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🔗 Medicine 🔗 Biology

The blue field entoptic phenomenon is an entoptic phenomenon characterized by the appearance of tiny bright dots (nicknamed blue-sky sprites) moving quickly along undulating pathways in the visual field, especially when looking into bright blue light such as the sky. The dots are short-lived, visible for about one second or less, and traveling short distances along seemingly random, undulating paths. Some of them seem to follow the same path as other dots before them. The dots may appear elongated along the path, like tiny worms. The dots' rate of travel appears to vary in synchrony with the heartbeat: they briefly accelerate at each beat. The dots appear in the central field of view, within 15 degrees from the fixation point. The left and right eye see different, seemingly random, dot patterns; a person viewing through both eyes sees a combination of both left and right visual field disturbances. While seeing the phenomenon, lightly pressing inward on the sides of the eyeballs at the lateral canthus causes the movement to stop being fluid and the dots to move only when the heart beats.

Most people are able to see this phenomenon in the sky, although it is relatively weak in most instances; many will not notice it until asked to pay attention. The dots are highly conspicuous against any monochromatic blue background of a wavelength of around 430 nm in place of the sky. The phenomenon is also known as Scheerer's phenomenon, after the German ophthalmologist Richard Scheerer, who first drew clinical attention to it in 1924.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Technology 🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Law 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Robotics 🔗 International relations/International law 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 European Union 🔗 Science Policy 🔗 Artificial Intelligence

The Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is a European Union regulation concerning artificial intelligence (AI).

It establishes a common regulatory and legal framework for AI in the European Union (EU). Proposed by the European Commission on 21 April 2021, and then passed in the European Parliament on 13 March 2024, it was unanimously approved by the Council of the European Union on 21 May 2024. The Act creates a European Artificial Intelligence Board to promote national cooperation and ensure compliance with the regulation. Like the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, the Act can apply extraterritorially to providers from outside the EU, if they have users within the EU.

It covers all types of AI in a broad range of sectors; exceptions include AI systems used solely for military, national security, research and non-professional purposes. As a piece of product regulation, it would not confer rights on individuals, but would regulate the providers of AI systems and entities using AI in a professional context. The draft Act was revised following the rise in popularity of generative AI systems, such as ChatGPT, whose general-purpose capabilities did not fit the main framework. More restrictive regulations are planned for powerful generative AI systems with systemic impact.

The Act classifies AI applications by their risk of causing harm. There are four levels – unacceptable, high, limited, minimal – plus an additional category for general-purpose AI. Applications with unacceptable risks are banned. High-risk applications must comply with security, transparency and quality obligations and undergo conformity assessments. Limited-risk applications only have transparency obligations and those representing minimal risks are not regulated. For general-purpose AI, transparency requirements are imposed, with additional evaluations when there are high risks.

La Quadrature du Net (LQDN) stated that the adopted version of the AI Act would be ineffective, arguing that the role of self-regulation and exemptions in the act rendered it "largely incapable of standing in the way of the social, political and environmental damage linked to the proliferation of AI".

🔗 Physics 🔗 Astronomy

A helium flash is a very brief thermal runaway nuclear fusion of large quantities of helium into carbon through the triple-alpha process in the core of low mass stars (between 0.8 solar masses (M_☉) and 2.0 M_☉) during their red giant phase. The Sun is predicted to experience a flash 1.2 billion years after it leaves the main sequence. A much rarer runaway helium fusion process can also occur on the surface of accreting white dwarf stars.

Low-mass stars do not produce enough gravitational pressure to initiate normal helium fusion. As the hydrogen in the core is exhausted, some of the helium left behind is instead compacted into degenerate matter, supported against gravitational collapse by quantum mechanical pressure rather than thermal pressure. Subsequent hydrogen shell fusion further increases the mass of the core until it reaches temperature of approximately 100 million kelvin, which is hot enough to initiate helium fusion (or "helium burning") in the core.

However, a fundamental quality of degenerate matter is that increases in temperature do not produce an increase in the pressure of the matter until the thermal pressure becomes so very high that it exceeds degeneracy pressure. In main sequence stars, thermal expansion regulates the core temperature, but in degenerate cores, this does not occur. Helium fusion increases the temperature, which increases the fusion rate, which further increases the temperature in a runaway reaction which quickly spans the entire core. This produces a flash of very intense helium fusion that lasts only a few minutes, but during that time, produces energy at a rate comparable to the entire Milky Way galaxy.

In the case of normal low-mass stars, the vast energy release causes much of the core to come out of degeneracy, allowing it to thermally expand. This consumes most of the total energy released by the helium flash, and any left-over energy is absorbed into the star's upper layers. Thus the helium flash is mostly undetectable by observation, and is described solely by astrophysical models. After the core's expansion and cooling, the star's surface rapidly cools and contracts in as little as 10,000 years until it is roughly 2% of its former radius and luminosity. It is estimated that the electron-degenerate helium core weighs about 40% of the star mass and that 6% of the core is converted into carbon.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Molecular Biology 🔗 Molecular Biology/Computational Biology

In electrical engineering, statistical computing and bioinformatics, the Baum–Welch algorithm is a special case of the expectation–maximization algorithm used to find the unknown parameters of a hidden Markov model (HMM). It makes use of the forward-backward algorithm to compute the statistics for the expectation step.

🔗 Australia 🔗 Australia/Western Australia 🔗 Australia/Australian biota 🔗 Spiders

Number 16 (c. 1974 – 2016), also known as #16, was a wild female trapdoor spider (Gaius villosus, family Idiopidae) that lived in North Bungulla Reserve near Tammin, Western Australia. She lived an estimated 43 years and became the longest-lived spider on record, beating a 28-year-old tarantula who previously held the title. When Number 16 finally died in 2016, it was not of old age but from a parasitic wasp sting.

