Even if you miss the poetical beauty of mathematics, it can be fun to check the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. If you fail to remember the sequence your ATM card brought to you is 23731211 – check at OEIS and you will see that these are the first 8 digits of Euclid numbers. From a different perspective, if you ATM code is at OEIS, you may well find reason to change it asap.
Quanta Magazine interviewed Neil Sloane, who founded OEIS in 1964 and keep collecting sequences since.
From NASA press release:
“New findings from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars.
Using an imaging spectrometer on MRO, researchers detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious streaks are seen on the Red Planet. These darkish streaks appear to ebb and flow over time. They darken and appear to flow down steep slopes during warm seasons, and then fade in cooler seasons. They appear in several locations on Mars when temperatures are above minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius), and disappear at colder times.
“Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “This is a significant development, as it appears to confirm that water — albeit briny — is flowing today on the surface of Mars.” … read full post, orelse go to the paper supporting this claim“
“Five years ago, industrial robotics was an elitist field. (…) —cost, danger and expertise—kept the field about as far away from the mainstream as technology can get.
(…) Specifically designed to solve all three of the field’s largest barriers, Baxter was the moment that robotics went mainstream: a (…) cheap (…) user-safe robot with a user-friendly interface. It means he can work side-by-side with humans and opens up a whole new frontier of cooperative and collaborative possibilities.”
Cool interactive way to explore physics theories, by QUANTA MAGAZINE
It appears we can’t keep their pace. In a recent batch of news a friend found robots painting Van Gogh style, robots beating us on rock-paper-scissors (below, and btw that’s cheating on my playground), writing adventures and so on.
On the more troubling strain we try to make sure we control military robots, and wonder how great an idea is it to build system that deceive us, or how good an AI boss can be.
And while we can’t make ethical robots, and they are not yet out there firing (at) us, humans may enjoy treating robots like Yo-Yo Ma’s cello — as an instrument for human intelligence.
Watching chimpanzees reactions to infanticide imagery bring evidence of Chimpanzee’s sense of right and wrong. Not far from what humans would deem relevant: From Claudia Rudolf et alli paper “Chimpanzees’ Bystander Reactions to Infanticide”
“we presented chimpanzees with videos depicting a putative norm violation: unfamiliar nonspecific engaging in infanticidal attacks on an infant chimpanzee. The chimpanzees looked far longer at infanticide scenes than at control videos showing nut cracking, hunting a colobus monkey, or displays and aggression among adult males. Furthermore, several alternative explanations for this looking pattern could be ruled out. However, infanticide scenes did not generally elicit higher arousal. We propose that chimpanzees as uninvolved bystanders may detect norm violations but may restrict emotional reactions to such situations to in-group contexts. We discuss the implications for the evolution of human morality.”
This latter behavior described is not unheard in humans, as Kitty Genovese murder case, when many bystanders failed to help to her as she was murdered and raped in two separate attacks. Not to mention mobs, lynching and other human habits.
Evidence at least as old as the bible is a reminder of how getting the sense of what is right is not enough – in case anyone say chimpanzee’s morals shouldering human’s is a clear upgrade.
At least since Deep Blue beat Kasparov chess masters got used to the idea that computers may outrun human chess abilities. Those were times that coders would handcrafted specialized evaluation functions. Chess-designed algos. Some comfort derived from the fact that even if computers would use brute force to practice and test millions of games in order to tune parameters, the basic features were designed and input by humans.
Now the game is changing (again). After A.I. mastered Atari games by itself, new deep learning application made possible computers to learn how to play chess by themselves.
Matthew Lai published the paper “Giraffe: Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Play Chess” describes an engine that could learn move decision in a way that is closer to human than previous attempts. The leap forward is in reducing options under evaluation. Pruning a decision tree as early as possible.
Its neural network seems to benefit a lot from playing itself. This may be something that humans will have a hard time to beat.
As Bitcoin show some limits and developers debate on how to amend it, MIT Tech Review story by Tom Simonite reports on allegation of blackmail and misconduct among divergent sides of the controversy.
