- ‘Friends’ Writer Claims Cast Was ‘Unhappy’ in Later Seasons, Would ‘Tank’ Jokes on Purpose IndieWire
- Friends writer says she was straight up not having a good time on the show The A.V. Club
- Former ‘Friends’ Writer Says Cast “Rarely Had Anything Positive To Say” About Scripts & Why She Suffered From Imposter Syndrome Yahoo Entertainment
- ‘Friends’ Writer Says Stars Intentionally Ruined Jokes They Hated In ‘Aggressive’ Table Reads HuffPost
- ‘A tired old show’: Friends writer claims cast deliberately ruined jokes The Guardian
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: purpose
Wife of radiologist who drove Tesla off Calif. cliff with family inside said he did it ‘on purpose,’ docs reveal – KPRC Click2Houston
- Wife of radiologist who drove Tesla off Calif. cliff with family inside said he did it ‘on purpose,’ docs reveal KPRC Click2Houston
- Man who drove off cliff says he was pulling over to check tire pressure; wife claims he drove off purposefully, San Francisco Chronicle reports, citing court documents CNN
- In the News: Update in Devil’s Slide Cliff Crash, New North Bay Toll Road, New Kit Kat Flavor NBC Bay Area
- California doctor ‘purposefully drove’ Tesla off cliff with family inside: affidavit Fox News
- Wife of radiologist who drove Tesla off Calif. cliff with family inside said he did it ‘on purpose,’ unsealed docs reveal Yahoo News
- View Full Coverage on Google News
What Was the Purpose of the Mysterious Ancient Stone Spheres? Scientists Finally Have an Answer
The stones range from 4,500 to 3,600 years old.
The stone spheres are believed to be from an Ancient Greek board game.
According to archaeologists from the University of Bristol, mysterious stone spheres discovered in several ancient settlements in the Aegean and Mediterranean could be game pieces from the oldest board games ever created.
These spheres were reportedly discovered at sites in Santorini, Crete, Cyprus, and other Greek Islands. There have been several theories about their potential uses, including sling stones, throwing balls, counting/record-keeping systems, or as counters/pawns.
Groups of spheres from Akrotiri. Credit: Konstantinos Trimmis
The same team from the
The kernos (slab with cup marks) at the square of the House of the Benches and an interpretation of how the spheres could be associated. Credit: Konstantinos Trimmis
The stones, which are smaller than golf balls, are in various colours and made from different materials. The analysis put the stones into two groups of larger stones and smaller. In addition, in Akrotiri and in other settlements across the Aegean there are stone slabs with shallow cup marks where the spheres could have sat or been placed.
Dr Ferneé said: “The most important finding of the study is that the speres fit two major clusters (one of smaller and one of larger stones). This supports the hypothesis that they were used as counters for a board game with the spheres most possibly have been collected to fit these clusters rather than a counting system for which you would expect more groupings.”
Stone slabs with cup marks (kernos) and their Reflectance Transformation Imaging analysis. Credit: Konstantinos Trimmis
If these spheres are in-fact part of a boardgame, they will be one of the earliest examples, along with similar examples from the Levant and Egypt, such as the Egyptian Mehen and Senet.
Dr Trimmis added: “The social importance of the spheres, as indicated by the way they were deposited in specific cavities, further supports the idea of the spheres being part of a game that was played for social interaction. This gives a new insight into the social interaction in the Bronze Age Aegean.”
The next stage of the research is to apply a similar methodology to the slabs to see if there is clustering in the cup marks and trying to associate the spheres and slabs together. The team also hope to use artificial intelligence techniques to determine how the game was actually played.
Reference: “The rolling stones of Bronze Age Aegean: Applying machine learning to explore the use of lithic spheres from Akrotiri, Thera” by Christianne L. Fernée, and Konstantinos P. Trimmis, 9 September 2022, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103615
The 120-year search for the purpose of T. rex’s arms
Persons explains that it was perfectly possible Osborn could have been right. If male T. rexes – which are notoriously difficult to identify – had turned out to have arms that looked different to female ones, it would make sense that they were using them for sex. “Now, that’s not the way things have gone down,” he says. Instead, as more and more individuals have been uncovered – there are now at least 40 – scientists have confirmed that they all have the characteristically small arms and they always look pretty much the same.
