Science & Technology

Mice used to test 'trolley problem' in real life

Clare Wilson
New Scientist
Fri, 11 May 2018 15:23 UTC

Would you kill someone if it would save the lives of five others? This classic thought experiment is known as the trolley problem, and is taking on growing importance as we train self-driving cars to take to the road. It's also had a recent rise in recognition thanks to its role in philosophical sitcom The Good Place. But the first real-life enactment of the problem in a lab - using mice - suggests we may have been approaching it wrong.

The trolley problem involves imagining that a runaway rail car is going to hit and kill five people - unless you pull a lever, diverting the car onto a different track, where it would only wipe out one. Rerouting the car would logically cause the least harm, but some people struggle with the hypothetical guilt of hurting someone through their direct actions and say they wouldn't be able to pull the lever.

Dries Bostyn of Ghent University in Belgium and his colleagues wanted to know if people would show this reluctance in a real-life version of the test. To do this, they used mice as the victims instead of people, and recruited about 200 volunteers. Each person entered a room and was told that a very painful but non-lethal electric shock was about to be applied to a cage of five mice in front of them. But if the person pressed a button, the shock would be diverted to a second cage, containing just one mouse.

Sea levels are rising, but not because of climate change

Fred Singer
Watt's Up With That
Tue, 15 May 2018 14:38 UTC

There is nothing we can do about it, except to build dikes and sea walls a little bit higher.

Of all known and imagined consequences of climate change, many people fear sea-level rise most. But efforts to determine what causes seas to rise are marred by poor data and disagreements about methodology. The noted oceanographer Walter Munk referred to sea-level rise as an "enigma"; it has also been called a riddle and a puzzle.

It is generally thought that sea-level rise accelerates mainly by thermal expansion of sea water, the so-called steric component. But by studying a very short time interval, it is possible to sidestep most of the complications, like "isostatic adjustment" of the shoreline (as continents rise after the overlying ice has melted) and "subsidence" of the shoreline (as ground water and minerals are extracted).

Comment: Those paying attention are putting their money on an ice age.

US intelligence in panic mode over Russia's new hypersonic glider weapon

RT
Thu, 17 May 2018 18:27 UTC

Russia's state-of-the-art hypersonic glide vehicle, which analysts say is capable of easily cutting through the existing US missile shield, will become operational by 2020, reports citing US intelligence have warned.

Speaking to CNBC on the condition of anonymity, sources aware of US intelligence reports, said the Russian military successfully tested the weapon twice in 2016. The third known test of the weapon was allegedly carried out in October 2017, and allegedly failed when the device crashed seconds before hitting its target.

The sources believe the device would be a significant breakthrough which could enable Russian military to surpass US counterparts. The intelligence sources claimed that the hypersonic gliders will get onboard countermeasures to enable them to defeat even the most advanced missile-defense systems.

Comment: See also: Russia reportedly successfully tests nuclear-capable hypersonic glider warhead

Researchers create new technique to reveal details of forest fire recovery

Karen Mcnulty Walsh
PhysOrg
Wed, 16 May 2018 14:28 UTC

© Brookhaven National Laboratory
The high-resolution imaging techniques used in this study accurately distinguished live, healthy trees from dead ones, and a healthy canopy from ground-level resprouting and other understory greenery.

Do you know someone who's so caught up in the details of a problem that they "can't see the forest for the trees?" Scientists seeking to understand how forests recover from wildfires sometimes have the opposite problem. Conventional satellite systems that survey vast tracts of land burned by forest fires provide useful, general information, but can gloss over important details and lead scientists to conclude that a forest has recovered when it's still in the early stages of recovery.

According to a team of ecologists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, a new technique using a combination of much higher-resolution remote sensing methods provides a more accurate and more detailed picture of what's happening on the ground. In a paper that will appear in the June 2018 issue of the journal Remote Sensing of Environment, they describe how they used much higher-resolution satellite imagery and aerial measurements collected by NASA to characterize a forested area damaged by a 2012 wildfire that had spread onto the Laboratory's grounds.

Are electric vehicles cleaner? The evidence points firmly in one direction

Julia Poliscanova
EURACTIV
Mon, 12 Mar 2018 10:19 UTC

Opponents of electrification will continue to misuse lifecycle analyses to discredit battery electric vehicles. But they need to be increasingly 'creative' to do so, writes Julia Poliscanova

© Jakob Härter / Flickr
To understand the impact of electric vehicles it is important to look not only at their use but also at the energy used to produce the vehicle and the battery

Julia Poliscanova is clean vehicles and air quality manager at sustainable transport group Transport & Environment.

As diesel sales slump and those of electric vehicles pass one million, batteries are fast becoming a major part of the EU's industrial future. It is not just talk this time. Investment is happening: LG Chem is planning for production in Poland and Samsung SDI is doing likewise in Hungary; NorthVolt has just signed a large loan to build a demo plant in Sweden, and Saft, a subsidiary of Total, announced a battery consortium with Siemens, Solvay and MAN.

Amidst all this, the environmental benefits of electric cars are under intense scrutiny with news articles on this a regular feature in most EU countries. So, do electric cars reduce car CO2 emissions or do they just shift the problem elsewhere?

