ELON MUSK'S MINI BRAIN CHIP
Elon Musk's 'Terrifying' MINI Brain Chip Cures Depression and Addiction?
Elon Musk says mysterious brain chip will be able to cure depression and addiction.
Mental disorders are diseases that are still incurable by medicine intake. There are therapies, but patients have no exact cure to heal from the brain disorder fully.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk Elon Musk has revealed more details about his mysterious brain-computer chip startup Neuralink, claiming that it could be used to help cure addiction and depression.
Mr. Musk founded Neuralink in 2016, though few details about how the technology will work have been revealed. After receiving more than $158m (£125m) in funding, Neuralink announced in a 2019 presentation that it had developed a “sewing machine-like” device capable of connecting brains directly to computers.
Little information has been revealed about the chips so far, although Musk has announced that more information will be revealed about the device on August 28.
Its explicit purpose is to provide humans with more highly-advanced artificial intelligence technology. There are no current clues on what really is the main product of Neuralink. Not until Musk himself was asked on Twitter.
On Thursday, July 9, the billionaire was asked about the benefits of using the brain chip-- more specifically for mental disorders. He confidently said that the brain chip will cure human depression or addiction, as it sees needed.
"Can Neuralink be used to retrain the part of the brain which is responsible for causing addiction or depression? It'd be great if Neuralink can be used for something like addiction/ depression," asks Pranay Pathole on Twitter.
Musk replied: "For sure. This is both great and terrifying. Everything we've ever sensed or thought has been electrical signals. The early universe was just a soup of quarks and leptons. How did a very small piece of the universe start to think of itself as sentient?"
According to Tech Crunch, Elon Musk's brain chip can be processed through a surgical robot that will implant the thin wire into a person's brain.
Once it is inside the brain, it will be connected to an external computer processing unit and will make a wireless connection with the computer and the human brain.
Basically, people are calling the brain chip as the medium to make future humans into cyborgs. The Royal Society studies also conducted the same studies about the communication of reading minds. In a 2019 report, experts explain the brain-computer interface.
"People could become telepathic to some degree, able to converse not only without speaking but without words - through access to each other's thoughts at a conceptual level," the report stated. "Not only thoughts but sensory experiences could be communicated from brain to brain. Someone on holiday could beam a 'neural postcard' of what they are seeing, hearing, or tasting into the mind of a friend back home."
In the short term, Neuralink will be used to treat brain diseases such as Parkinson’s, while the long-term ambitions for the technology are to allow humans to compete with artificial intelligence.
Unilever Renames Fair & Lovely
Unilever renames Skin lightening cream 'Fair & Lovely' after backlash
( NJS ) The Indian and Bangladeshi arms of consumer giant Unilever said Thursday they will rename their locally marketed "Fair & Lovely" skin-lightening cream in the face of global anti-racism protests.
The Anglo-Dutch firm -- which reportedly raked in some $500 million in revenue from the product in India last year -- said it would stop using the word "Fair" in the name as the brand was "committed to celebrating all skin tones".
The obsession with fair skin is deeply entrenched across Asia, and in some cities, it can be difficult to find cosmetics that do not contain some kind of whitening product. In South Asia in particular lighter tones are assumed to reflect higher social class, especially within India's complex caste hierarchy.
Earlier this month, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) said it would stop selling skin-whitening creams in Asia and the Middle East, while PepsiCo (PEP.O) said it would change the name and brand image of its Aunt Jemima pancake mix and syrup.
In India, the biggest market for “Fair & Lovely”, fairness products have long been endorsed by leading Bollywood celebrities, as well as other youth icons.
Adverts have regularly featured two faces showing skin tone transformation, as well as shade guides to show “improvement”. Several users on Twitter applauded the move, though some said it was too little, too late.
“This is a big win, but it’s only the beginning,” Nina Davuluri, who in 2014 became the first Indian American to be crowned Miss America, told Reuters.
“While Unilever removing words such as ‘fair, white, & lightening,’ and changing the ... brand name is a step towards inclusion, it’s only one piece of a much larger
fight to end colorism.” Davuluri on Tuesday wrote an open letter to Unilever CEO Alan Jope, urging him to stop production of the products.
The name change is subject to regulatory approvals, Unilever’s India unit, Hindustan Unilever, said. It declined to say what the new name would be.
Public records indicate Hindustan Unilever last week filed an application to trademark a logo for soaps, creams, shampoos and other products under the brand name “Glow & Lovely”.
In 2018, the company also registered trademarks to market skincare and haircare products under the brand names “Even & Lovely”, “Always Lovely”, “Care & Lovely” and “I Am Lovely”, among others. Separately, a source at L’Oréal in India said the French company was also having discussions in view of the backlash.
L’Oréal India declined to comment. L’Oréal in France did not respond to an e-mail seeking immediate comment.
P&G declined to comment.
