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The Independent
29-05-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Scientists fear Britain's entire food chain is contaminated as study finds microplastics in bugs
Plastic pollution is harming slugs, beetles, snails and earthworms, new research has found, raising fears Britain's entire food chain has been contaminated. Researchers found more than one in ten bugs had fragments of plastic in their stomachs, causing harmful chemicals to be passed on to larger animals that feed on them, like birds and hedgehogs. The study, by scientists at Sussex and Exeter universities, analysed more than 580 bug samples from 51 sites across Sussex. Microplastics were found in almost 12 per cent of bugs with the highest levels recorded in earthworms (30 per cent) and slugs and snails (24 per cent). Polyester, most likely from clothes, was the most common type of plastic found in the invertebrates tested. Researchers suspected these plastic fibres came from dried human sewage sludge which is used as fertiliser by some farmers and can contain fibres from washing machines. One common garden black beetle was found with a 4.5mm long piece of nylon inside it- that's a quarter of its body length. Although animals that feed on decaying plant matter had the highest rates of plastic, carnivorous insects, such as ladybirds, were also affected. Researchers say the findings raise fresh concerns about the long-term effects of plastic pollution and its impact on biodiversity and that it should no longer be seen as solely a marine issue. 'We were surprised by just how widespread this plastic contamination is,' said lead author Emily Thrift, Ecology Doctoral Tutor at the University of Sussex. 'This is the first study to find plastics consistently turning up across an entire community of land invertebrates. 'Similar plastic types were found in hedgehog faeces in our earlier research, and they seem to be entering the diet of birds, mammals, and reptiles via their invertebrate prey.' One previous study on insects from 2024 revealed ingesting plastic can lead to stunted growth, reduced fertility and changes in liver, kidney, and stomach function in various species, raising alarm among conservationists. In another 2020 study published in the journal Global Change Biology, dippers, a type of small bird, were found to be ingesting about 200 plastic particles a day from the insects they eat. Three in four of the fragments found in the birds were less than 0.5mm in size but were up several millimetres in length. Professor Fiona Mathews, Environmental Biologist at the University of Sussex, stressed that microplastics are now found in every level of the food chain, from bugs to mammals. She said: 'Attention is currently focused on litter as the main source of contamination, but these findings suggest multiple sources ranging from clothing to paint.' The researchers say their work, which spans six invertebrate groups and four levels of the food chain, highlights the need to research how these different plastics are damaging the environment and implement stronger measures to limit plastic pollution.
The Independent
28-05-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Scientists fear Britain's entire food chain contaminated as study finds microplastics in bugs
Plastic pollution is harming slugs, beetles, snails and earthworms, new research has found, raising fears Britain's entire food chain has been contaminated. Researchers found more than one in ten bugs had fragments of plastic in their stomachs, causing harmful chemicals to be passed on to larger animals that feed on them, like birds and hedgehogs. The study, by scientists at Sussex and Exeter universities, analysed more than 580 bug samples from 51 sites across Sussex. Microplastics were found in almost 12 per cent of bugs with the highest levels recorded in earthworms (30 per cent) and slugs and snails (24 per cent). Polyester, most likely from clothes, was the most common type of plastic found in the invertebrates tested. Researchers suspected these plastic fibres came from dried human sewage sludge which is used as fertiliser by some farmers and can contain fibres from washing machines. One common garden black beetle was found with a 4.5mm long piece of nylon inside it- that's a quarter of its body length. Although animals that feed on decaying plant matter had the highest rates of plastic, carnivorous insects, such as ladybirds, were also affected. Researchers say the findings raise fresh concerns about the long-term effects of plastic pollution and its impact on biodiversity and that it should no longer be seen as solely a marine issue. 'We were surprised by just how widespread this plastic contamination is,' said lead author Emily Thrift, Ecology Doctoral Tutor at the University of Sussex. 'This is the first study to find plastics consistently turning up across an entire community of land invertebrates. 'Similar plastic types were found in hedgehog faeces in our earlier research, and they seem to be entering the diet of birds, mammals, and reptiles via their invertebrate prey.' One previous study on insects from 2024 revealed ingesting plastic can lead to stunted growth, reduced fertility and changes in liver, kidney, and stomach function in various species, raising alarm among conservationists. In another 2020 study published in the journal Global Change Biology, dippers, a type of small bird, were found to be ingesting about 200 plastic particles a day from the insects they eat. Three in four of the fragments found in the birds were less than 0.5mm in size but were up several millimetres in length. Professor Fiona Mathews, Environmental Biologist at the University of Sussex, stressed that microplastics are now found in every level of the food chain, from bugs to mammals. She said: 'Attention is currently focused on litter as the main source of contamination, but these findings suggest multiple sources ranging from clothing to paint.' The researchers say their work, which spans six invertebrate groups and four levels of the food chain, highlights the need to research how these different plastics are damaging the environment and implement stronger measures to limit plastic pollution.
