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91

Drugs / Psychedelic Trips Defy Words—That’s the Key to Unlocking Higher Consciousness

« Last post by Chip on May 05, 2025, 11:58:52 AM »

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a64636206/altered-consciousness-psychedelic/?source=nl&utm_source=nl_pop&utm_medium=email&date=050425&utm_campaign=nl02_050425_POP39603700&oo=&user_email=1e7f7a9239bb44f191dc979b8fe5e634e587dfe020b84a653d2040468a8b342b&GID=1e7f7a9239bb44f191dc979b8fe5e634e587dfe020b84a653d2040468a8b342b&utm_term=TEST-%20NEW%20TEST%20-%20Sending%20List%20-%20AM%20180D%20Clicks%2C%20NON%20AM%2090D%20Opens%2C%20Both%20Subbed%20Last%2030D

Psychedelic Trips Defy Words—That’s the Key to Unlocking Higher Consciousness, Scientists Say

May 02, 2025 4:12 PM

Psychedelic Trips Defy Words—That’s the Key to Unlocking Higher Consciousness

UNDER the care of a traditional Peruvian healer, serial entrepreneur Mark Gogolewski took a powerful Amazonian psychedelic as part of his healing process from alcoholism. As the Ayahuasca ceremony deepened, Gogolewski felt himself pulled to the brink of death, but also felt an encouragement to just let go and jump, he says. But something caught him—and it was “infinite love,” he says. “Like, you can imagine anything you might want—the beautiful, loving light, the source, whatever word you use—we touch it. It’s not just ineffable. It’s everything. ... And I will never forget it, because it was beyond anything I could have ever imagined. I can’t give you exact words, but I remember the feeling of those words.”

Gogolewski’s struggle to put the experience into words touches on a larger mystery: why do so many people who undergo altered states of consciousness find themselves unable to explain what they felt? Studies are revealing that these states may be fundamentally outside the bounds of human language. Or perhaps language itself is a filter—a cage, even—that blocks us from grasping deeper truths.

Dr. Dave Rabin, Ph.D., a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies psychedelics and trauma, believes the disappearance of language in psychedelic states is not a glitch—it’s the point. “Psychedelic experiences—whether they’re accessed through medicine augmentation, deep meditation, breathwork, or other non–drug-induced methods—can result in states of extraordinarily high levels of presentness,” Rabin says.

In those moments, he explains, the mind shifts away from ego and the past and enters a mode of “just listening to what’s happening in the moment,” he says. “Our language center requires higher cortical levels of processing [parts of the brain involved in planning, memory, and conscious thought] that draw from our past knowledge and experience,” Rabin says. “So, when we find ourselves in states of extraordinary presentness—whether psychedelic drugs are involved or not—these states can leave us with an absence of words, or what we call ineffability.”

This beyond-words feeling doesn’t hit us because language is broken, Rabin suggests, but because it’s temporarily irrelevant. Describing an experience, especially in the peak psychedelic moment, actually removes us from the experience, because “we’re putting it through a filter in our minds to describe it, to attempt to define it.”

Yet, it’s through language that we’ve built laws, literature, religion, and reason itself. Human civilization depends on our ability to preserve and transmit knowledge through structured, symbolic communication. As philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Which, in a way, goes both ways. Language expands our reality—or quietly narrows it, too.

A 2024 study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science found that language doesn’t just express ideas; it encodes and spreads our attitudes across cultures and centuries, even the ones we don’t realize we have. Another 2024 paper, published on the preprint server arXiv and titled The Age of Spiritual Machines, offers striking evidence that reducing attention to language may itself induce altered states of consciousness, even in artificial intelligence (AI) models. When researchers dampened the language-processing functions of AI systems, the models began to resemble disembodied, ego-less, and unitive states—in short: the AIs tripped.

Michael Valdez, MD, a neurologist, addiction specialist, and medical director of Detox California, agrees that altered states reshape how language functions, but from a different angle. “Whether it is achieved through meditation, psychedelics, sleep deprivation, or trauma … language becomes less literal and more symbolic or metaphoric, as words become links to emotions that are felt rather than thought of.” He notes that during an altered state of consciousness, the experience of time, space, and reality can shift dramatically. So can the way people speak, leading to “fragmented and disjointed thoughts.” But in Valdez’s view, this is not linguistic failure—it’s a poetic reorientation.

In these moments, language stops being strictly logical and begins to resemble emotion in verbal form—metaphoric, symbolic, and affective, Valdez says. And while the words may sound jumbled on the surface, at their core they may open a path toward insight: “A new way of seeing, and perhaps, a new way of being,” Valdez says.

For Gogolewski, who wrote the book How to Be OK (When You’re Supposed to Be OK But You’re Not), the challenge of expression didn’t end with the February 2024 ayahuasca ceremony. For the last eight years, he has been studying Kabbalah and Buddhism, and he has found that words often fail in the face of symbols and metaphors rooted in ancient traditions. “The Buddhists would use these phrases that were impossible to understand purely with the mind. You’d have to wrestle with them before you could get an answer. Like, one I love right now is: ‘How you do one thing is how you do everything.’”

It could be Buddhism, Sufism in Islam, or Christian mysticism—“it doesn’t really matter,” Gogolewski says. What matters is the “spiritually rigorous vocabulary” that helps people in groups talk about things that might otherwise remain beyond “commoner” everyday language.

He has spent years trying to find better ways to describe what he experienced in that psychedelic ceremony—and still can’t. “I’m just going to spend the rest of my life trying to figure out better words,” Gogolewski says.



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92

Alcohol & Tobacco / Why Alcohol Hits Women Harder

« Last post by Chip on May 05, 2025, 10:46:02 AM »

"Why Alcohol Hits Women Harder"

 https://neurosciencenews.com/women-aud-neuroscience-28810/#:~:text=Why%20Alcohol%20Hits%20Women%20Harder

May 4, 2025

Summary:

Alcohol use among women has surged to match men’s rates, but women face far greater health risks even at lower consumption levels. A growing body of research is uncovering key neurobiological sex differences that influence why and how women drink, with stress being a more prominent motivator for women.

