Tag: science

Sport Drinks On the Ropes

A new study using telemetry to monitor hydration and temperature status found that the athletes own body adequately regulated temperature and found no relationship between hydration status and temperature. Temperature and measures of dehydration (sodium and urine concentration) stayed within normal ranges. Even large losses of fluid do not lead to heat illness.

As if the body would not protect itself given its sophisticated homeostatic mechanisms; mechanisms so complex they are still not fully understood. It is a grandiose claim that research or sports products can improve these evolved homeostatic mechanisms that serve not only we homo sapiens, but all mammals.

Professor Noakes smacks down the guidelines as “linked to an extensive marketing campaign, directed by the sports drink industry.”

new study smacks them down conclusively

Air Pollution


Tiles to reduce air pollution in a city, respiratory oases. I love it when architecture solves problems instead of creating them (ie suburbia):

The tiles are coated with titanium dioxide (TiO2), a pollution-fighting technology that is activated by ambient daylight. TiO2 is a photo-catalyst already known for its self-cleaning and germicidal qualities; it requires only small amounts of naturally occurring UV light and humidity to effectively reduce air pollutants into harmless amounts of carbon dioxide and water. When positioned near pollution sources, the tiles neutralize NOx and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) directly where they are generated. They transform previously inert urban surfaces into active surfaces, re-appropriate polluted spaces for safer pedestrian use, and invert problem spaces – dark, polluted, uninhabitable – to benevolent spaces that benefit communities.

2007-01-03: PigeonBlog

PigeonBlog enlists homing pigeons to participate in a grassroots scientific data gathering initiative designed to collect and distribute information about air quality conditions to the general public. Pigeons are equipped with custom-built miniature air pollution sensing devices enabled to send the collected localized information to an online server without delay. Pollution levels are visualized and plotted in real-time over Google’s mapping environment, thus allowing immediate access to the collected information to anyone with connection to the Internet.


2007-09-13: World’s most polluted places as a MyMap.
2014-06-29: US Air Quality Improvement. I like to highlight the occasional good news when it comes to the environment.

Air pollution has decreased even though population and the number of cars on the roads have increased. The shift is the result of regulations, technology improvements and economic change. New York City has seen a 32% decrease in nitrogen dioxide between the 2005-2007 and 2009-2011 periods.


2014-11-26: Pollution can be cleaned up quickly. This should make China’s pledge to improve air quality / reduce greenhouse gases quite feasible.

In 2002, South Korea was ranked 120th for air quality, and 43rd in 2014

2015-09-23: VW 1M tons of pollution. It is time to get tough, and destroy VW.

Volkswagen’s intentional fraud resulted in an extra 1M metric tons of air pollution being spewed into the skies over America; if they’d extended the con to Europe (where there are far more diesels), it would have been orders of magnitude worse.

2017-06-01: Electric Vehicles Are Cleaning Up

In regions that lean heavily on coal-fired power plants, plug-in cars can end up polluting more heavily at the smokestack than gasoline cars at their tailpipes. But as grids get greener, that’s becoming less true nationwide.

2017-06-17: Schlieren Imaging. This is what the world would look like if you could see invisible air currents, temperature gradients, and differences in pressure or composition of the air

2018-01-22: Far UVC disinfection. There’s part of the uv spectrum that kills viruses & bacteria, but does not damage skin.

2018-08-23: Too much CO2 affects sleep

If CO2 can affect sleep quality, that would explain how it could produce a whole-day effect. Strøm-Tejsen tests this on 16 subjects and finds that “objectively measured sleep quality and the perceived freshness of bedroom air improved significantly when the CO2 level was lower, as did next-day reported sleepiness and ability to concentrate and the subjects’ performance of a test of logical thinking.” Good things about this study: subjects were blinded to condition, the paper contains a pilot experiment and a main experiment which mostly replicate each other’s results. Bad things about this study: the experiments were about n = 15 each, the researchers didn’t correct for multiple comparisons, and they admit to manipulating the statistics surrounding their logical reasoning tests to get better results.

2020-08-23: Health benefits of clean air

Ditching fossil fuels would pay for itself through clean air alone. Over the next 50 years, keeping to the 2°C pathway would prevent 4.5m premature deaths, 3.5m hospitalizations and emergency room visits, and 300m lost workdays in the US.

2021-09-28: UV is very effective.

air filtration and UV disinfection can greatly reduce SARS-COV-II in hospital wards. The authors installed portable air filters with UV disinfection on 2 COVID hospital wards in the UK. The air was tested for viruses, bacteria and fungi before the filters were turned on, during the time the filters were on and then again after the filters were turned off. Airborne SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the ward on all 5 days before activation of air/UV filtration, but on 0 of the 5 days when the air/UV filter was operational; SARS-CoV-2 was again detected on 4 out of 5 days when the filter was off.


2022-03-28: 98% reduction in 5 minutes

“Far-UVC rapidly reduces the amount of active microbes in the indoor air to almost 0, making indoor air essentially as safe as outdoor air” The lamps inactivated more than 98% of the airborne microbes in 5 minutes. The low level of viable microbes was maintained over time, even though microbes continued to be sprayed into the room. The efficacy of different approaches to reducing indoor virus levels is usually measured in terms of equivalent air changes per hour. In this study, far-UVC lamps produced the equivalent of 184 equivalent air exchanges per hour. This surpasses any other approach to disinfecting occupied indoor spaces, where 5-20 equivalent air changes per hour is the best that can be achieved practically.

2022-08-19: Startups are entering this space to bring the cost down.

