Looks like the world of science doesn’t really stop for the Chinese New Year since we have about as much science news as usual.
Let’s start with a correction. Back in March 2014, the BICEP2 research team reported the discovery of primordial gravitational waves. My entry for that month duly linked to one such report. Since then a consensus has been reached that the finding was wrong as updated maps of interstellar dust do not support the original observation. Here is one article from The Economist which talks about it. As the publication notes, getting it wrong is embarrassing but being able to own up to mistakes is science’s great strength.
The next article is from Nature and covers what is called unconscious thought advantage, the notion that the unconscious mind is better than the conscious mind at solving at least some types of cognitive tasks. In what is the most rigorous study yet of the phenomenon, a Dutch team ran experiments that involved test subjects performing tasks like choosing the best car or apartments out of a sample based a list of desirable characteristics and distracting some of them to make conscious decision-making difficult. They also ran a meta-analysis of all known previous such studies. Both results suggest that the phenomenon does not exist and that there is no cognitive advantage in unconscious thought.
As an endless number of funny cat pictures on the Internet can prove, cats just love boxes. This Wiredarticle goes into some of the reasons why this is so. I think the behavioral reasons aren’t much of a surprise. Cats just instinctively like to hide. What is more interesting to me is that the temperature range that cats are most comfortable with is about 6 degrees Celsius warmer than the comfort zone for humans, so boxes just provide extra insulation in addition to just being plain comfortable for them.
The next one isn’t a science article. It’s a report on an extensive survey of Americans on their attitudes towards science. To me, what is especially illuminating are areas where the opinion of the general public diverges wildly from that of scientists. For example, only 37% of the public think that eating genetically modified food is safe but 88% of scientists do. Similarly only 45% of the public favor the building of nuclear power stations but 65% of scientists do. I think it’s worth reading the whole thing through as it covers everything from opinions about the quality of education, the importance of science, science funding and the public’s generally not very good grasp of what scientists believe.
Finally the last one isn’t science article but I like to end things with an extended feature. It’s about an ingenious scheme in which the Columbian army encoded secret messages in Morse code and transmitted it as part of a specially written pop song to hostages held by the FARC. The plan was created by an advertising executive who had personal reasons for opposing the drug trade in the country.
Yep, getting this done early again to stick with the “one post every couple of days” routine I’ve established. There is quite a bit of science stuff to cover this month too.
As usual I start with the biggest news of the month. It’s been widely reported everywhere but this one is an article on Bloomberg about the new paper. The popular conception is that it talks about how cancer is mostly caused by random mutations of stem cells, making incidences of the disease primarily a matter of luck. But as others have pointed out, this paper restricts itself to only some types of cancers while ignoring others and it does not argue that lifestyle choices and genetics have no effect on lifetime risks of developing cancers, merely that chance has a large effect.
Quite a few articles for this month and a day earlier too! I just wanted to get this done before getting back to writing about movies.
Unless you live under a rock, you’d be aware that the biggest science news this month has been the landing of Philae on a comet 500 million kilometers away from Earth as part of the Rosetta mission. There are many, many articles on this, so this one from The Guardian is just a suggestion. I strongly recommend watching one of the many animations made that describe the incredible 10-year journey. Unfortunately the lander ran of power shortly afterwards due to poor positioning. Hopefully it will wake up again when the comet moves closer to the Sun.
This next article is a more challenging read. Appearing in Quanta Magazine, it discusses the multiverse hypothesis, the idea that there are an infinite number of universes for which the constants are set at different values. This is meant to answer the anthropic question of why is it that the constants in our own universe seem uniquely tuned in such a way that would support our existence in it. I’m doubtful about the scientific value of this line of thought but I can’t deny that it makes for fascinating reading.
On a more practical note, this article from IEEE Spectrum, discusses a plan to install what are in effect powerful servers in privately owned buildings to serve as heating systems. The individual pays for the hardware but the cloud computing firm pays for data connection and maintenance costs. It’s a neat idea but as the comments point out, the homeowner has no control over the server’s computing load and therefore no control over how much heat it generates which makes it unreliable as a heating system.
Next we talk about gravity anomalies, the real kind caused by unusual geological formations, not the fake kind caused by retarded future humans. This article from The Economist covers how pigeons can sense the Earth’s gravitational field and use it to help them navigate even when they are in unfamiliar locations. The experiment used a massive crater which causes unusual variations in gravity. Pigeons were released both inside the crater, and outside of it where there were no gravity anomalies. The pigeons outside all found their way home quickly. The pigeons who started from inside the crater tended to get lost.
Finally just because GamerGate is still ongoing even though activity has died down by quite a bit, here is an article from The Telegraph discussing how girls in the 12-13 year old age group seem to outperform their male peers in using a simplified programming language for making video games. Granted, it’s a study with a very limited scope but it at least suggests that there is no biological reason why women cannot be at least as proficient as men in programming, traditionally a male dominated profession. Just check out the comments section if you don’t believe that there is a gender problem in the technology sector. Lewis’ Law is in full effect here.
Only three articles this month including one that could be a pretty big deal but will more likely than not be debunked in due course.
The big news is of course the announcement of a viable fusion reactor design by Lockheed Martin. There are many articles about it but here is the original one from Aviation Week. It’s a big deal because fusion energy have for many decades been heralded as bringing about the end of the fossil fuel age if and when it ever becomes viable but successive designs have never been able to get the technology to generate much, if any, excess energy beyond that needed to maintain the self sustaining fusion reaction. This news of a new design that is supposedly more efficient than the best current alternatives by a factor of 10 gains credibility because it was developed by the highly regarded Skunk Works of Lockheed Marton. But it is all too likely that it is just another plea for more research funds for negligible benefit.