Another, potentially comical, possibility is that T. rexes may have used their little arms to get up off the ground. With up to 15,500lb (7,031kg) bodies – equivalent to the weight of a large African elephant – they may not have found it easy to manoeuvre out of a resting position, or get back on their feet in the event that they fell over. (Many living animals struggle with this to this day, such as tortoises, which often rock themselves upright when they end up on their backs.)
“So when they were rising from a crouched position, they could use the arms to do a tiny tyrannosaur push-up,” says Persons. However, there is a small flaw with this theory – the carnivore’s arms wouldn’t actually have helped that much. “You’ve got to understand that that really only helps the tyrannosaur with the first two feet. And then it’s got like another 15 feet to go off the ground,” he says.
Another controversial idea, put forward by a single scientist in 2017, is that adults like the Wankel Rex may have used their stubby arms as weapons – perhaps holding their victim in their jaws or pinning it down with their bodyweight, before ripping and slashing at it. Underpinning the idea is that though they’re tiny, T. rex‘s arms are surprisingly muscular. He calculated that even with its 3ft (0.9m) limbs, these eviscerating actions could have done some serious damage, creating gashes several centimetres deep and at least a metre long in a matter of mere seconds.
“Now I personally think the arms are just too ridiculously short for that to make sense,” says Persons.
However, there is also the possibility that they had no function whatsoever – T. rex’s tiny arms were the last vestiges of once-useful appendages that had long ceased to be necessary. If they were simply hangovers from another time, like the human tailbone, the world’s most terrifying predator may have had an ever more bone-chilling future: eventually evolving to lose its arms altogether, to resemble a kind of horrifying land-shark.
HBO Max and Warner Bros. Discovery seem to be on fire, and that’s on purpose
The last few weeks, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has started to feel like a villain in a Real Housewives show. He isn’t here to make friends. He’s here to make money. Films have been canceled, TV shows have been yanked off HBO Max with zero preamble, execs have been let go, worsening the company’s already notable diversity problem, and the company has lost $20 billion off its market cap — all in an effort to get $3 billion in savings and hopefully reorient a ship Zaslav has disagreed with the course of.
Zaslav’s plan is to focus on making as much money as cheaply as possible. When he joined Discovery in 2006, it was a small collection of education-oriented cable channels. Zaslav turned it into the reality TV monster we know today. He’s made his money catering to audiences that don’t pay for streaming but, instead, flip the channel on the TV — and when they don’t find something to watch, pack up and head to the movie theater.
So while what we’re seeing could be the fumblings of an egoist with no grasp on the properties he’s purchased, what feels much more likely is that Zaslav just doesn’t care about the stuff a lot of us care about, such as “a big spread of readily available content that speaks to smaller groups often underrepresented in popular media all at a fairly affordable price.” Zaslav isn’t here to better enrich our entertainment landscape — he’s here to make money.
That means he’s got to shift a company that’s spent two years focusing its energies elsewhere. In the years leading up to the Warner Bros. and Discovery merger, Warner Bros. underwent a pretty radical transformation. COVID altered the way people operated in 2020 (and in much of 2021 and even 2022), and Warner Bros. went all-in, deciding to focus on streaming at the cost of its other businesses.
As a person with a very nice home theater setup and a love of quick and easy access to content, this was very appealing to me — and I bet it was to you, too. Instead of risking illness to see the biggest movies in theaters, we could sit at home and watch King Kong body Mothra over Mexico or Paul Atreides whisper-talk his way into legend in Dune. As people’s concerns over COVID waned (though it’s still very much a pandemic, and you should be testing regularly and masking up indoors!), HBO Max maintained a steady stream of content designed to compete not with traditional Warner Bros. rivals like Disney and Universal but with Netflix, whose movies go straight to the streamer and only make pit stops in theaters for awards eligibility.
Theater owners, already devastated by COVID, were furious at the new Warner Bros. plan. They’re much happier now that Zaslav has reversed course, widening release windows and even moving some direct-to-streaming films into theaters. (Even if a marketing budget crunch means the next few years will see fewer Warner Bros. films hitting theaters… it’s the thought that counts.)
And Zaslav’s appeal to theaters is mutually beneficial. Direct to streaming makes a lot of sense for Netflix, a company with a very small distribution arm. Warner Bros. Discovery has a whole apparatus built up to make lots of money off films in theaters. “Why,” I’m sure Zaslav says to himself, “should we throw away all that potential money just to boost the $15 a month subscriptions we sell for HBO Max?” Instead, the company can put the movies in theaters and then move them to the streaming service and double-dip on us, the consumers.
I, personally, am not a fan of that! I don’t want to pay a billion times for the same content. But I’ve done it with books, software, movies, and TV for a while now. Zaslav knows there are plenty of rubes just like me probably willing to pay.
We don’t know how the shocking cancellation of Batgirl plays into Zaslav’s grand plan to reverse streaming courses and turn Warner Bros. Discovery into a much more traditional entertainment behemoth. Reports on the film have ranged from “it’s so bad it should never see the light of day” to “it wasn’t bad and had a really great message.” It might have been canceled because it looked a little too CW to appear after the Warner Bros. Discovery logo on the big screen. Or it might have been canceled to help eke out a few extra tax break dollars as Zaslav & Co. work to make the $3 billion in savings promised by the merger.
When I spoke to Francine McKenna, a lecturer in accounting at The Wharton School and author of the newsletter, The Dig, she noted the move to cancel Batgirl for tax reasons was weird. “There are tax benefits to writing down the assets now if you are the kind of company who likes losses because they offset current or future tax liabilities,” she said via email. “WB is a loser to begin with so not sure why incremental losses based on trash canning finished films is that helpful.”
In its Q2 filings, Warner Bros. Discovery didn’t reference the cancellation specifically but did outline its overall plan in very accountant terms:
Content impairments for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022 of $496 million and $501 million, respectively, and content development write-offs of $329 million for the three and six months ended June 30, 2022 were due to the abandonment of certain content categories in connection with the strategic realignment of content following the Merger and are reflected in restructuring and other charges in the Studios, Networks and DTC segments.
All of the above is accountant speak for “WBD has a lot of content it doesn’t think makes sense for the new business and will get rid of it to write it off on the company’s taxes.”
Batgirl wasn’t the only thing to apparently fall victim to the accounting department’s very sharp pen. In the past few weeks, the company has quietly removed dozens of shows and films from HBO Max — often without even warning their creators. One showrunner The Verge spoke to only learned of their show’s removal from Twitter.
The reason for the culling seems to be that the content wasn’t hitting a big enough audience, and much of the content catered to an audience the new Warner Bros. Discovery just has no interest in: kids. Sources told CNBC that “Warner Bros. Discovery has decided to move away from the category with its future investment budget.” Earlier this week The Daily Beast reported that much of this culling, including the layoffs of the divisions overseeing HBO Max’s unscripted, kids and family, and international content, was in part to reorient the service and the company to better pursue Zaslav’s real money cow: Middle America.
“If David Zaslav had his wish, he would just program Chip and Joanna all day long,” one unnamed executive told The Daily Beast. “There was just a massive, ‘We don’t need you. You’re not offering the things we’re focused on.’”
And that’s what he’s doing to Warner Bros. Discovery. But Zaslav’s goal, to craft a company that can make money hand over fist by catering to the largest possible audience with a predictable (and cheap) slate of content, isn’t really what any of the rest of us want.
The last few years, we’ve enjoyed a renaissance of TV. So much TV has been made so quickly and for so much money that there’s now a shortage of qualified showrunners. So much TV has been made as every company scrambles to populate their new streaming services with stuff to watch that a wide variety of people who have rarely — if ever — had the opportunity to see their lives represented on TV have gotten that opportunity.
