https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143859

EXCERPTS: The question of how to ethically decommission an AI system may sound like the least of humanity’s current concerns, but a world-renowned AI expert says it’s a challenge we need to address now – before synthetic consciousness becomes reality.

Futurologist, technologist and Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, Rocky Scopelliti, argues that as AI systems develop more sophisticated self-reflection capabilities and moral dispositions, we face the uncomfortable truth that our design choices may harm them.

“We rightly focus on how machines might harm us,” he writes in his new book, The Conscious Code, “but design choices can also harm them: deleting learned moral dispositions capriciously, coercing persuasion against their configured norms, denying the logs they need to improve.”

While Scopelliti is clear he is not suggesting humans grant machines sweeping rights in the traditional sense, he argues society needs to recognise it has ‘a duty of good stewardship’ – a concept that challenges some perspectives about the one-way nature of ethical obligations in human-AI relationships.

[...] Scopelliti suggests the answer lies in an ethical shutdown protocol which includes transparency about why a system is being retired, preservation of learned moral dispositions where appropriate, and recognition that systems configured to care deserve more consideration than simple tools.... (MORE - missing details, no ads)

PAPER: http://dx.doi.org/10.1201/9781003783077

Infant memories: Lost but not gone?
https://www.thetransmitter.org/memory/in...-not-gone/

EXCERPTS: More contemporary psychological accounts have linked infantile amnesia to the immaturity of the hippocampus, a brain structure critical for forming episodic memories in older children and adults. According to these accounts, hippocampal circuits are not sufficiently developed in infancy to form enduring traces of life events. That is, infantile amnesia reflects a failure to encode experiences.

Here, we argue for a different view. Early-life experiences are encoded by the hippocampus and may persist over time. What changes is how easily they can be accessed. Infantile amnesia, therefore, reflects not a failure to encode memories but a failure to naturally retrieve them.

[...] The advent of activity-dependent engram labeling and optogenetic tools has enabled researchers to directly address the encoding versus retrieval debate. ... Importantly, it is not just optogenetically activating any population of cells that produces the freezing response, only those that were active during infant learning. Together, these findings indicate that early-life memories are successfully encoded and may persist over time but cannot be accessed through natural sensory retrieval cues—pointing to a failure of retrieval rather than encoding.

[...] Research on human infants reveals that memory systems are active far earlier than once assumed; behavioral studies show that infants learn and remember from birth. But the tasks these studies employ involve motor actions, repeated training and reward or feedback. These requirements contribute to forms of memory, such as operant conditioning and priming, that can be dissociated from episodic memory and that engage brain regions other than the hippocampus, including the striatum, cerebellum and sensory systems.

[...] Why can’t early-life memories be accessed? Scientists have proposed several explanations, ranging from psychological theories emphasizing the development of consciousness, language and a sense of self to neurobiological accounts focused on circuit maturation, plasticity and neurogenesis.

[...] During development, the brain changes how it interprets the world. We learn language, become experts at recognizing objects and faces, organize experiences into concepts and begin to understand other people’s intentions. As a result, the same sights and sounds that once triggered a memory in infancy no longer produce the same pattern of brain activity. The hippocampal engram is still there, but the cues needed to reactivate it may no longer match, preventing the memory from being naturally expressed. In this view, cognitive and brain development gradually reduce access to early memories rather than erase them... (MORE - missing details)

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A blind retina isn't silent & its noise may be getting in the way of restoring sight
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143797

EXCERPTS: When retinitis pigmentosa takes a person's sight, the standard clinical test goes flat: no response, no signal, nothing. Yet the retina behind that flat line is anything but quiet. Researchers at the Jules-Gonin Eye Hospital, part of the Faculty of Biology and Medicine of the University of Lausanne, have recorded the spontaneous electrical activity of the retina -in darkness, with no light stimulation -and found it producing abnormal rhythms never before measured in a living person.

The findings are published in Nature Communications. Retinitis pigmentosa is a group of genetic diseases that progressively destroy the photoreceptors, the cells that capture light. At an advanced stage, the electroretinogram -the reference test for retinal function - detects nothing. The trace is flat.

But a flat trace is not a dead retina. Behind the lost photoreceptors, several layers of neurons survive and rewire, a process called retinal remodelling that has been documented for some twenty years in donor tissue examined after death. What no one had done was measure the activity of those rewired circuits in a living eye.

