Recent Interesting Science Articles (July 2017)

A bit late this month but the delay was useful as I didn’t see many interesting stuff until the last several days. It’s a fairly mixed bag this time.

  • I remember posting something similar a while back so consider this further confirmation. This article talks about parabiosis in which a younger animals shares its blood with an older specimen, providing health benefits to the latter. The research so far suggests that it does work but the precise mechanisms remain unknown and it certainly isn’t a treatment approved by the authorities. Naturally this hasn’t stopped some enterprising businesses from offering such treatments. We should expect better quality data on this as more people opt for these procedures despite the cost.
  • Despite the clickbait headline, this looks like an article based on e legitimate study. It claims that statistical analysis of a survey of more than 500,000 Britons found that driving daily for more than two hours a day is associated with lower IQ. If you look closer however, it’s clear that this is similar to other forms of so-called sedentary behavior such as watching TV. Strangely the opposite is true for those who use computers as that was found to be an activity that stimulates the brain, leading to increased brain function instead.
  • This next one also has a clickbait title and it’s best thought of as yet another milestone in our improving ability to directly read brain signals and interpret it into meaningful information. In this case, it’s a device called the encephalophone which can read electrical signals in the brain, convert the information into musical notes and play them on a synthesizer. Effectively this allows you to think about music and have the computer produce it for you though the range of possible sounds seems limited for now.
  • The prevalence of fake news today makes this article especially relevant. It’s about the difficulty, or lack thereof, of generating artificial sound and video. As it notes, fake audio is now well within the realm of possibility and the technology now exists to feed samples of a particular person’s voice into an algorithm and then using it to generate what you want that person to say. Generated video is far from that point but there are certainly plenty of people working on it.
  • The last article is the most speculative and may not be anything more than a rumor. It reports that a research group at Facebook has shut down an internal project when they discovered that the AIs had developed what amounts to a new language to communicate among themselves. The project apparently began as chatbots meant to explore negotiation strategies which communicate in English. As time passed however, the bots began using the English words in new ways that are unintelligible to humans but which are meaningful for other bots. They also note that similar bots developed at other labs also employed shorthand languages in a similar fashion that became more involved over time.

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