Scientists are now investigating brain circuits, neuroimmune responses, and hormonal influences to better understand these differences and to develop more tailored, effective treatments. This work is especially urgent, as alcohol-related deaths and health complications are rising faster in women, yet existing treatments have been largely designed and tested on men.

Key Facts:

● Biological Vulnerability: Women metabolize alcohol differently, leading to higher blood alcohol levels and greater health risks at lower doses.

● Brain Differences: Women’s brains show distinct neuroimmune responses and stress-driven pathways linked to alcohol use disorder.

● Tailored Treatments Needed: Current alcohol use disorder medications are based on male-focused research, underscoring the need for sex-specific therapeutics.

Alcohol use disorder is a chronic disease that used to disproportionately affect men. But for the first time in history, women are catching up.

Today, women in the United States are drinking and engaging in harmful alcohol use at rates on par with their male counterparts.

Historically, research on alcohol use disorder—characterized by an impaired ability to control alcohol use despite negative consequenses—has focused on men.

“Alcohol use disorder is incredibly heterogenous,” says Sherry McKee, PhD, professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) and director of the Yale program.

“Not every medication is going to work for every person. And one of the key pieces that’s been missing in our research is a focus on sex and gender.”

Alcohol use is a growing women’s health issue
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified a disturbing trend—between 2016 and 2021, rates of alcohol-related deaths increased by 35% in women (and 27% in men). Some researchers hypothesize that changes in social norms may be one of the drivers of increased drinking in women.

“Women are now earning more, delaying marriage, and delaying childbirth,” says McKee.

“It’s thought that this might create more time and space for drinking.”

And, even among those who are married and starting families, alcohol companies have increasingly focused their marketing on women. Terms like “mommy juice” have grown in popularity, and gendered alcoholic drinks such as “Mom Water” have appeared on shelves in liquor stores.

“We’ve seen that marketing toward moms has normalized ‘wine mom culture,’” says Kelly Cosgrove, PhD, professor of psychiatry, of neuroscience, and of radiology and biomedical imaging at YSM.

Research shows that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the rise in drinking. One 2020 study found that the number of days in which women reported heavy alcohol use—at least four drinks within a couple of hours—rose by 41%.

“It had to do with the amount of time that people were home and the stress that they were under,” explains Marina Picciotto, PhD, Charles B. G. Murphy Professor of Psychiatry at YSM.

The rise in alcohol use is especially concerning because women face greater drinking-related health risks at lower amounts of alcohol than men. “We refer to this as the risk-severity paradox,” says McKee.

Studies have found that women who drink are at a disproportionately greater risk for brain damage, cognitive deficits, various cancers such as breast cancer, cardiovascular issues, liver injury, and immune system dysfunction.

Drinking is also associated with greater risk of mental health issues and suicide, physical and sexual assault, and pregnancy- and perinatal-related complications. Furthermore, alcohol can cause hormonal imbalances and menstrual irregularities.

The number of alcohol-related deaths is not only rising faster among women, but also driven by lesser amounts of alcohol. Men need to drink at least 3.2 drinks per day to be at increased risk of premature death, whereas women only need to consume 1.8.

“Not even two drinks a day is putting a woman at significantly increased risk,” says McKee.

These disparities are reflected in the health care system. Emergency room visits related to alcohol use increased by 70% in women versus 58% in men between 2006 and 2014, and hospitalizations rose by 69% in women (compared to 43% in men) between 2000 and 2015.

Why does alcohol disproportionately impact women?

Women experience greater health risks from drinking, in part, because they metabolize alcohol differently than men.

Alcohol is not lipid-soluble. In other words, when we consume alcohol, it does not enter fat tissue—it only disperses into tissue that contains water.

Women tend to have a lower percentage of body water and more fat tissue than men. Thus, they have less fluid to dilute the alcohol, leading to a higher blood alcohol concentration (BAC).

Furthermore, the primary enzyme involved in the metabolism of alcohol—alcohol dehydrogenase—is as much as 40% less active in women.

As result, when a woman and a man of the same age and weight drink the same amount at the same rate, the woman will experience a greater BAC.

“Let’s say they’re both 150 pounds and 48 years old, and they consume three drinks in two hours,” McKee says.

“The man will be significantly under the legal drinking limit for driving, and the woman will be over the legal drinking limit—just because of this difference in how alcohol is metabolized.”

Current alcohol use disorder treatments don’t address underlying sex differences
As alcohol-related harms continue to grow among women, they are also less likely to seek treatment than men. McKee believes that societal stigma surrounding alcohol consumption is the primary reason for this reluctance.

But another obstacle is that medical providers do not consider the sex-related differences when diagnosing and treating alcohol use disorder.

Women, for example, make up only about 13% of participants studied in research on withdrawal, according to a review in Frontiers in Psychiatry.

Medication trials for treating alcohol use disorder have also historically been conducted primarily on male cohorts. Only 1% of study participants involved in research on disulfiram—which, in 1948, became the first of the three FDA-approved medications for alcohol abuse —were women.

Studies show that naltrexone, another FDA-approved medication, is more likely to have side effects in women such as nausea and sleep disturbances—making them less likely to stick with the treatment. Research has not revealed any sex differences related to acamprosate, the third FDA-approved medication.

The Yale Program on Sex Differences in Alcohol Disorder is investigating key differences between the underlying mechanisms of alcohol addiction in women compared to men. One of its missions is to create more effective therapeutics tailored to women.

Emerging research, for example, shows that drivers of alcohol use differ between sexes.

While men are more likely to drink to experience the positive aspects of alcohol, such as feelings of pleasure and connecting socially with others, women are more likely to drink to help manage stress.

“So, we’re developing medications that target stress pathophysiology,” says McKee.

This may be explained by key sex differences in the brain that emerge during adolescence, particularly differences in the interactions of three key neural systems—the prefrontal cortex, striatum, and amygdala.

1. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive functions such as impulse control and decision-making.

2. The striatum drives pleasure-seeking behaviors and processes rewards, and becomes activated when individuals engage in risk-taking scenarios.

