New Antibiotic that Kills Drug-Resistant Bacteria Discovered in Technician’s Garden
April 4th, 2025Via: Nature:
Researchers have discovered a new antibiotic molecule that targets a broad range of disease-causing bacteria — even strains resistant to commercial drugs — and is not toxic to human cells.
The molecule was found in soil samples collected from a laboratory technician’s garden. The discovery shows that “there is terrifically interesting stuff hiding in plain sight”, says Kim Lewis, a microbiologist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the research. “Kudos to them that they knew what to look for.”
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Wright and his colleagues set out to find microbes that have developed previously unknown tricks to kill pathogens. They collected soil samples in Petri dishes with growth medium and stored them for a year. The researchers then exposed the microbes from these samples to Escherichia coli, a common gut bacterium that can cause serious disease.
One sample showed potent antibacterial activity — by a species belonging to the genus Paenibacillus.
More: New Class of Antibiotics Discovered
AI 2027
April 4th, 2025Via: AI 2027:
We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.
We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like. It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes.
“Listening to Music Alone Operates as a Social Surrogate”
April 4th, 2025Via: PhysOrg:
Humans have a fundamental need to belong, which strongly motivates our behavior. Failing to connect with others can lead to depression, anxiety and low self-esteem. There are traditional ways to fill this need, like spending time with family and friends, but there are non-traditional strategies as well, activities that might not be immediately recognized as social.
These are known as social surrogates, which can buffer against loneliness, isolation and social threats, like rejection, just as well as time spent with others.
Parasocial relationships, such as the one-sided bond between fans and celebrities, immersion into the social world, and reminders of others, are all social surrogates.
“Listening to music alone operates as a social surrogate along all three of those pathways,” says Paravati. “All of these paths can help us feel less lonely and more belonging. Music helps us feel connected to the artists; it can make us feel immersed in the world of music; and music can remind us of others.
“You might think you’re motivated to listen to your favorite song because you think it has a catchy beat, but it’s likely that you’re drawn in because that music is filling your social fuel tank and helping you feel a sense of belonging.”
For the study’s first experiment, researchers asked participants about their use of known social surrogates, such as favorite television shows, as well as their use of music.
“We found that listening to one’s favorite music helped individuals feel less lonely,” says Paravati. “But someone’s favorite music was more effective at this than just listening to music in general.
Oil Tumbles 8% as China Retaliates with Tariffs on U.S.
April 4th, 2025Via: Reuters:
Oil prices plunged by 8% on Friday, heading for their lowest close since the middle of the pandemic in 2021, as China hit back in an escalating global trade war with the U.S. after President Donald Trump’s barrage of levies this week.
China announced it will impose additional tariffs of 34% on all U.S. goods from April 10. Nations around the world have readied retaliation after Trump raised tariff barriers to their highest in more than a century, leading to a plunge in world financial markets.
Trump’s Tariff Strategy Explained in 18 Minutes
April 4th, 2025I never thought I would see the U.S. resist China’s grand strategy.
It would have been nice to have done it more slowly.
Factories could have been built, the expertise could have been cultivated, markets could have adjusted in an orderly manner…
Nope. That’s not how it’s going to go.
Trump has less than four years to try to do what would, in any sane approximation, take twenty.
Welcome to the deep end.
Via: Tucker Carlson:
SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Present in Cerebral Arteries Up to 17 Months Following mRNA Vaccination
April 3rd, 2025Via: Journal of Clinical Neuroscience:
Spike protein expression was detected in 43.8 % of vaccinated patients, predominantly localized to the intima of cerebral arteries, even up to 17 months post-vaccination.
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None of the cases showed nucleocapsid protein positivity, supporting the absence of active viral infection.
Bill Banning Geoengineering And Weather Modification Passes Florida Senate
April 3rd, 2025Via: American Greatness:
The Florida Senate passed a bill prohibiting geoengineering and weather modification by a vote of 28-9, Thursday. SB-56, dubbed the “chemtrails bill” by the media, prohibits “the injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of a chemical, a chemical compound, a substance, or an apparatus into the atmosphere within the borders of this state for the express purpose of affecting the temperature, weather, climate, or intensity of sunlight.”
