Day: May 23, 2024

US plan may boost NATO arms production for Ukraine  Defense One

Ukraine has a $5B deficit in its budget for weapon purchases, so the government is preparing to raise taxes.  Ukraine Business News

Pope clears way for online influencer to become saint  Euronews

Noise-canceling headphones have gotten very good at creating an auditory blank slate. But allowing certain sounds from a wearer’s environment through the erasure still challenges researchers. The latest edition of Apple’s AirPods Pro, for instance, automatically adjusts sound levels for wearers — sensing when they’re in conversation, for instance — but the user has little control over whom to listen to or when this happens.

A University of Washington team has developed an artificial intelligence system that lets a user wearing headphones look at a person speaking for three to five seconds to “enroll” them. The system, called “Target Speech Hearing,” then cancels all other sounds in the environment and plays just the enrolled speaker’s voice in real time even as the listener moves around in noisy places and no longer faces the speaker.

The team presented its findings in Honolulu at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The code for the proof-of-concept device is available for others to build on. The system is not commercially available.

“We tend to think of AI now as web-based chatbots that answer questions,” said senior author Shyam Gollakota, a UW professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “But in this project, we develop AI to modify the auditory perception of anyone wearing headphones, given their preferences. With our devices you can now hear a single speaker clearly even if you are in a noisy environment with lots of other people talking.”

To use the system, a person wearing off-the-shelf headphones fitted with microphones taps a button while directing their head at someone talking. The sound waves from that speaker’s voice then should reach the microphones on both sides of the headset simultaneously; there’s a 16-degree margin of error. The headphones send that signal to an on-board embedded computer, where the team’s machine learning software learns the desired speaker’s vocal patterns. The system latches onto that speaker’s voice and continues to play it back to the listener, even as the pair moves around. The system’s ability to focus on the enrolled voice improves as the speaker keeps talking, giving the system more training data.

The team tested its system on 21 subjects, who rated the clarity of the enrolled speaker’s voice nearly twice as high as the unfiltered audio on average.

This work builds on the team’s previous “semantic hearing” research, which allowed users to select specific sound classes — such as birds or voices — that they wanted to hear and canceled other sounds in the environment.

Currently the TSH system can enroll only one speaker at a time, and it’s only able to enroll a speaker when there is not another loud voice coming from the same direction as the target speaker’s voice. If a user isn’t happy with the sound quality, they can run another enrollment on the speaker to improve the clarity.

The team is working to expand the system to earbuds and hearing aids in the future.

Crows can control the number of vocalizations they produce, “counting” up to four in response to visual and auditory cues, researchers report. The findings suggest that the birds are capable of using a non-symbolic approximate number system, showing a level of vocal control that mirrors the early counting skills of human toddlers.

Counting out loud – reciting “one, two, three,” and so on, for example – requires understanding numerical quantities and purposeful vocal control. Humans use speech to symbolically count and communicate quantities, a complex skill developed in childhood. Before mastering symbolic counting, where specific words relate to specific quantities, toddlers will often produce a number of speech sounds that match the quantity of objects they see, using these sounds as acoustic tallies to convey the corresponding number.

This early behavior in humans reflects non-symbolic competencies shared with animals. Several animals have shown their ability to discriminate between different numbers of objects and to convey information through differing numbers of vocalizations.

However, whether non-human animals have the ability to “count” by deliberately producing specific numbers of vocalizations remains unknown. Here, Diana Liao and colleagues investigated whether carrion crows (Corvus corone) – one of the few bird species possessing both numerical competency and volitional vocal control – can control the number of vocalizations they produce to solve complex vocal response tasks.

Liao et al. trained 3 crows to produce 1 to 4 vocalizations in response to both visual (colored numeral) and auditory (distinct sound) cues, which were associated with numerical values. In each trial, crows had to produce a target number of vocalizations and indicate the end of the vocal sequence by pecking at a target.

The authors found that the crows could produce specific numbers of vocalizations successfully and deliberately in response to specific cues – a degree of control not yet observed in other animals. According to the findings, the birds used a non-symbolic approximate number system, planning the number of vocalizations before starting.