🔗 Physics

In quantum field theory, a false vacuum is a hypothetical vacuum that is relatively stable, but not in the most stable state possible. In this condition it is called metastable. It may last for a very long time in this state, but could eventually decay to the more stable one, an event known as false vacuum decay. The most common suggestion of how such a decay might happen in our universe is called bubble nucleation – if a small region of the universe by chance reached a more stable vacuum, this "bubble" (also called "bounce") would spread.

A false vacuum exists at a local minimum of energy and is therefore not completely stable, in contrast to a true vacuum, which exists at a global minimum and is stable.

🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America

The Solutrean hypothesis on the peopling of the Americas claims that the earliest human migration to the Americas took place from Europe, with Solutreans traveling along pack ice in the Atlantic Ocean. This hypothesis contrasts with the mainstream academic narrative that the Americas were first populated by people crossing the Bering Strait to Alaska by foot on what was land during the Last Glacial Period or by following the Pacific coastline from Asia to America by boat.

The Solutrean hypothesis posits that around 21,000 years ago a group of people from the Solutré region of France, who are historically characterized by their unique lithic technique, migrated to North America along pack ice in the Atlantic Ocean. Once they made it to North America, their lithic technique dispersed around the continent (c. 13,000 years ago) to provide the basis for the later popularization of Clovis lithic technology. The premise behind the Solutrean Hypothesis is that the similarities between Clovis and Solutrean lithic technologies are evidence that the Solutreans were the first people to migrate to the Americas, dating far before mainstream scientific theories of the peopling of the Americas.

Originally proposed in the 1970s, the theory has received some support in the 2010s, notably by Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution and Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter. However, according to David Meltzer, "[f]ew if any archaeologists—or, for that matter, geneticists, linguists, or physical anthropologists—take seriously the idea of a Solutrean colonization of America." The evidence for the hypothesis is considered more consistent with other scenarios. In addition to an interval of thousands of years between the Clovis and Solutrean eras, the two technologies show only incidental similarities. There is no evidence for any Solutrean seafaring, far less for any technology that could take humans across the Atlantic in an ice age. Genetic evidence supports the theory of Asian, not European, origins for the peopling of the Americas.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Education 🔗 Homeschooling 🔗 Alternative education

The Montessori method of education is a type of educational method that involves children's natural interests and activities rather than formal teaching methods. A Montessori classroom places an emphasis on hands-on learning and developing real-world skills. It emphasizes independence and it views children as naturally eager for knowledge and capable of initiating learning in a sufficiently supportive and well-prepared learning environment. It discourages some conventional measures of achievement, such as grades and tests.

The method was started in the early 20th century by Italian physician Maria Montessori, who developed her theories through scientific experimentation with her students; the method has since been used in many parts of the world, in public and private schools alike.

A range of practices exist under the name "Montessori", which is not trademarked. Popular elements include mixed-age classrooms, student freedom (including their choices of activity), long blocks of uninterrupted work time, specially trained teachers and prepared environment. Scientific studies regarding the Montessori method are mostly positive, with a 2017 review stating that "broad evidence" exists for its efficacy.

🔗 Sociology

The circulation of elites is a theory of regime change described by Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923).

Changes of regime, revolutions, and so on occur not when rulers are overthrown from below, but when one elite replaces another. The role of ordinary people in such transformation is not that of initiators or principal actors, but as followers and supporters of one elite or another.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Geology 🔗 Weather 🔗 Astronomy/Solar System 🔗 Weather/Weather 🔗 Weather/Space weather

A Miyake event is an observed sharp enhancement of the production of cosmogenic isotopes by cosmic rays. It can be marked by a spike in the concentration of radioactive carbon isotope ¹⁴
C in tree rings, as well as ¹⁰
Be and ³⁶
Cl in ice cores, which are all independently dated. At present, five significant events are known (7176 BCE, 5259 BCE, 660 BCE, 774 CE, 993 CE) for which the spike in ¹⁴
C is quite remarkable, i.e. above 1% rise over a period of 2 years, and four more events (12,350 BCE, 5410 BCE, 1052 CE, 1279 CE) need independent confirmation. It is not known how often Miyake events occur, but from the available data it is estimated to be every 400–2400 years.

There is strong evidence that Miyake events are caused by extreme solar particle events and they are likely related to super-flares discovered on solar-like stars. Although Miyake events are based on extreme year-to-year rises of ¹⁴
C concentration, the duration of the periods over which the ¹⁴
C levels increase or stay at high levels is longer than one year. However, a universal cause and origin of all the events is not yet established in science, and some of the events may be caused by other phenomena coming from outer space (such as a gamma-ray burst).

A recently reported sharp spike in ¹⁴
C that occurred between 12,350 and 12,349 BCE, may represent the largest known Miyake event. This event was identified during a study conducted by an international team of researchers who measured radiocarbon levels in ancient trees recovered from the eroded banks of the Drouzet River, near Gap, France, in the Southern French Alps. According to the initial study the new event is roughly twice the size of the Δ¹⁴
C increase for more recent 774 CE and 993 CE events, but the strength of the corresponding solar storm is not yet assessed. However, the newly discovered 12,350 BCE event has not yet been independently confirmed in wood from other regions, nor it is reliably supported by a clear corresponding spike in other isotopes (such as Beryllium-10) that are usually used in combination for absolute radiometric dating.

A Miyake event occurring in modern conditions might have significant impacts on global technological infrastructure such as satellites, telecommunications, and power grids.