Where are the dead? Remains of 166 people sent to space lost in the ocean
This was to be Celestis' 25th mission and its 12th 'Earth Rise' flight, a service that allows families to retrieve a keepsake that has truly travelled through space.However, the memorial took a tragic turn when the capsule failed to complete its planned return and instead plunged into the depths of the Pacific.Celestis confirmed that the remains are now lost at sea and cannot be recovered. 'No technical achievement replaces the profound personal meaning this service holds for our families,' said Celestis CEO Charles M. Chafer, acknowledging the emotional weight of the incident.The mission carried a diverse array of tributes, including ashes and DNA from people around the world, and even honored the youngest German to send his DNA into space, Matteo Barth.Over the years, Celestis has sent the remains of celebrities, scientists, and ordinary individuals into space, offering a new way to memorialise loved ones beyond Earth's bounds.Despite the setback, The Exploration Company has vowed to learn from the experience and attempt another launch in the future.The loss highlights both the promise and the risks of space memorial services, which have grown in popularity as more families seek extraordinary ways to commemorate their loved ones.For now, the remains of those aboard the Perseverance Flight rest at the bottom of the Pacific.- Ends
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Mint
an hour ago
- Mint
Europe's AI Law Needs a Smart Pause, Not a Full Stop
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- There's a common tool in the arsenal for anyone trying to change the course of artificial intelligence: the pause. Two years ago, Elon Musk and other tech leaders published an open letter calling on tech companies to delay their AI development for six months to better protect humanity. Now the target has shifted. Amid a growing fear of getting left behind in a race to build computers smarter than humans, a group of European corporate leaders are pointing the 'pause' gun at the European Union, the world's self-styled AI cop. Like the tech bros who wanted to rein in AI two years ago, this is a blunt suggestion that misses the nuance of what it's trying to address. A blanket pause on AI rules won't help Europe catch up with the US and China, as more than 45 companies now argue. That ignores a more fundamental problem around funding that the region's tech startups desperately need to scale up and compete with their larger Silicon Valley rivals. The idea that Europe has to choose between being an innovator and a regulator is a narrative successfully spun by Big Tech lobbyists who would benefit most from a lighter regulatory touch. But that doesn't mean the AI act itself couldn't do with a pause, albeit a narrow version of the what firms including ASML Holding NV, Airbus SE and Mistral AI called for in their 'stop the clock' letter published on Thursday, which demands that the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, postpone rules they call 'unclear, overlapping and increasingly complex.' On that they have a point, but only for the portion of the 180-page act that was hastily added in the final negotiations to address 'general-purpose' AI models like ChatGPT. The act in its original form was initially drafted in 2021, almost two years before ChatGPT sparked the generative AI boom. It aimed to regulate high-risk AI systems used to diagnose diseases, give financial advice or control critical infrastructure. Those types of applications are clearly defined in the act, from using AI to determine a person's eligibility for health benefits to controlling the water supply. Before such AI is deployed, the law requires that it be carefully vetted by both the tech's creators and the companies deploying it. If a hospital wants to deploy an AI system for diagnosing medical conditions, that would be considered 'high-risk AI' under the act. The AI provider would not only be required to test its model for accuracy and biases, but the hospital itself must have humans overseeing the system to monitor its accuracy over time. These are reasonable and straightforward requirements. But the rules are less clear in a newer section on general-purpose AI systems, cobbled together in 2023 in response to generative AI models like ChatGPT and image-generator Midjourney. When those products exploded onto the scene, AI could suddenly carry out an infinite array of tasks, and Brussels addressed that by making their rules wider and, unfortunately, vaguer. The problems start on page 83 of the act in the section that claims to identify the point at which a general purpose system like ChatGPT poses a systemic risk: when it has been trained using more than 10 to the 25th power — or 10^25 — floating point operations (FLOPs), meaning the computers running the training did at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations during the process. The act doesn't explain why this number is meaningful or what makes it so dangerous. In addition, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have shown that smaller models trained with high-quality data can rival the capabilities of much larger ones. 