Ukraine started its long-awaited counteroffensive to retake Russian-occupied parts of its country.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65866880
A day after the Ukrainian counteroffensive started, the Kakhovka dam blew up, sending a surge of water down the Dnieper River. Though both sides blamed the other for the act, the dam was inside Russian-controlled territory, and its destruction helped Russia since it prevented Ukrainian forces from making amphibious crossings downriver.
https://youtu.be/MNsTa90FjiA
“THE gruesome remains of soldiers from World War Two complete with Nazi helmets have been unearthed in the Ukrainian reservoir emptied by a devastating dam blast last week.”
https://www.the-sun.com/news/8349588/nazi-soldiers-ukraine-dam-lake-flooded-kherson/
Russia’s (highly probable) destruction of the dam has caused all the irrigation canals running into Crimea to go dry. An act meant to hobble the Ukrainian counteroffensive will have long-lasting consequences for the people living in the parts of Ukraine Russia annexed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65963403
A pipeline used to transport ammonia (the key ingredient in synthetic fertilizer) was blown up, leading to further recriminations between Ukraine and Russia.
https://www.barrons.com/news/russia-accuses-ukraine-of-blowing-up-key-ammonia-pipeline-ministry-96363315
Combat videos from both sides of the counteroffensive.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-advances-made-in-grueling-fight
A brutal, first-person video of Ukrainian special forces troops shooting Russian troops dead in a Russian trench has surfaced.
https://youtu.be/yRL3Nlu9uts
Zelenskyy admitted that the counteroffensive hasn’t gone as well as he’d hoped. Ukraine has suffered significant losses in exchange for insignificant amounts of land retaken from Russia. The Russians are just fighting better on the defensive than we expected.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/22/politics/ukraine-counteroffensive-western-assessment/index.html
A Russian kamikaze drone destroyed an advanced German antiaircraft system donated to Ukraine.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraines-prized-iris-t-air-defense-system-attacked-by-russian-drone-in-video
The Russians turned one of their antique T-54 tanks into a remote-controlled suicide drone packed with explosives.
https://youtu.be/l6Rwj5MsdyU
Ukraine lost a unit of Western-supplied tanks in its attack against the Russian lines.
https://youtu.be/8qSXAaQc7EI
Russia was rattled by a brief coup attempt by its Wagner private army.
- The group’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was a major power player in the country comparable to one of its oligarchs or top-level government advisors. He was angry at Putin and other rivals for making moves to damage his business interests and to usurp control over Wagner’s troops.
https://youtu.be/-5osFA4gdIM
https://www.yahoo.com/news/glory-fading-russian-warlord-took-122243817.html - In the lead-up to the coup attempt, Wagner troops captured and held hostage a Russian Army Colonel for allegedly shooting at them.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/wagner-parades-captured-russian-colonel-102837183.html - During the uprising, Wagner troops shot down seven Russian military aircraft that attacked them, killing at least 13.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wagner-mutiny-hit-russias-air-133200122.html - Wagner troops occupied the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and seized control of a military headquarters building that was supporting war efforts in Ukraine. Video evidence shows average Russians were friendly to the Wagner troops and cheered for them as they left.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/25/mutiny-bodes-ill-for-putin-00103571 - The coup attempt ended when Prigozhin accepted exile in Belarus along with some of his men in exchange for legal immunity for Wagner’s actions.
https://youtu.be/lLLNA4fcLGE - Though the coup attempt had little chance of toppling Putin, the fact that it happened at all and ended the way it did showed weakness and rot his regime.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/condoleezza-rice-disputes-claims-putin-staged-russia-rebellion-exploded-myth-ukraine - A high-ranking Russian general was arrested because he had connections to the aborted coup.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/general-armageddon-worked-prigozhin-detained-140448546.html
NATO countries still have not standardized their artillery. “Companies are making money out of the fact that ammunitions are not interchangeable, that they can dominate their national markets with their munitions.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nato-pushes-common-standards-tackle-085937666.html
After 111 years of service in some form or another, the U.S. military has finally stopped using the Colt .45 pistol.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/iconic-1911-pistols-are-finally-gone-from-marine-corps-service
‘The United States military released video Monday of what it called an “unsafe” Chinese maneuver in the Taiwan Strait on the weekend, in which a Chinese navy ship cut sharply across the path of an American destroyer, forcing the U.S. vessel to slow to avoid a collision.’
https://apnews.com/article/us-china-taiwan-strait-489a45bb6df134fa09443d285b3f8669
In WWII, Japanese troops used “lunge mines,” which were pressure-sensitive bombs attached to long poles. A soldier would use one to “spear” and enemy tank, and the collision between the mine and the tank’s surface would set off the explosives. It was usually fatal to the user.
