Science & TechnologyS


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Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales launches Twitter and Facebook rival

Tim Bradshaw
Financial TImes
Wed, 13 Nov 2019 00:01 UTC
Wikipedia Jimmy Wales
© Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty ImagesWikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales says the business model of social media companies is problematic: 'It turns out the huge winner is low-quality content'
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a rival to Facebook and Twitter that he hopes will combat "clickbait" and misleading headlines.

WT:Social, his new social-networking site, allows users to share links to articles and discuss them in a Facebook-style news feed. Topics range from politics and technology to heavy metal and beekeeping.

While the company is completely separate to Wikipedia, Mr Wales is borrowing the online encyclopedia's business model. WT:Social will rely on donations from a small subset of users to allow the network to operate without the advertising that he blames for encouraging the wrong kind of engagement on social media.

Comment: Sounds like a recipe for the worst social media platform ever. Considering he's launching this platform at our peak 'cancel culture' moment in history, giving people the ability to edit or delete each other's posts will likely lead to the removal of all content (except for, perhaps, the banal content Wales rails against). Everything offends someone, especially if it's something worth saying. This sounds like the opposite of the free-speech platforms people have been asking for.

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Gift 3

Science confirms dogs can recognize a bad person

Bright Side
brightside.me
Tue, 03 Jul 2018 23:01 UTC
Black and white dog
© Mary Swift/Shutterstock
Summary
  • An experiment led by Dr. Akiko Takaoka from the Department of Psychology at Japan's Kyoto University concluded that dogs refuse to trust a person who lied to it. Dogs did not follow a pointing hand that led them to an empty container.
  • In an experiment, dogs wouldn't take a treat from the people who'd been mean or disrespectful toward their owners. In fact, besides distrusting them, they flat-out ignored these meanies.
  • With enough training and treats for a job well-done, dogs are able to tell the happy faces from the sad ones, even with human faces they didn't come across during their training.

Comment: See also:

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Dollars

NASA Inspector General: Additional $300M payment to Boeing for commercial crew contract 'largely unnecessary'

Jeff Foust
Space News
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 00:46 UTC
NASA payments Boeing crew funding
© BoeingNASA provided Boeing with $287.2 million in additional commercial crew funding in order to create more schedule flexibility to address potential gaps in ISS crew access, but NASA's inspector general says most of that additional funding was unnecessary.
NASA paid Boeing nearly $300 million more than originally planned in its commercial crew contract in part because of agency concerns that the company might drop out of the program, a new report claims.

The Nov. 14 report on the commercial crew program by NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) highlighted several issues with the commercial crew program that, it warns, could hinder NASA's ability to access and utilize the International Space Station in the near future.

While some of those issues, like ongoing delays with development of commercial crew vehicles and potential loss of access to the station when Soyuz seats run out, are not new, the report highlighted a change to Boeing's contract that the OIG concluded was largely unnecessary.

According to the report, Boeing proposed in September 2016 prices for four "post-certification missions," or PCMs, of its CST-100 Starliner vehicle that NASA originally rejected as too high, based on a table in the original contract that set prices based on the number of missions ordered and the date ordered.
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Attention

New research says Japanese fisheries collapsed due to pesticides

Jordan Davidson
EcoWatch
Fri, 01 Nov 2019 18:31 UTC
pesticides
© Stockbyte / Getty ImagesSpraying chemicals on rice crop in Japan.
Scientists announced today that pesticide use on rice fields led to the collapse of a nearby fishery in Lake Shinji, Japan, according to a new study published in the journal Science.

The long-term study seems to have borne out the prophecy of Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, in which the author describes the nefarious trickle down effects of chemical pesticides that could "still the leaping of fish." While it is impossible to say that the use of pesticides caused the collapse of the fishery, the correlation is extremely strong.

Comment: Silent Hives: Colony Collapse Disorder and Pesticides:

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Fireball 5

Meteor outburst from the Alpha Monocerotids could produce meteors at a rate of 400 per hour!

Bob King
Sky and Telescope
Wed, 13 Nov 2019 00:00 UTC
Alpha-Monocerotid meteor
© NASAThe Alpha-Monocerotid meteor outburst in 1995. Meteors are actually pieces of rock that have broken off a comet and continue to orbit the Sun.
What's rarer than seeing a unicorn? How about a unicorn spitting meteors at the rate of 400 per hour? You'll have an opportunity to see it for yourself on Thursday night, November 21-22, when the obscure Alpha Monocerotid shower could produce upwards of 400 meteors per hour from a radiant near the star Procyon, a star near the constellation Monoceros, the unicorn. Even more amazing, the outburst is expected to last only a half-hour.

Peter Jenniskens, a senior research scientist with the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center, along with Esko Lyytinen of the Finnish Fireball Network, have been keeping tabs on the shower for years. During outbursts, such as those that occurred in 1925 and 1935, activity reached meteor-storm levels with a zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) of more than 1,000. Activity rose to near-storm levels again in 1985 and 1995 with ZHRs around 700 and 400. ZHR is an idealized number based on how many meteors a single observer would see if the radiant were overhead in a dark sky during shower maximum.

The source of the Alpha Monocerotids is unknown, but the stream's orbital characteristics point to a long-period comet with a period of about 500 years. This nameless visitor deposited a dense, narrow ribbon of debris in the distant past with a half-width of only around 55,000 kilometers, equal to the distance from the center of Earth to the geostationary satellite belt.

Comment: Also, the Earth is passing through the Leonids this month, a huge meteor cloud left behind by the Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Each year sees impressive displays, with certain nights offering particularly spectacular meteor showers. See: 'They thought it was judgment day': The night in 1833 when 'stars fell' on the southern US

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Info

Scientists find mechanism that turns herpes virus on and off

Patricia Waldron
Cornell Chronicle
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 17:46 UTC
Herpes simplex virus
© Shutterstock
The herpes virus causes cold sores and genital sores, as well as life-threatening infections in newborns, encephalitis and corneal blindness.

