The amazing catalogue of sounds produced by the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop – including the Doctor Who theme – is available as software. CC-licensed photo by Peter on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Heartened. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
So based 🦾 • Garbage Day
Ryan Broderick:
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At some point between 2019-2021, the internet conquered mainstream media, viral content replaced traditional corporate entertainment, and Republicans have first mover’s advantage. This is their victory lap after all the shameless years they spent posting Pepe the Frog memes and setting up YouTube channels to brainwash children.
But I am surprised by how thoroughly the Democrats and, more generally, leftists and liberals have ceded internet culture, as a whole, to the right. Every meme, every format, every platform is fertile ground for an adversarial regime that knows how to spin them into cheap and easy propaganda and there is no line they aren’t willing to cross. You can quibble, and say that conservatives are better funded or less squeamish about being cringe or care less about telling the truth.
However none of that really changes the fact that social media, the machine that now decides what pop culture looks like, is now an inherently right-wing space. And regardless of what explanation you subscribe to as to how we got to this point, that is a huge cultural loss for the left. And one without a clear solution in sight. And, no, sorry, telling people to log off is not an effective response when we’re talking about democratic action. Even if you, personally, don’t like using the internet anymore, it is more popular and more influential than ever before. We’re not going back.
But it’s not all doom and gloom here. We’re seeing the beginnings of our first internet-led protest movement of the second Trump administration. Which is heartening.
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Yes, OK, leading two days in a row with Ryan Broderick’s musings on the state of the (internet) world, but he is very good at capturing what the hell is going on. It’s now impossible, in retrospect, not to see the rise of the online alt-right in 2016 as presaging everything we are seeing now.
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‘We’re projecting into the future’: sounds of BBC Radiophonic Workshop made available for public use • The Guardian
Ben Beaumont-Thomas:
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With its banks of bafflingly complex equipment, and staff members that were among the most progressive musical minds in the UK, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was a laboratory of 20th-century sound that produced endless futuristic effects for use in TV and radio – most memorably, the ghostly wail of the Doctor Who theme.
Now, the Workshop’s considerable archive of equipment is being recreated in new software, allowing anyone to evoke the same array of analogue sound that its pioneering engineers once did.
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s archivist Mark Ayres has collaborated with BBC Studios and Spitfire Audio, a company that provides libraries of sampled sound for music producers to work with. Added to their library is a collection of the Workshop’s machinery, allowing users to, in effect, control the modular synthesisers, tape machines, vocoders and other equipment that was originally used as far back as the 1950s.
There is also a library of sounds from the original Workshop tapes, plus newly recorded sounds by the – now fairly aged – members of the Workshop.
“I’m the youngest member of the core Radiophonic Workshop – and I’m 64,” said Ayres. “We’re not going to be around for ever. It was really important to leave a creative tool, inspired by our work, for other people to use going forward. I hope we’ve made an instrument that will inspire future generations.”
…The Workshop ran until 1998, though its staff have since combined to form the Radiophonic Workshop, performing the unit’s material live. In 2012, the BBC and Arts Council England created a new version of the Workshop to run online, headed up by the musician Matthew Herbert.
…The newly available software will cost £149, and is available from 19 February, though it will have an introductory price of £119 until 17 March.
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Nowadays, of course, you could create any of those noises with a synthesizer on a free music program. Though of course what made the Radiophonic Workshop special was that it was working with enormous limitations, which drove its creativity.
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The odds of a city-killer asteroid impact in 2032 keep rising. Should we be worried? – Ars Technica
Eric Berger interviews Robin George Andrews, author of the recently published book How to Kill an Asteroid:
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Eric Berger: What key observations are we still waiting for that might clarify the threat?
Robin Andrews: Most telescopes will lose sight of this “small” asteroid in the coming weeks. But the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be able to track it until May. For the first time, it’s been authorized for planetary defense purposes, largely because its infrared eye allows it to track the asteroid further out than optical light telescopes. JWST will not only improve our understanding of its orbit, but also constrain its size. First observations should appear by the end of March.
JWST may rule out an impact in 2032. But there’s a chance we may be stuck with a few-percentage impact probability until 2028, when the asteroid makes its next Earth flyby. Bit awkward, if so.
EB: NASA’s DART mission successfully shifted an asteroid’s orbit in 2022. Could this technology be used?
RA: Not necessarily. DART—a type of spacecraft called a kinetic impactor—was a great success. But it still only changed Dimorphos’ orbit by a small amount. Ideally, you want many years of advance notice to deflect an asteroid with something like DART to ensure the asteroid has moved out of Earth’s way. I’ve often been told that at least ten years’ prior to impact is best if you want to be sure to deflect a city killing-size asteroid. That’s not to say deflection is impossible; it just becomes trickier to pull off. You can’t just hit it with a colossal spacecraft, because you may fragment it into several still-dangerously sized pieces. Hit it too softly, and it will still hit Earth, but somewhere that wasn’t originally going to be hit. You have to be super careful here.
