Friday, May 30, 2025

Polaris of Enlightenment

Starlink expansion threatens astronomy – scientists warn of increased interference

Published 27 October 2024
– By Editorial Staff
One of the SpaceX factories in the US.

Scientists at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy warn that Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites are causing severe radio interference in Earth’s orbit, hampering astronomers’ observations of distant planets and stars. They are now calling for action to tackle the problem before it gets any worse.

Since 2012, the European Low-Frequency Array radio telescope network (LOFAR) has been probing faint and distant objects in the universe to detect black holes and look for exoplanets.

However, since SpaceX began launching its Starlink satellites five years ago, increased radio wave emissions have made it much more difficult for LOFAR to carry out its observations.

Jessica Dempsey is the Scientific Director and Director General of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy.

– Last year, we started to see interference signals in the sky, we managed to trace them to some of the Starlink satellites from the first generation that were orbiting above the Earth, she said in an interview with The Independent.

6 000 satellites

SpaceX currently has a string of over 6 000 satellites in orbit, enabling high-speed internet access to almost anywhere on Earth. The satellites have been inadvertently emitting electromagnetic radiation, which the LOFAR astronomers initially thought was due to faulty batteries.

Dempsey says that last year they discussed solutions with SpaceX engineers to reduce the radiation and were optimistic that the problem could be solved.

But when the astronomers conducted new observations in July, they discovered that SpaceX’s updated Starlink V2 Mini satellites were causing even more interference. The company has also launched more satellites since then.

Starlink [was] emitting over 30 times more emissions, and now not just a few, all of [the satellites]. Frankly, we were shocked.

– The brightness in this particular frequency band of these new satellites, compared to what we’re looking at [is] about 10 million times brighter. The equivalent would be you’re trying to look at that beautiful, faintest star you can see with your eye on a dark night. And then, the full moon rises next to it, says Dempsey.

SpaceX Starlink satellit
6,000 Starlink satellites currently in orbit above the Earth.

The problem is increasing

The most worrying thing, according to Dempsey, is that the problem just keeps growing. Despite previous talks with SpaceX to reduce interference, their updated Starlink satellites have created even more radio interference.

The company is currently launching around 40 new satellites a week, and with plans to have 100,000 satellites in orbit in the future, scientists fear that ground-based astronomy will eventually become impossible.

– They’re launching 40 of these ‘full moons’ every week. Right now, there’s about 6,000 Starlink satellites up there but there’s an intended 100,000 [total future satellites]. So imagine 100,000 full moons up there. Then we can really say goodbye to any kind of astronomy that we would hope to do from the ground.

Dempsey and her colleagues recently published results in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics showing that almost all the Starlink satellites they observed emitted electromagnetic radiation that could interfere with the observations.

– The UN has regulations on the protected bands of frequencies. And, those protected bands are there so that astronomy can do its work. It’s a matter of whether those regulations are supported by anyone who has the power to do so.

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The first patient in the world treated with a new gene editing technology

Published 26 May 2025
– By Editorial Staff
The only CRISPR-based treatment approved for clinical use so far costs around $2 million per treatment session.

A teenager with a rare immune disorder has become the first in the world to be treated with the new gene editing technique prime editing. The aim: to restore the function of the body’s white blood cells.

One month after the procedure, the first results show that the technique seems to work – apparently without any serious side effects.

The treatment was performed on a teenager with chronic granulomatous disease – a rare, inherited condition in which the immune cells lack an enzyme that normally helps kill bacteria. This makes it difficult for the body to fight infections. Through prime editing, the researchers were able to correct the mutation in the DNA that causes the disease.

According to the biotech company Prime Medicine, which developed the treatment, after one month, enzyme function was restored in two-thirds of the patient’s neutrophils – a type of white blood cell that plays an important role in the body’s defense against bacteria. This was announced by the company on May 19.

