It could also be difficult for the human mind to conceptualize: a colossal cloud so colossal that it surrounds the sun and eight planets while stretching trillions of kilometers into space.

The spherical envelope often known as the Oort cloud is virtually invisible. The individual particles are so thinly distributed and thus far from the sunshine of any star, including the Sun, that astronomers simply cannot see the cloud, although it envelops us like a blanket.

It's also theoretical. Astronomers conclude that the Oort cloud exists since it is the one logical explanation for the arrival of a certain class of comets that sporadically visit our solar system. It seems that the cloud is basically an enormous reservoir could host billions of icy celestial bodies.

Two of those bodies will fly past Earth in the times leading as much as Halloween. Tsuchinshan ATLASalso often known as Comet C/2023 A3, will likely be at its brightest and certain visible to the naked eye for per week or two after October 12, the day it’s closest to Earth – just look in only after sunset the western sky. As the times pass, the comet becomes fainter and moves higher within the sky.

The second comet, C/2024 S1 (ATLAS)just discovered on September twenty seventh, needs to be visible around the top of October. The comet will make its closest approach to Earth on October twenty fourth – look deep into the eastern sky just before sunrise. Then, after orbiting the sun, the comet could reappear within the western night sky shortly before Halloween. However, it is feasible that every one or a part of it’s going to disintegrate, as sometimes happens when comets pass by the sun – and this one will come inside 1,000,000 miles (1.6 million kilometers) of our star.

As a planetary astronomerI'm particularly interested by the Oort Cloud and the icy bodies that inhabit it. The inhabitants of the cloud might be a reason for the emergence of life on Earth; When these icy bodies crashed onto our planet eons ago, they might have provided supplies a minimum of a number of the water that every one life requires. At the identical time, these same objects pose an ever-present threat to the continued existence of the Earth – and our survival.

billion comets

When an Oort cloud object finds its way into the inner solar system, its ice evaporates. This process creates a tail of debris that becomes visible as a comet.

Some of those bodies, often known as long-period cometshave orbits of a whole bunch, 1000’s and even tens of millions of years, like Tsuchinshan ATLAS. This is different from the so-called short-period cometswhich don’t visit the Oort cloud and have comparatively fast orbits. Halley's cometOne of those is planet Earth, which orbits the solar system and orbits the sun roughly every 76 years.

The twentieth century Dutch astronomer Jan Oort was fascinated by long-period comets and wrote a paper about it in 1950. He found that about 20 of the comets had a mean distance of greater than 10,000 astronomical units from the Sun. That was amazing; Just one AU is the Earth's distance from the Sun about 93 million miles. Multiply 93 million by 10,000 and also you'll find that these comets come from over a trillion miles away. What's more, Oort says, they weren't necessarily the outermost objects within the cloud.

Almost 75 years after Oort's paper, astronomers still cannot directly image this a part of space. However, they estimate that the Oort Cloud extends as much as 10 trillion miles from the Sun, which is sort of half that Next to Centaurithe closest star.

The long-period comets spend most of their time at these vast distances, making only short and quick visits near the Sun as they arrive from all directions. Oort speculated that the cloud contained 100 billion of those icy objects. There may be as many as these Number of stars in our galaxy.

How did they get there? Oort suspected and modern simulations have confirmed that these icy bodies can have originally formed nearby Jupiter, the most important planet within the solar system. These objects' orbits across the Sun can have been disrupted by Jupiter, much like what is usually the case with NASA spacecraft heading to destinations from Saturn to Pluto swung by the enormous planet to hurry up their journey out.

Some of those objects would have permanently escaped the solar system and grow to be interstellar objects. But others would have ended up with orbits like those of long-period comets.

Threats to Earth

Long-period comets represent a selected potential threat to the Earth. Because they’re thus far from our Sun, their orbits are easily altered by the gravity of other stars. This signifies that scientists do not know when or where any of those animals will appear until they suddenly do. At this point it is normally closer than Jupiter and moving quickly, at speeds of tens of 1000’s of miles per hour. In fact, the fictional comet that doomed Earth within the film is “Don't look up” got here from the Oort cloud.

New comets are continuously being discovered from the Oort Cloud, in recent times a couple of dozen per yr. The likelihood that considered one of them will collide with Earth is amazingly small. But it is feasible. The recent success of NASA's DART missionthat modified the orbit of a small asteroid shows a plausible approach to defending against these small bodies. But this mission was developed after years of studying its goal. A comet from the Oort cloud may not provide that much time – perhaps just months, weeks and even days.

