At a news conference a few days ago, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres announced that July will go down as the warmest month on record. And it won't be remotely close. "We don't have to wait for the end of the month to know this," he said, speaking on July 27. "Short of a mini ice age over the next days, July 2023 will shatter records across the board." Continuing, he said, "Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning." At a news conference on July 2 ...read more
It’s a news headline that can send a chill up the backs of pet owners. A small family pet is outside when a bird of prey swoops down and attacks.In Colorado, an eagle preyed on a Pomeranian while it was in the family’s fenced-in yard. In Canada, home security cameras captured a Yorkie puppy escaping an eagle’s grip. And in a Philadelphia public park, a hawk came up behind a small dog with its talons extended.[embedded content]These stories can prompt a pet owner to fear for their anim ...read more
Ask an AI machine like as ChatGPT, Bard or Claude to explain how to make a bomb or to tell you a racist joke and you’ll get short shrift. The companies behind these so-called Large Language Models are well aware of their potential to generate malicious or harmful content and so have created various safeguards to prevent it. In the AI community, this process is known as “alignment” — it makes the AI system better aligned wth human values. And in general, it works well. But it also sets up ...read more
Honey from the Australian honeypot ant (Camponotus inflatus) may have medicinal properties that fight infection. While this has been known among Australia’s indigenous peoples for thousands of years, Western science has now formally studied the organic substance’s antimicrobial properties in a recent study published in PeerJ.The interest in using honey as an antimicrobial treatment in modern medicine has skyrocketed with recent increases in antimicrobial resistance. Other studies have found ...read more
Tens of thousands of years ago in prehistoric Eurasia, some daredevil made friends with a gray wolf. The millions of domesticated dogs we see today are all likely its descendants, and their enormous diversity masks a remarkable fact: Even after millennia of selective breeding, all of them, from the Chihuahua to the St. Bernard, remain members of the same species.Canis familiaris displays by far the most variation of any mammal, and it’s still evolving at a steady clip. The mutation rate is s ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine