China is trying to regulate relationships with AI – can it work?

 

The film Ex Machina shows one way in which relationships with AI companions might go wrong. Image courtesy of BFA / Alamy Stock Photo.

Joel Kontinen

China  has begun to negotiate  relation with AI, But earnestly, something might go wrong with it.  Only when individuals speak with others can there be real understanding. We were not taught to communicate with AI but with  human individuals.  

China has begun regulating interactions with artificial intelligence in an attempt to protect its citizens from overreliance and exploitation. While many countries have been looking at rules around harmful content, China is the first to go a step further in legislating what kind of relationships with AI are permissible.

The new rules came into force this month and cover AI systems designed for sustained, human-like emotional interaction, while excluding customer-service bots and productivity assistants like straightforward AI chatbots.

Companies must now inform users they are talking to an AI, encourage them to take breaks and remind them of their usage. They must also monitor interactions to identify if someone is becoming dependent or having a crisis, then direct them to support or halt the conversation altogether.

 Source:

Chris Stokel-Walker 2026 China is trying to regulate relationships with AI – can it work? | New Scientist 22 July 

The animal that does not die

 

The animal that does not die?  Are we in the messianic age? More stories about Israel.

A Lazarus monkey has been found in the Congo

 

The newly recognised monkey species Colobus congoensis. Image courtesy of Daniel Rosengren

Joel Kontinen

A new Lazarus animal, black colobus monkey from a remote part of the Congo Basin rainforest, is thought to be severely threatened by poaching.

The monkey is known as Likweli to local people who hunt it for bushmeat, and it has been given the scientific name Colobus congoensis. It lives in one of the most inaccessible parts of Africa, without paved roads or infrastructure. This monkey is relative to other Asian colobine monkeys.

 “A typical expedition involves multiple modes of transportation: a flight, followed by a motorcycle ride, two days of hiking on foot and finally travel by dugout canoe to reach the monkey’s range,” says Kate Detwiler at Florida Atlantic University.

Detwiler and her colleagues believe the species’ mask-like face may represent ancestral traits that were present before the African and Asian colobine lineages diverged over 8 million years ago. according to evolution, “If so, likweli may have retained characteristics that were subsequently modified or lost in the other African colobus species,” says Detwiler.

Scientists first became aware of the species in 2008 when a team surveying on the banks of the Lomami river, in what is now Lomami National Park, took a photo that showed only a part of a monkey that had not been seen before, high in the canopy.

Then, in November 2018, another group again spotted the monkey, which is about 1.3 metres long and weighs around 7 kilograms. Between 2018 and 2022, there were 114 recorded observations of the new species, 25 of which were from vocalisations.

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Congolese monkey with mask-like face and strong BO is new to science | New Scientist 15 July

 

The Dinosaur Extinction Was More Complicated Than You Think

 

Joel Kontinen

According to evolution, the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago. According to Genesis it happened during the time of Noah. It did not kill all the dinosaurs, as the account in Job tells us.  

Dinosaurs are the biggest creatures to have ever walked on land, dominating Earth for over 130 million years according to evolution. But how could such extraordinary creatures have simply vanished in the blink of a geological eye? For decades, we’ve assumed these prehistoric megafauna – a staple of our childhoods and Hollywood movies – went extinct for one simple reason: the asteroid that hit Earth was so unimaginably large that it changed everything in one single blow. But now, thanks to new research, an even more intriguing idea has emerged: size alone doesn’t explain what happened.

The real reason the impact was so devastating may have been its angle. Had the asteroid arrived a according Earth at the time, predominantly dinosaurs on land, marine creatures in the sea and pterosaurs in the air, it appears to have struck at almost the worst possible angle imaginable, launching vast quantities of rock, dust and climate-altering gases high into the atmosphere and triggering one of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth’s history.

Source:

David Stock 2026  The Dinosaur Extinction Was More Complicated Than You Think | New Scientist July 16

How humans evolved to be twice as big as our ancestors

 

Image courtesy of Chuang Zhao.

Joel Kontinen

Artistic representations of ancient humans often show large men with bulging muscles – but our ancestors were actually smaller than us, in both height and body mass.

When we look at our evolutionary ancestors, we are twice as big as they were.  But there is one thing that about this – evolution does not make us bigger, but we are comparing us to beings that are smaller than us. They are only what evolutionist call ape men.

An article in New Scientist tells this about man and our evolution.

As someone who writes a lot about human evolution and archaeology, I’ve seen a great many artists’ impressions of prehistoric people. Some are remarkably believable, closely tied to scientific findings as much as possible. Others, not so much. I twitch every time I see a reconstruction of an African or tropical hominin with northern-European-style pale skin, and the twitches escalate whenever I see hairless hominins wandering around naked in temperate regions like Britain. Put something on or you’ll die.

