An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new era of medical discoveries, treatments and cures is on the horizon, researchers say, following the announcement that an unprecedented trove of genetic information is to be made available to scientists. Health researchers from around the world can now apply to study the whole genomes of half a million people enrolled in UK Biobank, a biomedical research project that has compiled detailed health and lifestyle records on individuals since it began 20 years ago. The move on Thursday amounts to the largest number of whole-genome sequences ever released for medical research. The sequences will be used with UK Biobank's records and other data to delve deeply into the genetics of everything -- from people's risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other conditions, to individuals' sleep and exercise patterns.

Researchers believe the new data will allow them to calculate people's individual risk scores for a raft of cancers and other diseases, and so work out who could benefit most from early screening. They should also gain a deeper understanding of serious genetic conditions such as Huntington's and motor neurone disease, which have often been studied in small numbers of severely affected patients. Health experts from academia, the government, industry and charities can apply for access though they have to be approved and study the genomes through a protected database stripped of identifying details such as names, addresses, birth dates, and GP information. "Until 2021 scientists could study only about 1% of the DNA of UK Biobank volunteers -- the fraction that encodes proteins," notes the report. "Since then, whole genomes have been released for 200,000 participants, but work continued to sequence all of the 500,000 volunteers."

"With that number of whole genomes in hand, researchers will be able to find much rarer genes which drive diseases, including those that behave like switches and turn other genes on and off."

Jennifer Ouellette reports via Ars Technica: Back in 2012, a crowdfunding effort on Indigogo successfully raised the funds necessary to purchase the Wardenclyffe Tower site on Long Island, New York, where Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla once tried to build an ambitious wireless transmission station. The goal was to raise additional funds to build a $20 million Tesla Science Center there, with a museum, an educational center, and a technological innovation program. The nonprofit group behind the project finally broke ground this April after years of basic restoration work -- only to experience a devastating setback last week, two days before Thanksgiving, when a fire broke out.

Over 100 firefighters from 17 local departments responded and battled the flames throughout the night, as residual embers led to two additional outbreaks. One firefighter sustained bruised ribs after falling off a ladder, but there were no other injuries or fatalities. Once the blaze was extinguished, the TSC group called in their engineers to assess the damage and make recommendations for repairs. While an investigation is ongoing as to the cause of the fire, Fire Chief Sean McCarrick said during a press conference on Tuesday, November 28, that they had ruled out arson. According to project architect Mark Thaler, there was nothing flammable in the lab that could have caused the fire, although the back buildings had wood-frame roofs. The original brick building, designed by Stanford White, is still standing, although there is considerable damage to the structure of the roof, steel girders, chimney, cupola, and a portion of a wall. Some elements have been irreparably destroyed, but fortunately all museum artifacts in TSC's collection were stored offsite. The most pressing concern is that water from the firehoses saturated the brick walls, according to Thaler, since the upcoming colder winter temperatures could freeze that moisture and cause the brick work to break apart and collapse. The engineers have also recommended adding strategic wall supports to both the interior and exterior to shore up the structure.

All of this comes with a hefty price tag: $3 million for immediate remediation to seal the roof and dry the building in order to stave off further damage. The building was insured, but that insurance won't come close to covering the cost. The TSC group has set up a 60-day Indiegogo campaign to raise those funds, which is separate from the $14 million it had already raised toward their targeted $20 million goal. "The best way to help right now is to donate if you can," said TSC Executive Director Marc Alessi. "We've never needed it more. We need to secure this lab, stop the water intrusion and future damage. And then we need to complete this project." [...] "Buildings burn down and can then be rebuilt," said John Gaiman, deputy county executive for Suffolk County. "The ideas behind them, the person, the history, the narrative that was created over 100 years ago still exists, and that will continue."

The United States and China are pursuing parallel scientific tracks. To solve crises on multiple fronts, the two roads need to become one, Nature's editorial board wrote Wednesday. From the post: It's no secret that research collaborations between China and the United States -- among other Western countries -- are on a downward trajectory. Early indicators of a possible downturn have been confirmed by more sources. A report from Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, published in August, for instance, stated that the number of research articles co-authored by scientists in the two countries had fallen in 2021, the first annual drop since 1993. Meanwhile, data from Nature Index show that China-based scientists' propensity to collaborate internationally has been waning, when looking at the authorship of papers in the Index's natural-science journals.