Prime editing is a new and more precise variant of the well-known CRISPR technique, often described as a “gene scissors”. While traditional CRISPR cuts out parts of DNA and replaces them, prime editing works more like a text editor that can correct errors in the genetic code without making major changes to the genome. The technique was developed in 2019 and is considered both safer and more versatile than previous methods.

Extremely expensive method

Despite the promising results, Prime Medicine says it does not plan to continue developing the treatment, known as PM359, on its own.

– The science has moved far enough that many patients would benefit from these gene-editing treatments. But it boils down to an issue not just of science and technology, but of economics, says David Liu, a chemical biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and co-founder of the company.

For very rare diseases, development costs are often high relative to the limited number of patients. The only CRISPR-based treatment approved for clinical use so far, for blood disorders such as sickle cell anemia, currently costs more than $2 million per treatment.

– It’s like upgrading your iPhone. NThere are new versions coming out all the time and the tools are constantly being refined, says Joseph Hacia, a medical geneticist at the University of Southern California.

Longer follow-up needed

Prime editing is one of several emerging techniques developed as alternatives to classical CRISPR. It has the potential to treat more diseases with greater precision, but time and follow-up are needed before firm conclusions can be drawn about its long-term effects.

It will take between six months and a year to be certain that the edited stem cells are thriving, says Annarita Miccio, a gene therapy expert at the Imagine Institute in Paris.

Critics have also raised several ethical concerns about prime editing and similar techniques, even though they are described as highly accurate. A recurring objection is the risk of genetic changes occurring in the wrong place in the genome and thus causing unwanted side effects and mutations.

Concerns have also been raised that the technology could be used in the future to modify traits rather than treat diseases – raising the debate about so-called ‘designer babies’ and how far we are prepared to go in altering the human genetic code.

The headache of brain cell masses: How human consciousness baffles neuroscientists

Man and consciousness

The thesis that human consciousness emanates from the brain cell mass is not as self-evident as the broad stream of research fields today would like to claim. This is what Cecilia Gustafsson writes, who takes a closer look at some of the questions that physical science has left unanswered.

Published 25 May 2025

Brain research has been conducted for decades, accumulating extensive knowledge about the brain’s functions and reactions, both electrochemical and biochemical. Today, the structure and composition of a brain cell can be described in great detail, and its function has been clarified. The brain has been established as the central organ of the nervous system, transmitting impulses enabling, among other things, motor functions. Humanity has thus gained a wealth of knowledge about the brain, as well as other physical organs, which is beneficial in cases of dysfunction, injury, treatment and surgery.

What has not been mapped, proven or explained, however, is human beings and human consciousness. Nevertheless, science, and implicitly large parts of brain researchers, stubbornly maintain that the human being is the brain and that the brain controls the entire human consciousness, i.e. everything that the human being thinks, feels, says, remembers, can and does. The brain is thus not only given the function of being the overall part of the nervous system, but is attributed the overall, or leading, position over the human being itself. How such reasoning has been allowed to pass as scientific fact, and is also widely accepted as truth within mainstream natural science, may seem absurd to an independently thinking individual.

What has not been mapped, proven or explained, however, is human beings and human consciousness.

If brain research, and thus physical science, cannot scientifically prove how the brain produces everything that a human being thinks, feels, and remembers, then how can it so confidently claim that it does? Moreover, how can such claims serve as the foundation for public discourse about the brain? Across websites, television programs, and institutions in healthcare and education, we are constantly presented with this “knowledge” about the brain’s supposed influence over us. However, none of the claims regarding the brain’s role in producing human consciousness and memory have been scientifically verified.

Not only are these explanations often contradictory (they depict the brain and the human self as separate entities), but they also defy reason by reducing the human being, this living entity with dreams, desires, willpower, reflection, intelligence, and agency, to a passive slave under the control of a wrinkled mass of organic matter and its electrochemical signals.

Here some quotes with following comments, to illustrate the contradictory arguments and how you as a human being are presented, taken from, among others, a national and well-known healthcare site on the internet:

“The outer layer of the cerebrum is called the cerebral cortex. It consists of gray matter that contains nerve cells. The cerebral cortex is responsible for our awareness of different sensory impressions. The cortex is where our thoughts, feelings and memories are created”.