The bill also requires the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) to set up a system where residents can report “suspected geoengineering activities” and directs the FDEP to investigate those claims, WFLA reported.
Geoengineering, or climate engineering is defined as “the intentional large-scale alteration of the planetary environment to counteract [alleged] anthropogenic climate change.”
Florida’s bill banning the practice must now be approved in the Florida House, which has its own watered down version.
If a bill passes, Florida would become the second state in the nation to ban geoengineering. Tennessee passed its own bill banning geoengineering and weather modification in 2024.
Trump Announces Sweeping Reciprocal Tariffs on Trading Partners
April 2nd, 2025I wonder if Ross Perot is smiling from the great beyond…
Remember that?
Because Ross Perot’s prescient warnings were not heeded decades ago, this is what a Made in USA car looks like now:
President Pfizer Warpspeed Trump Gaza #1 is awful in some ways… and good in other ways. Bringing sanity to trade imbalances won’t be easy, but the U.S. is finished otherwise. I have no idea if it’s too late for the U.S. to change course. I suspect that it is, but I’ve been wrong before.
Via: Sky:
Politico Claims: “Trump Tells Inner Circle That Musk Will Leave Soon”
April 2nd, 2025
Update: Musk – “Fake News”
Yeah, fake news https://t.co/nPhTpZj3Fc
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 2, 2025
—
Via: Politico:
President Donald Trump has told his inner circle, including members of his Cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role as governing partner, ubiquitous cheerleader and Washington hatchet man.
The president remains pleased with Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency initiative, but both men have decided in recent days that it will soon be time for Musk to return to his businesses and take on a supporting role, according to three Trump insiders who were granted anonymity to describe the evolving relationship.
Musk’s looming retreat comes as some Trump administration insiders and many outside allies have become frustrated with his unpredictability and increasingly view the billionaire as a political liability…
AI-Based Model Streams Intelligible Speech from Thoughts
April 2nd, 2025Via: Berkeley Engineering:
Marking a breakthrough in the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), a team of researchers from UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco has unlocked a way to restore naturalistic speech for people with severe paralysis.
This work solves the long-standing challenge of latency in speech neuroprostheses, the time lag between when a subject attempts to speak and when sound is produced. Using recent advances in artificial intelligence-based modeling, the researchers developed a streaming method that synthesizes brain signals into audible speech in near-real time.
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“Our streaming approach brings the same rapid speech decoding capacity of devices like Alexa and Siri to neuroprostheses,” said Gopala Anumanchipalli, Robert E. and Beverly A. Brooks Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley and co-principal investigator of the study. “Using a similar type of algorithm, we found that we could decode neural data and, for the first time, enable near-synchronous voice streaming. The result is more naturalistic, fluent speech synthesis.”
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According to study co-lead author Cheol Jun Cho, who is also a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in electrical engineering and computer sciences, the neuroprosthesis works by sampling neural data from the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls speech production, then uses AI to decode brain function into speech.
“We are essentially intercepting signals where the thought is translated into articulation and in the middle of that motor control,” he said. “So what we’re decoding is after a thought has happened, after we’ve decided what to say, after we’ve decided what words to use and how to move our vocal-tract muscles.”
To collect the data needed to train their algorithm, the researchers first had Ann, their subject, look at a prompt on the screen — like the phrase: “Hey, how are you?” — and then silently attempt to speak that sentence.
“This gave us a mapping between the chunked windows of neural activity that she generates and the target sentence that she’s trying to say, without her needing to vocalize at any point,” said Littlejohn.
Because Ann does not have any residual vocalization, the researchers did not have target audio, or output, to which they could map the neural data, the input. They solved this challenge by using AI to fill in the missing details.
“We used a pretrained text-to-speech model to generate audio and simulate a target,” said Cho. “And we also used Ann’s pre-injury voice, so when we decode the output, it sounds more like her.”
