News

Based on Fermi’s Paradox (where are all the space aliens, if they exist?). From RT: A Russian theoretical physicist has predicted a grim future for our civilization that “is even worse than extinction.” Alexander Berezin, a highly-cited scientist from Russia’s National University of Electronic Technology Research, outlined his bleak prediction in an article entitled ‘First to enter, last to leave: a solution to Fermi’s paradox’. He thinks that the aliens will try to eradicate all competition, including us, to fuel their own expansion and be the power in the universe. While that dog-eat-dog theory may seem harsh, Berezin says total destruction of other life forms likely won’t be a conscious obliteration. “They simply [will] not realize, in the same way Read More ›

From Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, world’s richest man, at Fellowship of the Minds: From Fox News: The recently anointed richest person in the world, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, says we need to colonize the moon — and time is of the essence. … “We will have to leave this planet,” he said, according to Geek Wire. “We’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better. We’ll come and go, and the people who want to stay, will stay.” … Mr. Bezos believes it will happen in our lifetime because the human race has little alternative. “The alternative is stasis,” he said, adding that without space settlements, societies around the globe “will have to stop growing” Read More ›

From Carolyn Gramling at ScienceNews: Earth’s earliest land-walking vertebrates didn’t paddle about in freshwater lakes or rivers. Instead, these four-footed creatures, which appeared about 375 million years ago, lived in the brackish waters of an estuary or delta, researchers report online May 30 in Nature. Early tetrapods, such as Ichthyostega and Acanthostega, lived an amphibious existence between land and sea: They had feet, but also gills and tails made for swimming. … An ability to tolerate different salinity environments could have helped tetrapods — a group that includes today’s amphibians, reptiles and mammals — survive a mass extinction of ocean-dwellers that occurred by the end of the Devonian Period about 359 million years ago, the researchers say. More. Some life Read More ›

Organic matter has been found on Mars in soil samples taken from 3 billion-year-old mudstone in the Gale crater by the Curiosity rover, NASA announced Thursday. The rover has also detected methane in the Martian atmosphere. It is not evidence for life as such, but methane is mostly produced on Earth by life forms. See also: Signs of life on Mars from 4 billion years ago?

Further to them being oversold, from researcher Filip Piekniewski at his blog: When the software fails and e.g. the control system of the vehicle hangs, it is more than likely that the end result of such situation would not be good (anyone working with robots knows how rapidly things escalate when something goes wrong – robots don’t have the natural ability to recover from a deteriorating situation). If that happened on a freeway at high speed, it would easily have lead to a serious crash with either another car or a barrier. If it happened in a dense urban area at small speed it could lead to injuring pedestrians. Either way, note that Waymo only reports the events that fulfill the Read More ›

Abstract: This article addresses questions in human geography and the geographies of sexuality by drawing upon one year of embedded in situ observations of dogs and their human companions at three public dog parks in Portland, Oregon. The purpose of this research is to uncover emerging themes in human and canine interactive behavioral patterns in urban dog parks to better understand human a-/moral decision-making in public spaces and uncover bias and emergent assumptions around gender, race, and sexuality. Specifically, and in order of priority, I examine the following questions: (1) How do human companions manage, contribute, and respond to violence in dogs? (2) What issues surround queer performativity and human reaction to homosexual sex between and among dogs? and (3) Read More ›

Well, not exactly. From ScienceDaily: Steelhead trout, a member of the salmon family that live and grow in the Pacific Ocean, genetically adapted to the freshwater environment of Lake Michigan in less than 120 years. Steelhead were intentionally introduced into Lake Michigan in the late 1800s in order to bolster recreational and commercial fisheries. In their native range, which extends from California to Russia, steelhead hatch in freshwater rivers, migrate to the ocean, and return to freshwater to spawn. This migration allows steelhead to feed in the ocean, where they can grow larger and produce more eggs than if they remained in freshwater streams for their entire lives. The steelhead introduced into Lake Michigan continue to spawn in small freshwater Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Globular clusters could be up to 4 billion years younger than previously thought, new research led by the University of Warwick has found. Comprised of hundreds of thousands of stars densely packed into a tight ball, globular clusters had been thought to be almost as old as the Universe itself — but thanks to newly developed research models it has been shown that they could be as young as 9 billion years old rather than 13 billion. The discovery brings into question current theories on how galaxies, including the Milky Way, were formed — with between 150-180 clusters thought to exist in the Milky Way alone — as globular clusters had previously been thought to be almost as Read More ›

