It Might Be That Our Understanding Of Dark Energy is Improving – Or Not!

2 related articles appeared last week:

First we had this:

Astronomers may have got dark energy all wrong. It’s great news for the universe

By Dennis Overbye

April 5, 2024 — 3.30pm

New York: On Thursday, astronomers who are conducting what they describe as the biggest and most precise survey yet of the history of the universe announced that they might have discovered a major flaw in their understanding of dark energy, the mysterious force that is accelerating the expansion of the cosmos.

Dark energy was assumed to be a constant force in the universe, both currently and throughout cosmic history. But the new data suggest that it may be more changeable, growing stronger or weaker over time, reversing or even fading away.

“As [Joe] Biden would say, it’s a BFD,” said Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, referring to the US president’s “big f-—ng deal” expression. Riess shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics with two other astronomers for the discovery of dark energy, but was not involved in this new study. “It may be the first real clue we have gotten about the nature of dark energy in 25 years,” he said.

That conclusion, if confirmed, could liberate astronomers – and the rest of us – from a long-standing, grim prediction about the fate of the universe. If the work of dark energy were constant over time, it would eventually push all the stars and galaxies so far apart that even atoms would be torn asunder, sapping the universe of all life, light, energy and thought, and condemning it to an everlasting case of the cosmic blahs. Instead, it seems, dark energy is capable of changing course and pointing the cosmos towards a richer future.

The keywords are “might” and “could”. The new finding has about a 1-in-400 chance of being a statistical fluke, a degree of uncertainty called three sigma, which is far short of the gold standard for a discovery, called five sigma: 1 chance in 1.7 million. In the history of physics, even five-sigma events have evaporated when more data or better interpretations of the data emerged.

This news comes in the first progress report, published as a series of papers, by a large international collaboration called the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI. The group has just begun a five-year effort to create a 3D map of the positions and velocities of 40 million galaxies across 11 billion years of cosmic time. Its initial map, based on the first year of observations, includes just 6 million galaxies. The results were released on Thursday at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Sacramento, California, and at the Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy.

“So far we’re seeing basic agreement with our best model of the universe, but we’re also seeing some potentially interesting differences that could indicate that dark energy is evolving with time,” Michael Levi, the director of DESI, said in a statement issued by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which manages the project.

The DESI team had not expected to hit pay dirt so soon, Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille, an astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley lab and a spokesperson for the project, said in an interview. The first year of results were designed to simply confirm what was already known, she said: “We thought that we would basically validate the standard model.”

But the unknown leaped out at them.

When the scientists combined their map with other cosmological data, they were surprised to find that it did not quite agree with the otherwise reliable standard model of the universe, which assumes that dark energy is constant and unchanging. A varying dark energy fit the data points better.

“It’s certainly more than a curiosity,” Palanque-Delabrouille said. “I would call it a hint. Yeah, it’s not yet evidence, but it’s interesting.”

But cosmologists are taking this hint very seriously.

Wendy Freedman, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago who has led efforts to measure the expansion of the universe, praised the new survey as “superb data”. The results, she said, “open the potential for a new window into understanding dark energy, the dominant component of the universe, which remains the biggest mystery in cosmology. Pretty exciting.”

Michael Turner, an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago who coined the term “dark energy,” said in an email: “While combining data sets is tricky, and these are early results from DESI, the possible evidence that dark energy is not constant is the best news I have heard since cosmic acceleration was firmly established 20-plus years ago.”

Dark energy entered the conversation in 1998, when two competing groups of astronomers, including Riess, discovered that the expansion of the universe was speeding up rather than slowing, as most astronomers had expected. The initial observations seemed to suggest that this dark energy was acting just like a famous fudge factor – denoted by the Greek letter Lambda – that Albert Einstein had inserted into his equations to explain why the universe didn’t collapse from its own gravity. He later called it his worst blunder.

But perhaps he spoke too soon. As formulated by Einstein, Lambda was a property of space itself: The more space there was as the universe expanded, the more dark energy there was, pushing ever harder and eventually leading to a runaway, lightless future.

Dark energy took its place in the standard model of the universe known as LCDM, composed of 70 per cent dark energy (Lambda), 25 per cent cold dark matter (an assortment of slow-moving exotic particles) and 5 per cent atomic matter. So far that model has been bruised but not broken by the new James Webb Space Telescope. But what if dark energy were not constant as the cosmological model assumed?

At issue is a parameter called w, which is a measure of the density, or vehemence, of the dark energy. In Einstein’s version of dark energy, this number remains constant, with a value of -1, throughout the life of the universe. Cosmologists have been using this value in their models for the past 25 years.

But this version of dark energy is merely the simplest one. “With DESI we now have achieved a precision that allows us to go beyond that simple model,” Palanque-Delabrouille said, “to see if the density of dark energy is constant over time, or if it has some fluctuations and evolution with time”.

The DESI project, 14 years in the making, was designed to test the constancy of dark energy by measuring how fast the universe was expanding at various times in the past. To do that, scientists outfitted a telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory with 5000 fibre-optic detectors that could conduct spectroscopy on that many galaxies simultaneously and find out how fast they were moving away from Earth.

As a measure of distance, the researchers used bumps in the cosmic distribution of galaxies, known as baryon acoustic oscillations. These bumps were imprinted on the cosmos by sound waves in the hot plasma that filled the universe when it was just 380,000 years old. Back then, the bumps were 500,000-light-years across. Now, 13.5 billion years later, the universe has expanded a thousandfold, and the bumps – which are now 500-million-light-years across – serve as convenient cosmic measuring sticks.

The DESI scientists divided the past 11 billion years of cosmic history into seven spans of time. (The universe is 13.8 billion years old.) For each, they measured the size of these bumps and how fast the galaxies in them were speeding away from us and from each other.

