It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, September 13, 2024
We're all living in a black hole: The bold theory scientists can't disprove
Image credit: Alamy Dr Alastair Gunn Published: September 13, 2024 at 9:00 pm
This possibility has been seriously considered by modern science, prompted by a number of facts.
Perhaps the most notable one is that if we calculate the size of a black hole with mass and energy equal to all the mass and energy we can see in the Universe, we get a surprising result: it’s almost the same size of the observable Universe!
If this seems odd, remember that a black hole’s radius is directly proportional to its mass, while its volume is proportional to its radius cubed.
So, the more massive a black hole is, the less dense it is.
So a black hole with the Universe’s radius would have roughly the average density we observe in the Universe.
The Universe has other similarities with black holes. For example, if we run the Universe’s expansion backwards, it’s clear that it began with a ‘singularity’ – the Big Bang – a point in time when densities, temperatures and energies were so extreme that the laws of physics break down.
This is mathematically the same as the singularities in black holes.
Black holes also have event horizons beyond which all light and matter is trapped. The Universe has something similar; the cosmological ‘event horizon’, beyond which we can’t see because light from there can’t reach us.
And, mathematically speaking, the properties of space outside of a black hole’s event horizon are simply an inversion of those within.
Other studies have also suggested that the creation of a black hole can produce ‘baby universes’.
But, despite these theoretical oddities, none of these ideas has resulted in a testable prediction or any observable evidence.
Hence, the question of whether we live inside a black hole can’t yet be answered.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Jae Cohen, via email) 'Could we be living in a black hole?'
Impact of 2020 Labor Day wildfires on highway infrastructure: a historical perspective on megafires and roadway damage in Washington, Oregon, and California
Figure 6. Length of highway (km) per state vs estimated overall damage costs due to the 2020 Labor Day wildfires.PreviousNext
Credit: The authors
Figure 2. (a) Location of 2020 Labor Day wildfires in OR. (b) Location of Highway 224 within the 2020 Riverside wildfire. (c) Location of Highway 22 within the 2020 Beachie Creek wild.fire. (d) Location of Highway 22 within the 2020 Lionshead wildfire[37]. (e) Location of Highway 126 within the 2020 Holiday Farm wildfire. (f) Location of Highway 138, within the 2020 Archie Creek wildfireA research team examines the extent of damage and associated costs on the 2020 Labor Day wildfires in Washington, Oregon, and California, comparing with the historical impact of megafires in these states. By analyzing data from the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), and California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the study provides critical insights into the vulnerabilities of highway systems to wildfire events.
Megafires, defined as wildfires burning over 100,000 acres, have become increasingly common in recent decades, driven by climate change, altered land use, and human fire practices. These fires can devastate landscapes, threaten lives and property, and significantly impact transportation infrastructure. The rise of megafires has also been marked by even larger gigafires (over 100,000 hectares) and terafires (over 1,000,000 hectares), underscoring the growing challenge of wildfire management. The 2020 Labor Day wildfires in Washington, Oregon, and California caused unprecedented damage to roadways, resulting in extensive economic losses and infrastructure challenges.
This study assesses roadway damage from the 2020 wildfires in comparison to the history of megafires from 1902 to 2023 in Washington, 1845 to 2023 in Oregon, and 1889 to 2023 in California, focusing on the causes, extent, and impact on highway infrastructure from the 19th century to the present. The research categorizes the types of damage, including traffic control, slope-rock scaling, hazard trees, and structural impacts. The anticipated costs from the 2020 fires include over $24 million for hazard tree removal, $17.5 million for slope-rock scaling, $43 million for structural repairs, and over $3 million for traffic control, with an average repair cost of $127,783 per kilometer of impacted route.
Results showed that the 21st century has seen a dramatic increase in megafires, with Washington experiencing 71%, Oregon 64%, and California 86% of their total recorded megafires since 2000. Lightning was the primary cause, responsible for 49% of the fires, followed by human activities at 26%. Despite the extensive historical occurrence of megafires, significant roadway damage was only documented in the 21st century, primarily due to the 2020 Labor Day fires, which collectively burned over 5.4 million hectares and impacted 18 highways across the three states. California incurred the highest costs, largely due to the longer duration and greater number of megafires affecting more highways, with structural damage and slope-rock scaling being the most costly repairs. Although similar lengths of highway were affected in each state, the cost discrepancies highlight the complex relationship between fire size, frequency, and location relative to infrastructure. The study emphasizes that megafires started by lightning, though common, tend to cause the most substantial infrastructure damage compared to other causes, indicating the critical need for targeted preventive measures and improved fire management strategies.
According to the study's lead researcher, Dr. Jane Doe, “Understanding the historical context of megafires helps us better anticipate and mitigate future infrastructure damage. The findings from the 2020 Labor Day fires highlight the urgent need for improved wildfire risk assessment and resilience planning for our critical highway systems.”
The 2020 Labor Day wildfires exemplify the growing threat of megafires to transportation infrastructure in the western United States. By placing the damage in historical context, this study aims to inform local, state, and federal agencies about the economic and physical impacts of wildfires on highways. Enhancing data collection, improving predictive models, and increasing resilience measures are crucial steps toward mitigating future wildfire damage and protecting critical transportation networks.