'FLOPs' don't necessarily capture a model's power — or risk — and using them as a metric can miss the bigger picture. Such technical thresholds meanwhile aren't used to define what 'general-purpose AI' or 'high-impact capabilities' mean, leaving them open to interpretation and frustratingly ambiguous for companies. 'These are deep scientific problems,' says Petar Tsankov, chief executive officer of LatticeFlow AI, which guides companies in complying with regulations like the AI act. 'The benchmarks are incomplete.' Brussels shouldn't pause its entire AI law. It should keep on schedule to start enforcing rules on high-risk AI systems in health care and critical infrastructure when they roll out in August 2026. But the rules on 'general' AI come into effect much sooner — in three weeks — and those need time to refine. Tsankov recommends two more years to get them right. Europe's AI law could create some much-needed transparency in the AI industry, and were it to roll out next month, companies like OpenAI would be forced to share secret details of their training data and processes. That would be a blessing for independent ethics researchers trying to study how harmful AI can be in areas like mental health. But the benefits would be short-lived if hazy rules allowed companies to drag their heels or find legal loopholes to get out. A surgical pause on the most ambiguous parts of the act would help Brussels avoid the legal chaos, and make sure that when rules do arrive, they work. More From Bloomberg Opinion: This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of 'Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.' More stories like this are available on
The Hindu
3 hours ago
- The Hindu
NIPGR's gene-edited japonica rice shows increased phosphate uptake, 20% more yield
Scientists at the Delhi-based National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR) have used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology to increase phosphate uptake and transport in japonica rice varieties. The resulting rice lines had higher seed and panicle numbers, thereby increasing the yield without compromising seed quality. The studies were carried out in a greenhouse. Phosphorus is an essential mineral for plant growth and development of plants. In case of limited phosphorus availability, crop productivity drops drastically. Even when phosphate fertilizers are used, only about 15-20% are taken up by plants while the balance gets leached out or lost through runoff. When the recommended amount of phosphate fertilizer was used, yield increased by 20% in gene edited rice lines. However, when only 10% of the recommended dose of phosphate fertilizer was used, yield in gene-edited rice lines increased by 40% compared with the control, says Dr. Jitender Giri from NIPGR, and the corresponding author of a paper published in Plant Biotechnology Journal. 'The purpose was to just demonstrate that even under extreme conditions of using only 10% of the recommended dose, the gene-edited lines showed increased phosphate uptake resulting in 40% higher yield compared with the control group, where the yield reduced sharply,' says Dr. Giri. 'But if phosphate fertilizer supply is reduced by 10% or even 30%, it is very likely that the gene-edited lines will still outperform the control plants.' Rice absorbs phosphate through its roots and transfers it to the shoots. One class of transporters brings phosphate from the soil into the root, while another inorganic phosphate transporter (OsPHO1;2) transfers phosphate from the root to the shoot. The NIPGR researchers restricted their work to the phosphate transporter that transfers phosphate from the root to the shoot. 'When the phosphate transporter OsPHO1;2 starts working more, it will create more demand for phosphate in the root. When this happens, the root-bound transporters will bring more phosphate from soil into the root,' he explains. 'We already know there is a negative regulator that controls the expression of the phosphate transporter in the model plant Arabidopsis. But what's happening in rice was not known till now.' Identification, removal of the repressor Through in silico and DNA-protein interaction studies, NIPGR researchers identified the repressor (OsWRKY6) and demonstrated that the repressor physically binds to the promoter. To verify if the repressor was indeed reducing the expression of the phosphate transporter, they silenced the repressor by knocking it out by using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool. When the repressor was knocked out, the expression of the phosphate transporter (OsPHO1;2) increased significantly. The increased expression of the transporter should have ideally led to more yield. But instead, the gene-edited rice lines fared poorly compared with the control. 