Nature reported last month that China's decoupling from the countries loosely described as the West mirrors its strengthening of science links with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. There are many good reasons for China to be boosting science in LMICs, which could sorely do with greater research funding and capacity building. But this is also creating parallel scientific systems -- one centred on North America and Europe, and the other on China. The biggest challenges faced by humanity, from combating climate change to ending poverty, are embodied in a globally agreed set of targets, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Approaching them without shared knowledge can only slow down progress by creating competing systems for advancing and implementing solutions. It's a scenario that the research community must be more aware of and work to avoid. Nature Index offers some reasons as to why collaboration between China and the West is declining. Travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic took their toll, limiting collaborations and barring new ones from being forged. Geopolitical tensions have led many Western governments to restrict their research partnerships with China, on national-security grounds, and vice versa.

A study of more than 2 million people's internet use found no "smoking gun" for widespread harm to mental health from online activities such as browsing social media and gaming, despite widely claimed concerns that mobile apps can cause depression and anxiety. From a report: Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, who said their study was the largest of its kind, said they found no evidence to support "popular ideas that certain groups are more at risk" from the technology. However, Andrew Przybylski, professor at the institute -- part of the University of Oxford -- said that the data necessary to establish a causal connection was "absent" without more co-operation from tech companies. If apps do harm mental health, only the companies that build them have the user data that could prove it, he said.

"The best data we have available suggests that there is not a global link between these factors," said Przybylski, who carried out the study with Matti Vuorre, a professor at Tilburg University. Because the "stakes are so high" if online activity really did lead to mental health problems, any regulation aimed at addressing it should be based on much more "conclusive" evidence, he added. "Global Well-Being and Mental Health in the Internet Age" was published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science on Tuesday. In their paper, Przybylski and Vuorre studied data on psychological wellbeing from 2.4 million people aged 15 to 89 in 168 countries between 2005 and 2022, which they contrasted with industry data about growth in internet subscriptions over that time, as well as tracking associations between mental health and internet adoption in 202 countries from 2000-19.

A team of researchers at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology has developed a prototype cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) microscope that, despite being significantly cheaper than high-end machines, has successfully solved protein structures with near-atomic resolution. The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Science Magazine reports: [MB physicist Chris Russo] wants a manufacturer to commercialize his team's design, which he believes could be built and sold for $500,000. That's within reach of a new hire's startup package, or one of the regular equipment grants offered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or National Science Foundation, says Bridget Carragher, founding technical director of the Chan Zuckerberg Imaging Institute. "It would be a marvelous machine," she says. "Everyone who wants to do structural biology could do it." [...] One of the team's key insights was that the electron beam does not need the energies typically used in high-end cryo-EM microscopes. Levels of 100 kiloelectronvolts (KeV) -- one-third as high -- suffice to reveal molecular structure, and they reduce costs by eliminating the need for a regulated gas, sulfur hexafluoride, to snuff out sparks. The team also saw room for improvement in the system of lenses that focuses the electrons and the detector that captures them after they probe the sample.

With the resulting prototype, the LMB group determined the structure of 11 diverse proteins. One was the iron-storing protein apoferritin, which has become a benchmark for cryo-EM resolution records. The LMB researchers mapped it at 2.6 angstroms -- 2.6 times the diameter of a hydrogen atom. That's not as high as the record cryo-EM resolution of 1.2 angstroms, but plenty good enough to make an atomic model, Russo says. And the process was fast. Because the microscope sat in the same lab as the freezing stage, the team could quickly check that its samples were good enough, rather than waiting weeks for results from a high-end machine. "Every single structure was done in less than a day," Russo says. Thermo Fisher Scientific, which makes a top-end machine, says it is already expanding the cryo-EM market. In 2020, it began to sell a lower cost option, called Tundra, that operates at 100 KeV. "I would say that there are universities that probably never believed they could own cryo-EM that now have the tools," says Trisha Rice, a vice president who heads the company's cryo-EM business. Indeed, Rajan's university just ordered one for $1.5 million.

