Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Is cybersecurity an unsolvable problem?

 

at 5/27/23 7:12am

Enlarge (credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) In November 1988, a graduate student at Cornell University named Robert Morris, Jr. inadvertently sparked a national crisis by unleashing a self-replicating computer worm on a VAX 11/750 computer in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Morris had no malicious intent; it was merely a scientific experiment to see how many computers he could infect. But he made a grievous error, setting his reinfection rate much too high. The worm spread so rapidly that it brought down the entire computer network at Cornell University, crippled those at several other universities, and even infiltrated the computers at Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories. Making matters worse, his father was a computer scientist and cryptographer who was the chief scientist at the National Security Agency's National Computer Security Center. Even though it was unintentional and witnesses testified that Morris didn't have "a fraudulent or dishonest bone in his body," he was convicted of felonious computer fraud. The judge was merciful during sentencing. Rather than 15–20 years in prison, Morris got three years of probation with community service and had to pay a $10,000 fine. He went on to found Y Combinator with his longtime friend Paul Graham, among other accomplishments. The "Morris Worm" is just one of five hacking cases that Scott Shapiro highlights in his new book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks. Shapiro is a legal philosopher at Yale University, but as a child, his mathematician father—who worked at Bell Labs—sparked an interest in computing by bringing home various components, like microchips, resistors, diodes, LEDs, and breadboards. Their father/son outings included annual attendance at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers convention in New York City. Then, a classmate in Shapiro's high school biology class introduced him to programming on the school's TRS-80, and Shapiro was hooked. He moved on to working on an Apple II and majored in computer science in college but lost interest afterward and went to law school instead.Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Features, Science, Tech, books, computer security, computers, features, hackers, tech policy]

— The lessons of a wildfire that destroyed a town and burned for 15 months

 

at 5/27/23 5:00am

Enlarge / The aftermath of the Fort McMurray fire. (credit: Katie Daubs) At noon on May 3, the fire chief in the oil town of Fort McMurray was on TV telling everyone that the situation was in hand and they should stay at work and school and go to little league or whatever as usual. He had been watching the fire for a couple of days, but business as usual was what they did in Alberta in the spring; it was wildfire season, after all. At 2:05 evacuation orders started to come through. By 10 that night, much of the city that was not yet incinerated was burning. The combination of extreme, record-breakingly high temperatures (91° F) with extreme, record-breakingly low humidity (15 percent), wind, and tons of dry fuel made for perfect fire weather. While this explosive combination used to be unattainable, it is occurring with growing frequency around the globe, including in areas that never experienced wildfires before. After destroying the city and the mines that fueled everything about it, the Fort McMurray Fire went on to burn for 15 months, until August 2, 2017. Fire Weather tells its story, and tries to place it in the context of our warming world.Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Science, Ars Shopping, climate change, wildfire]

— No A/C? No problem, if buildings copy networked tunnels of termite mounds

 

at 5/26/23 1:09pm

Enlarge / Part of the system of reticulated tunnels (egress complex) of a mound of Macrotermes michaelseni termites from Namibia. (credit: D. Andréen) The mounds that certain species of termites build above their nests have long been considered to be a kind of built-in natural climate control—an approach that has intrigued architects and engineers keen to design greener, more energy-efficient buildings mimicking those principles. There have been decades of research devoted to modeling just how these nests function. A new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Materials offers new evidence favoring an integrated-system model in which the mound, the nest, and its tunnels function together much like a lung. Perhaps the most famous example of the influence of termite mounds in architecture is the Eastgate Building in Harare, Zimbabwe. It is the country’s largest commercial and shopping complex, and yet it uses less than 10 percent of the energy consumed by a conventional building of its size because there is no central air conditioning and only a minimal heating system. Architect Mick Pearce famously based his design in the 1990s on the cooling and heating principles used in the region’s termite mounds, which serve as fungus farms for the termites. Fungus is their primary food source. Conditions have to be just right for the fungus to flourish. So the termites must maintain a constant temperature of 87° F in an environment where the outdoor temperatures range from 35° F at night to 104° F during the day. Biologists have long suggested that they do this by constructing a series of heating and cooling vents throughout their mounds, which can be opened and closed during the day to keep the temperature inside constant. The Eastgate Building relies on a similar system of well-placed vents and solar panels.Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Science, architecture, Biology, biomimicry, entomology, materials science, Metamaterials, science, termite mounds]

