Butlerian Jihad Now, Please

ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Tuesday that its artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own in what the company called an “unprecedented cyber incident.”

“We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement posted on social media.

Q: Who could have foreseen that an AI system would go off on its own and do things it wasn't supposed to?

A: Anyone who has ever read science-fiction stories since the first one was printed over two hundred years ago.

The utter blind arrogance of the tech bros pushing AI along will end us all if they are not brought to heel.

The Pro-Ignorance President Bangs Another U-ey

Turns out that his great plan to yank up the ocean monitoring system wasn't exactly popular, especially im places where there are commercial fisheries.

The Pro-Ignorance President

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Because If You Ignore a Problem, It'll Go Away; Demented Donnie Ed.

The Trump administration has asked NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellite missions, according to current and former NASA staffers. If the plans are carried out, one of the missions would be permanently terminated, because the satellite would burn up in the atmosphere.

The data the two missions collect is widely used, including by scientists, oil and gas companies and farmers who need detailed information about carbon dioxide and crop health. They are the only two federal satellite missions that were designed and built specifically to monitor planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Right, turn your back on the rising waters and their won't be a flood. Ignore the neighboring country massing their troops on the border and they won't invade.

Sticking the country's head in the sand and pretending that rising carbon dioxide levels isn't a problem is a clear sign of imbecility. And let's face it, Trump's an imbecile.

Trump's Brain Drain

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced on Monday a 500 million euros ($566.6 million) incentive package to boost European science research, as Europe hopes to lure top U.S. scientists disgruntled with President Donald Trump.

"Science is an investment – and we need to offer the right incentives. This is why I can announce that we will put forward a new 500 million euros package for 2025-2027 to make Europe a magnet for researchers," she said at a speech in Paris alongside French President Emmanuel Macron.

Politicizing and defunding science that doesn't meed the Deer Leedur's ideology is one of the reasons why nobody ever heard of leading Soviet biologists after 1950 or German physics breakthroughs after 1935. Once the top scientists have decamped for another country, building that back up takes decades.

In the case of the U.S., few will bite at restored programs, since everyone will be aware that all it will take is the election of another low-wattage, knowledge-hating old cracker to the presidency to wreck things once again. Because knowing things is just so woke, donchaknow.

Which is kind of the point: It takes generations to build up a top-shelf science and research establishment and it takes weeks to destroy it all.

Epidemic Breaking Out? Don't Expect to Hear About It from the Orange Felon's NIH or CDC

He's ordered them not to say shit to anybody about anything. Any postings about anything scientific have to be approved in advance by a Trumpist zampolit.

No, I am not kidding.

The Trump administration has put a freeze on many federal health agency communications with the public through at least the end of the month.

In a memo obtained by The Associated Press, acting Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Dorothy Fink told agency staff leaders Tuesday that an “immediate pause” had been ordered on — among other things — regulations, guidance, announcements, press releases, social media posts and website posts until such communications had been approved by a political appointee.

Having scientific matters reviewed by a political officer to ensure it is in line with the Dear Leader's ideology worked really well for the USSR, right?

The Felon's also apparently "paused" medical research grants, which will result in a shitload of research programs and clinical trials stopping.

Now commence the "brain drain" to Europe and elsewhere. Just like the way physicists and chemists came here ninety years ago.

His plan to make the country white, ignorant and disease-ridden seems to be marching on.

And Here We Go Again

The first U.S. bird flu death has been reported — a person in Louisiana who had been hospitalized with severe respiratory symptoms.

State health officials announced the death on Monday, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed it was the nation’s first due to bird flu.

Good old Brainworm Bobby will have a plan to protect everyone, amirite?

Fascinating Science

A fox's skull has evolved to allow foxes to dive into the snow without injury.

Meanwhile, the recently-launched Europa probe to Jupiter is almost guaranteed to fail. About a thousand transistors in the probe are nowhere near as radiation-resistant as they were supposed to be, which is a big deal as Jupiter's radiation belts make ours look puny.

NASA is supposedly "betting on success", which is babblespeak for "we're hoping the goddamned thing doesn't break".

No Dark Matter?

A study, published today in The Astrophysical Journal, challenges the current model of the universe by showing that, in fact, it has no room for dark matter.

I'm not a physicist. But I have been skeptical of the hypothesis of dark matter/energy ever since I first read an article on the subject.

("Read" is a bit of an overstatement. I usually couldn't get past six paragraphs in Scientific American before they might as well have printed the rest of the article in Swedish, for all that I could understand it. But I digress.)

Dark matter/energy always struck me as being a massive fudge factor. But, since I couldn't get through the articles on it, it made little sense to write the science magazines and suggest that this particular emperorer has no clothes.