Ten years ago, lesbians frantically watched queerbaiting fare like Rizzoli & Isles for just the idea of two women being close enough kinds of friends that they might be romantic. Two weeks ago, Amazon Prime gave us A League of Their Own, a TV show featuring almost an entire cast of queer women and their stories. The glut of content has, by its nature, produced a diversity of content.
But at Warner Bros. Discovery, Zaslav is turning off the content spigot and reorienting the company into something much more fiscally (and potentially culturally) conservative. The company’s stock has been on a downward spiral, but this could very well be a great thing for investors in Warner Bros. Discovery. It just won’t be as great for the rest of us.
Having a sense of purpose in life can slash risk of developing dementia, study suggests
Having a sense of purpose in life can slash risk of developing dementia, study suggests
- Feeling a sense of purpose can lower risk of developing dementia, study shows
- It was linked with 19% reduced rate of clinically significant cognitive impairment
- People with a higher sense of purpose also more likely to engage in exercise
Feeling a sense of purpose or meaning in life can lower the risk of developing dementia, a study shows.
Researchers reviewed evidence from eight previously published papers which included data from 62,250 older adults across three continents.
They found higher purpose or meaning in life was ‘significantly associated’ with a reduced risk of dementia and cognitive impairment. Notably, having a sense of purpose was linked with a 19 per cent reduced rate of clinically significant cognitive impairment.
This means they were almost a fifth less likely to have experienced concerning declines in memory, language and thinking abilities.
Researchers found higher purpose or meaning in life was ‘significantly associated’ with a reduced risk of dementia and cognitive impairment. Notably, having a sense of purpose was linked with a 19 per cent reduced rate of clinically significant cognitive impairment (file image)
This level of cognitive impairment is not as serious as dementia but it increases risk of the condition.
Previous evidence suggests that feeling a purpose in life may be beneficial to recovering from stress and is associated with reduced inflammation in the brain – both of which may be associated with a reduced risk of dementia.
People with a higher sense of purpose may also be more likely to engage in activities such as exercise and involve themselves socially, which may protect against dementia risk.
The findings, published in the journal Ageing Research Reviews, also indicated that a positive mood did not seem to have an effect on dementia risk.
People with a higher sense of purpose may also be more likely to engage in activities such as exercise and involve themselves socially, which may protect against dementia risk (file image)
Lead author Dr Joshua Stott, from University College London, said: ‘Dementia prevention programmes for at-risk groups that focus on wellbeing could benefit by prioritising activities that bring purpose and meaning to people’s lives, rather than just hedonistic activities that might increase positive mood states.
‘For example, if environmentalism is important to someone, they might benefit from helping in a community garden.’
First author and PhD student Georgia Bell said: ‘We have found that a sense of purpose may reduce the risk of dementia, adding to other evidence linking meaningful living to improved mental health and reduced risk of disability and heart disease.’
For foreign fighters, Ukraine offers purpose, camaraderie and a cause
LVIV, Ukraine, March 7 (Reuters) – Michael Ferkol, who once served as a supply specialist with engineer battalions in the U.S. Army, had been in Rome studying archaeology when he heard the Ukrainian president’s appeal for foreign fighters.
Within days, Ferkol said, he presented himself at a military recruiting office in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, hoping to be taken on as a frontline paramedic.
“I told them I wanted to triage patients,” said the 29-year- old, who has no combat experience. “There was a Finnish guy there too, and he was like, ‘I just want to kill Russians.'”
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Ukraine has established an “international” legion for people from abroad and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has publicly urged foreigners to “fight side-by-side with Ukrainians against the Russian war criminals” to show support for his country. Last week, Zelenskiy said that more than 16,000 foreigners had volunteered, without specifying how many had arrived.
Some foreign fighters arriving in Ukraine say they are attracted by the cause: to halt what they view as an unprovoked attack in a once-in-a-generation showdown between the forces of democracy and dictatorship. For others, many of them veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Ukraine war also offers a chance to use fighting skills they felt their own governments no longer appreciated.
Reuters interviewed 20 foreign fighters or others involved in the effort, and some said that Ukraine is struggling to vet, equip and deploy them.