3. The amygdala is associated with our emotional responses, especially those related to fear.

Brain imaging studies have shown that men have greater activation in the striatum, which makes them more likely to engage in risky behaviors.

* The prefrontal cortex of women, on the other hand, develops earlier than in men—acting as a brake on impulsivity.

However, women also show greater reactivity of the amygdala, which makes them more susceptible to anxiety or other mood disorders.

This may explain why women, unlike men, do not seek alcohol for the thrill of drinking, but rather to cope with negative emotions, McKee says.

These findings may also explain why women who suffered major stressors in early childhood, such as abuse or neglect, might be especially vulnerable to developing alcohol use disorder.

“The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are key brain regions that interact with the experience of childhood adversity, childhood trauma, and stress,” says McKee.

“Our working hypothesis is that these experiences will lead to the internalization of disorders such as anxiety and depression, which then lead to alcohol use. A lot of data suggest that this is a common pathway for alcohol use disorder in women.”

A closer look at sex differences in the female brain
Yale School of Medicine researchers are now diving even deeper into understanding how differences in the brain may be uniquely driving alcohol use disorder in women. Cosgrove, for instance, is focused on the neuroimmune system.

“Most of us are familiar with the peripheral immune system—it keeps us healthy,” she says.

“But the brain has its own immune system, and we’ve been focused on that because it’s responsible for healthy brain function. It’s at the root of everything.”

Cosgrove’s team is using a radiotracer—a radioactive substance used in medical imaging—that binds to an important type of immune cell in the brain called microglia.

Microglia play a crucial role in maintaining brain health, and their dysfunction is associated with a range of neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis.

Using positron emission tomography scans, the researchers are investigating whether there are differences between the microglia of men and women with alcohol use disorder.

They are finding that women with alcohol use disorder have a greater deficit of microglia than their male counterparts.

The findings, Cosgrove says, are not surprising. The fact that women are more likely than men to suffer from autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis points to differences underlying female immune processes.

“Women have different immune systems inherently,” she says.

Because immune dysfunction and inflammation are intertwined, when part of the neuroimmune system malfunctions, it can lead to increased or chronic inflammation.

Cosgrove’s research into neuroimmune sex differences could help explain why women are prone to alcohol-related harms such as alcohol-related liver disease.

“These sex differences are likely driven by differences in inflammation,” says Cosgrove.

“And we can think of different medications and treatments to target and treat this inflammation.”

Cosgrove’s team is also working to identify other differences in the neuroimmune system that might be easier to therapeutically target.

“The target we have now, TSPO [a protein expressed by microglia], isn’t an easy target to make a medication for,” she says.

“But there are likely other targets that could give us new ideas for medication development.”

Meanwhile, Picciotto is testing hypotheses raised by studies like Cosgrove’s in mice. By feeding a blocker of microglia to female mice, for example, her team is studying how this alters their likelihood to choose alcohol over water when under stress.

So far, they have found that reducing microglia by half does not significantly impact stress-induced alcohol consumption.

In future studies, they plan to investigate whether a greater deficit of microglia will impact mice behavior.

Her team has shown, however, that reducing inflammation does alter alcohol-seeking behaviors.

The researchers blocked signaling pathways known to promote inflammatory responses using a drug called apremilast. In humans, this drug treats conditions such as psoriatic arthritis and plaque psoriasis by reducing inflammation.

They found that the drug reduced the likelihood of mice choosing alcohol over water.

In future studies, Picciotto hopes to identify specific subtypes of inflammatory responses that are important in the context of alcohol use disorder.

“We’re interested in whether different circuits are engaged in response to stress-induced alcohol drinking in male and female mice,” she says.

“And we’re going to continue to look at the consequences of these inflammatory responses on neural signaling.”

Envisioning a future of personalized therapies:

This January, former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a report communicating to the public for the first time that alcohol is a significant cause of cancer—further highlighting the urgent need for effective therapies for alcohol use disorder.

The ongoing research at the Yale Program on Sex Differences in Alcohol Disorder is paving the way for a new era of more personalized therapeutics for women.

“We’re just at the beginning of really understanding what it is about the brain and body that differs between men and women who drink,” says Picciotto.

McKee hopes her program will help contribute to a healthier society overall. “Our goal is to improve the health of everyone,” she says. “We really need to be focused on a personalized medicine perspective—particularly in regard to addiction and alcohol.”

Women can develop alcohol use disorder no matter what stage of life they’re in. And there is no shame in seeking support, the researchers say.

“We think about adolescents as being particularly susceptible to problematic drinking—and they certainly are—but women can be at-risk of developing problematic drinking patterns across their lifespan,” says Picciotto. Research shows that alcohol use, for instance, is also on the rise among women ages 60 and older.

“Stressful life events may increase a woman’s alcohol intake in ways that are surprising to them, and there are options for them to get help if they need to decrease their drinking during stressful times.”

For resources on finding quality, evidence-based care, women can visit the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Alcohol Treatment Navigator.

The Yale Program on Sex Differences in Alcohol Disorder is also enrolling for medication trials.



So far, they have found that reducing microglia by half does not significantly impact stress-induced alcohol consumption. In future studies, they plan to investigate whether a greater deficit of microglia will impact mice behavior. Credit: Neuroscience News

93

Deep Learning / AI is just as overconfident and biased as humans can be, study shows

« Last post by smfadmin on May 05, 2025, 09:13:27 AM »

https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-is-just-as-overconfident-and-biased-as-humans-can-be-study-shows

AI is just as overconfident and biased as humans can be, study shows

May 4, 2025


RgmiboScVHY3qs2MEqVeQA-970-80.png.webp (23.33 kB . 970x546 - viewed 227 times)
(Image credit: SEAN GLADWELL/Getty Images)

Irrational tendencies — including the hot hand, base-rate neglect and sunk cost fallacy — commonly show up in AI systems, calling into question how useful they actually are.

Although humans and artificial intelligence (AI) systems "think" very differently, new research has revealed that AIs sometimes make decisions as irrationally as we do.

