Late this month due to an extended stay in Kuala Lumpur for the Malaysian general elections. Here are the three articles I’ve managed to glean from around the web in April.
This article from the Pacific Standard magazine covers a paper whose authors examined the obituaries of over 1,000 famous people published in The New York Times to determine if there are any patterns in them. They found that the famous people who died earliest were athletes, performers and non-performers who worked in creative fields. The famous people who died later were politicians, businessmen and military officers. The tentative conclusion is that people who work in sports and the performing arts incur psychological and physical costs that curtail their lifespan.
Here’s a link to a paper claiming that vervet monkeys were able to solve a multiplayer coordination “game” in which a captive monkey was trained to open a container holding a large amount of food, but only if the dominant monkeys of a wild troop stayed outside of an imaginary circle away from the food. The wild monkeys were able to infer the correct behavior by observing the trained monkey and receiving feedback from the trained monkey without the intervention of humans.
The Economist has an article talking about the tells that give players away when playing say a game of poker. Most people instinctively believe that the key to not giving away information about the hand you’re holding to other players is in keeping a straight face. As it turns out, experiments show that observers achieve a much higher success rate at correctly predicting the quality of a hand of cards held by another person not by looking at the player’s face but by looking at the player’s hands. This is sure to be a result that will revolutionize poker playing strategies.
I’ve been busy with programming stuff since Algorithms II just started up. The first assignment involved processing WordNet graphs. The second assignment involved implementing seam carving, also known as content-aware resizing. Anyway that’s why I’ve been browsing less lately and so have fewer articles. Here we go:
IBM’s Watson supercomputer made the news in 2011 when it won a special Jeopardy! tournament against human champions. This article covers some of the first commercial applications it is being used for, helping doctors to diagnose diseases in various hospitals in the United States. It also talks about how its size has since shrunk from that of a bedroom to that of a bathroom and how it could eventually be a handheld device. Cool note: Watson uses Princeton’s WordNet to help it parse and understand the English language.
In other computer news, the next big thing in computing is supposed to be quantum computers, and it has been for a while now but actual implementations have proved as elusive as nuclear fusion. This article talks about just such an implementation. It will be used by Lockheed Martin to “create and test complex radar, space and aircraft systems“, i.e. make weapons and works at temperatures close to absolute zero.
The next article is about Russian scientists discovering completely unknown forms of bacterial life deep under the Antarctic ice. The samples come from the underground Lake Vostok, a body of water that lies 3,700 meters under the ice and is thought to have been isolated from the rest of the planet for millions of years. Needless to say the Internet is waiting to see if they have awakened Cthulhu or dug up The Thing.
Finally we have an article about research into whether or not smiling before matches in the Ultimate Fighting Championships affects the chances of the martial artists’ success. Pre-match photographs of the two combatants were analyzed for the presence and intensity of smiles and matched with the results of each fight. The researches found that as expected, fighters who smile and smile more intensely, lose more often. There are various plausible explanations though none are proven. It could be that smiles are an involuntary sign of submission, or that smiling fighters simply aren’t as aggressive.
Due to the Chinese New Year festivities in February, I had less time to browse around for science articles so only three of them this month:
This article in The New York Times covers some very preliminary work on how brain signals can be transferred from one laboratory rat to stimulate another rat to perform an action intended by the original rat. It’s as if the original rat were remote-controlling the other rat, in this case made even more impressive by the fact that the signals were encoded and transmitted over the Internet from one rat to another. As the article goes on to note it is very simplistic and the responses were correct only slightly more often than random chance, but it’s still a step in an intriguing direction.
The next one is from Wired which discusses how dolphins may have personal names of their own, called signature whistles, and may address each other by these names. This suggests that dolphins are able to learn specific signals, as opposed to intuitive ones, and use them to communicate, all without the intervention or guidance of human handlers.
Finally this last one from The Atlantic comes with a video must be seen to be believed. It pulls the wraps off DARPA’s 1.8 Gigapixel video camera that can cover pretty much the entire area of a medium-sized city with enough resolution to spot a person waving their arms on the ground. That’s some serious Big Brother surveillance capability there.
