Tag: science

Super zoom

The classic short film Powers of 10 (1977) propelled viewers on a journey from a Chicago park into deep space and then back down to the scale of a single proton. In The Super Zoom, the Brazil-based graphic designer Pedro Machado’s visualisation dives even deeper into the realm of the subatomic and theoretical. While the original film by Charles and Ray Eames zoomed in to a scale of 10-16 m at most, Machado’s film draws on 40 years of quantum research – not to mention significant advances in 3D rendering technology – to drill down to the unfathomably small scale of 10-33 m, brushing up against the limits of human knowledge and imagination. The mind bending animation uses a framework of quantum gravity in which a gravitational field exists at these smallest conceivable scales.

Unread citations

How often do authors not read their cites? This might seem near-impossible to answer, but bibliographic analysis offers a cute trick. In olden times, citations and bibliographies had to be compiled by hand; this is an error-prone process, but one may make a different error from another author citing the same paper, and one might correct any error on reading the original. On the other hand, if you cite a paper because you blindly copied the citation from another paper and never get around to reading it, you may introduce additional errors but you definitely won’t fix any error in what you copied. So one can get an idea of how frequent non-reads are by tracing lineages of bibliographic errors: the more people copy around the same wrong version of a citation (out of the total set of citations for that cite), the fewer of them must be actually reading it.

Such copied errors turn out to be quite common and represent a large fraction of citations, and thus suggests that many papers are being cited without being read.

Automated Discovery

To what extent can scientific discovery be automated? Where are the areas where automation can make the biggest contribution to human efforts? These questions and a number of others are addressed in a very interesting 2-part review article on “Automated Discovery in the Chemical Sciences”. As the authors say, “The prospect of a robotic scientist has long been an object of curiosity, optimism, skepticism, and job-loss fear, depending on who is asked” I know that when I’ve written about such topics here, the comments and emails I receive cover all those viewpoints and more. Most of us are fine with having automated help for the “grunt work” of research – the autosamplers, image-processing and data-analysis software, the plate handlers and assay readers, etc. But the 2 things that really seem to set off uneasiness are (1) the idea that the output such machinery might be usefully fed into software that can then reach its own conclusions about the experimental outcomes, and (2) the enablement of discovery through “rapid random” mechanized experimental setups, which (to judge from the comments I’ve gotten) is regarded by a number of people as a lazy or even dishonorable way to do science.

Harbinger customers

there exist “harbinger customers” who systematically purchase new products that fail (and are discontinued by retailers). This article extends this result in 2 ways. First, the findings document the existence of “harbinger zip codes.” If households in these zip codes adopt a new product, this is a signal that the new product will fail. Second, a series of comparisons reveal that households in harbinger zip codes make other decisions that differ from other households. The first comparison identifies harbinger zip codes using purchases from one retailer and then evaluates purchases at a different retailer. Households in harbinger zip codes purchase products from the second retailer that other households are less likely to purchase. The analysis next compares donations to congressional election candidates; households in harbinger zip codes donate to different candidates than households in neighboring zip codes, and they donate to candidates who are less likely to win. House prices in harbinger zip codes also increase at slower rates than in neighboring zip codes. Investigation of households that change zip codes indicates that the harbinger zip code effect is more due to where customers choose to live, rather than households influencing their neighbors’ tendencies.

Calcifying Plankton

Then the calcifying plankton took over. Nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find ocean waters less than 100 meters deep that don’t contain calcifying plankton. Despite their teeny size, they may account for 12% of the total biomass in the oceans. And they’ve completely altered the way carbon moves around the planet. 80% of the carbon-containing rocks on Earth are derived from the remains of these plankton and other marine calcifiers — even though by mass, these plankton may account for less than 0.2% of Earth’s carbon-containing life. Making the oceans more stable didn’t just benefit the calcifying critters. With so many species less likely to become extinct at the planet’s whim, all marine species were able to relax and take the time to evolve complex relationships with others. That’s why life became bigger, faster and more aggressive: What had been a struggle against the planet became a struggle between organisms.

Mind scaffolding

Language is the scaffold of the mind

The lack of language affects even functions that do not seem to be intrinsically “linguistic,” such as math. Developmental research shows that keeping track of exact numbers above 4 requires knowing the words for these numbers. Imagine trying to tell the difference between 7 apples and 8 apples. The task becomes almost impossible if you can’t count them—and you can’t count them if you never learn that “7” is followed by “8.” As a result of this language-number interdependency, many deaf children in industrialized societies fall behind in math, precisely because they did not learn to count early on

Space Dust Ice Age

466m years ago, there was a very, very large asteroid impact. But, despite what you’re thinking, it actually helped life on Earth be fruitful and multiply. And that’s because the asteroid impact wasn’t on Earth. It was in the inner asteroid belt. A new paper points the accusatory finger at… dust. A lot of it, blasted outward when 2 big asteroids collided. This dust made its way to Earth, blocked a significant fraction of warming sunlight, started an ice age, and that put stress on marine environments which caused a burst of evolutionary diversity.

Merge

Merge unites all human languages

Because Merge recursively builds hierarchies, with each application connecting to both meaning and sound, there is no end to the complexity of the meaningful structures it builds. Merge gives us the ability to build the new worlds of ideas that have been so central to the successes and disappointments of our species. It makes language unlimited.

Out of Africa 2.5 ma ago?

The general consensus for decades has been that Homo erectus—an upright, long-legged species—was among the first hominins (or species closely related to modern humans) to leave Africa. Scientists presume members of this species traveled through the natural corridor of the Levant, a region along the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, around 2 ma ago. Scardia’s study suggests a far earlier exit. It proposes that hominins capable of tool creation may have been on the doorstep of Asia some 500 ka earlier.