https://youtu.be/rBnRhP41nmg
‘A national redoubt or national fortress is an area to which the (remnant) military forces of a nation can be withdrawn if the main battle has been lost or even earlier if defeat is considered inevitable. Typically, a region is chosen with a geography favouring defence, such as a mountainous area or a peninsula, to function as a final holdout to preserve national independence and host an effective resistance movement for the duration of the conflict.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_redoubt
‘There are two fundamentally different types of inertial navigation systems: gimbaling systems and strapdown systems.’
https://www.britannica.com/technology/inertial-guidance-system
Ten years after Google Glass, Apple has announced it is making its own augmented reality goggles.
https://youtu.be/TX9qSaGXFyg
This analyst thinks Apple probably won’t sell many Vision Pro units due to its high price and limited capabilities. However, it will lay the groundwork for future generations of the goggles, which will cheaper, better, and more widely used.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-vision-pro-technical-marvel-021046894.html
“An artist used AI to show what the children of famous celebrity exes would look like if they’d stayed together”
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/artist-used-ai-show-children-113000525.html
The new text-prompted image generators are being used to make fake child pornography.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-computer-generated-child-abuse-050000430.html
“Two apologetic lawyers responding to an angry judge in Manhattan federal court blamed ChatGPT Thursday for tricking them into including fictitious legal research in a court filing.”
https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-courts-e15023d7e6fdf4f099aa122437dbb59b
‘AlphaDev uncovered faster algorithms by starting from scratch rather than refining existing algorithms, and began looking where most humans don’t: the computer’s assembly instructions.
Assembly instructions are used to create binary code for computers to put into action. While developers write in coding languages like C++, known as high-level languages, this must be translated into ‘low-level’ assembly instructions for computers to understand.
We believe many improvements exist at this lower level that may be difficult to discover in a higher-level coding language. Computer storage and operations are more flexible at this level, which means there are significantly more potential improvements that could have a larger impact on speed and energy usage.’
https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphadev-discovers-faster-sorting-algorithms
Humans are using LLMs to automate task completion in Mechanical Turk.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mechanical-turk-workers-using-ai-191404515.html
Bing Chat can solve CAPTCHAs even if it doesn’t know it.
As the internet fills with computer-generated content (images, news articles, stories, sounds and music), we run the risk of creating corrupted data training sets for future AIs. The errors could compound themselves as AIs trained on flawed data make new content that is even more flawed, which newer AIs would use as THEIR training data, and so on.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-collapse
‘He predicted that AI would soon be better at the “aggregation of information” than human journalists and said that only publishers who created “the best original content” – such as investigative journalism and original commentary – would survive.’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/20/german-tabloid-bild-to-replace-range-of-editorial-jobs-with-ai
Computer programs can reliably assess breast cancer risk from mammogram images alone.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/990740
Terence Tao, one of the best mathematicians alive, predicts that AI will be able to co-author math research papers by 2026.
https://unlocked.microsoft.com/ai-anthology/terence-tao/
Mark Zuckerberg has no idea when AGI will be invented. He thinks LLMs might be a paradigm whose performance tops out before reaching general intelligence.
https://youtu.be/YkSXY4pBAEk
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey thinks the near-term potential and threat of AI is being overblown by tech companies because the publicity boosts their stock valuations. The media has gone along with it because doomsday stories boost their ratings.
https://youtu.be/WS7xmb3UhCU
Yann LeCun says we’re still decades away from building an AGI, and that we still don’t even have rat-brain-level AI.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65886125
The infamous terrorist and anti-technology advocate Ted Kaczynski killed himself in prison. The core claim in his Manifesto is that technology had created living conditions and lifestyles that were antithetical to human nature, and that the trend would culminate with the creation of A.I., which would either exterminate us or create an intensely miserable world that wouldn’t be worth living in. He advocated forsaking everything but pre-Industrial Age technology so we could live as nature intended for us.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/10/us/ted-kaczynski-unabomber-dead/index.html
Goldman Sachs predicts China’s economy will become bigger than America’s in 2035. Slower growth in China forced them to push the estimated date farther into the future than it had been.