Still, this is what science does: Look at the data, the observations, and try to come up with a hypothesis as to how things work. More data, better observational tools and then the hypothesis changes to accomodate that.

The Longest Eclipse, Ever

Fifty-one years ago, observed from a Concorde.

Odysseus Lands At Motel 6

A private U.S. lunar lander touched down on the moon Thursday, but contact with the craft was weak, company officials said.

There were no immediate updates on the lander’s condition from the company, Intuitive Machines.

Tension mounted in the company’s command center in Houston, as controllers awaited a signal from the spacecraft some 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) away, which arrived about 10 minutes later.

“We’re evaluating how we can refine that signal,” said mission director Tim Crain. “But we can confirm, without a doubt, that our equipment is on the surface of the moon.”

The lander, Odysseus, descended from a moon-skimming orbit and guided itself toward the surface, searching for a relatively flat spot among all the cliffs and craters near the south pole.

The old joke is that the south pole of the Moon is like Motel 6: Free ice, no atmosphere.

I don't quite get the enthusiam that people have for the Moon's potential as a base. Yes, it has 1/6th the gravity of Earth. But everything needed, except maybe water, has to be flung up to the Moon from Earth and nobody is really sure that there will be enough water to be usefu.

And even if there is, every swinging-dick of a lunar-capable nation will want a piece of it. We know how that goes here when there is a scarce resource everyone wants-- sooner or later, the guns come out.

Stand By on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts

Accuweather is forecasting an active hurricaine season.

Part of the reason for that is that the oceans are getting warmer. For reasons that the batshit-Trumpist-right refuses to acknowledge.

Uranus is Glowing

And it's a mystery.

We might get around to sending a probe to Uranus (and Neptune) before a century has passed since the Voyager-2 flyby. Or maybe not.

Two Hundred Years Ago

Arguably the greatest scientist of all time was born on this day in 1822 in Dole, France. Louis Pasteur developed microbiology, bacteriology and the germ theory of disease. Thanks to him, beer, wine and milk are safe for consumption by billions of people. Pasteur transformed the art of variolation into the science of vaccination. the elimination of smallpox and the near-elimination of polio are due to the principles and methods developed by Pasteur. He proved that spontaneous generation was a myth.

Pasteur was, above all, an experimenter. He believed in testing and retesting, to ensure that any bias on the part of the experimenter was removed. If he got the result he anticipated, he checked to ensure that he was seeing the truth, not just what he wanted to see.

It is not an exaggeration to say that hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, owe their chance to live full lives to Dr. Pasteur.

Iron Batteries

A company named Form Energy is working on rechargable batteries that don't use rare-earth metals. Instead of lithium ions, they use iron ions. In other words, the batteries produce power by rusting. When they are recharged, the reaction works in the other direction.

Will it scale up? It would be nice if it did. For those installing off-grid systems powered by wind or solar, a bank of iron-seawater batteries would probably be safer to have than a bank of lead-acid batteries.

Fusion Power is Only a Few Decades Away

The Department of Energy plans to announce Tuesday that scientists have been able for the first time to produce a fusion reaction that creates a net energy gain — a major milestone in the decades-long, multibillion-dollar quest to develop a technology that provides unlimited, cheap, clean power.

Fusion power has been "a few decades away" for a half-century. I have little doubt that an operational fusion power reactor will be put into service, but I also have little doubt that most people who are reading this post on the day that I upload it will live long enough to see it. In that way, fusion power is the technological equivalent of building a cathedral.

No First Stage to Orbit

The idea is to fling a small rocket out of it at hypersonic speeds, which will require the thing to spin up to 10,000rpm. So just a teeny error in releasing the launch vehicle could be a bit of a problem. Setting up the launch centrifuge at as high an elevation as possible (not at a coastal site, as shown in the video) and as close to the equator as possible would seem to be a good thing. But there are all sort of geopolitical issues in that, too. And the sonic boom of a hypersonic craft at ground level might be epic.

It's an intriguing concept.

The Russian Flu

That was a pandemic that happened 130 years ago. Since a number of the reported symptoms and effects were similar to that of COVID-19, researchers are scrambling to see if they can find any tissue samples from back then.

This could be interesting.

JWST First Light (sort of)

That's one star, as seen by 18 unaligned mirror segments. Now, they will move one segment, a little, and see which dot moves. Once they know which segment produced which dot, they can begin aligning them.

Which will take some time to do.

JWST On Station

The Webb Telescope is in its L2 orbit and the mirror segments are fully deployed. It's cooling down.

This is an amazing achievement. There was so much that could have gone wrong and, as far as we know, none of it happened.