A speaker at a prestigious science conference in India is taking heat for claiming that stem cell technology was actually invented by Hindus — thousands of years ago.
And another academic at the 106th Indian Science Congress used his platform to dismiss the findings of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, claiming neither of them understood physics.
Organizers of the conference, which ran from Jan. 3 to 7, tried to distance themselves from the speakers and their wild remarks.
“We don’t subscribe to their views and distance ourselves from their comments. This is unfortunate,” said Premendu P. Mathur, general secretary of the Indian Scientific Congress Association.
“There is a serious concern about such kind of utterances by responsible people.”
G. Nageshwar Rao, head of a southern Indian university, had cited an old Hindu myth in which a woman has 100 children as proof that stem cell research was discovered on the subcontinent thousands of years ago.
“We had 100 Kauravas from one mother because of stem cell and test tube technology,” said Rao, vice chancellor at Andhra University.
Rao also said a demon king from another ancient Hindu epic had a dozen aircraft and a network of landing strips in modern-day Sri Lanka.
“Hindu Lord Vishnu used guided missiles known as ‘Vishnu Chakra’ and chased moving targets,” he said to the scientists and schoolchildren in attendance.
In another lecture, speaker Kannan Jegathala Krishnan said Newton was wrong about gravity and that Einstein had made a “big blunder.”
“Newton and Einstein did not understand space and physics the way I do,” Krishnan said.
This isn’t the first time that Hindu myths and religion-based theories have made their way into mainstream India.
The minister for higher education, Satyapal Singh, last year said Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was wrong.
Hubble, the trusty space telescope that has been delivering gorgeous views of the cosmos for decades now, just delivered another gift. In a new composite image made up of many individual photos, Hubble shows us the nearby Triangulum galaxy in incredible detail. No, seriously, the final image is so huge that you’d never want to wait for it to load on a web page.
To create the image, Hubble snapped 54 individual photos of the galaxy. Those shots, totaling a jaw-dropping 665 million pixels, were carefully aligned to create a single image that weighs in at over one and a half gigabytes.
The image, which you can download in its full resolution from Hubble’s online portal, is absolutely packed with stars. According to NASA and ESA, the image contains almost 25 million individually resolved stars and you could spend a lifetime verifying whether or not that’s true.
Hubble’s handlers describe the image as follows:
The borders of individual Hubble images trace the jagged edge of the mosaic, which spans 19,400 light years across. Striking areas of star birth glow bright blue throughout the galaxy, particularly in beautiful nebulas of hot, ionized hydrogen gas like star-forming region NGC 604 in the upper left.
“My first impression on seeing the Hubble images was, wow, that really is a lot of star formation,” project lead Julianne Dalcanton of the University of Washington said in a statement. “The star formation rate intensity is 10 times higher than the area surveyed in the Andromeda galaxy in 2015.”
The Triangulum galaxy was chosen for this ultra-high-res photo op because it’s positioned such that we can view its structure in great detail. If it were oriented with its side facing us we’d have a much harder time picking out the millions of individual stars that make up its spiral shape.
Imagine you receive a video of yourself engaged in an explicit sexual act, with a demand to hand over money or else the clip will be sent to your family, friends and co-workers.
Only, it’s not really you, but a shockingly convincing fake that looks and sounds just like you.
Your options are to pay up and hope the blackmailer keeps good on their word or run the gauntlet of convincing everyone — including strangers who find it online — that you’re innocent.
It’s a worrying reality that’s not only possible thanks to rapidly evolving and widely available technology, but already playing out in a new trend called “malicious deepfakes.”
A victim told the Washington Post that she discovered a video of her face digitally stitched onto the body of a adult film actress circulating online.
“I feel violated — this icky kind of violation,” the woman, who is in her 40s, told the newspaper. “It’s this weird feeling, like you want to tear everything off the internet. But you know you can’t.”
The report said similar fakes, made using open source machine learning technology developed by Google, had been used to threaten, intimidate and extort women.
In just one instance, a video described as a “leaked sex tape” — but which is actually a deepfake — has been viewed almost two million times.
“Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body and making it look as eerily realistic as desired,” Johansson said.
Other stars, from Taylor Swift to “Wonder Woman” actress Gal Gadot, have been inserted into similarly vile videos.
But the technology has given those with sinister and malicious motives the opportunity to quickly ruin someone’s life at the click of a mouse.
Held at ransom
In 2016, a man in California was charged with targeting his ex-wife while earlier this year Indian investigative journalist Rana Ayyub found herself the victim of a deepfake video.
It spread quickly via social media in apparent retaliation to a piece she had written exposing government corruption.
“The slut-shaming and hatred felt like being punished by a mob for my work as a journalist, an attempt to silence me,” Ayyub wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times.
“It was aimed at humiliating me, breaking me by trying to define me as a ‘promiscuous’, ‘immoral woman.’”
There are forums online devoted to deepfakes, where users can make requests for women they want inserted into unflattering and usually pornographic scenarios.