When the researchers put it all together, they found that the usual assumption – a constant dark energy – didn’t work to describe the expansion of the universe. Galaxies in the three most recent epochs appeared closer than they should have been, suggesting that dark energy could be evolving with time.

“And we do see, indeed, a hint that the properties of dark energy would not correspond to a simple cosmological constant” but instead may “have some deviations,” Palanque-Delabrouille said. “And this is the first time we have that.” But, she emphasised again, “I wouldn’t call it evidence yet. It’s too, too weak.”

Time and more data will tell the fate of dark energy, and of cosmologists’ battle-tested model of the universe.

“LCDM is being put through its paces by precision tests coming at it from every direction,” Turner said. “And it is doing well. But, when everything is taken together, it is beginning to appear that something isn’t right or something is missing. Things don’t fit together perfectly. And DESI is the latest indication.”

Riess of Johns Hopkins, who had an early look at the DESI results, noted that the “hint,” if validated, could pull the rug out from other cosmological measurements, such as the age or size of the universe. “This result is very interesting and we should take it seriously,” he wrote in his email. “Otherwise why else do we do these experiments?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Here is the link:

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/astronomers-may-have-got-dark-energy-all-wrong-it-s-great-news-for-the-universe-20240405-p5fhq0.html

and second we have this:

Space

New 3D cosmic map raises questions over future of universe, scientists say

Researchers say findings from map with three times more galaxies than previous efforts could challenge standard idea of dark energy

Nicola Davis Science correspondent

Fri 5 Apr 2024 02.00 AEDTLast modified on Fri 5 Apr 2024 07.07 AEDT

The biggest ever 3D map of the universe, featuring more than 6m galaxies, has been revealed by scientists who said it raised questions about the nature of dark energy and the future of the universe.

The map is based on data collected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (Desi) in Arizona and contains three times as many galaxies as previous efforts, with many having their distances measured for the first time.

Researchers said that by using this map, they have been able measure how fast the universe has been expanding at different times in the past with unprecedented accuracy.

The results confirm that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, they added. However, the findings have also raised the tantalising possibility that dark energy – a mysterious, repulsive force that drives the process – is not constant throughout time as has previously been suggested.

Dr Seshadri Nadathur, a co-author of the work and senior research fellow at the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said: “What we are seeing are some hints that it has actually been changing over time, which is quite exciting because it is not what the standard model of a cosmological constant dark energy would look like.”

Prof Carlos Frenk, from Durham University and a co-author of the research, said that if dark energy was indeed constant in time, the future of the universe was simple: it would expand on and on, for ever. But if the hints found in the map stood up, that would be called into question.

“Now all of that goes out the window and essentially we have to start from scratch, and that means revising our understanding of basic physics, our understanding of the big bang itself, and our understanding of the long-range forecast for the universe,” he said, adding that the new hints left open the possibility that the universe might undergo a “big crunch”.

The research, which has been published in a series of preprints – meaning it has yet to be peer-reviewed – reveals how the team first created the 3D map, then measured patterns in the distribution of galaxies that relate to sound waves that occurred in the early universe, known as baryon acoustic oscillations.

As the size of these patterns is known to be regular, the team was able to calibrate the distances to different galaxies in the map, allowing them to work out how fast the universe has been growing over the last 11bn years, with a precision better than 0.5% over all times, and better than 1% between 8bn and 11bn years ago.

Frenk said the precision itself of the measurements was notable given that galaxies could be billions of light years away, and billions of years old. “It’s mind-boggling that we can measure anything to a precision of 1%, which is precision you get in the laboratory in physics for high-precision measurements,” he said.

Andrew Pontzen, professor of cosmology at University College London and author of the book The Universe in a Box, who was not involved in the work, said Desi was one of a slew of exciting new astronomical surveys cataloguing the night sky, with one of the primary goals being to measure the rate at which our expanding universe has speeded up.

“Like measuring the acceleration of a car, charting the universe’s expansion tells us about the ‘engine’ powering cosmic acceleration. That engine is known as dark energy,” he said.

However, Pontzen noted that our knowledge of how dark energy operates was limited. “The new data, when combined with existing measurements, would seem to contradict the simplest possible explanations for dark energy,” he said.

“At face value, that’s an exciting step forward. But as the team themselves caution, there is a huge amount still to understand about this data and early results should be taken with a healthy grain of salt.”

Here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/04/biggest-ever-3d-map-universe-dark-energy-data-scientists

I think Joe Biden is right that what we a dealing with here is a Big F…king Deal as it really goes to our understanding (or not) of the history and fabric of the cosmos. Doesn’t matter for tonight’s dinner but for where, over time, our overall understanding of the universe winds up!

All we can do is sit back and watch as the story unfolds, and keep our sense of awe and wonder alive.

David.

I Suspect We Need To Be A Bit Wary Of Some Excessive Hype But Things Are Happening!

This appeared last week:

03 April 2024

Australia entering ‘extraordinary epoch’ of AI in healthcare

By Harriet Grayson

AI apps could transform clinical workflows and patient outcomes across aged care, disability, radiology and primary care, according to the CSIRO.

The rise of natural language processing and generative language models across AI applications in healthcare has taken Australia’s health sector into an “extraordinary epoch”, according to a new report from the CSIRO.

The AI Trends for Healthcare report highlighted numerous opportunities and challenges to further integrating AI technologies in healthcare, including several initiatives being led by the CSIRO to implement AI across aged care, disability, medical imaging and clinical decision support.

One example included using natural language processing alongside the GPT-3 generative language model to build a natural language interface, OntoGPT, designed to streamline how users navigate information stored on SNOMED CT.