In almost half of the scenarios examined in a new study, ChatGPT exhibited many of the most common human decision-making biases. Published April 8. in the journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, the findings are the first to evaluate ChatGPT's behavior across 18 well-known cognitive biases found in human psychology.

The paper's authors, from five academic institutions across Canada and Australia, tested OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 — the two large language models (LLMs) powering ChatGPT — and discovered that despite being "impressively consistent" in their reasoning, they're far from immune to human-like flaws.

What's more, such consistency itself has both positive and negative effects, the authors said.

"Managers will benefit most by using these tools for problems that have a clear, formulaic solution," study lead-author Yang Chen, assistant professor of operations management at the Ivey Business School, said in a statement. "But if you’re using them for subjective or preference-driven decisions, tread carefully."

The study took commonly known human biases, including risk aversion, overconfidence and the endowment effect (where we assign more value to things we own) and applied them to prompts given to ChatGPT to see if it would fall into the same traps as humans.

Rational decisions — sometimes:

The scientists asked the LLMs hypothetical questions taken from traditional psychology, and in the context of real-world commercial applicability, in areas like inventory management or supplier negotiations. The aim was to see not just whether AI would mimic human biases but whether it would still do so when asked questions from different business domains.

GPT-4 outperformed GPT-3.5 when answering problems with clear mathematical solutions, showing fewer mistakes in probability and logic-based scenarios. But in subjective simulations, such as whether to choose a risky option to realize a gain, the chatbot often mirrored the irrational preferences humans tend to show.

"GPT-4 shows a stronger preference for certainty than even humans do," the researchers wrote in the paper, referring to the tendency for AI to tend towards safer and more predictable outcomes when given ambiguous tasks.

More importantly, the chatbots' behaviors remained mostly stable whether the questions were framed as abstract psychological problems or operational business processes. The study concluded that the biases shown weren't just a product of memorized examples — but part of how AI reasons.

One of the surprising outcomes of the study was the way GPT-4 sometimes amplified human-like errors. "In the confirmation bias task, GPT-4 always gave biased responses," the authors wrote in the study. It also showed a more pronounced tendency for the hot-hand fallacy (the bias to expect patterns in randomness) than GPT 3.5.

Conversely, ChatGPT did manage to avoid some common human biases, including base-rate neglect (where we ignore statistical facts in favor of anecdotal or case-specific information) and the sunk-cost fallacy (where decision making is influenced by a cost that has already been sustained, allowing irrelevant information to cloud judgment).

According to the authors, ChatGPT’s human-like biases come from training data that contains the cognitive biases and heuristics humans exhibit. Those tendencies are reinforced during fine-tuning, especially when human feedback further favors plausible responses over rational ones. When they come up against more ambiguous tasks, AI skews towards human reasoning patterns more so than direct logic.

"If you want accurate, unbiased decision support, use GPT in areas where you'd already trust a calculator," Chen said. When the outcome depends more on subjective or strategic inputs, however, human oversight is more important, even if it's adjusting the user prompts to correct known biases.

"AI should be treated like an employee who makes important decisions — it needs oversight and ethical guidelines," co-author Meena Andiappan, an associate professor of human resources and management at McMaster University, Canada, said in the statement.

"Otherwise, we risk automating flawed thinking instead of improving it."

94

Energy / Grid-Scale Battery Storage Is Quietly Revolutionizing the Energy System

« Last post by smfadmin on May 05, 2025, 08:58:12 AM »

https://www.wired.com/story/grid-scale-battery-storage-is-quietly-revolutionizing-the-energy-system/?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=wired&utm_mailing=WIR_Backchannel_050125&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_content=WIR_Backchannel_050125&bxid=67883001cdeb6340250c3d97&cndid=85787720&hasha=c9edd795ab58c731e64cc2832451a46d&hashb=92cd5a4e4f9a554757364e6cc6a52d8ff33f14ec&hashc=1e7f7a9239bb44f191dc979b8fe5e634e587dfe020b84a653d2040468a8b342b&esrc=bx_multi2nd_science&utm_term=WIR_Backchannel

Grid-Scale Battery Storage Is Quietly Revolutionizing the Energy System

Apr 26, 2025

This energy storage technology is harnessing the potential of solar and wind power—and its deployment is growing exponentially.

The tricky thing about generating electricity is that for the most part, you pretty much have to use it or lose it.

This fundamental fact has governed and constrained the development of the world’s largest machine: the $2 trillion US power grid. Massive generators send electrons along a continent-wide network of conductors, transformers, cables, and wires into millions of homes and businesses, delicately balancing supply and demand so that every light switch, computer, television, stove, and charging cable will turn on 99.95 percent of the time.

Making sure there are always enough generators spooled up to send electricity to every single power outlet in the country requires precise coordination. And while the amount of electricity actually used can swing drastically throughout the day and year, the grid is built to meet the brief periods of peak demand, like the hot summer days when air conditioning use can double average electricity consumption. Imagine building a 30-lane highway to make sure no driver ever has to tap their brakes. That’s effectively what those who design and run the grid have had to do.

But what if you could just hold onto electricity for a bit and save it for later? You wouldn’t have to overbuild the grid or spend so much effort keeping power generation in equilibrium with users. You could smooth over the drawbacks of intermittent power sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide, like wind and solar. You could have easy local backup power in emergencies when transmission lines are damaged. You may not even need a giant, centralized power grid at all.

That’s the promise of grid-scale energy storage. And while the US has actually been using a crude form of energy storage called pumped hydroelectric power storage for decades, the country is now experiencing a gargantuan surge in energy storage capacity, this time from a technology that most of us are carrying around in our pockets: lithium-ion batteries. Between 2021 and 2024, grid battery capacity increased fivefold. In 2024, the US installed 12.3 gigawatts of energy storage. This year, new grid battery installations are on track to almost double compared to last year. Battery storage capacity now exceeds pumped hydro capacity, totaling more than 26 gigawatts.

There’s still plenty of room to expand—and a pressing need to do so. The power sector remains the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and there will be no way to add enough intermittent clean energy to sufficiently decarbonize the grid without cheap and plentiful storage.