Further analysis showed that the initial vocalization’s timing and features predicted the number of subsequent vocalizations, and different acoustic features in vocalizations indicated the “number” within a given sequence.

“This competency in crows also mirrors toddlers’ enumeration skills before they learn to understand cardinal number words and may therefore constitute an evolutionary precursor of true counting where numbers are part of a combinatorial symbol system,” Liao et al. write.

Let’s face it, scavengers have a bad reputation. However, according to a new paper published in the Journal of Raptor Research, pairs of scavenging falcons called Chimango Caracaras (Milvago chimango) demonstrate an endearing level of collaboration while raising their chicks.

In their paper, “Biparental Care in a Generalist Raptor, the Chimango Caracara in Central Argentina” Diego Gallego-García from the Center for the Study and Conservation of Birds of Prey in Argentina (CECARA), and co-authors, share results from a two-year study on the nesting behaviors of Chimango parents. This is the first study of its kind for the species. As a group, caracaras remain relatively unstudied, yet they are notably curious, creative, and charismatic birds. The existing knowledge gaps on topics of caracara life history limit our collective understanding of their population dynamics, ecological contributions, and species-specific conservation status. More studies like this one could expand our caracara consciousness.

Chimango Caracaras are common across central Argentina where this study occurred, and they are one of nine species of living caracaras, all of which live in the Americas and nowhere else. Generally, raptor species with a large size difference between the sexes exhibit a clear division of parental responsibility — the larger female incubates the eggs, takes care of the nestlings, and defends the nest, while the smaller male hunts for prey. Chimango caracaras, however, show little difference in size between the sexes and are both predators and scavengers, which means their food sources are relatively unpredictable. Therefore, dividing the workload of feeding and caring for young could be the best path to success. This is what Gallego-García’s team set out to investigate.

The team observed 70 Chimango Caracara nests during the breeding seasons of 2016 and 2017 and confirmed that pairs shared most parental responsibilities at the nest, namely incubation, brooding, and food deliveries. In addition to splitting the workload, the male and female chimangos in this study demonstrated a detailed understanding of their chicks’ needs throughout all stages of development. For example, during the early days of nestling development, when they could not thermoregulate properly, parents devoted more time to brooding in the morning, when temperatures were lower. Additionally, as chicks grew, they underwent an uptick in food requirements during peak development, and the chimango parents matched this by bringing in more food.

Studying the home lives of raptors can help illuminate the big picture of how food webs are faring. According to Gallego-García, “the importance of studying raptor reproductive biology goes beyond the conservation of the species themselves. Raptors occupy the highest position in the food chain, and thus control populations of prey species below. We need to know what happens during reproduction, which is one of their most important and fragile life stages.” Gallego-García also says that many landowners in the area are happy to learn more about their backyard caracaras, a trend that will hopefully continue. “Most of them call us when they find an injured chimango, or a dead nestling, or a new active nest. In return, we invite them to attend banding days with nestlings.”

Gallego-García and coauthors suggest future research on reproductive success across larger parts of this specie’s range and would like to delve into survival estimates of fledglings after they disperse from the breeding area and become independent. Hopefully more support for such research will lead to a stronger foundational knowledge of these unique raptors and their contributions to ecosystem health, the details of which we are just beginning to understand.

In a recent study, researchers from the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF), in collaboration with the Guy Harvey Research Institute (GHRI) and Save Our Seas Foundation Shark Research Center (SOSF-SRC) at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, and the Galapagos National Park Directorate (GNPD) have documented the most extensive migration ever recorded for a silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis), revealing critical insights into the behavior of this severely overfished species and emphasizing the urgent need for cooperative international management measures to prevent further population declines.

The adult female silky shark, nicknamed ‘Genie’ in honor of late shark ecologist Dr. Eugenie Clark, was tagged with a fin-mount satellite transmitter near Wolf Island to the north of the Galapagos Marine Reserve on July 2021, and soon embarked on a vast journey covering more than 27,666 kilometers over 546 days. This epic voyage, equivalent to crossing the United States from coast to coast approximately four times, included two significant westerly migrations (halfway to Hawaii) extending as far as 4,755 kilometers from the tagging site into international waters – areas of high fishing pressure and minimal regulation.

