Features

LIVERPOOL/LONDON — The English city of Liverpool hosts the musical extravaganza that is Eurovision on Saturday after the UK agreed to host the song contest instead of 2022 winner Ukraine due to the war.

With songs of love, torment, peace and likely sequins aplenty on eye-popping costumes, performers representing 37 nations battle it out in a city synonymous with pop royalty.

The hometown of The Beatles and other big names in music in northwestern England stepped in after the UK came second to embattled Ukraine at last year’s contest.

Just months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kalush Orchestra won the world’s biggest live music event with “Stefania”, a rap lullaby combining Ukrainian folk and modern hip-hop rhythms. 

Carrying the hopes of Ukraine at the 2023 event is electronic music group Tvorchi, with the song “Heart of Steel”.

Inspired by the nearly month-long resistance put up by Ukrainian fighters at Mariupol’s besieged Azovstal steelworks, singer Jeffery Kenny said the song “symbolises strength... courage”.

Even as it geared up for Eurovision in recent weeks, the group had to contend with shelling and air-raid sirens at home as it tried to perform.

Despite huge sympathy for the group at Eurovision, observers and bookmakers agree a second win for Ukraine in a row is unlikely.

Sweden, again being represented by 2012 Eurovision winner Loreen, is the favourite to take home the crown, with the love song “Tattoo”, ahead of Finland’s energetic “Cha Cha Cha” by Kaarija in his signature neon green bolero jacket.

The UK last year had hoped to end a quarter-century of being shut out from the top spot with “Space Man” and its high notes belted out by the affable, long-haired Sam Ryder.

In the end, it had to keep its feet on the ground with second place. 

This year’s UK contender Mae Muller hopes to win over the judges and viewers with “I Wrote a Song” about getting over a broken heart.

France, which has not won a Eurovision contest since 1977, is placing its hopes in Canadian singer La Zarra and her electro-disco number “Evidemment” (“Obviously”).

Despite having cancelled two concerts recently in Amsterdam and London for personal reasons, the singer has said on social media that she is “more than ever determined to carry with pride and love the colours of France”.

But politics is often not far from the surface at Eurovision.

Croatia’s song, “Mama SC!” by the mustachioed Let 3, is a thinly veiled attack on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Switzerland’s singer Remo Forrer has opted for a more traditional message of peace with his entry “Watergun”.

Performing for the 6,000-strong audience, the entrants take the spotlight on a stage designed by Julio Himede, who has said the idea behind it is “a wide hug, opening its arms to Ukraine, the show’s performers and guests from across the world”.

Ahead of Saturday’s Eurovision 2023 crowning, the stage — which boasts 700 video tiles and 1,500 metres of LED lights — has already received a royal seal of approval.

King Charles III and Queen Camilla visited the site shortly before their coronation.

Eurovision takes in performers from across Europe and Central Asia, as well as Israel and Australia.

Two semifinals are scheduled to whittle the field down to 26 countries for Saturday evening’s big final.

The so-called Big Five main financial backers — Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain — as well as the previous year’s winner automatically qualify.

NEW YORK — British pop phenom Ed Sheeran expressed joy and relief on May 4 after a US jury found he did not plagiarise Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” in composing his hit “Thinking Out Loud”, calling the ruling a win for creative freedom.

The English musician hugged his team inside a Manhattan federal courtroom after jurors ruled that he had “independently” created his 2014 song.

Outside, he told reporters he was “very happy” but “unbelievably frustrated that baseless claims like this” even make it to trial.

The civil lawsuit was filed by heirs of Gaye co-writer Ed Townsend, who alleged that harmonic progressions and rhythmic elements of Sheeran’s song were lifted without permission from the classic made famous by Gaye.

The heirs sought a share of the profits from Sheeran’s hit.

“If the jury had decided this matter the other way, we might as well say goodbye to the creative freedom of songwriters,” Sheeran told reporters.

“It is devastating and also insulting to be accused of stealing other people’s songs when we put so much into our livelihoods,” he added. “I am just a guy with a guitar who loves writing music for people to enjoy.”

“I am not and will never allow myself to be a piggy bank for anyone to shake.”