Beam ($5000) is an LED-based, upper room disinfection device that uses 265-nanometer ultraviolet light to create a disinfection zone located above people in a room. Vive ($3000), meanwhile, uses a wavelength known as far-UVC at 222-nanometers to inactivate harmful microorganisms in the air and on surfaces, even while people are present. While the Beam works in large open spaces, like classrooms and office lobbies, the Vive can be installed in smaller spaces, such as conference rooms and bathrooms. “What we have come to realize is that there is not one-size, fits-all for infection protection. What Arc competes with is some form of chemical intervention. For Beam and Vive, it’s HVAC upgrades.”

2022-10-28: Without massive improvements to LEDs, far UVC is not practical due to cost. Unclear what the deal with these startups is but I suspect they don’t output enough power to be effective.

$2000 is a ballpark retail price for a lamp installed by specialists, and the lamps have an expected lifetime of 15 months if they run continuously. There’s hope that far-UV lamps based on LEDs will eventually provide cheaper and longer-lived alternatives to the gas lamps currently being used, but prototype LED far-UV lamps are currently restricted to impractically low levels of power.

2023-09-15: Giant progress in China

China’s pollution levels in 2021 had fallen 42% from 2013. The improvement means the average Chinese citizen’s lifespan is now 2.2 years longer. Chinese cities used to dominate global rankings of the world’s worst air quality; while some are still on those lists, in many cases they have been overtaken by cities in South Asia and the Middle East. In 2021, Beijing recorded its best monthly air quality since records began in 2013. There is still work to do as China remains the world’s 13th most polluted country. And Beijing’s particulate pollution – the tiny but highly dangerous pollutants that can evade the human body’s usual defenses – is still 40% higher than in the most polluted county in the United States.

2024-05-08: What’s needed to make far UVC viable

Light in the 200-235 nm range, or far-UVC, is one of the most promising tools for dramatically reducing airborne transmission from day one of almost any pandemic caused by airborne pathogens. If adopted widely, it could also have a dramatic impact on seasonal flu, colds, and endemic COVID-19.

Unfortunately, progress on development and adoption has been much slower than one would have hoped. One bottleneck is the high cost and low efficiency of the only commercially available source at this wavelength range, 222 nm krypton chloride excimer lamps. For example, by our calculations, equipping a classroom with far-UVC would cost >$10k/classroom/year in lamps alone.
While directly supporting solid-state far-UVC R&D to accelerate availability is important, growing the far-UVC market in general and enabling greater private investment is even more critical.

Translation

hmm

GT now gets 55% accuracy on English to Arabic. Human agreement on human translations is 60%. After this point they have no standard by which to measure their progress

2016-09-27: Getting amazingly close to human level performance. it’s interesting that for all languages, the gap between human and perfect translation is much much larger than between human and machine.

Neural Machine Translation: Much better translation quality
Full technical report (23 exciting pages of bedtime reading)

Research blog post

I’m very excited to announce that our new neural machine translation system closes the quality gap between the existing Google Translate production system and human quality translations by 58% to 87% for a variety of different language pairs (see table below, from the technical report we published today). This work has been a close collaboration between the Google Brain team and the Google Translate team.

Thanks to lots of hard engineering work and the computational efficiency of our Tensor Processing Units (see report), we are also rolling these benefits out to users of Google Translate, starting today with Mandarin to English as the first language pair live in production that uses this new system. We’ll be rolling out many more language pairs over the coming weeks.

This highlights the success of neural models at more accurately capturing the complexities of real human language, and is a powerful demonstration of the research our group has been doing on language understanding.

2016-11-15: Nice behind the scenes article on the recent translation breakthrough.

With this update, Google Translate is improving more in a single leap than we’ve seen in the last 10 years combined.

3 overlapping stories converge in Google Translate’s successful metamorphosis to A.I. — a technical story, an institutional story and a story about the evolution of ideas. The technical story is about 1 team on 1 product at 1 company, and the process by which they refined, tested and introduced a brand-new version of an old product in only about a quarter of the time anyone, themselves included, might reasonably have expected. The institutional story is about the employees of a small but influential artificial-intelligence group within that company, and the process by which their intuitive faith in some old, unproven and broadly unpalatable notions about computing upended every other company within a large radius. The story of ideas is about the cognitive scientists, psychologists and wayward engineers who long toiled in obscurity, and the process by which their ostensibly irrational convictions ultimately inspired a paradigm shift in our understanding not only of technology but also, in theory, of consciousness itself.

2023-07-08: Akkadian translation, with modest BLEU scores.

In its transliteration to English test, the AI model scored 37.47. In its cuneiform to English test, it scored 36.52. Both scores were above their target baseline and in the range of a high-quality translation. The model was able to reproduce the nuances of each test sentence’s genre. The AI model works best when it is translating short- to medium-length sentences. It also does better with more formulaic genres, like royal decrees and administrative records, than literary genres such as myths, hymns, and prophecies. With more training on a larger dataset, they aim to improve its accuracy. “100s of 100s of clay tablets inscribed in the cuneiform script document the political, social, economic, and scientific history of ancient Mesopotamia. Yet, most of these documents remain untranslated and inaccessible due to their sheer number and limited quantity of experts able to read them”

Deep Impact

claims that strangelets traversing earth might cause earthquakes. has a bit of a cold fusion feel to it

The visitor hit the top of the atmosphere over Antarctica. It cut through the rock below with equal ease. In less than 20 seconds, it had crossed the South Atlantic, deep beneath the ocean floor. 15 seconds later, it left Earth’s crust somewhere between Sri Lanka and Thailand. It lanced up through the afternoon sky and headed back out to the stars. The whole visit lasted less than 1 minute, and nobody saw a thing.