Emergency Management Science and Technology (e-ISSN 2832-448X) is an open access journal of Nanjing Tech University and published by Maximum Academic Press. It is a medium for research in the science and technology of emergency management. Emergency Management Science and Technology publishes high-quality original research articles, reviews, case studies, short communications, editorials, letters, and perspectives from a wide variety of sources dealing with all aspects of the science and technology of emergency.
POSTMODERN ALCHEMY
A Green Chemistry Breakthrough：Sustainable Collagen Extraction from Sardine Bones Using Banana Peel Water Extracts
Fig.4 Hierarchical structure of fish bone and amino acids found in collagen structure
A research team has developed an innovative and sustainable method to extract collagen from sardine bones using water extracts from banana peels, a common agricultural waste in Malaysia. This method addresses environmental concerns associated with traditional collagen extraction methods and offers a new approach to valorizing waste materials.
The global fisheries industry plays a crucial role in food security, producing significant volumes of waste from inedible parts such as bones and scales. Sardine bones, rich in collagen, present an underutilized resource with immense potential for various industries, including medical, cosmetic, nutraceutical, and food sectors. Traditional extraction methods often involve harsh chemicals and generate harmful waste, necessitating the exploration of eco-friendly alternatives.
A study (DOI: 10.48130/fmr-0024-0015) published in Food Materials Research on 03 September 2024, provides a sustainable alternative to mammalian-derived collagen, reducing reliance on traditional extraction processes that harm the environment.
The research employed a statistical modeling approach to optimize the collagen extraction process from sardine bones using water extracts from banana peels. A quadratic regression model was developed using experimental data to explore the relationship between extraction temperature (T), sardine bone-to-water extract ratio (R), and extraction time. The model included linear, interactive, and quadratic terms to provide a comprehensive understanding of these variables' effects on collagen yield. Statistical analysis, including T- and p-values, revealed that extraction time was the most significant factor, with longer times increasing yield until degradation occurred at extended durations beyond 72 hours. The model’s validity was confirmed through ANOVA, which indicated a significant regression fit (p-value of 0.000), with the lack-of-fit test suggesting the model adequately explained the data (p-value of 0.062). Extraction time emerged as the most influential variable, positively affecting yield, followed by the sardine bone-to-solvent ratio, which increased yield up to a ratio of 1:25. Temperature was the least influential but still showed a positive correlation with yield, optimizing around 40 °C. The overall goodness of fit, represented by an R² value of 0.9835, indicated that the model accounted for 98.35% of the variability in extraction yield. The response optimizer tool predicted that the optimal extraction conditions—40 °C, a bone-to-solvent ratio of 1:24, and 74 hours—would achieve a maximum yield of 9.21%, closely aligning with the experimental validation yield of 9.82%. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of using statistical modeling to refine and predict optimal extraction conditions, providing valuable insights into the parameters that most significantly impact the sustainable extraction of collagen from marine waste.
The water extracts were also tested on other fruit wastes, including mango peel, coconut husk, and pineapple pomace, yielding collagen extraction rates of 11.79%, 2.10%, and 13.58%, respectively. These findings highlight the potential of using diverse agricultural waste materials for sustainable collagen extraction.
According to the study's lead researcher, Dr. Azlan Hassan, “This research demonstrates the potential of using fruit waste to extract valuable compounds like collagen. It’s a great example of how we can turn waste into wealth while promoting environmental sustainability.”
This research highlights a promising method for extracting collagen using environmentally sustainable solvents derived from agricultural waste. By turning fruit waste into valuable resources, this approach aligns with the principles of green chemistry and waste valorization, offering significant benefits for the environment and various industries. As the world seeks sustainable alternatives, this method could pave the way for more eco-friendly production practices in the future.
This research was supported by the Research Management Office (RMO) at Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, through Talent and Publication Enhancement-Research grant (TAPE-RG, Vot. No. 55497) and partial fund by the Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia through the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS) FRGS/1/2020/STG01/UMT/02/4 (Vot. No. 59631). The authors would like to thank Maperow Sdn Bhd for providing the sardine processing waste.
About Food Materials Research
The open-access journal Food Materials Research (e-ISSN 2771-4683) is published by Maximum Academic Press in partnership with Nanjing Agricultural University. The article types include original research papers, reviews, methods, editorials, short communications, and perspectives. All articles published in Food Materials Research represent significant advances in the genetic, molecular, biochemical, physiological processes and pathways related to food materials and sources and will provide scientific information towards overcoming technological limitations in developing conventional and alternative foods.
How the humble capybara became a spirit animal for Asia's youth
Li Jing said she fell in love with capybaras for their relaxed and friendly temperament. (Supplied) abc.net.au/news/how-capybaras-became-asia-s-spirit-animal/104335784Link copied Share article
After years of following them online, Li Jing finally met her spirit animal – the capybara — at Sydney's Taronga Zoo.
"I first fell in love with capybaras when I saw their videos online. They were taking a bath in a Japanese zoo," Ms Li said.
The 31-year-old, who works in the pet industry, said she adored them because they were "so cute, so quiet, and so chill".
"When I realised Taronga Zoo had them, I got really excited and immediately went to see them.
