Ok, this totally breaks this page’s formatting, but what the heck. Forget the Olympics. This is the greatest spectacle going on right now and it’s not even on Earth. Yes it’s a CGI rendition instead of real imagery but what do you expect about something going on on Mars? The landing procedure is the stuff of science-fiction.
Category Archives: Science
Recent Interesting Science Articles (July 2012)
July 2012 has been a less awesome, insofar as science articles go. I guess things do slow down in the summer.
- This isn’t the first article about empathy for humans as displayed in dogs that has appeared in this blog, and it won’t be the last! This article from The Economist covers experiments performed to see if dogs can really perform actions out of empathy for the perceived suffering in humans, as opposed to acting out of curiosity. This was done by observing the behavior of dogs when alternately encountering a human crying and exhibiting other signs of distress or merely humming. They also alternated between using a trusted human for the dogs and a complete stranger. The results were that the dogs could indeed recognize distress in humans and react by whining, nuzzling, licking, and fetching toys for the human perceived to be suffering. They did this to the suffering human even if he or she was a stranger and their master was in the same room, indicating that it was the comfort of the suffering human that they sought rather than their own comfort.
- Just last month I had an article talking about how more modern pop music is getting sadder and sadder while becoming more emotionally ambiguous. This month I have a new article from Reuters making a different claim: that pop music is getting louder and louder, while at the same time becoming less diverse with a more limited variety of sounds. They’re not directly contradictory but they are odds enough that the two teams should probably have a good long discussion with each other about just what is going on.
- This next one is cheating a bit as it’s more of a demonstration video than a science article. Its about the color shifting abilities of a species of cuttlefish in Australia, Sepia plangon. Nothing new, you say? Except that this one is not only capable of shifting its colors, it can apparently shift each side of its body to a different color scheme, in this case, mimicking a female with half of its body and a male with the other half. This demonstrates not only as astounding level of control over its own colors but also an awareness of just who is looking at it from each direction.
- Ever wondered while walking in the rain if it would be more effective to run through the rain or walk steadily through it to minimize wetness. I did and judging by the contents of this Washington Post article, I’m not the only one. Intuitively, running is better to minimize your time spent in the rain but at the same as you travel fast, you run into more raindrops in your path. Walking steadily increases your exposure time, but you present a small target and you don’t walk into raindrops. The paper summarized in this article concludes that for most cases, running is best but the true answer really depends on your body shape, the direction of the rainfall (vertically or at a lateral angle), the angle of the path you are traveling across and so forth. It is truly a profound topic.
- Finally, no rundown would be complete without the biggest scientific news of the month: the confirmation of existence of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. There are many articles about it on the web but I’m partial to this one from the BBC. There are no practical applications for this but it is pretty solid confirmation of the Standard Model of physics.
Recent Interesting Science Articles (June ‘2012)
It’s time for our monthly round-up of the coolest, most fascinating science articles of the previous month and June 2012 has been an especially bountiful month in that regard. So here goes:
- How exactly does mainstream pop music evolve over time? This article from the Pacific Standard summarizes research demonstrating that on general pop music has been getting sadder and sadder over time. This is reflected not only in increasingly negative lyrics but also in the slower tempo and music with mixed emotional cues.
- The next article belongs in economics which many dispute is really a science at all, though I tend to disagree. This one is from the Library of Economics and Liberty and talks about how employers in different countries are averse to firing workers in different ways. The survey finds that there are two extremes, reflecting the different values of the countries involved. The Anglo-American business world likes being efficient, even if that means ruthlessness. They are more likely to fire expensive, middle-aged workers with middling performance. The Germans are more sympathetic towards middle-aged workers, preferring to fire a younger worker with comparable performance even if his wages are cheaper.
- The Economist has an article on a subject that Thomas Kuhn would no doubt heartily approve of: it is dangerous to generalize findings in experimental psychology too widely. This is because a lot of such research uses test subjects that fall into the same demographic category which the authors of the paper being cited have summed up in a media-savvy acronym: WEIRD. This stands for White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. To solve this, the authors have tried to use crowdsourcing to open surveys to a wider group of participants and since there seems to be an infinite supply of people willing to work for next to nothing on services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, it’s dirt cheap too.
- Normally the articles I like to select about new scientific discoveries rather than the latest technological gizmos. Gadgets are cool and all, but the years and years of research behind the principles that make them work are the really intellectually interesting part in my opinion. But I make an exception when it’s something that could open up cybernetics in a big way as this article from ExtremeTech explains. It’s an implantable fuel cell that generates electricity from the glucose in the human body. Once installed it can generate electricity indefinitely to power any other cybernetic implants you might have. Heck, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have an external port built into your body to charge your mobile phone or similar device with it. The only cost being that you might feel the need to eat a bit more than usual.
- The Turing Test is a well known test to determine the quality of an AI by engaging it in conversation. This article, again from the Pacific Standard, can be thought of as a variation of that. Can sophisticated, specially trained music aficionados tell the difference between a composition that is written by a human and one written by a computer program? It turns out that they can’t as a blind survey of musically knowledgeable listeners revealed that they found computer-composed works just as appealing as those written by real humans.