This robot hunt and kill invasive starfish…
Fine. May the starfish ask how non-invasive is the robot?
FromRachel Ehrenberg’s “Trillions of trees” published on Nature
story from MIT Tech Review
“(…) Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, are in the early stages of developing technology that uses your body as a communication medium, which they say could eventually work as a lower power, more secure alternative to Bluetooth for wearable gadgets like smart watches and fitness and health trackers.(…)
The researchers measured how much of the signal was lost from one body part to the next—arm to arm, or arm to head, for instance—and determined that it was as much as 10 million times less than what’s found with the use of Bluetooth. (…)Continue reading
As ‘smart drugs’ rise (see Modafinil’s case) one may expect the subsequent repressive actions – and abusers. In this post co-written with Michael Brandt:
“(…) Nootropics, and other biohacks are now drawing mainstream scrutiny and controversy as more and more people are using legal, off-label, and unscheduled “research chemicals” as nootropics to enhance their academic or work performance.
(…) many nootropics currently sit in a regulatory void…(…) sold on the open market as “research chemicals” and cannot be labeled for human consumption.
(…) pouring private R&D dollars into large-scale trials that definitely classify substances doesn’t make sense from a conventional intellectual property standpoint.Continue reading
That aging leads to mortality is a rather obvious conclusion. In some species this is a more statistical true than a biological determination. Researchers investigated mathematical relations between stress resistance, aging, and negligible senescence. Next step would be fix DNA so that the network is more stable.
“We conjectured, therefore, that the lifelong transcriptional stability of an organism may be a key determinant of longevity. We analyzed the stability of a simple genetic-network model and found that under most common circumstances, such a gene network is inherently unstable. Over a time it undergoes an exponential accumulation of gene-regulation deviations leading to death. However, should the repair systems be sufficiently effective, the gene network can stabilize so that gene damage remains constrained along with mortality of the organism”
Read full “Stability analysis of a model gene network links aging, stress resistance, and negligible senescence” by Valeria Kogan, Ivan Molodtsov, Leonid I. Menshikov, Robert J. Shmookler Reis & Peter Fedichev
Having similar applications, users, and backgound, at a distance Machine Learning may sometimes be confused with an application of Statistics.
A closer look reveal fundamental differences, as in “Why a Mathematician, Statistician, & Machine Learner Solve the Same Problem Differently” by Nir Kaldero.
One scientific field this difference comes to surface in a distinguished manner is economics, as Noah Smith’s “Economics Has a Math Problem” sensibly puts the emphasis on the way economics uses math.
Pushing science to new fields, scientists can now employ much more data and computational power than the time when a significant part of mainstream economics was developed. If econometric tools set the tone for neoclassic economic papers in the final decades of last century, could machine learning, Bayesian inference, and neural networks open new possibilities to economic theory?
One arguable example is “Mechanisms for Multi-unit Combinatorial Auctions with a Few Distinct Goods” by Piotr Krysta, Orestis Telelis, Carmine Ventre. Not a coincidence, researchers are not from Economics departments. Even if economists are stubborn enough to dismiss game theory as a non-fundamental field, message is clear: if economists don’t embrace new math, other scientists (human or not) could engulf economics less cerimoniously.
If this happens, will we find that Keynesian uncertainty and weight of arguments fits big data better than deterministic parameters of neoclassic mainstream?
from “The Reinvention of Black” by MARK PEPLOW at Nautilus.us
“Black is technically an absence: the visual experience of a lack of light. (…) This ideal is remarkably difficult to manufacture. (…)
(…) 18th century sparked advances in mining technology that boosted the output of coal-based pigments including Bideford black, while simultaneously driving up demand. (…)
In the 1840s, August Hofmann extracted aniline (a benzene ring connected to a nitrogen-containing amine group) from coal tar. Then in 1856, William Perkin, (…) synthetic dyes. By 1860, other researchers had found (…) a new black pigment: aniline black. (…)
Around the middle of the century, paint-makers began to offer a synthetic inorganic black pigment known as Mars black.(…) Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali used Mars black, and said of Jacques Blockx, who developed one of the earliest commercial Mars black oil paints, “This man, who never painted, will contribute more to the painters of tomorrow than what we will have accomplished, all the modern painters together.”Continue reading
Covering the historical gap mankind has put between itself and the (rest of the) animals, studies now show (other) monkeys have more capabilities than previously thought of.