Or no time in any respect. 'OumuamuaThe strange little object that visited our solar system in 2017 was discovered not before, but after its closest approach to Earth. Although 'Oumuamua is an interstellar object and doesn’t come from the Oort cloud, the suggestion still holds; One of those objects could sneak up on us and the Earth could be defenseless.

One approach to prepare for these objects is to raised understand their fundamental properties, including their size and composition. To this end, my colleagues and I are working on characterizing latest long-period comets. The largest known Bernardinelli–Bernsteindiscovered just three years ago, is about 75 miles (120 kilometers) in diameter. Most known comets are much smaller, from one to a number of miles, and a few smaller ones are too faint for us to see. But newer telescopes are helping. In particular, the decades-long Ruby Observatory Legacy Overview of Space and Timelaunching in 2025, could double the list of known Oort cloud comets, which currently stands at about 4,500.

The unpredictability of those objects makes them a difficult goal for spacecraft, however the European Space Agency is preparing a mission to do exactly that: Comet interceptor. With a launch planned for 2029, the probe will park in space until an acceptable goal emerges from the Oort cloud. Studying considered one of these ancient and pristine objects could provide scientists with clues concerning the origins of the solar system.

As for the comets which are now near Earth, it's okay to look up. Unlike the comet within the DiCaprio film, these two won’t crash into Earth. The closest Tsuchinshan ATLAS will reach us is about 44 million miles (70 million kilometers); C/2024 S1 (ATLAS), about 80 million miles (130 million kilometers). Sounds like an extended shot, but in space it's a near miss.

On Wednesday morning, the day before Thanksgiving, Mae woke up, put her hair in curlers, and turned on her laptop. A message appeared, saying that her Safari web browser had encountered an issue and offering the 83-year-old a link that might connect her to the Apple Computer Company. Mae clicked on it.

She didn’t understand it yet, but Mae, like Millions of Americans yearly, had fallen into the clutches of fraudsters. Over the subsequent 10 hours, the criminals tried various ways to steal their money.

The best approach to get them to purchase gift cards was to get them to purchase them. The cards from retailers like Target, Apple and Amazon are sold in drugstores and supermarkets.

They are higher for fraudsters than money, easier to move and just as anonymous. Criminals can obtain gift card numbers online, in stores all over the world or Sell ​​or trade them on illegal markets on the Darknet, telegram or discord.

An estimated $8 billion is stolen annually from seniors age 60 and older through scams perpetrated by strangers. in response to AARP. The cards are some of the common fraud methods reported by older adults,According to the Federal Trade Commission.

Mae’s story is one in every of many cases which have prompted us to – a Professor of Fraud Prevention and Forensic Accounting the previous top financial regulator and Pulitzer Prize winner investigative reporter – to analyze how fraudsters and corporations exploited cracks within the Civil War-era system of economic regulation.

The investigation shows that federal regulators have did not protect the general public from gift card fraud and Congress has largely bowed to regulators. Efforts by states and the federal government to rein within the industry have been fought by lobbyists and gift card trade groups. And gift card retailers are sometimes not much help to law enforcement.

One of us learned about Mae's case through his work as a fraud investigator and has seen dozens of comparable cases. Mae, who lives in Maryland, doesn't want to offer her last name, but she wants people to know her story in order that they don't make the identical mistakes.

In gift card fraud, everyone advantages except the victim: fraudsters, gift card firms, and retailers. Criminals benefit from a rapidly evolving payments industry that’s shrouded in secrecy and designed to make sure easy transactions.

Call this number

When Mae called the number that appeared on her screen, a person who introduced himself as Mac Morgan, an “Apple high security engineer,” answered. The problem appeared to be coming from her bank, he told her. She explained that she lived at M&T, a bank in northeast Buffalo, New York. Call them, he said, and gave her a phone number.

The woman who answered said her name was Alivia and that she worked from M&T Bank's anti-fraud unit. Alivia told Mae that a European pornographer and scammer had tried to realize access to her account and withdraw $20,000 through the night. The withdrawal had been blocked, but Mae needed to get to the bank and collect the cash before the scammers did.

Alivia promised to remain on the phone with Mae throughout the method.

Gift cards are the most recent tool utilized by scammers to defraud people of their money through schemes resembling romance scams, fake tax returns, and false investment schemes.

