Faculty Positions in Academy of Film and Creative Technology Times Higher Education
Click the Source link for more details
Faculty Positions in Academy of Film and Creative Technology – Times Higher Education
What Happened on September 5
Major Events
- 1839 First Opium War begins between the British Empire and the Qing dynasty of China
- 1958 First color video recording on magnetic tape is presented in Charlotte, North Carolina
- 2017 Hurricane Irma becomes one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin region with winds of 185 mph (280 km/h)
Sep 5 in Sport
- 1972 Eleven Israeli athletes are taken hostage and later killed by the Palestinian group Black September group at the Munich Olympics
Did You Know?Famous Weddings
- 1725 French King Louis XV (15) marries Polish princess Marie Leszczyńska (22)
- 1945 American singer-songwriter Boudleaux Bryant (25) weds aspiring songwriter Matilda Scaduto (19), whom he called ‘Felice’, five days after meeting, in Newport, Kentucky, until his death in 1987
- 1959 American motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel (20) weds Linda Joan Bork; divorce in 1997
Famous Divorces
- 1980 American lawyer Kathleen St. Johns divorces American best-selling author Michael Crichton (37) after nearly 2 years of marriage
Articles, Photos and Quiz
Click the Source link for more details
Ultra-Processed Foods Add Fat Without Extra Calories and Disrupt Hormones
Ultra-processed foods don’t just pack on pounds — they change the body in hidden ways.
In a tightly controlled study, young men gained more fat mass on a processed diet even when calorie counts were the same as unprocessed meals. Researchers also found worrying spikes in plastic-derived chemicals, along with drops in testosterone and other key fertility hormones.
Obesity, Diabetes, and Sperm Decline
Over the last 50 years, obesity and type 2 diabetes have climbed dramatically, while sperm quality has steadily declined. One factor that may be fueling these troubling shifts is the growing reliance on ultra-processed foods, which have been tied to numerous health problems. What scientists still debate is whether the harm comes from the industrial ingredients, the processing methods, or simply because these foods make people eat more than they need.
A new study provides fresh insight. Researchers found that people put on more weight when eating an ultra-processed diet compared to a diet of minimally processed foods, even though both contained the exact same number of calories. The human trial also revealed that ultra-processed meals exposed participants to higher levels of pollutants already linked to lower sperm quality. The work was published in the journal Cell Metabolism.
Proving the Hidden Harm
“Our results prove that ultra-processed foods harm our reproductive and metabolic health, even if they’re not eaten in excess. This indicates that it is the processed nature of these foods that makes them harmful,” says Jessica Preston, lead author of the study, who carried out the research during her PhD at the University of Copenhagen’s NNF Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR).
Same Calories, Different Outcomes
To get the best possible data, the scientists compared the health impact of unprocessed and ultra-processed diets on the same person. They recruited 43 men aged 20 to 35, who spent three weeks on each of the two diets, with three months ‘washout’ in between. Half started on the ultra-processed and half started on the unprocessed diet. Half of the men also received a high-calorie diet with an extra 500 daily calories, while half received the normal amount of calories for their size, age and physical activity levels. They were not told which diet they were on. Both the unprocessed and ultra-processed diets had the same amount of calories, protein, carbs and fats.
Men gained around 1 kg more of fat mass while on the ultra-processed diet compared to the unprocessed diet, regardless of whether they were on the normal or excess calorie diet. Several other markers of cardiovascular health were also affected.
Ultra-Processed Foods Polluted With Toxins
The scientists also discovered a worrying increase in the level of the hormone-disrupting phthalate cxMINP, a substance used in plastics, in men on the ultra-processed diet. Men on this diet also saw decreases in their levels of testosterone and follicle-stimulating hormone, which are crucial for sperm production.
“We were shocked by how many body functions were disrupted by ultra-processed foods, even in healthy young men. The long-term implications are alarming and highlight the need to revise nutritional guidelines to better protect against chronic disease,” says the study’s senior author Professor Romain Barrès from the University of Copenhagen’s NNF Center for Basic Metabolic Research, and the Université Côte d’Azur.
Reference: “Effect of ultra-processed food consumption on male reproductive and metabolic health” by Jessica M. Preston, Jo Iversen, Antonia Hufnagel, Line Hjort, Jodie Taylor, Clara Sanchez, Victoria George, Ann N. Hansen, Lars Ängquist, Susan Hermann, Jeffrey M. Craig, Signe Torekov, Christian Lindh, Karin S. Hougaard, Marcelo A. Nóbrega, Stephen J. Simpson and Romain Barrès, 28 August 2025, Cell Metabolism.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2025.08.004
Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.
Click the Source link for more details
UCLA Engineers Build Room-Temperature Quantum-Inspired Computer
Experimental device harnesses quantum properties for efficient processing at room temperature.