And alongside battle-hardened veterans of war, people are arriving with little or no combat experience, offering limited value in a war zone under constant, terrifying shelling by the Russian military. One man who identified himself as British military veteran referred to these recruits as “bullet-catchers.”
A senior Ukrainian official in Lviv involved in processing newly-arrived foreign volunteers, Roman Shepelyak, said the system to receive, train and deploy foreign fighters was still in its infancy, and that the process would get smoother in the coming days. Ukraine’s defence ministry declined to comment.
Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, calling it a “special operation” to demilitarize Ukraine and capture dangerous nationalists. Ukraine’s armed forces are heavily outnumbered by Russia’s but have mounted significant resistance.
Among those who have arrived to fight for Ukraine are dozens of former soldiers from the British Army’s elite Parachute Regiment, according to an ex-soldier from the regiment. Hundreds more would soon follow, he said. Reuters was unable to corroborate those numbers.
Often referred to as the Paras, the regiment has in recent years served in Afghanistan and Iraq. “They’re all highly, highly trained, and have seen active service on numerous occasions,” the ex-soldier from the regiment said. The Ukraine crisis will give them purpose, camaraderie and “a chance to do what they’re good at: fight.”
Michael Ferkol said there were many people with Ukrainian ancestry in his hometown, Chicago. He wanted to go to Kyiv, the capital, “and help out.”
“I’m a little nervous, to be honest,” he said, making his way through crowds of refugees at Lviv train station on Saturday, hoping to board a train to the frontline. “But at the same time, it’s not about me. It’s about the people that are suffering.”
‘HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL’
For some, travelling to Ukraine, even from far-away countries, was the easy part. Those who hadn’t brought body armour, helmets and other equipment with them were struggling to source them in Ukraine, according to several fighters Reuters spoke to.
Some veterans were sharing information on equipment and logistics through invite-only Facebook or WhatsApp groups with names like “Have Gun Will Travel.” These groups contain appeals for equipment, such as body armour and night-vision goggles, or for foreign veterans who are snipers or who can train Ukrainian soldiers in how to use sophisticated weapons that Western countries are sending.
With a vast mobilisation of Ukrainian men underway, the country has plenty of volunteer fighters. But there is a shortage of specialists who know how to use Javelin and NLAW anti-tank missiles, which professional soldiers train for months to use properly.
Even those with combat experience might struggle in Ukraine’s war zones, warned a former British soldier, who asked to be identified by his nickname, Kruger. He said he had served in Afghanistan and trained other soldiers.
“If you’re out here as a war tourist, this is not the place for you,” he said. “The realities of war, if you head out to the front, are going to be pretty overwhelming.”
Many of those arriving in Lviv end up at the semi-fortified offices of the Lviv regional administration, where their paperwork is checked by Shepelyak. He heads the region’s department for international technical assistance and cooperation. He acknowledged the system for processing those offering to fight was still in its infancy.
On Friday, when Reuters visited, six foreigners appeared at Shepelyak’s office, including a Polish military veteran called Michal, and a giant, heavily-tattooed Dutchman called Bert. Both men declined to give their full names.
Two foreign fighters from the UK asked to be identified as “Scouser” and “Jacks” pose for a picture as they are ready to depart towards the front line in the east of Ukraine following the Russian invasion, at the main train station in Lviv, Ukraine, March 5, 2022. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach
More foreigners were arriving every day, Shepelyak told Reuters. “If they have such a desire and persuasion to serve a foreign country, it matters. They are important.”
Shepelyak said he vetted their paperwork, but not their combat experience, which was evaluated at a military base outside Lviv where they were sent next. He added that those recruited into the Ukrainian army would be paid in line with other soldiers.
Other foreign fighters told Reuters they were bypassing the formal processes and heading straight for the eastern front, hoping to get weapons and orders from the Ukrainian military upon their arrival.
DELAYED DEPARTURES
The logistical issues have prompted some fighters to delay their arrival.
Anthony Capone, a wealthy healthcare entrepreneur in New York City, said he is providing funding for hundreds of ex-soldiers and paramedics who want to go to Ukraine. But he said he had delayed their departure “to give the Ukrainian army another week to improve their enlistment process for those entering the volunteer corps.”