And creators charge too — usually about $20 per piece for those wanting fabricated videos of exes, co-workers, friends, enemies and classmates.
With the use of artificial intelligence, the end product looked and sounded just like the former president, except he had never actually uttered those words.
And while the outcome was innocent, fun and purely an example, it showed how easily someone could use the technology for evil.
For the victim interviewed by the Washington Post, it emerged that the creator needed just 450 images of her, all sourced from search engines and social media.
“When a deepfake algorithm is trained on face images of a person, it’s dependent on the photos that are available on the internet that can be used as training data,” Lyu said.
“Even for people who are photographed often, few images are available online showing their eyes closed.
“Without training images of people blinking, deepfake algorithms are less likely to create faces that blink normally.”
However, Lyu admits software designed to scan for fakes is struggling to keep up with advancements in the technology that creates them.
“People who want to confuse the public will get better at making false videos — and we and others in the technology community will need to continue to find ways to detect them.”
Enormous risks
In a research paper published this year, Robert Chesney from the University of Texas and Danielle Citron from the University of Maryland said the damage could be “profound.”
“Victims may feel humiliated and scared,” they wrote.
“When victims discover that they have been used in fake sex videos, the psychological damage may be profound — whether or not this was the aim of the creator of the video.”
They could be used to extort and threaten victims, to spread misinformation in the increasingly worrying era of fake news, or to bribe elected officials, the report warned.
Or these faked clips, which are difficult to detect, could be used to terrify the public — such as “emergency officials ‘announcing’ an impending missile strike on Los Angeles or an emergent pandemic in New York City, provoking panic and worse.”
But policing the internet is a notoriously difficult task.
“Individuals and businesses will face novel forms of exploitation, intimidation, and personal sabotage,” Chesney and Citron wrote. “The risks to our democracy and to national security are profound as well.
“Machine learning techniques are escalating the technology’s sophistication, making deep fakes ever more realistic and increasingly resistant to detection.”
LAUREL, Md. — A NASA spacecraft has gone into orbit around an ancient asteroid, setting a pair of records.
The Osiris-Rex spacecraft entered orbit Monday around the asteroid Bennu, 70 million miles from Earth. It’s the smallest celestial body ever to be orbited by a spacecraft. Bennu is just 1,600 feet across.
The spacecraft’s laps are barely a mile above the asteroid’s surface, another record.
Osiris-Rex arrived at Bennu in early December and flew in formation with it until the latest maneuver. The goal is to grab gravel samples in 2020 for return to Earth in 2023.
The New Year’s Eve milestone occurred just hours before another NASA explorer, New Horizons, was set to fly past an icy space rock beyond Pluto.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has managed to capture some of the most stunning phenomena in the cosmos, and one of the latest images it took showed what it has been dubbed a "holiday wreath."
Last week, NASA released a new image from the Hubble telescope and described it in a statement as "a holiday wreath made of sparkling lights." In the image is the star RS Puppis in the center. The star, which NASA revealed is 200 times larger than our Sun, is surrounded by what the space agency calls a "gossamer cocoon of reflective dust." It appears bright in the image because it is being lit up by the sparkling RS Puppis star.
As to how the Hubble managed to get a clear picture of the so-called "cosmic holiday wreath," the space agency explained in a statement that the telescope captured images of a "light echo."
"Hubble took a series of photos of light flashes rippling across the nebula in a phenomenon known as a 'light echo.' Even though light travels through space fast enough to span the gap between Earth and the Moon in a little over a second, the nebula is so large that reflected light can actually be photographed traversing the nebula," NASA said.
Space Telescope Science said that this particular star is one of the most luminous in the class of Cepheid variable stars. Over a six-week cycle, it brightens and dims gradually, and its average intrinsic brightness is 15,000 times greater than the Sun's luminosity.
This isn't the first time that NASA has released images of beautiful phenomena in the cosmos.
Last month, the space agency's Juno mission produced mesmerizing images of Jupiter's colorful clouds. However, what captured the attention of the internet regarding these photos is the presence of "creatures" within the clouds, such as a "squid," "dolphin" and even a "dragon's eye."
The Juno mission aims to give scientists a better understanding of Jupiter's origin and evolution. Through this, scientists may also discover the secrets of the formation of the solar system. "As our primary example of a giant planet, Jupiter can also provide critical knowledge for understanding the planetary systems being discovered around other stars," NASA said.
Launched on Aug. 5, 2011, NASA's Juno spacecraft arrived in Jupiter in July 2016 and will end its orbit around the planet, and therefore its mission, in July 2021. On Dec. 21, it reached the "halfway point" of its journey.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a stunning "holiday wreath" in the cosmos. Pictured: This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image released 04 December, 2003 shows a festively colored nebula, called NGC 604, one of the largest known seething cauldrons of star birth in a nearby galaxy. NGC 604 is similar to familiar star-birth regions in our Milky Way galaxy, such as the Orion Nebula, but it is vastly larger in extent and contains many more recently formed stars. Photo: Getty Images/NASA