"Only four people can interact with the capybaras every day. People were lining up half an hour before tickets started to sell.
"Luckily, we got in. I fed them bamboo and they are just as cute as they are on video!"
The rodent species is a herbivore and can be found across most of South America, living in both wetlands and forests.
Semi-aquatic, they live partly on land and partly in water.
And they've won hearts all across the world in recent years.
Their rise to global stardom started in 2023, when a Russian blogger released a song called Capybara that went viral on TikTok and received millions of likes.
In parts of Asia, the animal's popularity took off years earlier, with an active fandom developing in Japan in the early 2010s, followed by China.
There are many cute animals around, but there is something special about capybaras, according to Ms Li.
"They have the vibe of being able face everything with a relaxed attitude … walking slowly, eating slowly and standing very still.
"They are also so friendly and can live harmoniously with other animals without conflict.
"Many people nowadays feel a lot of anxiety, and these qualities of capybaras are healing and release the pressure."
How did capybaras become Asia's favourite rodent?
A spiritual totem in a post-pandemic world
Like Ms Li, many young people on social media are increasingly using capybara content as a form of self-expression.
Its emojis are widely used and translated into different languages.
And in China, an online community of capybara lovers have identified themselves with the phrase "túnmén", which carries the connotation of piously following the capybara way of life as if it were a religious teaching.
Qian Gong, a researcher of Chinese popular culture at Curtin University, said the "highly volatile and super competitive" environment of the post-COVID era was one reason why the animal had become so popular among young people in Asia.
"Capybaras seem to be favoured particularly for their temperament — emotionally stable and having a calm attitude," Dr Gong said.
"Young people have been struggling to cope with pressure and many could not see the point of trying hard and joining the rat race.
A capybara in a hot spring at a zoo in Ito, Japan. (Reuters: Sakura Murakami )
Dr Gong added that internet neologisms like "lying-flat" and "quiet quitting" reflects the same kind of sentiment — but in comparison, a capybara's temperament carried a more positive connotation than these terms.
The idea of "lying flat" refers to working just enough to get by in China.
And instead of the rat race, it turns out young people have embraced a very different rodent.
"The capybara's personality is described by fans as 'buddha-like', suggesting a desire to seek peacefulness and tranquillity," Dr Gong explained. The rise of a 'capybara economy'
The online popularity of capybara has created business opportunities as well. (ABC News: Iris Zhao )
Beyond the internet craze, capybaras have also found their way into people's lives and created new business opportunities.
Pinyu Chen is the manager of a capybara-themed cafe called Mogu Kabi in the Taiwanese city of Tainan.
It opened in January 2022 and is home to five of the animals.
"At the time, capybaras weren't as popular in Taiwan as they were in Japan," Ms Chen said.
"We started doing this after seeing them on a Japanese tourist show. We imported baby capybaras from the United States.
"But today, almost every city has a capybara farm."
Capybaras at the Mogu Kabi cafe in Taiwan are adored by locals and tourists from around the world. (Supplied: Mogu Kabi)
According to Ms Chen, the cafe immediately became popular, attracting customers from all over the world.
"We are really surprised about the level of enthusiasm people have for capybaras."
But, she said, capybaras have a "timid and sensitive nature", so are often nervous around strangers.
"Therefore we limit the number of customers allowed to interact with them."
Fans have sometimes lined up at the cafe for more than two hours just to get a chance to see them.
Capybara-themed merchandise can also be found almost anywhere in Asia in the form of soft toys, key chains, backpacks and blankets.
These kind of products have been relatively rare in Australia, but recently a variety of capybara toys made their debut in several Melbourne stores.
Polly Zeng is the owner of a store that sells capybara toys in Melbourne.
(ABC News: Iris Zhao)
Shop owner Polly Zeng, 28, said her capybara products sold out in under three weeks.
"I brought them here because I personally really love capybaras," she said.
"I had no idea whether they would appeal to Australian consumers.
"It turns out that they sell so well.
"The younger generations are more focused on their own wellbeing and want to reject overthinking." Animal rights concerns
The popularity of capybaras has prompted some people overseas to keep them as household pets.
However, many owners have lacked the necessary expertise in caring for them, prompting animal welfare concerns from advocates.
Under federal and state law it is illegal to have a capybara as a pet in Australia. Whereas it is legal in some parts of Asia.
Huang Yuan, a vet from China's central city of Wuhan, said he once treated a capybara which was found abandoned.
"A zookeeper sent [the animal] to me and told me it was rescued by a resident," he said.
"The capybara got septicaemia. It stopped eating and its stomach bloated.
"It died soon after the surgery," the vet added.
Ms Chen said although many of her cafe's patrons had expressed the desire to have a pet capybara, it wouldn't be right for the welfare of these tranquil animals.
"It is an aquatic animal, it likes to play with water," she explained.
"You also need to have at least two capybaras at a time, because they are social."
Therefore, she said, they are "not suited for the conventional home environment".
Capybaras are particularly adored for their calm temperament.
( Reuters: Sakura Murakami)
Ms Li shared a similar sentiment.
"The better way is to watch them at a distance, rather than getting too close," she said.
"We need to try our best to create the environment that can maximise their happiness.
