Category Archives: news

Out of the Thin Air

As another modern miracle, scientists use solar energy to pull water from air.  Actually, we find out there are more than one method to do so, even without electricity.

This is all great news and scientists involved should be congratulated.

There is something else, however, that might be captured from this auspicious winds: the reinforcing contradiction of why such miracles usually don’t reach further, and many startups fail in their go-to market.

The technology is great but unless it gets a breakthrough or free-ride in other industry, cost is prohibitive for those who would need most.  And those who are not in need already live in a multiple faucet home.

Pull more info in:

‘Off-Grid Devices Draw Drinking Water from Dry Air‘ by By Donna J. Nelson, Jeffrey Carbeck to the Scientific American

Zero Mass Water – offering community and home water independence solutions.

Did you just see that?

The race towards capturing more frames per second has a new leader.

Publication at Nature Communications of  paper describing compressed ultrafast spectral photography – CUSP.  Researchers Peng Wang, Jinyang Liang, and Lihong V. Wang claim CUSP captures up to 70 trillion frames per second.  We still can’t move in the forth dimension, but for now that’s the closest we get from standing time.

This is not out of the blue.  For the record, this race have been going on for a while.  Recent methods that are also in the trillion club are Lund University back in 2017 below, and STAMP camera developed in Japan a few years earlier.

Non-Genetic Memory on Plants

Right… perhaps you don’t make sense out of memory and plants.  Fact is, there’s more evidence that plants do find their way to communicate information.

As always this depends on how you define communication, or information.  This new study by Yang, X., Sanchez, R., Kundariya, H. et al. shows that gene activation as response to initial environmental conditions can be transmitted to further generations of plants with no new stimuli nor genetic change.  In some cases individual response to stress are transmitted down to next generations.

This is not hard to see as beneficial in evolutionary terms.  What is hard in this case is to make peace with our egocentric view that plants, as the inferior life form we labeled them, would not be able to achieve such divine prerogative.

As consciousness researchers in general often realize, and studies such as we find in Peter Wohlleben amazing book ‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ we should more often rethink our ideas on plant complex existence.

New tunes on demand

OpenAI labs release rendering of freshly minted songs.  No less than Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Natalie Cole and much more.

As you suspect, this is AI generated songs – and lyrics – mimicking styles.  For the time being, you don’t need to be Alan Turing to spot the fake.  But as their Jukebox curated page shows, they are no doubt approaching showtime.

Check this new Elvis hit.

Forest Diet under Climate Change

Yes another aspect of climate change in the environment can be measured in forests: its nutrition patterns.

In ‘Will forests need vitamins?‘ researcher Alyssa Findlay describes how “growth and photosynthesis can dilute nutrient concentrations in leaves, and plant physiological responses to elevated CO2 and associated climate changes can limit nutrient uptake“.

At the same time, “concentrations of nitrogen, sulfur and calcium have increased in boreal forests because temperature and precipitation have become more favourable.“.

This may not be the end of our forests, of course.  And mixed conditions will rebalance nature as plants adapt.  We should keep in mind, however, that they do so in much slower ways than our animal minds and bodies behave.  Humans can get vitamins supplements online – but are we even aware of the consequences of our actions on our forests?

AI mastering Go

As soon as AlphaGo – Google´s Deepmind Go player defeated European champion 5-0 many people were celebrating, as a friend of mine who first shared the story.  Still pending of a contest against Lee Sedol in South Korea, I would not argue against its merits.

Deepmind team recently published “Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search” is indeed in the cutting edge of deep learning algorithm design.

Something is off in the big picture, though, as the (unsettled) argument that followed.  If the trend is clear looking back – think of Watson’s feats and you know this was coming.  It´s tempting to say same will happen to the future.  Increasing complexity in the ways computing appears to beat humans.

Key in this discussion are the boundaries of current approach, precisely for it´s being based in computing.  Of course AI beats us in a challenge of speed, memory or brute force strenuous calculation.  But this is not all that is.  To begin with this is only possible when humans tell AI how to deal with abstract symbols (as bits and code) and how to relate the external reality to such abstractions.

