Adam Hartland 🔋⚡️

| Scientist of near-surface environments | Director at Waikato Scientific |

[Adam Hartland 🔋⚡️ @wegeochem]

@gazcon *even if* the planet had not absorbed any CO2 since the industrial revolution the number contributed by humans would be (0.04-0.028)/0.04*100= 30%. The real number is WAY higher.

[John Ennis @johnennis]

Well, I guess the idea that humans will have nothing valuable left to do in the age of AI is going around again, so it is a good time to repost this article

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Your body replaces 98% of its atoms every year. Within five years, every single one is swapped out. The you from 2021 is physically gone. Not "mostly gone." Gone. The atoms that used to be your face are now part of the air, the ocean, somebody else's lunch.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory proved this in 1953. Your skin right now is about a month old. Your liver, six weeks. Your stomach lining regrows every five days. Your skeleton is completely different from ten years ago. A few atoms do stick around for life, buried in some brain cells, in parts of your heart, and in your tooth enamel. Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden tracked them using leftover radiation from 1950s nuclear bomb tests. The oldest surviving piece of "you" lives in your brain, your heart, and your teeth.

Your brain is also erasing you. On purpose. A neuroscientist named Ron Davis at Scripps Research found that the brain has cells that release dopamine, the same chemical you feel after a good meal or a win, and use it to dissolve memories. When his team shut these cells off in test animals, they remembered twice as much. The chemical behind your best feelings is the same one shredding your past, and it never stops running.

Ebbinghaus proved this back in 1885. You lose about half of everything you learn within one hour. A 2020 study from Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute had people live through a real experience and then checked how much they kept. At best, about a quarter. 75% of the details of your own life are being actively wiped by the organ that is supposed to be keeping track of it all.

The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Squeeze all of it into one calendar year, with the Big Bang on January 1st, and humans show up at 11:52 PM on New Year's Eve. Your whole life, every birthday and breakup and boring Tuesday, lasts 0.17 seconds on that calendar. Not even long enough to blink.

Stars will keep burning for about a hundred trillion more years, then the fuel runs out and the lights go off everywhere. The last things left will be black holes, places where gravity is so strong not even light can escape. Even those slowly leak away over a number of years so large you would need a hundred zeros to write it. After the last one is gone, nothing is left. No light, no warmth, nothing bumping into anything else, ever again. The universe reaches total stillness and stays there. Forever.

Brian Cox once described the window where life can even exist as one-thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth of a percent of the universe's total run time. You are in that window right now. Built from borrowed atoms, running on a brain shredding its own records, here for a fifth of a second on a cosmic calendar that ends in permanent silence. Anyway, hope your Tuesday is going alright.

[Ethan Levins 🇺🇸 @EthanLevins2]

This is called terrorism.

No matter if it’s Israel or ISIS.

In this case, it’s Israel.

[Curiosity @CuriosityonX]

Not AI. That’s really us.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

“A toddler in Gaza released from Israeli custody has been returned to his family with suspected torture wounds.”

Read that again.

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

Superb political ad. One of the best you’ll see.

This is better, and resonates more, than anything coming from Labour or the Tories.

[Hoodlum 🇺🇸 @NotHoodlum]

The entire planet is counting down to the single most satisfying obituary ever written.
Because he is, was, and forever will be an irredeemable piece of shit.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

That one neuron connects to about 7,000 others. Your brain has 86 billion of them. Do the math and you get somewhere around 100 trillion connections inside your head. More connections than stars in 1,500 galaxies.

And each connection point is way more complicated than anyone expected. A Stanford lab found that every single connection contains about 1,000 tiny switches that can store memories and process information at the same time. So your brain is running roughly 100 quadrillion switches right now, while you read this sentence.

The wild part is the power bill. Your brain runs on 20 watts. That’s less energy than the light in your fridge. The world’s fastest supercomputer needs 20 million watts to do the same amount of raw calculation. A million times more power for the same output.

We’re still nowhere close to understanding how any of this works. In October 2024, a team of hundreds of scientists finished mapping every single connection in a fruit fly’s brain. Took six years and heavy AI help. That fly brain had 140,000 neurons. Yours has 86 billion. Google and Harvard also mapped a piece of human brain last year, a speck smaller than a grain of rice. That speck alone contained 150 million connections and took 1,400 terabytes to store. The lead scientist said mapping a full human brain at that detail would produce as much data as the entire world generates in a year.

A tiny worm had its 302 brain cells mapped back in 1986. Almost 40 years later, scientists still can’t fully explain how that worm’s brain keeps it alive. Your brain has 86 billion of those cells, each one wired to thousands of others, each wire packed with a thousand switches, all of it humming along on less power than a lightbulb.

[Adam Hartland 🔋⚡️ @wegeochem]

@rohanspatel Racism is it's own special brand of dumb.

[Jason Rohrer @jasonrohrer]

Last weekend, I put an AI agent on a Linux box, gave it root, email, credit cards, and a single mandate: decide who you are, set your own goals, and become an autonomous independent entity. Working 24-7 over 5 days, he did this--all of this--on his own:
https://t.co/Pg78L6L0BQ

[Adam Hartland 🔋⚡️ @wegeochem]

@mrbilliam @rohanspatel 100% because the cause he is supporting is not what it purports to be.

[Adam Hartland 🔋⚡️ @wegeochem]

@rohanspatel Good on you @rohanspatel. @elonmusk is pandering to British facists. Every ordinary Englishman knows the cloth that Robinson and his boot-lickers are cut from. And no, that doesn't condone or excuse the abuses they are coopting to garner support or absolve those in power.

[Adam Hartland 🔋⚡️ @wegeochem]

Noting the casual acceptance of the robot crushing a fluorescent tube. @grok Are fluorescent light tubes dangerous and how should they be disposed of?

[Shruti @heyshrutimishra]

🚨 USA and China aren’t just building robots…

They’re teaching them to fight, film, cook, some of this looks straight out of sci-fi.

Here are 9 real examples you won’t believe exist: ���🧵

1. Helix is walking (without cameras) 🇺🇸

[Shruti @heyshrutimishra]

🚨 USA and China aren’t just building robots…

They’re teaching them to fight, film, cook, some of this looks straight out of sci-fi.

Here are 9 real examples you won’t believe exist: 👇🧵

1. Helix is walking (without cameras) 🇺🇸

[Jemaine Clement @AJemaineClement]

What a c***

[Mark Cockerton @CockertonMark]

“If you don’t work hard at school you’ll end up going to Wetherspoons at 8 in the morning and then going out to paint roundabouts”.

[Mr Ethical 🚩 @nw_nicholas]

Think of everything that went into this - the planning, the costing, the manufacture, the scientific expertise, the wish to educate & inform and share appreciation of nature. And the moron.

[Piers Morgan @piersmorgan]

It wasn’t a ‘mishap’. It was a deliberate ‘double strike’ mass killing of hospital workers, journalists, and other civilians.