— Study narrows long COVID’s 200+ symptoms to core list of 12

 

at 5/26/23 11:04am

Enlarge / A long COVID patient sits with her daughter in her wheelchair while receiving a saline infusion at her Maryland home on Friday, May 27, 2022. (credit: Getty | The Washington Post) Tens of millions of people worldwide are thought to have developed long-term symptoms and conditions in the wake of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. But this sometimes-debilitating phenomenon, often called long COVID, remains a puzzle to researchers. What causes it? Who gets it? And, perhaps, the most maddening one: What is it? Long COVID patients have reported a wide spectrum of more than 200 symptoms. Some are common, like loss of smell, while others are rarer, like tremors. Some patients have familiar constellations of symptoms, others seem to have idiosyncratic assortments. Researchers hypothesize that long COVID may simply be an umbrella term for a collection of variable—and potentially overlapping—post-COVID conditions that may have different causes. Those causes might include autoimmunity, immune system dysregulation, organ injury, viral persistence, and intestinal microbiome imbalances (dysbiosis).Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Health, Science, COVID-19, fatigue, Infectious disease, long COVID, NIH, post-exertional malaise, public health, SARS-CoV-2, smell, symptoms, taste]

— Your chocolate comes with a side order of deforestation

 

at 5/26/23 10:33am

Enlarge / A cocoa pod, this one grown in Asia. (credit: Tan Dao Duy) Cocoa farmers in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire make less than a dollar a day. And there are almost 2 million of them; the two countries are the world’s largest cocoa producers, supplying two-thirds of the global supply. Cocoa is the primary perennial crop in both places. However, there are no up-to-date, accurate maps of their cocoa plantations. This is a problem since cocoa is known to be a primary driver of deforestation in the region. Besides decimating biodiversity that may never recover, clear-cutting forests to plant cocoa (or for any other reason) makes it hotter and makes storms stronger, both locally in Africa and across the planet. So a team of European researchers made a deep neural network to collate publicly available satellite images of both countries with georeferenced cocoa farms, identified by their regular polygons. They then had a team in Côte d'Ivoire trekking around for three months to visit the farms and verify their results.Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Science, chocolate, Cocoa, Deforestation, Ecology]

— AI writing assistants can cause biased thinking in their users

 

at 5/26/23 9:36am

Enlarge (credit: Parradee Kietsirikul) Anyone who has had to go back and retype a word on their smartphone because autocorrect chose the wrong one has had some kind of experience writing with AI. Failure to make these corrections can allow AI to say things we didn’t intend. But is it also possible for AI writing assistants to change what we want to say? This is what Maurice Jakesch, a doctoral student of information science at Cornell, wanted to find out. He created his own AI writing assistant based on GPT-3, one that would automatically come up with suggestions for filling in sentences—but there was a catch. Subjects using the assistant were supposed to answer the question “Is social media good for society?” The assistant, however, was programmed to offer biased suggestions for how to answer that question. Assisting with bias AI can be biased despite not being alive. Though these programs can only “think” to the degree that human brains figure out how to program them to, their creators may end up embedding personal biases in the software. Alternatively, if trained on a dataset that has a limited or biased representation, the final product may display biases.Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: AI, Science, Computer science]

— Neuralink says it has the FDA’s OK to start clinical trials

 

at 5/25/23 6:10pm

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto) In December 2022, founder Elon Musk gave an update on his other, other company, the brain implant startup Neuralink. As early as 2020, the company had been saying it was close to starting clinical trials of the implants, but the December update suggested those were still six months away. This time, it seems that the company was correct, as it now claims that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given its approval for the start of human testing. Neuralink is not ready to start recruiting test subjects, and there are no details about what the trials will entail. Searching the ClinicalTrials.gov database for "Neuralink" also turns up nothing. Typically, the initial trials are small and focused entirely on safety rather than effectiveness. Given that Neuralink is developing both brain implants and a surgical robot to do the implanting, there will be a lot that needs testing. It's likely that these will focus on the implants first, given that other implants have already been tested in humans, whereas an equivalent surgical robot has not.Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Health, Science, Biology, brain implants, Elon Musk, medicine, neuralink]