BBC’s Collin Barras presents us to the case of “Chimpanzees and monkeys have entered the Stone Age“. Evidence of stone tool usage being passed through be many generations has been found in many species. And apparently they are prepared to enjoy and use cookery.
In another article, Natalie Shoemaker reports that “Koko the Ape Learns to Speak Using Basic Vocal Controls“.
I wonder what they have to way about global warming.
Christopher Watson on what to look for in a potential new earth. From BBC news.
“(…) Water in liquid form is thought to be a necessity for life on Earth.(…) Based on this, let’s look at the classical definition for the habitable zone as the region around a star, such as our own Sun, where the temperature of any orbiting planet permits water in liquid form.
Greenhouse gases (…) The very latest habitable zone definitions use simulations of these cloud and greenhouse effects – widening and blurring the crude classical definition.
Throw into the mix that we currently can’t study the atmospheres of rocky terrestrial exoplanets (and therefore have no idea whether they have clouds, greenhouse gases, or even an atmosphere at all!) – then to say “that planet is habitable” is impossible, for the time-being at least.
(…) High doses of radiation also tend to be harmful to biological material, and X-rays are capable of dissociating water – thereby depleting any water supply. Not ideal.
(…) Based on our knowledge of how life evolved on Earth, it is unlikely that even simple life would have time to evolve around stars that are all that much hotter than our Sun.
(…) a planet in the habitable zone of a red dwarf now was probably once scorching hot, and in the future will be freezing cold.
(…) Just over 20 years ago we didn’t know of ANY planets beyond our Solar System (we now know of thousands of candidates!) and only in the last few years have we been able to find small, rocky alien worlds.
The pace of discovery is astonishing and in 20 years’ time I suspect I will look back at this article and find I was totally wrong about everything.
This is what progress is.”
I tried to resist but after a while I had to check what’s the fuzz about octopus DNA findings.
“The octopus genome and the evolution of cephalopod neural and morphological novelties” is the paper, by Caroline B. Albertin et alli, that triggered the information treasure hunt in their DNA chest.
Cephalopods have the largest nervous systems among the invertebrates. Camera-like eyes, smart arms, early embryogenesis and great camouflage. Genome sequencing found expansions in genes thought unique of vertebrates. Study found hundreds of genes unique to cephalopods with elevated expression levels, including in the nervous system.
“One-Pot Synthesis of Carbon Nanofibers from CO2“, by George Washington University’s researchers Jiawen Ren, Fang-Fang Li, Jason Lau, Luis González-Urbina, and Stuart Licht.
“… Herein, we report the high-yield and scalable electrolytic conversion of atmospheric CO2 dissolved in molten carbonates into Carbon nanofibers (CNF). It is demonstrated that the conversion of CO2 → CCNF + O2 can be driven by efficient solar, as well as conventional, energy at inexpensive steel or nickel electrodes. The structure is tuned by controlling the electrolysis conditions, such as the addition of trace transition metals to act as CNF nucleation sites, the addition of zinc as an initiator and the control of current density. …”
Good news, no dobut – I hope people can climg or hang a swing on such plants
Modafinil has been used to enhance cognitive functions such as concentration and alertness.
This drug was originally designed to help sleeping disorder (narcolepsy).
“Modafinil for cognitive neuroenhancement in healthy non-sleep-deprived subjects: a systematic review” by R.M. Battleday, A-K. Brem presents a new study corroborating those cognitive functions benefits.
Never bad to keep in mind all sorts of psycological, force of habit, social and other forms of potential addictive side effects…