'This was unexpected. We figured out that the repressor was also needed for other functions in the plant. While knocking out the repressor gene completely helped in removing the repression of the phosphate transporter thereby increasing the levels of phosphate in the shoot, we were also removing some essential functions regulated by the repressor,' Dr. Giri explains. Removing the binding site The researchers then identified the site where the repressor actually binds to the promoter. The binding site in the promoter is a very short sequence of just 30 base pairs. Again CRISPR-Cas9 was used to remove the binding side of the repressor on the promoter. 'We removed only the binding site and not the repressor itself. So the repressor is present in the plant and continues to execute other vital plant functions,' Dr. Giri explains. The phosphate transporter (OsPHO1;2) is also regulated by other regulators. By specifically removing only the site where the repressor binds to the promoter, the researchers ensured that the binding sites of other regulators are intact so they can continue to bind to the promoter and regulate its function. Dr. Giri likens it to undertaking a very precise, minimal invasive surgery in the promoter gene. There was enhanced expression of the promoter in the roots, along with increased shoot phosphate accumulation and improved plant growth the gene-edited rice plants leading to increased transfer of phosphate from the root to shoot, when the binding site of the repressor gene was removed from the phosphate promoter. Though only the binding site in the promoter found in the shoot was gene-edited, the researchers found that other transporters present in the root surface brought more phosphorus into the root. 'The roots start behaving like a sink by absorbing more phosphate from the soil, and this phosphate is distributed throughout the plant,' he says. The team found that the gene-edited lines were channelising the extra phosphate absorbed by the roots to produce more seeds by increasing the number of panicles — the fruiting body which bears seeds — leading to an increase in yield by 20%. The researchers analysed the seed size, seed dimension, seed length, starch and phosphate content, and found the seed dimension or seed quality to be normal. Since the roots of gene-edited plants absorb more phosphate than before, will it become even more necessary to continue using the same amount of phosphate fertilizer? That only about 20% of the phosphate fertilizer applied is taken up by plants because Dr. Giri says that phosphate is very reactive. In alkaline soil, phosphate forms complexes with either calcium or magnesium, and if it is acidic, it forms complexes with iron and aluminium. Since phosphate complexes are insoluble in nature, the transporters found in the root cannot absorb them. 'In the case of gene-edited rice, the plants will quickly absorb more phosphate before it combines with aluminium, iron, calcium or magnesium and become insoluble,' he explains. Testing the hypothesis using japonica For the study, japonica cultivar Nipponbare was used since making gene-edited lines and transgenics is generally easy with japonica. 'Japonica variety is easy to work with; it's not easy to raise transgenics using indica varieties. It will take more time to generate a sufficient number of gene plants when using Indian cultivars,' Dr. Giri says. 'So, we test our hypothesis in the japonica variety because it can be done quickly and more reliably, and then replicate it in Indian indica varieties.' 'It's a very important scientific advancement,' says Dr. P.V. Shivaprasad of the Epigenetics lab in the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, who is not part of the study. 'Soil in several parts of India has phosphorus deficiency. When the same modifications are performed in indica rice lines, it will be extremely useful. One must also check the efficacy of phosphate absorption, and how much less phosphate fertilizer can be used without compromising yield in indica lines. Exciting times ahead.' Off-target events Activists have raised objections to gene-edited technology on the grounds that the IPRs are held by foreign entities. Dr. Giri says that India is negotiating for a license of the CRISPR-Cas9 technology. CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology does not always target only the bases/genes of interest. Off-target events do happen, which is another objection raised by activists. To address the off-target events problem, Dr. Giri says there are software that predict where an intended gene editing might cause unexpected, unwanted, or even adverse alterations to the genome. 'We checked for all off-target genes to check if there are any changes. In our case, we tested the top 10 contender off-target sites and did not find any deletion on those sites,' Dr. Giri says. Before the seeds are actually approved and released, and farmers are allowed to cultivate, efforts will be taken to ensure that the deletion is restricted only to the receptor binding site on the promoter with no off-target effect actually seen, he says. 'What we do actually is that we produce a large number of lines and then select the best line and check for off-targets,' Dr. Giri says. 'It is very much possible to eliminate off-target events,' says Dr. Shivaprasad. 