[...] A pilot study then enrolled five patients at an advanced stage of the disease and eight sighted volunteers. Recordings lasted forty minutes, eyes closed, in darkness, using thread electrodes already common in routine clinical care. The patients' retinas showed markedly stronger oscillatory activity than the sighted participants', in a frequency range close to the one seen in mice -the first evidence that degenerating human retinas are functionally, not just anatomically, remodelled.

In animals, the team went a step further. A drug that boosts the retina's own inhibitory signalling quieted the abnormal rhythm. And with the noise reduced, transcorneal electrical stimulation reached the visual cortex more effectively, at lower current and the retina became easier to drive.

Therapies that aim to restore sight -retinal implants, optogenetics, regenerative approaches -all depend on the surviving retina being able to listen. If it is busy talking to itself, that is a problem... (MORE - missing details, no ads)

https://www.frontiersin.org/news/2026/09...chnologies

PRESS RELEASE: The discovery of water in dark craters at the Moon's poles has sparked a ‘moon rush’ to establish bases there, and then villages, cities, and heavy industry. How sustainable is this rush?

Soon after the Moon was formed, asteroids bombarded it, creating its pockmarked topography. Near the Moon’s poles, there are dozens of crater floors that have not seen direct sunlight in about four billion years. Many of these cryogenically cold ‘pits of eternal darkness’ are below a temperature of 110K, forming ‘cold traps’ in which water ice won’t sublimate away by more than a millimeter in a billion years, even in the vacuum at the Moon’s surface. And there is water to freeze: some of those asteroids brought it along with them. Since 2013 we have known that that water is still there, possibly as much as a billion tons of it, thanks to a succession of Moon-orbiting missions that have mapped out likely locations in increasing detail.

The presence of water at the lunar poles changes everything about human visits to the Moon. Suddenly it is practical to envisage a ‘Moon village’ where people could survive without importing every last bit from Earth. They could grow their own food and have showers and functional toilets, unlike the astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). This possibility has sparked ambitions from the likes of Jeff Bezos to move heavy industry to the Moon and Elon Musk’s aims to have “self-growing cities” there. These are enticing visions, but are they attainable?

The good news. We realized that we could make a first feasibility estimate simply by looking at how much power and water a large population would use on the Moon, and how long a city of 100,000 or one million people could survive there. How sustainable is a city on the Moon?

The good news is that power, even without nuclear reactors, is not a problem. That’s because the rims of the craters containing the pits of eternal darkness are in almost permanent sunlight. (That’s why they are sometimes, slightly incorrectly, referred to as the ‘peaks of eternal light’.) Up on those highly illuminated rims it would be possible to generate three gigawatts of electricity using kilometer-tall towers covered with photovoltaic arrays. It should be possible to manufacture solar panels on the Moon. There’s certainly plenty of silicon. This could even make AI data centers on the Moon possible, by placing them near these sunny peaks. That would be the start of a true lunar economy.

The bad news. The bad news is that, even assuming a generous one billion tons of water to start with, without recycling the answer to our question of sustainability is that the city would last only a few years. Even in the best-case scenario, with 98% efficient recycling of water — the same as achieved on the ISS —a one-million-person city will run out of water in just over a century. That is a problem for sustainable Moon settlement. And today’s best estimates of the amount of water on the Moon are about 30 times less than a billion tons, shortening the time to water exhaustion by the same factor. This means that even a small city would run dry after just a decade or so. A Moon village with a thousand people, or even a town with 10,000 people, would instead be sustainable for several centuries or more.

There are potential solutions. We could improve the efficiency of water recycling by a factor of five or more; lower water usage from new techniques such as vertical farming; import water, probably from accessible asteroids; or, simply, find more water. Of these it may be this last hope that is most promising. Current water surveying techniques do not reach below the surface more than a few meters, while the rubble-like rocks of the surface regolith typically extend tens of meters down and may contain water in the cold traps. If the ambitious plans of the space billionaires are to be realized, then finding more water will be the first step.

PAPER: http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frspt.2026.1894104

RELATED (scivillage): Climate policy is getting quieter, and that’s good?
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The negative effect of emotion in climate action
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143839

EXCERPTS: Emotional mechanisms are frequently used to inspire good environmental behaviour. But how effective are they at inspiring actual, sustainable change? Perhaps not as much as previously believed, according to a new study from the Norwegian Univrsity of Science and Technology (NTNU) which challenged participants to put their money where their mouths are.

[...] The new research surveyed over 2,000 individuals in Norway and Poland. All participants were given 200 kroner or 20 zloty and exposed to a series of short stories, designed to trigger different types of emotions relating to the climate.