‘Songwriter’s alphabet’ 

The jurors spent some three hours deliberating whether Sheeran’s song and Gaye’s classic are substantially similar and if their common elements are protected by copyright law.

Sheeran spent days testifying with guitar in hand, playing demos for the court to prove the 1-3-4-5 chord progression in question is a basic building block of pop music that can’t be owned.

The 32-year-old said he writes most of his songs in a day, and said he co-wrote “Thinking Out Loud” with singer-songwriter Amy Wadge, a regular creative collaborator.

A musicologist retained by the defence told the court the four-chord sequence was used in a number of songs before Gaye’s hit came out in 1973.

“These chords are common building blocks,” Sheeran said Thursday. “They are a songwriter’s ‘alphabet’, our tool kit.”

“No one owns them, or the way they are played, in the same way nobody owns the colour blue.”

Plaintiff Kathryn Townsend Griffin left court and breezed by reporters smoking what appeared to be a cigarillo, saying only: “God is good all the time, all the time God is good”.

‘Sense of relief’

Industry insiders closely followed the copyright lawsuit as some feared it could chill songwriters’ creativity and open the door to future litigation.

It was the second trial in a year for Sheeran, who successfully testified at a London court last April in a case over his song “Shape Of You”, saying the lawsuit was emblematic of copyright litigation going too far. 

The judge also ruled in his favour in that case.

Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” shot up America’s Billboard Hot 100 charts upon release, and won Sheeran a 2016 Song of the Year Grammy.

There have been a handful of landmark music copyright cases in recent years, notably when Gaye’s family — who was not part of the New York lawsuit against Sheeran — successfully sued the artists Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over similarities between the song “Blurred Lines” and Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up”.

That result in 2015 surprised many in the industry, including legal experts, who considered many of the musical components cited as foundational, and existing largely in the public domain.

Then an appeals court decision confirmed Led Zeppelin’s victory over a similar case focused on the classic “Stairway to Heaven” — a victory for songwriters that Sheeran’s case should bolster.

“I hope that the verdict gives songwriters and publishers some sense of relief that they don’t need to be looking over their shoulders quite so much,” said Joseph Fishman, a law professor specialised in intellectual property at Vanderbilt University. 

“That would be a big shift from the mood following the ‘Blurred Lines’ verdict.”

‘Sanity prevailed’

The swinging pendulum has nevertheless left some songwriters fearful of the volatility of opinions from jurors who almost certainly do not have a background in musicology and must rely on expert witnesses for context.

After delivering the verdict, juror Sophia Neis told journalists it took a beat for all seven members to find common ground.

“There was a lot of back and forth” with advocates on both sides, the 23-year-old said.

Joe Bennett, a forensic musicologist at the prestigious Berklee College of Music, told AFP he was “delighted” that “sanity prevailed” in the case.

“In music copyright litigation cases involving one or two bars of music, the plaintiff’s allegation of plagiarism is almost always wrong,” he said. “Coincidental similarity happens all the time, particularly with chords and short melodic fragments.”

“Hopefully this sensible verdict will discourage other spurious complaints.”

First introduced in its modern iteration in 2006 as a more sophisticated interpretation of the American saloon, with its combination of aggressive styling, big displacement power plant and more contemporary Mercedes-Benz derived unibody platform, the Dodge Charger now stands as one of the most traditional cars on the market. 

Set to cease production by the end of the year, and most likely to be replaced by yet another uncharismatic EV, the Charger’s visceral combustion engine recipe of generous dimensions, comfort, performance and attainability will be missed.

Brawny aesthetic

As a sporting non-premium V8-powered saloon, the Charger may be thoroughly steeped in automotive Americana, but as a four-door muscle car, it conceptually owes more to the Australian interpretation of the genre, and shares more with long retired would-be down under rivals like the Holden Commodoure and Ford Falcon, that the iconic original 1960s Charger coupe. Little changed in its basic recipe, the modern Charger gained a significant aesthetic refresh and evolved from sixth ‘LX’ to seventh ‘LD’ generation by 2015, and was again subtly updated in 2019.