Engineers are working to design computers capable of handling a difficult class of tasks known as combinatorial optimization problems. These challenges are central to many everyday applications, including telecommunications planning, scheduling, and route optimization for travel.
Current computing technologies face physical limits on how much processing power can be built into a chip, and the energy required to train artificial intelligence models is enormous.
A collaborative team from UCLA and UC Riverside has introduced a new strategy to address these limitations and tackle some of the hardest optimization problems. Instead of representing all information digitally, their system processes data through a network of oscillators — components that shift back and forth at defined frequencies. This architecture, called an Ising machine, excels at parallel computing, enabling many calculations to run at the same time. The solution to the problem is reached when the oscillators fall into synchrony.
Quantum properties at room temperature
In their report published in Physical Review Applied, the researchers described a device that relies on quantum properties connecting electrical activity with vibrations inside a material. Unlike most existing quantum computing approaches, which must be cooled to extremely low temperatures to preserve their quantum state, this device can function at room temperature.
“Our approach is physics-inspired computing, which has recently emerged as a promising method to solve complex optimization problems,” said corresponding author Alexander Balandin, the Fang Lu Professor of Engineering and distinguished professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “It leverages physical phenomena involving strongly correlated electron–phonon condensate to perform computation through physical processes directly, thus achieving greater energy efficiency and speed.”
Materials linking quantum and classical physics
The research showed that oscillators naturally evolve to a ground state, in which they’re synced up, allowing the machine to solve combinatorial optimization problems.
Balandin and his colleagues used a special material to bridge the gap between quantum mechanics — counterintuitive rules governing interactions between subatomic particles — and the more familiar physics of everyday life. Their prototype hardware is based on a form of tantalum sulfide, a “quantum material” that makes it possible to reveal the switching between electrical and vibrational phases.
The new technology has the potential for low-power operation; at the same time, it can be compatible with conventional silicon technology.
“Any new physics-based hardware has to be integrated with the standard digital silicon CMOS technology to impact data information processing systems,” said Balandin, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, or CNSI. “The two-dimensional charge-density-wave material that we selected for this demonstration has the potential for such integration.”
Reference: “Charge-density-wave quantum oscillator networks for solving combinatorial optimization problems” by Jonas Olivier Brown, Taosha Guo, Fabio Pasqualetti and Alexander A. Balandin, 18 August 2025, Physical Review Applied.
DOI: 10.1103/zmlj-6nn7
The coupled oscillators in this research were built at the UCLA Nanofabrication Laboratory, jointly run by CNSI and UCLA Samueli, and tested in UCLA’s Phonon Optimized Engineered Materials laboratory.
The study was funded by the Office of Naval Research and the Army Research Office.
Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.
Click the Source link for more details
Neolithic Mendik Tepe Site Discovered In Southeastern Türkiye Is Older Than Gobeklitepe
Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – Mendik Tepe, with its earliest Neolithic layers, is located in the rural Payamli area of Eyyubiye, Sanliurfa Province, and was discovered by Fatma Sahin, the excavation director of Cakmaktepe, where excavation efforts at Çakmaktepe began in 2021.
An aerial view of the excavations carried out at Mendik Tepe, which is thought to be older than Gobeklitepe, described as the “zero point of history” and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2018, and Karahantepe in Sanliurfa, Türkiye, Aug. 27, 2025. (AA Photo)
Now, the site is investigated by Professor Douglas Baird of the University of Liverpool in collaboration with Turkish and British institutions. The excavations are part of the wider Taş Tepeler (“Stone Hills”) project, in which are included several Neolithic sites in the region.
This systematic approach enables researchers to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the network of prehistoric settlements that emerged in this region thousands of years ago.
The findings suggest that Mendik Tepe belongs to the dawn of the Neolithic. Although it is associated with Göbekli Tepe and Karahantepe, its structures show unique forms and may even precede them, ” explains Douglas Baird
Mendik Tepe is very ancient site, but initial analyses indicate that it can be dated to the dawn of the Neolithic period, even be older than Göbekli Tepe, dated to around 9600 BC.
Image credit: AA
Should these assumptions be validated, researchers say, we will be confronted with a discovery of an enormous significance. The Neolithic transformation is believed to have started in southeastern Turkey over 11,000 years ago.
It was then that people began to move from the nomadic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers to a sedentary style. Baird points out that Mendik Tepe may be the key to understanding how and why people abandoned nomadic gathering and settled permanently, starting to grow plants.
Mendik Tepe stands out for its multifunctional character against the background of other positions from this period.
Image credit: AA
Archaeologists have discovered structures of varying size and purpose, suggesting a complex social organization. Three types of structures were identified at the site: small structures with a diameter of approximately 3 meters (likely used for storing or preparing food), medium-sized buildings with a diameter of 4-5 meters (which could have served as houses), and large structures of likely ritual significance.