Russo says Tundra is a step in the right direction, but his team's innovations could make cryo-EM even cheaper. For example, he says, Tundra dials back the energy on a simplified version of the costly electron source used in top-end microscopes, whereas the electron gun on the LMB prototype was designed for 100 KeV from scratch. But he understands that commercializing his team's design would require large investments by potential manufacturers. "We're talking to all of them," Russo says. "But at the end of the day, it's up to them."

Rooting out manipulation should not depend on dedicated amateurs who take personal legal risks for the greater good. From a story on Financial Times: As the Oxford university psychologist Dorothy Bishop has written, we only know about the ones who get caught. In her view, our "relaxed attitude" to the scientific fraud epidemic is a "disaster-in-waiting." The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, a data sleuth who specialises in spotting suspect images, might argue the disaster is already here: her Patreon-funded work has resulted in over a thousand retractions and almost as many corrections. That work has been mostly done in Bik's spare time, amid hostility and threats of lawsuits. Instead of this ad hoc vigilantism, Bishop argues, there should be a proper police force, with an army of scientists specifically trained, perhaps through a masters degree, to protect research integrity.

It is a fine idea, if publishers and institutions can be persuaded to employ them (Spandidos, a biomedical publisher, has an in-house anti-fraud team). It could help to scupper the rise of the "paper mill," an estimated $1bn industry in which unscrupulous researchers can buy authorship on fake papers destined for peer-reviewed journals. China plays an outsize role in this nefarious practice, set up to feed a globally competitive "publish or perish" culture that rates academics according to how often they are published and cited. Peer reviewers, mostly unpaid, don't always spot the scam. And as the sheer volume of science piles up -- an estimated 3.7mn papers from China alone in 2021 -- the chances of being rumbled dwindle. Some researchers have been caught on social media asking to opportunistically add their names to existing papers, presumably in return for cash.

The Hill published this warning from an Information Sciences assistant professor: Since 1980, more than 40,000 scientific publications have been retracted. They either contained errors, were based on outdated knowledge or were outright frauds... Yet these zombie publications continue to be cited and used, unwittingly, to support new arguments. Why? Almost always it's because nobody noticed they had been retracted...

Just by citing a zombie publication, new research becomes infected: A single unreliable citation can threaten the reliability of the research that cites it, and that infection can cascade, spreading across hundreds of papers. A 2019 paper on childhood cancer, for example, cites 51 different retracted papers, making its research likely impossible to salvage. For the scientific record to be a record of the best available knowledge, we need to take a knowledge maintenance perspective on the scholarly literature... And we need to build on that knowledge, not on the errors and fraud...

Slow science, living articles and reducing the pressure to publish are among the interventions that could help. We need a healthy, trustworthy ecosystem that rewards effort, not just results... Individuals and organizations that do the work of science must ensure that the work doesn't end at publication. Sometimes, it is just the beginning.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: In 2024, a new spacecraft will hurtle toward Jupiter in a bid to learn whether its moon Europa is capable of supporting life. The craft will carry more than high-tech sensors: It also will bear a poem and hundreds of thousands of human names.

Yours could be one of them.

NASA is asking people to submit their names ahead of the mission's October 2024 launch. Those submitted by the end of 2023 will go into space on the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which should enter Jupiter's orbit in 2030... They'll eventually be stenciled onto a dime-sized microchip in microscopic writing, then attached to a metal plate engraved with the poem that will accompany the craft.
700,000 names have been submitted so far — and they'll all be carried a distance of over 1.8 billion miles.

They'll travel through space with a poem that ends by describing what we humans on earth are made of — including "a need to call out through the dark."

The world's biggest iceberg is on the move after more than 30 years being stuck to the ocean floor. From a report: The iceberg, called A23a, split from the Antarctic coastline in 1986. But it swiftly grounded in the Weddell Sea, becoming, essentially, an ice island. At almost 4,000 sq km (1,500 sq miles) in area, it's more than twice the size of Greater London. The past year has seen it drifting at speed, and the berg is now about to spill beyond Antarctic waters. A23a is a true colossus, and it's not just its width that impresses.

