#bigots #propaganda #AI #racism "Travel Influencer Caught Using AI to Make It Seem Like Minorities Are Terrorizing London 'Just surrounded by hostiles. Goodness, gracious me.' As travel vloggers go, South African Kurt Caz has never exactly trafficked in highbrow content. His career as an influencer began about six years ago, through YouTube videos with simple but effective titles like 'What is Bologna, Italy Like?' But as Caz got more travel time under his belt, his videos quickly devolved into the exploitative fare typical of most poverty vloggers: 'Don’t Visit This Egyptian Ghetto!' and 'Avoiding Guerillas on Peru’s Deadliest Road' became the new blueprint, while his views ballooned into the millions. Now after building a following of some four million subscribers, Caz is flipping the script from thinly veiled travel exploitation to overt racism — with a little help from generative AI. In a 36-minute YouTube video titled Avoid This Place in London,' Caz braves the London borough of Croydon, where 36.2 percent of residents are immigrants. Of course, he only does so with his trusted goon Leo in tow, who’s notably much smaller than Caz himself. As shock vlogs go, it’s pretty unremarkable. The influencer spouts off some obnoxious missives about crime and immigration, referring to non-white people running errands as 'interesting characters.' What is remarkable is the video’s thumbnail, which shows Caz walking down a street flanked by storefronts with signage in Arabic script. A man passing by on a bike is also shown clad in a black balaclava, mean mugging Caz as he films. Yet as the social media account Right Wing Cope observed, the same frame in the video bears little resemblance to the one in the preview. As it turns out, both the store signs are in English, and the menacing biker was actually a smiling Black guy — a sure sign of an image doctored with generative AI. (. . .) Back in September, *Futurism* reported on the rise of pro-white, anti-immigrant AI slop in the UK. As generative AI has become more accessible, these images have gained prominence as a tool for right-wing propagandists to stir up anti-immigrant vitriol throughout the country. Caz’ thumbnail is a prime example of this — a piece of media altered with AI to spread the gospel of reactionary bigotry, slipping into millions of social media feeds without a second thought."

Futurism

Travel Influencer Caught Using AI to Make It Seem Like Minorities Are Terrorizing London

Sensationalist travel vlogger Kurt Caz was caught using AI to doctor a thumbnail to look like immigrants are taking over London.

#paleoanthropology #evolution #HomoFloresiensis "On the other hand, 'how can you prove something doesn’t exist? You can’t,' Tocheri says. Finding a physical specimen first isn’t the only way to make a discovery, according to Forth. 'For me as an anthropologist, evidence that Flores Islanders have actually seen living creatures that closely correspond to their descriptions of ‘ape-men’, and therefore Homo floresiensis, is the best among several explanations for what they told me,' he says. Forth isn’t equating the unearthing of H. floresiensis bones with a definite conclusion about the hobbits still existing. But he’s not ruling out the possibility. Such a discovery in the genus Homo 'would be extraordinary. Not only would it contradict the current orthodoxy; it would also overturn current theories of hominin evolution and raise questions about what it means to be ‘human’—or ‘not quite human,’' Forth says. The finding would also demonstrate to people in the academic world that 'ordinary folk' have knowledge of local species, which scientists—who flit in and out of an area for a specific study—often do not, he adds. Since the hobbit was discovered, the field of paleoanthropology has seen rapid progress, such as the discovery of the species Homo naledi of South Africa and the Siberian Denisovans, who may be closely related to Neanderthals. Scientists have also sequenced Neanderthal DNA fragments from bones, and identified Neanderthal and Denisovan genetic codes in modern humans—which means the three species once interbred. The closest any former human species comes to still being alive is by being a part of us. So the idea that an entirely extinct human is still living clandestinely among us is shocking, Tocheri says. He agrees with Forth that it would be amazing to find the descendants of these people—considered gone 500 centuries or so ago—still populating a small pocket on Flores. Before finding the hobbit, researchers looked at human origins in a slightly more linear way. They knew some species likely branched off from earlier relatives—an effect of evolutionary pressures like climate change—in different times and places. For example, H. sapiens evolved mainly from Homo heidelbergensis, but so did Homo neanderthalis. Various species living at the same time may have met and interbred as well. We know that our own species has some Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. All this simultaneous evolution and intermingling makes the traditional 'family tree' more of an interconnected bush, Tocheri explains." https://archive.ph/mfrHV#selection-835.0-847.440

#cats #China "Ancient DNA reveals China’s first ‘pet’ cat wasn’t the house cat The leopard cat pounced on ancient Chinese mice long before the house cat arrived The house cat (Felis catus) slunk into China in the eighth century. But long before that, the ancient Chinese were by no means catless. A new genetic analysis offers evidence that between 5,400 and 1,900 years ago, it was the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) that pounced on the rats and mice of ancient China, researchers report November 27 in Cell Genomics. The finding offers hints as to why some animals end up in our homes and hearts, while others stay wild and free. Modern house cats are descendants of the African wildcat (Felis lybica). Humans must have brought them to China, 'but there were a lot of debates on when exactly this happened,' says He Yu, a paleogeneticist from Peking University in China. Art and literature dating back to a few centuries B.C. talks about 'cats' and even includes images of cats. 'But there were also people arguing this cat may not be the domestic cat that we assume today,' Yu says." https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dna-china-first-cat-leopard-rodent

#fungi #mushrooms #China "Experts Explore New Mushroom Which Causes Fairytale-Like Hallucinations Picture this: You're enjoying a delicious bowl of mushroom soup, when suddenly you notice hundreds of tiny people dressed in cartoonish clothing marching across your tablecloth, jumping into your bowl, swimming around, and clinging to your spoon as you lift it for another taste. You're not dreaming — you've just experienced the effects of a mushroom known scientifically as Lanmaoa asiatica. It belongs to an entirely different class of Fungi than the more commonly known 'magic mushrooms' and remains far more mysterious. When outsiders first embarked into the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1934, they encountered a perplexing sight: after consuming a type of wild mushroom which they called 'nonda,' the local people would appear to go temporarily insane, exhibiting a sudden and striking change in mood and behavior. Subsequent accounts of the 'mushroom madness' phenomenon, as it was termed, provided more details into the mushroom's strange psychological effects. purchasing lanmaoa asiatica or jian shou qing lilliputian mushrooms Conversing with sellers to find and purchase samples for scientific study of the psychoactive mushroom known as Jian shou qing. There are many potentially confusing look-alikes, but after asking the seller if this is the one that will make us see little people, their amused response, often accompanied with a personal anecdote, served as our confirmation of its identity. (. . .) Specifically, it was reported that those affected would experience lilliputian hallucinations — a rare, clinically defined psychiatric syndrome (named after the tiny people in Gulliver's Travels) characterized by the perception of numerous little people autonomously moving about and interacting in the real-world environment. One elder tribesman in Papua New Guinea describes this effect, explaining how he saw tiny people with mushrooms around their faces. They were teasing him, and he was trying to chase them away.' By the 1960s, scientists were working to identify the species of mushrooms involved and what chemicals within them might be responsible for such bizarre effects. However, both questions have remained unanswered to this day. As a Ph.D. student at the Natural History Museum of Utah, I've been working to solve this puzzle: What exactly is the identity of this mushroom, how widespread is the cultural knowledge of its effects, and why does it produce such fantastical visions

Natural History Museum of Utah

Experts Explore New Mushroom Which Causes Fairytale-Like Hallucinations

Between traditional folklore and modern biology, the wild forest floor and the sterile scientific laboratory, lies the story of the lilliputian mus...

Quote of the Day. "It wasn’t Hitler or Himmler who kidnapped me, beat me, and shot my family. It was the shoemaker, the milkman, and the neighbor who were given uniforms and then believed they were the master race." -- Karl Stojka, Holocaust survivor