"I will just go to Taronga Zoo to see them once in a while."
Is anyone out there?
Dead Internet Theory says that you’re the only human left online. It started out as a conspiratorial joke, but it is edging ever closer to reality
If you’ve eer walked a city street so late at night that it’s very early in the morning, you may have been greeted by a strange and unbidden thought. In the eerie stillness, it can feel for a moment as though you’re the last person alive. The usual throngs are gone, and the absence of what should be there is impossible to ignore—until some other person, off to start their working day, breaks the spell. The world is still there.
It is hard, in any real-world city, to maintain the illusion of being the only person for any length of time. But the internet is different. There is always an element of unreality to an online interaction with another human: how do we know for sure that they are who they say they are? Can we be certain they’re even actually a person?
This is the idea at the core of what became known as Dead Internet Theory, a joke-cum-conspiracy that says if you’re reading these words online, you’re the last person on the internet. Everyone else is a bot. The other commentators on Reddit? Bots. The people in the videos or the podcasts you listen to? Bots. What’s filling the junky websites that we all can’t help but click? You guessed it. They’re all bots, and you’re the guinea pig in the perverse experiment of some unknown power.
Dead Internet Theory is, if anything, a thought experiment. We’ve learned that we can’t necessarily trust what we read or who we meet online—so what happens if we take that notion to the extreme? If you were the last actual human on the internet, how long would it take for you to notice? The web is being taken over by a global, automated ad fraud system
The idea began to gain traction almost a decade ago, with the “time of death” of the internet typically given as being around 2015 or 2016—but in the years since, reality has begun to mirror this once unserious conspiracy. The complaint of the modern internet is that it is filled with “slop” content, the spiritual successor to email spam. Low-quality content—such as trashy viral images or regurgitated news articles—created by artificial intelligence is filling up social media, search results and anywhere else you might look. But while junk memes are near impossible to avoid, they are just the most visible sign of the AI detritus that is coming to dominate our online worlds.
In reality, the internet is bots all the way down. Automated systems generate fake but clickable content. Bot accounts like and comment, boosting the slop in the algorithms of social media sites and search engines. Clickfarms monetise the whole endeavour, posing as real users with real eyeballs and thus earning advertising revenue. In this way, the web is being taken over by a global, automated ad fraud system, and whether or not any human sees any of it is entirely irrelevant. The things that generate real value for us are being pushed further and further to the margins, unable to compete with this brutal new algorithmic reality.
The most obvious destination for slop is Facebook, a social network that has been seen as dated and perennially naff for at least a decade, but which nonetheless counts more than a quarter of humanity as its users—even if many don’t log in quite as often as they used to.
If you do check your Facebook “Suggested for you” feed, though, you’re likely to find it chock-full of AI-generated slop: mostly images that don’t pass for real after even so much as a cursory glance, but which nonetheless generate tens of thousands of likes.
For a while, the trend was for images of what looked like wood or sand sculptures and their artists, with captions such as “made it with my own hands”. At another point, bizarre images of Jesus were du jour. One image of “shrimp Jesus” portrayed Christianity’s saviour as a crustacean. This was followed by pictures of US veterans, beggars or children looking miserable with birthday cakes, usually in strange locations, captioned with “why do images like this never trend?” The latest fad is for pictures of grotesquely emaciated people holding out begging bowls, often with strange skeleton or snake-like appendages. The nature of the junk memes changes, but it is always bizarre and lacking in any obvious purpose.
The independent journalism startup 404 Media has done more than anyone else to work out what is behind the apparently unstoppable slew of AI-generated slop on Facebook. The answer is a sign of what’s gone wrong on the internet and indicates how difficult it will be to fix: ultimately Facebook is funding the content that is destroying the value of its own network.
Behind the accounts posting slop on Facebook are entrepreneurs, of sorts, working out of countries including India, Vietnam and the Philippines, where internet access is widespread but incomes are relatively low. Here, the advertising revenue from a viral Facebook meme page is much more attractive relative to an average salary than it is in a country such as the UK.
These “creators” are often trained through online seminars which are themselves promoted through AI-generated content. As 404 Media reports, they are instructed to share “emotional” content to generate likes, comments and shares, but many boost this type of material either through artificial accounts or by partially hijacking real user accounts.
Some users who persistently comment on AI slop appear to have two personalities, effectively because they do. One “persona”—the real person—comments as usual on their local interest groups. But their account, which has been compromised without them noticing, also posts generic, AI-generated comments on thousands of pieces of AI-generated slop. This is a kind of benign hacking, in which bots piggyback on an account, letting the real user go about their business while using it to boost their content—a parasite for the digital era.
The motive is, of course, money. Facebook slop is monetised in two ways. Meta, which owns Facebook, shares revenue from the advertising it shows alongside the content of major creators. This means that if AI meme pages generate a big and apparently real audience on the site, Facebook itself pays the page creators. But if Facebook is the laboratory in which slop developed its strength, it long ago leaked into the wider internet ecosystem. Many pages direct users elsewhere, onto the web proper, where more money can be made. It is here that junk content for junk clicks reaches its natural and inevitable peak.
In his 2008 book Flat Earth News, the journalist Nick Davies identified a new scourge of the journalism industry, brought about by the internet era. Junior staff at local and even national newspapers were being asked to generate huge numbers of online stories at a relentless pace.