This slab of ice is some 400m (1,312 ft) thick. For comparison, the London Shard, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, is a mere 310m tall. At the time, it was hosting a Soviet research station, which just illustrates how long ago its calving occurred. Moscow despatched an expedition to remove equipment from the Druzhnaya 1 base, fearing it would be lost. But the tabular berg didn't move far from the coast before its deep keel anchored it rigidly to the Weddell's bottom-muds.

So, why, after almost 40 years, is A23a on the move now? "I asked a couple of colleagues about this, wondering if there was any possible change in shelf water temperatures that might have provoked it, but the consensus is the time had just come," said Dr Andrew Fleming, a remote sensing expert from the British Antarctic Survey. "It was grounded since 1986 but eventually it was going to decrease (in size) sufficiently to lose grip and start moving. I spotted first movement back in 2020." A23a has put on a spurt in recent months, driven by winds and currents, and is now passing the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, is far more harmful to human health than previously thought, according to a new report, which found that coal emissions are associated with double the mortality risk compared with fine airborne particles from other sources. From a report: The research, published Thursday in the journal Science, linked coal pollution to 460,000 deaths among Medicare recipients aged 65 and older between 1999 and 2020. Yet the study also found that during that period the shuttering of coal plants in the United State, coupled with the installation of scrubbers in the smokestacks to "clean" coal exhaust, has had salubrious effects. Deaths attributable to coal plant emissions among Medicare recipients dropped from about 50,000 a year in 1999 to 1,600 in 2020, a decrease of more than 95 percent, the researchers found.

"Things were bad, it was terrible," Lucas Henneman, the study's lead author, and an assistant professor in environmental engineering at George Mason University, said in an interview. "We made progress, and that's really good." Researchers from six universities collected emissions data from 480 coal power plants between 1999 and 2020. They used atmospheric modeling to track how sulfur dioxide converted into particulate matter and where it was carried by wind, and then examined millions of Medicare patient deaths by ZIP code.

Though the researchers could not identify exact causes of death, the statistical model showed that areas with more airborne coal particulates had higher death rates. Some 138 coal plants each contributed to at least 1,000 excess deaths, and 10 plants were linked to more than 5,000 deaths apiece, the researchers found. While fine particulate matter, known as P.M. 2.5, is frequently examined for its health risks, the researchers found that inhaling those fine particles from coal exhaust was especially deadly.

Scientists have detected the most powerful cosmic ray seen in more than three decades. But the exact origin of this turbocharged particle from outer space remains a mystery, with some suggesting that it could have been generated by unknown physics. From a report: The puzzling cosmic ray had an estimated energy of 240 exa-electron volts (EeV; 10^18 volts), making it comparable to the most powerful cosmic ray ever detected, aptly named the Oh-My-God particle, which measured at around 320 EeV when it was discovered in 1991. The findings were published today in Science.

"It's amazing because you have to think of what could produce such high energy," says Clancy James, an astronomer at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. A cosmic ray, despite its name, is actually a high-energy subatomic particle -- often a proton -- that zips through space at close to the speed of light. In their ultra-high energy form, cosmic rays have energy levels that exceed one EeV, which is around one million times greater than those reached by the most powerful human-made particle accelerators. Cosmic rays with energies of more than 100 EeV are rarely spotted -- fewer than one of these particles arrive on each square kilometre of Earth each century.

NASA selected Blue Origin in February to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, a pair of smallsats that will study the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere of Mars. The space agency now expects the mission will be on the first launch of Blue Origin's New Glenn launch vehicle next year. SpaceNews reports: Neither Blue Origin nor NASA disclosed exactly where in the manifest of New Glenn launches ESCAPADE would take place. "It will be an early New Glenn mission and we're going to be ready," one Blue Origin executive, Ariane Cornell, said at the Satellite 2023 conference in March. At a Nov. 20 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council's human exploration and operations committee, Bradley Smith, director of NASA's Launch Services Office, said he was "incredibly excited" about the ESCAPADE launch, which he said was scheduled for about one year. His charts, though, and past presentations, listed an August 2024 launch for ESCAPADE.