Mendik Tepe is set apart from Göbekli Tepe by its diverse range of functions. While Göbekli Tepe primarily served as a ritual center, Mendik Tepe appears to have been a place where daily life and spiritual practices coexisted. This distinction highlights the multifaceted role that Mendik Tepe played in its historical context.
Mendik Tepe’s architecture is also fascinating.
Unlike the characteristic T-shaped pillars found at Göbekli Tepe and Karahantepe, Mendik Tepe is distinguished by vertical stones of various forms.
Written by Conny Waters – AncientPages.com Staff Writer
Click the Source link for more details
Mystery Of The Cursed Ancient Temple With Treasures Guarded By Serpents
Ellen Lloyd – AncientPages.com – This ancient and enigmatic temple, with its perilous vaults, has captivated the imagination for generations. Legends speak of a curse that befalls those who dare to violate this sacred site.
When treasure seekers attempted to breach the temple’s defenses, deadly serpents reportedly emerged from one of the vaults. Could there truly be a curse at play? Stories suggest that using man-made technology to open the mysterious vault triggers calamities around the temple grounds.
It is said that there is only one specific method for unlocking its secrets; any other approach invites disaster. The fear of this curse has persisted through time, as tales of the temple have been passed down through countless generations.
This is a preview of our premium article available only to members of Ancient Pages.
Become a member to read more – Click here
If you are already a member and have logged in to your account, you can access the article here
See also:
Remarkable Ancient Treasure Found By Man In Ohio Who Refuses To Reveal The Location
Spooky Forest Hiding Cursed Ancient Treasures And A Mysterious Armored Skeleton
Mysterious Ancient Tracks In Rock, Strange Legend And Hidden Treasure – A Puzzle From Arkansas
Click the Source link for more details
The Startling Healing Shortcut That Might Also Fuel Cancer
Scientists have uncovered a strange and messy new way that injured cells may heal themselves.
In addition to known processes like programmed cell death and controlled recycling, researchers discovered that cells can suddenly “vomit” their internal machinery, purging themselves to reset into a stem cell-like state. This shortcut, called cathartocytosis, speeds up regeneration but leaves behind waste that may fuel chronic inflammation and cancer.
A Hidden Cellular Purge
When cells are injured, they activate a series of carefully controlled responses to repair the damage. These include a well-known self-destruct routine that removes dead or defective cells, along with a more recently recognized ability for aging cells to revert to a younger state so they can rebuild healthy tissue.
In a new study using mice, researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Baylor College of Medicine uncovered another healing strategy that had not been seen before. The team identified a cellular purge that helps damaged cells quickly reset into a stem cell-like form. They named this newly described process cathartocytosis, drawing from Greek words meaning cellular cleansing.
The findings, published in Cell Reports, came from experiments on stomach injury. By using this model, scientists were able to examine how cells succeed or fail at repairing themselves after being harmed by infection or inflammatory disease.
A Cellular Cleanse With a Twist
“After an injury, the cell’s job is to repair that injury. But the cell’s mature cellular machinery for doing its normal job gets in the way,” said first author Jeffrey W. Brown, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology at WashU Medicine. “So, this cellular cleanse is a quick way of getting rid of that machinery so it can rapidly become a small, primitive cell capable of proliferating and repairing the injury. We identified this process in the GI tract, but we suspect it is relevant in other tissues as well.”
Brown compared cathartocytosis to “vomiting” out cellular waste, a shortcut that allows the cell to clear clutter and concentrate on rebuilding tissue faster than it could through the slower, step-by-step breakdown of waste.
But shortcuts often come with drawbacks. The researchers note that cathartocytosis is rapid but disorderly, which could explain why some healing processes fail, particularly during long-term injury. If the process continues unchecked, as during infection, it may lead to chronic inflammation and ongoing cellular damage, conditions that create fertile ground for cancer. The buildup of expelled waste itself may also serve as a marker for tracking or detecting cancer, the investigators said.
A Novel Cellular Process
The researchers identified cathartocytosis within an important regenerative injury response called paligenosis, which was first described in 2018 by the current study’s senior author, Jason C. Mills, MD, PhD. Now at the Baylor College of Medicine, Mills began this work while he was a faculty member in the Division of Gastroenterology at WashU Medicine and Brown was a postdoctoral researcher in his lab.
In paligenosis, injured cells shift away from their normal roles and undergo a reprogramming process to an immature state, behaving like rapidly dividing stem cells, as happens during development. Originally, the researchers assumed the decluttering of cellular machinery in preparation for this reprogramming happens entirely inside cellular compartments called lysosomes, where waste is digested in a slow and contained process.