With its bulbous, browed and squinting headlights, slim deep-set grille, and retro-style full-width rear lights, the LD Charger is distinctly more modern looking than its overtly retro-influenced predecessor. Subtly influenced by the classic and dramatic 1969 Charger, nonetheless, the long, wide and low LD’s discretely scalloped bonnet, sculpted surfacing and deeply ridged side creases accentuate its moodily aggressive presence. With its rakish roofline and sense of momentum, the lightly revised 2019 model adopts a snoutier and hungrier fascia, with a slimmer grille, deeper side and broader lower intakes.

Rumbling and robust

Bowing out with a slew of ever more aggressive and powerful variants including Last Call and muscular Widebody editions, and offered with engine options ranging from 292BHP entry-level 3.6-litre V6 SXT to brutal 797BHP supercharged 6.2-litre V8 SRT Hellcat Redey, the defining Charger model, however, remains the more mid-tier R/T. Powered by a naturally-aspirated 5.7-litre HEMI V8 nestled under its bonnet scoop, the R/T’s engine is quintessentially American. Muscularly languid and low-revving in character, its compact old school 16-valve pushrod OHV engine redlines at just 5,800rpm.

Responsive from standstill, if not with the same relentless urgency of Charger SRT variants, the charismatically rumbling R/T is nevertheless robust and progressive, with ample torque on tap throughout its rev range. Best in its abundant mid-range, the R/T’s delivery is characterised by muscular versatility rather than peaky punch. Producing 370BHP at 5,250rpm and 395lb/ft at 4,200rpm, the R/T is ever-confident, capable and quick, and is estimated to haul its hefty 1,938 mass through 0-100km/h in around 5.5-seconds and onto an estimated 235km/h top speed.

Quick and compliant

Effectively putting power down, the Charger R/T delivers brisk performance without being overly aggressive or too eager to un-stick its driven rear wheels and set off stability control interventions than powerful Hellcat versions. The R/T’s smooth and slick shifting 8-speed automatic gearbox meanwhile features a broad range of ratios including aggressive lower gears and relaxed higher gears, to make full use of available output for performance, versatility, refinement and efficiency. Capable of running on mid-grade 91RON fuel, the R/T returns comparatively moderate 12.4l/100km combined fuel consumption.

Though big and heavy, the Charger R/T is well-balanced with its slight front weight bias. Planted and stable at speed, it is meanwhile confident through corners, and features good throttle response and linear delivery to smoothly feed power when muscling out of bends. Featuring standard fixed rate ‘performance’ suspension, the R/T comparatively well controls body lean through corners for its size and weight, but is nevertheless tuned set-up for a more comfortably compliant ride quality than firmer riding, flatter cornering and more buttoned down high performance SRT versions.

Composed and comfortable

Composed through fast sweeping bends and at speed on straights, the R/T is also more agile than its size suggests. Tidy and accurate into corners with its quick electric-assisted 2.6-turns lock-to-lock steering, the R/T is, however, not as crisp, composed or focused as the naturally-aspirated SRT 392 high performance variant, which is next up in the model range, and the best resolved Charger. Confident and balanced through corner, the R/T can understeer slightly if entering too hard, but is easily adjustable with its long wheelbase and progressive weight shifts.

Forgiving over imperfections despite firm and grippy low profile 245/45R20 tyres, the R/T is highly refined and well-insulated inside. Large and spacious, the R/T’s cabin has a hunkered down ambiance with comfortable seats, good front visibility and generous rear width and legroom, if only adequate headroom, owing to a sharply descending roofline and high-set rear bench. Well-finished with good quality materials, driver-oriented controls and instruments, the Charger is thoroughly well equipped with convenience, comfort, safety and assistance features, including an intuitive and versatile Uconnect infotainment system.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Engine: 5.7-litre, cast-iron block/aluminium head, in-line V8-cylinders

Bore x Stroke: 99.5 x 90.9mm

Compression ratio: 10.5:1

Valve-train: 16-valve, Pushrod OHV

Gearbox: 8-speed automatic, rear-wheel-drive

Gear ratios: 1st 4.71 2nd 3.14 3rd 2.10 4th 1.67 5th 1.29 6th 1.0 7th 0.84 8th 0.67