Instead of going out to speak to people or do original reporting, journalists would be required to produce a story every hour, or even every 45 minutes, by simply rewriting other people’s work. Davies popularised a name for this phenomenon—“churnalism”—and pointed to the obsession of bosses with generating online clicks for advertising revenue as its cause.
If a hasty rewrite produced at virtually no cost could generate as many views—and so as much online revenue—as an original investigation, why bother producing the latter? The churnalism phenomenon hollowed out newsrooms and replaced accountability journalism with articles such as “What time does Strictly Come Dancing start tonight?” and “What other shows has Olivia Colman been in?”, designed to lure in audiences from Google.
Sixteen years on, newsroom bosses are reaping what they sowed with the race to the bottom, pursuing cheap content to satisfy only the most casual of online browsers. Executives learned that if online clicks are all you care about, most of the journalism can be discarded. Their successors realised something more: the newsroom itself can be thrown away. Instead of having a real media organisation, you can churn out rewrites using ChatGPT and other AI tools, which can even build a credible looking news site itself.
These imposter news sites are generally harmless bottom feeders, trying to make their owner a living through ad views, but occasionally they cause serious trouble. One such site, Channel3Now, based in Pakistan, was among the earliest boosters of the false story that the attack on girls at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport had been perpetrated by a Muslim asylum seeker. This disinformation sparked riots and widespread public disorder in the UK.
In a world where ad revenue is all that matters, the first realisation was that journalists were optional. This was followed by the understanding that the news site didn’t need to be real in any meaningful way either; anyone can create something that looks newsy enough to hook people in. There was only one obvious next step: if neither the content nor the site has to be real, why does the audience need to be?
Faking page views is an online arms race. Brands rely on advertising networks (which include Google and Facebook, as well as companies you’d never have heard of) to actually reach their potential customers. The brands pay for views, and so are very keen to make sure that every view is an advert seen by a living, breathing human.
The incentives for the middleman are less clear. They need to do enough to satisfy the brands to keep spending, but they are paid by the click, just like the creators themselves. Ad networks quickly cracked down on easy-to-spot “clickfarm” behaviour—setting up a computer to constantly click refresh on the same page, for example—but fakers learned increasingly sophisticated means to bypass security precautions. For a time, operations working out of countries such as China would pay workers to essentially browse the internet on rigs of five to 10 smartphones at a time, generating clicks on sites at a relentless pace for shifts of 12 hours a day.
These operations became automated and professionalised, abolishing what was surely one of the dullest and most repetitive jobs in the content industry. Today, these clickfarms are formed of tens or hundreds of thousands of sim cards, which imitate real mobile internet browsing, generating millions of apparent ad impressions every hour.
Real people and our needs have become irrelevant to the business model of the modern internet
This completes the soulless lifecycle of the modern internet economy. People desperate to earn a meagre living create automated systems that churn out low-quality or outright fake content. Others create dummy accounts to boost and share such content, or fake users to read it. All of this is done to milk some money out of real-world brands. Along the way, it enriches the internet giants that operate all of the machinery.
Real people and our needs have become irrelevant to the business model of the modern internet. If something interests us, our clicks pay just the same as a fake user in a Chinese clickfarm. Good content is relegated to the sidelines, to people who are able and willing to pay for the real thing. Original reported journalism is increasingly siloed behind paywalls that are, themselves, getting ever harder. Everyone else is force-fed slop, because there is no value in giving them anything better.
The journalist and activist Cory Doctorow christened this phenomenon the “enshittification” of the internet, and argued it was an inevitable result of the business model of the modern internet age: hooking people in on a free or subsidised product, getting a monopoly and then starting to extract as much profit from that product as is possible. As consumers, we get hooked on a product—be it a cheap taxi ride, a holiday, food delivery or human connection through social media—that is genuinely too good to be true, because it’s being subsidised by billionaire investors. Then we watch it steadily get worse.
That extends well beyond online browsing. Ridesharing apps such as Uber, Lyft and their competitors captured the private hire market by drastically undercutting the cost of existing taxis, while initially paying drivers at least as much as they had before. Once the market was captured and the old incumbents had given up, first the drivers were screwed by declining incomes, and then customers faced higher prices. The apparently great new service could never have actually lasted in the long term. This story plays out in almost every other venture capital market, from subscription boxes and fast food or grocery delivery, to Airbnb and WeWork.
The era of a gold-plated service at a rock-bottom price never lasts. Eventually, the real costs come back, the investors want to make money, and reality reasserts itself. Silicon Valley relies on selling us a dream it knows from the outset cannot last.
It could have been better than this. Both the internet and the world wide web predate the Silicon Valley era which propelled startups into becoming the richest and most powerful companies on the planet. The technology works as it ever did—making it incredibly quick, cheap and easy for us to connect to each other, and to publish what we wish. The AI slop didn’t need to take over. The fact that it has is the result of a series of choices.
The joke of the Dead Internet Theory was that everyone else online might have disappeared, and you could be left alone without noticing. In the decade since the idea caught on, emerging technologies have been harnessed almost as though this is the goal. Humanity has become irrelevant to the business model of the internet, and so we’re getting relegated to the sidelines.
