Features

PARIS — AIDS researchers announced on Wednesday that a fourth person has been “cured” of HIV, but the dangerous procedure for patients also battling cancer may be little comfort for the tens of millions living with the virus worldwide.

The 66-year-old man, named the “City of Hope” patient after the Californian centre where he was treated, was declared in remission in the lead up to the International AIDS Conference, which begins in Montreal, Canada, on Friday.

He is the second person to be announced cured this year, after researchers said in February that a US woman dubbed the New York patient had also gone into remission.

The City of Hope patient, like the Berlin and London patients before him, achieved lasting remission from the virus after a bone marrow transplant to treat cancer.

Another man, the Duesseldorf patient, has also previously been said to have reached remission, potentially bringing the number cured to five.

Jana Dickter, an infectious disease specialist at the City of Hope, told AFP that because the latest patient was the oldest yet to achieve remission, his success could be promising for older HIV sufferers who also have cancer.

Dickter is the lead author of research on the patient which was announced at a pre-conference in Montreal but has not been peer reviewed.

‘I am beyond grateful’

“When I was diagnosed with HIV in 1988, like many others, I thought it was a death sentence,” said the patient, who does not want to be identified.

“I never thought I would live to see the day that I no longer have HIV,” he said in a City of Hope statement. “I am beyond grateful.”

Dickter said the patient had told her of the stigma he experienced during the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

“He saw many of his friends and loved ones become very ill and ultimately succumb to the disease,” she said.

He had “full-blown AIDS” for a time, she said, but was part of early trials of antiretroviral therapy, which now allows many of the 38 million with HIV globally to live with the virus. 

He had HIV for 31 years, longer than any previous patient who went into remission. 

After being diagnosed with leukaemia, in 2019 he received a bone marrow transplant with stem cells from an unrelated donor with a rare mutation in which part of the CCR5 gene is missing, making people resistant to HIV.

He waited until getting vaccinated for Covid-19 in March 2021 to stop taking antiretrovirals, and has been in remission from both HIV and cancer since.

Reduced-intensity chemotherapy worked for the patient, potentially allowing older HIV patients with cancer to get the treatment, Dickter said.

But it is a complex procedure with serious side effects and “isn’t a suitable option for most people with HIV”, she added.

Steven Deeks, an HIV expert at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the research, said the “first thing you do in a bone marrow transplant is you destroy your own immune system temporarily”.

“You would never do this if you didn’t have cancer,” he told AFP.

‘Holy Grail’

Also announced at the AIDS conference was research about a 59-year-old Spanish woman with HIV who has maintained an undetectable viral load for 15 years despite stopping antiretroviral therapy.

Sharon Lewin, president-elect of the International AIDS Society which convenes the conference, said that it was not quite the same as the City of Hope patient, because the virus remained at a very low level.

“A cure remains the Holy Grail of HIV research,” Lewin said.

“We have seen a handful of individual cure cases before and the two presented today provide continued hope for people living with HIV and inspiration for the scientific community.”

She also pointed to a “truly exciting development” towards identifying HIV in an individual cell, which is “a bit like finding a needle in a haystack”.

Deeks, an author of the new research also presented at the conference, said it was an “unprecedented deep dive into the biology of the infected cell”.

The researchers identified that a cell with HIV has several particular characteristics.

It can proliferate better than most, is hard to kill, and is both resilient and hard to detect, Deeks said.

“This is why HIV is a lifelong infection.”

But he said that cases such as the City of Hope patient offered a potential roadmap towards a more broadly available cure, possibly using CRISPR gene-editing technology.

“I think that if you can get rid of HIV, and get rid of CCR5, the door by which HIV gets in, then you can cure someone,” Deeks said.

“It’s theoretically possible — we’re not there yet — to give someone a shot in the arm that will deliver an enzyme that will go into the cells and knock out CCR5, and knock out the virus.

“But that’s science fiction for now.”

WASHINGTON — As early as 7,400 years ago, Siberian dogs had evolved to be far smaller than wolves, making them more dependent on humans for food including sea mammals and fish trapped below the ice, a recent study showed.