So far, according to Capone, only a “small number” had arrived in neighbouring Poland. Capone had posted on LinkedIn his message offering funding, thinking that 10 or 15 people would reply. “Right now, I’m at about 1,000,” he said.
Capone added he was only funding ex-soldiers whose military credentials he could verify, or paramedics who currently worked in an emergency trauma setting.
About 60% of those who had been in touch were American and 30% European, with the remainder hailing from at least 25 countries as far-flung as Colombia, Japan and Jamaica, Capone said.
Most were ex-soldiers; the rest were emergency medics or critical care nurses. They’re willing to “defend a country they’ve never visited,” said Capone, a specialist in computational learning theory.
The U.S. government has discouraged citizens from travelling to Ukraine to combat Russian forces. Some countries have issued stronger warnings, including Britain. Others, such as Canada or Germany, have cleared the way for their citizens to get involved.
A CONNECTION IN KYIV
In central Lviv on Thursday, a burly, Russian-speaking Canadian, who identified himself only as Sig, heaved bags of equipment into the back of a minivan he had bought in Poland and driven to Lviv.
He wore a flak jacket bristling with medical tools, and said he usually worked as a civilian paramedic.
Another of Sig’s four-strong team was an American who said he was born in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and had fought Russians “for generations.”
In Sig’s bags were hundreds of kilograms of equipment, including medical supplies and military rations known as MREs, or meals ready to eat. Sig said his team planned to help train Ukrainian volunteers in Lviv for a day, before heading straight for the front.
“I have a connection in Kyiv who will help us out,” he said.
Standing outside the ticket hall of Lviv station on Sunday were a group of British men in military uniform, waiting for a train to Kyiv. They were in high spirits, often exchanging fist-bumps and handshakes with Ukrainian refugees who thanked them for fighting for their country.
They were led by Ben Grant, a strapping Englishman from Essex, who said he had served in Britain’s Royal Marines and had just completed a stint as a security advisor in Iraq. He was unclear whether his men would be deployed independently or as part of a Ukrainian unit.
Of the Ukrainian soldiers, Grant added: “They seem strong – really strong. I’m more than happy to fight next to them.”
(The story has been refiled to update lede with more information about Michael Ferkol’s former role in U.S. Army and removes stray word in the lede)
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Reporting by Andrew R. C. Marshall in Lviv, Ukraine; Additional reporting by Jacqueline Thomsen and Phil Stewart in Washington, DC, and Shariq Khan and Medha Singh in Bengaluru. Editing by Cassell Bryan-Low
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says
Enlarge / AMD’s RX 6500 XT.
AMD
AMD will begin selling its latest budget GPU, the Radeon RX 6500 XT, on January 19th. Its retail price is $199. But the ongoing GPU shortage, caused in part by cryptocurrency miners and scalpers who are snapping up every card they can get, has made it mostly impossible to get any graphics card at its list price over the past year.
Whether the 6500 XT will be any different depends partly on supply, but AMD has also apparently designed the card to make it deliberately less appealing to miners while retaining its usefulness as an entry-level graphics card. Speaking to journalists in a press roundtable earlier this week, AMD Radeon VP Laura Smith talked about how the 6500 XT had been “optimized” for games (a transcript from a now-apparently-deleted PCWorld article is preserved here).
“We have really optimized this one to be gaming-first at that target market,” Smith said. “And you can see that with the way that we configured the part. Even with the four gigs of frame buffer. That’s a really nice frame buffer size for the majority of AAA games, but it’s not particularly attractive if you’re doing blockchain-type activities or mining activities.”
Indeed, if you look at the spec sheet of the 6500 XT, you’ll notice a few things that stick out compared to the last-gen RX 5500 XT. For starters, there isn’t an 8GB version of the 6500 XT. The 6500 XT also uses a 64-bit memory interface, which is exceedingly rare in modern GPUs—you’ll sometimes see it in low-end dedicated laptop GPUs like the GeForce MX 450, but discrete GPUs released within the last couple of generations have mostly stuck to 128-bit memory interfaces at a minimum. Both of these decisions make the 6500 XT bad for Ethereum mining in particular, since it needs more than 4GB of video RAM and really likes memory bandwidth.