Source:

By Michael Marshall 2026 How humans evolved to be twice as big as our ancestors | New Scientist 13 July 

Sugar molecules found in interstellar space for the first time

 

Image courtesy of NASA, JPL-Caltech, Susan Stolovy (SSC/ Caltech) et al.

Joel Kontinen

Researches have found sugar molecules in a cosmic cloud nearly  27light i yeas from us, The ones who believe in panspermia or that life could arise on other planets, suppose that asteroids brought them to earth.

Sugar molecules have been found in interstellar space for the first time. The finding adds further evidence to the idea that early life on Earth may have benefited from complex sugar molecules arriving from elsewhere.

Sugars arise from chemical bonds among carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Besides serving as an energy source, certain sugars are fundamental building blocks of RNA and DNA, the genetic material found in every living cell. However, there has long been a chicken-and-egg problem: living organisms make sugars with enzymes, but experiments recreating conditions on pre-life Earth have yielded relatively few.

Source:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2026 Sugar molecules found in interstellar space for the first time | New Scientist13 July 

  

Global warming already causing crop losses of over $20 billion a year

 

Image courtesy of  Alamy

Joel Kontinen

Evolution and global warming are the trends we have been forced to look at,  but this has not been present in Finland.  

Global warning -fuelled heat and drought is already hitting yields of maize, wheat and soybeans to the tune of $20 billion a year, a study has estimated.

There is great uncertainty about these kinds of projections, not least because so much depends on how farmers respond and adapt to a continually changing climate, for instance, by switching to different crops or adopting irrigation where it is possible. In fact, the whole point of this study is to raise awareness and encourage adaptation, to help ensure these projections turn out to be overestimates, says team member Kai Kornhuber, also at IIASA. “This is the entire mission of climate scientists: we make these cases for people to react, so our projections turn out to be wrong.”

The researchers started by gathering data on the yields per country of maize, wheat and soya from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Next, they took past climate data and calculated the drought level, using a standard approach that estimates soil moisture levels from rainfall and evaporation levels.

The researchers then calculated the economic losses, based on FAO data showing how much farmers would have been paid for their produce at the time. Finally, they used the same approach to project future losses in several different emissions scenarios, assuming that some adaptation takes place.

This could be an underestimate of the full impact of climate change for a number of reasons: it’s just three crops, and it doesn’t include flood, storm or rain damage, or the possibility that shortages could lead to big price increases, as is already happening with some other crops such as coffee and cacao.

Source:

 Michael Le Page  2026 Global warming already causing crop losses of over $20 billion a year | New Scientist 10 July

Fossil fruits sand flowering plants flourished in time of dinosaurs

 

Image courtesy of Brian Engh

Joel Kontinen

According to evolution, dinosaurs now lived  with flowering plants. This is new, as the standard view of din9saurs was that they only eat each other or some form of cones,

.“Jonathan Birch at the London School of Economics says the study is the first time he has  seen “wanting” and “liking” disentangled in a bee."

“We underestimate insects so much,” he says. “It’s led to a golden age of very charming studies where scientists use modern techniques – sometimes just high-resolution, high-frame-rate video, as in this study – to reveal behaviours people have been missing.”

A wide variety of fruits and seeds that were smothered in the ash from a volcanic eruption nearly 75 million years ago suggest flowering plants were diverse and thriving in the time of the dinosaurs, far earlier than previously known.

Researchers had thought the emergence of large seeds and fruits followed the end-Cretaceous extinction, 66 million years ago, and was tied to the rise of mammals and birds.

“Now, we have evidence that large fruit and seeds and the related ecological conditions can be traced back to 10 million years before the asteroid impact that according to evolution wiped out the dinosaurs,” says Jaemin Lee at the University of California, Berkeley.

The team discovered an extraordinary 77 different kinds of fruits and seeds. Such a ready banquet of nutritious fruit would almost certainly have been eaten by herbivorous dinosaurs and other animals.The first flowering plants emerge in the fossil record 136 million years ago, but, until now, it was thought early forms were mostly small and weedy and vastly different to the range of species that dominate Earth’s forests today.

In Cretaceous deposits elsewhere, the fruit and seeds are roughly the size of a poppy seed on average – far smaller than the blueberry-sized seeds at Jose Creek.

Yes, according to Genesis, flowers and animals were created at the same time.  

Source:

James Woodforg 2026 Fossil fruits show flowering plants flourished in time of dinosaurs | New Scientist 25 June 

A worm that lived half a billion years ago preferred turning right

 

Image courtesy of Scott Evans/AMNH

Joel Kontinen

Do animals prefer their right hand? This is shown by a fossil that evolutionist say is a half million years ago.  

A 555-million-year-old worm had a predilection for turning right, possibly indicating the oldest known example of handedness.

Scott Evans at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and his colleagues analysed 100 fossil specimens of a small flatworm-like creature, Spriggina floundersi, collected in South Australia over recent decades.