Robert Losey of the University of Alberta, who led the research published in Science Advances, said the findings helped explain the growth in the early dog population, as people put them to work for hunting, herding and sledding.

“The long term changes in dog diet have really been oversimplified,” he told AFP, explaining that prior work had focused only on two main ideas to explain how dogs transitioned from wolves, a process that began some 40,000 years ago.

The first of these was that friendlier wolves approached human camps during the Ice Age to scavenge for meat, eventually became isolated from their wild counterparts, and were then intentionally bred into dogs.

The second was that some dogs evolved a better capacity to digest starches following the agricultural revolution, which is why some modern dog breeds have more copies of the AMY2B gene that creates pancreatic amylase.

To study ancient dog diets in more depth, Losey and colleagues analysed the remains of around 200 ancient dogs from the past 11,000 years, and a similar number of ancient wolves.

“We had to go to collections all over Siberia, we analysed those bones, took samples of the collagen, and analysed the protein in labs,” he said.

Based on the remains, the team made statistical estimates for body sizes.

They also used a technique called stable isotope analysis to generate dietary estimates.

They discovered that dogs of 7,000-8,000 years ago “were already quite small, meaning that they just couldn’t do the things that most wolves were doing”, said Losey.

This in turn led to greater dependence on humans for food, and reliance on small prey and scavenging, rather than prey bigger than themselves, which wolves hunt.

“We see that dogs have marine diets, meaning they’re eating fish, shellfish, seals and sea lions, which they can’t easily get themselves,” he said.

Ancient dogs were found to be eating fish “in areas of Siberia where the lakes and rivers are frozen over for seven to eight months of the year”.

Wolves of the time, and today, were hunting in packs and mainly eating various species of deer.

Benefits and challenges

These new diets brought dogs both benefits and challenges.

“Beneficial because they could access stuff from humans, and those are oftentimes easy meals, but it came with the costs of all these new diseases and problems, like not enough nutrition,” said Losey.

While the new bacteria and parasites they were exposed to could have helped some adapt, some dog populations might not have survived.

Most of the first dogs of the Americas died out, for unclear reasons, and were replaced by European dogs — though it’s not thought colonisation was to blame.

Those dogs that did survive acquired more diverse gut microbiomes, helping them further in digesting more carbohydrates associated with life with humans.

MAGALIESBURG, South Africa — Chinese demand for traditional medicines has sent poachers hunting for African animals from rhinos to pangolins. Now a humbler creature is threatened: donkeys.

Once prized by emperors, a gelatin called ejiao — made from donkey skins — is increasingly sought after by China’s middle class.

The health benefits are believed similar to products derived from rhino horns, from working as a blood thinner to acting as an aphrodisiac, which could ease pressure on endangered rhinos.

But as in countries from Burkina Faso to Kenya, South Africa is now seeing its donkey population plunge, threatening other businesses that make soaps and creams from donkey milk.

“In South Africa we have seen a rapid decline of the donkey population due to illegal slaughter to supply the Chinese skin trade,” said Jesse Christelis, co-founder of the Donkey Dairy. 

A recent study by researchers from the University of South Africa showed the donkey population shrank from 210,000 in 1996 to about 146,000 in 2019.

The shrinking supply has sent prices soaring. According to Christelis, a donkey would fetch about $30 at auction five years ago. Now they cost about $125 each.

That is still a relative bargain in China where donkey hides that sold for $473 in 2018 now sell for $1,160.

The ejiao produced from them can sell for up to $360 per kilogramme.

South Africa legally exports about 10,500 donkey hides to China every year, but the real quantity is believed much higher as smugglers have tapped into the trade.

“This year, we intercepted two loads of donkeys that were going to Lesotho,” said Grace De Lange of the National Council of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Donkey rustlers

“On our farm there has been a big focus to go look for donkeys that have been placed in places of misery and we actually buy them out,” he told AFP.

“We sit often on most of the auctions whether it is online or a physical auction to out bid the kill-buyers who supply the trade with donkey skins.”

Theft of donkeys also hits small farmers who need the animals to transport their produce.

