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.
Only four articles since I’ve been away or else occupied for much of this month.
According to the scientists covered in this article from the BBC, rats may be observed to feel regret. The experiment involved setting up lines for food and the rats could choose whether to stay in line or switch to a different one. When they realized that their new choice was worse than the previous one, they were observed pausing and looking back towards the reward they had passed over.
This article from recode.net talks about how computer algorithms are being used to devise customized treatments for cancer patients. The process involves sequencing the DNA of both the patient’s normal cells and that of the cancerous ones to add to the usual wealth of data that is then fed into the algorithm to generate precisely the correct treatment. All this is still in the trials stage of course, but it’s one of the biggest steps yet towards the long talked-about era of personalized medicine.
One of the biggest science news this month was the discovery of a truly massive body of water located deep beneath the Earth’s surface. This article for example from New Scientist provides details of how the underground has a total volume three times that of all the oceans on the surface, supporting the idea that all of the water currently on the surface gradually oozed out of the Earth’s interior rather than originating from comets.
Facebook recently revealed that it had conducted an experiment in which it intentionally manipulated the emotions of its users by tweaking their news feeds to be either sadder or happier than normal. They then monitored the posts of these users to see if the emotional tone matched. This article from The Independent gives further details. The change in subsequent seems small but most people are more shocked that Facebook chose to perform such an experiment without notifying users and asking for their permission. Naturally this also raises the question of whether other online companies tweak the content received by their users in similar ways.
I’m getting an early start on the May instalment of this regular feature due to not being around next week. Here are six science articles from the past month that deserves your attention:
The most exciting of these is news about how scientists have been able to seemingly reverse aging in older mice by the relatively simple expedient of infusing them with the blood of younger ones. This article from The Boston Globe has more, but really it’s been published everywhere. The results seems to be similar over a number of different studies and the procedure is known to improve muscles, the heart and the brain. Naturally the joke going around is that vampirism has turned out to really be the key to immortality.
This next article from The Guardian talks about a project that created synthetic DNA letters, effectively similar to creating a new X-Y base pair to add to the normal G-C and T-A base pairs. The scientists inserted this new base pair into E coli bacteria and then bred them. This was done to prove that synthetic DNA, once introduced into a species, could then stably be passed down to future generations.
Why do Westerners tend to be individualists while Asians tend to be collectivists? For understandable reasons this is a difficult question to answer as it is far too easy to content oneself with just-so scenarios and answers that fit one’s biases. This article from the South China Morning Post presents yet another theory: rice-growers tend to be collectivists because growing rice requires heavy labour and hence the assistance of neighbours. Wheat-growing on the other requires less cooperation with others. Intriguingly China itself is used as a test-case because while southern China grows rice, northern China grows wheat and indeed surveys by the researchers demonstrate that southern Chinese tend to be more collectivist while northern Chinese tend to be more individualistic.
Whether or not genes determine intelligence is one of the most controversial questions in biology. But if they do, would it be possibly to identify the set of genes that do so? This article from The Economist covers the discovery of how a particular version of a gene, called KL-VS may be responsible for about 3% of the variation of IQ in the general population. The gene apparently codes for increased levels of a protein known as klotho. Experiments on mice show that mice that are genetically engineered to produce more of this protein perform much better in intelligence tests than on unmodified mice, suggesting that a drug that acts to elevate klotho levels might boost general intelligence.
The next one is just for fun, about the discovery of the fossilized bones of what is now thought to be the largest dinosaur ever to walk the Earth. This article from BBC News tells the story of the discovery in Argentina. This new and as yet unnamed species of dinosaur must have weighed over 77 tonnes and stood 20 metres high, with an overall length of 40 metres from the nose to the tip of the tail. Cue jokes about Argentina being the final resting place of Godzilla.
Finally here we have at least one article that isn’t about biology. Instead this one is about experimental success in reliably transmitting quantum information. This article from the New York Times talks more about the process. Although the term quantum teleportation is used, the speed of light is not violated as the process still requires the measurement information to be transmitted classically. But this measurement information is then used to decode the original information encoded in one of the two entangled electrons so that the information itself needs never be transmitted, resulting in theoretically uncrackable data transmissions.
Quite a few articles this month though there’s no single big piece of news that dominates everything.
This fascinating article in the New York Times talks about how an entirely new language is observed to be in the process of being born in a spontaneous manner in an isolated community in Australia. Apparently it began as baby-talk from parents in a mixture of three languages but the children then took the proto-language and added innovations to it that were not present in the original language and it was then used as well by older members of the community.
Here’s a link to a paper on PubMed that reveals how people seem to be able to accurately gauge a man’s intelligence from a photograph of his face, but are unable to do so for women.