No summarizing article for this next one, just a link to the paper itself. It examines correlations between how long a marriage lasts and various data points. The headliner is that the more money is spent on the wedding ceremony and the ring, the shorter the marriage lasts. On the other hand, positive correlations are the number of guests invited to the wedding and whether or not there was a honeymoon.
Finally, this one is an article from Modern Farmer which talks about how plants are actually aware that they are being eaten and actively takes steps against it. The experiment involved the thale cress and recording the vibrations of a caterpillar eating a plant. They found that when that specific recording is played back, the plant would produce extra mustard oil to help deter predators and doesn’t react in the same way to other, non-threatening vibrations.
I’m massively late this month due to having to make an extended stay in Kuala Lumpur to handle some personal issues and hence having no access to my regular computer. I’m now back however, so here are the five articles for this month:
The first article I have isn’t an announcement of a new discovery as most of my posts tend to be. Instead, it’s an exploration, published in The New Yorker, about what it is like for a person who is blind from birth to be able to see for the first time. In particular, if a blind person can differentiate shapes using touch, can he or she tend recognize the same objects upon seeing them for the first time? It turns out that it is incredibly difficult to make sense of what you see when you are doing it for the first time, so it is a skill that needs to be developed over time based on building up an internal database of “visual memories”.
The coolest bit of news all month is easily the discovery of the largest dinosaur yet found, and hence the largest terrestrial animal known. Newly named as the “dreadnoughtus”, it is calculated to weight about 65 tons, heavier than a Boeing 737 jet. Its size was extrapolated based on fossil remains found in Argentina, as reported in this Washington Post article.
This next article from Scientific American isn’t about a new discovery either but it is highly topical. Instead, it talks about using a tried and true method to attempt to treat victims of the current outbreak of ebola. Since new drugs for the disease are still largely unavailable, doctors are proposing to transfuse patients with the blood of survivors of the disease in the hopes that the blood already contains effective antibodies. This is in fact vaccination in its oldest form.
The next article is for coffee lovers, including my wife. Publishes in The New York Times, it’s a cool look into how caffeine evolved in coffee plants. Some highlights include how coffee plants evolved the molecule differently from other plants that also contain coffee like cacao and how the plant uses it as a toxin to prevent other plants from germinating in the soil near it.
Finally this article from The Guardian talks about how the nerve endings on finger tips actually process the touch sensations it receives before sending the results to the brain. It’s a finding that lends extra credence to theories that state that the mind is effectively what the entire body, or at least the nervous system distributed throughout the entire body, does as opposed to merely the brain.
A bit late this past month as I’ve had to spend more time than expected dealing with personal stuff. Only four articles in total here:
The hottest piece of news is this article from the UK-version of Wired talking about how a team at NASA has experimentally validated a revolutionary space propulsion drive. The drive supposedly works by bouncing microwaves around inside a closed cavity and somehow generates thrust without any propellant. If true, this would seem to be a violation of fundamental physics. Personally, I side with the skeptics. It seems likelier than this is due to some error in measurement or in the way the experiment has been set up than that such a device could work.
The next article is from The Verge and covers how MIT researchers were able to reconstruct sounds from the tiny vibrations in a bag of potato chips. This is achieved simply by pointing a video camera at the bag while the sound is being played and analyzing the results. Apparently the method also works by looking at the leaves of plants and ripples in a glass of water.
This next one isn’t a science article by an extensive survey of prostitution by The Economist. The survey mainly serves to reinforce the truth of stereotypes about the industry, but one surprising result is that sex workers with more education earn more on an hourly basis, in line with jobs in other industries.
Finally this last article from the MIT Technology Review discusses a new kind of computer chip designed by IBM that mimics biological neural systems. This represents a break from the chips in use today which works linearly. Also striking is how these new chips consume very little electricity and how the neural structure encompass both memory and processor instead of separating the two.
Only four articles this month and they’re more on the speculative side than the solid science side than the norm:
This Ars Technicaarticle needs to be thoroughly and carefully read to be fully understood. It summarizes recent work by physicists that pushes towards the view that the wave function of quantum physics really does represent the observed system itself rather than represent we know about the system. In other words, it is yet another nail in the coffin that reality is classical, deterministic and local.
This article from CityLab was apparently inspired by a blog post by Charles Stross. It discusses the feasibility of building a human colony on Venus, specifically a floating city about 50 kilometers above the surface of the planet. At that altitude, atmospheric pressure and temperatures would be roughly equivalent to those on Earth even if the air is poisonous. The best thing about Venus compared to the most popular candidate is that its gravity is very close to that of Earth while Mars would have only a third of our gravity.
I’m not sure how the researchers covered in this article from The Washington Post thought up this experiment but I guess the results are interesting. The test subjects were led into an area free of any distractions and invited to let their mind wander. The only thing that they could interact with was a device that would administer a mild electric shock when a button was pressed. Surprisingly most of the men chose to use the device, repeatedly even, rather than be bored. The authors frame it as people hating having nothing to do except think but personally I’m sceptical.
The last one is a post on a blog called The Mitrailleuse. It argues that first conscious machines will probably be created as a result of financial firms creating ever more sophisticated algorithms to parse various information from the real world and use the results to perform financial transactions. Since the rewards of getting it right are huge, the firms routinely spend large amounts of money into perfecting their algorithms, in the process making ever closer to thinking beings.