The first month of 2013 has been particularly fruitful so we have a mixed bag of various science related articles. Here goes:
We’ll start with the most important piece of news that made the rounds this month, though more often in editorial than science circles. This Mother Jonesarticle, one of many on the topic, talks about a new explanation of the perplexing rise in America’s crime rate in the 1960s to 1970s and its equally perplexing fall in the 1990s. The answer apparently lies in the use of lead in ordinary petrol. Childhood exposure to lead when it was a common component of petrol in the 1940s and 1950s caused brain damage that subsequently led to increased crime when these children grew up twenty years later. The subsequent shift to unleaded petrol resulted in a new generation who were never exposed, hence the fall in crime rates.
Similarly the next article isn’t so much news from scientists as a recent topic of discussion among economists. In the face of much talk about whether or not innovation has slowed down compared to the past, the blog Sociological Speculationproposes one obvious low-hanging fruit that could dramatically improve human productivity: a way to reduce or entirely eliminate the human need to sleep. The article is more about the effects of such a revolution rather than any specific technology but it does mention Modafinil. A quick check on Malaysia’s own Lowyet.net forums reveals that even Malaysians are asking about its availability, meaning that there is genuine interest in using technological means to wrest more hours out each day.
Next a couple of lighter articles on psychology. First is an article from the BPS Research Digest about how people who are more easily digusted really do have a heightened ability to spot dirt, even if the said dirt is nothing but simulated grey shades on a white background.
Then this article from the New York Times covers a cognitive bias that upon introspection seems quite odd, called the end of history illusion. People readily look back upon their past selves and admit how different they were from how they are now. Yet when asked how they expect their future selves to be, they seem to think that it will be more or less like what they are currently. In other words, it seems as if people lock-in their present states and project that into the future, regardless how old they currently are. Yet the evidence is that people never stop changing and your future self is likely to be as different from what you are currently as you are now different from your past self.
We end this post with a couple of links to just plain cool stuff. This piece of news talks about a military laser recently tested by a German company. It was capable of slicing through 15 mm steel from a kilometer away and accurate enough to shoot down drones that were falling at 50 meters per second from two kilometers away. And remember for every bit of this type of news that makes it out to the general public, you can be sure that there are plenty more that are kept under wraps.
Finally this article from NBC covers what is billed as the largest structure in the universe. It is a structure composed of 73 quasars with supermassive black holes at its centre and is 4 billion light years across at its widest point. Our own Milky Way galaxy is only about 100,000 light years wide.
Just four articles for the last month of December 2012 and one of them isn’t a science article at all but is a retrospective on the year with a perspective that I hope more people would share.
The first one is on a subject that Hiew actually forwarded to me earlier in the month. It’s about how it may be possible to know whether or not the universe that we currently exist in is actually a simulation run on some unimaginably powerful computer. The idea is that if our universe is simulated using an evenly-spaced three-dimensional lattice then the structure of that lattice itself imposes fundamental limits on the energy levels that any particles within the system can possess. And according to the team behind the paper, our universe does indeed have this kind of cut off in the spectrum of high energy particles. Personally I’m leery about this approach because it makes unfounded assumptions about the structure of the simulation. For example, instead of a fixed, regularly-spaced lattice, one could easily imagine a flexible system which could be as dense or as sparse as required to track the particles that are present locally. In any case, for a look at a fictional scenario of this, check out the novella True Names by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow.
The next link is not an article but rather a letter written in response to an earlier article. The original thesis made two complementary claims: 1) that humanity as a species is becoming less intelligent over time due to the accumulation of mutations that have deleterious effects on intelligence and 2) that if this is so the question of why we managed to evolve intelligence at all in the first place is because modern society shelter humans from the full effects of natural selection. Hunter-gatherer societies it is claimed have greater use for intelligence while in our time even relatively stupid people may thrive and live long enough to procreate. This letter argues against these conclusions stating that mutations occur in individuals and not the entire population as a whole while intelligence is correlated with the number of surviving children in modern societies.
Then we have this article from Smithsonian.com about why humans blink so frequently. As the article states, some blinking is obviously necessary to lubricate the eyeballs, but we seem to blink more often than necessary for these basic functions. It turns out that another reason for blinking is to temporarily shut out the world to give ourselves a moment for introspective thinking. In effect, our minds shift to an altered mental state more conducive to thought at the moment when we blink.
