Science & TechnologyS


Bulb

Watch Russian special forces take 'hallucination-inducing' shield into action


RT
Tue, 02 Apr 2019 19:19 UTC
hallucination shield filin light fun
© YouTube / Russia’s Defense Ministry
It not only provides protection in close quarters combat, but it can also make the enemy hallucinate. Russian special forces using an armored shield with a state-of-the-art light suppression system have been caught on video.

In mid-March, the arrival of a Russian warship with a Filin light gun onboard near British shores caused a meltdown in the UK tabloids. The papers shocked their readers with details of the device's hallucination and vomit-inducing effects, forgetting to mention that the system was designed for defense purposes, and didn't cause irreversible damage to eyesight.

Now, it turns out that similar suppression means, but of a smaller scale, can be also be successfully employed by the troops during combat.

Comment: Compare the relatively harmless, defensive weapon produced by Russia with what America is conjuring up: US marines reveal plans for plasma 'crowd control' weapon that screams, burns, blinds and kills from 3,000 feet away

See also:

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Cow Skull

Hot air! Methane warming caused by livestock exaggerated by 400%

Barry Brill
Watts Up With That
Sat, 30 Mar 2019 00:00 UTC
cows
The IPCC's AR5 estimated the global warming caused by a tonne of livestock methane would be 28 times that of a tonne of carbon dioxide. New research destroys that estimate.

The war on meat has been gathering pace amongst our Western elites. The Economist makes a detailed case for "plant-based food" in the interests of quelling climate change -
The FAO calculates that cattle generate up to two-thirds of the greenhouse gases from livestock, and are the world's fifth largest source of methane. If cows were a country, the United Herds of Earth would be the planet's third largest greenhouse-gas emitter.
These calculations are based on figures supplied by the IPCC's AR5, which contends that the global warming potential (GWP) of methane over 100 years is no less than 28 times the global warming it expects to be caused by an equivalent weight of carbon dioxide. This estimate is up from the GWP of 21 put forward in the IPCC's previous report.
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Brain

New study on pre-natal brain development blows up old ideas about girls and boys

Leonard Sax M.D., Ph.D.
Psychology Today
Wed, 27 Mar 2019 17:39 UTC
boy girl baby sex differences
© Stock
Is gender a mere tool of the patriarchy? Or is it hardwired prior to birth?

If there are superstar scholars, Berkeley professor Judith Butler is a superstar. She is best known for pioneering the idea that "male" and "female" are merely social constructs. She writes that "because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all." For this insight, she has been rewarded with an avalanche of scholarly honors and prizes, including the Mellon Prize, which carries with it a $1.5 million cash award. (By comparison, the Nobel Prize gets you just $1.1 million.)

Butler is a professor of comparative literature, not a neuroscientist, but her ideas about gender have become widely accepted worldwide in the nearly 30 years since the publication of her book Gender Trouble. In 2017, Cordelia Fine, professor of historical and philosophical studies at the University of Melbourne, published a book titled Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the myths of our gendered minds Following Butler, Fine asserted that any claims that women and men differ significantly in brain or behavior are simply myths perpetuated by the heteronormative patriarchy. Fine's book promptly received the Royal Society's prestigious prize for best science book of the year.
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2 + 2 = 4

Mathematician Granville Sewell: Devolution is natural, evolution is not

Granville Sewell
Evolution News
Mon, 01 Apr 2019 17:54 UTC
Japan car factory
© Toru Hanai / Reuters
I know many other mathematicians and engineers who share my low opinion of Darwinism, but most are reluctant to express their views publicly because they feel that the issue is simply outside their area of expertise and they will not be taken seriously. I also tend to defer to specialists on scientific issues outside my discipline - until those specialists try to tell me something clearly absurd, for example, that unintelligent forces alone could have reorganized the basic particles on Earth into computers and airplanes and Apple iPhones. Then I don't hesitate to jump into the debate. I have done so, for example, in a 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer opinion piece, "A Mathematician's View of Evolution," and in a 2017 Physics Essays article, "On 'Compensating' Entropy Decreases."

A Very Simple Principle

It is really not necessary to be a biochemist or a paleontologist to understand the main issue in the debate between Darwinism and intelligent design. That is because it is a very simple principle, as I keep emphasizing: natural (unintelligent) causes do not create order (or information). They destroy it. That is the main theme of the first half of my video "Why Evolution Is Different."

Comment: More from Behe himself:

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Robot

Killer robots already exist

Mark Ryder
The Conversation
Wed, 27 Mar 2019 11:28 UTC
Killer Robots
© Mykola Holyutyak/Shutterstock
Humans will always make the final decision on whether armed robots can shoot, according to a statement by the US Department of Defense. Their clarification comes amid fears about a new advanced targeting system, known as ATLAS, that will use artificial intelligence in combat vehicles to target and execute threats. While the public may feel uneasy about so-called "killer robots", the concept is nothing new - machine-gun wielding "SWORDS" robots were deployed in Iraq as early as 2007.