From Dismissed Debris to Discovery
From the start, though, the researchers noticed debris outside the cells. They initially dismissed this as unimportant, but the more external waste they saw in their early studies, the more Brown began to suspect that something deliberate was going on. He utilized a model of mouse stomach injury that triggered the reprogramming of mature cells to a stem cell state all at once, making it obvious that the “vomiting” response — now happening in all the stomach cells simultaneously — was a feature of paligenosis, not a bug. In other words, the vomiting process was not just an accidental spill here and there but a newly identified, standard way cells behaved in response to injury.
Although they discovered cathartocytosis happening during paligenosis, the researchers said cells could potentially use cathartocytosis to jettison waste in other, more worrisome situations, like giving mature cells that ability to start to act like cancer cells.
The Downside to Downsizing
While the newly discovered cathartocytosis process may help injured cells proceed through paligenosis and regenerate healthy tissue more rapidly, the tradeoff comes in the form of additional waste products that could fuel inflammatory states, making chronic injuries harder to resolve and correlating with increased risk of cancer development.
“In these gastric cells, paligenosis — reversion to a stem cell state for healing — is a risky process, especially now that we’ve identified the potentially inflammatory downsizing of cathartocytosis within it,” Mills said. “These cells in the stomach are long-lived, and aging cells acquire mutations. If many older mutated cells revert to stem cell states in an effort to repair an injury — and injuries also often fuel inflammation, such as during an infection — there’s an increased risk of acquiring, perpetuating, and expanding harmful mutations that lead to cancer as those stem cells multiply.”
Infection, Inflammation, and Cancer
More research is needed, but the authors suspect that cathartocytosis could play a role in perpetuating injury and inflammation in Helicobacter pylori infections in the gut. H. pylori is a type of bacteria known to infect and damage the stomach, causing ulcers and increasing the risk of stomach cancer.
The findings also could point to new treatment strategies for stomach cancer and perhaps other GI cancers. Brown and WashU Medicine collaborator Koushik K. Das, MD, an associate professor of medicine, have developed an antibody that binds to parts of the cellular waste ejected during cathartocytosis, providing a way to detect when this process may be happening, especially in large quantities. In this way, cathartocytosis might be used as a marker of precancerous states that could allow for early detection and treatment.
Guiding Healing Without Harm
“If we have a better understanding of this process, we could develop ways to help encourage the healing response and perhaps, in the context of chronic injury, block the damaged cells undergoing chronic cathartocytosis from contributing to cancer formation,” Brown said.
Reference: “Cathartocytosis: Jettisoning of cellular material during reprogramming of differentiated cells” by Jeffrey W. Brown, Xiaobo Lin, Gabriel Anthony Nicolazzi, Xuemei Liu, Thanh Nguyen, Megan D. Radyk, Joseph Burclaff and Jason C. Mills, 30 July 2025, Cell Reports.
DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2025.116070
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant numbers K08DK132496, R21AI156236, P30DK052574, P30DK056338, R01DK105129, R01CA239645, F31DK136205, K99GM159354 and F31CA236506; the Department of Defense, grant number W81XWH-20-1-0630; the American Gastroenterological Association, grant numbers AGA2021-5101 and AGA2024-13-01; and a Philip and Sima Needleman Student Fellowship in Regenerative Medicine. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.
Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.
Click the Source link for more details
Tiny Lab-Grown Spinal Cords Could Hold the Key to Healing Paralysis
Researchers have created a remarkable new approach to repairing spinal cord injuries by merging 3D printing, stem cells, and lab-grown tissues.
They engineered tiny scaffolds that guide stem cells to form nerve fibers capable of bridging severed spinal cords. In experiments with rats, this method restored nerve connections and movement, offering new hope that one day similar techniques could help people living with paralysis.
Breakthrough in Spinal Cord Injury Treatment
For the first time, scientists at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have successfully combined 3D printing, stem cell science, and lab-grown tissues to explore a new approach for treating spinal cord injuries.
Details of the work appear in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Spinal cord injuries affect more than 300,000 people in the United States, according to the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center. There is still no treatment that can fully reverse the paralysis and long-term damage these injuries cause. One of the biggest barriers to recovery is that nerve cells die, and the remaining fibers cannot regrow across the site of injury. The Minnesota team designed their study to directly address this challenge.
3D-Printed Scaffolds and Stem Cells
The researchers developed a specialized 3D-printed structure known as an organoid scaffold. This tiny framework contains microscopic channels that are filled with spinal neural progenitor cells (sNPCs). These cells, which originate from human adult stem cells, can divide and develop into specific types of mature nerve cells.
“We use the 3D printed channels of the scaffold to direct the growth of the stem cells, which ensures the new nerve fibers grow in the desired way,” said Guebum Han, a former University of Minnesota mechanical engineering postdoctoral researcher and first author on the paper who currently works at Intel Corporation. “This method creates a relay system that when placed in the spinal cord bypasses the damaged area.”