Finally our non-science article is this optimisticretrospective of 2012 from The Spectator. One of my personal pet peeves is people being unreasonably pessimistic about the present and like to view the past through rose-tinted glasses. But as this article reminds us 2012 has really been the best year ever for humanity as a whole. Poverty has never been lower. On a global scale, inequality is down too. Far fewer people die from violence or disease. And despite doomsayers’ repeated proclamations of peak oil, we live in an age of energy abundance not scarcity. So here’s looking forward to 2013 being an even better year!
Majorly late with this one, I know. I’ve been in Kuala Lumpur for extended period lately. But better late than never and I’m determined to keep this blog alive if updates now are less frequent. So let’s get on with it.
This first one is a bit trite and still a truth worth keeping in mind. It’s from the BPS Research Digest and talks about how people tend to think of their own names as being rarer, and therefore more special, than they really are. Also connected is the finding that people with genuinely rare names tend to be happier with their names, further confirming the observation like to be special. But I think people should be careful about going too far and end up choosing names that are just plain ridiculous.
The next article from the website MNT and covers the subject of how people might be able to solve mathematical problems unconsciously. The study in questioned distracted the participants with another stimuli while an arithmetic equation or a verbal expression was displayed. The result, to no one’s surprise, is that the so-called unconscious stimuli primed participants to be more likely to respond with the correct answer. Personally I find this particular piece of research to be fairly dubious. The mathematically problem given as an example seems to simple that it should be solvable by reflex so it’s not clear to me what the news here is.
Next up is a feature from The New Yorker which talks about the world’s grandest computer simulation of a brain. The initial target is to simulate the brain of a macaque monkey on a collection of ninety-six of the world’s fastest computers. It’s more of an overview of this area of research than this particular project since we have only the announcement and not much else to go on. Count me in as one of the skeptics on this one. I have a feeling that brain computation involves more than just neurons and ignoring the rest of the complex biochemistry going on is a mistake.
A mixed bag of articles for this month, ranging from the funny to the weird. Let’s get to it.
Regenerative medicine, or growing replacement body parts from one’s own cells, will be the next frontier of medicine. This article from the admittedly skanky Global Post site demonstrates that it has the potential to covers external organs as well as the more commonly considered example of internal organs. In this instance, a woman had a replacement ear grown on her arm as a substitute for the original one which was removed due to cancer. The new ear was fashioned using cartilage from her rib.
The next article from the Wall Street Journal covers a paper that is cleverly titled “The Power of Kawaii”. The claim is that human test subjects perform assigned with greater care and precision after being exposed to pictures of cute things, such as puppies and kittens. The tasks ranged from the delicate, such as picking up small objects from a hole without brushing the sides, to the purely logical, such as finding a target from a sequence of random numbers. As a control, participants were also exposed to pictures of adult dogs and cats and food items, which did not result in the same improved performance.
As this next article from The Economist states, we’ve found so many extrasolar planets now that they’re no longer exciting. The difference with this one is that it’s orbiting Alpha Centauri B, one of the three gravitationally bound stars that form the trinary Alpha Centauri system. This is the nearest system from our own Sol system at a mere four light-years, close enough that we could conceivably launch an expeditionary probe to it. The bad news is that it is located far too close to its parent star to have any chance of harboring life with one of its “years” lasting 3.2 Earth days. But where we’ve found one planet, we’re more likely to find more. You can bet that astronomers all around the world are feverishly working on it.
Ever wonder if animals are capable of recognizing their own dead and responding to it? This post at the The Scorpion and the Frog blog talks about a research paper on just this topic. The animals in question are western scrub-jays and the researchers tested their responses towards both an actual scrub-jay carcass, complete with feathers, and a collection of painted wood pieces arranged vaguely to look like a dead scrub-jay. The live birds reacted furiously to the real carcass, hopping about and calling loudly, while taking far fewer peanuts strewn on the ground as usual. Testing further with a realistic mounted great horned owl, a predator of scrub-jays, led to similar reactions, leading the scientists to conclude that the reaction wasn’t about grief but about alarm and physical danger.
Finally, here’s a longer article about the evolution of lactose intolerance in humans from Slate. It’s not about a specific new discovery, more of an overview of the subject. Apparently the ability to digest lactose in adult humans spread very quickly once the mutation occurred, unreasonably quickly according to most scientists, and the reason why is still something of a mystery.