Comments by "Kevin Street" (@Kevin_Street) on "Dr Ben Miles" channel.

  1. Thank you for another great video! I hope the oncolytic virus in this video succeeds in becoming an effective cancer therapy, though at 5-10 years it'll be a while before we find out. In any case the larger field will no doubt grow and provide many more potential therapies. With so many possibilities out there, surely some of them will become gamechanging and history making treatments! It really feels like we're getting closer and closer to a world where cancer is a treatable disease.
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  2. I think this material would probably work better in paint than in tiles, for just this reason. A thin layer of pigment on a hard surface won't soak up water like the tiles would.
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  3. I believe there's a city in Turkey (maybe Canakkale, I'm not sure) where there's a relatively high level of natural background radiation due to isotopes in the local rock. It's nowhere near the level of Chernobyl, but the fact that people have lived there for hundreds of years and don't seem to have higher rates of cancer would seem to support the idea that the body can adapt to low levels of radiation.
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  4. What an incredible technology! Just the idea of regularly making Bose–Einstein condensates and using them for navigation is wild enough. But putting that gear on planes, and eventually silicon chips(!) is just mind blowing.
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  5. I think it's impossible for anything to change without some change in the energy of the system. That's why he said time crystals get close to (but are not) perpetual motion machines. The oscillation is powered by the laser, but when the input is constant it shows that the oscillation isn't caused by the laser. It's an inherent property of the crystal itself, using some of the beam energy to oscillate in time. Reducing the temperature is setting the stage for the experiment. It happens before the experiment begins and so long as that temperature is held constant, isn't a factor in what's occurring.
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  6. Thanks for another great video! I love the way you introduce a lot of actual scientific terms, but always know which ones to to explain in detail and which ones to breeze past quickly. That quality of judgement, knowing both what information is needed to understand the subject and having a feel for what your audience can quickly comprehend in a fast paced video, is probably the most important part of science education. And you do it really well. As for this new material, it sounds great! If they can put it in paint and use it in mass quantities it might make quite a difference in cooling buildings without electricity. I wonder, if this material was written into the building code for a large city and it gradually became the dominant color on rooftops, could it make a dent in the heat island effect? It would be amazing if a single color of paint could measurably cool an entire city.
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  7. Thank you for the wonderful video! Perovskite solar cells certainly look like they'll be a key technology in our future, so it's a good idea to understand how they work as completely as we can.
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  8. Thank you for this most interesting (and somewhat scary) video! "...If these images become commonplace, easily scattered across the Internet, constantly in your newsfeed, what happens? Just like the instant access of the Internet has dulled our attention spans and kept us hungry for the next novel thing, will this devalue our own imaginations, because we can create without consequence or without effort?" That's a darn good question. I wish I could just say no, this kind of AI will help us use our imaginations in ways we normally don't use them now because it's too difficult or costs too much - but that's just some people, the ones who are already creatively motivated to express themselves. What about the rest of us, the majority who are just consuming information? Will we lose interest in art itself, because "anybody can do that?" Wish I knew the answer to your question. "In training an AI we are teaching it about our world. If we aren't careful we'll imprint the imperfections of our society into the brain of that AI. You're only as good as the examples you learn from, which is true both for people as well as for artificial intelligence." This is another extremely fascinating subject. I'm not sure I agree with the statement "you're only as good as the examples you learn from," but I agree you only start out as good as the examples you've learned from. Humans can learn on their own by rational deduction, detecting our implicit biases and overcoming them. It isn't easy, in fact it's one of the hardest things we can do, and it seems to get harder with age. But surely an AI could do the same thing. I used to think there was no way a computer could paint an original picture, but here we are.
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  9. It's interesting. I really like your video and I'm impressed by the chain of reasoning behind it, but for the first time I can't agree with the conclusion. My honest belief is closer to what you say at 12:47, although I know you don't find that idea compelling or explanatory. Regardless, it's clear that our thoughts are influenced by the physical condition of our brains. When our brains are injured or diseased we can't think clearly. If the corpus callosum is severed one side of the brain appears to be unaware of what the other side perceives. When learning a new skill we can actually measure how our neurons become more efficient, requiring less activity to perform the same task. And something subtle happens as brains age - our thoughts become more settled and we tend to be less and less open to new ideas, perhaps because of an age related loss of brain plasticity. So at some level thought must emerge from the physical processes of our brain, at least in part. On the other hand, the idea that we have no free will seems pretty implausible. If consciousness is a purely mechanistic phenomenon, something we've evolved to explain to ourselves why we carry out actions that have already been computed somewhere in the brain, then why is human behavior so unpredictable? Why is there a need to "explain" anything at all? Why are we conscious in the first place? In the end, I think "free will" is still a mystery. You say you can't find a place for it, so it can't exist. I say that just shows our knowledge of existence is missing something fundamental. There are still certain features of human existence like free will and our perception of the passage of time that can't be explained (and probably won't be fully explained) no matter how much we learn about how the universe works.
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  10. You make an excellent point. And frankly it should be the role of government to pioneer things and spend huge sums of money getting industrial ecosystems started. Now those companies exist, it's better for everyone following behind.