The aging US grid is also in dire need of upgrades, and batteries can cushion the shock of adding gigawatts of wind and solar while buying some time to perform more extensive renovations. Some power markets are finally starting to understand all the services batteries can provide—frequency regulation, peak shaving, demand response—creating new lines of business. Batteries are also a key tool in building smaller, localized versions of the power grid. These microgrids can power remote communities with reliable power and one day shift the entire power grid into a more decentralized system that can better withstand disruptions like extreme weather.

If we can get it right, true grid-scale battery storage won’t just be an enabler of clean energy, but a way to upgrade the power system for a new era.

How Big Batteries Got so Big:

Back in 2011, one of my first reporting assignments was heading to a wind farm in West Virginia to attend the inauguration of what was at the time the world’s largest battery energy storage system. Built by AES Energy Storage, it involved thousands of lithium-ion cells in storage containers that together combined to provide 32 megawatts of power and deliver it for about 15 minutes.

“It was eight megawatt-hours total,” said John Zahurancik, who was vice president of AES Energy Storage at the time and showed me around the facility back then. That was about the amount of electricity used by 260 homes in a day.

In the years since, battery storage has increased by orders of magnitude, as Zahurancik’s new job demonstrates. He is now the president of Fluence, a joint venture between AES and Siemens that has deployed 38 gigawatt-hours of storage to date around the world. “The things that we’re building today, many of our projects are over a gigawatt-hour in size,” Zahurancik said.

Last year, the largest storage facility to come online in the US was California’s Edwards & Sanborn Project, which can hold 3.3 gigawatt-hours. That’s roughly equivalent to the electricity needed to power 110,000 homes for a day.

It wasn’t a steady climb to this point, however. Overall grid battery capacity in the US barely budged for more than a decade. Then, around 2020, it began to spike upward. What changed?

One shift is that the most common battery storage technology, lithium-ion cells, saw huge price drops and energy density increases. “The very first project we did was in 2008 and it was on the order of $3,000 a kilowatt-hour for the price of the batteries,” said Zahurancik. “Now we’re looking at systems that are on the order of $150, $200 a kilowatt-hour for the full system install.”

That’s partly because the cells on the power grid aren’t that different from those in mobile devices and electric vehicles, so grid batteries have benefited from manufacturing improvements that went into those products.

“It’s all one big pipeline,” said Micah Ziegler, a professor at Georgia Tech who studies clean energy technologies. “The batteries in phones, cars, and the grid all share common characteristics.” Seeing this rising demand, China went big on battery manufacturing and, much as it did in solar panels, created economies of scale to drive global prices down. China now produces 80 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries.

The blooming of wind and solar energy created even more demand for batteries and increased the pressure to improve them. The wind and the sun are often the cheapest sources of new electricity, and batteries help compensate for their variability, providing even more reason to scale up storage. “The benefits of this relationship are apparent in the increasing number of power plants that are being proposed and that have already been deployed that combine these resources,” Ziegler said. The combination of solar plus storage accounted for 84 percent of new US power added in 2024.

And because grid batteries don’t have to be small enough to be mobile—unlike the batteries in your laptop or phone—they can take advantage of cheaper, less dense batteries that otherwise might not be suited for something that has to fit in your pocket. There’s even talk of giving old EV batteries a second life on the power grid.

Regulation has also helped. A major hurdle for deploying grid energy storage systems is that they don’t generate electricity on their own, so the rules for how they should connect to the grid and how much battery developers should get paid for their services were messy and restrictive in the past. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order 841 removed some of the barriers for energy storage systems to plug into wholesale markets and compete with other forms of power. Though the regulation was issued in 2018, it cleared a major legal challenge in 2020, paving the way for more batteries to plug into the grid.

Eleven states to date including California, Illinois, and Maryland have also set specific procurement targets for energy storage, which require utilities to install a certain amount of storage capacity, creating a push for more grid batteries. Together, these factors created a whole new businesses for power companies, spawned new grid battery companies, and fertilized the ground for a bumper crop of energy storage.

What Can Energy Storage Do for You?

Energy storage is the peanut butter to the chocolate of renewable energy, making all the best traits about clean energy even better and balancing out some of its downsides. But it’s also an important ingredient in grid stability, reliability, and resilience, helping ensure a steady flow of megawatts during blackouts and extreme weather.

The most common use is frequency response. The alternating current going through power lines in the US cycles at a frequency of 60 hertz. If the grid dips below this frequency when a power-hungry user switches on, it can trip circuit breakers and cause power instability. Since batteries have nearly zero startup time, unlike thermal generators, they can quickly absorb or transmit power as needed to keep the grid humming the right tune.

Grid batteries can also step in as reserve power when a generator goes offline or when a large power user unexpectedly turns on. They can smooth out the hills and valleys of power load over the course of the day. They also let power providers save electricity when it’s cheap to produce, and sell it back on the grid at times when demand is high and power is expensive. It’s often faster to build a battery facility than an equivalent power plant, and since there are no smokestacks, it’s easier to get permits and approvals.

Batteries have already proven useful for overstressed power networks. As temperatures reached triple digits in Texas last year, batteries provided a record amount of power on the Lone Star State’s grid. ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, didn’t have to ask Texans to turn down their power use like it did in 2023. Between 2020 and 2024, Texas saw a 4,100 percent increase in utility-scale batteries, topping 5.7 gigawatts.


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Jupiter Power battery storage complex in Houston in 2024. Photograph: Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

Grid batteries have a halo effect for other power generators too. Most thermal power plants—coal, gas, nuclear—prefer to run at a steady pace. Ramping up and down to match demand takes time and costs money, but with batteries soaking up some of the variability, thermal power plants can stay closer to their most efficient pace, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and keeping costs in check.

“It’s kind of like hybridizing your car,” Zahurancik said. “If you think about a Prius, you have an electric motor and you have a gasoline motor and you make the gas consumption better because the battery absorbs all the variation.”

Another grid battery feature is that they can reduce the need for expensive grid upgrades, said Stephanie Smith, chief operating officer at Eolian, which funds and develops grid energy storage systems. You don’t have to build power lines to accommodate absolute maximum electricity needs if you have a battery—on the generator side or on the demand side—to dish out a few more electrons when needed.