The study shattered previous movement record almost six-fold, illustrating the shark’s extensive use of the open ocean, far beyond national jurisdictions, demonstrating the urgent need to establish regulations to conserve ocean biodiversity beyond areas of national jurisdiction.

Dr. Pelayo Salinas de León, lead author of the study and co-Principal Investigator of the shark ecology project at the Charles Darwin Foundation noted: “Understanding the migratory pathways of silky and other threatened pelagic sharks is crucial for developing effective management strategies to revert ongoing global population declines. Sharks have been roaming the world’s oceans for hundreds of millions of years and the map boundaries we humans have established on paper mean nothing to them. Their long migrations through heavily fished international waters expose them to significant risks, highlighting the need for a coordinated global response to ensure the survival of this highly threatened group of species.”

Silky sharks are particularly vulnerable to overfishing due to their slow growth, late maturity, and the high demand in the global shark fin trade. Classified as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, they represent one of the most frequently caught sharks in both artisanal and industrial fisheries, and are a conservation priority for CDF and other organizations.

Remarkably, more than 99% of the time Genie was tracked occurred within international waters to the west and south, far outside the Ecuador managed Exclusive Economic Zone around the Galapagos Islands, highlighting the critical need for international cooperation in the protection of these long-distance travelling oceanic sharks.

“Obtaining shark tracks with good location resolution for over a year is difficult at best. In this case, we were able to track Genie for 1.5 years, revealing unexpectedly consistent, repeated travel pathways of massive distances going far offshore, well beyond national management and current marine protected areas. This finding is a call to action for all stakeholders involved in marine conservation and fisheries management to work together to protect these iconic species and the oceanic ecosystems they inhabit,” adds co-author, Dr. Mahmood Shivji of the SOSF-SRC and GHRI.

This article published in the Journal of Fish Biology, and freely accessible, serves as a crucial reminder of the interconnectedness of our global marine environments and the collective action required to safeguard ocean biodiversity.

This research was made possible thanks to generous donations from the Save Our Seas Foundation, the Darwin and Wolf Conservation Fund, the Mark and Rachel Rohr Foundation, the Shark Foundation and the Guy Harvey Foundation.

Astronomers have made the rare and tantalising discovery of an Earth-like exoplanet 40 light-years away that may be just a little warmer than our own world.

The potentially-habitable planet, named Gliese 12 b, orbits its host star every 12.8 days, is comparable in size to Venus – so slightly smaller than Earth – and has an estimated surface temperature of 42°C (107°F), which is lower than most of the 5,000-odd exoplanets confirmed so far.

That is assuming it has no atmosphere, however, which is the crucial next step to establishing if it is habitable.

It may have an Earth-like atmosphere, one more akin to Venus – which experienced a runaway greenhouse effect that made it a 400°C (752°F) hellhole – no atmosphere, or perhaps a different kind of atmosphere not found in our solar system.

Getting an answer is vital because it would reveal if Gliese 12 b can maintain temperatures suitable for liquid water – and possibly life – to exist on its surface, while also unlocking answers about how and why Earth and Venus evolved so differently.

Gliese 12 b is by no means the first Earth-like exoplanet to have been discovered, but as NASA has said, there are only a handful of worlds like it that warrant a closer look.

It has been billed as “the nearest, transiting, temperate, Earth-size world located to date” and a potential target for further investigation by the US space agency’s £7.5billion James Webb Space Telescope.

The closest Earth-like exoplanet to us – and possibly the most famous – is Proxima Centauri b, which is only 4 light-years away. However, because it is not a transiting world we still have a lot to learn about it, including whether it has an atmosphere and the potential to harbour life.

Most exoplanets are discovered using the transit method, where a planet passes in front of its star from our point of view, causing a dip in the host star’s brightness.

