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More from @Unexplained2020

Vicky Verma

@Unexplained2020

Oct 30

These Men Explain That Your Dreams and Thoughts Are No Longer Safe. They claim that all our 'Dreams' and 'Thoughts' can be Decoded—imagine what authoritarian states could do with such power. AI can even read Wi-Fi radio signals bouncing around a space to create 3D image estimations.

Tristan Harris (Right) and Aza Raskin (Left) are the co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology which aims to warn people about how technology affects individuals, organizations, and society. It looks for ways to manage these effects, encourages leaders to take action, and offers resources for those interested in humane technology.

FYI: Harris was Google's Design Ethicist, developing a framework for how technology should “ethically” steer the thoughts and actions of billions of people from screens. Raskin is a trained mathematician and dark matter physicist. He is the son of Jef Raskin, a human–computer interface expert who was the initiator of the Macintosh project at Apple.

In May 2023, Harris & Raskin attended Summit At Sea where they discussed how existing A.I. capabilities already pose catastrophic risks to a functional society, how A.I. companies are caught in a race to deploy as quickly as possible without adequate safety measures, and what it would mean to upgrade our institutions to a post-A.I. world.

This video educated me about the serious consequences we might face if greater control over advanced AI models—specifically generative models like Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs)—isn't implemented.

🧵A thread to blow your mind.

Tristan Harris explains the complex terms behind "generative large language multimodal models" (AI models that handle language and images). To make things simpler, he suggests calling them "Golems." This is inspired by the Golem in Jewish mythology—a creature that comes to life and gains unexpected abilities, much like these AI models. As more data is fed to them, they start displaying new skills even their creators didn’t anticipate.

Although many AI demos look different on the surface, they often function in similar ways. For example, tools like Stable Diffusion or DALL-E let users type words to generate images. If you type "Google soup," the model turns it into a picture. However, Raskin points out that these "Golems" don’t truly “understand” what they’re doing; they process information without real comprehension of meaning.

Your Dreams And Thoughts Are No Longer Safe

Researchers Harris & Raskin discuss here how to turn brain patterns into images by studying brain scans from people looking at pictures.

Raskin explains a person sits in an fMRI machine, which records brain activity while they look at an image. The computer learns to match each brain pattern with the image the person is viewing.

When the computer is shown only the brain patterns (without seeing the actual image), it tries to guess what the person saw. For example, if someone looked at a giraffe, the computer would use only the brain data to create an image it believes represents the giraffe.

The latest research uses “stable diffusion” technology, a tool used in digital art creation, to make these brain-reading images even clearer. Surprisingly, tools made for art are now helping decode human thoughts.

The research has advanced to the point where it can capture people’s inner dialogue—the words they think to themselves. In one experiment, people watched a video and thought about what they saw. The computer was able to recreate their thoughts, like “a girl gets hit and falls,” based solely on brain patterns.

This kind of brain decoding could raise concerns, especially in authoritarian States, since it could lead to tracking what people think or dream about.

youtu.be/cB0_-qKbal4

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Vicky Verma

@Unexplained2020

Oct 28

This Man Claims We May Live At The Center Of A Cosmic Void 2 Billion Light-Years Wide That Defies The Laws Of Cosmology. A growing list of observations suggests we live in the crosshairs of a giant cosmic void — the largest ever observed.

Astronomers first suggested such a void in 2013 and evidence for its existence has been stacking up ever since.

We may live in a void that shouldn't exist.

🧵

According to a fundamental theory of cosmology named the cosmological principle, matter in the universe should be uniformly distributed on very large scales.

This idea is important because it allows scientists to use the same laws of physics for objects near us and those far away, even at the edges of the early universe. Basically, everything follows the same universal rules.

This approach helps us study and understand the universe better and suggests that large empty spaces, like the one we might live in, shouldn’t really exist.

However, many observations in the last ten years indicate that matter in the universe may actually gather in areas of high and low density, which means it might not be as evenly distributed as we thought.

The image below shows The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) made the largest 3D map of our universe to date. This sliver of the cosmos shows its high- and low- density regions.

Credit: businessinsider.in/science/news/a…

"By now it's pretty clear that we are in a significant underdensity," said Indranil Banik, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of St. Andrews.

"There's a few people that are still opposed to it to a limited extent. For example, some people have correctly argued that such a void shouldn't exist in the standard model, which is true. That unfortunately doesn't prove it's not there," he added.

Indranil Banik is a cosmologist studying the Hubble tension, which is the observation that the Universe is expanding faster locally than expected based on early Universe observations.

He thinks this faster expansion may be caused by a local void or underdensity, creating a "Hubble bubble" where the expansion rate appears higher due to the outflow from the void.