Successful Transplants in Animal Models
In their study, the researchers transplanted these scaffolds into rats with spinal cords that were completely severed. The cells successfully differentiated into neurons and extended their nerve fibers in both directions—rostral (toward the head) and caudal (toward the tail)—to form new connections with the host’s existing nerve circuits.
The new nerve cells integrated seamlessly into the host spinal cord tissue over time, leading to significant functional recovery in the rats.
The method involves creating a unique 3D-printed framework for lab-grown organs, called an organoid scaffold, with microscopic channels. Credit: McAlpine Research Group, University of Minnesota
Toward Future Clinical Translation
“Regenerative medicine has brought about a new era in spinal cord injury research,” said Ann Parr, professor of neurosurgery at the University of Minnesota. “Our laboratory is excited to explore the future potential of our ‘mini spinal cords’ for clinical translation.”
While the research is in its beginning stages, it offers a new avenue of hope for those with spinal cord injuries. The team hopes to scale up production and continue developing this combination of technologies for future clinical applications.
Reference: “3D-Printed Scaffolds Promote Enhanced Spinal Organoid Formation for Use in Spinal Cord Injury” by Guebum Han, Nicolas S. Lavoie, Nandadevi Patil, Olivia G. Korenfeld, Hyunjun Kim, Manuel Esguerra, Daeha Joung, Michael C. McAlpine and Ann M. Parr, 23 July 2025, Advanced Healthcare Materials.
DOI: 10.1002/adhm.202404817
In addition to Han and Parr, the team included Hyunjun Kim and Michael McAlpine from the University of Minnesota Department of Mechanical Engineering; Nicolas S. Lavoie, Nandadevi Patil and Olivia G. Korenfeld from the University of Minnesota Department of Neurosurgery; Manuel Esguerra from the University of Minnesota Department of Neuroscience; and Daeha Joung from the Department of Physics at Virginia Commonwealth University.
This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the State of Minnesota Spinal Cord Injury and Traumatic Brain Injury Research Grant Program and the Spinal Cord Society.
Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.
Click the Source link for more details
AI the Latest Instance of our Capacity for Innovation Outstripping our Capacity for Ethics — History News Network
The eagerness with which movie and television studios have proposed to use artificial intelligence to write content collides with the concern of Writers Guild members for their employment security and pay in the latest episode of technological innovation running ahead of ethical deliberation.
Regarding modern technology, the psychologist Steven Pinker and the economist/environmentalist E. F. Schumacher have expressed opposite opinions. In his Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018), the former is full of optimism–e.g.,“technology is our best hope of cheating death”–but many decades earlier Schumacher stated that it was “the greatest destructive force in modern society.” And he warned, “Whatever becomes technologically possible . . . must be done. Society must adapt itself to it. The question whether or not it does any good is ruled out.”
Now, in 2023, looking over all the technological developments of the last century, I think Schumacher’s assessment was more accurate. I base this judgment on recent developments in spyware and Artificial Intelligence (AI). They have joined the ranks of nuclear weapons, our continuing climate crisis, and social media in inclining me to doubt humans’ ability to control the Frankensteinian monsters they have created. The remainder of this essay will indicate why I have made this judgment.
Before taking up the specific modern technological developments mentioned above, our main failing can be stated: The structures that we have developed to manage technology are woefully inadequate. We have possessed neither the values nor wisdom necessary to do so. Several quotes reinforce this point.
One is General Omar Bradley’s: “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.”
More recently, psychologist and futurist Tom Lombardo has observed that “the overriding goal” of technology has often been “to make money . . . without much consideration given to other possible values or consequences.”
Finally, the following words of Schumacher are still relevant:
“The exclusion of wisdom from economics, science, and technology was something which we could perhaps get away with for a little while, as long as we were relatively unsuccessful; but now that we have become very successful, the problem of spiritual and moral truth moves into the central position. . . . Ever-bigger machines, entailing ever-bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever-greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the nonviolent, the elegant and beautiful.”
“Woefully inadequate” structures to oversee technological developments. How so? Some 200 governments are responsible for overseeing such changes in their countries. In capitalist countries, technological advances often come from individuals or corporations interested in earning profits–or sometimes from governments sponsoring research for military reasons. In countries where some form of capitalism is not dominant, what determines technological advancements? Military needs? The whims of authoritarian rulers or elites? Show me a significant country where the advancement of the common good is seriously considered when contemplating new technology.
Two main failings leap out at us. The first, Schumacher observed a half century ago–capitalism’s emphasis on profits rather than wisdom. Secondly–and it’s connected with a lack of wisdom–too many “bad guys,” leaders like Hitler, Stalin, Putin, and Trump, have had tremendous power yet poor values.