"It's an incredibly ambitious first launch for New Glenn and we really appreciate the partnership," he said. Later in the committee meeting, he confirmed that NASA expected ESCAPADE to be on the inaugural New Glenn launch. "We will very likely be the very first launch of New Glenn," he said. That is acceptable, Smith said, since ESCAPADE is what NASA characterizes as a "class D" mission with a higher tolerance for risk. "We're willing to take a little bit of risk with a price tag and a mission assurance model that reflects that risk."

Besides the inherent technical risks in the first launch of a new rocket, there are also schedule risks. New Glenn development is years behind the original schedule Blue Origin put forward. The company has not provided recent updates about progress towards a first launch of the rocket, although Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for New Glenn at Blue Origin, said at World Satellite Business Week in September that the first flight vehicle would arrive at a Florida integration facility by the end of the year, with the company planning "multiple" launches of New Glenn in 2024.

Large earthquakes are always followed by aftershocks -- a series of smaller but still potentially damaging quakes produced as the ground readjusts. But how long does it take for the aftershocks to die out? A new study suggests some areas can experience aftershocks decades or even centuries after the original earthquake. From a report: In earthquake-prone areas it is hard to tell the difference between aftershocks and ordinary background seismicity. But recognising aftershocks is an important part of assessing a region's disaster risk. To understand how long aftershocks can persist, researchers turned to the stable continental interior of North America, where earthquakes are uncommon. Using statistical analysis they assessed the timing and clustering of quakes that followed three large magnitude 6.5 to 8 historical earthquakes: one near south-east Quebec in Canada in 1663; a trio of quakes around the Missouri-Kentucky border from 1811 to 1812; and an earthquake in Charleston in South Carolina in 1886. Their results, published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, suggest that the Quebec quake in 1663 has likely shaken itself out, but to their surprise nearly a third of modern quakes in the Missouri-Kentucky area were most likely to be aftershocks from the 1811-12 event, and about 16% of recent quakes in the Charleston region are probably aftershocks from the 1886 quake.

As if homesickness, wasting muscles, thinner bones, an elevated cancer risk, the inescapable company of overachievers and the prospect of death in the endless vacuum of space were not enough to contend with, male astronauts may return from deep space prone to erectile dysfunction, scientists say. From a report: In what is claimed to be the first study to assess the impact of galactic radiation and weightlessness on male sexual health, Nasa-funded researchers found that galactic cosmic rays, and to a lesser extent microgravity, can impair the function of erectile tissues, with effects lasting potentially for decades. Raising their concerns in a report on Wednesday, the US researchers said they had identified "a new health risk to consider with deep space exploration." They called for the sexual health of astronauts to be closely monitored on their return from future deep space missions, noting that certain antioxidants may help to counteract the ill-effects by blocking harmful biological processes.

"While the negative impacts of galactic cosmic radiation were long-lasting, functional improvements induced by acutely targeting the redox and nitric oxide pathways in the tissues suggest that the erectile dysfunction may be treatable," said Dr Justin La Favor, an expert in neurovascular dysfunction at Florida State University and a senior author on the study. The warning comes amid a renewed focus on deep space missions, with Nasa and other major space agencies preparing for long-term expeditions to the moon and more ambitious voyages to Mars. Nasa's Artemis programme aspires to send astronauts to the moon as early as next year, with crewed missions to Mars tentatively lined up for as early as 2040.

Rahul Rao reports via Space.com: On Nov. 14, NASA picked up a laser signal fired from an instrument that launched with the Psyche spacecraft, which is currently more than 10 million miles (16 million kilometers) from Earth and heading toward a mysterious metal asteroid. (The spacecraft is at more than 40 times the average distance of Earth's moon, and still voyaging afar.) The moment marked the first successful test of NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) system, a next-generation comms link that sends information not by radio waves but instead by laser light. It's part of a series of tests NASA is doing to speed up communications in deep space, on different missions. "Achieving first light is a tremendous achievement. The ground systems successfully detected the deep space laser photons from DSOC," Abi Biswas, the system's project technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in an agency statement.