“Stock theft units need to be more proactive,” said Ashley Ness, an inspector at the Highveld Horse Care Unit, an equine welfare agency situated on the outskirts of Johannesburg.

“Instead of taking action after the cause, they should take leads from villages that get approached by suspicious agents.” 

The top agriculture official in the North West province, Manketsi Tlhape, said they are “investigating all the reported incidents”.

However, donkey farmers like Christelis have limited options to protect their herd from thieves.

“We have electric fences, alarms and our donkeys are also micro chipped in case they get stolen,” he said.

Donkey Dairy

There is scant information on the size of the ejiao market, but the Britain-based animal welfare group Donkey Sanctuary estimated that in 2019 China needed 5 million skins to supply to the trade.

In contrast, the market for products using donkey milk is still in its infancy. The size of the global donkey milk market is projected to reach just $16 million by 2026.

South Africa has two donkey dairies, but they may not be viable if prices for the animals keep rising.

Kenya banned donkey slaughter in 2020, after the populations there plunged due to the skin trade.

Donkey milk is believed to contain antioxidant, antimicrobial and antidiabetic properties.

“I think the donkey skin trade is definitely a threat to donkey dairies in South Africa and across Africa,” said Christelis, who owns 116 donkeys at his farm.

“The increased demand for donkey milk is mainly from people suffering from eczema, psoriasis,” he said. “Seeing the donkey population being depleted, we don’t know if the demand for donkey milk will be met.”

By Ghaith Madadha

Powerful, yet, bland, electric vehicles (EV) are hailed as the future of clean motoring by some, but derided by others as a insufficiently developed, heavy, limited and fundamentally flawed technology that only-re-locates pollution to power plants and mines.

Regardless of one’s view, EVs are set to become ever more prevalent, and so manufacturers are looking ever more to a more charismatic past to mine for inspiration to make the EV a more desirable prospect to the public. The retro-futuristic EV also aims at drawing a sense of continuity and association with brands’ own heritage. 

Hyundai N Vision 74

The more evocatively styled of two Hyundai “rolling lab” concept cars unveiled earlier this month, the N Vision 74 is a stylish high performance hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) coupe pointing towards future possibilities for the brand’s sporting N division. Inspired by the Giorgetto Giugiaro designed 1974 Hyundai Pony Coupe concept with its clean surfacing, uncomplicatedly sharp lines, rearwards orientation and dramatically recessed headlights, the N Vision 74’s could just as easily be an homage to another iconic Giugiaro design; the 1981 DeLorean DMC-12.

Sharing a similarly angular Giugiaro-like roofline as both historical cars, the Vision 74 is, however, more muscular with its jutting lower lip and sills, large rear wing and big, gaping mid-rear cooling vents. Its bulgingly blistered wheel-arches, meanwhile, resemble those of the classic 1980s Audi Quattro, which itself is rooted in another Giugiaro design. That said, the Vision 74’s lower roofline and wide flat bonnet draw parallels with the DMC-12, but its grille design and “parametric pixel” headlights owe slightly more to the Pony Concept. 

Driving the rear wheels through twin electric motors each side, the N Vision 74 is said to bring a fun factor to high performance electric propulsion, with a torque vectoring system operating like a limited-slip differential in apportioning power for stability and agility. Claiming impressive performance figures including 670BHP and 664lb/ft torque the Vision 74 promises of 3-second 0-100km/h acceleration and a 250km/h top speed. With 4.2kg capacity hydrogen fuel cells solving many of the issues related to EV charging time and range, the Vision 74 promises 5-minute re-fuelling time and a 600km range.

Specifications

Engine type: Fuel cell electric vehicle

Drive-line: Twin electric motors, rear-wheel-drive

Battery: 62.4kWh, 800v recharging capability

Hydrogen fuel stack: 85-95kW

Hydrogen capacity: 4.2kg

Re-fueling time: 5-minutes

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 670 (680) [500]

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 664 (900)

Top speed: 250km/h

Range: 600km

Length: 4,952mm

Width: 1,995mm

Height: 1,331mm

Wheelbase: 2,905mm

Opel Manta GSe ElektroMod

A different take on the retro-futuristic electric concept car, the 2021 Opel Manta GSe ElektroMod is, as the name implies, a modified EV version of the German brand’s classic 1970s coupe. A more charmingly basic and workable EV concept than most, the ElektroMod is an original 1974 Manta, with its uncomplicated yet evocatively dramatic shape intact, yet, it adds a few subtly modern styling details including its facia, lights and wheels.