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  11. I love Isaac Asimov's writing. His Three Laws of Robotics weren't meant to be realistic, though. Their purpose was to stimulate interesting ideas for stories, as his characters continually tried to think of edge cases and ways around them - but the idea of instilling a very basic "ethical operating system" in every AI is a good one. If they were all programmed to do good at the most basic level of code, it might head off all sorts of situations where people try to misuse them. In that case their increasing levels of intelligence would work in our favor, since they'd be increasingly better able to understand "good" uses and refuse to do "bad" ones, even when we don't understand why it won't do what we say. But we'd have to find some way to make sure the AI didn't reinterpret good beyond the immediate situation (IE: is this command the user is giving me "good" for him and other humans right now), and don't develop some sort of moral philosophy where they only work for the good of the human species. No ends justify the means thinking for our flying weapons platforms, please!
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  12. I'm sorry I didn't water you enough. I got distracted and forgot. Please stop chemically shouting at me!
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  13.  @peterjf7723  That's a very good point. It seems like scientists would need to understand how Zika works a lot better before they use it in therapies.
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  14. Acquiring nitrogen would seem to be the next big step, as we need something to reduce the partial pressure of the oxygen. Besides the obvious fire hazard, breathing pure oxygen for too long is extremely bad for the human body. Since nitrogen is so non-reactive, I think isolating it from the Martian atmosphere would be more a matter of removing the CO2 and retaining what's left over, rather than some chemical process.
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  15. Sounds like the takeaway is that when these neurons in the anterior insular cortex are activated it leads to increased motivation in the mice. Unfortunately the researchers were activating the neurons electrically through wires inserted in their brains. Not a strategy that could be widely applied to humans. So we need non-invasive, side effect free ways to activate these neurons.
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  16. This video is so cool! Thank you for making it. Out of all of them, large language models are the most terrifying new breakthrough, and that's certainly big in its way. The three medical breakthroughs are probably the most helpful in terms of saving lives and making life better for people. And other things like the ion engine, making oxygen on Mars and the discoveries of the James Webb telescope are extremely awesome. But for me, the discovery of background gravitational waves is probably the coolest breakthrough. The competition is tough, but that idea of using pulsars to determine how far Earth has shifted is just amazing.
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  17.  @peterjf7723  A modified Zika virus? Yikes. I know nothing of the subject so this could be wrong, but I'd be scared of accidentally triggering Guillain-Barre syndrome in the patients. Even one in a thousand patients would be too many, especially when they already have cancer.
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  18. I'm sorry for your loss, ukgroucho.
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  19. Mars is the planet that would need extra help. But it's further from the Sun and thus the satellite would need more solar panels, making it bigger than an equivalent orbiting Earth.
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  20. Your concerns are well made. It does seem unlikely that: - the natural process of precipitation just happened to form working batteries - those batteries could stay charged after literal millions of years discharging into the water And the scientists themselves say they didn't find a high enough voltage for electrolysis. But I still find this discovery incredibly exciting! It seems the nodules really do act like batteries, since they did actually measure a voltage difference across them. As for where the energy comes from, maybe the process is partly biological? Maybe there are organisms inside the nodules (bacteria most likely) that provide the tiny extra charge that makes electrolysis happen? And maybe it's these organisms that keep the potential difference going over millions of years.
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  21. What a wonderful idea! Thanks for telling us about it.
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  22. Thank you for this video! You explain a complicated subject really well.
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  23. I've heard the biggest problem with these AI systems is false positives, so this system makes sense. It kicks any suspected positives up to the human level for error checking, and in return the humans have to deal with a much smaller number of scans overall.
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  24. Thank you for the really interesting video!
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  25. It's real-life evidence that confirms Einstein's theory of General Relativity. Also, these waves are incredibly faint signals sent by objects (probably huge black holes orbiting each other) that are very far away. By measuring the waves, scientists are learning something about the universe that we couldn't otherwise perceive.
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  26. That's a neat idea! It's the reverse of using it as an insulator. In your use case it would absorb the heat from the aluminum and radiate it out the other side...
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  27. Thank you for this REALLY interesting video! It's quite a bit to think about. So when one photon is measured the other photon instantaneously takes on the opposite value, no matter how far away it is. They're still somehow connected.
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  28. That's a good point.
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  29. Thank you for this video! I'm really impressed, both by this First Light Fusion company and by your channel. I'm so glad YouTube recommended it to me.
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  30. Thank you for this fascinating new video!
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  31. Thank you for this video! It sounds like it may be too early to give a real assessment of Betavolt's potential. If they can successfully produce a 100 microwatt battery at a reasonable price, then it may be time to consider them in a more serious way. One watt seems kind of overambitious. That said, I love your ideas for nuclear battery applications! If they could make these batteries cheaply enough, it would be world changing to put low power trackers on shipping crates! So much smuggling and human trafficking is done today because it's possible to obfuscate the origin or destination of shipping containers. If the container had a tracker that could not be altered while the container is in transit, it would be an invaluable tool for law enforcement. Then there's the benefit to shippers and insurance companies. Low power sensors in industrial settings like pipelines could also be revolutionary. There's so many leaks in even the best pipeline networks. Imagine a computer that could monitor the effectiveness of the pipeline in real time, with granular detail on each section... If there was a leak they could get on top of it before massive amounts of oil or methane leaked into the environment. That would be very cool. I wonder if you could also use nuclear powered sensors to ensure that industries have anti-pollution technologies installed. Or heck, if they're cheap enough maybe you could use sensors to check if cars have catalytic converters! The cops could check for the signal, and if it's not there give the driver a ticket. And what about sensors that continually monitor water and air quality? Spread a thousand of them around a lake and scientists could study changes in water quality in real time.
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