2025 Beyond the closed-forest paradigm: Cross-scale vegetation structure in temperate Europe before the late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2950475925000061


Beyond the Closed-Forest Paradigm: Rethinking Temperate Europe’s Natural Landscapes

Our new study, co-authored with an international team, challenges the long-standing assumption that Europe’s temperate landscapes were uniformly covered by closed forest before human impact. Here, using state-of-the-art pollen analyses we reconstruct vegetation patterns from the Last Interglacial (~129,000–116,000 years ago) - prior to the human-driven megafauna extinction - and uncover a highly heterogeneous landscape—not the dense, continuous forests often assumed.

Key Findings:

✅ Mosaic Landscapes: At a local scale (~9 km²), vegetation was a dynamic mix: 17% open areas, 21% closed forests, and 63% light woodlands (composed of disturbance-adapted plants) —far from a uniform dense forest.

✅ Weak Climate Correlations: Surprisingly, climate alone did not strongly predict vegetation openness, suggesting that local-scale factors and disturbances played a key role.

✅ Scale Matters: Local and regional vegetation patterns were only weakly correlated, highlighting the importance of fine-scale heterogeneity in understanding past ecosystems.

✅ The Role of Megafauna: Large herbivores likely played a key role in shaping this landscape, maintaining openness and biodiversity through grazing and browsing—a perspective with key implications for conservation, restoration, reforestation, and rewilding.

🌍 These findings challenge the classic closed-forest paradigm and provide crucial insights for biodiversity conservation and restoration strategies today.

‘Godfather of AI’ predicts it will take over the world | LBC
https://youtu.be/vxkBE23zDmQ?si=kTx8QE7ywOyV8tMe


You say they try to get more control as if they are already thinking devices, as if they think in a way analogous to the way we think. Is that really what you believe?

"Yes, the best model we have of how we think is these things. There was an old model for a long time in AI where the idea was that thought was applying rules to symbolic expressions in your head and most people in AI thought it has to be like that, that's the only way it could work. There were a few crazy people who said no no it's a big neural network and it works by all these neurons interacting. It turns out that's been much better at doing reasoning than anything the symbolic AI people could produce and now it's doing reasoning using neural networks."

...

We would like them to be just tools that do what we want even when they're cleverer than us but the first thing to ask is how many examples do you know of more intelligent things being controlled by much less intelligent things? There are examples of course in human societies of stupid people controlling intelligent people but that's just a small difference in intelligence. With big differences in intelligence there aren't any examples. The only one I can think of is a mother and baby and evolution put a lot of work into allowing the baby to control the mother."

Křemíkoví Sověti - Sen o nesmrtelnosti
https://politiq.cz/2025/02/01/kremikovi-soveti/

Zdá se, že zde existuje paradoxní paralela mezi futuristickým myšlením mladého Sovětského svazu a diskurzem Silicon Valley. A čím blíže se na ni díváte, tím je jasnější. Dalo by se dokonce říci, že ducha kalifornského technologického kapitalismu lze plně pochopit pouze tehdy, čtete-li ho na pozadí jeho komunistického protějšku.

Vzorky z planetky Bennu jsou plné životadárných sloučenin — ČT24 — Česká televize
https://ct24.ceskatelevize.cz/clanek/veda/vzorky-z-planetky-bennu-jsou-plne-zivotadarnych-sloucenin-357647

An evaporite sequence from ancient brine recorded in Bennu samples | Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08495-6

Evaporation or freezing of water-rich fluids with dilute concentrations of dissolved salts can produce brines, as observed in closed basins on Earth1 and detected by remote sensing on icy bodies in the outer Solar System2,3. The mineralogical evolution of these brines is well understood in regard to terrestrial environments4, but poorly constrained for extraterrestrial systems owing to a lack of direct sampling. Here we report the occurrence of salt minerals in samples of the asteroid (101955) Bennu returned by the OSIRIS-REx mission5. These include sodium-bearing phosphates and sodium-rich carbonates, sulfates, chlorides and fluorides formed during evaporation of a late-stage brine that existed early in the history of Bennu’s parent body. Discovery of diverse salts would not be possible without mission sample return and careful curation and storage, because these decompose with prolonged exposure to Earth’s atmosphere. Similar brines probably still occur in the interior of icy bodies Ceres and Enceladus, as indicated by spectra or measurement of sodium carbonate on the surface or in plumes2,3.