The The average reported loss amount is $1,000.but between 2021 and 2022, greater than 100 consumers reported losses from gift card fraud exceeding $400,000, in response to an FTC public records request. According to Jordan Hirschfield, a present card analyst at Javelin Strategy & ResearchHe estimates that between 1% and 5% of gift card sales could possibly be fraud, but since nobody keeps records, it's difficult to get a precise number. If the 1% to five% figure is correct, that's between $5.5 billion and $27.5 billion per yr.

A victim’s fear bubble

Mae had a Fear bubblean artificially induced state of panic that makes rational considering difficult.

Anyone can turn into a victim. Mae had graduated with honors from an elite private university. She is a sober retired nurse who lives independently. Now, on the instructions of a scammer, she rushed to her bank in a panic.

At the bank, the teller and manager tried to dissuade Mae from withdrawing $20,000 in money. After about quarter-hour, they managed to get her to calm down.

In Maryland, the bank had no alternative but to offer Mae her money. This isn’t the case in other states. In Florida, a state that’s battling increased fraud cases against seniors, The legislature passed a law In May, financial institutions were allowed to postpone transactions with people over 65 if there is affordable suspicion of exploitation.

Reports from law enforcement agencies indicate that even a couple of hours' delay can burst the fear bubble created by fraudsters.

Several states have passed or are considering laws requiring warning labels on gift cards. Delaware, Iowa, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island And West Virginia.

Next, Alivia led Mae to a Cash2Bitcoin He went to an ATM at a gas station and explained the registration process, including uploading her driver's license, a know-your-customer requirement that doesn't apply to gift cards. Mae put 1000’s of dollars into the machine. At $15,000, she reached the limit for deposits.

Alivia then passed the phone to a co-worker named Ross, who instructed Mae to purchase gift cards. At Rite Aid, Mae bought 4 $2,000 cards, scratched off the backs of the cards, and skim the numbers to Ross.

But on the Food Lion supermarket, a manager who knew her refused to sell her gift cards. Ross gave up and told her to go home but not to inform anyone what had happened.

Gift card firms claim to be “heavily regulated” because Congress has passed the bank card law in 2009. It eliminated many gift card fees, prohibited them from being valid for no less than five years, and allowed state laws to override federal laws. However, it didn’t expand existing protections against consumer fraud on credit and debit cards.

In 2010 Congress created a unified regulatory authority for financial consumer protection: the Consumer Protection Office for FinanceBut the agency has not kept pace with the Increase in consumer financial products outside banksThe regulations it passed in 2016 and 2018 exempted most gift cards from regulation. The FTC and Treasury Department have also proven ineffective in combating the issue.

The fear bubble bursts

By the time Mae finally pulled into her driveway, the ether had already died down. “There was a big lightbulb: 'You've been screwed,'” she said.

Mae called M&T: There was no open fraud case. She called Target: The gift cards had already been spent. Mae got most of her Bitcoin a reimbursement, because of compliance efforts and the fraud freeze on her account the day of the fraud. But the cash from the gift cards was gone.

Fraud against the elderly, including through gift cards, is predicted to proceed to extend.

Mae reported her story to the local police, AARP and the FTC database“It can happen to anyone,” she said.

For the total investigation, see: Gift card fraud is making scammers and the industry billions as regulators fail to guard consumers – and the way an 83-year-old fell into the ‘fear bubble’

Huge amounts of cash are being poured into generative artificial intelligence, a technology from the San Francisco Bay Area that has taken the world by storm. But the relentless hype is making a bubble that experts say is bound to burst. So far, the price-performance ratio has been modest, while there are various serious problems.

It was lower than two years ago that San Francisco-based OpenAI released its generative AI bot ChatGPT, sparking an arms race amongst major tech firms, a flood of enterprise capital for AI startups, and a growing variety of firms trying to cut costs and increase productivity by integrating the technology into virtually every product and repair possible.

Investors have greater than 24 billion US dollars in generative AI, in response to consulting giant EY, and technology firms plan to spend $1 trillion Goldman Sachs predicts that the approaching years will see an enormous change in AI infrastructure. Many engineers see great potential within the technology, which uses patterns and relationships in data to generate text, images and sounds, but others see critical shortcomings in it.

“Everyone wants to make money in the AI ​​race,” says San Jose-based Howard Young, who integrates AI software into computer systems at tech giant AAEON to enhance urban infrastructure, industrial processes, manufacturing and medicine. Young was on the Reuters Momentum AI conference in San Jose this month together with a whole lot of other engineers and executives. “I'm not seeing the real, organic revenue yet,” Young says. “Even with the best minds in Silicon Valley, it's going to take some time.”