To understand the impact of electric vehicles it is important to look not only at their use - ie, when you drive them - but also at the energy used to produce the vehicle and the battery. For this we use lifecycle analysis. Lifecycle methodologies are based on complex modelling with a number of assumptions determining how battery cars perform vis-à-vis fossil fuel cars. The most critical factor is the carbon intensity of electricity used to power and build the vehicle.

X-Ray laser heats water to 180,000 degrees in a fraction of a second

Jonathan Kesh
Outer Places
Tue, 15 May 2018 18:03 UTC

At first glance, hearing that "scientists heated water really fast" doesn't sound like that cool of an achievement. But it's how they did it that makes it a little more flashy.

A team of scientists at Uppsala University in Sweden have just successfully used an X-ray laser to heat room temperature water to a whopping 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit (100,000 degrees Celsius) in less than a tenth of a picosecond. That would be about a millionth of a millionth of a second, and it was done in a way that the water didn't vaporize into steam at such ridiculously high temperatures.

To be exact, it took about 75 femtoseconds for the water to go from a glass of tap water into something several times the temperature of the sun's surface. Since it's not easy to find a laser with that much power behind it, the experiment took place at the SLAC Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University; the researchers just published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So, how does X-ray heating work?

Researchers removed a memory from one snail and stuck it in another snail

Rafi Letzter
Live Science
Tue, 15 May 2018 20:08 UTC

A new study strongly suggests that at least some memories are stored in genetic code, and that genetic code can act like memory soup. Suck it out of one animal and stick the code in a second animal, and that second animal can remember things that only the first animal knew.

That might sound like science fiction or remind some readers of debunked ideas from decades past. But it's serious science: In a new study, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) extracted RNA, a genetic messenger molecule, from one snail and implanted it in another snail. Then, for good measure, they dribbled that same RNA over a bundle of loose neurons in a petri dish. In both experiments, the recipient - either the snail or the petri-neurons - remembered something the donor snail had experienced.

The memory was simple, the kind of thing even a snail's reflex-based, brainless nervous system can hold onto: the shock of an electric zap in the butt.

Comment: More on the research into connectomes:

Tech genius says AI is summoning demons - "no one is paying attention"

Ruby Henley
Investment Watch Blog
Mon, 14 May 2018 17:45 UTC

When I watched this video, I had to do a second take. I thought I had misunderstood this man's words, but I was not mistaken. I am still amazed at what he said to the audience in trying to explain the sinister facets of artificial intelligence. As Elon Musk had said at an earlier time, "we are summoning the demon."

This, too, is amazing to me, as Musk helped to create A.I. I don't know if any of you have noticed, but Elon has been on the downside of luck recently. He has had accident after accident with his inventions. I am really concerned for him, as he said earlier that "humans were underrated."

He said this, as the accidents had begun to occur in his factories. He went in himself to investigate why these accidents were occurring. What happened next was amazing. He found that the flaws found in his products were coming from A.I. he had replaced his human workers with.

That is when he made the statement, "humans are underrated." He then hired his workers back.

Comment: Of course, one tech genius's speculation (assuming that is what it is) does not make a solid case that this is what is in fact happening. But at least he's asking the question. 'Paranoia' about extreme dangers is not irrational - it is what helps humans survive.

'Green' paradox: New report finds broad adoption of electric cars will increase air pollution

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That?
Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00 UTC

New report suggests EV's are out of reach for the average American, and broad adoption will actually cause an increase in traditional air pollution

It asks whether the internal combustion engine is on its way out. It soon will be, according to advocates for "zero-emissions vehicle" (ZEV) technologies, especially battery-powered electric vehicles. They claim that ZEVs will offer superior performance, lower cost, and, most importantly, "emissions-free" driving.

Sound too good to be true? That's because it is, according to a new report published by the Manhattan Institute. Dr. Jonathan Lesser, the author of "Short Circuit: The High Cost of Electric Vehicles," argues that critics of the internal combustion engine fail to consider just how clean and efficient new cars are.

Using a recent forecast prepared by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Lesser's analysis shows that, over the period 2018 - 2050, the electric generating plants that will charge new EVs will emit more air pollution than the same number of new internal combustion engines, even accounting for air pollution from oil refineries that manufacture gasoline.

Comment: Increasing air pollution is not a minor consideration - it is the world's biggest killer.

MIT Scientists prove adults master languages to fluency nearly as well as children

Scott Chacon
Medium
Tue, 15 May 2018 11:07 UTC

This week a new paper was published in the journal Cognition titled "A Critical Period for Second Language Acquisition" that used a new, viral Facebook-quiz-powered method of gathering a huge linguistic dataset to provide new insights into how human beings learn language and what effect age has on that process.

In a nutshell, this team found that if you start learning a language before the age of 18, you have a much better likelihood of obtaining a native-like mastery of the language's grammar than if you start later. This is a much older age than has been generally assumed and is really interesting for reasons I'll get into a bit later.

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Science & Technology

Mice used to test 'trolley problem' in real life

Sea levels are rising, but not because of climate change

US intelligence in panic mode over Russia's new hypersonic glider weapon

Researchers create new technique to reveal details of forest fire recovery

Are electric vehicles cleaner? The evidence points firmly in one direction

X-Ray laser heats water to 180,000 degrees in a fraction of a second

Researchers removed a memory from one snail and stuck it in another snail

Tech genius says AI is summoning demons - "no one is paying attention"

'Green' paradox: New report finds broad adoption of electric cars will increase air pollution

MIT Scientists prove adults master languages to fluency nearly as well as children

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