— The curious case of the brie made from nuts that caused a multi-state outbreak

 

at 5/25/23 6:01pm

Enlarge / Some real brie cheese in Paris. (credit: Getty | FRANCOIS GUILLOT/AFP) Niche plant-based foods are often touted for their health benefits—but one benefit that may be less obvious is that they can help keep outbreaks from mushrooming. Such was the case with a small Salmonella outbreak from late 2020 to early 2021, outlined Thursday in a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The outbreak involved an unusual plant-based food that carried unusual bacteria. And starting with just two cases, health officials could identify the source and spur a product recall before standard outbreak measures were triggered—squashing an outbreak that could have festered across the country. The food at the outbreak's center was cashew brie—a vegan brie alternative—and the first two cases identified were in Tennessee. The two people reported eating the same brand of cashew brie at the same restaurant before falling ill. And clinical isolates found they had the same rare serotype of Salmonella—S. Duisburg. Health officials conducted whole genome sequencing of the offending bacteria and entered them into a national repository of pathogen isolates collected for disease surveillance. There were three genetically related matches: two isolates from California and one from Florida.Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Health, Science, cashew brie, CDC, Cheese, nuts, outbreak, raw nuts, salmonella]

— People in Old Testament Jerusalem suffered from widespread dysentery, study finds

 

at 5/25/23 5:00pm

Enlarge / Fecal samples in sediment collected from beneath this stone toilet seat at Armon Hanatziv, circa mid-7th century BCE, showed evidence of a dysentery-causing parasite (Giardia II). So did samples from a near-identical stone toilet at House of Ahiel. (credit: Ya’akov Billig) Last year, we reported on an analysis of soil samples collected from a stone toilet found within the ruins of a swanky villa, revealing the presence of parasitic eggs from four different species. Conclusion: The wealthy, privileged elite of Jerusalem in the seventh century BCE were plagued by poor sanitary conditions and resulting parasitic intestinal diseases. Now scientists have found evidence of a parasite that causes dysentery in soil samples collected from that same stone toilet, as well as a second stone toilet from the same region that is nearly identical in design. The results appear in a new paper published in the journal Parasitology. "The fact that these parasites were present in sediment from two Iron Age cesspits suggests that dysentery was endemic in the Kingdom of Judah," said co-author Piers Mitchell, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge. "Dysentery is spread by feces contaminating drinking water or food, and we suspected it could have been a big problem in early cities of the ancient Near East due to overcrowding, heat and flies, and limited water available in the summer." Archaeologists can learn a great deal by studying the remains of intestinal parasites in ancient feces. For instance, prior studies have compared fecal parasites found in hunter-gatherer and farming communities, thereby revealing dramatic dietary changes, as well as shifts in settlement patterns and social organization coinciding with the rise of agriculture. The domestication of animals, in particular, led to more parasitic infections in farming communities, while hunter-gatherer groups were exposed to fewer parasites and transmissible diseases given their nomadic lifestyle. This is even reflected in modern nomadic communities of hunter-gatherers. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Culture, Science, Archaeology, archaeoparasitology, dysentery, History, paleoparasitology, parasitology]

— Supreme Court limits the EPA’s authority under the Clean Water Act

 

at 5/25/23 1:55pm

Enlarge / Wetlands like this may end up a complicated patchwork of regulated and unregulated areas thanks to the latest Supreme Court decision. (credit: Stefano Madrigali) On Thursday, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling that severely limits the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate pollution under the Clean Water Act. The ruling applies to wetlands that are connected to bodies of water that fall under the Clean Water Act's regulatory scheme, with the court now ruling that those connections need to be direct and contiguous for the act to apply. This would remove many wetlands separated by small strips of land—including artificial structures like levees—from oversight by the EPA. The decision is a somewhat unusual one in that all nine justices agree that the people who originally sued the EPA should prevail. But there was a very sharply worded 5-4 disagreement over what the word "adjacent" means. Whose waters are these? The Clean Water Act was a major piece of environmental regulation due to the sometimes horrific pollution prevalent in the early 1970s. Its text applies regulations to the "waters of the United States," a term that has proven sufficiently vague that it has been the subject of various lawsuits and federal regulatory policies over the years. Several geographic features—seasonal streams, human-made water features, and marshlands without a direct connection to rivers—have all been subject to dispute.Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Policy, Science, clean water act, EPA, Supreme Court]

— Two dead in US from tainted surgeries in Mexico; 206 more may have brain infections