Reverse/final drive ratios: 3.32/2.62

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 370 (375) [276] @5,250rpm

Specific power: 65.4BHP/litre

Power-to-weight: 191BHP/ton

Torque lb/ft (Nm): 395 (536) @4,200rpm

Specific torque: 94.8Nm/litre

Torque-to-weight: 276.5Nm/ton

Rev limit: 5,800rpm

0-100km/h: 5.5-seconds (estimate)

Top speed: 235km/h (estimate)

Fuel consumption, city/highway/combined: 14.7-/9.4/12.4-litres/100km

Fuel capacity: 70-litres

Fuel requirement, recommended (minimum): 93(91)RON

Track, F/R: 1,611/1,620mm

Weight distribution, F/R: 55 per cent/45 per cent

Aerodynamic drag co-efficiency: 0.335

Steering: Electric-assisted rack & pinion

Turning circle: 11.49-metres

Lock-to-lock: 2.6-turns

Suspension F/R: Unequal double wishbones/five-link, anti-roll bars

Brakes, F/R: Ventilated discs 345 x 28mm/320 x 22mm

Brake callipers, F/R: 2-/1-pistons

Tyres: 245/45R20

By Dina Halaseh
Educational Psychologist

As parents, we all aim to provide our children with an optimal experience and environment in their developmental stages; all in the hope of ensuring the best possible brain development. This is why it is important to understand what the main component is for the brain to develop properly.

A child going through trauma of any kind may need professional help. Understanding how the brain responds to traumatic experiences and stress is a vital part in understanding brain development. This helps parents deal with their child’s behaviour if their child has undergone trauma.

What is trauma

In order to understand the impact of trauma on the brain, we need to understand what trauma is. Trauma is a psychological reaction to a horrific incident, not just a stressful situation. These incidents might include accidents, death, sexual assault, war, natural disasters and much more.

People who go through a traumatic experience often suffer shock and denial at first; while other symptoms may appear at a later stage. These include erratic emotions, flashbacks, strained relationships and even physical discomfort like headaches or nausea.

There are three types of trauma:

• Acute trauma, which usually results from a single traumatic event

• Chronic trauma happens frequently, for a continuous period, such as domestic abuse

• Complex trauma: is caused by being exposed to more than one traumatic event over an extended period

The Three R’s

Unfortunately, a brain suffering a traumatic experience will not develop as other brains. Traumatic stress can have a range of negative consequences on memory-related processes as well as an impact on structure and function.

So how do we deal with children who go through trauma? We regulate, relate, reason!

The three R’s are described by Bruce Perry, a famous psychiatrist and the director of the Child Trauma Academy. This is usually different to how parents approach any scenario; parents tend to try to reason on the spot!

If we simplify the brain to three parts, we will have: our guarding brain, feeling brain and thinking brain. Trauma and stress cause us to use our guarding and feeling brain only. It’s hard to access our thinking brain when things are too hard, because the feeling and guarding parts of the brain take over — as they are the ones involved in the fight or flight response.

As soon as things calm down, we can go back to reasoning and thinking. This occurs in the frontal area of the brain, otherwise known as the pre-frontal cortex, responsible for rationalising the experiences we undergo through logical thought.

Regulating, relating and reasoning

When we regulate, we simply help our children to calm down, relating is showing understanding instead of dismissing them or their feelings. After that, we can start to reason with them once their stress hormones are down and they feel calm enough to accept our advice.

This is why our first step is to regulate and relate. We need to help children feel safe and understood so they can lower their guard and access their thinking brain, thus becoming more receptive to our advice and help.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

By Daniel Lawler 
and Pierre Celerier
Agence France-Presse

PARIS — Scientists said on Wednesday that they have observed a dying star swallowing a planet for the first time, offering a preview of Earth’s expected fate in around five billion years.

But when the Sun finally does engulf Earth, it will cause only a “tiny perturbation” compared to this cosmic explosion, the US astronomers said.

Most planets are believed to meet their end when their host star runs out of energy, turning into a red giant that massively expands, devouring anything unlucky enough to be in its path.

Astronomers had previously seen the before-and-after effects of this process, but had never before caught a planet in the act of being consumed.

Kishalay De, a postdoc researcher at MIT in the United States and the lead author of the new study, said the accidental discovery unfolded like a “detective story”.