“What we do with stand-alone batteries, the more and more of those you get, you start to alleviate needs or at least abridge things like new transmission build,” Smith said. These batteries also allow the grid to adapt faster to changing energy needs, like when a factory shuts down or when a new data center powers up.

On balance this leads to a more stable, efficient, cheaper, and cleaner power grid.

Charging Up:

As good as they are, lithium-ion batteries have their limits. Most grid batteries are designed to store and dispatch electricity over the course of two to eight hours, but the grid also needs ways to stash power for days, weeks, and even months since power demand shifts throughout the year.

There are also some fundamental looming challenges for grid-scale storage. Like most grid-level technologies, energy storage requires a big upfront investment that takes decades to pay back, but there’s a lot of uncertainty right now about how the Trump administration’s tariffs will affect battery imports, whether there will be a recession, and if this disruption will slow electricity demand growth in the years to come. The extraordinary appetite for batteries is increasing competition for the required raw materials, which may increase their prices.

Though China currently dominates the global battery supply chain, the US is working to edge its way in. Under the previous administration, the US Department of Energy invested billions in energy storage factories, supply chains, and research. There are dozens of battery factories in the US now, though most are aimed at electric vehicles. There are 10 US factories slated to start up this year, which would raise the total EV battery manufacturing capacity to 421.5 gigawatt-hours per year. Total global battery manufacturing is projected to reach around 7,900 gigawatt-hours in 2025.


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Lithium battery modules inside the battery building at the Vistra Corp. Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in Moss Landing, California, in 2021. Photograph: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

There’s also a long and growing line of projects waiting to connect to the power grid. Interconnection queues for all energy systems, but particularly solar, wind, and batteries, typically last three years or more as project developers produce reliability studies and cope with mounting regulatory paperwork delays.

The Trump administration is also working to undo incentives around clean energy, particularly the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The law established robust incentives for clean energy, including tax credits for stand-alone grid energy projects. “I do worry about the IRA because it will change the curve, and quite honestly we cannot afford to change the curve right now with any form of clean energy,” Smith said. On the other hand, Trump’s tariffs may eventually spur even more battery manufacturing within the US.

Still, utility-scale energy storage is a tiny slice of the sprawling US power grid, and there’s enormous room to expand. “Even though we’ve been accelerating and going fast, by and large, we don’t have that much of it,” Zahurancik said. “You could easily see storage becoming 20 or 30 percent of the installed power capacity.”



Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Power transmission towers outside the Crimson Battery Energy Storage Project in Blythe, California. Photograph: Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s biggest solar and battery storage plant, the Eland Solar and Storage Center in the Mojave Desert. Photograph: Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Battery solar energy storage units, right, at the Eland Solar and Storage Center in 2024. Phtogoraph: Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

95

General Discussion for Everybody / Prior to "getting on" as seen by AInAE

« Last post by smfadmin on May 04, 2025, 08:43:36 AM »

~

96

Phenethylamines / A Legal Buzz (best alternative to "hard" as determined by Chipper)

« Last post by Chip on May 03, 2025, 01:10:44 PM »

-> https://github.com/aegersz/Legal-buzz/blob/main

If you don't have a GitHub account then make one and follow me -- there is a Private section and if you want access then i'll make you a collaborator

97

Neuroscience / The Computational Limit of Life May Be So Much Higher Than We Thought

« Last post by smfadmin on May 03, 2025, 11:29:56 AM »

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a64612958/computation-limit-biology/?source=nl&utm_source=nl_pop&utm_medium=email&date=050225&utm_campaign=nl01_050225_HBU39603697&oo=&user_email=1e7f7a9239bb44f191dc979b8fe5e634e587dfe020b84a653d2040468a8b342b&GID=1e7f7a9239bb44f191dc979b8fe5e634e587dfe020b84a653d2040468a8b342b&utm_term=TEST-%20NEW%20TEST%20-%20Sending%20List%20-%20AM%20180D%20Clicks%2C%20NON%20AM%2090D%20Opens%2C%20Both%20Subbed%20Last%2030D

The Computational Limit of Life May Be So Much Higher Than We Thought, Scientists Say

May 02, 2025 9:30 AM

... and it’s all thanks to quantum mechanics

● A new paper written by a theoretical physicist at Howard University claims that aneural eukaryotic cells could process information up to a billion times faster than typical biochemical processes.

● This idea forms from the emerging evidence that biology and quantum mechanics may not be as mutually exclusive as scientists originally thought.

● Although this idea requires rigorous experimentation to be proven, it might show that biological computation is much more powerful that even the greatest quantum computers.

What is the computational limit of biology? According to some technologists, the human brain is capable of 1016 computations per second, and if a super-advanced AI were to ever that threshold (and gain a whole host of other abilities), we’d enter hit what is known in tech circles as the singularity.

However, a new article written by theoretical physicist Philip Kurian argues that this limit—and all other neuron-based estimations of life’s computational abilities—have woefully underestimated the true abilities of biological brains.

Kurian includes a controversial (but increasingly influential) idea in his calculations: that quantum processes in a biological system, when taken together, far exceed the computing power of even the most advanced quantum computer.

Published in the journal Science Advances, this article expands on QBL’s recent discovery of cytoskeleton filaments exhibiting quantum optical features and recalculates the computational capacity of carbon-based life on Earth.

“This work connects the dots among the great pillars of twentieth century physics—thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum mechanics—for a major paradigm shift across the biological sciences, investigating the feasibility and implications of quantum information processing in wetware at ambient temperatures,” Kurian said in a press statement (“wetware” is a term for organic material in the human body analogous to hardware in a computer).

* “Physicists and cosmologists should wrestle with these findings, especially as they consider the origins of life on Earth and elsewhere in the habitable universe, evolving in concert with the electromagnetic field.”