During a transit, the star’s light also passes through an exoplanet’s atmosphere and some wavelengths get absorbed. Different gas molecules absorb different colours, so the transit provides a set of chemical fingerprints that can be detected by telescopes like Webb.

Gliese 12 b could also be significant because it may help reveal whether the majority of stars in our Milky Way galaxy – i.e. cool stars – are capable of hosting temperate planets that have atmospheres and are therefore habitable.

The discovery of the ‘exo-Venus’, by two international teams of astronomers, has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

It orbits a cool red dwarf star called Gliese 12, which is almost 40 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Pisces.

“Gliese 12 b represents one of the best targets to study whether Earth-size planets orbiting cool stars can retain their atmospheres, a crucial step to advance our understanding of habitability on planets across our galaxy,” said Shishir Dholakia, a doctoral student at the Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia.

He co-led a research team with Larissa Palethorpe, a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh and University College London.

The exoplanet’s host star is about 27 per cent of the size of our Sun and has a surface temperature that is around 60 per cent of our own star.

However, the distance separating Gliese 12 and the new planet is just 7 per cent of the distance between Earth and the Sun. Gliese 12 b therefore receives 1.6 times more energy from its star as Earth does from the Sun and about 85 per cent of what Venus experiences.

This difference in solar radiation is important because it means the planet’s surface temperature is highly dependent on its atmospheric conditions. As a comparison to Gliese 12 b’s estimated surface temperature of 42°C (107°F), Earth has an average surface temperature of 15°C (59°F).

“Atmospheres trap heat and – depending on the type – can change the actual surface temperature substantially,” Dholakia explained. “We are quoting the planet’s ‘equilibrium temperature’, which is the temperature the planet would be if it had no atmosphere.

“Much of the scientific value of this planet is to understand what kind of atmosphere it could have. Since Gliese 12 b gets in between the amount of light as Earth and Venus get from the Sun, it will be valuable for bridging the gap between these two planets in our solar system.”

Palethorpe added: “It is thought that Earth’s and Venus’s first atmospheres were stripped away and then replenished by volcanic outgassing and bombardments from residual material in the solar system.

“The Earth is habitable, but Venus is not due to its complete loss of water. Because Gliese 12 b is between Earth and Venus in temperature, its atmosphere could teach us a lot about the habitability pathways planets take as they develop.”

The researchers, along with another team in Tokyo, used observations by NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) to help make their discovery.

“We’ve found the nearest, transiting, temperate, Earth-size world located to date,” said Masayuki Kuzuhara, a project assistant professor at the Astrobiology Center in Tokyo, who co-led a research team with Akihiko Fukui, a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo.

“Although we don’t yet know whether it possesses an atmosphere, we’ve been thinking of it as an exo-Venus, with similar size and energy received from its star as our planetary neighbour in the solar system.”

An important factor in retaining an atmosphere is the storminess of its star. Red dwarfs tend to be magnetically active, resulting in frequent, powerful X-ray flares.

However, analyses by both teams conclude that Gliese 12 shows no signs of such extreme behaviour, raising hopes that Gliese 12 b’s atmosphere may still be intact.

“We know of only a handful of temperate planets similar to Earth that are both close enough to us and meet other criteria needed for this kind of study, called transmission spectroscopy, using current facilities,” said Michael McElwain, a research astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-author of the Kuzuhara and Fukui paper.

“To better understand the diversity of atmospheres and evolutionary outcomes for these planets, we need more examples like Gliese 12 b.”

At 40 light-years from Earth, Gliese 12 b is about the same distance as the TRAPPIST-1 system.

This is made up of seven planets, all roughly in Earth’s size range and likely rocky, orbiting a red dwarf star.

Three of these are in the habitable zone but at least two – and probably all of them – have no atmosphere and are likely barren, dismissing hopes when they were first discovered eight years ago that they could be water worlds hosting life.

Anti-Israel students who set up a new “Liberated Zone” encampment at UCLA today are now complaining about the school “not letting food and water in”

The students say it’s “unacceptable”

Do the students think it’s an “open air prison” too? pic.twitter.com/RMxfIsFmdK

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) May 23, 2024