“It all started about three years ago when I was looking at data from the Zwicky Transient Facility survey, which takes images of the sky every night,” De told an online press conference.

He stumbled across a star that had suddenly increased in brightness by more than 100 times over a 10-day period. 

The star is in the Milky Way galaxy, around 12,000 light years from Earth near the Aquila constellation, which resembles an eagle. 

Ice in boiling water

De had been searching for binary star systems, in which the larger star takes bites out of its companion, creating incredibly bright explosions called outbursts.

But data showed that this outburst was surrounded by cold gas, suggesting it was not a binary star system.

And NASA’s infrared space telescope NEOWISE showed that dust had started to shoot out of the area months before the outburst.

More puzzling still was that the outburst produced around 1,000 times less energy than previously observed mergers between stars.

“You ask yourself: What is 1,000 less massive than a star?” De said. 

The answer was close to home: Jupiter.

The team of researchers from MIT, Harvard and Caltech established that the swallowed planet was a gas giant with a similar mass to Jupiter, but was so close to its star that it completed an orbit in just one day.

The star, which is quite similar to the Sun, engulfed the planet over a period of around 100 days, starting off by nibbling at its edges, which ejected dust. 

The bright explosion occurred in the final 10 days as the planet was totally destroyed when it plunged inside the star.

Miguel Montarges, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory who was not involved in the research, noted that the star was thousands of degrees hotter than the planet.

“It’s like putting an ice cube into a boiling pot,” he told AFP.

Morgan MacLeod, a postdoc at Harvard University and co-author of the study, published in the journal Nature, said that most of the thousands of planets discovered outside the Solar System so far “will eventually suffer this fate”.

And in comparison, Earth will most likely end not with a bang but a whimper.

When the Sun expands past Mercury, Venus and Earth in an estimated five billion years, they will make “less dramatic disturbances” because rocky planets are so much smaller than gas giants, MacLeod said.

“In fact, they will be really minor perturbations to the power output of the Sun,” he said.

But even before it gets swallowed, Earth will already be “quite inhospitable”, because the dying Sun will have already evaporated all the planet’s water, MacLeod added.

Ryan Lau, an astronomer and study co-author, said the discovery “speaks to the transience of our existence”.

“After the billions of years that span the lifetime of our Solar System, our own end stages will likely conclude in a final flash that lasts only a few months,” he said in a statement.

Now that astronomers know what to look for, they hope that soon they will be able to watch many more planets be consumed by their stars.

In the Milky Way alone, a planet could be engulfed once a year, De said.

SAN PEDRO, California — Floating in the port of Los Angeles, a strange-looking barge covered with pipes and tanks contains a concept that scientists hope to make waves: a new way to use the ocean as a vast carbon dioxide sponge to tackle global warming.

Scientists from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have been working for two years on SeaChange — an ambitious project that could one day boost the amount of CO2, a major greenhouse gas, that can be absorbed by our seas.

Their goal is “to use the ocean as a big sponge”, according to Gaurav Sant, director of the university’s Institute for Carbon Management.

The oceans, covering most of the Earth, are already the planet’s main carbon sinks, acting as a critical buffer in the climate crisis.

They absorb a quarter of all CO2 emissions, as well as 90 per cent of the warming that has occurred in recent decades due to increasing greenhouse gases.

But they are feeling the strain. The ocean is acidifying, and rising temperatures are reducing its absorption capacity.

The UCLA team wants to increase that capacity by using an electrochemical process to remove vast quantities of CO2 already in seawater — rather like wringing out a sponge to help recover its absorptive power.

“If you can take out the carbon dioxide that is in the oceans, you’re essentially renewing their capacity to take additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” Sant told AFP.

Trapped

Engineers built a floating mini-factory on a 30-metre long boat which pumps in seawater and subjects it to an electrical charge.

Chemical reactions triggered by electrolysis convert CO2 dissolved in the seawater into a fine white powder containing calcium carbonate — the compound found in chalk, limestone and oyster or mussel shells.

This powder can be discarded back into the ocean, where it remains in solid form, thereby storing CO2 “very durably... over tens of thousands of years”, explained Sant.