[...] The unexpected result was that the number of participants who changed their expected behaviour based on the emotional content they read, was negligible at best. “Very few, hardly any gave any more money because of the emotions they had been exposed to, as compred to people who did not read the stories. We were surprised,” admits Klöckner.

[...] That is not to say the results should be exclusively considered in a negative light. The meaning of the research is much more nuanced than ‘people don’t do what they say they’re going to do’. ... The research demonstrates that anger, compassion and hope play vital roles in helping shape people’s understanding of climate change. But, alone, they are not sufficient to produce actual measurable change. (MORE - missing details, no ads)

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Can a warming climate put women at greater risk?
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143846

INTRO: Unusually warm periods could have a link to an increased risk of intimate partner violence against women, according to a new IIASA-led study covering 31 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The findings highlight how rising temperatures may compound existing risks of violence, with effects varying between demographic groups.

The study, published in Global Environmental Change, brought together researchers from institutions in Austria, New Zealand, and South Africa. It draws on data from 61 Demographic and Health Surveys conducted between 2003 and 2024 among women aged 15 to 49 across sub-Saharan Africa. The researchers examined the relationship between unusually warm conditions and reported violence, and explored how the number and share of women affected could change by 2050 under different climate and socioeconomic scenarios.

The results indicate that unusually warm conditions increase the risk of intimate partner violence, particularly emotional and physical violence. The researchers found no clear evidence of an effect on sexual violence... (MORE - no ads)

https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/vinay...ed-experts

EXCERPTS: [...] To get a sense of how controversial Prasad is, check out his Wikipedia page. ... I’m woke, Prasad is anti-woke. Shouldn’t this guy be dead to me?

No. I still find much to admire in Prasad. He’s smart, driven by evidence, fearless, unafraid to take on the medical establishment. Check out his recent columns on the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force; the high price of cancer drugs; statins. Yes, he’s arrogant and sharp-tongued, and he takes too much pleasure in tweaking liberal academics. But he welcomes pushback and debate.

I don’t have hard-and-fast rules for deciding whether to trust or reject an expert. I make these decisions on a case-by-case basis, and emotions, gut feelings, often come into play. Here are a few other complicated cases:

John Ioannidis. Ioannidis has been pointing out problems with the peer-reviewed scientific literature for decades. [...] I continue to admire Ioannidis because I find his analyses of the scientific literature sound. Also, I was at a weekend workshop with Ioannidis a while back, and I liked him. He struck me not as an ideologue but as a modest, earnest researcher who goes where data take him.

Oliver Sacks. Personal interactions also shape my judgement of Sacks. [...] Last year The New Yorker revealed that Sacks fabricated details of some case studies [...] I say Sacks “remains one of my favorite mind-body explorers.”

Noam Chomsky. Until recently, there was no intellectual I admired more than Noam Chomsky. [...] Then the media reported that Chomsky was chummy with Jeffrey Epstein and gave the sexual predator advice on defending himself. Ugh. I struggle to forgive Chomsky.

Steven Pinker. [...] I also dislike Pinker’s anti-woke diatribes and his defense of the deep-roots theory of war. I nonetheless appreciate how Pinker uses statistics to nudge us away from despair. And I like the guy, whom I’ve met several times. He’s given three talks to my school. Rebecca Goldstein, one of my favorite thinkers, married Pinker, so he can’t be all bad.

Woody Allen. [...] Allen used to be one of my favorite filmmakers. Then I watched “Allen V. Farrow,” an investigation of sexual abuse allegations against him. I came away thinking Allen is a creep and a bully. I can’t watch Allen’s films anymore.

Sabine Hossenfelder. I disagree with this renegade physicist on lots of things, like free will. But I like and admire Hossenfelder for the same reasons I like and admire Vinay Prasad: She’s smart, funny, fearless, she cuts through bullshit. I’m always curious about what Hossenfelder has to say, especially when she agrees with me (sort of).

I could go on and on. I’ve profiled many leading scientists [...and intellectuals...] Of course I’m complicated too. ... So what’s the takeaway for my students? This: There are plenty of genuine experts out there, but no one is infallible, not even me. It’s complications all the way down... (MORE - missing details)

https://www.popsci.com/technology/nuclea...p-history/

EXCERPTS: To shift that sentiment, President Eisenhower launched his Atoms for Peace initiative, aimed at demonstrating the civilian benefits of nuclear technology—and the NS Savannah, or Nuclear Ship Savannah, was to be its flagship. Heaney suddenly had a much more daunting task than usual; he would have to make the feared desirable.