Our relationship with military robots goes back even further than that. This is because when people say "robot", they can mean any technology with some form of "autonomous" element that allows it to perform a task without the need for direct human intervention.

These technologies have existed for a very long time. During World War II, the proximity fuse was developed to explode artillery shells at a predetermined distance from their target. This made the shells far more effective than they would otherwise have been by augmenting human decision making and, in some cases, taking the human out of the loop completely.

So the question is not so much whether we should use autonomous weapon systems in battle - we already use them, and they take many forms. Rather, we should focus on how we use them, why we use them, and what form - if any - human intervention should take.
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Comet 2

Asteroid G6478 now has two tails and scientists think it's breaking apart

Dave Mosher
Business Insider
Thu, 28 Mar 2019 20:59 UTC
6478 Gault
Thanks to an impressive collaboration bringing together data from ground-based telescopes, all-sky surveys and space-based facilities — including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope — a rare self-destructing asteroid called 6478 Gault has been observed.
In space, no one can hear an asteroid scream. But astronomers just used the Hubble telescope to see one destroying itself.

A 2.5-mile-wide asteroid called 6478 Gault was first discovered in 1988, and it seemed like many of the other 800,000 known space rocks.

But in January, astronomers saw something strange in survey telescope images: Gault had become "active" and sprouted a big, bright tail - much like a comet's - that stretched more than 500,000 miles long. A dimmer second tail was found several weeks later.

Some space rocks that initially look like asteroids are later found to be comets when they pass close to the sun. The boost in solar energy can warm up ice and other frozen compounds hidden under layers of dust, turning those materials into gases and leading the rock to spew out comet debris to form a long, glowing tail.


Comment: As noted in Something only EU can explain: Asteroid 6478 Gault 'suddenly sprouts a comet-like tail':
It IS a 'comet' because the only difference between an asteroid and a comet is that the latter is glowing from electrical discharge.

Gault didn't seem to fit the bill, though, since it lurks about 214 million miles away from the sun in a fairly circular orbit between Mars and Jupiter. In other words, it never swung close to the sun. So scientists wondered if another space rock had collided with Gault, splashing its dusty guts all over space.

Comment: Scientists are documenting a lot of 'rare' activity which they are struggling to explain because, despite the advance in technology which can monitor space rocks, their current theories have yet to incorporate the electro-magnetic nature of space: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Cell Phone

'Technoference' - The disruptive impact of mobile phones

Nick Carne
Cosmos Magazine
Sun, 31 Mar 2019 19:17 UTC
Smart Phone
© d3sign/Getty ImagesConvenient they might be, but for an increasing number of people mobile phones are also disruptive.
New Australian research highlights the increasing risk of "technoference'" - the disruptive impact of mobile phones.

Nearly a quarter of women surveyed and 15% of men could be classified as problematic mobile users, the researchers say. That jumps to 40.9% for the 18-to-24 age group.

And it's a rapidly escalating problem.

The researchers, led by Oscar Oviedo-Trespalacios from the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety at Queensland University of Technology, surveyed 709 people aged 18 to 83 in 2018, using questions replicated from a similar survey in 2005.

They then compared the findings and discovered significant increases in people blaming their phones for everything from losing sleep to becoming less productive or taking more risks while driving.

Today 19.5% of women 11.8% of men say they lose sleep due to the time they spend on their mobile phone, compared with just 2.3% and 3.2% respectively in 2005.

One in eight men say their productivity has decreased as a direct result of the time they spend on their mobile - compared to none in 2005.
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Attention

These giant viruses have weaponised CRISPR against their rivals and bacterial hosts

Michael Le Page
New Scientist
Sat, 30 Mar 2019 07:42 UTC
Bacteriophage viruses
© EYE OF SCIENCE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYBacteriophage viruses attacking an E. coli cell
Hundreds of huge, bacteria-killing viruses have been newly discovered lurking in all kinds of environments, including our guts. Their massive genomes code for many proteins not found in smaller viruses, including CRISPR systems used to attack both their bacterial hosts and rival viruses.

The massive viruses have long gone unnoticed because the standard methods used to look for bacteria-killing viruses, or bacteriophages, literally filter them out. Instead, a team has found them by looking at all the DNA present in a variety of samples, an approach known as metagenomics.

The researchers then pieced together the genomes of the huge phages using a method developed by team leader Jill Banfield at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bacteriophages are the most common entities on Earth. There can be many millions in a drop of seawater. Almost all known phages have genomes tens of thousands of DNA letters long at most. Larger ones were thought to be very rare. But earlier this year, Banfield's team reported finding more than a dozen phages with genomes up to 540,000 DNA letters long in the guts of humans and animals.

