Category: [Science & technology]

This seems like a bold claim…

RFK Jr pledges to find the cause of autism by September

US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has pledged “a massive testing and research effort” to determine the cause of autism in five months.
Experts cautioned that finding the causes of autism spectrum disorder – a complex syndrome that has been studied for decades – will not be straightforward, and called the effort misguided and unrealistic.
Kennedy, who has promoted debunked theories suggesting autism is linked to vaccines, said during a cabinet meeting on Thursday that a US research effort will “involve hundreds of scientists from around the world.”
“By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures,” Kennedy said. […]
Kennedy did not give details on the research project or how much funding will be devoted to autism research.
Since being sworn in two months ago, the former environmental lawyer has slashed the budget for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the NIH, CDC and other government health organisations that oversee food and drug safety and conduct disease research.
“We’re going to look at vaccines, but we’re going to look at everything,” Kennedy later said during an interview with Fox News about the scope of the undertaking. “Everything is on the table, our food system, our water, our air, different ways of parenting, all the kind of changes that may have triggered this epidemic.”

I don’t think I’m being too unrealistic or controversial if I say right now the answer will, in fact, just turn out to be vaccines:

Kennedy has also alarmed some over his hiring of David Geier, who has been described by some as a conspiracy theorist, to research vaccines and autism, and on Thursday Democrats in the US House of Representatives wrote to HHS “to express our urgent concern” over the selection of “a biased and discredited individual”.
Geier is a leading vaccine sceptic who was fined by the state of Maryland for practicing medicine without a medical degree or licence and prescribing dangerous treatments to autistic children.

Vaccines. I’m calling it now. In fact, probably anyone with any sense looking at this story knows where it’s going to go, I don’t think I’m seeing anything that no one else is seeing here. I’ll be surprised if it turns out to be anything else, and even if it does, vaccines will still be the main culprit. Come back in September and we’ll see if I’m right.

One of these days…

Weren’t we supposed to have already put astronauts on Mars by this year?

Oh yeah.

Elon Musk’s dream of sending humans to Mars could come true in the next decade.
Speaking at Vox Media’s Code Conference, the SpaceX CEO said he believes it’s possible to send the first humans to the Red Planet by 2025.
“If things go according to plan, we should be able to launch people probably in 2024 with arrival in 2025,” Musk said. His timeline puts the privately held SpaceX ahead of NASA’s goal of sending the first astronauts to Mars sometime in the 2030s.

Also, note that Edolf just says it’ll “launch” next year, maybe. No guarantee that it’ll even make it out of the atmosphere, of course, never mind making it as far as our red neighbour, given some of SpaceX’s recent misadventures…

Now it’s just showing off

Astronomers discover 128 new moons orbiting Saturn

Astronomers have discovered 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, giving it an insurmountable lead in the running tally of moons in the solar system.
Until recently, the “moon king” title was held by Jupiter, but Saturn now has a total of 274 moons, almost twice as many as all the other planets combined. The team behind the discoveries had previously identified 62 Saturnian moons using the Canada France Hawaii telescope and, having seen faint hints that there were more out there, made further observations in 2023.
“Sure enough, we found 128 new moons,” said the lead researcher, Dr Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Academia Sincia in Taiwan. “Based on our projections, I don’t think Jupiter will ever catch up.” […]
The moons were identified using the “shift and stack” technique, in which astronomers acquire sequential images that trace the moon’s path across the sky and combine them to make the moon bright enough to detect. All of the 128 new moons are “irregular moons”, potato-shaped objects that are just a few kilometres across. The escalating number of these objects highlights potential future disagreements over what actually counts as a moon.
“I don’t think there’s a proper definition for what is classed as a moon. There should be,” said Ashton. However, he added that the team may have reached a limit for moon detection – for now.
“With current technology, I don’t think we can do much better than what has already been done for moons around Saturn, Uranus and Neptune,” said Ashton.

The thing that kind of puzzles me here is that, frankly, Cassini was in Saturn’s close vicinity for thirteen years and never spotted any of these new moons. It did find some, but only seven, not over a hundred. Weird how a probe actually orbiting the planet these moons are also orbiting never noticed them, but we’re able to detect them from here on Earth. Jupiter has 95 moons, by the way; I’ve always been amused by the scene in “Revenge of the Cybermen” where the Doctor expresses surprise at Jupiter having acquired a thirteenth moon, cos that line was dated before the show was even broadcast (an actual 13th moon was spotted in September 1974 just before filming even started for it), and it’s only got more so as decades have gone by…

AI gets cheesy

Google remakes Super Bowl ad after AI cheese gaffe

Google has re-edited an advert for its leading artificial intelligence (AI) tool, Gemini, after it overestimated the global appetite for Gouda.
The commercial – which was supposed to showcase Gemini’s abilities – was created to be broadcast during the Super Bowl.
It showed the tool helping a cheesemonger in Wisconsin write a product description by informing him Gouda accounts for “50 to 60 percent of global cheese consumption”.
However, a blogger pointed out on X that the stat was “unequivocally false” as the Dutch cheese was nowhere near that popular.
Replying to him, Google executive Jerry Dischler, insisted this was not a “hallucination” – where AI systems invent untrue information – blaming the websites Gemini had scraped the information from instead.
“Gemini is grounded in the Web – and users can always check the results and references,” he wrote.

Just as well someone did, cos apparently no one at Google checked to see if it was right or not. Obviously it wasn’t THEIR fault, it was the fault of all the other websites carrying this apparently incorrect information that Jerry’s throwing under the bus; curious that Gemini apparently only found websites with the wrong information and didn’t question it. Seems you need actual intelligence for that…

The front fell off

I will say one thing for SpaceX: that bit of gear they have which recaptures the rocket booster rather than just letting it fall in the ocean or something actually looks pretty cool. Be nice if Starship were actually better at doing the job it’s supposed to, though… This video is a slightly dry but certainly informative look at what exactly may have gone wrong, using some actually quite stunning footage from SpaceX’s video feed including from the rocket itself, and it also introduced me to the term “RUD”, or “rapid unscheduled disassembly”, which is an… interesting way of saying it blew up, I suppose… As our narrator also notes, this was supposedly the improved version of the thing, which suggests to me that several more improvements might be needed. On the other hand, it did make for an awfully pretty light show, and some of the videos I’ve seen from the people on Turks & Caicos who got the best view of it are kind of amazing… Also, since others have drawn the comparison:

Orders from above

Author Chuck Wendig posted this recently:

Obviously I see the point he’s making—the ease of generative AI without the need for actual skill or to do anything but come up with the right words is what it’s all about—but I think his analogy is a bit off. The work is everything, sure, but the work is still being done in the situation Wendig describes… which was basically the situation in which Val Lewton produced his famous horror films for RKO’s B unit in the 1940s; the studio came up with the film’s title and left him to get on with the job of actually making the film. So Lewton had to organise the cast and crew and all of that. Actual work still had to be done. I know there’s other comparable cases in the film industry (though admittedly the specific instances aren’t leaping to mind as I write this) (EDIT: fucking American International, of COURSE. How could I have forgotten them?) where the production company came up with the ad campaign first and then made the movie. Similarly, if a book publisher gives an author a specific order for a book they want written, or a record company pulls its roster together to make a tribute album or something, if they’re not using generative AI then the work is being done, even if the creator of the work didn’t have the original idea. Like I said, I completely get Wendig’s point but the comparison doesn’t work for me…