August has been a terrible month for my stock portfolio but a fantastic one with regards to science news. Plenty of reading up ahead:
The coolest (or is it hottest?) bit of science news is, of course, Elon Musk’s hyperloopproposal. This is sort of like an inter-city elevated train that runs inside a tube. Air is pumped out of the tube until is almost a vacuum. The idea is that the lack of air resistance enables the capsules to travel at a top speed of some 1,200 kmph while reducing the weight of the infrastructure required. The whole thing is driven by linear electric motors and costs is supposed to be kept low by building the track above existing highways. While this is a very science-fiction scenario, my take on this is skeptical. Cost is everything and despite the suggested optimizations, the proposed looks implausibly low to me as many others have already pointed out.
In the US, recent political trends point towards white people being critical of affirmative action being black people remain strongly supportive. But are the whites truly in favour of meritocracy? This article points out a survey that does indeed find that white Californian adults are in favour of university admissions policies that prioritize standardized test scores and high school academic achievements. But when white people are reminded that Asian Americans are disproportionately represented inside the University of California system, because Asian Americans tend to do much better at standardized academic tests than other groups, they tend turned around and favoured a reduced role for test scores instead. This suggests that white people are in favour of policies that they perceive will help their own group rather than the principle of meritocracy.
As we all know, evolution is a continuous process that is ongoing, for us as well as all other species that we share this planet with. This article suggests that as humans have prospered and changed the environment, the animals inhabiting that environment have evolved in response. Based on the observation of increasing skull sizes, various mammals species including mice, shrews, bats etc. seem to be evolving larger brains to successfully navigate this changed environment. In particular, the brains of small mammals in cities or suburbs seem larger those of the same species in rural areas.
This next article requires some knowledge of black hole physics. For years now, it was thought that if someone were to fall into a black hole, he would be crushed by the awesome gravitational forces involved. This is now changing. Not that the person would die of course, just that he would first be killed by the so-called “firewall” of energy at the edge of the black hole. This is a relatively new concept stemming from the understanding that having information flow out of a black hole would be incompatible with the Einsteinian idea that the event horizon is smooth. Instead it is now thought that a discontinuity in the vacuum, manifesting as a wall of energetic particles, exists just inside the boundary of the black hole exist. Please read the full article for how this idea came about and the implications it has for physics.
As someone who has some red-green colour blindness, this piece of news has personal significance. It’s essentially a review of a pair of expensive glasses that addresses red-green colour blindness. The lenses apparently contain filters that increase sensitivity to specific colour temperatures and there are specific pairs for specific types of colour blindness. Given the caveat that it works only with very bright light (so it mostly won’t work indoors and won’t work with computer monitors), the writer of the review pretty unequivocally states that it makes a tremendous and immediately noticeable difference to how he perceives the world. He was able to discern colours he had never noticed before and the colours of the world became richer and more saturated.
Finally, here’s an article about research into how using Facebook and other social networks tend to make its users unhappy. After having controlled for the observation that those who tend to use Facebook are just unhappy in the first place, it finds that people demonstrably becomes unhappier after each Facebook session after an extended period of tracking. The reasoning is that such use arouses envy. Since those who post to Facebook tend to do so about the best things in their lives, whether they are their best photos, best moments or best lines, such moments are exaggerated and not at all representative of such people’s everyday life, forming an unhealthy point of comparison between different lifestyles.
Quite a few of these articles this month, so here goes:
Cloning animals is nothing new these days but, still, there is something symbolic about cloning one from a single drop of blood, as this article from BBC News covers.
We all know that bats can navigate using ultrasound, but could prey make use of this fact as a defensive measure? This article from Popsci covers how hawk moths, found in the tropics, are able to respond to the ultrasounds emitted by bats hunting them by responding with ultrasound clicks of their own. It may be useful to just startle the moths or it could be part of an active jamming system to hamper the effectiveness of the bats’ echolocation abilities.
Nearly a quarter of a century after its inception, a study into the crack babies phenomenon of the 1980s has finally ended. The term refers to an epidemic of babies born to mothers who were addicted to cocaine and were exposed to the substance while in-utero. Apocryphal stories at the time talked of babies with shrunken heads, poor muscle tone and troubling behavioural symptoms. Twenty-three years later this study found that there was no difference in IQ between such babies and those of a control group with no prenatal cocaine exposure. They did find that both groups had IQ scores that were markedly lower than the national average and attribute it to the effects of poverty.
This next article is somewhat like the one above: conclusions that are “obvious” are not always correct. Pop quiz: which areas are safer to live in, for developed countries at least: urban areas or rural areas? As it turns out, this article from CNN explains how contrary to intuition, the risk of injury or death from violent crime and accidents are more than 20% higher in the countryside in the United States than in urban areas. We don’t know exactly why yet, but there are some educated guesses. In the US, rates of firearm ownership are higher in rural areas for example, and these residents tend to drive longer distances over more dangerous roads. Plus it’s easier and faster to get to a hospital in a city than in the countryside.