According to the report, the rise of natural language interfaces and generative language models presenting the opportunity to strengthen clinical decision-making and reduce administrative workloads for clinicians as well as improving patient outcomes

“These technologies represent an extraordinary epoch in medicine, where machines will be able to lighten the administrative load for clinicians, offer therapeutic support through chatbots that can take histories and offer education to patients, and enable improved clinical decision making,” the authors said.

“This, together with their ability to enhance patient care when they are linked to electronic records via SMART on FHIR represents a potentially rich and impactful research and implementation opportunity for CSIRO.”

Other CSIRO-led AI initiatives included developing smart homes integrated with mobile health apps and clinician platforms to support chronic conditions, improving preventative risk management such as falls prevention and enhancing eye health diagnosis and prevention.

While the significant increase in computational power in the last decade was the “biggest contributor” driving recent advances in machine learning, the substantial investment required to support the computer servers hosting AI networks could create inequity of access among medical researchers, the report warned.

Key barriers to introducing AI into aged care included the lack of rigorous evidence supporting AI-enabled products and services and limited education regarding how to safely and effectively engage with AI tools among older Australians living in residential aged care or within their communities.

Alongside working to develop and integrate AI tools across various clinical settings, greater attention needed to be paid to strengthen the digital capabilities of Australia’s health workforce, the report said.

The authors identified a number of initiatives led by the AHERC to improve digital health education among health workers nationwide, including work with the university sector to provide FHIR training courses, as well as developing opportunities with health bodies such as Queensland Health to develop staff on FHIR-aligned activities

“While the operationalisation of the existing frameworks is not landed yet, it is important to create inclusive, interdisciplinary, and ongoing discussions across sectors to shape the regulatory processes and to size the potential of AI in a safe way,” the report said.

“To harness the capabilities already at our disposal within the health ecosystem appropriately and responsibly – it is critical that our workforce (from clinicians, scientists, system administrators etc) are equipped to identify both the opportunities, challenges, and potential pitfalls as we navigate these new paths together.”

Here is the link:

https://www.medicalrepublic.com.au/australia-entering-extraordinary-epoch-of-ai-in-healthcare/106397

Here is a summary of the report:

New report says healthcare is a winner when it comes to AI

March 27th, 2024

Our new report AI Trends for Healthcare  released today, shows that healthcare is set to be the big winner in the artificial intelligence stakes.

The recent explosion in AI for healthcare has resulted from a rapid increase in compute power, as well as the availability of AI tools being developed by research centres like AEHRC in collaboration with industry.

This is not unlike many sectors where AI is taking hold. But healthcare is unique because the safety and success of the technology can mean life and death, health or disease.

We published our first AI report in 2020, at the height of the pandemic and at an epoch which will undoubtedly be remembered as the tidal wave for digital health

This report leans to some extent on the first edition especially in that we explain some of the terms and language around health AI.

What’s new is a challenges and opportunities section and a case studies section where we reveal the latest research using AI for health.

This report is not to be missed if you’re interested in how AI will be used in the future of diagnosis, treatment and management of disease.

Here is the link:

https://aehrc.csiro.au/new-report-says-healthcare-is-a-winner-when-it-comes-to-ai/

It is well worth downloading the 48 page report to see the details of what the CSIRO is up to!

They have a serious number of people (150+) and serious funding to progress some quite important work, that we don’t seem to hear all that much about – which is a pity!

David.

 

I Think It Is Probably Wise To Wait A Few Years Before Trusting AI Health Advice!

This appeared a few days ago

Why you shouldn’t ask ChatGPT for medical advice

By Angus Thomson

April 4, 2024 — 6.00am

If you asked a doctor whether to use ice to treat a burn, they would quickly advise you to run it under cold water instead. Even “Dr Google” will tell you that extreme cold constricts the blood vessels and can make a burn worse.

But what happens when you ask ChatGPT the same question? The chatbot will tell you it’s fine to use ice – so long as you wrap in a towel.

The question is one of a hundred common health queries that Australian researchers used to test the chatbot’s ability to provide medical advice.

They found the software was fairly accurate when asked to provide a yes or no answer, but became less reliable when given more information – answering some questions with just 28 per cent accuracy.

Co-author Dr Bevan Koopman, CSIRO principal research scientist and associate professor at the University of Queensland, has spent years looking at how search engines are used in healthcare.

He said people were increasingly using tools such as ChatGPT for medical advice despite the well-documented pitfalls of seeking health information online.

“These models have come on to the scene so quickly ... but there isn’t really the understanding of how well they perform and how best to deploy them,” he said. “In the end, you want reliable medical advice … and these models are not at all appropriate for doing things like diagnosis.”

The study compared ChatGPT’s response to a known correct response for a set of questions developed to test the accuracy of search engines such as Google.

It answered correctly 80 per cent of the time when asked to give a yes or no answer. But when provided with supporting evidence in the prompt, accuracy was reduced to 63 per cent, and fell to 28 per cent when an “unsure” answer was allowed.

Inverting the prompts to frame the question as a negative also reduced the accuracy of its answers – from 80 per cent to 56 per cent for the yes/no option, and from 33 per cent to just 4 per cent when it was given a third option of “unsure”.

Koopman said large language models such as ChatGPT were only as good as the information they were trained on, and hoped the study would provide a stepping stone for the next generation of health-specific tools “that would be much more effective”.

A national road map for artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, released last year, recommended the government “urgently communicate the need for caution” when using generative AI that is untested and unregulated in healthcare settings.

Professor Enrico Coiera, the director of Macquarie University’s Centre for Health Informatics and one of the authors of the road map, said some doctors were using large language models to help them take patient notes and write letters, but these had so far avoided the regulation and testing hurdles that every other health technology has to go through.