“The brain is involved in almost everything we do, feel, and experience. It gives us our personality and emotions. The brain is what allows us to have consciousness, to think, and to remember”.

“The brain uses very few neurons to remember things it sees”.

“Research claims that neurons act as thought cells, capable of specializing on certain memories previously selected by the brain”.

Note how the cerebral cortex is described as a gray matter containing neurons, and how this gray matter is responsible for the consciousness of sensory impressions – “it sees”, “it remembers”. Further, how the brain is ascribed properties that allow you to think and remember and that it also “selects” memories based on “what it sees”. You have no say in these representations, you have to rely on the fact that “the brain sees correctly”, that the neurons “remember what the brain sees”. In other words, you are entirely subordinate, and who you are or what the brain needs you for is not made clear. How the brain, with its nerve cells, “chooses,” “sees,” and “remembers” cannot be explained by physicalist research, yet it is not willing to reconsider its claims.

From this reductionist view of man and consciousness, allow me to take a somewhat humorous look at the “life of the brain cell mass Edgar”:

The brain cell mass Edgar was created at the same time as the physical body in which the brain cell mass Edgar is located at the top. They both came in the “same package” via the body of another brain cell mass, as a result of this second brain cell mass, called mother, together with a third brain cell mass, called father, previously jointly deciding to breed a new brain cell mass.

The brain cell mass Edgar is now an adult and lives in his own apartment. Not far from Edgar the brain cell mass lives his best friend, another brain cell mass called Agaton. They spend a lot of time together and it’s easy to mistake them for twins. They are both extremely similar to each other. They both have a pinkish-gray hue with a wrinkled appearance, they weigh about the same, are similarly shaped and divided into the same number of lobes and ventricles each. Both have identical cerebellums and brain stems, and the cerebral cortex of both brain cell masses, which unites the two divided halves, is deceptively similar. The thalamus, hypothalamus and limbic system of the two also look the same and are located in the same places. In short, their structure, organization and function are not at all different and it is very easy to mistake the two at a glance.

Despite their incredible similarity, there is a significant difference between them. Since its inception, the Agaton brain cell mass has been very adept at producing beautiful sounds on various instruments. The brain cell mass Edgar, on the other hand, is, despite many and valiant attempts, completely untrainable when it comes to making music, and also completely tone deaf. They have both asked themselves on several occasions how this can be. After all, the two brain cell masses are so similar and both have the same functions in their respective parts. Edgar the brain cell mass once asked Agaton the brain cell mass how it is that he is so musically skilled. Did the brain cell mass Agaton’s brain cell mass parents play a lot of music? The Agaton brain cell mass searched feverishly in itself, both in the place in itself called the cerebral cortex and in the gray matter where the so-called “short-term memories” and “long-term memories” are said to be located, but without result. The brain cell mass Agaton could not, in itself, find where the interest in music arose, when it arose or how the skill to handle different instruments emerged. Growing up, there was no other music-making brain cell mass in the immediate vicinity.

Some of Edgar’s cortical neurons found this realization frustrating and reacted with sadness, generating a state of melancholy. Other neurons deemed it unfair. The two brain masses debated the issue extensively, communicating by emitting bursts of sound through the largest hole in the head.

Such a representation of the human being raises a host of questions, only a few of which are addressed in this text. The thinking reader, with intelligent ability and with the perception of himself as the possessor of self-activated thought, can certainly ask more questions.

What cells are missing from the brain cell mass of Edgar, who cannot learn to play music, that the brain cell mass of Agaton seems to have had since its creation? Which brain cells decide what to select, what to learn, where to store what has been learned, and how do the cells decide where to store it? Why such individual differences between brain cell masses despite the same diligent training, similar upbringing, the same conditions, and sometimes even the same parents (if siblings are involved)? If the brain cell mass creates the thoughts and feelings, as both brain cell masses have been taught by other brain cell masses involved in brain research and education, which brain cells get upset and sad, as in the case of the Edgar brain cell mass above, and how do the brain cells create these feelings? If brain cells have the same function in all healthy brain cell masses, what is it that makes, say, one and the same phenomenon make the brain cells in the cerebral cortex upset and sad in some brain cell masses, but not in others? How is this determined and by what?