- Finally just for fun, this article from the Mail Online covers one of the greatest scientific achievements of humanity: the Voyager 1 space probe that was launched in 1977 is now leaving the solar system. Incredibly it is still in contact with NASA, despite a communications delay of 16 hours. We probably shouldn’t expect it to be able to keep that up for long once it enters interstellar space.
Recent Interesting Science Articles (May ‘2012)
I’m getting an early start on this month’s installment of this regular feature. I’m really digging how this new abbreviated format allows me to burn through more articles in a succinct fashion. Here goes:
- The first article is actually a post on Robin Hanson’s blog Overcoming Bias who points out that stories, both the telling and enjoyment of them, has interesting and unexpected effects on a person’s outlook on life. In particular, enjoying fiction seems to, in a sense, cause us to buy into the fictional world with its sense of poetic justice and ethical norms. So we believe the world to be more just and less impersonal than it actually is and behave accordingly. Hanson further speculate that this is a benefit that religions also share, regardless of the underlying truth of that belief.
- Next we have a real-life, honest-to-goodness version of Robocop. This Phys.org article talks about how South Korea is testing robotic guards in one of its prisons. The robots are equipped with a wide variety of sensor devices and software that helps determine the behavioral characteristics of inmates. They are capable of autonomously patrolling the halls of the prison and are supposed to alert human operators if they detect anything out of the ordinary. They’re not armed yet but it seems the next plan would be to get the robots to perform body searches, looking for hidden and improvised weapons in particular.
- Next we have an article about a study confirming something that all dog owners already suspect to be true: just as people yawn when they see and hear other people yawn, so do dogs. This article from The Washington Post covers research which shows that not only do dogs yawn when they hear humans yawning, they are more likely to do it when they hear a person whose voice they recognize yawning.
- Online learning is all the rage these days and I’m currently taking free courses for fun from coursera.org myself but the effectiveness of such computer assisted learning is understandably a big point of contention within educational circles. This article from Inside Higher Ed looks at an experiment that compared the results of students who studied in the traditional way with lectures from a live instructor and students who studied using a hybrid format devised by Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative. This involved a mere one hour of live instruction per week with the rest of the time spent on an artificially intelligent learning platform working through lessons and exercises. The results were pretty shocking: the students using the hybrid format needed only about one quarter of the time to obtain the same results as those using the traditional format.
- Modern animal researchers are very careful about anthropomorphism, that is explaining animal behaviors through the lens of human experience but as this article from the BBC indicates, for some animals this is actually warranted because they really are so alike to humans. Chimpanzees and orangutans it seems are so similar to humans, due to our shared evolutionary history, that not only can each animal be said to have a distinct personality but their personality types are similar to those of humans. This is after carefully controlling that human observers aren’t projecting human biases into their observations.
Driverless cars
For a while now, I’ve been talking about how public transport should work ideally in private conversations with my wife. This is because I think privately owned motor vehicles are terribly inefficient. They’re idle the vast majority of the time, they transport too few people for the road area they occupy and consequently waste too much energy. I for one was shocked when I first learned than more than 50% of the area of a typical city is devoted solely to roads. But in practice, privately owned vehicles are so convenient compared to the alternative of public transport that, except for the very densest of cities, they’re the method of transportation of choice despite their inefficiencies.
So all this has remained my personal pet peeve. (I guess I’m also personally biased against cars because I dislike driving.) Until now, at least, because with the advent of Google’s driverless cars, suddenly my vision of an efficient public transport system now seems almost like the inevitable future. Some relevant links to consider:
- This news item about Google being granted a license to operate driverless cars in the state of Nevada early this month kicked off a lot of articles and blog posts about the effects this development will eventually have.
- This article about a reporter’s account of being transported in one of Google’s cars reveals that a lot of work remains to be done. Google’s engineers wouldn’t allow the car to be driven away from the fixed routes it was trained on and the computer handed back control to the humans at a few moments when it was unsure about what to do.
- Still, it does seem that the kinks will be worked out eventually and this blog post points out how the widespread deployment of driverless cars could drastically reshape our urban geography.
Of course, driverless cars would also alter our lifestyles. Freed of the need to pay attention to the road, time spent in transit would be extra time to spend as you wish, whether working, reading, watching videos or even sleeping. I predict that with transport becoming vastly more efficient, this would drive down transport costs and raise effective standards of living. And of course, cities would be more beautiful and more pleasant to live. This truly would be the next revolution to look out for.
Recent Interesting Science Articles (Apr ’12)
No less than five articles this month! I’ve been a little busy bee, especially with moving into a new house and all.
- Jon Stewart commented that you rarely see a headline in 2012 that sounds like it should be a headline in 2012 when you were just a kid. This is of course apropos of the asteroid mining plan announced by space startup Planetary Resources. There are lots of articles on this all over the web but this one from Forbes talks about the firm’s plans to be cashflow positive even though no actual mining will happen for more than ten years at least. That makes it sound a bit more real and less of a pipe dream, even if it is backed by Google’s founders and the creator of Microsoft Office.