Now, however, on to the five specific technological developments mentioned above. First, nuclear weapons. From the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 until the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, concerns about the unleashing of a nuclear holocaust topped our list of possible technological catastrophes. In 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists established its Doomsday Clock, “a design that warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making.” The scientists set the clock at seven minutes to midnight. “Since then the Bulletin has reset the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock 25 times,” most recently in January of this year when it was moved to 90 seconds to midnight–“the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.” Why the move forward? “Largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine.”
Second, our continuing climate crisis. It has been ongoing now for at least four decades. The first edition (1983) of The Twentieth Century: A Brief Global History noted that “the increased burning of fossil fuels might cause an increase in global temperatures, thereby possibly melting the polar ice caps, and flooding low-lying parts of the world.” The third edition (1990) expanded the treatment by mentioning that by 1988 scientists “concluded that the problem was much worse than they had earlier thought. . . . They claimed that the increased burning of fossil fuels like coal and petroleum was likely to cause an increase in global temperatures, possibly melting the polar ice caps, changing crop yields, and flooding low-lying parts of the world.” Since then the situation has only grown worse.
Third, the effects of social media. Four years ago I quoted historian Jill Lepore’s highly-praised These Truths: A History of the United States (2018): “Hiroshima marked the beginning of a new and differently unstable political era, in which technological change wildly outpaced the human capacity for moral reckoning.” By the 1990s, she observed that “targeted political messaging through emerging technologies” was contributing to “a more atomized and enraged electorate.” In addition, social media, expanded by smartphones, “provided a breeding ground for fanaticism, authoritarianism, and nihilism.”
Moreover, the Internet was “easily manipulated, not least by foreign agents. . . . Its unintended economic and political consequences were often dire.” The Internet also contributed to widening economic inequalities and a more “disconnected and distraught” world. Internet information was “uneven, unreliable,” and often unrestrained by any type of editing and fact-checking. The Internet left news-seekers “brutally constrained,” and “blogging, posting, and tweeting, artifacts of a new culture of narcissism,” became commonplace. So, too did Internet-related companies that feed people only what they wanted to see and hear. Further, social media “exacerbated the political isolation of ordinary Americans while strengthening polarization on both the left and the right. . . . The ties to timeless truths that held the nation together, faded to ethereal invisibility.”
Similar comments came from the brilliant and humane neurologist Oliver Sacks, who shortly before his death in 2015 stated that people were developing “no immunity to the seductions of digital life” and that “what we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.”
Fourth, spyware. Fortunately, in the USA and many other countries independent media still exists. Various types of such media are not faultless, but they are invaluable in bringing us truths that would otherwise be concealed. PBS is one such example.
Two of the programs it produces, the PBS Newshour and Frontline have helped expose how insidious spyware has become. In different countries, its targets have included journalists, activists, and dissidents. According to an expert on The Newshour,
“The use of spyware has really exploded over the last decade. One minute, you have the most up-to-date iPhone, it’s clean, sitting on your bedside table, and then, the next minute, it’s vacuuming up information and sending it over to some security agency on the other side of the planet.”
The Israeli company NSO Group has produced one lucrative type of spyware called Pegasus. According to Frontline, it “was designed to infect phones like iPhones or Androids. And once in the phone, it can extract and access everything from the device: the phone books, geolocation, the messages, the photos, even the encrypted messages sent by Signal or WhatsApp. It can even access the microphone or the camera of your phone remotely.” Frontline quotes one journalist, Dana Priest of The Washington Post, as stating, “This technology, it’s so far ahead of government regulation and even of public understanding of what’s happening out there.”
The fifth and final technological development to consider is Artificial Intelligence (AI). During the past year, media has been agog with articles on it. Several months ago on this website I expressed doubts that any forces will be able to limit the development and sale of a product that makes money, even if it ultimately harms the common good.
More recently (this month) the PBS Newshour again provided a public service when it conducted two interviews on AI. The first was with “Geoffrey Hinton, one of the leading voices in the field of AI,” who “announced he was quitting Google over his worries about what AI could eventually lead to if unchecked.”
Hinton told the interviewer (Geoff Bennett) that “we’re entering a time of great uncertainty, where we’re dealing with kinds of things we have never dealt with before.” He recognized various risks posed by AI such as misinformation, fraud, and discrimination, but there was one that he especially wanted to highlight: “the risk of super intelligent AI taking over control from people.” It was “advancing far more quickly than governments and societies can keep pace with.” While AI was leaping “forward every few months,” needed restraining legislation and international treaties could take years.
He also stated that because AI is “much smarter than us, and because it’s trained from everything people ever do . . . it knows a lot about how to manipulate people, and “it might start manipulating us into giving it more power, and we might not have a clue what’s going on.” In addition, “many of the organizations developing this technology are defense departments.” And such departments “don’t necessarily want to build in, be nice to people, as the first rule. Some defense departments would like to build in, kill people of a particular kind.”