That´s when people start to wonder if it should be the case of having more open minded AIs, as in “Don’t Know Mind: Zen and the Art of AGI Indecision” By Gareth John.

Even accepting that more layers (deeper learning)  may imply broader ‘minds’, it’s a different way of looking on what would be next.

Free will strikes back

The point of no return in vetoing self-initiated movements, published at PNAS by german researchers Matthias Schultze-Krafta, Daniel Birmana et al. brings evidence that people can stop ‘spontaneous’ movements even after brain is ready to execute this.

Even if it is the case that brain activity is ready as-if movement decision from 0,5 to a few seconds before awareness, conscious will may overrule this readiness and block movement as late as 200 ms before action.

Free will is on constant attack.  Apparently as soon as men were able to reason they sought scape goats.  Fate, wrath of gods, astrology, determinism, historical materialism, psychologism, providence, so on always look for arguments for their case.

Following contemporary trend, recent neurological studies are used in this debate.  If brain activity preceded awareness of some movements, our conscious ‘decisions’ would not be such at all.  Not only it was not conscious, since action was triggered before us being aware, arguably it was not our decision to begin with; ‘mere’ synaptic determinism.

Above mentioned researches focus on simpler processes when compared to typical free will debate, such as moral and social options.  Nothing of the sort about other decision making, from choosing one’s socks to dress to moral or political issues.

Read their research and their engineous approach to the matter.

Sweet or Bitter? ask your brain, not your mouth

Article from Nature, by Yueqing Peng, Sarah Gillis-Smith, Hao Jin, Dimitri Tränkner, Nicholas J. P. Ryba & Charles S. Zuker.

Debate on causality of perceptions and awareness have lately been feedng from neural research.  This study fits into this trend, as some other examples of perceptual ilusions making it richer.

“…In mammals, information from taste receptor cells in the tongue is transmitted through multiple neural stations to the primary gustatory cortex in the brain.

Recent imaging studies have shown that sweet and bitter are represented in the primary gustatory cortex by neurons organized in a spatial map with each taste quality encoded by distinct cortical fields.

Here we demonstrate that by manipulating the brain fields representing sweet and bitter taste we directly control an animal’s internal representation, sensory perception, and behavioural actions. These results substantiate the segregation of taste qualities in the cortex, expose the innate nature of appetitive and aversive taste responses, and illustrate the ability of gustatory cortex to recapitulate complex behaviours in the absence of sensory input.”

Order by the waiter

Tim Döring and Brian Wansink’s “The Waiter’s Weight
Does a Server’s BMI Relate to How Much Food Diners Order?” look into a curious empathy related phenomenon: diners food order seem to be influenced by waiters’ body mass.

Alcohol, and dessert particularly, showed a greater response to waiter’s body mass than main courses.

It is tempting to see ironic backfiring in the fact that restaurants with discriminatory hiring practices favouring lean-figured staff may be selling less drinks and sweets that are a particular fat slice of their profit.

U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act

Some say it’s far too early or even that such act is a sign of insolence, or even a straight joke.

Fact is U.S Congress issued this Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which includes exploration of commercial flights and asteroid mining.

It closes with a disclaimer: “the United States does not thereby assert sovereignty or sovereign or exclusive rights or jurisdiction over, or the ownership of, any celestial body.”

Some progress.

 

 

News – and still more of the same…

News about Earth on track for hottest year is almost like no news anymore.  And as the tragedy goes from front page to weather forecast people seem to pay less and less attention.  Scientists must then get a sparkle of obituary/criminal ‘flare’ to draw attention, such as “Severe droughts and devastating flooding being experienced throughout the tropics and sub-tropical zones bear the hallmarks of this El Niño, which is the strongest for more than 15 years” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud.

Similar case can be found when pesticide exposure impairs crop pollination services provided by bumblebees.  Researcher Dara Stanley team had to make clear that human-interest crops were at risk, such as apples.  Public really care are not for bees, but for their services to humans.