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3202752/china-gdp-surpass-us-around-2035-years-later-previously-expected-goldman-sachs-predicts
‘”By 2030, we think we’re going to have four million tonnes [of worn-out scrap solar panels] – which is still manageable – but by 2050, we could end up with more than 200 million tonnes globally.” To put that into perspective, the world currently produces a total of 400 million tonnes of plastic every year.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65602519
Decades worth of research on photosynthesis, which could have led to improvements in solar panel technology, were destroyed when a janitor unplugged a freezer in a university research lab. All of the specimens thawed out and were lost.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66028401
Virgin Galactic’s space plane has started routine commercial operations.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66045177
“Elon Musk hires 14-year-old ‘genius’ scientist to build SpaceX rockets”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22674352/elon-musk-hires-14-year-old-genius-spacex/
Space rocket launchpads are interesting pieces of technology themselves.
https://youtu.be/2EsqMLT0Hzw
Phosphorus, a key chemical ingredient of organic life, has been discovered on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/14/world/enceladus-ocean-phosphorus-scn/index.html
A former U.S. intelligence officer publicly claims the U.S. government has been running a secret UFO program for decades. Crashed alien spacecraft and dead alien pilots are allegedly in U.S. possession, and our engineers have been trying to reverse engineer them. While he hasn’t seen any of the spacecraft or aliens, or even seen photos of them, he claims to know people who have and that he has written documents from the secret program. He’s getting the truth out by filing a whistleblower complaint with the Pentagon inspector general, in which he alleges that keeping the program secret from Congress violates the law. Congress is supposed to know about even the most classified military projects.
https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/military-whistleblowe-us-ufo-retrieval-program/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12189773/Pentagon-whistleblower-says-Vatican-aware-existence-non-human-intelligences.html
The U.S. military and CIA have rapid deployment teams for recovering crashed enemy aircraft for the purposes of study. There are even teams that can raise sunken enemy ships and subs from the seafloor. A secret program to recover UFOs would be modeled after this.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/aliens-or-not-secret-crash-retrieval-programs-are-a-very-real-thing
‘At long last, ocean drillers exhume a bounty of rocks from Earth’s mantle’
https://www.science.org/content/article/long-last-ocean-drillers-exhume-bounty-rocks-earth-s-mantle
Billionaire Peter Thiel will have himself cryogenically frozen upon death.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/05/billionaire-peter-thiel-still-plans-to-be-frozen-after-death-for-potential-revival-i-dont-necessarily-expect-it-to-work/
‘In all, five rats received a vitrified-then-thawed kidney in a study whose results were published this month in Nature Communications. It’s the first time scientists have shown it’s possible to successfully and repeatedly transplant a life-sustaining mammalian organ after it has been rewarmed from this icy metabolic arrest. Outside experts unequivocally called the results a seminal milestone for the field of organ preservation.’
https://www.statnews.com/2023/06/21/cryogenic-organ-preservation-transplants/
Scientists used genetic engineering to turn unfertilized mouse eggs into viable mouse embryos, in a process called “parthenogenesis.” One of the resulting offspring survived until adulthood and had natural children of its own. In the far future, this technique will be used to create humans and posthumans.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2115248119
‘Dolphin moms use baby talk to call to their young’
https://apnews.com/article/dolphin-mothers-baby-talk-calves-cc0c189aa1b8e1298155b1ea78c1002a
‘Henneguya salminicola is the only known multicellular animal that does not rely on the aerobic respiration of oxygen, relying instead on an exclusively anaerobic metabolism.[8][7] It lacks a mitochondrial genome and therefore mitochondria, making it one of the only known members of the eukaryotic animal kingdom to shun oxygen as the foundation of its metabolism.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henneguya_zschokkei
‘A new study published in Lancet estimates that 101 million people in India – 11.4% of the country’s population – are living with diabetes. A survey commissioned by the health ministry also found that 136 million people – or 15.3% of the people – could be living with pre-diabetes. ‘
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-65852551
The USDA has approved the first company to sell lab-grown chicken meat in the U.S.
https://apnews.com/article/cultivated-meat-lab-grown-cell-based-a88ab8e0241712b501aa191cdbf6b39a
Evidence is building that the amino acid taurine extends human lifespan.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/health/taurine-longevity-wellness/index.html
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/taurine
There are no shortcuts in drug development.
‘But this accelerated approval process is controversial because some companies fail to follow through on their promises to confirm their treatments work. A drug approved this way to prevent premature birth was recently withdrawn after being found useless.’
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/06/22/1183576268/muscular-dystrophy-patients-get-first-gene-therapy
“Osimertinib” is a pill that has just been found to sharply reduce death rates among people with lung cancer.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jun/04/lung-cancer-pill-cuts-risk-of-death-by-half-says-thrilling-study
The former head of China’s Center for Disease Control says a lab leak could have started the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65708746
It’s now known that three scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill right before the COVID-19 outbreak started in their city, and almost simultaneously.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/wuhan-clan-we-finally-know-the-identity-of-the-scientists-in-the-lab-linked-to-covid/
U.S. intelligence says it can’t tell whether those three scientists got sick with COVID-19 or something else.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/23/biden-administration-intelligence-wuhan-lab-00103523