Science & Technology

X-ray vision will soon give soldiers the superhero ability to see through walls

Saqib Shah
The Sun
Fri, 15 Jun 2018 09:30 UTC

© MIT
After three people that have been mapped by the wireless AI device using radio signals, the tech allows you to see them through walls as moving stick men.

Bionic soldiers with X-ray vision could soon be a reality thanks to a new wireless system that uses radio-waves to map people's movements behind walls.

Researchers at MIT trained artificial intelligence to analyse radio signals that bounce off human bodies to create a dynamic stick figure that mimics a person's actions.

The so-called neural network can sense people's postures and movement even from the outside of a building or room.

Comment: See also:

What happened when a scientist filed a public records request for NASA code? Two years of stonewalling

Retraction Watch
Fri, 15 Jun 2018 20:59 UTC

Nathan Myhrvold

Retraction Watch readers may know Nathan Myhrvold, who holds a PhD in physics, as the former chief technology officer at Microsoft, or as the author of Modernist Cuisine. They may also recall that he questioned a pair of papers in Nature about dinosaurs. In that vein, he has also been raising concerns about papers describing the sizes of asteroids. (Not everyone shares those concerns; the authors of the original papers don't, and astronomer Phil Plait said Myrhvold was wrong in 2016.) Last month, Myhrvold published a peer-reviewed paper as part of his critique. The final version of that paper went live today, as did a story about the science in The New York Times and a detailed explanation by Myrhvold in Medium. As the discussion over the results continues, here he shares his experience trying to obtain details about the methodology the authors used.

Two years ago, I uploaded a preprint to arXiv.org describing what I considered serious problems, including apparently irreproducible results, that I had uncovered when analyzing a set of research articles published by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) NEOWISE project. NEOWISE is the largest scientific analysis of asteroids ever conducted; the researchers on the project have so far published estimated sizes of more than 164,000 objects in the solar system, estimates they have claimed were all derived by applying a standard approach to raw observations from the WISEspace telescope.

Russian scientist: Humans may kill aliens to survive in future

Nirmal Narayanan
International Business Times
Fri, 01 Jun 2018 00:37 UTC

Alexander Berezin, renowned Russian theoretical physicist has sensationally predicted that humans are the real bad guys in the Universe who could even destroy alien life to expand our civilization.

The scientist who works at Russia's National University of Electronic Technology Research recently published an article claiming that he has found an ultimate solution to the Fermi's paradox. Fermi's paradox asks the billion dollar question that if the universe is so vast and expanding all the time, then why humans haven't discovered alien life.

Alexander Berezin argues that humans have not found aliens just because ET or extraterrestrials do not have the intelligence like humans and it might be the reason behind the communication gap between these two entities. However, the study was published in the ArXiv digital archive.

Berezin makes it clear that humans will not indulge in this destruction process due to anger or grudge, but it is the natural system of survival. He calls it Darwin's concept of 'survival of the fittest' taken into outer space.

Comment: Resources and cooperation or doom and destruction. Who decides?

Researchers have created an AI that can predict what humans will do in the future

Chris Mahon
Outer Places
Fri, 15 Jun 2018 19:10 UTC

Apparently, teaching artificial intelligence to read our innermost thoughts or turning them into terrifying psychopaths isn't enough - now researchers are teaching AI systems to predict what humans will do in the future (and how long you'll be doing it) "minutes or even hours" before we decide to do it.

It's fine when Google finishes your sentences when typing into a search bar, but this new technology might be able to recognize patterns in human behavior and perform tasks before you've even thought about asking.

Like most tasks performed by artificial intelligence, this ability is tied to machine learning and neural networks.

In the course of their research, a team from the University of Bonn in Germany tried out two models for their networks: one that made predictions and "reflected" before making new more, and one that was based on a matrix structure.

Both networks were shown videos of people making relatively simple food dishes (especially breakfasts and salad) with the goal of teaching them to predict what the chef was going to do next.

Discovery: New type of photosynthesis

Haley Dunning
Phys.org
Thu, 14 Jun 2018 00:00 UTC

© Dennis Nuernberg
Cross-section of beach rock (Heron Island, Australia) showing chlorophyll-f containing cyanobacteria (green band) growing deep into the rock, several millimeters below the surface.

The discovery changes our understanding of the basic mechanism of photosynthesis and should rewrite the textbooks. It will also tailor the way we hunt for alien life and provide insights into how we could engineer more efficient crops that take advantage of longer wavelengths of light.

The discovery, published today in Science, was led by Imperial College London, supported by the BBSRC, and involved groups from the ANU in Canberra, the CNRS in Paris and Saclay and the CNR in Milan.

The vast majority of life on Earth uses visible red light in the process of photosynthesis, but the new type uses near-infrared light instead. It was detected in a wide range of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) when they grow in near-infrared light, found in shaded conditions like bacterial mats in Yellowstone and in beach rock in Australia.

As scientists have now discovered, it also occurs in a cupboard fitted with infrared LEDs in Imperial College London.

Wild animals are reverting to nocturnal habits of distant ancestors to avoid humans

Michael Le Page
New Scientist
Thu, 14 Jun 2018 00:00 UTC

Once great monsters ruled the planet, and mammals cowered in the shadows and came out only at night. Now monsters once again rule the planet, and mammals are reverting to the nocturnal habits of their distant ancestors.

"All mammals were active entirely at night, because dinosaurs were the ubiquitous terrifying force on the planet," says Kaitlyn Gaynor of the University of California, Berkeley. "Now humans are the ubiquitous terrifying force on the planet, and we're forcing all of the other mammals back into the night-time."