We can celebrate the fact that NIH will no longer support biomedical research on Chimpanzees, as a step forward.  There’s a long road ahead though, as “These decisions are specific to chimpanzees. Research with other non-human primates will continue to be valued, supported, and conducted by the NIH.”

 

3D qualitative spatial representation

Alex Burmester’s article on How do our brains reconstruct the visual world provides a short introduction of brain perception process.  Selective processes, visual attention, and inattentional blindness are key to understand how our mind build an schematic version of the environment as images in our minds.

Taking a more conceptual – and from an opposite side – tackle into the problem is the paper by Till Mossakowski and Reinhard Moratz on Relations Between Spatial Calculi
About Directions and Orientations.  They describe how relation algebras help us understand the transition from qualitative approaches of the environment to relative direction.

Linking the two is the effort to understand how we see.  Our brain combines each eye receives a limited, partially colourless signals at the retina into a seemingly continuous 3D experience.  Something that is very handy, to say the least.

This would not be possible if brains were not trained to continuously construct this environment.  There is much to learn from this process about our subjective stance towards objects and our consciousness.

“A movement in the making”

BY John Hagel, John Seely Brown & Duleesha Kulasooriya

” “Making”—the next generation of inventing and do-it-yourself—is creeping into everyday discourse, with the emerging maker movement referenced in connection with topics ranging from the rebirth of manufacturing to job skills development to reconnecting with our roots. As maker communities spring up around the globe, a plethora of physical and virtual platforms to serve them have emerged—from platforms that inspire and teach, to those that provide access to tools and mentorship, to those that connect individuals with financing and customers. (…) Continue reading→

Sonogenetics – non-invasive neural control by sound

Sonogenetics is a technique that allows non invasive activation of specific neurons.  This is not totally new, but significantly different from similar results were obtained through light-sensitive neurons for a few years.  Let’s recap:

First you have to decide which neurons you plan to interact with.  Not trivial, especially if you consider how extensive and intricate neural mappings and brain networks can be – currently beyond scientific precision.

Then you genetic engineer such neurons so that they develop certain features (misexpression of TRP-4 protein channel if you ask) that react to ultrasound stimulus.

And then, you make sure you are able to produce and transmit ultrasound to those neurons in a controlled way.  In this point there is a major advance compared to light stimulation, for you don’t have to place a light source directly at the neuron population.

And voila – ultrasound transmission remotely control neural activity.

Scientists Stuart Ibsen, Ada Tong, Carolyn Schutt, Sadik Esener & Sreekanth H. Chalasani published an article describing how they did it.  Of course, in a much more accurate manner.  And initial results were tested in a nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (a small worm) but implications and potential are very promising.

Far from the initial experiment results of controlling the movements of a worm, many nervous system treatments and deeper understanding of brain mechanisms may benefit from further developments.

A.I. weakness: relevance

As a friend told me and we are getting used to, an AI algorithm can match the average American on real SAT questions, and more of it is bound to come.  Should we worry?  If I had to guess I would say sometime in the future we will see SAT as a short-lived bad way to assess anything really relevant about humans.

What about human dominance on creativity?  taking Brazilian composer Chico Science “Computers make art, artists make money” insight: SATs are an easy field to yield to computers – not sure if left to opt between money and creativity which would artists yield…

If we have an option at all.  Algo trading is making money already – and Margaret A. Boden makes the point on MIT review that computers aren’t close to being ready to supplant human artists:Continue reading→

Monkey business

Studies show Neuroanatomical correlates of personality in chimpanzees by Robert D. Latzman, Lisa K. Hecht, Hani D. Freeman, Steven J. Schapiro, William D. Hopkins in a way that we are trying to make connections among human psychological and neurobiological traits.

Among such traits, violence comes along.  As long ago back we look, we can see it, as new insights into collective violence in Early Neolithic Central Europe by Christian Meyer, Christian Lohr, Detlef Gronenborn, and Kurt W. Alt tells us.

