Recent Interesting Science Articles (September 2019)

Biology again predominates this month and they’re really interesting bits of news too.

  • The excellent Zootopia famously featured a sloth in a scene and this helped make them popular. This feature article details some of the workings of their biology, possible only because their tree-based life cycle means that they are almost completely free of predators. In many ways, they have adapted to be more like reptiles than other mammals, soaking up energy from the sun and moving slowly to conserve energy.
  • Next is an article featuring cats but isn’t actually about cats. Instead it uses the typical ranges of medical costs for cats and other pets to note how different this market is compared to healthcare for humans, especially in the US. While we all know about inflation in healthcare costs for humans, it notes that medical costs for pets have actually declined modestly. It’s interesting example of how insurance markets and greater consumer choice influence prices.
  • Moving on to people, we have an article about education. Many universities now allow students to rate the quality of their professors and the quality of the instruction they get. The article differentiates between active learning, using methods that encourage students to get involved, and passive learning which consists mostly of listening to lectures. The data show that active learning is unequivocally superior but require more effort from the students. Yet as a result, students give higher ratings to professors who employ passive learning methods, especially when they are enlivened with amusing stories and anecdotes. The tragedy is that students think they have learned a lot from superstar lecturers but tests actually show the opposite.
  • Are different languages spoken at different speeds? This article explores this and related questions. The truth is that they do and yet a new study concludes that despite this speed difference, the rate that information is conveyed using different languages is about the same. This is because some languages, such as English, are more efficient in that information can be conveyed in fewer syllables. Others like Japanese need more syllables but speakers speak faster using them and so need the same amount of time to convey the same information.
  • Finally we end with an article about Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). We all know that AI is all the rage but thus far most ANNs we use rely on blank slates that are then trained using vast reams of data. This article asserts that we ought to take a page from nature in that the brains of most animals don’t start out as blank slates but are highly structured by their genomes. As such the way to get past the bottlenecks of current ANNs is to incorporate innate behavior even in their initial state.

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