Gaynor and her colleagues study the impact people have on wildlife. They noticed a striking pattern: animals were becoming more active at night to avoid human disturbances. When they looked in the scientific literature, they found many other groups had seen the same pattern.

Her team has now done a meta-analysis of 76 studies of 62 mammals all around the world. Almost all of them are shifting to the night to avoid us.

The shape code: Even more information found in DNA

Evolution News
Fri, 15 Jun 2018 16:32 UTC

We may have yet another code to add to Jonathan Wells's growing list of information systems in the cell that challenge the Central Dogma. A new discovery hints at a "shape code" in the double helix.

Can the shape of the DNA double helix affect its behavior? Researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands made "a remarkable discovery" about a protein named Polycomb that binds to DNA. They noticed that it would not bind unless the helix relaxed its twist slightly at the binding site. They concluded, "The shape of the DNA helix proves to be as important as its sequence."

The mechanism of DNA binding of the well-studied protein Polycomb, which is vital for cell division and embryogenesis, has finally been deciphered. A remarkable discovery, as it proves that the shape of DNA is at least as important for where the protein binds in the DNA as the DNA sequence. The role of the shape of DNA had not been demonstrated so clearly. Researchers at Radboud University will publish their findings on May 28th in the scientific journal Nature Genetics. [Emphasis added.]

A 13-second animation shows how this works. The docking protein MTF2, which ferries Polycomb, needs the DNA to un-twist in order to bind to the site, where Polycomb will switch off specific genes. "MTF2 only recognises the binding spot on the DNA if the helix is in a relatively unwound state," the caption says.

Major medical journal backtracks on charges of statistical flaws in published clinical trials

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
Science
Wed, 13 Jun 2018 22:00 UTC

One year after a damning review suggested that many published clinical trials contain statistical errors, The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) today is correcting five of the papers fingered and retracting and republishing a sixth, about whether a Mediterranean diet helps prevent heart disease. (Spoiler alert: It still does, according to the new version of the paper.) Despite errors missed until now, in many ways the journal system worked as intended, with NEJM launching an inquiry within days of the accusations.

The journal's unusual move was prompted by a controversial analysis published in June 2017. Writing in Anaesthesia, where he is also an editor, anesthesiologist John Carlisle of Torbay Hospital in Torquay, U.K., took a statistical deep dive into 5087 randomized, controlled trials. With the help of a computer program, Carlisle looked for a specific type of anomaly: nonrandom assignment of volunteers to different treatments, when the trial had claimed the assignments were random. This can skew a trial's results-for example, if many more elderly people are assigned to a control group while younger ones get an experimental treatment, the new drug may look like it has fewer side effects because the people getting it are healthier.

Across eight journals, Carlisle analyzed how certain features of the volunteers-such as their height, weight, and age-were spread across the treatments tested. If he didn't see certain patterns-if the distribution was too perfect, or too far off-he suspected the assignments were not truly random, whether because of scientific misconduct or honest error. Roughly 2% of the papers he ran through his program fell into this questionable category.

Comment: Further reading:

Politically motivated study claims warmer temps will reduce agricultural production

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That
Tue, 12 Jun 2018 16:52 UTC

From the LONDON SCHOOL OF HYGIENE & TROPICAL MEDICINE, doom division, comes this story that seems not to realize what every gardener knows: that many vegetable plants do better in a warmer environment with more CO2, hence the idea of "hothouse tomatoes.

What's funny is that their own paper reported this:

The mean (95% CI) reported yield changes for all vegetables and legumes combined were +22.0% (+11.6% to +32.5%) for a 250-ppm increase in CO2 concentration...

... −8.9% (−15.6% to −2.2%) for a 25% increase in O3 concentration,−34.7% (−44.6% to −24.9%) for a 50% reduction in water availability, and −2.3% (−3.7% to −0.9%) for a 25% increase in salinity.

So, they are assuming water availability will be less and more salty in the future, and there will be more ozone O3 pollution. Yet all indications thus far that a warmer world will be a wetter world due to enhanced atmospheric water vapor, and so far, ozone pollution has been declining, especially in coastal areas.

Then there's this:

The authors acknowledge limitations of the study, including the fact that collated evidence on the impact of environmental changes on the nutritional quality of vegetables and legumes was limited and the research team identified this as an area requiring more evidence generation.

Researchers discover the sun changes size according to its level of activity

Emily Conover
Science News
Mon, 11 Jun 2018 16:18 UTC

© Solar Dynamic Observatory/NASA
The radius of the sun gets a smidge smaller during periods when the sun is most active, a new study reports.

Its radius decreases by 1 or 2 kilometers during periods of high solar activity

How big is the sun? Well, that depends on when you're measuring.

The sun slightly shrinks and expands as it goes through a solar cycle, a roughly 11-year period of high and low magnetic activity, a new study finds. When the sun is the most active, its radius decreases by 1 or 2 kilometers, two researchers report in a paper accepted in the Astrophysical Journal. Given that the sun's full radius is about 700,000 kilometers, that's a tiny change.

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Science & Technology

X-ray vision will soon give soldiers the superhero ability to see through walls

What happened when a scientist filed a public records request for NASA code? Two years of stonewalling

Russian scientist: Humans may kill aliens to survive in future

Researchers have created an AI that can predict what humans will do in the future

Discovery: New type of photosynthesis

Wild animals are reverting to nocturnal habits of distant ancestors to avoid humans

The shape code: Even more information found in DNA

Major medical journal backtracks on charges of statistical flaws in published clinical trials

Politically motivated study claims warmer temps will reduce agricultural production

Researchers discover the sun changes size according to its level of activity

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