People within the technology industry are “significantly overestimating” the present capabilities of generative AI, and it stays questionable to what extent it’s going to improve, says Jim Covello, chief equity analyst at Goldman Sachs.

“The technology is nowhere near where it needs to be to be useful,” Covello said in a generative AI newsletter from the bank in June. “If AI technology ends up having fewer use cases and lower adoption than is currently widely expected, it's hard to imagine that this won't be problematic for many companies investing in the technology today.”

David Cahn, a partner at Silicon Valley enterprise capital giant Sequoia, identified in a June blog post that there’s a “speculative frenzy” surrounding generative AI that’s resulting in an “illusion” emanating from Silicon Valley that “we can all get rich quick.”

Generative AI, known in tech circles as “GenAI,” is certainly a bubble that's about to burst, and damage is looming — but that's nothing recent for Silicon Valley, says Steve Blank, an associate professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University. Blank compared the technology to the bubbling birth of the World Wide Web and the dot-com crash that followed.

“It wasn't that we were wrong about the web, it just took several iterations and restructuring to separate the wheat from the chaff,” Blank said.

For Bay Area startups, it's not removed from the reality once they say, “You won't get funding if you don't have AI in your title or your story,” Blank said. “That's crazy. That giant sucking sound you hear is all the lemmings spending money on the next big thing. One or two of them will strike gold. The rest will lose their shirts.”

The inevitable bursting of that bubble might be less damaging than the implosion of the dot-com bubble, “simply because many companies spending money today are better capitalized than the companies back then,” says Goldman Sachs' Covello.

The transformation within the business world that was touted with huge investments in generative AI has not happened. The expensive technology is essentially unable to unravel complex problems that may enable comprehensive automation of tasks and jobs.

Meanwhile, the technology continues to be suffering from problems which are either growing pains or fundamental flaws, depending on who's talking. The key developers of generative AI are battling in court against artists, photographers, authors, programmers, music labels and newspapers – including this one – for allegedly stealing copyrighted material by crawling the web to “train” AI models.

The training and deployment of generative AI has upended Google and Microsoft's progress toward meeting their climate and sustainability goals. Both firms reported dramatic increases of their electricity and water usage last yr from AI-related data processing and storage. Chatbots and generative search proceed to supply errors and falsehoods. Propagandists use the technology to spread disinformation, students use it to cheat, and evildoers use it for scams and bullying. State legislatures introduced nearly 200 bills to oversee and regulate AI last yr.

Nevertheless, those that imagine within the promise of generative AI are convinced that almost all challenges might be overcome through innovation, they usually point to essential early deployments and powerful potential applications.

“The industry is just emerging,” said Blank. “The earth is still molten. We are beginning to see the outlines of the continents.”

“Right now, it's just starting to rise,” Leong said. “When it can walk and run, I think we'll be overwhelmed by the impact.”

Shomit Ghose, a UC Berkeley lecturer and enterprise capitalist, identified that generative AI has been used to develop a drug currently being tested on humans that’s getting used to treat a lung disease that may result in cancer. The technology can be starting to hurry up weather forecasting. Ghose believes an excessive amount of goes into the AI ​​technologies that underpin generators like ChatGPT and too little into other kinds of generative AI which are starting to revolutionize science.

Energy firms are already using this technology to Making power grids more efficientand integrate wind and solar energy with maximum impact, in response to the International Energy Agency.

Shobie Ramakrishnan, chief digital and technology officer at pharmaceutical giant GSK, told attendees on the Momentum AI conference that the corporate was capable of increase production of its shingles vaccine by a million doses by utilizing generative artificial intelligence to create “digital twins” that replicate factory operations using software.

“It’s a technology,” Ramakrishnan said, “that is both underrated and overrated.”

Originally published: July 28, 2024 at 6:21 am

President Joe Biden’s temporary incoherent debate performance against Donald Trump in June growing pressure from donors, some democratic politicians And Voters for Biden’s withdrawal from the race.

But Biden, in an ABC News interview On July 5, 2024, he questioned whether people were actually demanding his resignation and brushed aside growing concerns about his ability to defeat Trump within the election.

“I don't think anyone is better qualified to be president or to win this race than I am,” Biden told moderator George Stephanopoulos.