- The wise old mentor is a trope that everyone knows, but is it true? Does age actually confer wisdom? Inasmuch that wisdom can be quantifiable, researchers from the University of Waterloo, Canada, has attempted to verify just that, as detailed in this article from The Economist. The results are nothing short of astonishing. North Americans do appear to gain wisdom with age, but the Japanese appeared to be nearly as wise as wizened North Americans even when young and their wisdom scores never varied much with age. This is just the sort of finding that calls for lots more cultural study.
- When I was studying in France, my French language professor liked to comment about how the Chinese can say so many things with so few words. This is because each syllable in the Chinese language is unusually dense with information, possibly because of the different tonal variations possible. This Scientific American article shows how to correlate this fact with another observation: different languages are spoken at different speeds. It turns out that while each syllable in Chinese is packed with more information than the norm, the Chinese language is also one of the slowest spoken languages, so its overall information transmission rate still roughly matches that of other languages. In the same way, languages which are spoken very fast, such as Spanish, have less information per syllable.
- Ever since buckyballs were invented in 1985, it was hailed as a game-changing revolutionary material and science writers loved to hype it up. I suspect that it’s at least partly because using the word buckminsterfullerene in print is so fun. Until very recently however, very few practical applications have been found for its unusual properties. This blog post points at a completely unexpected use for it. A team studying the long-term toxicology effects of the molecule by giving it to rats in a solution of olive oil not only found it to be completely non-toxic, it actually extended the lifespan of the rats by some 90% making it the most effective life-extension treatment ever found for rodents. Now, that is game-changing indeed.
- On the astronomy front, a huge new discovery about what surrounds the Milky Way is new reason to think that the mysterious dark matter might not exist after. Dark matter was posited to explain why the relatively sparse matter that we can observe is far less than the mass that the universe needs to have. It turns out that we simply haven’t been looking hard enough. This news release from the AlphaGalileo Foundation trumpets the discovery of a vast structure of satellite galaxies and clusters of stars that surrounds the Milky Way. I guess space just isn’t that sparse after all.
Recent Interesting Science Articles (Mar ’12)
Once again, I’m sacrificing verbosity for sheer quantity of science-related links. Here goes:
- I notice that despite that my very liberal political sympathies, many of my posts have been showing a markedly anti-democratic bias. This article from LiveScience is a good demonstration of why democracy is inherently flawed: most people aren’t smart enough to judge the competence of other people. The article cites research by a Cornell University psychology which shows that not only are people incompetent at judging the competence of other people in fields in which they are not an expert, they are ignorant about their own incompetence. As the familiar anecdote goes, most people, if asked to rate their personal ability in a particular field, will give themselves an above-average rating. This poses obvious problems for democracies which in theory rely on elections to help us pick the most qualified leader. But as always, the Churchill dictum that democracy is the worst form of government, except all of the others, remains true. Such findings don’t invalidate that. They merely remind us that natural and inalienable human rights should never be contravened even by a democratic majority and that direct rule through referendums is probably a bad idea.
- I remember when mixing descriptions between senses, like hearing a color or feeling a smell, was just a literary flourish but as this article from The Economist points out, not only do synaesthetes exist, but most people probably have cross-modal associations of this sort without being consciously aware of it. In this case, researchers from Oxford University asked volunteers to describe different smells and tastes in terms of music, and there turns out to be a surprisingly correlation in how people associate the same type of smell or taste with the same pitch or even specific musical instrument.
- This doesn’t count as a science article in that sense of news coverage of a recently published scientific paper. It’s a blog post by a statistics expert but I’ve come to like his blog very much so here it is. This one is an analysis of the relationship between changes in the availability of pornography and perceived social effects. The upshot is that increased availability of pornography has no detrimental effect on anti-social behavior. Japan for example, which many now know for its widespread availability of violent pornography, went from almost no porn to lots of porn within a short of period time, actually reports a decrease in sexual crime. It’s worth noting that increasing availability of porn reduces sexual crimes only and has no effect on other crimes. Watching porn does seem to induce some sociological changes, such as reported happiness in marriages among different types of couples, but I’ll leave it up to the reader to read the report in full and judge if it’s good or bad.
- Another year, another species of early hominid discovered. This article, also from LiveScience, covers fossils of heretofore unknown species discovered in China. Daubed the “Red Deer Cave People”, they are unusual in that they have a combination of both modern and archaic anatomical features and seemed to have coexisted with modern humans in the earliest age of agriculture up to around 11,000 years ago.
- Finally, an evolutionary psychology article. I just love them, both for what they reveal about cognition and for how they drive a certain class of intellectual bonkers. This one comes from ScienceDaily and talks about how communities of chimpanzees seem to have police officers of their own. These take the form of respected and senior members of the community who intervene as a third-party in disputes.