This Blew My Mind!
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The world's first fox-dog hybrid has been confirmed, discovered in Brazil: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/13/first-dog-fox-hybrid-discovered-in-wild-brazil
Sadly, the animal has died since it was discovered last year.
Paraphrased from the article:
South American foxes belong to the genus lycalopex.
Lycalopex animals, which includes the pampas fox, are genetically different to both dogs and European foxes. The genus name literally means “wolf fox”. This hybrid is believed to be the first time a dog has bred outside the canis group.
“Although the common English name is pampas fox, the species is not closely related to the European foxes,” Dr Kretschmer said.
“The pampas fox is more closely related to dogs. Even so, this hybridisation occurred between two species that are more phylogenetically distant than the previously reported hybridisation reported in other parts of the world.”
Scientists gave the hybrid the name "dogxim". They looked at the dogxim’s genes and found 76 chromosomes. Only one canid, the maned wolf, has this amount of chromosomes and it looks so different to the newly-discovered Brazilian animal that the scientists ruled it out.
A dog has 78 chromosomes and a pampas fox 74 and hybridisation of the two would produce 76 chromosomes. No other interspecies could produce the dogxim’s karyotype, the team says.
Mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down maternally in the cell’s energy-making capsules, revealed fox heritage. However, elsewhere in the genome were clear stretches of dog-like DNA.
“In our study we recorded the first case of hybridisation between one species of wild canid and the domestic dog,” study first author Bruna Elenara Szynwelski, a PhD student in genetics and molecular biology at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, told The Telegraph.
“But, different to cases of hybridisation studied in North America, Europe, and Africa, this hybridisation occurred between species from the distinct genera: lycalopex and canis.”
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Maybe not the most mind blowing thing, but I found it interesting and I know stitching and clothing construction is of interest around here:
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@EdH badass video by one of the best vloggers out there IMO--thanks for sharing.
- topic:timeago-later,2 months
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This could just be vapourware (vapourwear?) but fucking Star Trek could be reality before we know it...
No idea if it will actually work, but damn it's a cool idea.
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@EdH said in This Blew My Mind!:
vapourware
1 billion dollar kickstarter in bound! Vapourware surely, can't really see the utility advantage over getting your iPhone out of your pocket? Then again, they said something similar about the first Mac
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@AdamJ said in This Blew My Mind!:
can't really see the utility advantage over getting your iPhone out of your pocket?
Depends on how tight your jeans are...
I have a lot of questions on how well it actually works. Apparently the device is available for pre-order already. As for use cases, I didn't see the point in an Apple Watch until I got one, but actually just being able to glance at my wrist when something pings me to know whether I need to get my iPhone out of my pocket is a huge boon and saves me a lot of screen time and distraction. (I don't know about you, but whenever I look at my phone I end up doing 5 things I didn't intend to and forget what I got it out of my pocket for...)
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@AdamJ Don't get me wrong, I'm ever the sceptic, but I'm messing around with language AI a fair amount for work and it really is quite powerful once you get used to the 'art' of giving it prompts that generate useful responses. And the next versions will be multi-modal AI's like the one imagined in the promo video above, where you can hold up a picture of someone and ask "tell me about this person".
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Definitely need an AI for restock date estimates too
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@popvulture I don't want to become a statistic in a newspaper article about the workforce being replaced by AI !
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@AdamJ hahaha fair enough, more just wanted to spare y’all our constant badgering
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@AdamJ - you’d melt your virtual CPUs with the number of requests this would generate!
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@Matt said in This Blew My Mind!:
What could possibly go wrong?
This:
TL;DW - 2 New York lawyers used ChatGPT to do legal research. ChatGPT gave them cases that didn't exist. The lawyers filed an affidavit relying on those cases without checking. Once they were rumbled by the other side, who couldn't find any reference to the fictitious cases, the Judge was not happy. At all.
- topic:timeago-later,21 days
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@EdH How could they trust ChatGPT without verifying the sources? ChatGPT or any AI is not a reliable research tool.
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@EdH there is a Black Mirror episode about this:
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@danyhearty I don't think they realised that. The tech was very new at the time and I expect they thought it was generating text based on a search, rather than just operating as a glorified predictive text generator. I was in charge of writing our workplace's policy on Generative AI and the case of these two was very instructive.
Incidentally, I got ChatGPT to do a first draft and it was generally very good and came up with important clauses that I had not thought of. Honestly, it was good enough that I could have sent it out as it was if I wanted a summary "don't do x, y, or z" kind of policy, but I wanted to enhance it with a brief explanation of why each clause of the policy was in place. Definitely a useful tool to get a draft down on paper.