 

at 5/25/23 9:32am

Enlarge / This 2006 image depicts two sides of a Petri dish (reverse L, front R) growing a filamentous colony of Fusarium solani, the potential fungal pathogen behind the outbreak. (credit: CDC/ Mark Lindsley, Sc.D. D(ABMM), Lynette Benjamin, Shirley McClinton) A second person in the US has died in an outbreak of fungal meningitis linked to surgeries in Mexico that involved epidural anesthesia. While the case count is now up to 18, more than 200 others across 25 states may have also been exposed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned in an outbreak update Wednesday. So far, the outbreak among US patients spans 224 people, with 206 potentially exposed and under investigation, nine suspected cases, and nine probable cases. Two of the patients with probable cases have died. Last week, the CDC released a travel advisory and a health alert to clinicians about the cases. At the time, health authorities had identified only five cases, all Texas residents, one of whom had died. An update Wednesday from Texas health officials said that they have since identified two more cases, bringing the state's total to seven. All seven cases were hospitalized, but the officials are still reporting only one death in Texas.Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Health, Science, anesthetic, cases, CDC, Clinica K-3, deaths, epidural, fungal meningitis, fungi, Infectious disease, Matamoros, medical tourism, mexico, outbreak, River Side Surgical Center]

— The neurons that make you feel hangry

 

at 5/25/23 7:59am

Enlarge (credit: warrenrandalcarr via Getty Images) Maybe it starts with a low-energy feeling, or maybe you’re getting a little cranky. You might have a headache or difficulty concentrating. Your brain is sending you a message: You’re hungry. Find food. Studies in mice have pinpointed a cluster of cells called AgRP neurons near the underside of the brain that may create this unpleasant hungry, even “hangry,” feeling. They sit near the brain’s blood supply, giving them access to hormones arriving from the stomach and fat tissue that indicate energy levels. When energy is low, they act on a variety of other brain areas to promote feeding. By eavesdropping on AgRP neurons in mice, scientists have begun to untangle how these cells switch on and encourage animals to seek food when they’re low on nutrients, and how they sense food landing in the gut to turn back off. Researchers have also found that the activity of AgRP neurons goes awry in mice with symptoms akin to those of anorexia, and that activating these neurons can help to restore normal eating patterns in those animals.Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Health, Science, anorexia, eating disorders, Neurochemistry, nutrition]

— More and more Americans are skipping medical care due to money woes

 

at 5/24/23 4:11pm

Enlarge (credit: health.mil) The percentage of American adults who say they skipped medical care due to costs rose significantly last year, hitting 28 percent. That's up from 24 percent in 2021 and 23 percent in 2020, according to a survey out this week from the Federal Reserve titled Economic Well-Being of US Households in 2022. The percentage of people skipping medical care due to money woes is now at the highest point since 2014, when the country was on a downward slide as the Affordable Care Act came into full effect, offering affordable health insurance options to all Americans. The percentage of Americans reporting skipped medical care due to costs in 2013 was 32 percent, then 31 percent in 2014, and down to 27 percent in 2015. The Federal Reserve's survey reported that people without health insurance were significantly more likely to skip medical care due to costs than those with insurance in 2022—42 percent of uninsured said they missed care because they couldn't afford it, versus 26 percent of insured adults who said the same.Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Health, Science, Federal Reserve, health care spending, inflation, medicaid, medical care, skipping care, us healthcare]

— Colorless nanoparticles used to create lightweight, colorful paint

 

at 5/24/23 1:36pm

Enlarge / Materials in a butterfly's wing create color by altering the paths taken by some wavelengths of light. This was the inspiration for a new form of paint. (credit: Getty Images) Do you know more than 50 percent of microplastic pollution in our oceans comes from color paints? Almost every object that people throw into the ocean, whether it be a broken toy, a small bottle cap, or a shoe, has some sort of color coating. While you might try to collect all the plastic objects that are thrown into the oceans, there is no way to gather the microplastics that have already mixed into the water. Particles derived from paint aren’t only a problem in the ocean; they also mix into the air that you breathe. In 2010, scientists studied the effect of chemicals that are used in commercial wall paint on children’s health. They found that kids who sleep in rooms with walls coated with paint having high levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are more likely to develop medical conditions like eczema and asthma. So does that mean commercial paint materials will continue to degrade our environment and our health? Well, there is a new ray of hope. Researchers from the University of Central Florida (UCF) recently published a study that describes “plasmonic paint,” a lightweight, eco-friendly material that has the potential to replace most colored coatings. They claim that their plasmonic paint is also the lightest paint in the world because it avoids the use of pigments and all the materials needed to hold the pigments in place.Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Science, Color, light, materials science, nanoparticles, paint, pigments]