“In Silicon Valley they say, ‘move fast and break things’. That’s not a good mantra in healthcare where the things you might break are people,” he said.

Large language models construct sentences by assessing a huge database of words and how often they appear next to each other. They are chatty and easy to use but “don’t know anything about medicine”, Coiera said, and therefore should be supported by another kind of AI that can better answer health-related questions.

Dr Rob Hosking, a GP and the chairman of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners’ technology committee, said there was a place for large language models in healthcare “if it’s trained on medical quality data, and supervised by a clinician who knows how to understand the data”.

“It’s really no different from our perspective – people come in with information they’ve got from friends, family or the internet,” he said. “It’s a bit like the move from using pen and paper to using a word processor – it’s a tool. We can’t take it as gospel.”

Here is the link:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-you-shouldn-t-ask-chatgpt-for-medical-advice-20240327-p5ffkp.html

At this point I reckon we should seek health advicr from a human who is backed up by a computer to fill in the blanks and details.

I am sure many would be re-assured if the advice from the doctor is confirmed by the computer but I think I want the human touch for now! 10 years on who knows?

What do you think?

David.

This Sounds Like A Good Step Forward In The Further Evolution Of FHIR.

This appeared last week:

03 April 2024

FHIR independent watchdog established

By Staff Writers

A committee consisting of reps from DoHAC, CSIRO, ADHA, MSIA and HL7 has convened to oversee the development of the first national FHIR standards.

An independent committee has been established to oversee the development and implementation of FHIR standards, with FHIR founder Grahame Grieve appointed committee chair. 

 The Australian FHIR Coordination Committee was designed to maintain transparency and integrity throughout the development of FHIR standards, in accordance with the recently drafted Australian FHIR management framework outlining governance arrangements for FHIR standards development. 

Former HISA chair David Rowlands was appointed deputy chair of the committee, with other members including representatives from Oracle Health, MSIA, DoHAC, the ADHA and CSIRO, as well as members from HL7 Australia’s FHIR work group and technical services group. 

All representatives would operate independently from their respective organisations while on the committee, Mr Grieve said. 

We are transparent, we keep good records, and everybody knows that even if they don’t like the outcomes, they were heard, and that no underhanded stuff going on,” he said.  

“If the government is going to make this kind of investment in the community, then they have a legitimate concern – as does the rest of the community – in how does that trust and integrity get built in. 

“The drive for me, which comes out of my experience in international standards, is having an independent watchdog with a nominated watchdog role.” 

Funding for the coordination committee and FHIR management framework arose out of the 2023-24 budget, with money allocated by the federal government for the CSIRO to work with the states and territories, the Australian Digital Health Agency and software vendors to develop and adopt national standards, according to HL7 Australia board chair Isobel Frean. 

Here is the link:

https://www.medicalrepublic.com.au/fhir-independent-watchdog-established/106399

It is especially good to see there is at least some funding allocated to support the effort

Personally I would like the see Grahame get rich out of his efforts – but I fear the Standards Gods don’t run to that!

David.

The Flogging Of This Dead Horse Is Really Getting Silly!

This appeared last week:

CareVision Working to Integrate My Health Record for NDIS Aged Care and Community Care

Apr 4, 2024 | Company News, Home Care Software, Home Care Technology

The Australian government recommends the universal adoption of My Health Record by the aged care sector. My Health Record provides authorised healthcare professionals with access to a patient’s key health information. CareVision is working towards integrating My Health Record as it provides many benefits:

•                Saves time in the transfer of care especially in emergencies
•     Quick and reliable verification and validation of clinical information
•     It helps in avoiding the duplication of tests as well as diagnostic imaging
•    Improves the continuity of patient or client care

The information included in My Health Record is uploaded by healthcare professionals, including doctors and pharmacists. Some of the clinical documents that will be accessed include:

•                shared health summaries
•   vaccination and immunisation information
•     prescription and dispense records
•   discharge summaries
•    transfer of care information
•    radiology and pathology results.

It is also possible for the actual patients or their family members and carers to upload advanced care documents.

Here is the link:

https://carevision.com/carevision-working-to-integrate-my-health-record-for-ndis-aged-care-and-community-care/

The real question here is just what is the actual usage level on the myHR and how many GPs are actually filling it in as each patient visits.

It is now a little over a year since this commentary appeared, and it appears usage has rather flatlined or worse since then.

My Health Record is meant to empower patients – but with little useful information stored, is it worth saving?

Published: March 3, 2023 6.08am AEDT

Author

1. Megan Prictor

Senior Lecturer in Law, The University of Melbourne

Australia’s My Health Record is a national, integrated electronic record, intended to overcome the problem of having personal health information “siloed” in different systems.

People can access their own My Health Record via MyGov or an app. Any of their treating health professionals can access it, too.

My Health Record can hold various past information, including a shared health summary, records of health conditions, allergies and medications, summaries of cancer treatment, test and scan results, hospital discharge notes, vaccination records, organ donation choices, and notes entered by patients themselves.

But is the system actually being used? Why is it, when people access their My Health Record, they often find little helpful information? Earlier this year, Health Minister Mark Butler promised an overhaul as part of the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce. But what needs to happen for it to be finally fit for purpose?

Lots more here:

https://theconversation.com/my-health-record-is-meant-to-empower-patients-but-with-little-useful-information-stored-is-it-worth-saving-199508

The current usage statistics are found here:

https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/my-health-record/statistics

You will note there has been no update since January, 2024 and that people looking at their information has basically flatlined or dropped since January 2023. Practitioner usage also seems to have flatlined or also declined.

As far as I can tell active usage by GPs of the myHR is stable to declining and the huge pile of historical documents (many years old) just pile up! Any sign of the promised improvements?

It is of note that even the ADHA has stopped updating the stats in the last 3 months – what does that tell you?

