The Earth
It’s 70 percent water.
The air,
That’s 21 percent oxygen.
But the oceans,
They’re salty.
There are people,
Surrounded by water,
Who die of thirst.
There are people,
In hospitals,
At home,
Who choke,
Not able to take in the oxygen
All around them
Too much oxygen,
And you would
Die
Free flowing oxygen
Attacking the retina
Breaking up your nervous system
A tragedy,
The thing that keeps us alive,
Ultimately killing us
Thursday 18, 2021 was the date that the perseverance rover from NASA overcame the “7 minutes of terror” to land on the Mars surface. This made it the fifth rover to ever reach make it to the red planet.
Perseverance: “continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition : the action or condition or an instance of persevering : steadfastness.”
Like its name, perseverance was built through determination and hard work. The team had been working on the project for over 10 years, and it all boiled down to the “seven minutes of terror” when the crew frantically scrambled to get everything right so as to not reach a sudden and disappointing end to their voyage.
There are many reasons to justify missions to Mars, among those being the hyped possibility of life, relative ease to travel between planets (there are alignment opportunities around every two years), and scientific curiosity of the possibilities of the planet so close to ours.
The nail-biting sequence if pretty stressful to watch, even for those not following the story. Some of the thrill and nervousness of the crew and team was shared by the millions of viewers throughout the world eagerly watched the landing, having marked their calendars for weeks.
The rover has sent out pictures of the Martian surface back to Earth, the group quickly posting them online and operating its own twitter account! The first pictures were black and white, but the newer ones sent Friday were in full color, showing off the famous red surface of the planet.
The rover will operate in icy temperatures. Mars has an average surface temperature of negative eighty degrees Fahrenheit, or negative sixty degrees Celsius!
Congratulations to the NASA team and the scientific community, both national and international for this monumental and historic achievement. Perseverance has joined the ranks of Sojourner, Opportunity, Spirit, and Curiosity, the previous four rovers to ever successfully make the journey. The team has proved to us the cliché “anything is possible with perseverance and determination”
Titanium dioxide, TiO2, is the basis for a huge variety and number of different products that many of us use daily. Used for over a century. It is used in paints for its high whiteness and opacity, and its ability to mask or hide.
Titanium dioxide is also used in other products. Ranging from chocolates for smoothness and color (in relatively small doses) to sunscreen and lotions for its color, along with a DIY market of over 3 billion dollars.
The only problem with this white powder is its potential carcinogenic properties. The FDA has ruled that there is no harm in uses of under 1% in foods, and manufacturers are rarely required to list it as an ingredient. Unfortunately, The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified titanium dioxide as “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” due to increased lung tumors in animals linked to consumption.
For now, there’s little to do about it, and you’re unlikely to be able to avoid it in your food or paint, and the world is dangerous enough that titanium dioxide doesn’t have to be in our list of worries anyway.
Artificial Intelligence- By Purusha Shirvani
We often think about ourselves as living in a “modern world,” imagining the twenty-first century as the height of human civilization to date, with advances in all forms of technology, ranging from healthcare, medicine, prevention, and detection to every area like recreation, forensics, transportation, and in almost every other aspect of our lives.
This was all accomplished by what we like to proudly call our “superior intellect” to the other inhabitants of this planet. What some have begun worrying about throughout the last century, however, is that one day we might NOT be the most intelligent species on Earth. This would make us unable to rule this land the way we have been doing for millennia. This perceived threat is usually associated with fears that our creations might be the ones accelerating our way to this demise. This would make our improvement and advances being a double-edged blade.
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This double-edged blade can take many forms, but one of the most famous examples is Artificial Intelligence. An often misused label for functions that would otherwise require human intelligence is also confused with machine learning. Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that involves learning and improving by itself. Ever since the introduction of ENIAC (one of the first computers, it stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer ), fears of the machines one day overtaking us grew and were often expressed in the form of stories, novels, and sometimes conspiracy theories
However, unlike what some of us think, the fear is not wholly baseless, nor is it “far off on the horizon.” Stephen Hawking once said that artificial intelligence could be the “worst event in the history of our civilization.” He also urged creators to “employ best practice and effective management.” Turing has proven that it’s logically impossible to know if every program reaches a conclusion and halts; or if it will loop forever trying to find a solution.*
That means that simple rules such as “minimize human suffering” or “never harm humans” could have unknown consequences or direct the AI in a way we could never have predicted. This restriction would, in effect, make containment algorithms that seek to do precisely that unusable. A super-intelligent AI with unknown or greater than human capacity would thus be unpredictable and uncontrollable by extension.
Kind of scary, but it’s still a long ways off, right?