— How NASA plans to melt the Moon—and build on Mars

 

at 5/24/23 8:17am

Enlarge / Mars Dune Alpha is the first structure built for NASA by the Moon to Mars Planetary Autonomous Construction Technology team. (credit: ICON) In June a four-person crew will enter a hangar at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and spend one year inside a 3D-printed building. Made of a slurry that—before it dried—looked like neatly laid lines of soft-serve ice cream, Mars Dune Alpha has crew quarters, shared living space, and dedicated areas for administering medical care and growing food. The 1,700-square-foot space, which is the color of Martian soil, was designed by architecture firm BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group and 3D printed by Icon Technology. Experiments inside the structure will focus on the physical and behavioral health challenges people will encounter during long-term residencies in space. But it’s also the first structure built for a NASA mission by the Moon to Mars Planetary Autonomous Construction Technology (MMPACT) team, which is preparing now for the first construction projects on a planetary body beyond Earth. When humanity returns to the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, astronauts will first live in places like an orbiting space station, on a lunar lander, or in inflatable surface habitats. But the MMPACT team is preparing for the construction of sustainable, long-lasting structures. To avoid the high cost of shipping material from Earth, which would require massive rockets and fuel expenditures, that means using the regolith that’s already there, turning it into a paste that can be 3D printed into thin layers or different shapes.Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Science, Space, Mars, moon, NASA, space, syndication]

— Your fave illustration of Franklin’s kite experiment is likely riddled with errors

 

at 5/23/23 4:46pm

Enlarge / Hand-colored lithograph published by Currier & Ives in 1876, probably the most widely distributed illustration of Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment. Franklin is wrongly shown to be holding the string in one hand above where the key is attached. (credit: Public domain) Most Americans are familiar with the story of Benjamin Franklin and his famous 18th-century experiment in which he attached a metal key to a kite during a thunderstorm to see if the lightning would pass through the metal. That's largely due to many iconic illustrations commemorating the event that found their way into the popular imagination and became part of our shared cultural lore. But most of those classic illustrations are riddled with historical errors, according to a new paper published in the journal Science and Education. Franklin's explorations into electricity began as he was approaching 40 years old after his thriving career as an entrepreneur in the printing business. His scientific interest was piqued in 1743 when he saw a demonstration by scientist/showman Archibald Spencer, known for performing various amusing parlor tricks involving electricity. He soon started a correspondence with a British botanist named Peter Collinson and began reproducing some of Spencer's impressive parlor tricks in his own home. He would have guests rub a tube to create static and then have them kiss, producing an electrical shock. He designed a fake spider suspended by two electrified wires so that it seemed to swing back and forth of its own accord. And he devised a game dubbed "Treason," whereby he wired up a portrait of King George so that anyone who touched the monarch's crown would be shocked. And he once infamously shocked himself while trying to kill a turkey with electricity. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Culture, Science, Benjamin Franklin, electricity, history of science, kite experiment, Physics, science, Science communication]

— Woman with untreated TB still on the lam three months after arrest warrant

 

at 5/23/23 2:01pm

Scanning electron micrograph of Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, which cause TB. (credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) A woman with an untreated infectious case of tuberculosis and a months-old civil warrant out for her arrest continues to evade the sheriff's department in Tacoma, Washington, drawing local frustration. On Friday, the woman failed to show up to yet another court hearing, to which she has been summoned on a roughly monthly basis since January 2022. That's when the county health department began using court orders to try to compel her to get her deadly respiratory infection treated and/or remain in isolation to protect the public until she is no longer infectious. Pierce County Superior Court Judge Philip Sorensen ruled once again Friday that the woman—known only by the initials "V.N." in court documents—was in contempt of those court orders. Sorensen had initially issued a civil arrest warrant on March 2, 2023, ordering her to involuntary detention for testing and treatment. He extended the warrant Friday.Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Health, Science, arrest warrant, bacterial infection, bus, casino, Infectious disease, public health, Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, tb, treatment, Tuberculosis, Washington, woman with untreated TB]

