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Welcome to our second instalment of our fortnightly newsletter! We’d love to get you all up to speed with what events we have going on soon, and don't forget about Science News and Fun Corner! We hope you all enjoy the read and take a well-deserved break during Flex Week!

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Subcommittee Recruitment

SCISOC subcommittee applications have officially closed! Thank you to everyone who took the time to apply and good luck to those who have interviews 😊!! 

 

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UNSW MarkSoc x SCISOC x WAO Presents: CLOUD 9

Are you feeling under the weather about the stress of your mid-semester exams? Get ready to soar above the mundane and escape reality on CLOUD 9!

Party the night away in a dreamy oasis and prepare to take your Friday night to new heights!

 

DETAILS

WHEN: Friday 24th March

TIME: 9:00 pm - Late

WHERE: WAO Superclub

 

For more information, please have a look at the Facebook Event or click the link here https://fb.me/e/XDzYDDd1

 

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AI - A New Way of Life

 

By now, it’s a given that the majority of us have used artificial intelligence in our everyday lives in one way or another. In this day and age, artificial intelligence has a wide range of applications in student life including planning our day-to-day activities, to more ‘clever’ uses such as using it to write applications for internships. A great dilemma nowadays is whether should we live alongside artificial intelligence and make good use of it, or do we restrict ourselves from exploiting artificial intelligence to prevent a ‘dumber generation’.

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Last year in November, OpenAI initially released a software called ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chat bot that was capable of an abundance of tasks. Whether you needed some answers for a math question you couldn’t solve, some inspiration/ideas on what your next essay for class should be about, or even snippets of code to help complete your labs, ChatGPT was more than capable of fulfilling your queries. As of March 2023, a newer version of ChatGPT, ChatGPT 4.0, has been released and is claimed to have even more advanced reasoning capabilities, being able cater to whatever question you desire. With this in mind, many people have now been utilising it for code snippets, answering essay questions, and many more uses.

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This shines light on a big issue for students, raising the question whether they will be capable of synthesising their own ideas and work, when they know that a chatbot can provide a solution that is essentially instant and requires no work. With the increasing reliance on a chatbot to solve the needs of the population, Dr. Li Jiang, the Stanford director of the AIRE (Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Education) program has made clear that it is vital that everyone understands that AI in general will be a part of our way of life, and we will only fall behind if we do not embrace this.

AI is still an ever-changing and dynamic field of study but has already left such a great impact on the world with many people hopping onboard with this technological revolution. The reality is that AI will only become more prominent in the future, and the means of ‘survival’ in the modern world is to understand this technology and make use of it. The greater question is however, what lengths will AI seep into our daily lives and routines, and how much do we really benefit from it?

 

With this new wave of technology continuing to grow and have more reach in the world, we encourage students to also test some software out, and see whether it could benefit your day-to-day lives as well! Some include:

  • ChatGPT: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt

  • Notion: https://www.notion.so/product/ai

  • Quizlet: https://quizlet.com/blog/meet-learning-assistant

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The Last of Us – Science Fiction or Premonition 

 

*May contain minor spoilers of the game and film*

 

Are post-apocalyptic worlds overrun by zombified humans only categorised and seen in fictional narratives?

In this case, the TV adaptation of the very popular game series, ‘The Last of Us’ showcases a world devastated by a very real fungal pandemic. The show starts off with two scientists on a fictional 1968 talk show discussing the microbes that give them pandemic nightmares, giving the example of a fungus that turns ants into living zombies, puppeteering the insects by flooding their brains with hallucinogens. And they go on to say that although the human body temperature keeps us fungus-free, that might not be true if the world got a little bit warmer. 

 

In both the game and TV show, the infected hordes are identifiable by their gruesome appearance with spiky tendrils, mutated mushroom-like garden bodies, and classic aggressive zombie behaviour. As ghastly as this may sound, the inspiration for such horrors was taken from a snippet of BBC’s “Planet Earth” documentary. 

The real-world phenomenon called cordyceps is a type of fungus that mainly infects insects and other arthropods. They distinctively mutate and grow from the heads of their victims and in some cases it can precisely control the mind of its host’s behaviour to spread the infection. 

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It can then force the ant to climb to the highest point of a plant and clamp down on it, creating the ideal situation for the fungus to explode out of its head and infect the rest of any nearby ant colonies. 

 

Now apply that same logic to infecting humans. From a biological perspective, the possibility of cordyceps infecting humans right now is very low. Their uniqueness is super species-specific and can’t even jump from infecting one insect species to another, let alone an organism related to humans. In fact, the fungus, cordyceps, is widely researched and sometimes used in traditional medicines. So as disappointing as that may sound, there are no signs of zombified humans yet!

 

However, it also doesn’t seem theoretically impossible either. Factors like climate change could put pressure on such species to evolve and infect humans. In a warmer world, fungi will also need to adapt to temperature changes and as such, imagine their optimal growth temperatures becoming higher and closer to human body temperatures. 

 

Climate change may have allowed a deadly fungus called Candida auris to acclimate to human body temperatures. A version of the fungus that could infect humans independently emerged on three continents from 2012 to 2015. 

 

Not to worry as most fungal species simply can’t reproduce at human body temperature (37°C). But as the world warms these strains either have to die or adapt and that raises the possibility that fungi that now infect insects or reptiles, could evolve to grow at temperatures closer to human body temperature. At the same time, humans’ average body temperature has been falling since the 19th century, which means the possibility of a post-apocalyptic world coming to life may no longer be a fantasy but a consideration to have for the upcoming future challenges.


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