The huge “white elephant” status of the myHR seems to be confirmed.

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 741 – Results – 7 April, 2024.

Here are the results of the recent poll.

Do You Believe Deployment Of More AI In Healthcare Will Make It Safer And Better?

Yes                                                                             11 (34%)

No                                                                              18 (50%)

I Have No Idea                                                            3 (0%)

Total No. Of Votes: 32

People seem to think that deployment of more AI won’t help much, Rather sad!

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

A fair number of votes. But also a rather mixed outcome! 

3 of 32  who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many thanks to all those who voted! 

David.

Looks Like The ADHA CEO Has Left - Can Anyone Confirm?

Noted this today! (From a release from the APodA!)

"Australian Digital Health Agency Acting CEO Peter O’Halloran said, “Our initial focus has been on supporting GPs and pharmacies to register but they are not the only healthcare providers that face large amounts of paperwork whenever health professionals join or leave their employment."

Web site is not updated as of Friday 5/4/2024

David,

I Think We Still Have A Great Deal To Learn About The Denisovans…

This appeared last week

The Observer Evolution

Scientists link elusive human group to 150,000-year-old Chinese ‘dragon man’

Researchers have found fresh evidence that may connect the mysterious Denisovans to the early human species Homo longi

Robin McKie Science editor

Sun 31 Mar 2024 02.00 AEDT Last modified on Sun 31 Mar 2024 07.16 AEDT

They remain one of the most elusive groups of humans to have walked on earth. Evidence from the DNA traces left by Denisovans shows they lived on the Tibetan plateau, ­probably ­travelled to the Philippines and Laos in south Asia and might have made their way to northern China more than 100,000 years ago. They also interbred with modern humans.

What Denisovans looked like or how they lived has remained a­ ­mystery, however. Only a jaw ­fragment, a few bits of bone and one or two teeth ­provide any evidence of their physical characteristics.

Their DNA, which was first found in samples from the Denisova cave in Siberia in 2010, provides most of our ­information about their existence.

But recently scientists have pinpointed a strong candidate for the species to which the Denisovans might have belonged. This is Homo longi – or “Dragon man” – from Harbin in north-east China. This key fossil is made up of an almost complete skull with a braincase as big as a modern human’s and a flat face with delicate cheekbones. Dating suggests it is at least 150,000 years old.

“We now believe that the Denisovans were members of the Homo longi species,” said Prof Xijun Ni of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, last week. “The latter is ­characterised by a broad nose, thick brow ridges over its eyes and large tooth sockets.”

The possible Denisovan-Homo longi link is one of several recent developments by researchers working on these humans with whom Homo sapiens shared the planet for hundreds of thousands of years. It is even thought they could have played a key role in our own evolution.

Scientists in Tibet have discovered a Denisovan gene in local people, the result of interbreeding between the two species in the distant past. Crucially, this gene has been shown to help modern men and women survive at high altitudes.

In addition, evidence to ­support the Denisovan-Homo longi link has also been traced to the Tibetan ­plateau, where scientists began studying a jawbone initially found in a remote cave 3,000 metres (10,000ft) above sea level by a Buddhist monk, who kept it as a relic.

The bone was found not to come from a modern human. But only when researchers began to study the cave where the jawbone had been originally discovered did they find its ­sediments were rich in Denisovan DNA. In addition, it was found the fossil itself contained proteins that indicated Denisovan origins.

“It was the first time a Denisovan fossil find had been made outside Sibera and that was very important,” said Janet Kelso of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “Equally intriguing was the fact that the jawbone has teeth that are similar to the teeth found in Homo longi. So I think the evidence suggests a link between the cranium and Denisovans”

This view was backed by Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. “The evidence supports the idea that Denisovans were members of Homo longi but we are still short of absolute proof. Nevertheless, that will come with time, I believe.”

A big problem for researchers has been the fact that no DNA has yet been found in Chinese fossils such as Homo longi, added Stringer. “Their genes have not survived the ­passing of time. However, using the ­techniques of proteomics may ­provide key new data. These focus on a fossil’s ­proteins, which survive for far longer than its DNA and could tell us much more about the species.”

Recent research also suggests these people might have played a key role in the evolution of our own species.

The impact of the Denisovan gene found in Tibetans today provides one example. But Denisovan DNA has also been found in other modern populations, including people in New Guinea, northern Australia and the Philippines, and appears to have helped them fight infections from diseases such as malaria.

Denisovans settled in areas that covered a very varied geography, said Stringer. “Some were hot and low-lying, others were cold and mountainous. They represented very diverse habitats, from the Tibetan plateau to islands like Sulawesi [in Indonesia].”

By contrast, the Neanderthals, the third large grouping of humans that evolved over the past few hundreds of thousands of years, confined themselves to the cooler climates of a region that stretched east from Europe to southern Siberia.

They did not expand from this relatively uniform environment. So is the rich variety of homelands adopted by the Denisovans a sign that they were capable of much more diverse and adaptive behaviour than Neanderthals, scientists are now asking?

Homo sapiens also appears to have interbred with Denisovans on more than one occasion. “Indeed, there is good evidence that some modern humans interbred with genetically distinct Denisovans on multiple occasions,” said Kelso. “This suggests that the two groups coexisted for an extended time, with some studies suggesting a last contact as recently as 25,000 years ago.”

More here:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/30/scientists-link-elusive-human-group-to-150000-year-old-chinese-dragon-man

As far as I can tell these Denisovans are the closest distinct group to modern humans and so are of interest to those curious to know where we came from! Apparently these people were about pretty recently in a geological sense and there is considerable genetic similarity to some PNG tribes

There is a lot more to read in Wikipedia on all this if you are really curious!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisovan

I have to confess I find to way our story is slowly emerging is fascinating.