And among the howlers, what was know about men now is also confirmed in monkeys; the more insecure and worse performing the monkey the louder and more focused in intimidating competitors they are.  Evidence shows an “Evolutionary Trade-Off between Vocal Tract and Testes Dimensions” by Jacob C. Dunn, Lauren B. Halenar, Thomas G. Davies, Jurgi Cristobal-Azkarate, David Reby, Dan Sykes, Sabine Dengg, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Leslie A. Knapp.  Louder howlers apparently work on securing a more captive group of females.  This could compensate for their worse performance in breeding.  Quieter males tend to outperform in less exclusive groups by their reproductive capability.

Diverting asteroids – AIDA/AIM Mission

AIDA, joint cooperation between European and US space agencies:  IT’s main goal is to to assess the possibility of deflecting an asteroid by impact.

They will send two spacecrafts to a double asteroid system, Didymos.
“The AIM spacecraft is set to rendez-vous with the asteroid system a few months prior to the impact to fully characterise the smaller of the two bodies, dubbed “Didymoon”.

In addition to this AIM will release a set of Cubesats in deep space and a lander on the surface of the smaller asteroid. We will thus demonstrate deep-space inter-satellite linking for the first time between the main spacecraft, the cubesats and the lander.
“AIM is a unique mission as it will be the first time that a spacecraft will investigate the surface, subsurface and internal properties of a small binary Near-Earth Asteroid, in addition to performing various important technology demonstrations that can serve other space missions. This knowledge is not only important for Planetary Defense, but it has great implications for our understanding of the history of the Solar System. Our current understanding is that these small asteroids are the outcome of collisions and other effects that made them what they are now. Having crucial information on their internal properties will allow us to feed small body population evolution models to draw a more reliable story of the Solar System.”

Read more about it at ESA

“The Struggle to Define What Artificial Intelligence Actually Means” by Gary Lea

Posted at The Conversation:

“When we talk about artificial intelligence (AI) – (…) – what do we actually mean?

(…) having a usable definition of AI – and soon – is vital for regulation and governance because laws and policies simply will not operate without one.

(…)  Defining the terms: artificial and intelligence
For regulatory purposes, “artificial” is, hopefully, the easy bit. (…) , leaves the knottier problem of “intelligence”.

From a philosophical perspective, “intelligence” is a vast minefield, especially if treated as including one or more of “consciousness”, “thought”, “free will” and “mind”. (…)

Let’s take a step back and ask what a regulator’s immediate interest is here?

I would say that it is the work products of AI scientists and engineers, and any public welfare or safety risks that might arise from those products.

Logically, then, it is the way that the majority of AI scientists and engineers treat intelligence” that is of most immediate concern.(…)  read full post

 

Brain Power

Helping brain activity to reach other parts of the body bypassing spinal cord and other nervous system injuries is an advancing technology, as Paralyzed Man Walks Using Brain Power and Woman Controls a Fighter Jet Sim Using Only Her Mind illustrates well.

The somewhat reverse path, though, is not so obvious – use brain to override or neutralize nervous systems signaling.  A.M. Youssef, V.G. Macefield, and L.A. Henderson’s paper “Pain inhibits pain; human brainstem mechanisms” is an attempt to bring more light to it:

“Conditioned pain modulation is a powerful analgesic mechanism, occurring when a painful stimulus is inhibited by a second painful stimulus delivered at a different body location.

(…)  Human lesion studies show that the circuitry responsible for conditioned pain modulation lies within the caudal brainstem, although the precise nuclei in humans remain unknown. (…)

The expression of analgesia was associated with reduction in signal intensity increases during each test stimulus in the presence of the conditioning stimulus in three brainstem regions(…) Furthermore, the magnitudes of these signal reductions in all three brainstem regions were significantly correlated to analgesia magnitude.

Defining conditioned pain modulation circuitry provides a framework for the future investigations into the neural mechanisms responsible for the maintenance of persistent pain conditions thought to involve altered analgesic circuitry.”