From Yale president Peter Salovey at Scientific American: We Should Teach All Students, in Every Discipline, to Think Like Scientists For many, knowledge about the natural world is superseded by personal beliefs. Wisdom across disciplinary and political divides is needed to help bridge this gap. This is where institutions of higher education can provide vital support. Educating global citizens is one of the most important charges to universities, and the best way we can transcend ideology is to teach our students, regardless of their majors, to think like scientists. From American history to urban studies, we have an obligation to challenge them to be inquisitive about the world, to weigh the quality and objectivity of data presented to them, and Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at Oscillations, With the ramping up of investigations in various parts of the world into the mechanics of biology, I’ve decided to post my conversation with Institut Curie biophysicist Emmanuel Farge on the role of mechanics in reprogramming the embryo [2010], relating to his work first published in the scientific literature in 2003, which was well received by the science establishment. … Emmanuel Farge:Exactly. Because you need the gene expression to have the germ-band extension. Then after you need the germ-band extension to have the expression of Twist at the anterior pole, which is mechanically induced. What I’m saying is that you always are in a situation where you cannot say that mechanics is more important than genetics Read More ›

What’s hot.what’s not. And what’s rot. From David Klinghoffer at ENST: — The Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence will focus on the profound concerns stirred by the mystery of minds. Join us in Seattle on Wednesday, July 11, as we launch the Bradley Center with a special public conversation at Seattle’s William Allen Theater at the Museum of Flight. It’s FREE, from 7:30 to 9:30 pm. We require that you register here to save your place. The topic for the evening: “Will the Machines Take Over? Human Uniqueness in the Age of Smart Machines.” Computers vastly outperform humans in executing calculations. But in any meaningful sense, can they host minds? Has technology revealed the emptiness of the Read More ›

And Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, can just suck it up. From IAS director Robbert Dijkgraaf at Quanta: Scientists seek a single description of reality. But modern physics allows for many different descriptions, many equivalent to one another, connected through a vast landscape of mathematical possibility. The current Standard Model of particle physics is indeed a tightly constructed mechanism with only a handful of ingredients. Yet instead of being unique, the universe seems to be one of an infinitude of possible worlds. We have no clue why this particular combination of particles and forces underlies nature’s structure. Why are there six “flavors” of quarks, three “generations” of neutrinos, and one Higgs particle? Furthermore, the Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet: … She worries about the fact that some prominent atheists are attracted to the intellectual dark web, “an alliance of heretics” making “an end run around the mainstream conversation” (New York Times). The dark web includes figures like Jordan B. Peterson, Steven Pinker, and Bret Weinstein,) who want to discuss research findings and contemporary events without the muzzle of political correctness. New atheist Sam Harris, a dark webber, has recently been accused of “pseudoscientific racialist speculation” by assorted progressives. Why? Having finally read sociologist Charles Murray’s controversial book on IQ, The Bell Curve (1994), Harris doesn’t think it is mere “racist trash” but an argument from a body of data that a scientist like himself Read More ›

From geologist Julie Hollis at Massive: Sexual dimorphism is a result of males and females diverging down different evolutionary paths through selection processes, such as competition to reproduce. These processes happen for a variety of reasons. In some cases, strong colors in male birds are a sign of health. The elephant seal’s bulbous nose allows him to roar loudly to defend his territory – and his harem. And the moose’s antlers are used to intimidate or fight other males. Sexual dimorphism is the end result of choices made by mating partners and can increase the likelihood of reproduction: I would bet on the moose with the biggest antlers, wouldn’t you? But what about the long run? What’s the impact on Read More ›

From AI researcher Filip Piekniewski at VentureBeat: Deep learning has been at the forefront of the so-called AI revolution for years now, and many people believed that it would take us to the world of the technological singularity. Many companies talked big in 2014, 2015, and 2016 when technologies such as Alpha Go were pushing new boundaries. For example, Tesla announced that its fully self-driving cars were very close, even selling that option to customers — to be enabled later via a software update. We are now in the middle of 2018 and things have changed. Not on the surface yet — the NIPS conference is still oversold, corporate PR still has AI all over its press releases, Elon Musk Read More ›