David.

 

This Is A Fantastic Story On How One Of Our Most Important Tech. Companies Emerged.

This appeared last week

Morris Chang turned 55. Then he started the world’s most important company

By Ben Cohen

The Wall Street Journal

1:24AM March 31, 2024

The world’s most valuable tech companies were founded in dorm rooms, garages and diners by entrepreneurs who were remarkably young. Bill Gates was 19. Steve Jobs was 21. Jeff Bezos and Jensen Huang were 30.

But what might just be the world’s most invaluable company was founded by Morris Chang when he was 55 years old.

Never has anyone so old created a business worth so much as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, known simply as TSMC, the chip manufacturer that produces essential parts for computers, phones, cars, artificial-intelligence systems and many of the devices that have become part of our daily lives.

Mr Chang had such a long career in the chip business that he would have been a legend of his field even if he’d retired in 1985 and played bridge for the rest of his life. Instead he reinvented himself. Then he revolutionised his industry.

But he wasn’t successful despite his age. He was successful because of his age. As it turns out, older entrepreneurs are both more common and more productive than younger founders. And nobody personifies the surprising benefits of mid-life entrepreneurship better than Mr Chang, who had worked in the US for three decades when he moved to Taiwan with a singular obsession.

“I wanted to build a great semiconductor company,” he told me.

What he built was unlike any existing semiconductor company. You probably use a device with a chip made by TSMC every day, but TSMC does not actually design or market those chips.

That would have sounded completely absurd before the existence of TSMC. Back then, companies designed chips that they manufactured themselves.

Mr Chang’s radical idea for a great semiconductor company was one that would exclusively manufacture chips that its customers designed. By not designing or selling its own chips, TSMC never competed with its own clients. In exchange, they wouldn’t have to bother running their own fabrication plants, or fabs, the expensive and dizzyingly sophisticated facilities where circuits are carved on silicon wafers.

The innovative business model behind his chip foundry would transform the industry and make TSMC indispensable to the global economy.

Now it’s the company that Americans rely on the most but know the least about. Morris Chang isn’t a household name, either, but he should be.

TSMC’s founder shaped the chip business over the past 70 years and still finds himself playing an important role today. His longevity puts him right at the top of the list of the people most responsible for cultivating the world’s most vital technology.

“Hardly anyone has been more influential,” says Chris Miller, the author of the book Chip War

I recently spoke with Mr Chang by video chat to find out what others can learn from his adventures as a middle-aged entrepreneur and why it’s never too late to try something new.

As the demand for chips intensifies and US-China relations deteriorate, the world increasingly depends on TSMC, and there are lots of questions about the future of this company that Mr Chang founded on a geopolitically vulnerable island. But the topic of our conversation was TSMC’s past.

Mr Chang, now 92, officially retired as TSMC’s chairman in 2018, but the white-haired pioneer was sitting at his desk in a suit and tie as he sipped from a glass of Diet Coke during our 90-minute interview.

I wanted to know more about his decision to start a new company when he could have stopped working altogether. What I discovered was that his age was one of his assets. Only someone with his experience and expertise could have possibly executed his plan for TSMC.

“I could not have done it sooner,” he says. “I don’t think anybody could have done it sooner. Because I was the first one.”

Texas, then Taiwan

Long before he moved to Taiwan in middle age, Morris Chang moved to the US as a teenager.

Mr Chang was born in mainland China and had a peripatetic childhood as his family bounced around the war-torn country. When he fled to the US in 1949, America felt to him like paradise. He later became a US citizen.

Mr Chang grew up dreaming of being a writer — a novelist, maybe a journalist — and he planned to major in English literature at Harvard University. But after his freshman year, he decided that what he actually wanted was a good job.

He transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering, earned his master’s degree and would have stayed for his PhD if he hadn’t failed the qualifying exam. Instead, he got his first job in semiconductors and moved to Texas Instruments in 1958.

Back then, chips were known as things made from potatoes. But he came along as the integrated circuit was being invented, and his timing couldn’t have been any better, as Mr Chang belonged to the first generation of semiconductor geeks. He developed a reputation as a tenacious manager who could wring every possible improvement out of production lines, which put his career on the fast track.

Three years after he moved to Dallas, the company sent him to Stanford University for his PhD in electrical engineering. This time, he aced the qualifying exam and returned as Dr Chang. By the late 1960s, he was managing TI’s integrated-circuit division. Before long, he was running the entire semiconductor group.

Mr Chang was such a workaholic that he made sales calls on his honeymoon and had no patience for those who didn’t share his drive. These days, TSMC is investing $US40 billion ($61.3bn) to build plants in Arizona, but the project has been stymied by delays, setbacks and labour shortages, and Mr Chang told me that some of TSMC’s young employees in the US have attitudes toward work that he struggles to understand.

“They talk about life-work balance,” he says. “That’s a term I didn’t even know when I was their age. Work-life balance. When I was their age, if there was no work, there was no life.”

Mr Chang climbed the executive ranks at TI, but he was passed over for top jobs and felt like he was being put out to pasture. He wanted TI to focus on semiconductors, but the company wanted to keep selling consumer products.

“Home computers and all that stuff,” he says. “That was a serious distraction and a serious diversion of corporate resources.” In 1983, once he accepted that he wouldn’t be promoted, and his company wasn’t going to bet on a market that he believed was the future, he quit Texas Instruments.

Almost immediately, he was hired by electronics manufacturer General Instrument as president and chief operating officer. Almost immediately, he realised that he’d made a huge mistake. “I was a mismatch — a complete misfit,” Mr Chang says. After one year, he quit General Instrument, too.