'There are multiple tools available for guide RNA design that almost eliminate the possibility of off-target events. It is also important to check for off-target regions to ensure that off-target events have not happened. It needs expertise.' According to Dr. Shivaprasad, there are more than three good in silico tools available to check for off-target events. 'Southern blot analysis, particularly junction fragment analysis, is carried out to verify the successful integration or modification of DNA sequences within a genome and to confirm if multiple copies or half copies are not present,' he says. NIPGR researchers have used tissue culture-based transgenic generation. When plants are produced using tissue culture, even before seeds are produced the plants are tested to check if gene editing has been precise without any off-target events. 'Only if the gene editing has been precise with no off-target events will we even allow the plants to grow to the seed stage. The rest are discarded. So whatever plant we grow till the seed stage will always carry the correct gene editing. The seeds coming from that plant and from the progeny will carry the phosphate transporter that has been precisely gene-edited to remove the 30 base pairs that form the binding site for the repressor (OsWRKY6),' Dr. Giri says. Foreign DNA The third major objection is the presence of foreign DNA. The Cas9 protein used in CRISPR gene editing is derived from Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria. Therefore, Cas9, which acts as a DNA-cutting enzyme, carries foreign DNA. Foreign DNA also comes from soil bacterium that is used as a vector for delivering the CRISPR-Cas9 components into plant cells. Dr. Giri claims that the DNA from bacteria is removed in the second generation through a simple Mendelian segregation method, as the plants are tested before growing to the seed stage to know if the gene editing has been precise without any off-target events. 'If you have one trait, the next generation will segregate into 3:1, where three will have the foreign DNA, and one will not. In the next generation, foreign DNA free plants are identified and propagated,' he says. 'It is possible to remove the DNA of Agrobacterium tumefaciens — the soil bacterium that is used as a vector for delivering the CRISPR-Cas9 components into plant cells — through the Mendelian segregation method,' confirms Dr. Shivaprasad. When the soil bacterium vector is removed, the S. pyogenes bacterium also gets removed automatically. India is almost entirely dependent on imports — nearly 4.5 million tonnes of Diammonium phosphate (DAP) — to meet the demand for phosphate fertilizers. The gene-edited technology, if successfully replicated in Indian rice varieties, can possibly contribute towards sustainable agriculture.
NDTV
4 hours ago
- NDTV
Space Capsule Carrying Ashes Of Over 160 Crashes Into Pacific Ocean
A space capsule carrying the ashes of 166 people crashed into the Pacific Ocean after two successful orbits around the Earth. According to the New York Post, a German startup called The Exploration Company (TEC) launched the Nyx capsule on June 23 as part of the program "Mission Possible". Its cargo included the remains of 166 people, whose ashes were sent into orbit through Celestis, a Texas-based space burial company. However, things didn't go exactly to plan as the capsule encountered an "issue" after its launch and plummeted to Earth, dropping into the Pacific Ocean. In a statement, the company said that the capsule was "launched successfully, powered the payloads nominally in-orbit, stabilized itself after separation with the launcher, re-entered and re-established communication after black out," but then things went off script. As per the New York Post, the company stated that it "lost communication" with the capsule "a few minutes before splash down." It added that it is still "investigating the root cause". "We apologize to all our clients who entrusted us with their payloads," the company said in a statement in the letter. "We all hoped for full success; partial success is often part of the road for those who take risks and push boundaries to change the world positively. I take full responsibility and present my apologies to our customers for not achieving full success," said TEC CEO Helene Huby in a LinkedIn Post. Celestis, a Texas-based space burial company which was part of the mission, stated that this was the first Celestis mission in which ashes were "designed to return from orbit". However, it noted that due to the crash into the Pacific Ocean, the ashes were dispersed at sea. As a result of this, they believe that they would "not be able to recover or return the flight capsules aboard." "Though we currently believe that we cannot return the flight capsules, we hope families will find some peace in knowing their loved ones were part of a historic journey, launched into space, orbited Earth, and are now resting in the vastness of the Pacific, akin to a traditional and honored sea scattering," the company said in a statement, according to People. Notably, ashes weren't the only thing on board the space capsule. Cannabis plant matter and seeds launched as part of a citizen science project called Martian Grow were also on board the capsule, per the outlet.