Yet, despite his fears, Hinton thinks it would be a “big mistake to stop developing” AI. For “it’s going to be tremendously useful in medicine. . . . You can make better nanotechnology for solar panels. You can predict floods. You can predict earthquakes. You can do tremendous good with this.”
What he would like to see is equal resources put into both developing AI and “figuring out how to keep it under control and how to minimize bad side effects of it.” He thinks “it’s an area in which we can actually have international collaboration, because the machines taking over is a threat for everybody.”
The second PBS May interview on AI was with Gary Marcus, another leading voice in the field. He also perceived many possible dangers ahead and advocated international controls.
Such efforts are admirable, but are the hopes for controls realistic? Looking back over the past century, I am more inclined to agree with General Omar Bradley–we have developed “our technology without wisdom or prudence,” and we are “ethical infants.”
In the USA, we are troubled by divisive political polarization; neither of the leading candidates for president in 2024 has majority support in the polls; and Congress and the Supreme Court are disdained by most people. Our educational systems are little concerned with stimulating thinking about wisdom or values. If not from the USA, from where else might global leadership come? From Russia? From China? From India? From Europe? From the UN? The past century offers little hope that it would spring from any of these sources.
But both Hinton and Marcus were hopeful in their PBS interviews, and just because past efforts to control technology for human betterment were generally unsuccessful does not mean we should give up. Great leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Nelson Mandela did not despair even in their nations’ darkest hours. Like them, we too must hope for–and more importantly work toward–a better future.
Click the Source link for more details
Did It Matter That Elizabeth I Was a Woman?
‘The idea of rule by women was very new’
Carole Levin is Willa Cather Professor of History Emerita at the University of Nebraska
Though Queen Elizabeth I may well, as she claimed, have had ‘the heart and stomach of a king’, she was all too aware that she also had the body of a ‘weak and feeble woman’. Elizabeth was only the second queen regnant after her sister Mary, so the idea of rule by women was very new. What could be expected for a male ruler was more problematic for a woman. One of the ways that a king could gain power and popularity was to be militarily successful, as kings such as Henry V had demonstrated. But in England women did not lead in battle, one reason why Henry VIII was so emphatic about the need to have a legitimate male heir, since, as he put it himself, the battlefield was ‘unmeet for women’s imbecilities’. When Elizabeth said in her speech to the troops at Tilbury in 1588 that ‘I myself will be your general’, this was not something she could actually do.
Kings were traditionally perceived as God’s representative on earth. When Henry broke with the Catholic Church, he became Supreme Head of the Church of England. Though his son, Edward, was only nine years old when he became king, at his coronation in 1547 Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, affirmed that he was Supreme Head. But when 25-year-old Elizabeth became ruler in 1559 Parliament would not grant this title to a queen, and she became Supreme Governor instead.
It is also very possible that churchmen and nobles treated Elizabeth differently than they would have a king. Edmund Grindal, when archbishop of Canterbury, told her that he chose ‘rather to offend your earthly Majesty than to offend the heavenly majesty of God’. In 1598, during a meeting of the Privy Council, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, turned his back on Elizabeth, a terrible insult to a monarch. When she responded by boxing his ears, Essex started to draw his sword before he was stopped.
But Elizabeth also found ways to rule effectively in the manner of male rulers. She listened to her advisers, especially William Cecil and Lord Burghley, but made it clear that the final decisions on policy would always be her own. As James Melville remarked to her early in her reign, he knew she would never marry as now she was ‘king and queen both’. Elizabeth expanded the view of gender and rule so that she could be just that.
‘There were plenty of times when she imposed her will effectively’
Neil Younger is Senior Lecturer in History at the Open University and author of Religion and Politics in Elizabethan England: The Life of Sir Christopher Hatton (Manchester University Press)
There’s no doubt that questions around marriage and the succession loomed large across the whole of Elizabeth’s reign, as much the result of the barrenness of the Tudor family tree as of Elizabeth’s gender. Her friends’ compliments and her foes’ criticisms both dwelt a good deal on her femaleness, even though women were to be found ruling in 16th-century Scotland, France, and the Netherlands, as well as England. And it may be that her gender led some of her subjects, ministers, or military commanders to take her less seriously than they would a man – though equally, there were plenty of times when she imposed her will effectively (and indeed scared them stiff).
Yet when considering the successes or failures of her reign, it is hard to see how the challenges which confronted Elizabeth would have been radically different, or would have had substantially different outcomes, if Anne Boleyn had brought forth the much-desired son rather than a daughter in 1533. Few of her main problems were of her own making. Elizabeth faced religious tension and disunity in England, and if she was – at best – only partially successful in resolving this, the same was true of her predecessors and successors, male and female, child and adult. In foreign policy, she faced a forbiddingly powerful enemy in Spain, particularly over the war in the Netherlands; at length, she concluded that intervening in that war to secure her own coasts was necessary, even if it brought the Spanish Armada down upon her. Would a male monarch have pursued a more adventurous, even expansionist, foreign policy? Henry VIII might have done, perhaps, but Elizabeth’s canny grandfather, Henry VII, did not, and nor did her Stuart successors. Her domestic policies – poor relief, taxation, – were responses to large-scale social and economic changes, such as growth in both population and poverty, not to her own decisions.