Comment: See also:

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Chalkboard

Information Realism: Why physics is pointing inexorably to mind

Bernardo Kastrup
Scientific American
Mon, 25 Mar 2019 20:53 UTC
mind physics
© Getty Images
In his 2014 book, Our Mathematical Universe, physicist Max Tegmark boldly claims that "protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars" are all redundant "baggage." Only the mathematical apparatus used to describe the behavior of matter is supposedly real, not matter itself. For Tegmark, the universe is a "set of abstract entities with relations between them," which "can be described in a baggage-independent way" - i.e., without matter. He attributes existence solely to descriptions, while incongruously denying the very thing that is described in the first place. Matter is done away with and only information itself is taken to be ultimately real.


Comment: Tegmark is right about the importance of information, but his formulation is the epitome of what is wrong with scientific abstraction: the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. As R.G. Collingwood wrote in Speculum Mentis:
For it must be borne in mind that the abstract concept is nothing but the abstract structure of the sensible world, and therefore if the concept alone is real the world whose structure it is will be mere appearance and not reality, and therefore the concept will be a class whose members are not real.

... Mathematics is nothing but the assertion of the abstract concept, and it can give us no account of the presuppositions of this assertion. Mathematical logic is only the shadow of science itself. It is the truth, but the truth about nothing: it is the description of the structure of a null class. Hence, though the hypotheses of empirical science must have some kind of categorical basis, they cannot find this in mathematics, which is the very distilled essence of hypothesis itself. The abstract cannot rest upon the more abstract, but only on the concrete.

This abstract notion, called information realism is philosophical in character, but it has been associated with physics from its very inception. Most famously, information realism is a popular philosophical underpinning for digital physics. The motivation for this association is not hard to fathom.

Indeed, according to the Greek atomists, if we kept on dividing things into ever-smaller bits, at the end there would remain solid, indivisible particles called atoms, imagined to be so concrete as to have even particular shapes. Yet, as our understanding of physics progressed, we've realized that atoms themselves can be further divided into smaller bits, and those into yet smaller ones, and so on, until what is left lacks shape and solidity altogether. At the bottom of the chain of physical reduction there are only elusive, phantasmal entities we label as "energy" and "fields" - abstract conceptual tools for describing nature, which themselves seem to lack any real, concrete essence.


Comment: Only if we commit ourselves to believing solely in our own abstractions.

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Microscope 1

Michael Behe responds to Prof. Lenski: Most random mutations ARE damaging

Michael Behe
Evolution News
Fri, 29 Mar 2019 19:03 UTC
Richard Lenski
© Zachary Blount [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia CommonsRichard Lenski
This is the third in a series of posts responding to the extended critique of Darwin Devolves by Richard Lenski at his blog, Telliamed Revisited. Professor Lenski is perhaps the most qualified scientist in the world to analyze the arguments of my book. He is the Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University, a MacArthur ("Genius Award") Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences with hundreds of publications. He also has a strong interest in the history and philosophy of science. His own laboratory evolution work is a central focus of the book. I am very grateful to Professor Lenski for taking time to assess Darwin Devolves. His comments will allow interested readers to quickly gauge the relative strength of arguments against the book's thesis.

Unintended Consequences

I have already addressed several of the issues that Lenski has raised at his blog in his third post on Darwin Devolves, "Is the LTEE Breaking Bad?," in my responses (here, here, and here) to the review by my Lehigh colleagues, because they cited his work frequently. Nonetheless, repetition is a fine teaching tool. So here I will again speak to those issues and also address a few others.

In "Is the LTEE Breaking Bad?" Lenski agrees that the beneficial mutations seen in his Long Term Evolution Experiment are overwhelmingly degradative or loss-of-function ones. Even so, that does not concern him because "the LTEE represents an ideal system in which to observe degradative evolution." Beneficial degradative changes are only to be expected there, it seems.
The LTEE was designed (intelligently, in my opinion!) to be extremely simple in order to address some basic questions about the dynamics and repeatability of evolution, while minimizing complications. It was not intended to mimic the complexities of nature, nor was it meant to be a test-bed for the evolution of new functions. The environment in which the bacteria grow is extremely simple. ...

Indeed, the LTEE environment is so extremely simple that one might reasonably expect the bacteria would evolve by breaking many existing functions. That is because the cells could, without consequence, lose their abilities to exploit resources not present in the flasks, lose their defenses against absent predators and competitors, and lose their capacities to withstand no-longer-relevant extreme temperatures, bile salts, antibiotics, and more. [Emphasis in the original.]
In other words, there are many tools in the robust E. coli genomic toolbox that wouldn't be needed in the Michigan State lab. It could lose them without immediate consequence. In fact, there may even be some benefit to losing them, either by simply saving the energy of making them, or by diverting resources to other pathways that are more heavily used in the lab environment.

Comment: Behe's previous responses to Lenski:

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