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The Science Thread

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I came across this story a couple of years ago but the wonder of it all still astounds me.
The story is well worth a read and I suggest the book would make a great present for an inquiring mind.

Do Trees Talk to Each Other?
A controversial German forester says yes, and his ideas are shaking up the scientific world

... Wohlleben has devoted his life to the study and care of trees. He manages this forest as a nature reserve, and lives with his wife, Miriam, in a rustic cabin near the remote village of Hümmel.

Now, at the age of 53, he has become an unlikely publishing sensation. His book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, written at his wife’s insistence, sold more than 800,000 copies in Germany, and has now hit the best-seller lists in 11 other countries, including the United States and Canada. (Wohlleben has turned his attention to other living things as well, in his Inner Life of Animals, newly issued in translation.)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/
 
Fascinating Bellenuit. Good find.

This story on how AI fills in the knowledge gaps very quickly and learns at a startling rate segues into that article.
Batteries Not Included
..
Artificial Childhood
For decades, humans have worked to advance the capabilities of machines. By evolving and programming the “genetic” code of computers, we have advanced technology, reduced our own cognitive loads, and subsequently gained the freedom to imagine the next application of our innovations. Recently, we took a quantum leap and allowed machines to learn and to teach each other. In other words, we programmed AI – and it, in turn, began programming itself.

In 2011, AI took a new step toward truly passing the Turing test with the birth of a sub-discipline of machine learning known as deep learning. Deep-learning algorithms seek to truly replicate the way the human brain works by building connections between synapses. Most recently, Google’s DeepMind began inputting imagination-augmented agents (I2As) into its software, which helps the AI sort valuable predictions about its environment from predictions with little value. The era of synthetic imagination is upon us.
https://miscmagazine.com/batteries-not-included/
 
One of the best explanations of how chaos theory is behind a range of everyday phenomena and how the maths works.
 

Potential sign of alien life detected on inhospitable Venus

Scientists said on Monday they have detected in the harshly acidic clouds of Venus a gas called phosphine that indicates microbes may inhabit Earth's inhospitable neighbor, a tantalizing sign of potential life beyond Earth.
www.reuters.com

".. on Earth phosphine is produced by bacteria thriving in oxygen-starved environments. The international scientific team first spotted the phosphine using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and confirmed it using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope in Chile.

“With what we currently know of Venus, the most plausible explanation for phosphine, as fantastical as it might sound, is life,”
 
Looks like there is water, and apparently a lot of it, on the moon. ! A really big deal in terms of any future human settlements.

Water spotted hiding in broad daylight on the Moon

Scientists have long suspected that large amounts of frozen water lurk on the Moon in deep, polar craters that never see the Sun — but they've now detected water molecules in a pockmarked, sunlit region near its south pole.
www.abc.net.au
 
It is fantastic, water on the moon means we can have a moonbase. We can set up industry on the moon. We can explore the stars.
It is a game changer!

Water spotted hiding in broad daylight on the Moon

Scientists have long suspected that large amounts of frozen water lurk on the Moon in deep, polar craters that never see the Sun — but they've now detected water molecules in a pockmarked, sunlit region near its south pole.
www.abc.net.au
 
This is BIG.. You may have heard of the capacities of the computer program Deep Mind. It basically learns skills by itself at a breathtaking space.

After it taught itself chess and Go it went from zero to trouncing the best human players in the world within weeks.

But this was just the warm up. Check out this story and perhaps consider the industries that will get a powerful boost from this capacity.

DeepMind AI cracks 50-year-old problem of protein folding

Program solves scientific problem in ‘stunning advance’ for understanding machinery of life
www.theguardian.com
 

I'm sure that there are some big traders on the ASX that could make use of it if it can make predictions .
 

They spent 12 years solving a scientific puzzle. It yielded the first COVID-19 vaccines.

Long before anyone knew of SARS-CoV-2, a small band of government and university scientists uncovered a prototypical key that unlocked life-saving immunizations.
www.nationalgeographic.com

They spent 12 years solving a puzzle. It yielded the first COVID-19 vaccines.
Long before anyone knew of SARS-CoV-2, a small band of government and university scientists uncovered a prototypical key that unlocked life-saving immunizations.

more science .....
 
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