A moderate yet effective EV conversion of the sort that is sure to gain real world popularity, the modified Manta GSe features a smaller 147BHP electric motor driving the rear wheels through an original 4-speed manual gearbox mated to a modified clutch. Capable of 150km/h and a range of 200km, the ElektroMod’s manual gearbox surely makes for more engaging and authentic driving, but nevertheless has ample torque to drive from standstill in fourth gear. Weighing 1,137kg, the ElektroMod’s rear-mounted batteries and electric motor exert a 175kg penalty over the original.

Specifications

Engine: Front-mounted synchronous electric motor

Gearbox: 4-speed manual, rear-wheel-drive

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 145 (147) [108]

Top speed: 150km/h

Battery: Lithium ion, 31kWh

Range 200km

Kerb weight: 1,137kg

Brakes, F/R: Ventilated discs/discs

Tyres: 205/40R17

MG Cyberster

Unveiled at last year’s Shanghai motor show, the MG Cyberster concept is a futuristic interpretation of the classic MGB roadster and a nod to the brand’s British origins. With dynamic tension oozing from its tautly skinned body, the Cyberster’s jutting angles, generous curves and classic long bonnet proportions lend it a sense of urgent athleticism. With a vast wire-like grille design and scalloped wheel-arches, the Cyberster mixes the classic with the modern, and incorporates much larger wheels and a shorter, more swept back windshield than its iconic predecessor.

With little information or specifications released about the Cyberster or how functional it is, it does, however, seem to be densely packed for a small two-seat roadster, with a large enough battery pack and electric motor to provide its promised supercar-like 3-second 0-100km/h acceleration and 800km driving range. Incorporating 5G connectivity and an “interactive gaming cockpit”, earlier Cyberster press releases had projected that it would also include Level 3 autonomous driving.

Specifications

Engine: Electric motor

0-100km/h: 3-seconds

Range: up to 800km

Audi S1 E-tron 

Quattro ‘Hoonitron’

A functional one-off show car built for automotive showman, stunt driver and now official Audi collaborator, Ken Block, rather than a traditional concept car, the 2021 S1 E-tron Quattro “Hoonitron” is inspired by the German manufacturer’s three-time Pike’s Peak hill climb winning 1980s S1 Quattro. With enormous and wild front and rear wings, giant protruding sills and wheel-arch blisters, the iconic original S1 Quattro’s trademark details are reinterpreted in a more futuristic manner for the E-tron Quattro, which however incorporate a more current fascia design.

Menacingly muscular and appealing in its own right, the space-frame built E-tron Quattro’s heavily stylised design, low arcing roofline and rounded edges however lacks the brutally sharp angles and lines of the charismatic original with its big glasshouse and functional design. Said to be enormously capable in performance, Audi may have not disclosed output or performance specifications, but the Audi Sport developed E-tron Quattro is expected to feature an at least two electric motor four-wheel-drive system.

Specifications

Engine: Electric motor

Gearbox: Four-wheel-drive

By Dr Silvia Zayadin
Veterinarian

Summer is finally here and it is time to plan for your next vacation. While checking dates and reservations, you’re worrying about your pet.

Travelling abroad with your pet

Different countries have different regulations for pet travel so do your research first. Remember that this process might be more demanding for certain countries than others; thus, you’ll need to start planning for that in advance.

Vaccines for your pet

First, your pet needs to be fully vaccinated; this includes the rabies vaccine. A microchip implanted in your pet’s skin for identification is also a must. Some countries such as the European Union, the United States and the United Arab Emirates require a rabies titre test. This test measures the number (titre) of antibodies formed after receiving the rabies vaccine. 

The test is not done in Jordan as it must be done in an international licence reference laboratory. In this case, a blood sample is taken from your pet and sent to a certified laboratory abroad. The results usually take a few weeks to be ready. Still, some countries (like EU countries) require that 90 days pass from the day of sampling before the pet can enter the destination country. 