Related Story


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Turning a Quantum Computer into a Time Crystal

Biology and quantum mechanics typically don’t mix, and for good reason. Artificial quantum systems generally require ultracold, approaching-absolute-zero temperatures to run, as qubits are incredibly sensitive to disturbances (this is why quantum computers also contain robust error correction measures). So, the warm and chaotic environment of, say, a human brain, is far from ideal for quantum processes.

However, for decades, some theories (that have slowly become less out there with age) have suggested that quantum processes could in fact be occurring in the brain. In some hypotheses, they could even be responsible for consciousness itself. Kurian’s paper focuses on the amino acid tryptophan, which is found in many proteins and can form large networks within structures like microtubules, amyloid fibrils, cilia, and neurons. Combined with QBL’s discovery last year, an idea has taken shape that aneural organisms may be able to use these quantum signals to process information.



ai head
Andriy Onufriyenko//Getty Images

98

Deep Learning / I scammed my bank

« Last post by smfadmin on May 03, 2025, 10:59:53 AM »

https://www.businessinsider.com/bank-account-scam-deepfakes-ai-voice-generator-crime-fraud-2025-5?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=News%20Alert%20-%20bank-account-scam-deepfakes-ai-voice-generator-crime-fraud-2025-5&insiderId=a2c855c8-d312-49ca-a91a-71f178a9261c

May 2, 2025

All it took was an AI voice generator and a phone call

I may be a tech reporter, but I am not tech savvy. Something breaks, I turn it off and back on, and then I give up. But even I was able to deepfake my own bank with relative ease.

Generative AI has made it way easier to impersonate people's voices. For years, there have been deepfakes of politicians, celebrities, and the late pope made to sow disinformation on social media.

Lately, hackers have been able to deepfake people like you and me. All they need is a few seconds of your voice, which they might find in video posts on Instagram or TikTok, and maybe some information like your phone or debit card number, which they might be able to find in data leaks on the dark web.

In my case — for the purposes of this story — I downloaded the audio of a radio interview I sat for a few weeks ago, trained a voice generator on it after subscribing to a service for a few dollars, and then used a text-to-voice function to chat with my bank in a voice that sounded a bit robotic but eerily similar to my own. Over the course of a five-minute call, first with the automated system and then a human representative, my deepfake seemingly triggered little to no suspicion.


It's a tactic scammers are increasingly adopting. They take advantage of cheap, widely available generative-AI tools to deepfake people and gain access to their bank accounts, or even open accounts in someone else's name. These deepfakes are not only getting easier to make but also getting harder to detect. Last year, a financial worker in Hong Kong mistakenly paid out $25 million to scammers after they deepfaked the company's chief financial officer and other staff members in a video call.

That's one major oopsie, but huge paydays aren't necessarily the goal. The tech allows criminal organizations to imitate people at scale, automating deepfake voice calls they use to scam smaller amounts from tons of people. A report from Deloitte predicts that fraud losses in the US could reach $40 billion by 2027 as generative AI bolsters fraudsters, which would be a jump from $12.3 billion in 2023. In a recent Accenture survey of 600 cybersecurity executives at banks, 80% of respondents said they believed gen AI was ramping up hackers' abilities faster than banks could respond.

These scammers can take gen-AI tools and target accounts at a massive scale. "They're the best engineers, the best product managers, the best researchers," says Ben Colman, the CEO of Reality Defender, a company that makes software for governments, financial institutions, and other businesses to detect the likelihood that content was generated by AI in real time. "If they can automate fraud, they will use every single tool." In addition to stealing your voice or image, they can use gen AI to falsify documents, either to steal an identity or make an entirely new, fake one to open accounts for funneling money.

Related stories:

In a recent Accenture survey of 600 cybersecurity executives at banks, 80% of respondents said they believed gen AI was ramping up hackers' abilities faster than banks could respond.

The scammers are playing a numbers game. Even when a financial institution blocks them, they can try another account or another service. By automating the attempts, "the attackers don't have to be right very often to do well," Colman says.

They don't care about going after only the richest people; scamming lots of people out of small amounts of money can be even more lucrative over time.

According to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, the average online scam in 2024 came out to just under $20,000 across more than 250,000 complaints the FBI received from people of all ages (those over 60 filed the most complaints and saw the biggest losses, but even people under 20 lost a combined $22.5 million).

"Everybody is equally a target," he says.

Colman says some banks have tried to get ahead of the deepfake problem in the past few years, while others didn't see it as a pressing issue.

Now, more and more are using software to protect their clients. A 2024 survey of business executives (who worked across industries, not just in banking) found that more than 10% had faced an attempted or successful deepfake fraud.

More than half said that their employees had not been trained to identify or address such attacks.

I reached out to several of the largest banks in the US, asking them what they're doing to detect and shut down deepfake fraud. Several did not respond.

Citi (my old workplace, and a damn good one, says Chip) declined to share any details of its fraud detection methods and technology.

Darius Kingsley, the head of consumer banking practices at JPMorgan Chase, told me the bank sees "the challenges posed by rapidly evolving technologies that can be exploited by bad actors" and is "committed to staying ahead by continuously advancing our security protocols and investing in cutting-edge solutions to protect our customers."

Spotting deepfakes is tricky work. Even OpenAI discontinued its AI-writing detector shortly after launching it in 2023, reasoning that its accuracy was too low to even reliably detect whether something was generated by its own ChatGPT.

Image, video, and audio generation have all been rapidly improving over the past two years as tools become more sophisticated: If you remember how horrifying and unrealistic AI Will Smith eating spaghetti looked just two years ago, you'll be shocked to see what OpenAI's text-to-video generator, Sora, can do now.

■ Generative AI has gotten leaps and bounds better at covering its tracks, which is great news for scammers.

On my deepfake's call with my bank, I had fake me read off information like my debit card number and the last four digits of my Social Security number.

Obviously, this was info I had on hand, but it's disturbingly easy these days for criminals to buy this kind of personal data on the dark web, as it may have been involved in a data leak. I generated friendly phrases that asked my bank to update my email address, please, or change my PIN.

Fake me repeatedly begged the automated system to connect me to a representative, and then gave a cheery, "I'm doing well today, how are you?" greeting to the person on the other line. I had deepfake me ask for more time to dig up confirmation codes sent to my phone and then thank the representative for their help.