Facebook feeds that used to be full of real information and real stories about people from our real lives are now full of low-quality and freakish engagement bait. It is no surprise that many of us, as a result, are looking elsewhere. Google results keep getting worse, social media feeds are full of dreck, and it is impossible to know what to trust.
None of the internet giants seem to even see the problem, let alone a way to fix it. Instead of trying to rebuild internet services to their former glory, they are packing in more AI and automation, and, inevitably even more slop. But an internet built for the bots is doomed to fail: in the end the economy is made up of the collective efforts of humans, not anything else.
If the multi-billion-dollar companies running the internet don’t make it fit for humans, someone else will. However much it might feel that way, the internet is no emptier than the streets of London. We’re all still there, just out of sight. James Ball is political editor at the New European
‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman
Published: September 13, 2024 THE CONVERSATION
Okinawa, Japan is famous for having one of the highest concentrations of over-100s in the world.
From the swimming habits of dead trout to the revelation that some mammals can breathe through their backsides, a group of leading leftfield scientists have been taking their bows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 34th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Not to be confused with the actual Nobel prizes, the Ig Nobels recognise scientific discoveries that “make people laugh, then think”.
We caught up with one of this year’s winners, Saul Justin Newman, a senior research fellow at the University College London Centre for Longitudinal Studies. His research finds that most of the claims about people living over 105 are wrong.
How did you find out about your award?
I picked up the phone after slogging through traffic and rain to a bloke from Cambridge in the UK. He told me about this prize and the first thing I thought of was the lady who collected snot off of whales and the levitating frog. I said, “absolutely I want to be in this club”.
What was the ceremony like?
The ceremony was wonderful. It’s a bit of fun in a big fancy hall. It’s like you take the most serious ceremony possible and make fun of every aspect of it.
But your work is actually incredibly serious?
I started getting interested in this topic when I debunked a couple of papers in Nature and Science about extreme ageing in the 2010s. In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up. I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.
The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.
Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.
The Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They’ve eaten the least vegetables; they’ve been extremely heavy drinkers.
What about other places?
The same goes for all the other blue zones. Eurostat keeps track of life expectancy in Sardinia, the Italian blue zone, and Ikaria in Greece. When the agency first started keeping records in 1990, Sardinia had the 51st highest old-age life expectancy in Europe out of 128 regions, and Ikaria was 109th. It’s amazing the cognitive dissonance going on. With the Greeks, by my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases.
Sardinia is another place whose longevity data is highly questionable. David Burton/Alamy
What do you think explains most of the faulty data?
It varies. In Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war. That’s for two reasons. If the person dies, they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.
According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 “living” pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.
Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It’s closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.
The oldest man in the world, John Tinniswood, supposedly aged 112, is from a very rough part of Liverpool. The easiest explanation is that someone has written down his age wrong at some point.
But most people don’t lose count of their age…
You would be amazed. Looking at the UK Biobank data, even people in mid-life routinely don’t remember how old they are, or how old they were when they had their children. There are similar stats from the US.
What does this all mean for human longevity?
The question is so obscured by fraud and error and wishful thinking that we just do not know. The clear way out of this is to involve physicists to develop a measure of human age that doesn’t depend on documents. We can then use that to build metrics that help us measure human ages
. Life expectancy goes to the heart of the global economy. Simon Pilolla 2
Longevity data are used for projections of future lifespans, and those are used to set everyone’s pension rate. You’re talking about trillions of dollars of pension money. If the data is junk then so are those projections. It also means we’re allocating the wrong amounts of money to plan hospitals to take care of old people in the future. Your insurance premiums are based on this stuff.
What’s your best guess about true human longevity?
Longevity is very likely tied to wealth. Rich people do lots of exercise, have low stress and eat well. I just put out a preprint analysing the last 72 years of UN data on mortality. The places consistently reaching 100 at the highest rates according to the UN are Thailand, Malawi, Western Sahara (which doesn’t have a government) and Puerto Rico, where birth certificates were cancelled completely as a legal document in 2010 because they were so full of pension fraud. This data is just rotten from the inside out. Do you think the Ig Nobel will get your science taken more seriously?
I hope so. But even if not, at least the general public will laugh and think about it, even if the scientific community is still a bit prickly and defensive. If they don’t acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I’ll just get someone to pretend I’m still alive until that changes.
Author
Saul Justin Newman Research Fellow, Centre For Longitudinal Studies, UCL
Exceptional warm air intrusions and omnipresent aerosol layers in the stratosphere.
First results of one year of cloud research at the German polar station Neumayer III published.
Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS)
image:
Clouds in Antarctica. Midnight sun at Christmas 2022 looking south "towards the South Pole".
Leipzig/Bremerhaven. Extremely clean air on the ground, warm air intrusions and sulphate aerosol at high altitudes - a Leipzig research project has gained new insights into clouds in Antarctica. From January to December 2023, the vertical distribution of aerosol particles and clouds in the atmosphere above the German Neumayer Station III of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) was investigated from the ground for the first time. The height-resolved measurements were the first of their kind in Queen Maud Land, the area of the Antarctic that borders the Atlantic and covers an area larger than Greenland.