Veterinarian visit

A few days before the travel date, your pet needs to be examined by the veterinarian; your pet will get its deworming and external parasite control prevention. Then the vet will issue a health certificate, which acts as your pet’s passport.

Discuss your pet’s behaviour with your veterinarian, as some pets might suffer from anxiety during the trip or have motion sickness. Your veterinarian will advise if you need to use certain products and medications to help your pet during the journey. 

Pre-booking tips

Ensure that the airline you choose is pet-friendly and that the aircraft is appropriate for live animal transportation. Every airline has its own regulations, so ensure to ask about all the details and follow all instructions. Failing to complete all the requirements can deny your pet the right to enter the destination country.

You also need to check that the facilities at your travel destination are pet-friendly. You don’t want unpleasant surprises that can turn your dream vacation into a nightmare. 

Keeping your pet in Jordan?

If you decide to leave your pet in Jordan, you can either leave it at home and ask a family member to take care of it, use professional boarding facilities, or keep it at another family’s home.

Professional boarding facilities in Jordan are available. You can choose one based on your preferences. When trying to decide which facility is the most appropriate following:

•How long you will be using the services of the boarding facility

•The species, breed and age of your pet

•If your dog is well trained and gets along with other dogs

•If your pet is friendly with people

•If your pet has any behavioural problems such as separation anxiety

•If your pet is on any medications for any health conditions

•If your pet is on any special diet

•The location of the boarding facility

•Your budget for this kind of service

•If your pet will need additional training or socialisation

Once you get all these questions answered, you can go and visit the boarding facilities that meet your needs. It is always good to see where your pet will be staying while you are away. What is suitable for one person might not be good for you, so always choose the facility based on your own preferences and judgement.

Before leaving your pet at the boarding facility, ensure your pet’s vaccinations are up-to-date, given the internal and external parasite preventive medications and healthy.

Notify the facility if your pet is not spayed or neutered so the staff will take precautions to prevent accidental mating. Report any medical conditions and bring all the medications your pet takes so the staff can continue giving them as prescribed.

If your pet is on a special diet or has specific dietary routines, discuss them with the staff so your pet’s diet won’t be changed.

Always leave one or more emergency contacts and provide the name and address of your veterinary care provider (clinic) in case of any medical emergency your pet might suffer during its stay.

Most boarding facilities will provide daily updates on your pet or even share a live stream during the pet’s stay at the facility. Ask about those options and discuss the pros and cons with your family, veterinarian and service provider.

For more details on pet travel requirements, you can check pettravel.com and choose the country you’ll be travelling to, or call your veterinary clinic to help you with the process.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

By Tomohiro Osaki
Agence France-Presse

KUMAMOTO, Japan — Inside Koichi Miyatsu’s blue, child-sized backpack are neatly folded cartoon-print sweatshirts and a pair of white sneakers — all he has from before he was left at Japan’s only “baby hatch”. 

He was only a toddler when he was placed in the hatch at a hospital in southern Japan’s Kumamoto, where children can be left anonymously by desperate family. 

“These are some of the clothes I was wearing when I was left there,” 18-year-old Miyatsu told AFP. 

“They are the oldest memories I have of my childhood... so I’ve treasured them ever since.” 

This year, Miyatsu became the first person to speak publicly in Japan about being abandoned in the hatch, which first opened in 2007, modelled on a German programme.

His comments have rekindled debate about a scheme described by supporters as a last resort for marginalised women but criticised by opponents as encouraging the abandonment of children.

For Miyatsu, though, there is no question.

“The day I was left there was the day a new chapter of my life began,” the university freshman said. 

“I owe what I am today to the baby hatch.”

Catholic-run Jikei Hospital in Kumamoto launched the programme to provide an alternative for those struggling to parent and unable or unwilling to seek formal solutions like giving children up for care.

They argue it can prevent the abuse and even death of children, and in 15 years, 161 babies and toddlers have been left with them.