"And we were also able to send some data, meaning we were able to exchange 'bits of light' from and to deep space," Biswas added.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reviewing a cutting-edge therapy called exa-cel that could potentially cure people of sickle cell disease, a painful and deadly disease with no universally successful treatment. "If approved, exa-cel, made by Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals and the Swiss company CRISPR Therapeutics, would be the first FDA-approved treatment that uses genetic modification called CRISPR," reports CNN. From the report: CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, is a technology researchers use to selectively modify DNA, the carrier of genetic information that the body uses to function and develop. [...] The new exa-cel treatment under FDA consideration can use the patient's own stem cells. Doctors would alter them with CRISPR to fix the genetic problems that cause sickle cell, and then the altered stem cells are given back to the patient in a one-time infusion.

In company studies, the treatment was considered safe, and it had a "highly positive benefit-risk for patients with severe sickle cell disease," Dr. Stephanie Krogmeier, vice president for global regulatory affairs with Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated, told the panel. Thirty-nine of the 40 people tested with the treatment did not have a single vaso-occlusive crisis, which means the misshapen red blood cells block normal circulation and can cause moderate to severe pain. It's the top reason patients with sickle cell go to the emergency room or are hospitalized. Before the treatment, patients experienced about four of these painful crises a year, resulting in about two weeks in the hospital.

The FDA sought the independent panel's advice, in part, because this would be the first time the FDA would approve a treatment that uses CRISPR technology, but Dr. Fyodor Urnov, a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, reminded the committee CRISPR has been around for 30 years and, in that time, scientists have learned a lot about how to use it safely. "The technology is, in fact, ready for primetime," Urnov said. With this kind of genetic editing, scientists could inadvertently make a change to a patient's DNA that is off-target, and the therapy could harm the patient. [...] The FDA is expected to make an approval decision by December 8.

The use of environmentally damaging gases in air conditioners and refrigerators could become redundant if a new kind of heat pump lives up to its promise. A prototype, described in a study published last week in Science, uses electric fields and a special ceramic instead of alternately vaporizing a refrigerant fluid and condensing it with a compressor to warm or cool air. From a report: The technology combines a number of existing techniques and has "superlative performance," says Neil Mathur, a materials scientist at the University of Cambridge, UK. Emmanuel Defay, a materials scientist at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology in Belvaux, and his collaborators built their experimental device out of a ceramic with a strong electrocaloric effect. Materials that exhibit this effect heat up when exposed to electric fields.

In an electrocaloric material, the atoms have an electric polarization -- a slight imbalance in their distribution of electrons, which gives these atoms a 'plus' and a 'minus' pole. When the material is left alone, the polarization of these atoms continuously swivels around in random directions. But when the material is exposed to an electric field, all the electrostatic poles suddenly align, like hair combed in one direction. This transition from disorder to order means that the electrons' entropy -- physicists' way of measuring disorder -- suddenly drops, Defay explains. But the laws of thermodynamics say that the total entropy of a system can never decline, so if it falls somewhere it must increase somewhere else. "The only possibility for the material to get rid of this extra mess is to pour it into the lattice" of its crystal structure, he says. That extra disorder means that the atoms themselves start vibrating faster, resulting in a rise in temperature.

"To celebrate my life, I've arranged to buy up others' medical debt and then destroy the debt," reads a posthumous tweet posted Tuesday after the death of 38-year-old Casey McIntyre.

The Washington Post explains... McIntyre, who served as publisher at Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House, was diagnosed in 2019 and proceeded through treatment without taking on debt, [husband Andrew Rose] Gregory told The Washington Post. But many fellow cancer patients she met were in more precarious financial positions, Gregory added. "We were both so keenly aware that Casey had great health insurance through Penguin Random House," said Gregory, 41. "Casey had no medical debt...."