While Biden's press conference After the NATO summit on 11 July, he reiterated his determination to remain within the race and said – despite Evidence of negative polls for him in vital swing states and amongst likely voters – that he had seen no indication that he couldn’t win the election.

Biden's Rejection of some political polls and the concerns of a majority of Democratic voters about his candidacy raise the query of whether he’s unaware of the challenges he faces within the campaign or whether he’s ignoring the views and desires of others.

Presidents must depend on advisers and staff to assist them sift through the overwhelming amount of data available and deliver relevant insights at the correct time.

Sometimes this close relationship results in a sort of “presidential bubble,” that’s, an isolated relationship between the president and his staff, advisers, and possibly his family.

Biden will not be the primary president to be criticized Living in a bubble with an echo chamber of yes-men. Harry Truman once described the White House as “big white prison.”

Life within the bubble

The presidency of Ronald Reagan is an example of how living in a presidential bubble has each positive and negative effects. During Reagan’s first term, his closest advisers – James Baker, Michael Deaver and Edwin Meese – known as “The Troika.” These three men often disagreed, but openly discussed policies and options with Reagan and compelled him to make decisions based on different perspectives.

During Reagan's second term, these advisers left office and took on other assignments. Instead, Reagan began to depend on his chief of staff, Don Regan, as his closest adviser. Regan was a really aggressive chief of staff who tightly controlled the knowledge given to the president. In the late Nineteen Eighties, the Tower Commission – a presidential commission to analyze how the federal government secretly sold weapons to Iran without congressional approval – blamed Regan for what was described as Iran-Contra affairThe Commission concluded that Regan President with bad advicewhich led to the scandal.

During former President George HW Bush's administration within the late Nineteen Eighties and early Nineteen Nineties, he realized that his chief of staff, John Sununu, was also making a bubble around him. Sununu desired to be Bush's primary source of data and made it unimaginable for people he didn’t approve of to fulfill with Bush.

Bush became suspicious of Sununu’s activities and opened a Mailbox in Kennebunkport, Maine, within the early Nineteen Nineties. Bush instructed cabinet members, aides and others to send him information there in the event that they suspected Sununu was not sharing it. Bush's suspicion was finally confirmedand he fired Sununu in December 1991.

Former President Donald Trump also deliberately created a presidential bubble of advisers and allies to only positive feedbackIt became widely known that Trump watched the news program “Fox & Friends.” The program’s coverage began to focus positively on him, in a attempt to get his attention – and encourage him to act otherwise, equivalent to participation within the Republican primary debate in 2023.

There are other examples of the results of the presidential bubble.

Former President Barack Obama, for instance, tried to avoid being stuck within the bubble by refusing to offer up his personal BlackBerry, which he viewed as a vital lifeline for direct contact with friends. He was finally allowed to maintain italthough some security restrictions apply.

Distinguishing truth from fiction

Presidential bubbles inevitably form. Presidents live and work in Washington, but cannot walk the streets freely as just one other face in the gang. They must depend on others to get a feel for the general public mood.

Presidents depend on information from the media and on their staff to investigate it and switch it into coherent feedback. But these staff's job security often will depend on pleasing their boss, which might cause them to present information in a positive light. Presidents should be smart enough to tell apart the reality from the facade.

When former President Bill Clinton took office, appointed Mack McLartyhis friend since kindergarten as chief of staff because he knew that he can be brutally honest if mandatory.

Others, like Reagan, were led to disaster, while George HW Bush was sensible enough to mitigate isolation. Some, like Trump, enjoy the bubble since it provides a distorted but seemingly blissful reality.

Presidents have the privilege of getting more information on certain issues than the general public and may due to this fact gain deeper insights than the general public receives.

But in the event that they ignore the views of the common citizen, they achieve this at their peril. Voters within the US have a big selection of opinions and viewpoints. The assumption that White House or Washington DC insiders reflect the views of your complete country adds to the frustration of a president not listening to the people.

Biden has been in public service since 1972. I imagine his service to the country, within the Senate and in the chief branch, can’t be quickly or easily diminished.

But I believe the president needs to contemplate whether he remains to be serving the general public. Is the recommendation presidents receive from their friends, family and staff coloured by their very own ambitions and desire for continuity? Does Biden serve the general public higher by making way for an additional candidate or by becoming the official Democratic presidential nominee?

Such decisions are never easy, but on this case they must be weighed against his own abilities, the views of his staff and likewise the views of the general public. I believe that democratic and democratically oriented voters should be a part of the method and not only be expected to go together with it without having a say.