Authorities are starting to sound the alarm on how easy and widespread deepfakes are becoming.

In November, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network put out an alert to financial institutions about gen AI, deepfakes, and the risk of identity fraud. Speaking at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in April, Michael Barr, a governor of the Federal Reserve, said that the tech "has the potential to supercharge identity fraud" and that deepfake attacks had increased twentyfold in the past three years.

Barr said that we'll need new policies that raise the cost for the attacker and lower the burden on banks. Right now, it's relatively low risk and low cost for scammer organizations to carry out a massive number of attacks, and impossible for banks to catch each and every one.

It's not just banks getting odd calls; scammers will also use deepfakes to call up people and impersonate someone they know or a service they use.

There are steps we can take if suspicious requests come our way. "These scams are a new flavor of an old-school method that relies on unexpected contact and a false sense of urgency to trick people into parting with their money," Ashwin Raghu, the head of scam policy and innovation at Citi, tells me in an email.

Raghu says people should be suspicious of urgent requests and unexpected calls — even if they're coming from someone who sounds like a friend or family member. Try to take time to verify the caller or contact the person in a different way.

If the call seems to be from your bank, you may want to hang up and call the bank back using the phone number on your card to confirm it.

Related stories:

For all the data on you that scammers can dig up using AI, there will be things that only two people can ever know. This past summer, an executive at Ferrari was able to catch a scammer deepfaking the company CEO's voice when he asked the caller what book he had recommended just days earlier.

Limiting what you share on social media and to whom is one way to crack down on the likelihood you'll become a target, as are tools like two-factor authentication and password managers that store complex and varied passwords. But there's no foolproof way to avoid becoming a target of the scams.

Barr's policy ideas included creating more consistency in cybercrime laws internationally and more coordination among law enforcement agencies, which would make it more difficult for criminal rings to operate undetected. He also called for increasing penalties on those who attempt to use generative AI for fraud. But those won't be the quickest of fixes to keep up with how rapidly the tech has changed.

Even though this tech is readily available, sometimes in free apps and sometimes for purchases of just a few dollars, the problem is less a proliferation of lone wolf hackers, says Jason Ioannides, the vice president of global fintech and sponsor banking at Alloy, a fraud prevention platform. These are often carried out by big, organized crime rings that are able to move in large numbers and are bolstered by automation to carry out thousands of attacks.

If they try 1,000 times to get through and make it once, they'll then focus their efforts on chipping away at that same institution, until the bank notices a trend and comes up with fixes to stop it. "They look for a weakness, and then they attack it," Ioannides says. He says banks should "stay nimble" and have "layered approaches" to detect quickly evolving fraud. "You're never going to stop 100% of fraud," he says. And banks generally won't be perfect, but their defense lies in making themselves "less attractive to a bad actor" than other institutions.

Ultimately, I wasn't able to totally hack my bank. I tried to change my debit card PIN and my email address during the phone calls, but I was told I had to do the first at an ATM and the second online. I was able to hear my account balance, and with a bit more prep and expertise, I may have been able to move some money.

Each bank has different systems and rules in place, and some might allow people to change personal information, like emails, over the phone, which could give a scammer much easier access to the account.

Whether my bank caught on to my use of a generated voice, I'm not sure, but I do sleep a little bit better knowing there are some protections in place.

The rest is behind a paywall but you get the idea ... be careful that someone impersonating your bank doesn't call *you*; always ring them with their gazetted telephone number and ask to speak with their manager, at least you improve your odds and quadruple check any large money transfers, starting with a dollar and then ring another number associated with the bank to confirm that it went through and get a receipt for it (Chip) !

99

General Discussion for Everybody / [Quora and Chip] What is the easiest way to stay healthy for a long time?

« Last post by smfadmin on May 03, 2025, 10:48:45 AM »

Some 6 vital pillars to robust health
___________________________________


1. Brush your teeth before going to bed. Toothache is the worst type of pain one can have because It won't let you sleep.only those people who ever had any dental issues can understand how bitter it feels like.

2. Just like how everyday we need to charge our phones, in the very similar way body also needs fuel to run itself and the fuel for body are good food and good sleep.

3. Talk to people, we are social animals with social needs and responsbilities. A healthy individual is the one who is mentally, physically as well as socially healthy. Conversations are necessary.

4. You can't eliminate sugary stuff from your life, but can maintain a balance for yourself. Eat but try to avoid stress eating which basically is overeating. Try to eat some fruits to satisfy your sugary cravings and avoid sugary candies, biscuits and beverages from your diet.

5. Find a reason to smile or try to make someone smile.

6. [Chip's] If you decide to use a particular drug then do your research about how long it takes to return to baseline (to avoid addiction and will be longer than how long it takes for it to leave your body (search for articles)) and understand the Amino Acids and Supplements required to neutralise any negative ramifications of doing so, and:

6a. Study the metabolic pathways so you know what's going on -- "To be forwarned is to be forarmed" !

100

General Discussion for Everybody / [Quora] Some random tips for your family with gas appliances

« Last post by Chip on May 03, 2025, 10:37:39 AM »

One of the most important articles that may one day save your entire family.

Learn from other people's mistakes:

A family consisting of a man, his wife, and their infant child had just arrived home from dinner outside and smelled gas in their house.

When he entered the kitchen, the husband turned on the light to get a better look but an explosion occurred that killed the man on the spot.

The explosion also sent his wife to the ICU. and the baby who was some distance away from the explosion was rescued. Kitchen utensils were thrown more than 200 m from the explosion site.

■ Lessons to be learned:

1. When you smell gas, do not turn on the lights and vice versa, if the lights are already on, do not turn them off, butvopen the window slowly so as not to cause sparks.

2. Close the gas cylinder.

Do not turn on the light until you are sure that the gas smell is completely gone.

3. Do not open the refrigerator or freezer as this can also cause sparks.

4. If you are outside the house, wet the key with your saliva before inserting it into the keyhole.

5. Don't use your phone.

  ● Put it away.

If you need any help or a chat then IM/PM or email me, Chip