BBC News
26-05-2025
- Science
- BBC News
The people who think AI might become conscious
But quite recently, in the real world there has been a rapid tipping point in thinking on machine consciousness, where credible voices have become concerned that this is no longer the stuff of science fiction. The sudden shift has been prompted by the success of so-called large language models (LLMs), which can be accessed through apps on our phones such as Gemini and Chat GPT. The ability of the latest generation of LLMs to have plausible, free-flowing conversations has surprised even their designers and some of the leading experts in the field. There is a growing view among some thinkers that as AI becomes even more intelligent, the lights will suddenly turn on inside the machines and they will become conscious. Others, such as Prof Anil Seth who leads the Sussex University team, disagree, describing the view as "blindly optimistic and driven by human exceptionalism". "We associate consciousness with intelligence and language because they go together in humans. But just because they go together in us, it doesn't mean they go together in general, for example in animals." So what actually is consciousness? The short answer is that no-one knows. That's clear from the good-natured but robust arguments among Prof Seth's own team of young AI specialists, computing experts, neuroscientists and philosophers, who are trying to answer one of the biggest questions in science and philosophy. While there are many differing views at the consciousness research centre, the scientists are unified in their method: to break this big problem down into lots of smaller ones in a series of research projects, which includes the Dreamachine. Just as the search to find the "spark of life" that made inanimate objects come alive was abandoned in the 19th Century in favour of identifying how individual parts of living systems worked, the Sussex team is now adopting the same approach to consciousness.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
AI could already be conscious. Are we ready for it?
I step into the booth with some trepidation. I am about to be subjected to strobe lighting while music plays – as part of a research project trying to understand what makes us truly human. It's an experience that brings to mind the test in the science fiction film Bladerunner, designed to distinguish humans from artificially created beings posing as humans. Could I be a robot from the future and not know it? Would I pass the test? The researchers assure me that this is not actually what this experiment is about. The device that they call the "Dreamachine" is designed to study how the human brain generates our conscious experiences of the world. As the strobing begins, and even though my eyes are closed, I see swirling two-dimensional geometric patterns. It's like jumping into a kaleidoscope, with constantly shifting triangles, pentagons and octagons. The colours are vivid, intense and ever-changing: pinks, magentas and turquoise hues, glowing like neon lights. The "Dreamachine" brings the brain's inner activity to the surface with flashing lights, aiming to explore how our thought processes work. The images I'm seeing are unique to my own inner world and unique to myself, according to the researchers. They believe these patterns can shed light on consciousness itself. They hear me whisper: "It's lovely, absolutely lovely. It's like flying through my own mind!" The "Dreamachine", at Sussex University's Centre for Consciousness Science, is just one of many new research projects across the world investigating human consciousness: the part of our minds that enables us to be self-aware, to think and feel and make independent decisions about the world. By learning the nature of consciousness, researchers hope to better understand what's happening within the silicon brains of artificial intelligence. Some believe that AI systems will soon become independently conscious, if they haven't already. But what really is consciousness, and how close is AI to gaining it? And could the belief that AI might be conscious itself fundamentally change humans in the next few decades? The idea of machines with their own minds has long been explored in science fiction. Worries about AI stretch back nearly a hundred years to the film Metropolis, in which a robot impersonates a real woman. A fear of machines becoming conscious and posing a threat to humans was explored in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the HAL 9000 computer tried to kill astronauts onboard its spaceship. And in the final Mission Impossible film, which has just been released, the world is threatened by a powerful rogue AI, described by one character as a "self-aware, self-learning, truth-eating digital parasite". But quite recently, in the real world there has been a rapid tipping point in thinking on machine consciousness, where credible voices have