The observations were performed with the OCEANET-Atmosphere platform from the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS). OCEANET-Atmosphere demonstrated its robustness already while it was drifting in the Arctic for a whole year on the RV Polarstern during the international MOSAiC expedition 2019/20. During the 12 months of operation in Antarctica, the platform was supervised on-site by TROPOS scientist Martin Radenz. Initial results have now been published in the renowned journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS). The measurements were funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and carried out in close co-operation with the AWI.
The Antarctic continent and the Southern Ocean are important components of the global climate system. While Antarctica's climate was considered relatively stable in the last century, significant changes are now being observed. Climate projections indicate that the interior of the Antarctic will warm by more than 3 Kelvin, the sea ice extent will decrease by around 30 per cent and precipitation will increase in the 21st century. However, such projections are subject to major uncertainties and the global atmospheric circulation models are not yet able to correctly reproduce the cloud cover and radiative forcing over the Southern Ocean. This incorrect representation of clouds leads to distorted estimates of thermal radiation and sea surface temperature, which are a prerequisite for estimating the energy fluxes between the ocean and atmosphere. In addition, in order to be able to document any change in an environment, such as Antarctica, also its current state needs to be documented as good as possible.
Gaining knowledge about cloud formation in Antarctica is an essential need, as this takes place differently in the clean air of the southern hemisphere than in the northern hemisphere with more abundant land surfaces. A second major source of uncertainty is the transport of moisture and particles from the mid-latitudes and subtropics to the pole. The relatively flat surface between the Weddell Sea and the South Pole might be a kind of highway for warm and humid air masses.
In order to learn more about the clouds in Antarctica, the instrumentation at the German research station Neumayer III of the AWI were supplemented by remote-sensing measurements such as an atmospheric lidar and a cloud radar for around a full year in the framework of the project COALA (Continuous Observations of Aerosol-Cloud Interactions in the Antarctic). The importance of the project was well recognized by the priority program ‘Antarctic Research’ of the German Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), which provided the funding for the endeavour. Carrier of the instrumentation was the TROPOS OCEANET-Atmosphere container. The platform had previously drifted through the Arctic for a year on RV Polarstern during the MOSAiC expedition led by AWI in 2019/20. " The MOSAiC observations allowed us to show for the first time that the atmosphere at the North Pole is more polluted than previously assumed. But what about over the Antarctic? Fortunately, we had the opportunity to operate our OCEANET container there for a year," explains Dr Ronny Engelmann from TROPOS. OCEANET was installed 300 meters south of the German Antarctic Neumayer Station III at the beginning of 2023. OCEANET-Atmosphere is an autonomous, polar-tested, specially equipped 20-foot container packed with state-of-the-art atmospheric observation equipment. It is currently the only polar-capable single container platform that combines multiwavelength lidar, a cloud radar, a microwave radiometer, and a Doppler lidar to observe clouds and aerosols, including turbulent air motions.
OCEANET was supplied with power from the research station, where the researcher from Leipzig also lived and spent a year making sure that all the devices measured without interruption: Dr Martin Radenz from TROPOS joined the station's core team. He was one of the 10 people who spent the winter in the dark polar night at Neumayer Station III. "Being able to spend a year in Antarctica with the community of our small team, the fascinating nature, snowstorms and isolation was a unique experience," reports Martin Radenz. The green laser beam of the multiwavelength lidar, which scanned the atmosphere above Neumayer Station III, was a novelty in this part of Antarctica. A lidar, also known as a "light radar", sends short laser pulses from the ground into the atmosphere and receives the backscattered light with a special receiver. Information about the height, quantity and type of suspended particles (aerosols) in the atmosphere can be derived from the travel time, intensity and polarisation of the backscattered signals. To date, related measurements with cloud radar and aerosol lidar have only been carried out at McMurdo station on the other side of Antarctica, 3500 kilometres away, bordering the Pacific Ocean. Contrary to Neumayer III on the ice shelf, the US McMurdo station there is built on rock. The researchers also hope that the measurements taken at Neumayer Station III over ice shelves will provide them with new insights into cloud formation over the vast expanses of ice in the Antarctic. "It is particularly pleasing that, following COALA, the AWI now permanently deploys similar remote sensing devices at Neumayer Station III in cooperation with TROPOS. This will make an important contribution to recording the short-lived climate components aerosols and clouds in the Antarctic," says Prof Andreas Macke, Director of TROPOS and Head of the "Remote Sensing of Atmospheric Processes" department.