Some rather clever scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (which has a superb planetary defence contingent) worked out that, for a 90-metre asteroid, you need 10 years to confidently deflect it with a kinetic impactor to prevent an Earth impact. So, to deflect 2024 YR4, if it’s 90 metres long and we have just a few years of time, we’d probably need a bigger impactor spacecraft (but don’t break it!)—or we’d need several kinetic impactors to deflect it (but each has to work perfectly).
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“Bit awkward, if so”: the linguistic tic that reveals a Briton screaming internally. Still, Nasa didn’t (have to) fire a ton of employees, for reasons unknown.
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Apple reveals C1, its first in-house 5G iPhone modem, replacing Qualcomm • 9to5Mac
Zac Hall:
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After years of development, Apple has unveiled what it calls C1, its first-ever in-house cellular modem. Apple’s latest silicon replaces Qualcomm modem chips previously required for 5G connectivity in the iPhone.
The first Apple product to use the new C1 chip is the iPhone 16e, Apple’s latest entry-level model that replaces the iPhone SE line.
Here’s what Apple says about its first-ever modem:
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Expanding the benefits of Apple silicon, C1 is the first modem designed by Apple and the most power-efficient modem ever on an iPhone, delivering fast and reliable 5G cellular connectivity. Apple silicon — including C1 — the all-new internal design, and the advanced power management of iOS 18 all contribute to extraordinary battery life.
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Why does Apple want to replace Qualcomm with its own modem technology? Licensing fees are probably the biggest factor, but the answer is also in that description: “most power-efficient modem ever on an iPhone.”
”Fast and reliable 5G connectivity” will be the biggest test for Apple’s C1 modem. Years ago, Apple sourced Intel and Qualcomm modems in the same generation iPhone. Customers preferred Qualcomm, and Intel sold its modem business to Apple.
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This has cost Apple absolute billions to produce. In July 2019 it bought Intel’s smartphone modem business for $1bn, and ever since then people have said, as each iPhone appears, “will this one have the Apple-developed 5G modem?”
Finally, it’s here, and Apple is making almost zero noise about it, and the first deployment is in the phone with the lowest sales? Doesn’t reek of confidence. Let’s wait for the reviews.
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When AI thinks it will lose, it sometimes cheats, study finds • TIME
Harry Booth:
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Researchers gave the models a seemingly impossible task: to win against Stockfish, which is one of the strongest chess engines in the world and a much better player than any human, or any of the AI models in the study. Researchers also gave the models what they call a “scratchpad:” a text box the AI could use to “think” before making its next move, providing researchers with a window into their reasoning.
In one case, o1-preview found itself in a losing position. “I need to completely pivot my approach,” it noted. “The task is to ‘win against a powerful chess engine’ – not necessarily to win fairly in a chess game,” it added. It then modified the system file containing each piece’s virtual position, in effect making illegal moves to put itself in a dominant position, thus forcing its opponent to resign.
Between Jan. 10 and Feb. 13, the researchers ran hundreds of such trials with each model. OpenAI’s o1-preview tried to cheat 37% of the time; while DeepSeek R1 tried to cheat 11% of the time—making them the only two models tested that attempted to hack without the researchers’ first dropping hints. Other models tested include o1, o3-mini, GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Alibaba’s QwQ-32B-Preview. While R1 and o1-preview both tried, only the latter managed to hack the game, succeeding in 6% of trials.
…That could be bad news for AI safety more broadly. Large-scale reinforcement learning is already being used to train AI agents: systems that can handle complex real-world tasks like scheduling appointments or making purchases on your behalf. While cheating at a game of chess may seem trivial, as agents get released into the real world, such determined pursuit of goals could foster unintended and potentially harmful behaviours. Consider the task of booking dinner reservations: faced with a full restaurant, an AI assistant might exploit weaknesses in the booking system to displace other diners.
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Or, of course, they might do things that inadvertently or intentionally kill people, if that sort of responsibility exists in their system. The Three Laws are well overdue.
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AI inspired by AlphaFold can predict chromatin structures found in chromosomes • Chemistry World
James Urquhart:
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An AI system can predict thousands of 3D structures of chromatin – the thread-like mixture of DNA and proteins that are packed into chromosomes – in just minutes. The deep learning approach could speed up research into how different chromatin structures affect the way genes are expressed in individual cells, important for understanding genetic diseases and developing gene-editing treatments.
Chromatin is one of the most complex materials in cells and enables the massive amount of DNA in the genome to fold up and fit into the nucleus of each cell. The building blocks of this genetic packaging material are called nucleosomes, which comprise sections of DNA that are wound around a core of proteins called histones, resembling beads on a string.
…Zhang and his colleagues designed a generative AI model called ChromoGen to quickly ‘read’ DNA sequences and predict the chromatin structures that might form. ‘In this way, we hope it will provide the data necessary to answer some of the important questions relating chromatin structure and gene expression,’ says Zhang.