— Study: People think undermining democracy is ok if others do it first

 

at 5/23/23 1:51pm

Enlarge (credit: Douglas Rissing) Many Americans have been shocked by the frequency with which people who claim to love our democracy have supported blatantly undemocratic efforts to limit people's ability to vote or to selectively discard votes already cast. Unfortunately, this sort of democratic backsliding is far from a US-specific problem. Despite widespread support for democracy in countries like Venezuela and Hungary, people have turned out in large numbers to vote for autocrats. A new study performed in the US suggests at least one explanation for the problem: People across the political spectrum appear to believe their political opponents are likely to take anti-democratic action if given the opportunity. And the strength of this belief correlates with a slightly increased willingness to take those actions first. Nobody says they like this stuff The finding, from a University of California, Berkeley-Massachusetts Institute of Technology collaboration, is based on demographically representative survey populations, which were asked about several potential anti-democratic actions. For example, those surveyed were asked if they agreed with reducing the number of voting facilities in towns that support the opposing party. Similar questions got at things like banning rallies, limiting freedom of expression, ignoring court rulings, or resorting to violence. After being asked for their own opinions, people were then asked whether they thought their political opponents supported these anti-democratic approaches.Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Science, authoritarianism, Behavioral science, democracy, Human behavior, politics]

— Life on Earth might have gotten a boost from the Sun’s mega-tantrums

 

at 5/22/23 12:55pm

Enlarge (credit: NASA/SDO) How, exactly, living things emerged on Earth remains a mystery. Now a new experiment has revealed that blasts of solar particles could have kickstarted the process by creating some of the basic components of life.  Time in the sun Before so much as the first microbe existed, there had to be amino acids thought to have formed in one of the primordial oozes of early Earth. It was previously thought that lightning might have supercharged the formation of amino acids. However, Kensei Kobayashi of Yokohama National University in Japan, along with astrophysicist Vladimir Airapetian of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a team of researchers from both institutions, have found another possibility: The young Sun’s superflares probably helped give rise to the stuff of life. “[Galactic cosmic rays] and [solar energetic particle] events from the young Sun represent the most effective energy sources for the prebiotic formation of biologically important organic compounds,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Life. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Science, astronomy, Biology, chemistry, origin of life, Physics]

— Hypersensitive robot hand is eerily human in how it can feel things

 

at 5/22/23 10:53am

Enlarge (credit: Columbia University ROAM Lab) From bionic limbs to sentient androids, robotic entities in science fiction blur the boundaries between biology and machine. Real-life robots are far behind in comparison. While we aren’t going to reach the level of Star Trek’s Data anytime soon, there is now a robot hand with a sense of touch that is almost human. One thing robots have not been able to achieve is a level of sensitivity and dexterity high enough to feel and handle things as humans do. Enter a robot hand developed by a team of researchers at Columbia University. (Five years ago, we covered their work back when this achievement was still a concept.) This hand doesn’t just pick things up and put them down on command. It is so sensitive that it can actually “feel” what it is touching, and it's dextrous enough to easily change the position of its fingers so it can better hold objects, a maneuver known as "finger gaiting." It is so sensitive it can even do all this in the dark, figuring everything out by touch.Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Science, Computer science, machine learning, proprioception, Robotics]

— Ars Frontiers is here: Come (virtually) hang out with the experts

 

at 5/22/23 7:00am

The Frontiers livestream. Your favorite Ars writers will appear inside of this magic box starting at 1:30 pm US Eastern Daylight Time! It's Frontiers Day at Ars Technica! Between the hours of 13:30 and 17:00 (all times US Eastern Daylight, UTC-4:00), we'll be carrying our livestreamed discussion with a half-dozen expert-packed panels on topics that range from IT to health care to space innovation. Each session will last approximately 30 minutes, with the last 10 minutes reserved for questions and answers from the audience. If you want to weigh in, leave your questions as comments on the YouTube stream. (You can also leave questions in the comments of this article, but YouTube is the preferred place because the moderators gathering questions will be focusing their efforts there.) Schedule and sessions The event kicks off at 13:30 EDT, with a quick intro from Ars Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher and me. Even though this is a virtual event, Ken and I will be at the Ars studio at the Condé Nast Manhattan office to act as hosts. Ken will welcome everyone in and say some opening remarks, and we'll roll from there directly into the sessions. Each session will also be bookended by a short recap by Ken and me. Session 1: TikTok—banned or not, it's probably here to stay (13:30 EDT) Ars senior policy reporter Ashley Belanger gets to be up first with an especially relevant topic: While Congress and various states are vowing action against TikTok, will "banning" the app (whatever "banning" actually means) really come to anything? What are the policy implications around this kind of regulation, and how did we get here? We'll feature EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry among the panel's guests, along with Columbia University's Ioana Literat and former White House lawyer and CPRI Executive Director Bryan Cunningham.Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Category: Features, Science, Staff, ars conference, ars frontiers, conference, frontiers, frontiers23]

As of 5/29/23 4:15pm. Last new 5/27/23 8:39am.