Furthermore, if, for example, you don’t remember something at a certain time, but then remember it clearly at a later time, is it the case that the brain cells that stored the specific memory you wanted were busy with other things or were off duty at the first time, and then were “back on duty” at the later time, and can then retrieve the memory? How do the “memory-carrying” brain cells pick up the memory image itself? And how does it become a picture for your mind? How is the memory, which is spread over several neurons, assembled? And “oneself”, by the way, is it oneself who wants to remember something, or is it the brain? Because if it is “oneself” who wants to remember and sees the memory image “in one’s mind”, then this “oneself” must be something other than the brain itself. How, then, do these two entities relate to each other?

Such questions, and more, cannot be answered by physical science, which dismisses them as irrelevant. But if science is to be a guide to knowledge, it should follow scientific practice and thus stick to what it knows and does not know, what is ascertainable and what is not, and not create guesses and theories to fill the gaps in knowledge. Science knows that the brain is an organ which, like other organs, belongs to the physical organism.

Such questions, and more, cannot be answered by physical science, which dismisses them as irrelevant.

Science knows how nerve cells work and what electrochemical and biochemical impulses they transmit to each other. Science knows that these signals transmit and trigger other signals and activities in other organs of the organism. However, today’s science neither knows nor can explain what consciousness is. And because of its ignorance of the latter, it reduces living people to intelligence-free and will-less gray matter. Pressing inappropriate pieces into an already established puzzle and at the same time rejecting pieces they cannot fit.

Physical scientists often defend this by saying that much of what concerns the brain is still a mystery and that this is largely because it is difficult to research the brain. But the real mystery is not the physical brain itself, it is the living being, the human with consciousness, that remains unexplained. To somewhat dispel the headache that therefore prevails about this “mystery of the brain”, it may be helpful for further development in the field if those who carry out the research did not so dogmatically claim that human memory and consciousness are created in and by an organic gray mass of brain cells; is only the secondary result of brain cell impulses.

 

Cecilia Gustafsson

 


Sources and references:

1177 – Så fungerar hjärnan

Utforska sinnet – Vårt minne: hur fungerar det egentligen?

Sweden stands out in new global mapping of economic power

Published 15 May 2025
– By Editorial Staff
Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are usually considered three of the richest - and most powerful - men in the world.

A new international database maps the world’s most economically influential power brokers – and Sweden stands out. In contrast to many other countries, outstanding academic credentials are rarely required to reach the top of the financial ladder here.

Who really controls the global economy? A group of 70 researchers has collected data on over 3,500 people from 16 countries who together account for a majority (54 percent) of the world’s GDP.

The results, presented in the new World Elite Database (WED), reveal both global similarities and national differences in terms of age, education, and background, with Sweden deviating significantly in one respect. Here, only five percent of the richest power holders have a doctorate the lowest figure among all countries surveyed.

These are CEOs and board members of large companies, those with the greatest wealth and people with the power to regulate the economy. The median age varies greatly: the American financial aristocracy is the oldest (62), while China and Poland have the youngest top echelons (55).

Place of birth also differs: in China, almost half of the elite were born in small villages, but only 1 percent were born abroad. In the UK, on the other hand, 45 percent of the richest were born outside the country, often in India.

– It is interesting to see that as much as 20 percent of the UK’s economic elite comes from the country’s former colonies, notes Håkan Johansson, professor at Lund University and one of the researchers behind WED.

“Not highly valued in Sweden”

Sweden’s economic ruling class is distinguished by its low level of education, even when compared to neighboring countries. In Germany, just over a third of those with economic power have a doctorate or equivalent, compared to one in twenty power holders in Sweden.