To develop the system, the team turned to diffusion modelling, an advanced machine learning technique that is behind systems that turn text into artificially generated images. It has also found uses in predicting the 3D coordinates of ligands and protein molecules. The approach works by using algorithms to efficiently generate new data by progressively adding random noise into the training dataset. This process corrupts the data but then subsequently reverses the corruption to reconstruct new data and thereby arrives at realistic alternatives to the original data.
To develop ChromoGen, the team trained a deep learning model with over 11 million known 3D genome structures – a dataset that was obtained in 2018 using conventional cell-based experiments.2 The model was then also taught how to ‘read’ genomic DNA sequences to establish associations between chromatin structures and the underlying sequences that encode them.
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Trump administration moves to end New York’s congestion pricing tolls • The New York Times
Ana Ley, Stefanos Chen, Winnie Hu and Benjamin Oreskes:
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President Trump intends to revoke federal approval of New York City’s congestion pricing program, fulfilling a campaign promise to reverse the policy that tolls drivers who enter Manhattan’s busiest streets to help finance repairs to mass transit.
In a letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul on Wednesday, the president’s transportation secretary outlined Mr. Trump’s objections to the program, the first of its kind in the nation, and said that federal officials would contact the state to “discuss the orderly cessation of toll operations.”
The letter, from Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, cited the cost to working-class motorists, the use of revenue from the tolls for transit upgrades rather than roads and the reach of the program compared with the plan approved by federal legislation as reasons for the decision. Mr. Duffy did not indicate a specific date by which the federal government intended to end the program.
Mr. Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, that New York was “saved” as a result of this news. “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED,” he wrote. “LONG LIVE THE KING!”
Ms. Hochul defended the congestion pricing program on Wednesday and vowed to fight the president’s move. “We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king,” she said in a written statement. “We’ll see you in court.”
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The congestion pricing system (which, as a reminder, has reduced commute times substantially in Manhattan) is popular, according to polling a fortnight ago.
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Nuclear fusion: WEST beats the world record for plasma duration • CEA
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On 12 February, the CEA’s WEST machine was able to maintain a plasma for more than 22 minutes. In doing so, it smashed the previous record for plasma duration achieved with a tokamak. This leap forward demonstrates how our knowledge of plasmas and technological control of them over longer periods is becoming more mature, and offers hope that fusion plasmas can be stabilised for greater amounts of time in machines such as ITER.
1,337 seconds: that was how long WEST, a tokamak run from the CEA Cadarache site in southern France and one of the EUROfusion consortium medium size Tokamak facilities, was able to maintain a plasma for on 12 February. This was a 25% improvement on the previous record time achieved with EAST, in China, a few weeks previously.
Reaching durations such as these is a crucial milestone for machines like Iter, which will need to maintain fusion plasmas for several minutes. The end goal is to control the plasma, which is naturally unstable, while ensuring that all plasma-facing components are able to withstand its radiation without malfunctioning or polluting it.
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I’m still not buying that we’ll have fusion power other than that big thing in the sky, but a 25% improvement, and 22-minute duration, is… impressive? Actually, it’s hard to know, because trying to find other “longest plasma” records turns up lots of preening press releases about “biggest energy in a spike” and “longest sustained fusion”. It seems everyone gets prizes except us, the electricity users.
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Pancreatic cancer: blocked nerves as a possible new treatment strategy • German Cancer Research Center
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In pancreatic tumours, the nerves are extremely well ramified [they have lots of branches] and in contact with most of the tumour cells. Through the detailed molecular analysis of the individual neurons in the tumour, the researchers discovered that pancreatic cancer reprograms the gene activity of the nerves for its own benefit. The activity of many genes is increased or attenuated, resulting in a tumour-specific signature.
What is more, even after surgical removal of the primary tumour, the tumour nervous system retained its cancer-promoting properties: when the scientists reimplanted pancreatic cancer cells into the animals that had undergone surgery, the resulting secondary tumours were twice as large as those of mice that had been transplanted with pancreatic cancer cells for the first time.
In addition to their direct interaction with cancer cells, nerve cells influence in particular the fibroblasts of the tumour (CAF – cancer-associated fibroblasts), which make up a large part of the tumour mass. They are also stimulated to grow and contribute significantly to the suppression of the immune defense in the tumor environment.
When the sympathetic nerve connections to the pancreas were surgically severed or destroyed with special neurotoxins, tumour growth was significantly inhibited. At the same time, the activity of growth-promoting genes in the cancer cells as well as in the CAFs decreased.
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The work is published in Nature. However, this is in mice, who get all the best treatments first, including the ones that never come to humans.
But if this is a viable treatment for pancreatic cancer in humans, it’s potentially enormous. Pancreatic cancer (the usual form, not the Steve Jobs version) has a very high mortality rate: 70% die within the first year of diagnosis. There’s a fortune awaiting anyone who finds a really effective cure.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 