‘I was there once’

Soon after Miyatsu was found sitting uncomprehendingly in the hatch, he was taken in by Yoshimitsu and Midori Miyatsu in rural Kumamoto.

Parents of five biological children, the couple have also fostered over 30 others and didn’t hesitate to take in Miyatsu.

“I thought an angel was sent our way,” Yoshimitsu, 65, said recalling Miyatsu’s arrival.

The pair have long supported Jikei’s programme, having witnessed firsthand the troubled circumstances of other foster children, including broken families, delinquency, homelessness and unexpected pregnancies.

“Once a heavily pregnant girl with practically no money sought our help on a freezing December day... so we knew there were kids out there who would need this kind of place,” said Midori, 63.

Miyatsu was among the first children left at the hatch, and he was found with nothing indicating his name, age or birthplace.

“I have no recollection of the moment when I was dropped off... but the image of the hatch’s door is seared into a corner of my brain,” he said. 

Around a year after he was left, he saw a photo of the hatch in a newspaper, Midori said.

“He told us, ‘I was there once.’ That’s when we knew that he remembered.” 

‘Complicated feelings’

He was given a name by a local official, and his age was established by DNA testing. His early days of care were tough, with regular nightmares and constant finger-sucking.

But the couple never hid his backstory, and with time, the trauma faded. 

Years later, he learned more about his origins, including that his biological mother was killed in a car accident five months after his birth.

He keeps a framed picture of her, with curly hair like his, and says he feels she is “keeping watch on me from heaven”.

“I would tell her that I have grown up to be 18 years old, and that I want to live the life that was cut short for her.”

Every month, Miyatsu provides free meals to underprivileged children at a local church and he wants to work with children in the future, and perhaps become a foster parent too.

He hopes telling his story will “pave the way for other children [left in the box] to come forward and get their messages across”, describing his experience overcoming “complicated feelings about myself”.

“But even if there are a few pieces missing, it doesn’t fundamentally change who I am today. I don’t think my identity should be dictated by the first few years of my life,” he said. 

“Life after the baby hatch is far more important.”

SAN FRANCISCO — An internal fight over whether Google built technology with human-like consciousness has spilled into the open, exposing the ambitions and risks inherent in artificial intelligence that can feel all too real.

The Silicon Valley giant suspended one of its engineers last week who argued the firm’s AI system LaMDA seemed “sentient”, a claim Google officially disagrees with.

Several experts told AFP they were also highly sceptical of the consciousness claim, but said human nature and ambition could easily confuse the issue.

“The problem is that... when we encounter strings of words that belong to the languages we speak, we make sense of them,” said Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor at University of Washington.

“We are doing the work of imagining a mind that’s not there,” she added.

LaMDA is a massively powerful system that uses advanced models and training on over 1.5 trillion words to be able to mimic how people communicate in written chats. 

The system was built on a model that observes how words relate to one another and then predicts what words it thinks will come next in a sentence or paragraph, according to Google’s explanation.

“It’s still at some level just pattern matching,” said Shashank Srivastava, an assistant professor in computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“Sure you can find some strands of really what would appear meaningful conversation, some very creative text that they could generate. But it quickly devolves in many cases,” he added.

Still, assigning consciousness gets tricky. 

It has often involved benchmarks like the Turing test, which a machine is considered to have passed if a human has a written chat with one, but can’t tell.

“That’s actually a fairly easy test for any AI of our vintage here in 2022 to pass,” said Mark Kingwell, a University of Toronto philosophy professor.

“A tougher test is a contextual test, the kind of thing that current systems seem to get tripped up by, common sense knowledge or background ideas — the kinds of things that algorithms have a hard time with,” he added.

‘No easy answers’

AI remains a delicate topic in and outside the tech world, one that can prompt amazement but also a bit of discomfort. 

Google, in a statement, was swift and firm in downplaying whether LaMDA is self-aware.

“These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic,” the company said.

“Hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA and we are not aware of anyone else making... wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphising LaMDA,” it added.

At least some experts viewed Google’s response as an effort to shut down the conversation on an important topic.

“I think public discussion of the issue is extremely important, because public understanding of how vexing the issue is, is key,” said academic Susan Schneider.