Meanwhile, the pumped water returns to the sea, ready to absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Sant and his team are confident the process will not damage the marine environment, although this will require further testing to confirm. 

A potential additional benefit of the technology is that it creates hydrogen as a byproduct. As the so-called “green revolution” progresses, the gas could be widely used to power clean cars, trucks and planes in the future.

Of course, the priority in curbing global warming is for humans to drastically reduce current CO2 emissions — something we are struggling to achieve.

But in parallel, most scientists say carbon dioxide capture and storage techniques can play an important role in keeping the planet livable. 

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) could help to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 as it offsets emissions from industries which are particularly difficult to decarbonise, such as aviation, and cement and steel production.

It could help to tackle the stocks of CO2 that have been accumulating in the atmosphere for decades.

‘Promising solution’

Keeping global warming under control will require the removal of between 450 billion and 1.1 trillion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2100, according to the first global report dedicated to the topic, released in January.

That would require the CDR sector “to grow at a rate of about 30 per cent per year over the next 30 years, much like what happened with wind and solar”, said one of its authors, Gregory Nemet.

UCLA’s SeaChange technology “fits into a category of a promising solution that could be large enough to be climate-relevant”, said Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

By sequestering CO2 in mineral form within the ocean, it differs markedly from existing “direct air capture” methods, which involve pumping and storing gas underground through a highly complex and expensive process.

A start-up company, Equatic, plans to scale up the UCLA technology and prove its commercial viability, by selling carbon credits to manufacturers wanting to offset their emissions.

In addition to the Los Angeles barge, a similar boat is currently being tested in Singapore.

Sant hopes data from both sites will quickly lead to the construction of far larger plants that are capable of removing “thousands of tonnes of carbon” each year.

“We expect to start operating these new plants in 18 to 24 months,” he said.

PARIS — Scientists said Monday they have found a way to use brain scans and artificial intelligence modelling to transcribe “the gist” of what people are thinking, in what was described as a step towards mind reading.

While the main goal of the language decoder is to help people who have lost the ability to communicate, the US scientists acknowledged that the technology raised questions about “mental privacy”.

Aiming to assuage such fears, they ran tests showing that their decoder could not be used on anyone who had not allowed it to be trained on their brain activity over long hours inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.

Previous research has shown that a brain implant can enable people who can no longer speak or type to spell out words or even sentences.

These “brain-computer interfaces” focus on the part of the brain that controls the mouth when it tries to form words.

Alexander Huth, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of a new study, said that his team’s language decoder “works at a very different level”.

“Our system really works at the level of ideas, of semantics, of meaning,” Huth told an online press conference.

It is the first system to be able to reconstruct continuous language without an invasive brain implant, according to the study in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

‘Deeper than language’

For the study, three people spent a total of 16 hours inside an fMRI machine listening to spoken narrative stories, mostly podcasts such as The New York Times’ Modern Love.

This allowed the researchers to map out how words, phrases and meanings prompted responses in the regions of the brain known to process language.

They fed this data into a neural network language model that uses GPT-1, the predecessor of the AI technology later deployed in the hugely popular ChatGPT.

The model was trained to predict how each person’s brain would respond to perceived speech, then narrow down the options until it found the closest response.

To test the model’s accuracy, each participant then listened to a new story in the fMRI machine.

The study’s first author Jerry Tang said the decoder could “recover the gist of what the user was hearing”.

For example, when the participant heard the phrase “I don’t have my driver’s license yet”, the model came back with “she has not even started to learn to drive yet”.

The decoder struggled with personal pronouns such as “I” or “she”, the researchers admitted.

But even when the participants thought up their own stories — or viewed silent movies — the decoder was still able to grasp the “gist”, they said.

This showed that “we are decoding something that is deeper than language, then converting it into language”, Huth said.

Because fMRI scanning is too slow to capture individual words, it collects a “mishmash, an agglomeration of information over a few seconds”, Huth said.

“So we can see how the idea evolves, even though the exact words get lost.”

Ethical warning

David Rodriguez-Arias Vailhen, a bioethics professor at Spain’s Granada University not involved in the research, said it went beyond what had been achieved by previous brain-computer interfaces.