Hottest Temperature on Record-Siberia
It Just Hit 100 Degrees Fahrenheit in Siberia, the Hottest Temperature on Record
Russian heatwave smashed an all-time record high in one Siberian town this weekend, possibly the hottest temperature on record so far north in the Arctic, continuing an off-the-charts warm year in what is typically one of coldest places on Earth.
The remote Siberian town of Verkhoyansk is known for its extreme cold: Winter temperatures often dip below –50° Celsius. But on June 20, temperatures in the town soared to a high of 38° C (100.4° Fahrenheit). If confirmed by the World Meteorological Association, that marks the hottest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle.
Verkhoyansk has experienced extreme heat before: On July 25, 1988, the town hit a then-record of 37.3° C (99.1° F). The new high, which smashes that 32-year record, comes on the heels of a historically hot May around the globe, and especially in Siberia, which is in the grips of an ongoing heatwave.
If that reading is found to be correct, that would smash the town's all-time record of 37.3 degrees Celsius - 99.1 degrees Fahrenheit - set on July 25, 1988. Temperature records in Verkhoyansk date to 1885.
It would also be the hottest temperature on record north of the Arctic Circle, according to Etienne Kapikian, a meteorologist with Meteo France.
The average high in late June in Verkhoyansk is only in the upper 60s, or around 20 degrees Celsius. Siberia, one of the world's coldest places in winter, just reached 100 degrees (F) this year before Dallas or Houston did.
To escape the heat, children were seen swimming in a lake near Verkhoyansk, Sunday, a lake that would be frozen solid in the depths of winter, when average temperatures in Russia's "Pole of Cold" typically plunge into the minus 40s and 50s Celsius.
Verkhoyansk once plunged to minus 67.8 degrees Celsius - minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit - on Feb. 5 and 7, 1892.
This is 105.8 degrees Celsius colder than its just-recorded all-time record high. That's a difference in extremes larger than the difference between water's freezing and boiling points, likely the largest spread between all-time record high and low temperatures anywhere on Earth. Expansive blocking high pressure aloft over Siberia was responsible for this latest heatwave, which has been in place since June 12.
This blocking high hasn't allowed colder air to push south from Russia's Arctic coast. And this is continuing a trend so far in 2020. Berkeley Earth lead scientist Robert Rohde noted Russia clobbered its record warmest January - May period in 2020 by a whopping 1.9 degrees Celsius over the previous record warmest first five months of a year, 2016.
By far and away, Russia has been the epicenter of the planet's most expansive and extreme warm anomalies in 2020.
End of the world?
The world will end on this Sunday June 21, 2020 according to reading of Mayan Calendar!
(NJS) - Doomsday theorists were once convinced the world would end on Dec. 21, 2012. Apparently, the reading of the Mayan calendar was incorrect.
The global corona virus pandemic, social unrest, and natural disasters have combined to make 2020 many people’s worst year of their lives. The Mayan calendar is an alternative system of counting time to the Gregorian calendar, which is used by most people in the world, and other systems such as the Islamic or Julian calendars.
The calendar was devised by the Maya civilization, a term which refers to the peoples who inhabited the Central American area of modern-day Guatemala and Belize, southeast Mexico, and western Honduras and El Savador before the arrival of European colonialists.
While Europeans conquered the Maya and destroyed most evidence of their history, in the 1990s archaeologists began to piece together more knowledge about the civilization’s calendar system.
The Maya calendar was not based on cycles of the moon or the sun directly. Instead, they had three calendars for different purposes. The Maya long-count calendar is the one that has attracted attention from Doomsday theorists – people who believe in a catastrophic end to all life on Earth. According to their reading of the calendar and interpretation of the Maya belief in “world ages,” the calendar said that the world was set to end on December, 2012, the date which marked the end of a 5,126-year-long cycle.
While their prediction was evidently wrong, last week a scientist accused of being a conspiracy theorist reexamined the calendar – and suggested that the correct date for the end of the world was in fact this week.
Scientist Paolo Tagalogun issued a series of tweets last week , which have since been deleted, saying that, “Following the Julian Calendar, we are technically in 2012. The number of days lost in a year due to the shift into Gregorian Calendar is 11 days. For 268 years using the Gregorian Calendar (1752-2020) times 11 days = 2,948 days. 2,948 days / 365 days (per year) = 8 years.”
This eight-year difference apparently shifts the end of the world from 2012 to 2020, and from December 12 to June 21.
What this means is that if we add up the missing days, then the supposed Mayan apocalypse would occur on June 21, 2020.
However, many experts are wary of using the Maya calendar to calculate the end of the world, regardless of the date. Rather than the end of the world, the end of the long-count calendar represents only the end of an era, according to Emiliano Gallaga Murrieta, the Chiapas state division director of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, who was interviewed by National Geographic.
“It is like for the Chinese, this is the Year of the Rabbit, and the next year is going to the Year of the Dragon, and the next is going to be another animal in the
calendar,” Gallaga said.
As of Monday, no world leaders have commented on the supposed imminent catastrophe.