“There are no easy answers to questions of consciousness in machines,” added the founding director of the Centre for the Future of the Mind at Florida Atlantic University.

Lack of scepticism by those working on the topic is also possible at a time when people are “swimming in a tremendous amount of AI hype”, as linguistics professor Bender put it. 

“And lots and lots of money is getting thrown at this. So the people working on it have this very strong signal that they’re doing something important and real” resulting in them not necessarily “maintaining appropriate scepticism”, she added.

In recent years AI has also suffered from bad decisions — Bender cited research that found a language model could pick up racist and anti-immigrant biases from doing training on the Internet.

Kingwell, the University of Toronto professor, said the question of AI sentiency is part “Brave New World” and part “1984”, two dystopian works that touch on issues like technology and human freedom.

“I think for a lot of people, they don’t really know which way to turn, and hence the anxiety,” he added.

PARIS — A team of astrophysicists known for debunking previous supposed black holes announced a discovery of their own on Monday: the first “dormant” stellar-mass black hole spotted orbiting a star in a nearby galaxy.

While these black holes are thought to be common throughout the universe, they have proved difficult to find, and they have themselves rejected several possible candidates in recent years.

Now the international team has found a “needle in a haystack”, said Tomer Shenar, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam and lead author of a new study in the Nature Astronomy journal.

The team was searching the skies for something that could eventually become a binary black hole, in which two black holes orbit each other after swallowing their stars in a supernovae explosion.

“We found a quite massive star, that weighs 25 times the mass of our Sun, that is orbiting around something that we do not see,” Shenar told AFP.

They believe the blue star, which is in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy that neighbours our Milky Way, is locked in a death dance with a black hole that has nine times the mass of our Sun.

These kinds of black holes are normally detected by the X-ray radiation they emit as they collect material from their companion star.

But this binary system, known as VFTS 243, is called dormant because it does not emit X-rays — it is not close enough to suck matter from its star.

‘Black hole destroyer’

Hugues Sana, astrophysicist at the KU Leuven University in Belgium, said the Milky Way alone is thought to have around 100 million stellar-mass black holes, which are far smaller than their supermassive big brothers.

However, only 10 have been found, said Sana, a co-author of the study. 

This could be because many are laying dormant, biding their time to eventually swallow their companion star.

Sana said observing them was like watching two people dance in a dark room, one dressed in white and the other in black. You might only see one dancer, but you know the other one is there.

“We’ve never really detected such systems before,” Shenar told AFP. “There have been a few claims in the last years, but they have all more or less been refuted,” Shenar told AFP.

Indeed, members of his team were among those rejecting previous discoveries, by laying out alternatives for what the data could indicate.

Because of this, Shenar said they expected extra scrutiny.

So they went about meticulously eliminating all the other possibilities, Shenar said, until they were satisfied that “it’s either a fat, invisible alien — or a black hole”.

Then they called the most famous black hole debunker they knew.

Kareem El Badry of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics has been “debunking black holes one after another” over the last couple of years, Tomer said, dubbing him the “black hole destroyer”.

“I sent him the data and I told him, listen, we found this object — prove me wrong,” Tomer said.

“I had my doubts,” said Badry, who joined the team and ran his own simulations.

“But I could not find a plausible explanation for the data that did not involve a black hole.”

Not with a bang, but a whimper

The discovery could also give an insight into how black holes are formed.

Stellar-mass black holes are believed to be born during the death of a large star, in a massive supernovae explosion.

The force of the blast knocks black holes in a binary system into an elliptical, rather than circular orbit.

However, VFTS 243 has an orbit that is also perfectly circular.

“That means that the star immediately vanished into the black hole,” Shenar said.

“This has a lot of implications as to how these black hole pairs form,” he said, adding that VFTS 243’s star could eventually collapse in a similar way.

Andrew Norton, an astrophysicist at Britain’s Open University who was not involved in the study, said: “This is important evidence that all such stars may not end their lives in supernovae explosions.”

Shenar said he welcomed other scientists trying to debunk the debunkers.

“If someone comes and debunks this as well, I’m sure they will have a pretty fantastic explanation — like the fat alien.”