These animals lived during the Ediacaran Period, when multicellular life first became widespread. It preceded the Cambrian explosion, when animal life diversified dramatically and many groups of animals first appeared. according to evolution.

This is what evolutionist say, their dating in millions of years is not true.     

Source:

James Woodford 2026 A worm that lived half a billion years ago preferred turning right | New Scientist 9 July

‘Hobbit’ hominins scavenged meat left over by Komodo dragons

 

Image courtesy of Lionel Bret/Eurelios/Science Photo Library

Joel Kontinen

Did hobbits or Homo floresiensis  eat animal bones left by Komodo dragons, according to devolution, the science says it is so.

The diminutive ancient humans nicknamed hobbits that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores until around 50,000 years ago had limited hunting skills, according to a study of animal bones found in their caves. Instead, researchers think they scavenged meat that was left behind by Komodo dragons.

Fossils of Homo floresiensis were first announced to the world in 2004. These humans stood just over a metre tall and their remains have been dated to between 90,000 and 50,000 years old.

Source:

 James Woodford 2026 ‘Hobbit’ hominins scavenged meat left over by Komodo dragons | New Scientist 3 July

Catholic nun issues chilling warning about aliens amid religious conflict

 

Image courtesy of Phylyp, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Joel Kontinen

 A catholic nun says UFOs are rooted in the spiritual realm and can be fallen angels or evil spirits.  

However, Mother Miriam many UFO sightings and alleged alien encounters may be the work of fallen angels.

“Citing the teachings of St Thomas Aquinas, she noted that the medieval theologian described angels as extraterrestrial beings because they originate from another world, the spiritual realm.

'The Catholic position, there is such a thing as extraterrestrial intelligence,' she said. 'These creatures really are from another world, the spiritual world. They're what we call fallen angels.'”

Source:

Stacy Liberatore 2026 Catholic nun issues chilling warning about aliens amid religious conflict 26 June

This could be why we still haven’t found alien life

 

Image courtesy of NASA

 Joel Kontinen

Where is alien life? We have found hundreds planets but alien life is still missing. What is the reason for  this? It could be that alien life never existed or are there other valid reasons?

The search for extraterrestrial life has been a topic of fascination and speculation for centuries. The universe has not yet yielded conclusive evidence of alien life. This phenomenon, known as the Fermi Paradox, poses the question: given the high probability of habitable planets, why have we not detected signs of extraterrestrial civilizations? 

Scientists aren’t finding alien life because they are likely searching for the wrong signals or looking in the wrong places, a new study warns.

Astronomers are mainly focused on avoiding “false positive” cases of instruments being fooled by the biology-mimicking chemistry of non-living things on other planets. However, , the study says that they should consider false negatives as well. A false negative is when life is present on an alien world but it remains invisible to us because we aren’t looking for the right signals.

“We should be aware of these false-negative results,” Inge Loes ten Kate, an astrobiologist from the University of Amsterdam, said. “These shortcomings are not yet high on the research agenda.”

False negatives may yield from factors like poor preservation of biological traces, weak signals from planets or limits of existing instruments.

Some theories try to explain this:

The Rare Earth Hypothesis: Suggests that the conditions necessary for complex life are extraordinarily uncommon across the universe. 

Life Is Common, Intelligence Is Rare: Many scientists believe that while simple life forms may be abundant, the emergence of intelligence is a rare leap. 

The Great Filter: A theory that posits a barrier preventing most life from reaching our level of development, such as the leap from single-celled organisms to complex life. 

But what if there is no alien life?

 Source:

Vishwam Sankaran 2026 This could be why we still haven’t found alien life 28 May

The most detailed survey of the universe ever conducted starts now

 

Image Courtesy Of Nsf–Doe Vera C. Rubin Observatory/Noirlab/Slac​/Aura

Joel Kontinen

What do we know of the universe?  Not much, but the most detailed survey of the universe starts now.  Over 11 000 new asteroids discovered and ”they are expected to result in the most complete inventory of solar system objects ever created.”

“The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is finally beginning its mammoth survey of the universe. After a year of testing and calibration,it is starting the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which is poised to become the most detailed record of the universe ever captured.

For the next decade, Rubin will collect about 10 terabytes of data every night in the form of hundreds of high-resolution images of the southern sky. Each image will cover an area about 40 times the size of the full moon, and the completed survey will include nearly the entirety of the sky that is visible from the southern hemisphere.

This treasure trove of data will serve several purposes. The first, which has already begun, is to alert researchers to anything changing in the night sky, such as the appearance of supernovae or the motion of asteroids and comets. they are expected to result in the most complete inventory of solar system objects ever created,”

Source:

 Leah Crane 2026 The most detailed survey of the universe ever conducted starts now | New Scientist 30 June