– It is quite clear that a doctorate is not highly valued in Sweden and is not necessary to reach the top of society, Johansson continues.

A master’s degree is most common among the elite, except in Argentina, Italy, and the UK, where a bachelor’s degree is more common. Those who have inherited their wealth have the lowest level of education.

To become part of the financial elite, a degree in economics is otherwise the most common route – except in China and Finland, where it is more common for those who have reached the “top” to be civil engineers.

In the UK, Poland, and Switzerland, law and the humanities are also highly valued at least 20 percent of the “top tier” have studied these subjects compared to less than 10 percent in the Nordic countries.

“Have enormous power”

Some may wonder why it is important for researchers to map the backgrounds and qualifications of those in power, but Håkan Johansson points out that this is a group that has an extremely large influence and that it is important to try to understand how and why they make their decisions.

– Economic elites are interesting because they have enormous power. They influence people’s working conditions, countries’ prosperity, and financial development. This is the first database of its kind, and many researchers will use it in their studies.

One example of research that would be interesting to do using the database is to link it to what economic elites actually do with their power, for example in studies of the climate impact of elites, he continues.

The World Elite Database (WED) is the result of an international collaboration between some 70 researchers from Chile, Denmark, Italy, France, Finland, China, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States.

The database is currently only available to researchers and contains more than 3,500 names from 16 countries that together account for 54% of the world's gross domestic product.

The first scientific article based on the material was published recently in the British Journal of Sociology.

Robotic insects to revolutionize agriculture

Published 6 May 2025
– By Editorial Staff
An early version of the robotic insect from MIT.

Researchers are developing different types of robotic insects. The idea is that they will revolutionize agriculture when other pollinators are threatened with extinction, but also to be able to engage in surveillance.

Today, a large proportion of the world’s pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, are heading towards extinction, with the UN estimating that nearly 35% are threatened with extinction globally. However, robotic insects are not intended to replace real insects, but rather to develop agriculture.

Pollination is critical to the entire food industry, as 75% of the world’s food grown depends on pollination. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believe that with artificial pollination, using robotic insects, farmers could in the future grow fruit and vegetables in multi-storey warehouses. This, in turn, is said to increase yields while reducing some of the harmful environmental effects of farming.

For some time, researchers have been working on developing various robotic insects. Earlier versions of the robotic insect consisted of four identical units, each with two wings, combined into a rectangular unit about the size of a microcassette.

Now, much smaller and more durable robotic insects have been developed. The new robots can hover for about 1 000 seconds, which is more than 100 times longer than previously demonstrated. At the same time, they weigh about the same as a paper clip and can fly much faster.

– Compared to the old robot, we can now generate control torque three times larger than before, which is why we can do very sophisticated and very accurate path-finding flights, said researcher Kevin Chen in a press release.

The goal is to achieve a flight lasting longer than 10,000 seconds. They also want to improve its precision so that it can land and take off from a flower, which it currently cannot do.

Photo: Harvard SEAS

Inspired by the crane fly

Researchers at Harvard University have also been working on developing robotic insects. RoboBee can fly, dive and hover like a real insect. The robot weighs only one-tenth of a gram and has a wingspan of three centimeters. The idea is that RoboBee could be used for artificial pollination, but also for surveillance and rescue operations.

However, researchers have long struggled to land it effectively, but now they have found a solution. Taking inspiration from nature, a seemingly graceful landing has been upgraded for RoboBee.

The crane fly spends much of its short life landing and taking off, and it has a strong ability to cushion the landing using its long legs that almost act as shock absorbers. Since the robot’s size and shape were already similar to the crane’s, the researchers chose to develop the robot’s legs like the crane’s.

However, RoboBee is still unable to fly without external energy and is wired. The idea now is to continue developing the robot.

– The longer-term goal is full autonomy, but in the interim we have been working through challenges for electrical and mechanical components using tethered devices, said researcher Robert Wood, from Harvard, in a press release.

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