The so-called ‘great man’ approach to history is currently unfashionable, and whether one regards Elizabeth as great or not, it’s not at all clear that either a ‘great man’ or a ‘great woman’ had the ability to challenge the fundamental position which the Tudor realms faced during the late 16th century.
‘She converted herself from an oxymoron into a miracle’
Helen Hackett is Professor of English at UCL and author of The Elizabethan Mind: Searching for the Self in an Age of Uncertainty (Yale University Press)
Who can fail to be awed by the magnificent portraits of Elizabeth I: the Armada, the Ditchley, and the Rainbow, to name but a few? They surely surpass even the glorifying images of Henry VIII by Holbein, and of Charles I by van Dyck, in their power to impress and fascinate. This not only reflects the fact that the costume of elite Renaissance women was even more flamboyant and sumptuous than that of men; Elizabeth’s portraits also draw us in with complex symbolism, requiring interpretation like texts. Meanwhile, in literary texts themselves Elizabeth generated a plethora of personae. As Thomas Dekker wrote in a court prologue of 1599: ‘Some call her Pandora, some Gloriana, some Cynthia, some Delphaebe.’
Why this mythologisation and proliferation of roles? Because Elizabeth, as a woman, was a representational problem. Monarchs were supposed to excel in virtues traditionally defined as masculine: martial prowess, virility, rational intellect, decisiveness, and powerful oratory. Yet the ideal woman of this period was praised for silence, obedience, and staying at home. She was not supposed to resist marriage and assert her agency and authority as Elizabeth did. Writers and artists grappled with this problem by splitting their queen into many figures: ‘mirrors more than one’, as Edmund Spenser put it in The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), his epic poem dedicated to Elizabeth. She is both Gloriana and Belphoebe, the former representing ‘her rule’, the latter ‘her rare chastity’; and she is also Una, Britomart, Mercilla, Cynthia, and Diana, multiple personae embodying the multiple and often contradictory qualities required of a queen regnant.
Elizabeth knew she was an anomaly and worked hard to turn this to her advantage in speeches and writings: she thanked God that ‘being a woman by my nature weak, timid, and delicate, as are all women, Thou has caused me to be vigorous, brave, and strong’. She converted herself as female monarch from a kind of oxymoron into a kind of miracle. Meanwhile the surge of creativity in Elizabethan culture generated by the representational challenge of a woman on the throne constructed a mystique around the queen that persists to this day.
‘To Elizabeth herself it was largely irrelevant’
Elizabeth Tunstall is Author of The Succession Debate and Contested Authority in Elizabethan England, 1558-1603 (Palgrave Macmillan)
Channelling Elizabeth herself, I feel this may be an ‘answer answerless’ – or at least a bit yes and a bit no. Elizabeth herself always viewed her authority as queen to be just as complete as that of her father as king. However, she was also aware that for many of her people, the fact that she was a woman would always alter the way that they treated her, and her rights as a monarch.
To balance the inherent contradiction of a woman wielding the masculine powers of a king, Elizabeth and her Privy Council used a theoretical construction as the foundation of her rule. The king’s two bodies theory stated that a monarch had two bodies, the body physical and the body politic. In her first speech as queen, delivered at Hatfield, Elizabeth outlined the theory by declaring that: ‘I am but one body naturally considered, though by His permission a body politic to govern.’ While the body physical was what the monarch was born with, the body politic, which each monarch assumed upon their coronation, could not age, did not die, and was not restricted by gender.
When Elizabeth became queen in 1558 this theory enabled her to circumvent the gender expectations of the time. It enabled her to rule as completely as her father had done while also retaining her own distinctly feminine persona. However, the theory which gave her the means to rule regardless of her gender was also the cause of personal turmoil for Elizabeth.
In 1582, when she bid farewell to her final suitor, the duke of Anjou, Elizabeth wrote a deeply personal poem stating: ‘I love and yet am forced to seem to hate; I do, yet dare not say I ever meant.’ In ‘On Monsieur’s Departure’, Elizabeth wrote of the internal struggle of rejecting this marriage proposal which part of her wished to accept, of doing what was needed as a monarch by denying herself as a woman.
So, did it matter that Elizabeth was a woman? To Elizabeth herself it was largely irrelevant, as she proclaimed at Tilbury: ‘I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.’ However, gender did matter in 16th-century England, and so the theoretical solution was to separate her royal power from her female form.
Click the Source link for more details