Since late 2020, he has published several papers on this topic. His main evidence suggests that the Universe is older than it would be if the local expansion rate were accurate, aligning with early Universe methods.

This implies that the observed redshift gradient with distance is enhanced compared to a uniformly expanding universe, likely due to outward peculiar velocities, indicating we might be in a giant void that's about 20% less dense than the cosmic average.

Watch his work here: youtube.com/@indranilbanik…

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Vicky Verma

@Unexplained2020

Oct 22

This Man Says There Is A Switch In The Human Body To Make A 100-Year-Old Young Again. He says he can create sperm and an egg from human skin cells, fertilize them, and clone a human. He claimed to have created Mini-human brains in his lab that are aged artificially to mimic 80-year-old brains, and they show signs of diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's.

David Sinclair, a Harvard biologist, said he and his team found a way to reverse aging in the eyes of mice, suggesting that it could also happen in humans.

In 2022, Sinclair and his team at Harvard Medical School published their findings, in which they believe that epigenetic changes—and not just changes to the DNA—affect aging.

They discovered a way to "reset" the age of a mouse's eye using three specific genes (— Oct4, Sox2, and Klf4, together named OSK). By reprogramming the eye, they were able to reverse its age by 80%, helping the mice regain their vision.

Sinclair believes that this means there might be a way to make older people feel young again because the information needed to be young is still in the body.

A thread to reset human body age!🧵

Repost, Likes, Quotes, and Comments, would be helpful for me to keep creating for you guys. Thanks

David Sinclair mentions that they found a "universal reset switch," which means they can apply this technique to other parts of the human body, like skin and muscles. Essentially, they are turning on a program that makes older cells act younger. He believes that one day it might be possible to reset the age of the entire body, and they have already succeeded in mice. Now, they are focused on how soon they can do this for humans.

On Ed Mylett's podcast, David Sinclair talked about a study conducted by Steve Horvath and Greg Fahy during the early months of the pandemic. In this study, they treated people for a year with a mix of metformin, a bit of growth hormone, and DHEA (hormone that helps produce testosterone and estrogen) to manage some side effects of growth hormone that could lead to type 2 diabetes.

nmn.com/news/renowned-…

Dr. Greg Fahy, a California-based aging researcher, presents a cocktail of compounds that reactivates the thymus, an organ crucial for training immune cells to combat pathogens, and rejuvenates the body.

They found that, after the treatment, the biological "clock" of the body had reversed by more than two years.

Dr. Fahy said that participants were biologically younger at the end of the trial than they were at the beginning. Dr. Fahy adds that there was an age reversal of about two-and-a-half years over the course of the year-long treatment. Thus, although a year had passed during treatment, the participants were still a year-and-a-half younger than when they started the trial, according to Horvath’s aging clock. The study participants were also still two-and-a-half years younger at the end of the trial than they would have been had they not participated.

At first, Sinclair thought that two years wasn’t a huge change, but then he realized that if this could be done every year, it would be really interesting because it would mean people could literally age in reverse.

While he isn't sure about achieving immortality, he would be happy with just an extra 10 years of healthy life—or even just two years. He emphasizes that they are now at a point where they can control aging in the lab, being able to speed it up or slow it down.

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Vicky Verma

@Unexplained2020

Oct 21

This Man Proved Time Is An Illusion. In 1972 he entered a cave chamber 440 feet below the ground, alone and isolated from any natural light & clocks. For six months he removed from all time references which led to his discovery of a human time warp and slowing down time. He found that without time cues, several people including himself adjusted to a 48-hour rather than a 24-hour cycle.

In 1962, a French scientist named Michel Siffre lived alone in a cave for two months, with no clock, calendar, or sunlight. He only slept and ate when he felt like it, to see how living without time would affect the body's natural rhythms. Over the next ten years, he set up more than twelve similar experiments. In 1972, he went back into a cave in Texas for six months. His work helped start the study of human biological clocks.

A thread to slow your body time🧵

Michel Siffre was a trained geologist. In 1961, he discovered an underground glacier in the Alps and initially planned to spend fifteen days studying it. However, he later decided that two months would be more useful to understand it better. During this time, he wanted to live like an animal, without a watch, in the dark, and without knowing what time it was.

Instead of just studying caves, he ended up studying time. He created a scientific method by putting a team at the entrance of the cave to call him when he woke up, ate, and went to sleep. His team was not allowed to contact him, so he wouldn't know the outside time. Through this experiment, he unintentionally developed the field of human chronobiology. He noted that, similar to rats, which were known to have an internal biological clock since 1922, humans also have a body clock.

Michel Siffre describes his living conditions during the experiment as difficult, with poor equipment and a cramped camp. His feet were often wet, and his body temperature dropped to 34°C (93°F). To pass the time, he read, wrote, and conducted research in the cave, while also thinking about his future.