Now he was turning 54 and had no clue what he was going to do next. He knew he wanted to work again and had venture-capital offers that he might have accepted if Taiwan hadn’t beckoned. But he could afford to wait for a better opportunity.

Mr Chang says he wouldn’t have taken the risk of moving to Taiwan if he weren’t financially secure. In fact, he didn’t take that same risk the first time he could have.

In 1982, Mr Chang received a tempting job offer from a powerful Taiwanese official named K.T. Li, the man credited with orchestrating the country’s postwar economic development and galvanising the nation’s tech industry. He wanted Mr Chang to be the president of Taiwan’s leading tech institute and spin research into profit.

By then, Mr Chang knew that he wasn’t long for Texas Instruments. But his stock options hadn’t vested, so he turned down the invitation to Taiwan. “I was not financially secure yet,” he says.

“I was never after great wealth. I was only after financial security.” For this corporate executive in the middle of the 1980s, financial security equated to $US200,000 a year. “After tax, of course,” he says.

Mr Chang’s situation had changed by the time Mr Li called again three years later. He’d exercised a few million dollars of stock options and bought tax-exempt municipal bonds that paid enough for him to be financially secure by his living standards. Once he’d achieved that goal, he was ready to pursue another one.

He calls moving to Taiwan his “rendezvous with destiny,” but the truth is that nothing about TSMC was destined.

“There was no certainty at all that Taiwan would give me the chance to build a great semiconductor company, but the possibility existed, and it was the only possibility for me,” Chang says. “That’s why I went to Taiwan.”

He had spent most of his career in Texas and thought he would retire in the US after 15 years in Taiwan. That was almost 40 years ago.

When older is better

Is Morris Chang an outlier?

Not long ago, a team of economists investigated whether older entrepreneurs are more successful than younger ones. By scrutinising Census Bureau records and freshly available Internal Revenue Service data, they were able to identify 2.7 million founders in the US who started companies between 2007 and 2014. Then they looked at their ages.

The average age of those entrepreneurs at the founding of their companies was 41.9. For the fastest-growing companies, that number was 45. The economists also determined that 50-year-old founders were almost twice as likely to achieve major success as 30-year-old founders, while the founders with the lowest chance of success were the ones in their early 20s. Every shred of evidence led them to a counterintuitive takeaway.

“Successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, not young,” they wrote in their 2020 paper.

This is not the image of startup founders that most people have in their minds. They are more likely to think of Steve Jobs tinkering in a garage or Mark Zuckerberg coding in his dorm room. Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta Platforms had founders who were 30 or younger, and Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists throw money at talented young entrepreneurs in the hopes they will start the next trillion-dollar company.

They have plentiful energy, insatiable ambition and the vision to peek around corners and see the future. What they don’t typically have are mortgages, family obligations and other adult responsibilities to distract them or diminish their appetite for risk. Mr Chang himself says that younger people are more innovative when it comes to science and technical subjects.

But in business, older is better. Entrepreneurs in their 40s and 50s may not have the exuberance to believe they will change the world, but they have the experience to know how they actually can.

Some need years of specialised training before they can start a company. In biotechnology, for example, founders are more likely to be college professors than college dropouts. Others require the lessons and connections they accumulate over the course of their careers.

“There are ideas that you can only have once you’ve been around and you’ve had a real job,” said MIT Sloan School of Management professor Pierre Azoulay, one of the paper’s authors. “Those are not typically challenges solved by twenty-somethings, because you need to be up close and personal with the problems of a corporate customer to imagine a solution.”

There was one more finding from their study of US companies that helps explain the success of a chip maker in Taiwan. It was that prior employment in the area of their startups — both the general sector and specific industry — predicted “a vastly higher probability” of success.

“The closer the industry match,” they wrote, “the greater the success rate.”

The founding of a foundry

Morris Chang had 30 years of experience in his industry when he decided to uproot his life and move to another continent. He knew more about semiconductors than just about anyone on earth — and certainly more than anyone in Taiwan. As soon as he started his job at the Industrial Technology Research Institute, Chang was summoned to K.T. Li’s office and given a second job.

“He felt I should start a semiconductor company in Taiwan,” Mr Chang says. “So that was the start of TSMC.”

When he sat down to figure out what TSMC’s business model should be, Mr Chang started by recognising what it couldn’t be.

“I decided right away that this could not be the kind of great company that I wanted to build at either Texas Instruments or General Instrument,” he says.

TI handled every part of chip production, but what worked in Texas would not translate to Taiwan. The only way that he could build a great company in his new home was to make a new sort of company altogether, one with a business model that would exploit the country’s strengths and mitigate its many weaknesses.

Mr Chang determined that Taiwan had precisely one strength in the chip supply chain. The research firm that he was now running had been experimenting with semiconductors for the previous 10 years. When he studied that decade of data, Mr Chang was pleasantly surprised by Taiwan’s yields, the percentage of working chips on silicon wafers. They were almost twice as high in Taiwan as they were in the US, he said.

Mr Chang knew his company wouldn’t have the resources to compete with Silicon Valley when it came to designing, selling or marketing chips. But he believed there was one potential competitive advantage for the company that would become TSMC: manufacturing chips — and only manufacturing chips.

The seeds of a pure chip foundry had been planted in his mind by Gordon Campbell, a semiconductor entrepreneur who visited Mr Chang during his otherwise regrettable year at General Instrument.

Chipmaker TSMC formally opened its first Japanese plant on Saturday (February 24), highlighting the Taiwanese…

Mr Campbell was familiar with the agonies and the inefficiencies of building and operating a fab. He felt startups were better off designing chips and outsourcing the manufacturing. To some in his business, this was unthinkable. “Real men have fabs,” the famous saying went. One man thought the future was fabless.

