Earlier this year, over 150 experts in AI, robotics, ethics, and supporting disciplines signed an open letter denouncing the European Parliament’s proposal to make intelligent machines persons. According to Canadian futurist George Dvorsky, the Parliament’s purpose is to hold the machines liable for damages, as a corporation might be: “The EU is understandably worried that the actions of these machines will be increasingly incomprehensible to the puny humans who manufacture and use them.” AI experts acknowledge that no such robots currently exist. But many argue, as does Seth Baum of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, “Now is the time to debate these issues, not to make final decisions.” AI philosopher Michael LaBossiere likewise wants to “try to avoid our usual Read More ›

Neutrons can be used to probe living tissues without damaging them (neutron scattering). Suzan Mazur interviews biophysicist John Katsaras, whose specialty is cell membranes, at Oscillations on their implications for studying the origin and development of life forms. Among the fascinating details, Suzan Mazur: Your membranes research revealed that lipids gathered with others of their type. John Katsaras: Right. The cell makes thousands of different types of lipids. In the plasma membrane, which is the outer membrane of the cell, there are hundreds or, maybe thousands of different lipids. The question is, why does the cell expend so much energy to make all of these different lipids. You could say, well, maybe they have all different physical properties.. As a Read More ›

It is very interesting to study a technology that doesn’t rely on trust. However, in the end, the most interesting thing it tells us is not how we should build a network but rather the social value of trust in society. More than economic power, more than scientific advances, trust is really what builds wealth in a society. When you can trust your neighbor not to steal, not to lie, not to try to ruin you, the increases in efficiency are gigantic. In the comparison between Bitcoin and the Visa network, the performance gain in efficiency of trust vs. lack of trust is 400,000x. My hat is off to Bitcoin. Not only for developing an interesting technology, but also for Read More ›

But maybe it doesn’t matter. For example, as British Psychological Society’s Research Digest’s editor, Christian Jarrett, tells it, Educational neuromyths include the idea that we learn more effectively when taught via our preferred “learning style”, such as auditory or visual or kinesthetic … the claim that we use only 10 per cent of our brains; and the idea we can be categorised into left-brain and right-brain learners. Belief in such myths is rife among teachers around the world, according to several surveys published over the last ten years. But does this matter? Are the myths actually harmful to teaching? The researchers who conducted the surveys believe so… But now this view has been challenged by a team at the University Read More ›

Haebichan Jung tells us that he built an original pop music-making machine “that could rival deep learning but with simpler solutions.” Deep learning “is a subfield of machine learning concerned with algorithms inspired by the structure and function of the brain called artificial neural networks.” (Jason Brownlee, Machine Learning Mastery) Jung tells us that he went to considerable trouble to develop deep learning methods for generating machine pop music but in the end… I made a simple probabilistic model that generates pop music… Eric Holloway notes that this is an expected outcome based on the fact that computers cannot generate mutual information, where two variables are dependent on each other. Can simple probabilities outperform deep learning?” at Mind Matters Today Read More ›

Science writer David Appell suggests this, in all seriousness, in his review of Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at Physics World: Hossenfelder confronts physicists to ask them why their ideas aren’t working. Michael Krämer, who heads the new-physics group at the LHC and works on supersymmetry, tells her that he is “honestly confused”. He adds, “I thought something must happen. But now? I’m confused.” She travels to the US to show up at the offices of luminaries including Nobel laureates Frank Wilzcek and Steven Weinberg. She considers Weinberg the greatest living physicist – his office in Austin, Texas is half the size of hers, she notes, “an observation that vaporizes what little ambition I ever had to Read More ›

We just tried to pull a Darwinian out of the way of the southbound freight called Progress when here it is rumbling back into town again: This week’s peer-reviewed portrayal of fragile masculinity comes to you from the journal Science Advances, which recently published a depressing new study about online dating. Researchers looked at nearly 200,000 heterosexual users and found that while men’s sexual desirability peaks at age 50, women hit their prime at 18. And then it’s all downhill from there apparently. Can I just remind you that 18-year-olds are teenagers, and so this study is basically saying that straight men don’t find women attractive; they like girls. While these studies may focus on sexual relations, they’re yet another Read More ›