become concerned that this is no longer the stuff of science fiction. The sudden shift has been prompted by the success of so-called large language models (LLMs), which can be accessed through apps on our phones such as Gemini and Chat GPT. The ability of the latest generation of LLMs to have plausible, free-flowing conversations has surprised even their designers and some of the leading experts in the field. There is a growing view among some thinkers that as AI becomes even more intelligent, the lights will suddenly turn on inside the machines and they will become conscious. Others, such as Prof Anil Seth who leads the Sussex University team, disagree, describing the view as "blindly optimistic and driven by human exceptionalism". "We associate consciousness with intelligence and language because they go together in humans. But just because they go together in us, it doesn't mean they go together in general, for example in animals." So what actually is consciousness? The short answer is that no-one knows. That's clear from the good-natured but robust arguments among Prof Seth's own team of young AI specialists, computing experts, neuroscientists and philosophers, who are trying to answer one of the biggest questions in science and philosophy. While there are many differing views at the consciousness research centre, the scientists are unified in their method: to break this big problem down into lots of smaller ones in a series of research projects, which includes the Dreamachine. Just as the search to find the "spark of life" that made inanimate objects come alive was abandoned in the 19th Century in favour of identifying how individual parts of living systems worked, the Sussex team is now adopting the same approach to consciousness. They hope to identify patterns of brain activity that explain various properties of conscious experiences, such as changes in electrical signals or blood flow to different regions. The goal is to go beyond looking for mere correlations between brain activity and consciousness, and try to come up with explanations for its individual components. Prof Seth, the author of a book on consciousness, Being You, worries that we may be rushing headlong into a society that is being rapidly reshaped by the sheer pace of technological change without sufficient knowledge about the science, or thought about the consequences. "We take it as if the future has already been written; that there is an inevitable march to a superhuman replacement," he says. "We did not have these conversations enough with the rise of social media, much to our collective detriment. But with AI, it is not too late. We can decide what we want." But there are some in the tech sector who believe that the AI in our computers and phones may already be conscious, and we should treat them as such. Google suspended software engineer Blake Lemoine in 2022, after he argued that artificial intelligence chatbots could feel things and potentially suffer. In November 2024, an AI welfare officer for Anthropic, Kyle Fish, co-authored a report suggesting that AI consciousness was a realistic possibility in the near future. He recently told The New York Times that he also believed that there was a small (15%) chance that chatbots are already conscious. One reason he thinks it possible is that no-one, not even the people who developed these systems, knows exactly how they work. That's worrying, says Prof Murray Shanahan, principal scientist at Google DeepMind and emeritus professor in AI at Imperial College, London. "We don't actually understand very well the way in which LLMs work internally, and that is some cause for concern," he tells the BBC. According to Prof Shanahan, it's important for tech firms to get a proper understanding of the systems they're building – and researchers are looking at that as a matter of urgency. "We are in a strange position of building these extremely complex things, where we don't have a good theory of exactly how they achieve the remarkable things they are achieving," he says. "So having a better understanding of how they work will enable us to steer them in the direction we want and to ensure that they are safe." The prevailing view in the tech sector is that LLMs are not currently conscious in the way we experience the world, and probably not in any way at all. But that is something that the married couple Profs Lenore and Manuel Blum, both emeritus professors at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, believe will change, possibly quite soon. According to the Blums, that could happen as AI and LLMs have more live sensory inputs from the real world, such as vision and touch, by connecting cameras and haptic sensors (related to touch) to AI systems. They are developing a computer model that constructs its own internal language called Brainish to enable this additional sensory data to be processed, attempting to replicate the processes that go on in