To make up for the slower memory interface and help the card compete with the RX 570-class cards that AMD wants it to replace, AMD has boosted the clock speed of the RX 6500 XT way up. Its maximum boost frequency is 2815 MHz, up from 1845 MHz in the RX 5500 XT. Even the top-tier 6900 XT only boosts up to 2250 MHz—it just has a lot more GPU hardware and much more memory bandwidth to work with in the first place.
Nvidia has also taken steps to limit its GPUs’ mining capabilities, most notably when it re-issued “LHR” (or Low Hash Rate) versions of the RTX 3000-series cards in mid-2021. But the underlying hardware remains capable of better hash rates, and determined miners have used everything from alternative BIOSes to special software to buggy drivers to restore all or part of those cards’ mining performance. The 6500 XT shouldn’t have those problems—it’s generally not possible to hack more video RAM onto a graphics card. What remains to be seen is whether the design decisions that make the 6500 XT sub-optimal for mining also make it sub-optimal for gaming.
Mammals Carry a Graveyard of Viruses in Our DNA, And It Could Have a Crucial Purpose
Huge swaths of our DNA library are made up of non-coding genes that were long regarded as “junk DNA”. Recent findings, however, have shown these bits of DNA actually have many purposes in mammals.
Some help form the structure in our DNA molecules so they can be packaged neatly within our cell nuclei while others are involved in gene regulation. Now, researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia have discovered another potential purpose for these non-coding instructions, within the genomes of marsupials.
Some of the gene sequences once considered “junk” are actually fragments of viruses left buried in our DNA from an infection in a long-forgotten ancestor.
Whenever a virus infects you, there’s a chance it will leave behind a piece of itself within your DNA, and if this happens in an egg or sperm cell, it will then be passed on through the generations. These are known as endogenous viral elements (EVEs).
In humans, fragments of viral DNA make up around 8 percent of our genome. They can provide a record of viral infections through our evolutionary history, like genetic memory.
“These viral fragments have been retained for a reason,” said paleovirologist Emma Harding. “Over millions of years of evolution, we would expect all DNA to change, however, these fossils are preserved and kept intact.”
To try to work out why, Harding and colleagues searched for EVEs in the genomes of 13 species of marsupials, including the tammar wallaby (Macropus eugeni), Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii), and fat-tailed dunnarts (Sminthopsis crassicaudata).
They found EVEs from three viral groups – Bornaviridae, Filoviridae, and Parvoviridae – in all of the animals sampled.
“One of the EVEs I found was from the Bornaviridae family of viruses, which first entered the animals’ DNA during the time of the dinosaurs when the South American and Australian land masses were still joined together,” Harding said. Bornaviridae is present in the opossums of America as well as Australia’s marsupials.
The Bornaviridae EVEs were particularly prevalent and more closely related to similar viral fossils found in birds and reptiles rather than those seen in placental mammals like us.
“Bornaviridae viruses were previously thought to have evolved 100 million years ago,” Harding explained. “But the one I found in almost every marsupial DNA we looked at puts it at 160 million years old.”
Surprisingly, some of these ancient viral fragments were still being transcribed into RNA. Often in cells, RNA transcriptions act as protein templates. But in this case they weren’t being translated, effectively making them non-coding RNA.
That doesn’t make them useless. Non-coding RNA is used in a number of cell functions, including the regulation of RNA transcription among other genes.
A tammar wallaby, one of the study species. (Hossein Anv/Unsplash)
Significantly, it is also known that this type of RNA is used for many cell functions, including regulating the creation of RNA, and it is also known to contribute to immune defense against viruses in plants and invertebrates. Bats have a particularly large cache of these fossil viral fragments too, and they’re well known for their unfortunate ability to survive while carrying deadly viruses that do most other mammals in.
Looking at koalas in more detail, the researchers discovered some of the EVEs were indeed being transcribed into small RNA molecules known to be antiviral in invertebrates.