This brings us closer to a future in which machines are “able to read minds and transcribe thought”, he said, warning this could possibly take place against people’s will, such as when they are sleeping.

The researchers anticipated such concerns.

They ran tests showing that the decoder did not work on a person if it had not already been trained on their own particular brain activity.

The three participants were also able to easily foil the decoder.

While listening to one of the podcasts, the users were told to count by sevens, name and imagine animals or tell a different story in their mind. All these tactics “sabotaged” the decoder, the researchers said.

Next, the team hopes to speed up the process so that they can decode the brain scans in real time.

They also called for regulations to protect mental privacy.

“Our mind has so far been the guardian of our privacy,” said bioethicist Rodriguez-Arias Vailhen.

“This discovery could be a first step towards compromising that freedom in the future.”

VALDIVIA, Chile — In a forest in southern Chile, a giant tree has survived for thousands of years and is in the process of being recognised as the oldest in the world.

Known as the “Great Grandfather,” the trunk of this tree measuring four metres in diameter and 28 metres tall is also believed to contain scientific information that could shed light on how the planet has adapted to climatic changes.

Believed to be more than 5,000 years old, it is on the brink of replacing Methuselah, a 4,850-year-old Great Basin bristlecone pine found in California in the United States, as the oldest tree on the planet.

“It’s a survivor, there are no others that have had the opportunity to live so long,” said Antonio Lara, a researcher at Austral University and Chile’s centre for climate science and resilience, who is part of the team measuring the tree’s age.

The Great Grandfather lies on the edge of a ravine in a forest in the southern Los Rios region, 800 kilometres to the south of the capital Santiago.

It is a Fitzroya cupressoides, a type of cypress tree that is endemic to the south of the continent.

In recent years, tourists have walked an hour through the forest to the spot to be photographed beside the new “oldest tree in the world”.

Due to its growing fame, the national forestry body has had to increase the number of park rangers and restrict access to protect the Great Grandfather.

By contrast, the exact location of Methuselah is kept a secret.

Also known as the Patagonian cypress, it is the largest tree species in South America.

It lives alongside other tree species, such as coigue, plum pine and tepa, Darwin’s frogs, lizards, and birds such as the chucao tapaculo and Chilean hawk.

For centuries its thick trunk has been chopped down to build houses and ships, and it was heavily logged during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Scientists excited

Park warden Anibal Henriquez discovered the tree while patrolling the forest in 1972. He died of a heart attack 16 years later while patrolling the same forest on horseback.

“He didn’t want people and tourists to know [where it was] because he knew it was very valuable,” said his daughter Nancy Henriquez, herself a park warden.

Henrique’s nephew, Jonathan Barichivich, grew up playing amongst the Fitzroya and is now one of the scientists studying the species.

In 2020, Barichivich and Lara managed to extract a sample from the Great Grandfather using the longest manual drill that exists, but they did not reach the centre.

They estimated that their sample was 2,400 years old and used a predictive model to calculate the full age of the tree.

Barichivich said that “80 per cent of the possible trajectories show the tree would be 5,000 years old”.

He hopes to soon publish the results.

The study has created excitement within the scientific community given that dendrochronology — the method of dating tree rings to when they were formed — is less accurate when it comes to older trees as many have a rotten core.

‘Symbols of resistence’

This is about more than just a competition to enter the record books though, as the Great Grandfather is a font of valuable information.

“There are many other reasons that give value and sense to this tree and the need to protect it,” said Lara.

There are very few thousands-years-old trees on the planet.

“The ancient trees have genes and a very special history because they are symbols of resistance and adaptation. They are nature’s best athletes,” said Barichivich.

“They are like an open book and we are like the readers who read every one of their rings,” said Carmen Gloria Rodriguez, an assistant researcher at the dendrochronology and global change laboratory at Austral University.

Those pages show dry and rainy years, depending on the width of the rings.

Fires and earthquakes are also recorded in those rings, such as the most powerful tremor in history that hit this area in 1960.

The Great Grandfather is also considered a time capsule that can offer a window into the past.

“If these trees disappear, so too will disappear an important key about how life adapts to changes on the planet,” said Barichivich.