For fun, the next piece talks about how many people would we need to start a sustainable colony in another star system. The idea is that we need to have enough people to maintain sufficient genetic diversity to deal with unknown conditions while too few people would result in in-breeding and vulnerabilities to diseases. It appears that the minimum number seems to be about 10,000 people.
This article from NewScientist talks about a mathematical proof that appears to be correct but since it is approximately as long as the entirety of Wikipedia is far too long for human mathematicians to check by hand. The proof was generated by a computer and can only be verified by computer using a completely different method.
In tech news, this article from the HuffingtonPost covers how the U.S. Navy is experimenting with a process that converts seawater to a hydrocarbon-based liquid fuel. There’s no magic in this however as the process is lossy, energy-wise. Electrical energy is required to produce hydrogen and extract carbon dioxide from seawater and convert the gasses into usable fuel. The idea is not to generate energy but to have a reliable source of fuel while in the field. But it could also be a very handy way of storing excess electrical energy for later use.
Finally this last one is probably the most significant of the findings here with many implications for other studies, past or future. Appearing in Science, the article covers the startling finding that mice actually feel different levels of pain in response to stimulants depending on the gender of the experimenter handling them. Apparently the mice were able to detect male odours, which boosted their stress levels and decreased their sensitivity to pain. The worry is that humans may respond similarly, such that a male or female doctor administering a treatment would have different effects. This may invalidate large parts of a lot of research.
Despite my recent focus on films, I haven’t exactly forgotten this ongoing series and there are quite a few of these articles for the previous month:
The obvious starting point is the biggest scientific news of the month and perhaps the biggest cosmological finding of the decade. There are countless articles about it but here’s one from National Geographic for emphasizing what the results imply for the existence of a multiverse. This follows observations made at the BICEP2 facility in Antartica of curling patterns in the distribution of temperature and matter, which stands in for gravitational waves. These findings not only support the rapid inflation theory of how the currently observable universe was formed but suggests that ours is only one of many universes that may exist.
This next article from the Los Angeles Times reads like something right out of a bad sci-fi thriller. It’s about how a 30,000-year-old virus was found and revived from the Siberian tundra. This sample represents a particularly large virus that infects only amoeba but the obvious horror movie scenario is that some commercial drilling operation might unearth an ancient virus that would be dangerous to humans.
In another piece of cool cosmological news, Crain’s Detroit Business has an article about how scientists have managed to measure the spin of a distant, supermassive black hole. The object in question is at the centre of a quasar about 6 billion light years away from Earth. The scientists were able to take advantage of gravitational lensing effects to accurately measure the distant light and found the black hole to be rotating at about half the speed of light.
This next bit has also appeared in various places but this version is from the Utah People’s Post. It talks about how elephants have been found to be able to recognize different languages spoken by humans, as well as the age and gender of the speaker. The research was performed in Kenya and used different tribal peoples, some of whom actively hunted and killed elephants and some of whom ignored them. They found that the elephants were able to recognize the languages spoken by the Masai tribe which usually kills elephants and react accordingly by fleeing or bunching together to protect each other. They were also able to moderate their responses if the speaker was a child or a female, indicating a low threat.
Male-female inequality isn’t anything new but I’ve been paying more attention to this recently since it’s become a hot issue within the gaming community. This article from ThinkProgress show how investors respond better to sales pitches made by men compared to those made by women, even when the content of the pitches is exactly the same. Oddly, they even found that investors responded better to good looking men, but attractiveness in women didn’t seem to make a difference.
The next one is a news release rather than a real alert and it’s from EurekAlert! It’s about how computers are better able to tell when someone is faking being in pain than people. Humans fake being in pain for many reasons of course, including when it comes to demanding insurance compensation. The computer system works by looking at the faces of the people involved and trying to work out whether or not the grimaces are generated by voluntary or involuntary facial movements. Apparently the system was able to achieve accuracy rates of 85 percent while even trained humans were only to achieve rates of 55 percent, that is only slightly better than chance.
And finally for another right out of sci-fi story, this article from NewScientist covers an experimental treatment for victims of severe physical trauma. It’s only meant as a last resort specifically for people who are immediately in danger of dying from gunshot or knife wounds and the doctors believe that they will die before the wounds can be treated. The idea is to drain out all of the victim’s blood and replace it with a cold saline solution. This very rapidly cools down the body and stops almost all cellular activity. This also means that the victims become clinically dead. This gives the doctors about two hours during which they try to fix as much of the physical damage as possible before replacing the saline solution with blood again and restarting the heart. Naturally, if this works, it will lead to questions about just how long we can keep a person in suspended animation in this way.