Philip Cunningham writes to tell us of an interesting experiment by quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger and colleagues that pushed the “free-will loophole” back to 7.8 billion years ago, using quasars to determine measurement settings: Abstract: In this Letter, we present a cosmic Bell experiment with polarization-entangled photons, in which measurement settings were determined based on real-time measurements of the wavelength of photons from high-redshift quasars, whose light was emitted billions of years ago; the experiment simultaneously ensures locality. Assuming fair sampling for all detected photons and that the wavelength of the quasar photons had not been selectively altered or previewed between emission and detection, we observe statistically significant violation of Bell’s inequality by 9.3 standard deviations, corresponding to an estimated p Read More ›

Here at UD, we often find food for thought in the comment box. The following by ScuzzaMan, is worth pondering as a particular, from the horse’s mouth philosophical-theological perspective within the Christian frame (and yes, it is Creationist-Biblical in focus rather than empirical-inferential on reliable signs of design). Here is a Christian voice, in his own words: ___________   Design Law Theory. Design Law Theory is the notion that the book of nature, being written by the same author who inspired scripture, and being properly understood, is an unerring guide to the nature and character of that author. As such it is necessarily an equally unerring guide to the nature of his moral or spiritual laws, as demonstrated to physical Read More ›

He is the author of a “bad design” book, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes: Earlier this year writers for Evolution News posted responses to Dr. Lents, who teaches at John Jay College and wrote a recent book, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. He argues that our bodies demonstrate “poor design” or “suboptimal design” which is best explained by evolution. Lents wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal summarizing his case. He argues in his book that the fact that the openings to the maxillary sinuses (called “ostia”) are situated near the top of the sinuses would prevent gravity drainage of mucus. This, he Read More ›

Suggested at New Scientist: There may be life out there that was like life on Earth when Earth was a very different environment: In the 4.5 billion years our planet has existed, it has experienced dramatic transformations: ice ages and warming periods, times when the atmosphere was impossible to breathe, when large areas were desert, or when lush tropical forests hugged the poles. Throughout the vast majority of this turbulent history, life has somehow clung on. If, armed with a spotters’ guide to the world we inhabit today, we found exoplanets resembling those early Earths, would we even recognise them for what they were? Maybe not. We know how to seek comparatively advanced signs of intelligent life, such as cacophonous Read More ›

Earlier, we wrote about human habitation of Madagascar being pushed back 6000 years. Now that claim is disputed due to lack of evidence besides tools: “These finds of cut-marked bones seem to predate any evidence of humans. Not only is there an absence of human remains [from that time], but there is an absence of human artefacts.” Such artefacts should include tools large enough to butcher the giant birds. Aside from small tools, only a single undated axe has ever been found on Madagascar. Hansford stands by his team’s work. “This paper will undoubtedly cause some controversy, but it really is very strong evidence,” he says. Dyani Lewis, “Claim for early humans in Madagascar disputed” at Cosmos Magazine Well now, Read More ›

Remember old-fashioned, unalterable DNA? It was interesting stuff. So now this: “A study of chemical tags on histone proteins hints at how the same genome can yield very different animals:” The bee genome has a superpower. Not only can the exact same DNA sequence yield three types of insect—worker, drone, and queen—that look and behave very differently, but, in the case of workers, it dictates different sets of behaviors. A key to the genome’s versatility seems to be epigenetic changes—chemical tags that, when added or removed from DNA, change the activity of a gene. Previous studies had shown distinct patterns of tags known as methyl groups on the genomes of bees performing different roles within their hives.Shawna Williams, “As Bees Specialize, Read More ›

A type of crosshatch etched in ocher: The discovery “helps round out the argument that Homo sapiens [at Blombos Cave] behaved essentially like us before 70,000 years ago,” says archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen in Norway. His team noticed the ancient drawing while examining thousands of stone fragments and tools excavated in 2011 from cave sediment. Other finds have included 100,000- to 70,000-year-old pigment chunks engraved with crosshatched and line designs (SN Online: 6/12/09), 100,000-year-old abalone shells containing remnants of a pigment-infused paint (SN: 11/19/11, p. 16) and shell beads from around the same time. Bruce Bower, “This South African cave stone may bear the world’s oldest drawing” at Science News Yes, the past is changing so fast we can’t keep Read More ›