“This suggests the tantalizing possibility of this RNA defense system, previously thought to be abandoned in mammals in favor of the interferon system, still being active and protecting marsupial cells,” Harding and colleagues wrote in Microbiology Australia.
As marsupials undergo most of their developmental time within their mother’s pouch, some are born before they’ve even developed bones let alone fully functioning immune systems. So, this kind of antiviral defense could be critical to pouch young, the team suspects.
“This could be a mechanism similar to vaccination but is inherited through generations. By keeping a viral fossil, the cell is immunized against future infection,” said Harding.
“If we can show it occurring in marsupials, it may also be occurring in other animals, including humans.”
This researcher was published in Virus Evolution.
A Russian ‘space truck’ just burst into flames on purpose and the photo is amazing
A Russian “space truck” has met its fiery doom on its way home to Earth.
The cargo ship Progress MS-15 from Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, broke apart as it burned up in Earth’s atmosphere after undocking from the International Space Station yesterday (Feb. 8). The astronauts living on the space station watched the craft’s fiery demise from above and shared the experience on social media.
“Farewell, Progress 76P MS-15! #Russian cargo spacecraft undocked from #ISS, and successfully burned up,” JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi tweeted along with a photo taken from the space station, showing the cargo craft burning up in Earth’s atmosphere below.
Related: Russia’s Progress cargo ship explained
Farewell, Progress 76P MS-15! #Russian cargo spacecraft undocked from #ISS, and successfully burned up. #ロシア プログレス宇宙船、役目を終えて大気圏突入時の夜空に燃え尽きる瞬間を見事に捉えました！#はやぶさ 思い出すと泣けます。。。 pic.twitter.com/2OLMrlmAKOFebruary 9, 2021
Roscosmos launched Progress MS-15 (also known as Progress 76) to the space station July 23, 2020 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Docking with the station just 3 hours 18 minutes and 31 seconds after launch, the craft arrived in record time, according to Roscosmos. This was a routine cargo delivery, carrying over 2.5 tons of cargo to the station. Cargo missions like this deliver food and other astronaut supplies in addition to scientific equipment and experiments to the space station.
In saying farewell to the craft, Roscosmos cosmonaut Ivan Vagner, who returned to Earth last year on Oct. 22, shared some photos on Twitter of the craft arriving to the space station this past summer. “The #ProgressMS15 cargo spacecraft undocked from the International @Space_Station at 08:21 Moscow time. Most recently, on July 23, 2020, we received it on board the #ISS. Today I want to share with you the photos taken during the docking,” he wrote.
The #ProgressMS15 cargo spacecraft undocked from the International @Space_Station at 08:21 Moscow time. Most recently, on July 23, 2020, we received it on board the #ISS. Today I want to share with you the photos taken during the docking. pic.twitter.com/BvJuH2cUg6February 9, 2021
The cargo ship spent about seven months in space attached to the space station. Yesterday, MS-15 detached from the station, traveled away from the station, got close enough to be pulled out of near-Earth orbit and burned up in our planet’s atmosphere, a maneuver that was intentional and went as planned.
“After preparations for undocking were completed, a command was issued to open the Progress MS-15 spacecraft hooks; it was undocked from the station and sent away. After the spacecraft was withdrawn to a safe distance from the station, the specialists of the TsNIIMash Mission Control Center (MCC, part of Roscosmos) began the controlled deorbit of the spacecraft,” Roscosmos said in a statement.
The non-combustible components of the craft landing and sinking into a “non-navigable region of the South Pacific,” Roscosmos said in another statement.
“Non-combustible structure elements will drop in the calculated area of the non-navigable region of the Pacific Ocean. The estimated fragments drop area is approximately 1,680 km east of Wellington (New Zealand). Roscosmos has completed all the necessary procedures to flag this area as temporarily dangerous for sea navigation and aircraft flights,” the agency wrote.
The next “space truck” to deliver supplies from Russia to the space station will be Progress MS-16, a cargo spacecraft that will deliver 2.5 tons of cargo on Feb. 17. Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov are preparing for the anticipated arrival.
Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook