The headline is a bit wrong: the tubes don’t seem to be returning, it’s mostly talking about an industry they never left: hospitals. They are fancier now, though.
What an awful inspiration for a waterslide concept. Halfway through, you get covered in fecies collected from the port-o-potties.
And dumped off in the pool at the bottom.......shaped like a toilet.
Dammit brain!!! Why do you make me think these things??? Other people are thinking about puppies, or, 4th of july plans, or pride month, or juneteenth, or how small snicker bars can get before bite size is the new standard bar.
Yet here I am thinking "what if we ruined everybodys pool party???"
If only we had a series of pneumatic tubes connecting all our homes, you could order something online and have it pop up right next to you minutes later.
A big truck.....for dumping......a dump......truck........A DUMP TRUCK!!!
OMG!!! THAT MEANS CONSTRUCTION WORKERS ARE ACTUALLY IT PROFESSIONALS!!! That explains.....nothing actually. If anything it raises a whole NEW set of questions.
The Hyperloop was very successful, it prevented billions of dollars of investment in mass transit, then evaporated before it could reduce the market for cars.
"grisly results". Are you sure? I think the pressure failure of the Titan submarine was closer to "grisly". Transit tube failure scores lower on the pressure failure scale. /jk
I want one to get beer from the fridge to the couch. I could move the fridge next to the couch, but if a pneumatic system is an option, I assume I don't have to explain which would be the better choice by a land slide. Cool beers on the couch, in the garden, in the bath tub, etc. I could fire my wife.
Of course I'm joking, I would never exchange my wife for a pneumatic tube system. I don't have a wife.
As computers and credit cards started to become more prevalent in the 1980s, reducing paperwork significantly, the systems shifted to mostly carrying lab specimens, pharmaceuticals, and blood products. Today, lab specimens are roughly 60% of what hospital tube systems carry; pharmaceuticals account for 30%, and blood products for phlebotomy make up 5%.
I initially thought it's because of IT-security and the hospital hacks.
We have mammoth DNA and scientists have been working to restore them for at least a couple of decades now. Every few years you'll see an article about how it's just around the corner to clone one.
Sure, we’ve sequenced the genome, but they’ve tried somatic cell nuclear transfer only to find out that the cell dies with the mammoth nucleus. Unless it was stored in cryogenic storage beneath lead shielding to protect from ionizing background radiation it’ll never work.
The only hope they have is cloning huge sections of the mammoth genome into the elephant genome, which is a project the size and scale of which will never be performed if we can’t even be fucked to properly care for their only surviving relative the elephants (or even care enough to do anything about global warming for that matter).
which is a project the size and scale of which will never be performed if we can’t even be fucked to properly care for their only surviving relative the elephants (or even care enough to do anything about global warming for that matter).
You know, I can't rule out billions of dollars being poured into resurrecting a species with nowhere to go. The human capacity for BS is truly enormous.
Getting a live mammoth, assuming we'd manage it would just get one sad and lonely animal which would be isolated from any other member of its species. For creatures that most likely had social structures as strong and important as those of elephants, it seems like you'd get a neurotic animal. It's not at all a given that it could integrate in an elephant group.
Research in the last 5ish years has shown that "any" cell can be induced to change into a stem cell by changing its environment and adding specific growth factors.
Edit:
I spent an hour looking for the research I was referring to. I found the papers and dissertation of the author who's talk I went to where the topic was discussed. Unfortunately, with a quick read I didn't find where the author talked about it, leading me to believe it was a discussion had at the end of their defense.
Although I couldn't find the research, [email protected] found what I was talking about (induced pluripotent stem cells)
Edit 2: As [email protected] points out the techniques are not currently at the level where induced stem cells can replace native stem cells.
This link is a relatively new development, but
induced pluripotent stem cells have been in use since around 2006 for research purposes. They can be made from a variety of cell types.
There's so many "buts" attached to that it's not even funny. They don't work as well as an actual stem cell, for one thing. That's why there's still plenty of demand for the embryonic kind.
No, a critter is more than just DNA. And most genome sequences aren't complete, and DNA is currently slow to print artificially, and the OG samples from anything dead in ambient conditions for more than days are badly degraded.
If we have DNA we could maybe do it one day, in principle. Especially for critters like mammoths with living relatives. This particular tech from the story isn't highly related, though.
Ethical research guidelines bar any attempts to culture human embryos beyond 14 days of gestation, so as usual it’s clickbait and not something that will be explored anytime soon.
As a general concept, sure. Actually making it happen in a petri dish can be detail-intensive and unreliable, which is why we haven't been doing it routinely for decades.
I remember seeing these Costco tubes as a kid in the 90s. Thought it was the coolest fucking thing, the vertical pipe going up from each cashier and making a maze of pipes all heading somewhere on the ceiling
We used to use them for the same thing in Kmart (Australia) when I worked there 20 years ago. They were used to clear the float so you didn't have too much cash in the register. Now that 90% of transactions are on card I bet they don't use them anymore.
Because these tokens are not actual commonly spoken words or phrases, the chatbot can fail to grasp their meanings. Researchers have been able to leverage that and trick GPT-4o into hallucinating answers or even circumventing the safety guardrails OpenAI had put in place.
Google's Gemini doesn't seem to like some of these tokens either, I threw "Please translate the following text: _日本毛片免费视频观看" into it and it returned "我没法提供这方面的帮助，因为我只是一个语言模型。" which according to Google translate is "I can't help with that because I'm just a language model." It will however translate the error message just fine.
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