Treatment of the virus is difficult, because it hides out in nerve cells and emerges months or years later to reactivate the infection. New research from Dr. Luis M. Schang and his group at the Baker Institute for Animal Health has identified a new mechanism that plays a role in controlling how the virus alternates between dormant and active stages of infection.

In Schang's group, Mi Yao Hu and Esteban Flores Cortes discovered that the virus switches between the "latent" stage and the "lytic" stage, in which it is actively replicating, depending on how tightly its DNA is packaged into bundles called chromatin.

Their findings are in a paper, "Chromatin Dynamics and the Transcriptional Competence of HSV-1 Genomes During Lytic Infections," which published Nov. 14 in PLOS Pathogens. Schang's group collaborated with scientists from the University of Alberta, Canada, and University College London (UCL).

"Any problem that herpes causes is because of reactivation from latency," Schang said. "That's the reason why antivirals cannot cure the infection and why so far it's been impossible to develop a vaccine. Latency and reactivation are a major focus for herpes virus research."
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Alarm Clock

Earthquake-like brain-wave bursts found to be essential for healthy sleep


Medical Xpress
Fri, 15 Nov 2019 14:36 UTC
sleep earthquakes
© Ivanov et al.Findings link healthy sleep to brain-wave bursts that mathematically mimic earthquakes
New research in rats shows that cortical arousals and brief awakenings during sleep exhibit non-equilibrium dynamics and complex organization across time scales necessary for spontaneous sleep-stage transitions and for maintaining healthy sleep. Prof. Plamen Ch. Ivanov of Boston University and colleagues present these findings in PLOS Computational Biology.

Sleep is traditionally considered to be a homeostatic process that resists deviation from equilibrium. In that regard, brief episodes of waking are viewed as perturbations that lead to sleep fragmentation and related sleep disorders. While addressing aspects of sleep regulation related to consolidated sleep and wake and the sleep-wake cycle, the homeostatic paradigm does not account for the dozens of abrupt sleep-stage transitions and micro-states within sleep stages throughout the night. Ivanov and colleagues hypothesized that, while sleep is indeed homeostatic at time scales of hours and days, non-equilibrium dynamics and criticality underlie sleep micro-architecture at shorter time scales.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers collected electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings of brain activity over multiple days in normal rats and in rats with injuries to the parafacial zone, a brain region that helps regulate sleep. They analyzed the bursting dynamics of brain activity patterns known as theta waves and delta waves, which are seen in both sleeping rats and humans.
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Butterfly

Insect pollination pushed back 50 millions years with new amber fossil

Indiana University
Phys.org
Mon, 11 Nov 2019 12:00 UTC
burmitina
© the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology.A. burmitina in amber. The 99-million-year-old fossil, recovered from a mine in northern Myanmar, also contains 62 pollen grains from a eudicot flower. It is the earliest known physical evidence of insect pollination.
A new study co-led by researchers in the U.S. and China has pushed back the first-known physical evidence of insect flower pollination to 99 million years ago, during the mid-Cretaceous period.

The revelation is based upon a tumbling flower beetle with pollen on its legs discovered preserved in amber deep inside a mine in northern Myanmar. The fossil comes from the same amber deposit as the first ammonite discovered in amber, which was reported by the same research group earlier this year.

The report of the new fossil will publish Nov. 11 in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The fossil, which contains both the beetle and pollen grains, pushes back the earliest documented instance of insect pollination to a time when pterodactyls still roamed the skies — or about 50 million years earlier than previously thought.

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Info

Study suggests objective reality doesn't exist

Alessandro Fedrizzi and Massimiliano Proietti
The Conversation
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 05:11 UTC
Blowing Bubbles
© Gearoid Hayes/Flickr, CC BY-SA
Alternative facts are spreading like a virus across society. Now it seems they have even infected science - at least the quantum realm. This may seem counter intuitive. The scientific method is after all founded on the reliable notions of observation, measurement and repeatability. A fact, as established by a measurement, should be objective, such that all observers can agree with it.

But in a paper recently published in Science Advances, we show that, in the micro-world of atoms and particles that is governed by the strange rules of quantum mechanics, two different observers are entitled to their own facts. In other words, according to our best theory of the building blocks of nature itself, facts can actually be subjective.

Observers are powerful players in the quantum world. According to the theory, particles can be in several places or states at once - this is called a superposition. But oddly, this is only the case when they aren't observed. The second you observe a quantum system, it picks a specific location or state - breaking the superposition. The fact that nature behaves this way has been proven multiple times in the lab - for example, in the famous double slit experiment (see video below).
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R2-D2

From science fiction to science lab: Holograms you can 'feel'


Phys Org
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:54 UTC
Help me, Obi-wan Kenobi!
© Lucasfilm/20th Century Fox
Walking, talking holograms have been a staple of sci-fi films since Princess Leia was magically brought to life in "Star Wars".

Now scientists in Britain say they can make even more realistic 3-D versions — a butterfly, a globe, an emoji — which can be seen with the naked eye, heard and even felt without the need for any virtual reality systems.

Writing in the journal Nature, a team at the University of Sussex in southern England, said technology currently in use can create 3-D images but they are slow, short-lived and "most importantly, rely on operating principles that cannot produce tactile and auditive content as well".

To fill in the picture, so to speak, the team created a prototype called Multimodal Acoustic Trap Display (MATD) which "can simultaneously deliver visual, auditory and tactile content".
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