Five articles this month, with an emphasis on the softer sciences.
For a light start, this first one is a profile in The New York Times about a scientist who has spent his career on researching the topic of communication between animals of different species. The canonical example here is that when birds make noise, other animals in the forest are able to hear it and respond appropriately. One particularly cool example is how a squirrel is able to understand bird alarms about a predatory raptor in the air and make noises of its own that are acoustically similar to the original bird alarms.
Not quite the end of the month yet, but let’s get this out of the way:
The biggest bit of news naturally is that Chinese scientists have used the CRISPR/Cas9 technique that I talked about last month to experiment on human embryos. The news first appeared in Nature, but not as a paper since it was rejected. The team used non-viable embryos that could never have fully developed to stave off ethical concerns and the attempt to modify the gene responsible for β-thalassaemia is considered to be a failure because only a small proportion of the sample accepted the modifications and there a large number of unintended mutations. Nevertheless the wider implication is that germ-line gene editing on human samples is now no longer a secret.
The next two articles deal with Internet culture and online behavior. The first one talks about an algorithm that can be used to identify online trolls which might be used to help police online spaces like social networks and forums.
The second one talks about the toxicity of the comments in many online articles and posts. In particular, it discusses findings about how even reading prejudiced comments can cause other people to post more prejudiced comments themselves, leading to a downward spiral of poor quality comments.
Continuing on in the sphere of the social sciences, this paper discusses how organizations that explicitly frame themselves as being meritocratic actually end up favoring men instead over women. This matters because I’ve often had occasion to debate people who oppose feminism on the grounds that they favor egalitarianism instead of measures that actively promote the interests of women over men.
Finally, on a more lighthearted note, here’s an article from The Economist about a robot chef that soon become a commercial reality. The idea is to have it replicate precisely the movements of celebrity chefs. However the technology isn’t quite there yet since the robot isn’t even trusted with a knife at the moment and a human still needs to prepare all of the ingredients and put them within reach of the robot.
Only a handful of articles this time and the biggest one of them, which I’ll start with, is deceptively underwhelming.
CRISPR isn’t a new discovery but it was only recently that it has been put to its current use and its importance understood. This article from Quanta Magazine gives a broad overview of the topic. It was originally discovered as a unusual gene in common E. coli and researchers only later realized that the microbes which possess this gene are able to use it to defend themselves against viruses. Effectively the microbes are able to cut out parts of viral DNA and store them so as to recognize these invaders in the future. Even later, researchers realized that this could be adapted into a gene editing tool which would enable scientists to precisely snip out a specific section of DNA and replace it with anything else. Finally, the changes will persist in future generations of the organism. As you can imagine, this makes all kinds of customized organisms much easier to engineer.
This next article from the BBC is much lighter fare. It talks about how the signalling function of the peacock’s elaborate tail may be much subtler than previously imagined. Apparently in addition to the large size and brilliant colors of the famous fantail, it also produces an infrasonic sound that is inaudible to humans but that both male and female peacocks can detect. This effectively allows peacocks to use their fantails to send signals to each other even when not in line of sight.
Ever wondered why we have lots of adjectives that are sight-based, for example all of the different words for even minor variations of colors, but few words for describing smells. In fact, it is difficult to think of many words for describing smells that don’t refer to the source of the smell. This article from The Economist talks about how a study of the Mani people who live in Thailand that this may at least be partially due to cultural bias rather than purely because our sense of smell isn’t as well developed as your sight. Researchers administered smell tests to them and found that they could identify smells much more quickly than a control group of Dutch people and furthermore that their language contains many unique descriptors for smells.
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.