experience medium high to very high impact” from humans. Overall, rising ocean temperatures represent the biggest threat to marine ecosystems.
— LA Times-Washington Post |
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Computers ‘to match human brains by 2030’
Computer power will match the intelligence of human beings within the next 20 years because of the accelerating speed at which technology is advancing, according to a leading scientific “futurologist”.
There will be 32 times more technical progress during the next half century than there was in the entire 20th century, and one of the outcomes is that artificial intelligence could be on a par with human intellect by the 2020s, said the American computer guru Ray Kurzweil. Machines will rapidly overtake humans in their intellectual abilities and will soon be able to solve some of the most intractable problems of the 21st century, said Dr Kurzweil, one of 18 maverick thinkers chosen to identify the greatest technological challenges facing humanity. Dr Kurzweil is considered one of the most radical figures in the field of technological prediction. His credentials stem from being a pioneer in various fields of computing, such as optical character recognition, the technology behind CDs, and automatic speech recognition by machine. His address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) portrayed a future where machine intelligence will far surpass that of the human brain as they learn how to communicate, teach and replicate among themselves. Central to his thesis is the idea that silicon-based technology follows the “law of accelerating returns”. The computer chip, for instance, has doubled in power every two years for the past half century, which has led to an ever- accelerating progression, and miniaturisation, in all chip-based technologies. Dr Kurzweil told the annual meeting of the AAAS in Boston: “The paradigm shift rate is now doubling every decade, so the next half century will see 32 times more technical progress than the last half century. Computation, communication, biological technologies, for example, DNA sequencing, brain scanning, knowledge of the human brain, and human knowledge in general are all accelerating at an ever-faster pace, generally doubling price-performance, capacity and bandwidth every year.” Computers have so far been based on two-dimensional chips made from silicon, but there are developments already well advanced to make three-dimensional chips with vastly improved performances, and even to construct them out of biological molecules that can be miniaturised even more than metal-based computer chips. “Three-dimensional, molecular computing will provide the hardware for human-level “strong artificial intelligence” by the 2020s. The more important software insights will be gained in part from the reverse engineering of the human brain, a process well under way. Already, two dozen regions of the human brain have been modelled and simulated,” he said. Although the brain cannot match computers in terms of the straight storage and retrieval of information, it has an unrivalled capacity of associating different strands of information, to look ahead and plan, as well as performing the imaginative creativity that is at the heart of human existence. But Dr Kurzweil is one of several computer scientists who believe that computers are well on the way to creating a “post-human” world where a second, intelligent entity exists alongside people.
— The Independent |
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TRENDS
Sudden, tremendous gushes of water from underground most likely carved out unusual fan-shaped geological formations with steps like a staircase long ago on the surface of Mars, scientists said on Wednesday.
The Martian surface boasts perhaps 200 large basins that have formations resembling fans. About 10 of them are terraced, with what looks like steps into the basin. Since they were first seen three years ago, scientists have debated how these formations, some of them 9 miles wide, were created. Dutch and U.S. researchers simulated on Earth on a vastly smaller scale the conditions that might have led to these formations on Mars that resemble dry river deltas with steps.
— Reuters
Mysterious creatures Australian experts taking part in an international programme to take a census of marine life in the ocean at the far south of the world collected specimens from up to 6,500 feet beneath the surface, and said many may never have been seen before.
— AP |
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PROF YASH PAL
I have heard that at one time the world famous scientist Albert Einstein made a statement “God does not play dice”. What provoked him to say so?
This is one of the most celebrated statements made during an epoch-making period in the development of science. This was the time in the mid twenties of the last century when quantum mechanics was being invented. Before the arrival of quantum mechanics scientists had come to believe that if we knew the position and velocity of a particle at one given time then we would be able to predict its future for all time. If this was true for all particles of the universe then we could in principle predict the future of the universe for all time. I used the words “in principle” in the last sentence to make allowance for the fact that when many particles are involved exact prediction might become impossible because of chaos, and non-linearity of systems. But this impossibility was not a fundamental impossibility. Such a fundamental impossibility was introduced by quantum mechanics. In the beginning of the twentieth century a serious problem related to emission of radiation by hot bodies confronted physicists. A solution was found through the hypotheses put forward by Planck. This was the so-called quantum hypothesis according to which radiant energy could come out only as quanta. Light of frequency f could only be a packets of energy E = f x h, where h was a fundamental constant. Frequency f, of course, is inversely proportional to wavelength. Suppose that we want to determine the position and momentum of a particle with great accuracy so that we can predict its position accurately at any time in future. We might be advised to see it with high frequency photon, because it will be more compact. The momentum can of course be measured by making two or more measurements after a time lapse. However we will find that we have landed ourselves in a spot of trouble. We do get good position measurements but we do not get a good answer for the momentum of the particle, which is moved in an undefined way by the collision with the high-energy photon. If we then shift to a measurement with a low energy photon, the momentum of the particle may not be changed much, but because of the increased dimension of the photon wave the position measurement of the particle would be less accurate. The result of such an impasse coming from the mere needs of the observation process leads us to a conclusion that the future also cannot be predicted with great accuracy! This consideration led one of the creators of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg, to formulate the uncertainty principle, which is stated as: Ñx . Ñp >= h. In word, it says that the product of uncertainty in position and that in momentum would be always greater than the quantum of action h. This being so there is limit to the predictability of the future state of a system. We lapse into the realm of probability. This is what made Einstein uncomfortable. He and several others kept on searching for hidden variables to save the universe from a probabilistic future. However the dominant view was that you couldn’t talk of the state of the universe without looking at it. It is the process of looking that brings in the uncertainty. Stephen Hawking was recently forced to say that Einstein was wrong to say that God does not play dice; indeed God is an inveterate gambler! Le me say, for the sake of the lay reader that we are talking of the atomic and particle size regime. For the world at our scale where masses and moments are much larger this uncertainty does not make a detectable difference. |
Scientists investigating the icy waters of Antarctica said Tuesday they have collected mysterious creatures, including giant sea spiders and huge worms, in the murky depths.