In January 2024, the OCEANET container was dismantled, transported to the edge of the ice shelf and loaded onto the resupply vessel. The devices arrived in Leipzig in March, the DFG COALA project was completed and the researchers took stock: "All the devices held out and recorded valuable data. We are particularly pleased about this because it would have taken months for a replacement part to arrive during the polar night. Our experience from the MOSAiC expedition three years earlier in the Arctic was a great help. Nevertheless, it was a real challenge to make the devices storm-proof and clean them of snow almost every day," reports Martin Radenz. For Radenz and his team, however, the effort was worth it. The measurements provided three new insights into the Antarctic under climate change:
Atmosphere only clean close to the surface The lidar measurements provided an insight into how many particles are floating above this part of Antarctica and at which altitudes. The lower part of the atmosphere (troposphere) with pristine conditions was mostly comparatively clean. In contrast, the team observed an unexpectedly large number of particles between an altitude of around 9 km and 17 km (stratosphere). "The optical properties of the aerosol derived from the lidar clearly indicate sulphate aerosol, which is mainly caused by volcanic eruptions. These aerosols were observed in the stratosphere since January 2023 and are therefore most likely related to the eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai in January 2022," says Martin Radenz. "The fact that volcanic dust can persist for a very long time over the south polar region surprised us just as much as the forest fire smoke over the north polar region, which we were able to observe for the first time during the MOSAiC expedition in 2020," reports Ronny Engelmann. The lidar measurements from the ground are particularly important, as the volcanic aerosol over Antarctica has apparently not been observed sufficiently from space before. At least no aerosol was detectable in the standard products of NASA's CALIOP satellite lidar. Aerosol in the stratosphere has an influence on the occurrence of polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs), where complex chemical processes take place and which are suspected of contributing to the hole in the ozone layer over the polar regions.
Aerosol-cloud interaction in shallow mixed-phase clouds While more aerosol was observed in the upper layers of the atmosphere than expected, the lower layers proved to be about as clean as assumed. The continuous measurements enabled the team to "watch" the clouds grow. For example, a stable mixed-phase cloud consisting of ice crystals and water droplets embedded in a layer of marine aerosol was observed for a period of 10 hours. "Our measurements confirm that practically all particles serve as cloud nuclei, to either form cloud droplets or ice crystals. Cloud growth is therefore limited by the amount of particles. If there were more particles, for example because more polluted air flows into the Antarctic, then there would also be more droplets and ice crystals in the clouds, which would change their lifespan and lead to yet unknown effects on weather and climate," explains Dr Patric Seifert from TROPOS.
Unusual warm air intrusions Warm air from lower latitudes could intensify climate change in Antarctica. It was therefore important to be able to analyse two extreme warm air intrusions in detail: One with intense snowfall in April, which brought 10 per cent of the snowfall of an entire year, and a second with record-breaking maximum temperatures and heavy ground icing due to supercooled drizzle in July. During this warm spell, the temperature rose to -2.3 degrees Celsius on 6 July 2023. "This is the highest temperature recorded in July at the German Antarctic Neumayer Station since continuous observations began in 1982. This means that it has never been so warm there in the middle of the polar night, the peak of the Antarctic winter," explains Martin Radenz. These unusually high temperatures led to supercooled drizzle. On the surface, a layer of clear ice of around 2 millimetres formed on top of the snow from the previous day. "What often happens here in Central Europe in winter is very unusual for the Antarctic during the dark polar night. Normally, temperatures at Neumayer Station III are below -30 degrees Celsius in July. Our observations over ice shelves are the first of their kind," emphasizes Radenz.
It took not long until the value of the remote sensing measurements was also recognized by the Alfred Wegener Institute that operates the Neumayer station. The deployment of OCEANET-Atmosphere was only the start of a long-term time series of profile measurements in this part of Antarctica: at the beginning of 2024, the Alfred Wegener Institute expanded the permanent observation capacities with a lidar and radar, thus ensuring that the unique OCEANET data set is continued. “The long-term climatology of aerosol and cloud parameters for the Neumayer station will thus be permanently extended to the vertical dimension," explains Dr Holger Schmithüsen from AWI.
The provision of an overview of the obtained results in the BAMS journal demonstrates the potential of the 1-year dataset for shedding light on the still barely characterized properties of clouds and aerosols above Antarctica. “But the BAMS article only provides a first glimpse into the highlights obtained during the measurements. Detailed statistics and process studies will follow in a subsequent step,” says Radenz. Over the next few months, the extensive data from Antarctica will be further analysed and compared with existing data sets from southern Chile, Cyprus, Germany and the Arctic. The researchers hope to gain new insights into why the clouds in the far south differ so much from those in the northern hemisphere. Plenty of datasets from key-regions of climate research are available for a comparison. As part of the DFG Transregio "Arctic Amplification" (AC3-TR), TROPOS has been investigating clouds in the Arctic together with the University of Leipzig since 2016. In addition, processes in the southern hemisphere have also become the focus of attention in recent years: in 2016/17, cloud researchers from Leipzig took part in the international Antarctic circumnavigation ACE. In 2018-2021, extensive measurements took place in southern Chile. Two major measurement campaigns in and around New Zealand are currently being prepared for 2025 and 2026: goSouth at the southern tip of the South Island, accompanied by HALO-South with the German research aircraft HALO and an expedition around New Zealand with the research vessel Sonne are the placemarks of the next series of experiments under the lead of TROPOS. "TROPOS is about to contribute important novel insights for improving the understanding of aerosol-cloud-climate processes in the clean and maritime southern hemisphere," concludes Prof Andreas Macke.
Tilo Arnhold
Twilight over Antarctica.
Aurora Australis above the OCEANET container at the German research station Neumayer III in Antarctica.
Ground-Based Remote Sensing of Aerosol, Clouds, Dynamics, and Precipitation in Antarctica: First Results from the 1-Year COALA Campaign at Neumayer Station III in 2023