Each time he called the surface, he performed two tests. First, he measured his pulse. Second, he did a psychological test where he counted from 1 to 120 at a rate of one number per second. Through this test, they made an important discovery: it took him five minutes to count to 120, meaning he experienced five real minutes as if they were only two.

youtu.be/kPVtuCMo11A

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Vicky Verma

@Unexplained2020

Oct 18

Scientists from Johns Hopkins University claim Psychedelics Can Awaken Your Consciousness to the ‘Ultimate Reality’ That Many say is God.

After taking a psychedelic, researchers at Johns Hopkins University say your brain might feel like it’s connecting to something greater or the "Ultimate Reality."

Psychedelic compounds can create feelings of euphoria, a loss of your sense of self, and as various treatment studies demonstrate, cause a transcendent experience so deeply moving that it helps people kick heavy burdens like depression and alcoholism—at least temporarily.

It is a thread to awaken your reality🧵

For thousands of years, people have been using natural drugs like ayahuasca and psilocybin to change their feelings and how they see the world. These substances have been part of many religious and cultural practices, from Native American rituals to those of South Asian Vedic traditions and European customs.

For example, ayahuasca, known as the “vine of the spirits” or “vine of the dead” in the Quechua language of Peru, is made by boiling certain plants in the Amazon. This bitter drink is used in shamanic ceremonies to help people feel connected to nature and the spiritual world. Similarly, people around the world might have been eating psilocybin "magic mushrooms" for thousands of years to expand their minds.

popularmechanics.com/science/a61949…

Compounds like psilocybin connect to serotonin receptors in your brain. However, scientists don’t yet understand how these connections create hallucinations and changes in reality that some users describe as a spiritual experience, like “seeing God.” Researchers believe that combining therapy, brain scans, and controlled doses of psychedelics could help them understand this better.

A 2019 study from Johns Hopkins’ Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research surveyed 4,285 healthy people about their experiences of God or a higher “Ultimate Reality.” The participants included both users and non-users of classic psychedelics like psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, and DMT.

The results, published in the journal PLOS One, showed that users were more likely to describe their experiences as “Ultimate Reality” when given options like “God,” “Higher Power,” or “Aspect of God (like an angel).” They reported feeling a presence that influenced their reality and a reduced fear of death. Other studies have found similar experiences among those who used these psychedelic drugs.

journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…

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Vicky Verma

@Unexplained2020

Oct 16

Meet Tom Mueller, not so famous as Elon Musk but he is the reason Musk's rockets are flying and being reused, with a big tower catching them. He developed the engines that power the Falcon rockets, enabling their reuse, which was a game changer for space travel.

Mueller met Musk in Los Angeles in the early 2000s through a mutual friend, and they decided to build rockets that could one day take humans to Mars.

Much of SpaceX's success is attributed to Mueller's expertise in propulsion. He had a background in aerospace from TRW and spent time testing rockets as a hobby before joining Musk in creating SpaceX.

He was instrumental in overcoming early failures with the Falcon 1 rocket, leading to its success as the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit. This success secured a significant contract with NASA.

This man is a genius🧵

“Engineer” wasn’t a term Tom Mueller came across much as the son of a St. Maries logging-truck driver.

Mueller’s father worked as a logger and logging-truck driver in North Idaho’s lumber-filled forests, just as his father had a generation earlier. Mueller knew he didn’t want to go into the family profession.

But the future co-founder of SpaceX, University of Idaho alumnus and 2018 commencement speaker knew he liked science.

Mueller experimented with plastic and cardboard model rockets in elementary school, including many that crashed and burned. And he inherited an uncle’s 1950s-era chemistry set, including the sometimes-caustic liquids and powders inside.

“Most of the chemicals in that chemistry set wouldn’t have been in one you bought today,” he said. “So I learned a lot — kept all my fingers somehow.”

He graduated from the University of Idaho in 1985 with a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering. After graduating, Mueller worked at Hughes Aircraft and Loyola Marymount University, where he earned a Master of Science in mechanical engineering in 1992. He spent 15 years as a rocket development engineer at TRW before joining Elon Musk and Chris Thompson in 2002 to start SpaceX.

'Do you want to be the guy who fixes the plane or the guy who designs it?'

Were it not for an inspiring high school math teacher, Mueller says he never could have even dreamed a logger's kid from St. Maries, Idaho could become a rocket scientist.

Mueller said he has since gone back and personally thanked that math teacher.

“I am very fortunate to have followed the path in engineering that led to SpaceX,” Mueller said. “I am very proud of what we have achieved at SpaceX and it could not have happened for me without that foundation that U of I provided.”

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