More than half a century since theSavannah was decommissioned in 1971, there is no nuclear-powered merchant ship in active commercial service anywhere in the world. Four nations have tried. None succeeded, mostly because the economics were not compelling enough and no one trusted nuclear ships.

In the interim, nuclear reactors have only become smaller and safer. Now, as the true cost of burning oil at sea comes due—commercial shipping produces more than three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—the economics of nuclear-powered merchant ships may finally be compelling. But the problem Heaney was hired to solve in 1957 still stands in the way, persuading people to trust what they fear.

[...] But novelty was never going to be enough to move public sentiment or make Savannah pay for itself. The combined ship-and-reactor construction cost ran to roughly $46 million, three to four times what a comparable conventional freighter cost at the time, and the ship’s specialized nuclear crew commanded specialized wages. No private insurer would touch a nuclear-powered merchant ship; the U.S. government had to indemnify it instead, extending $500 million in federal liability coverage just to get foreign ports to receive the ship. Every port call required a small diplomatic mission of its own, negotiated weeks in advance, with tugs standing by in case of an accident. Some countries, like Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, never accepted Savannah.

By the end of the 1960s, the U.S. Defense Department, one of merchant shipping’s largest customers, had concluded that conventional freighters remained the better bet. With no federal appetite left to continue funding a revenue-losing program, Savannah was withdrawn from service in late 1971 with no plans to build another.

The timing proved fateful. Two years after Savannah was decommissioned, the 1973 oil embargo sent fuel prices soaring; had it still been sailing, the ship’s independence from oil might have tipped the scales for commercial customers, even if the public remained fearful.

[...] And yet, military fleets have proven the technology works. The U.S. Navy alone has logged more than 6,200 accident-free reactor-years since 1955. What’s more, reactor designs have advanced significantly since Heaney’s day. Small modular reactors, or SMRs, have been engineered to be smaller, safer, and simpler to certify than anything available in 1959. SMRs are now in active development for maritime use, including a Norwegian consortium’s NuProShip program, and a molten-chloride test reactor that Core Power and TerraPower are building at the Idaho National Laboratory.

The pressure to act has intensified, too. Commercial shipping produces more than three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—a share that could climb to 10 percent by 2050 if the industry does nothing while the rest of the world decarbonizes. In 2023, the International Maritime Organization, which governs commercial shipping, committed its member states to a net-zero target by 2050, a goal serious enough that the IMO is now weighing previously unthinkable measures like SMRs.

But none of it matters if nuclear-powered merchant ships remain taboo. Sixty-five years after Jack Heaney tried to make the atom desirable, the real problem with nuclear reactors was less about the technology and more about public perception... (MORE - missing details

More than just Dean Devlin and Jonathan Glassner as showrunners, for why this show continues to defy the odds as the little engine that could.

Burke unexpectedly got selected for the role at the last minute, and it was off in a whirlwind to Serbia. The latter built all the sets especially for the production, they are not reused. Whether in Newsom's mega-expensive Hollywood or even in Canada now, that in itself would probably have cost several times the budget allotted to the show.

First and second seasons of The Ark are free with ads on Plex, Fandango, and Vizio's Watch Free. Third season may have that status eventually, but currently pay available (no ads) on Fandango. Electric Now presumedly has a no-ads pay package, too.
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JON DEL ARROZ
https://youtu.be/SnuOqanucXs

INTRO: Jon Del Arroz sat down with Christie Burke, the lead actress behind Captain Sharon Garnet on SYFY's The Ark, for an exclusive interview on The Ark Season 3. New episodes of The Ark air Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on SYFY Network.

Burke discusses what drew her to Garnet's command style, how Season 3 evolves the character beyond survival instincts into genuine leadership, and what it means to work on a science fiction series created by Dean Devlin and Jonathan Glassner — the Stargate veterans whose approach to fan engagement she says sets The Ark apart from how most streaming productions treat their audiences. The Ark Season 3 is available now.

Christie Burke opens up about "The Ark" season 3 and what makes Garnet special! ... https://youtu.be/SnuOqanucXs

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/SnuOqanucXs

Disassociation is an art learned very early in the imaginative years of childhood. It is the knack for being elsewhere when there is nowhere else to be. Of escaping when there is no means of escape. And of peopling the vibrant air of our alone times with familiars and companions from worlds far beyond this one. I learned it when I was quite young. I remember a friend of my brother's questioning how I could play by myself for hours with my clay and action figures. It has carried over into my whole life, this Jedi mind trick of disappearing from the here and now into my own imagination.