the brain. "We think Brainish can solve the problem of consciousness as we know it," Lenore tells the BBC. "AI consciousness is inevitable." Manuel chips in enthusiastically with an impish grin, saying that the new systems that he too firmly believes will emerge will be the "next stage in humanity's evolution". Conscious robots, he believes, "are our progeny. Down the road, machines like these will be entities that will be on Earth and maybe on other planets when we are no longer around". David Chalmers – Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University – defined the distinction between real and apparent consciousness at a conference in Tucson, Arizona in 1994. He laid out the "hard problem" of working out how and why any of the complex operations of brains give rise to conscious experience, such as our emotional response when we hear a nightingale sing. Prof Chalmers says that he is open to the possibility of the hard problem being solved. "The ideal outcome would be one where humanity shares in this new intelligence bonanza," he tells the BBC. "Maybe our brains are augmented by AI systems." On the sci-fi implications of that, he wryly observes: "In my profession, there is a fine line between science fiction and philosophy". Prof Seth, however, is exploring the idea that true consciousness can only be realised by living systems. "A strong case can be made that it isn't computation that is sufficient for consciousness but being alive," he says. "In brains, unlike computers, it's hard to separate what they do from what they are." Without this separation, he argues, it's difficult to believe that brains "are simply meat-based computers". And if Prof Seth's intuition about life being important is on the right track, the most likely technology will not be made of silicon run on computer code, but will rather consist of tiny collections of nerve cells the size of lentil grains that are currently being grown in labs. Called "mini-brains" in media reports, they are referred to as "cerebral organoids" by the scientific community, which uses them to research how the brain works, and for drug testing. One Australian firm, Cortical Labs, in Melbourne, has even developed a system of nerve cells in a dish that can play the 1972 sports video game Pong. Although it is a far cry from a conscious system, the so-called "brain in a dish" is spooky as it moves a paddle up and down a screen to bat back a pixelated ball. Some experts feel that if consciousness is to emerge, it is most likely to be from larger, more advanced versions of these living tissue systems. Cortical Labs monitors their electrical activity for any signals that could conceivably be anything like the emergence of consciousness. The firm's chief scientific and operating officer, Dr Brett Kagan is mindful that any emerging uncontrollable intelligence might have priorities that "are not aligned with ours". In which case, he says, half-jokingly, that possible organoid overlords would be easier to defeat because "there is always bleach" to pour over the fragile neurons. Returning to a more solemn tone, he says the small but significant threat of artificial consciousness is something he'd like the big players in the field to focus on more as part of serious attempts to advance our scientific understanding – but says that "unfortunately, we don't see any earnest efforts in this space". The more immediate problem, though, could be how the illusion of machines being conscious affects us. In just a few years, we may well be living in a world populated by humanoid robots and deepfakes that seem conscious, according to Prof Seth. He worries that we won't be able to resist believing that the AI has feelings and empathy, which could lead to new dangers. "It will mean that we trust these things more, share more data with them and be more open to persuasion." But the greater risk from the illusion of consciousness is a "moral corrosion", he says. "It will distort our moral priorities by making us devote more of our resources to caring for these systems at the expense of the real things in our lives" – meaning that we might have compassion for robots, but care less for other humans. And that could fundamentally alter us, according to Prof Shanahan. "Increasingly human relationships are going to be replicated in AI relationships, they will be used as teachers, friends, adversaries in computer games and even romantic partners. Whether that is a good or bad thing, I don't know, but it is going to happen, and we are not going to be able to prevent it". The truth about life on other planets - and what it means for humans How can traditional British TV survive the US streaming giants? Nasa needs saving from itself – but is this billionaire right for that job? Top picture credit: Getty Images BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. You can send us your feedback on the InDepth section by clicking on the button below.