Finally here’s a just for fun article about a couple of physics points from the Pacific Rim film in a Scientific American blog: specifically how much force is there in a rocket-assisted punch delivered by a giant robotic fist and can a giant monster with a huge wingspan fly its way into space? It’s just the first in a series of two such articles with maybe more to come so be sure to look out for more too.
Four articles this month, representing a fairly mixed bag of subjects. Here goes:
Let’s start with a very simple but effective technological innovation that applies only to countries that have four seasons. Tech-On! features a report about a new type of glass that would block sunlight in the summer while letting it through in the winter. It relies on the simple fact that sunlight in summer and winter have different incidence angles and the invention consists of nothing more sophisticated that joining two sheets of glass together. This alters the refractive qualities of the joined sheet of glass and the researchers tuned this precisely to have the desired effects. What I don’t quite understand is whether or not the glass needs to be precisely tuned to the latitude of the place where it will be installed because presumably the incidence angle of sunlight depends on the latitude of the location.
The next piece is not a science article but an extensive feature published in the New York Times about research on the outcomes to women and their babies who wanted abortions but were denied them. The key point is that the study manages to compare these women against similar women who wanted abortions and did get them. Not very surprisingly, the study found that these women have much poorer outcomes, with higher anxiety and depression levels, more likely to end up being poor and have poorer health. What is surprising is that despite these objectively poorer outcomes, most of these women still insisted that having that originally unwanted child was still the best thing that happened to them and significant numbers claimed years after the fact that they have never sought an abortion in the first place.
Then here’s an article from The Conversation about how cheetahs actually use their fabled speed. One uneducated guess about cheetahs might be that because of their reputation as the fastest land speed animal on Earth, you might expect them to hunt best of all on flat ground where they can show off their top speed. This turns out not to be true because cheetahs hunt more successfully in dense forested cover than on open ground. This is because the true advantage cheetahs have is not absolute top speed but fantastic acceleration rates and even better deceleration rates. This allows them to manoeuvre much more effectively than the prey they chase.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek has a very cool article about concrete, particularly the kind that the ancient Romans used. As we know from the copious amount of architectural works the ancient Romans left behind, they built a lot and a lot of it has lasted quite a long time. It turns out that ancient Roman concrete is significantly stronger than the modern variety we use today, commonly known as Portland cement. The precise formula for the kind the ancient Romans used was lost but researchers claim to have rediscovered by analysing their mineral content. By incorporating lyme and volcanic ash into their mixture, the Romans made more durable concrete than modern builders.
Four articles for the month of May 2013. One of them however is about a story in the realm of mathematics so arguably isn’t much of a science article at all.
Older computer users will probably remember the ELIZA chat bot written in the 1960s. It was created only as a early demonstration of natural language processing but many people took it seriously as a virtual psychotherapist. This article from the BBC talks about a real attempt at creating a virtual therapist to help real humans. As such it goes much farther than just printing text output onto a screen. It has an onscreen avatar which it can control, can verbalize its responses, can listen to patients’ voices and observer their body language and so forth.
So many claims of success at achieving cold fusion have been refuted over the years that many people now think it is impossible. This article from ExtremeTech covers the latest such claim and given the secrecy involved, it seems likely that it is just another scam. In this case however, a number of scientists from reputable European universities have been allowed to study the device, though they are still being kept in the dark about how exactly it works, and their preliminary, non-peer reviewed, finding is that it works as advertised. Given the potency of cold fusion as a power source, which would allow it to completely supplant our currently fossil-fuel based energy economy, this is something that deserves a lot of attention.
The next article from the so-called smart rifle. It comes with a color graphics display that allows the user to lock on to a target. The rifle then uses its own suite of sensors to determine when exactly to open fire, taking into account factors such as wind and distance, to ensure a hit. It even comes with Wi-Fi so the data for every shot can be shared online.
Finally here’s an extensive article describing the excitement in the mathematical community surrounding the release of a series of papers by a Japanese mathematician in August 2012. The mathematician in question Shinichi Mochizuki posted the papers onto the Internet claiming that it was a proof of the ABC Conjecture, a number theory problem that has important ramifications for mathematicians, and for all intents and purposes simply walked away, refusing all media interviews and requests to field questions. Other mathematicians of course delved eagerly into the papers, but there are 512 pages in total, and those were filled with new mathematical concepts and constructs that Mochizuki had seemingly invented himself. This meant that no other mathematician has so far been able to verify the correctness of his proof and so many months later the entire community is still waiting with bated breath to see if the proof is correct.
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.