Science & TechnologyS


Bulb

'Insect apocalypse' and light pollution: Is there a connection? New study says Yes

Damian Carrington
The Guardian
Fri, 22 Nov 2019 06:25 UTC
insects light
© Simone De Peak/Getty ImagesThousands of moths swarm around floodlights. Artificial light at night can affect every aspect of insects’ lives, the researchers said.
Light pollution is a significant but overlooked driver of the rapid decline of insect populations, according to the most comprehensive review of the scientific evidence to date.

Artificial light at night can affect every aspect of insects' lives, the researchers said, from luring moths to their deaths around bulbs, to spotlighting insect prey for rats and toads, to obscuring the mating signals of fireflies.

"We strongly believe artificial light at night - in combination with habitat loss, chemical pollution, invasive species, and climate change - is driving insect declines," the scientists concluded after assessing more than 150 studies. "We posit here that artificial light at night is another important - but often overlooked - bringer of the insect apocalypse."

However, unlike other drivers of decline, light pollution was relatively easy to prevent, the team said, by switching off unnecessary lights and using proper shades. "Doing so could greatly reduce insect losses immediately," they said.

Brett Seymoure, a behavioural ecologist at Washington University in St Louis and senior author of the review, said: "Artificial light at night is human-caused lighting - ranging from streetlights to gas flares from oil extraction. It can affect insects in pretty much every imaginable part of their lives."
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Rocket

Watch Russian military put another top secret "inspection" satellite into orbit


RT
Tue, 26 Nov 2019 02:10 UTC
rocket russia
© Russian Defense Ministry
A military-purpose satellite launched from Russia's Plesetsk space center has reached orbit after a successful launch, carrying a mysterious top-secret optical surveillance and "inspection" device.

Launched on a modified Soyuz carrier rocket, the classified military satellite took flight late on Monday and reached orbit soon after, where it will help monitor other Russian craft high above the planet, the Defense Ministry said in a brief statement.

"The spacecraft created on the basis of a unified multifunctional space platform has been put into the target orbit, from where the state of domestic satellites can be monitored."

Comment: See also:

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Robot

Facial recognition "Robocops" see through our clothes and listen to our phone calls


Mass Private I
Tue, 26 Nov 2019 00:00 UTC
Knightscope robots
It has been six months, since I informed the public about the dangers of police Knightscope robots that look an awful lot like Doctor Who's infamous Dalek's.

In my article I warned people that police would use Knightscope's thermal imaging cameras to identify what is under everyone's clothes. (To learn more about public imaging scanners click here.)

A recent article in One Zero revealed that Knightscope has turned their Robocop's into mobile facial recognition devices that can also blacklist people.
"One presentation slide features the company's facial recognition capabilities, indicating that the company can surface a known person's name, the similarity of the person's face compared to a known image, and a log of other identities that the robot has seen."
mobile facial recognition
© One Zero
It is bad enough that the Feds and police use secret blacklists but it is an entirely different story when private companies like Knightscope use facial recognition to do the same thing.

What we are seeing is a total transformation of our legal system run by corporate interests.

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Info

Babies in the womb may see more than we thought

Robert Sanders
University of California, Berkeley
Mon, 25 Nov 2019 17:15 UTC
Retinal Cells
© Franklin Caval-HolmeAn intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cell (ipRGC) as it would appear if you looked at a mouse’s retina through the pupil. The white arrows point to the many different types of cells it networks with: other subtypes of ipRGC cell (red, blue and green) and retinal cells that are not ipRGCs (red). The white bar is 50 micrometers long, approximately the diameter of a human hair.
By the second trimester, long before a baby's eyes can see images, they can detect light.

But the light-sensitive cells in the developing retina — the thin sheet of brain-like tissue at the back of the eye — were thought to be simple on-off switches, presumably there to set up the 24-hour, day-night rhythms parents hope their baby will follow.

University of California, Berkeley, scientists have now found evidence that these simple cells actually talk to one another as part of an interconnected network that gives the retina more light sensitivity than once thought, and that may enhance the influence of light on behavior and brain development in unsuspected ways.

In the developing eye, perhaps 3% of ganglion cells — the cells in the retina that send messages through the optic nerve into the brain — are sensitive to light and, to date, researchers have found about six different subtypes that communicate with various places in the brain. Some talk to the suprachiasmatic nucleus to tune our internal clock to the day-night cycle. Others send signals to the area that makes our pupils constrict in bright light.

But others connect with surprising areas: the perihabenula, which regulates mood, and the amygdala, which deals with emotions.

In mice and monkeys, recent evidence suggests that these ganglion cells also talk with one another through electrical connections called gap junctions, implying much more complexity in immature rodent and primate eyes than imagined.

"Given the variety of these ganglion cells and that they project to many different parts of the brain, it makes me wonder whether they play a role in how the retina connects up to the brain," said Marla Feller, a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and senior author of a paper that appeared this month in the journal Current Biology. "Maybe not for visual circuits, but for non-vision behaviors. Not only the pupillary light reflex and circadian rhythms, but possibly explaining problems like light-induced migraines, or why light therapy works for depression."
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Doberman

Dog or wolf? Scientists still unable to determine 18,000 year old canine remains found in Siberia


Sputnik
Tue, 26 Nov 2019 14:02 UTC
paleo canine
© Centre for Palaeogenetics/ S Fedorov/twitter
Even though the creature's remains were well-preserved due to freezing temperatures, scientists are yet to determine what kind of canine it actually was.

The remains of an ancient puppy found buried in permafrost in the vicinity of the Indigirka River in Siberia, north-east of Yakutsk, left researchers scratching their heads as even a DNA test didn't help them determine the exact nature of the creature, The Siberian Times reports.