About nine months before McIntyre died, her husband came across a video online about members of a North Carolina church who purchased nearly $3.3 million of local residents' medical debt for $15,048 in a "debt jubilee," a historical reference to ancient stories about personal debts being canceled at regular intervals. The couple chose to make monthly donations to RIP Medical Debt, the same organization that partnered with the North Carolina churchgoers. The nonprofit organization aims to abolish medical debt "at pennies on the dollar," according to its website. For every $100 donated, the company relieves $10,000 of medical debt. As of Saturday, nearly $200,000 had been donated to RIP Medical Debt in McIntyre's memory, which would wipe out approximately $20 million of unpaid medical bills. [By Sunday afternoon it had risen to over $334,000...]

Allison Sesso, president and chief executive of RIP Medical Debt, said her organization found out about McIntyre's case after McIntyre's posthumous social media post went viral. Sesso said the pace of donations was record-setting for her charity. "What an incredible gesture to the world as you're exiting," Sesso told The Post. "This final act of generosity is blowing up. The amount that they're raising and the rate at which this has gone is not something that we're used to."
McIntyre's post on X has now received 65,400 likes — and 3,086 reposts.

"And no, it's not COBOL," jokes long-time Slashdot reader schwit1, sharing this report from ScienceAlert: A secret text has been discovered in Türkiye, scattered among tens of thousands of ancient clay tablets, which were written in the time of the Hittite Empire during the second millennium BCE. No one yet knows what the curious cuneiform script says, but it seems to be a long-lost language from more than 3,000 years ago.

Experts say the mysterious idiom is unlike any other ancient written language found in the Middle East, although it seems to share roots with other Anatolian-Indo-European languages. The sneaky scrawlings start at the end of a cultic ritual text written in Hittite — the oldest known Indo-European tongue — after an introduction that essentially translates to: "From now on, read in the language of the country of Kalasma"... Currently, there are no available photos of the newly discovered tablet with Kalamaic writings, as experts are still working out how to translate it. Schwemer and his colleagues hope to publish their results along with images of their discovery sometime next year.

A professor of religion at Columbia University writes, "I do not think human beings are the last stage in the evolutionary process." Whatever comes next will be neither simply organic nor simply machinic but will be the result of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between human beings and technology. Bound together as parasite/host, neither people nor technologies can exist apart from the other because they are constitutive prostheses of each other... So-called "artificial" intelligence is the latest extension of the emergent process through which life takes ever more diverse and complex forms.
The article lists "four trajectories that will be increasingly important for the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines."

- Writing about neuroprosthetics, the professor argues that "Increasing possibilities for symbiotic relations between computers and brains will lead to alternative forms of intelligence that are neither human nor machinic, but something in between."

- Then there's biobots. The article argues that with nanotechnology, "it will be increasingly difficult to distinguish the natural from the artificial."

But there's also an interesting discussion about synthetic biology. "Michael Levin and his colleagues at the Allen Discovery Center of Tufts University — biologists, computer scientists and engineers — have created "xenobots," which are "biological robots" that were produced from embryonic skin and muscle cells from an African clawed frog." As Levin and his colleagues wrote in 2020...

Here we show a scalable pipeline for creating functional novel lifeforms: AI methods automatically design diverse candidate lifeforms in silico to perform some desired function, and transferable designs are then created using a cell-based construction toolkit to realize living systems with predicted behavior. Although some steps in this pipeline still require manual intervention, complete automation in the future would pave the way for designing and deploying living systems for a wide range of functions.
And the article concludes with a discussion of organic-relational AI: While Levin uses computational technology to create and modify biological organisms, the German neurobiologist Peter Robin Hiesinger uses biological organisms to model computational processes by creating algorithms that evolve. This work involves nothing less than developing a new form of "artificial" intelligence... Non-anthropocentric AI would not be merely an imitation of human intelligence, but would be as different from our thinking as fungi, dog and crow cognition is from human cognition.

Machines are becoming more like people and people are becoming more like machines. Organism and machine? Organism or machine? Neither organism nor machine? Evolution is not over; something new, something different, perhaps infinitely and qualitatively different, is emerging.

Who would want the future to be the endless repetition of the past?