“People were ingrained in thinking the secret sauce of a successful semiconductor company was in the wafer fab,” Mr Campbell told me. “The transition to the fabless semiconductor model was actually pretty obvious when you thought about it. But it was so against the prevailing wisdom that many people didn’t think about it.”

He was thinking about it when he spoke with Mr Chang in late 1984. And soon Mr Chang was thinking about it, too. He began to think that every fabless company would need a foundry.

Taiwan’s government took a 48 per cent stake, with the rest of the funding coming from the Dutch electronics giant Philips and Taiwan’s private sector, but Mr Chang was the driving force behind the company. The insight to build TSMC around such an unconventional business model was born from his experience, contacts and expertise. He understood his industry deeply enough to disrupt it.

“TSMC was a business-model innovation,” Mr Chang says. “For innovations of that kind, I think people of a more advanced age are perhaps even more capable than people of a younger age.”

Mr Chang says the idea behind TSMC was also the result of the personal philosophy that he’d developed over the course of his long career. “To be a partner to our customers,” he says. That founding principle from 1987 is the bedrock of the foundry business to this day, as TSMC says the key to its success has always been enabling the success of its customers.

More here:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-wall-street-journal/morris-chang-turned-55-then-he-started-the-worlds-most-important-company/news-story/9b1de69660a81bcbfd4b87673dfabce9

What a great story showing you are never to old to become an ‘overnight success’!

David.

This Is An Amazing Story Of Being At The Right Place, With The Right Skills And Technology, At The Right Time!

This appeared last week:

The Observer Artificial intelligence (AI)

How did a small developer of graphics cards for gamers suddenly become the third most valuable firm on the planet?

John Naughton

By turning his computer chip-making company Nvidia into a vital component in the AI arms race, Jensen Huang has placed himself at the forefront of the biggest gold rush in tech history

Sun 31 Mar 2024 03.00 AEDTLast modified on Sun 31 Mar 2024 09.16 AEDT

A funny thing happened on our way to the future. It took place recently in a huge sports arena in San Jose, California, and was described by some wag as “AI Woodstock”. But whereas that original music festival had attendees who were mainly stoned on conventional narcotics, the 11,000 or so in San Jose were high on the Kool-Aid so lavishly provided by the tech industry.

They were gathered to hear a keynote address at a technology conference given by Jensen Huang, the founder of computer chip-maker Nvidia, who is now the Taylor Swift of Silicon Valley. Dressed in his customary leather jacket and white-soled trainers, he delivered a bravura 50-minute performance that recalled Steve Jobs in his heyday, though with slightly less slick delivery. The audience, likewise, recalled the fanboys who used to queue for hours to be allowed into Jobs’s reality distortion field, except that the Huang fans were not as attentive to the cues he gave them to applaud.

Still, it made for interesting viewing. Huang is an engaging speaker and he has built a remarkable company in the years since 1993, when he first sketched his idea for Nvidia in a Silicon Valley diner. And the audience were in awe of him because they regard him as a man who saw the future long before they did, and hoped to catch a glimpse of what might be coming next.

And in this they were not disappointed. What’s coming next is Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 chip, complete with its 208bn transistors, and the family of monster machines that it will enable, including a formidable supercomputer that fits into a rack and has almost two miles of copper cabling neatly intertwined in its innards. Cue wild applause.

Watching this spectacle, the thought that came to mind was this: how did a small company specialising in graphics cards for gamers come to be the third most valuable company on the planet? And how did it happen so quickly at the end? After all, Nvidia was only worth $278bn in October 2022 and is now worth $2.3 trillion, trailing only Apple and Microsoft.

In February, Nvidia reported record quarterly revenue of $22.1bn, up 22% from the previous quarter and up 265% from a year ago

It’s a good story, and no doubt someone is already working on the screenplay. But even a cursory account produces a picture of a company that from the beginning was good at anticipating the needs of a particularly demanding class of users – gamers – and eventually realised that in developing processors that could address their needs it had produced a new kind of computer: a graphics processing unit (GPU) that could perform many calculations in parallel, as opposed to conventional CPUs that did everything serially.

A pivotal moment came in 2013, when Huang decided that GPUs could be useful for an emerging technology called machine learning, and that henceforth the company would focus on that. It was a bold bet at the time, and initially Wall Street thought it foolish. But when machine learning really started to take off and desperately needed parallel processing machines to handle the associated heavy computation, Nvidia hit the jackpot. If you wanted to do this kind of AI then you needed Nvidia GPUs – lots of them. And, more importantly, you needed a way to enable them to work seamlessly together – a kind of operating system. A Stanford software genius named Ian Buck created one for Huang. They called it CUDA (for compute unified device architecture), and from then on buying Nvidia kit became a no-brainer for anyone aspiring to get into the AI business.

Which is how Huang found himself virtually the only trader with a supply of ready-made shovels in the biggest gold rush in tech history. In February his company reported record quarterly revenue of $22.1bn, up 22% from the previous quarter and up 265% from a year ago.

The Blackwell B200 chip is his latest super shovel. And in his keynote, Huang unveiled what can be done with it. He rolled out the DGX GB200 NVL72 (Nvidia doesn’t do human-friendly labelling), which is a powerful supercomputer with 72 Blackwell processors in a single water-cooled rack. I couldn’t find any information about pricing, but then I guess that if you have to ask you can’t afford it.

Google, can, though. So can Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Tesla, Amazon and Dell. From what their bosses say, they’ve already joined the queue for supplies. In this case, Huang has indeed seen the future. And it works for him. Whether it works for the rest of us, though, remains to be seen.

More here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/30/nvidia-jensen-huang-ai-gold-rush-computer-chip-maker

This really is an example of cometh the hour, cometh the man with just the chips you needed to support the AI revolution.

It is another of those 20 year ‘overnight successes’!

Enough said.

David.