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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2022 March 11

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March 11

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Robots

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Are there any circumstances where real robots or AIs are compliant with the Three Laws of Robotics, or the extended versions of such? --Iloveparrots (talk) 05:16, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Robots aren't sophisticated enough to understand situations to the point where they could even potentially apply the three laws. Clarityfiend (talk) 07:13, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Telephone on president's desk

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Do Biden and Putin still have the direct line, red telephones on their desks (as what happened with the American and Russian presidents 40 years ago) so they can talk to each other if the war takes a turn for the worse, clear up misunderstandings and negotiate before someone does something terrible that cannot be undone? Or is that all ancient history now? --146.200.129.62 (talk) 06:53, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The war? What war is Biden involved in? HiLo48 (talk) 07:08, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I was talking about the current Ukraine situation. Didn't really mean to make a US party political point (not American myself). Just that Biden is the current top man and is involved in the crisis, along with a load of other world leaders. 146.200.129.62 (talk) 07:32, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Moscow–Washington hotline says "the hotline was never a telephone line, and no red phones were used. The first implementation used Teletype equipment, and shifted to fax machines in 1986. Since 2008, the Moscow–Washington hotline has been a secure computer link over which messages are exchanged by a secure form of email." Clarityfiend (talk) 07:11, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
So, the presidents never actually directly speak to each other? --Iloveparrots (talk) 08:00, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Apparently not. Also, [quibble, quibble] the big boss over there was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Clarityfiend (talk) 09:39, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I always thought they had a phone line, but someone else said it was text only. I don't suppose it's a given that the American president can speak Russian or the Soviet president can speak English. --Iloveparrots (talk) 08:04, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Written communication was chosen because it is less liable to distortion - a verbal misunderstanding could have serious consequences. Also there's a permanent record of what was said - no need for secret tapes which could be doctored . 2A00:23C5:CD8A:1100:7D8C:33FE:7E83:9F9C (talk) 11:18, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Written communications are also prone to verbal misunderstandings, as the medium is inherently verbal. But only spoken communications are prone to oral misunderstandings. Understand? :) -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 18:28, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
That actually depends on which connotation of verbal is applied. Per https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verbal#Adjective written words are not verbal when "Expressly spoken rather than written; oral". Modocc (talk) 23:13, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
For completeness, world leaders do make audio phone calls to each other on a regular basis, including Presidents of the United States and Russia. Here's a memorandum of a phone call between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin from 1993. Such calls typically involve multiple people, usually involve a fair amount of planning, and an official record is kept. --Robert Merkel (talk) 05:09, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Reversing the aging process.

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Greetings!

I stumbled across this article in the Jerusalem Post claiming that Israeli scientists have discovered how to make eggs, harvested from 40 and 50-year old women, resemble and act like those of 20-year old women.

https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/pregnancy-and-birth/article-700813

I apologize in advance if this is a stupid question.

But could a similar procedure be used in vitro to reverse the biological age of donated human organs and tissues before implanting them in new recipients? Or might one day such a method even reverse the aging of an adult human being in vivo?

And closer to our current time frame, can something similar to this help us create better organoids?

Thank you for reading this.

Pine (talk) 10:58, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Human organs are not made from eggs and the number of cells of them is many billions. There is no known way to reset the age of all of them. Ruslik_Zero 13:07, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Eggs and sperm can be frozen for years and not die, they are not good evidence for what can be done to humans. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 15:06, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
You mean that the Mechanism that protects the eggs could also be used for ablated stem cells in the body? 2A02:908:426:D280:210B:493E:1F19:EBBB (talk) 08:59, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]