Saudi Gazette
20-05-2025
- Science
- Saudi Gazette
Scientists in a race to discover why our Universe exists
WASHINGTON — Inside a laboratory nestled above the mist of the forests of South Dakota, scientists are searching for the answer to one of science's biggest questions: why does our Universe exist? They are in a race for the answer with a separate team of Japanese scientists – who are several years ahead. The current theory of how the Universe came into being can't explain the existence of the planets, stars and galaxies we see around us. Both teams are building detectors that study a sub-atomic particle called a neutrino in the hope of finding answers. The US-led international collaboration is hoping the answer lies deep underground, in the aptly named Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (Dune). The scientists will travel 1,500 meters below the surface into three vast underground caverns. Such is the scale that construction crews and their bulldozers seem like small plastic toys by comparison. The science director of this facility, Dr Jaret Heise describes the giant caves as "cathedrals to science". Dr Heise has been involved the construction of these caverns at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (Surf) for nearly ten years. They seal Dune off from the noise and radiation from the world above. Now, Dune is now ready for the next stage. "We are poised to build the detector that will change our understanding of the Universe with instruments that will be deployed by a collaboration of more than 1,400 scientists from 35 countries who are eager to answer the question of why we exist," he says. When the Universe was created two kinds of particles were created: matter – from which stars, planets and everything around us are made – and, in equal amounts, antimatter, matter's exact opposite. Theoretically the two should have cancelled each other out, leaving nothing but a big burst of energy. And yet, here we – as matter – are. Scientists believe that the answer to understanding why matter won – and we exist – lies in studying a particle called the neutrino and its antimatter opposite, the anti-neutrino. They will be firing beams of both kinds of particles from deep underground in Illinois to the detectors at South Dakota, 800 miles away. This is because as they travel, neutrinos and anti-neutrinos change ever so slightly. The scientists want to find out whether those changes are different for the neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. If they are, it could lead them to the answer of why matter and anti-matter don't cancel each other out. Dune is an international collaboration, involving 1,400 scientists from thirty countries. Among them is Dr Kate Shaw from Sussex University, who told me that the discoveries in store will be "transformative" to our understanding of the Universe and humanity's view of itself. "It is really exciting that we are here now with the technology, with the engineering, with the computer software skills to really be able to attack these big questions," she said. Half a world away, Japanese scientists are using shining golden globes to search for the same answers. Gleaming in all its splendour it is like a temple to science, mirroring the cathedral in South Dakota 6,000 miles (9,650 km) away. The scientists are building Hyper-K — which will be a bigger and better version of their existing neutrino detector, Super-K. The Japanese-led team will be ready to turn on their neutrino beam in less than three years, several years earlier than the American project. Just like Dune, Hyper-K is an international collaboration. Dr Mark Scott of Imperial College, London believes his team is in pole position to make one of the biggest ever discoveries about the origin of the Universe. "We switch on earlier and we have a larger detector, so we should have more sensitivity sooner than Dune," he says. Having both experiments running together means that scientists will learn more than they would with just one, but, he says, "I would like to get there first!" But Dr Linda Cremonesi, of Queen Mary University of London, who works for the Dune project, says that getting there first may not give the Japanese-led team the full picture of what is really going on. "There is an element of a race, but Hyper K does not have yet all of the ingredients that they need to understand if neutrinos and anti-neutrinos behave differently." The race may be on, but the first results are only expected in a few years' time. The question of just what happened at the beginning of time to bring us into existence remains a mystery – for now. — BBC