According to the media outlet, the puppy was originally discovered in 2018, with all of its body intact, including whiskers and eyelashes.

But while scientists were able to establish that the creature lived about 18,000 years ago and that it was about two-months old at the time of its death, the initial genome sequencing performed by Swedish Centre for Palaeogenetics (CPG) failed to define whether the creature was a wolf or a dog.

Comment: See also:

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Info

Movement rather than shape of wings determines flight

Nick Carne
Cosmos Magazine
Tue, 26 Nov 2019 00:40 UTC
Flight Chamber
© Diana ChinGary goes through his paces in an instrumented flight chamber.
Humans can't fly, but we're determined to work out how others do.

Last month a Canadian team suggested that the way birds move their wings, rather than the shape of those wings, determines how they fly.

Now researchers from Stanford University, US, have watched five parrotlets in flight and discovered that - counterintuitive as it might sound - they used drag to help with their take-off and lift to assist with landing.

Conventional wisdom tells us that drag is a force that slows an object down and lift is a force that counters gravity. However, in this case drag supported up to half of the birds' (admittedly low) body weight at a crucial time, while lift helped with braking.

David Lentink and Diana Chin made the finding after encouraging Gaga, Gary, Oreo, Aurora and Boy to make repeated flights from perch to perch through an instrumented flight chamber developed specifically for the purpose.

It was only 80 centimetres long, but then the birds only weigh 30 grams - and a grain of millet was sufficient inducement for each trip.

To measure the horizontal and vertical forces instantaneously, Chin built a setup with sensor panels on the floor, ceiling, front and back of the birds' flight paths.
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Document

What are lost continents and why are we discovering so many?

Maria Seton, Joanne Whittaker, Simon Williams
The Conversation
Sun, 24 Nov 2019 20:05 UTC
lost continent
For most people, continents are Earth's seven main large landmasses.

But geoscientists have a different take on this. They look at the type of rock a feature is made of, rather than how much of its surface is above sea level.

In the past few years, we've seen an increase in the discovery of lost continents. Most of these have been plateaus or mountains made of continental crust hidden from our view, below sea level.

One example is Zealandia, the world's eighth continent that extends underwater from New Zealand.

Several smaller lost continents, called microcontinents, have also recently been discovered submerged in the eastern and western Indian Ocean.

Comment: See also:

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Robot

New machine learning algorithms increase safety and fairness

University of Massachusetts Amherst
ScienceDaily
Thu, 21 Nov 2019 00:00 UTC
algorithm
© Getty Images
Seventy years ago, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov imagined a world where robots would serve humans in countless ways, and he equipped them with built-in safeguards - now known as Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, to prevent them, among other goals, from ever harming a person.

Guaranteeing safe and fair machine behavior is still an issue today, says machine learning researcher and lead author Philip Thomas at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "When someone applies a machine learning algorithm, it's hard to control its behavior," he points out. This risks undesirable outcomes from algorithms that direct everything from self-driving vehicles to insulin pumps to criminal sentencing, say he and co-authors.
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2 + 2 = 4

A simple proof of intelligent design

Robert Arvay
The American Thinker
Sun, 24 Nov 2019 00:00 UTC
intelligent design
One of the biggest, and most consequential, debates in science is the question of whether the universe, and the life it harbors, are intelligently designed, or whether we all exist only by random chance. Many minds far greater than mine have debated the matter pro and con for years. I have the audacity to propose a simple theorem that will put the matter to rest. Here it is:

Randomness can operate only within nonrandom parameters.

The truth of that utterance is manifold, and its implications are all-embracing. Acceptance or rejection of that simple statement decides whether we, as a society, accept moral principles that cannot possibly come from the human mind, but only from the Supreme Being.

Although this very brief commentary cannot encompass all the complexities, let us nevertheless begin with the manifold layers of proof, and then proceed to the implications.

To start us off, here is a trick question, using a pair of dice as the example. Rolling a single die from the pair, what are the chances of the die-roll "landing a six?" If you answered, one chance in six, then you fell for the trick. I never said that the die being rolled has six sides. Dice can have any number of sides, from four upward.
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Robot

Humanity heading towards a cyborg future

Djuke Veldhuis and Matthew Gwynfryn Thomas
Sapiens
Fri, 15 Nov 2019 16:49 UTC
Cyborgs
© Ronda Churchill/AP Images for Warner Bros. Consumer Products
When you hear the word "cyborg," scenes from the 1980s films RoboCop or The Terminator might spring to mind. But the futuristic characters made famous in those films may no longer be mere science fiction. We are at the advent of an era where digital technology and artificial intelligence are moving more deeply into our human biological sphere. Humans are already able to control a robotic arm with their minds. Cyborgs — humans whose skills and abilities exceed those of others because of electrical or mechanical elements built into the body — are already among us.

But innovators are pushing the human-machine boundary even further. While prosthetic limbs are tied in with a person's nervous system, future blends of biology and technology may be seen in computers that are wired into our brains.

Our ability to technologically enhance our physical capabilities — the "hardware" of our human systems, you could say — will likely reshape our social world. Will these changes bring new forms of dominance and exploitation? Will unaltered humans be subjected to a permanent underclass or left behind altogether? And what will it mean to be human — or will some of us be more than human?

Initial answers may be closer than we think.

Physicist Max Tegmark, MIT professor and president of the Future of Life Institute, considers the recent advances in artificial intelligence and technology through an evolutionary lens to imagine us as "more than human." He categorizes all life into three levels. In his view, the vast majority of life — from bacteria to mice, iguanas to lobsters — falls into what he calls Life 1.0. These creatures survive and replicate, but they cannot redesign themselves within their lifetime. They evolve and "learn" over many generations.
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