science

Fungal Intelligence

With all the recent hype around artificial intelligence, this thing that I came across today is a breath of fresh air. The subject is: fungal intelligence. “WTF?”, I hear you ask. Have a look at this tiny video:

Crazy, right? Well, crazy enough to be found in this article at Nature.com. And, how the heck did I end up there? That’s the first link in the Google search results for “fungal intelligence”, which I had to look up after watching this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrFSAbnhKYI

Fascinating stuff!

Science for fun – fun science topics and experiments

Science4fun is a website that helps make science more fun for kids.

Welcome to Science4Fun. It is the place for kids to learn science in a fun way. It has a wide variety of interesting science topics that are full of articles, and easy to do science experiments. All the content of the website is written in simple English with a lot of pictures to help you understand the concept easily.

With kids being a lot more video-oriented these days, I think this site is more helpful for parents, rather than the kids themselves. But it’s a good effort, with a good selection of topics and experiments. If you are looking for a way to have fun with kids while making it useful too, give it a try.

It’s Official: NASA’s Peer-Reviewed EM Drive Paper Has Finally Been Published

Science Alert has published these interesting news: It’s Official: NASA’s Peer-Reviewed EM Drive Paper Has Finally Been Published.

In case you’ve missed the hype, the EM Drive, or Electromagnetic Drive, is a propulsion system first proposed by British inventor Roger Shawyer back in 1999.

Instead of using heavy, inefficient rocket fuel, it bounces microwaves back and forth inside a cone-shaped metal cavity to generate thrust.

According to Shawyer’s calculations, the EM Drive could be so efficient that it could power us to Mars in just 70 days.

But, there’s a not-small problem with the system. It defies Newton’s third law, which states that everything must have an equal and opposite reaction.

According to the law, for a system to produce thrust, it has to push something out the other way. The EM Drive doesn’t do this.

This is a good reminder that we are far from knowing everything and there are inventions to be made, laws of nature discovered, and knowledge acquired. Exciting!

Trust in Automation

Trust in Automation is by far the best thing I’ve read on the subjects of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and their affects on human society. There are plenty of links and quotes that make you think and want you to learn more … until you don’t. It’s not depressing, but it is quite concerning. Here are a couple of quotes from the article (some of them are quotes of other people), which I liked:

As the cost of labor goes up and the cost of machinery goes down, at some point, it’ll be cheaper to use machines than people. With the increase in productivity, the GDP goes up, but so does unemployment. What do you do? … The best way is to reduce the time a certain portion of the population spends living, and then find ways to keep them busy.

—Jingfang Hao, Folding Beijing (2014)

Also this one:

If you think discrimination is bad today, just wait until the machines take over. They will discriminate based on the the shade of your iris, the shape of your brow, the size of a tatoo, or any arbitrary collection of low-level traits whose presence triggers a subtle bias.

Largest digital survey of the sky mapped billions of stars

Engadget reports:

An international team of astronomers have released two petabytes of data from the Pan-STARRS project that’s also known as the “world’s largest digital sky survey.” Two petabytes of data, according to the team, is equivalent to any of the following: a billion selfies, one hundred Wikipedias or 40 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with single-spaced text. The scientists spent four years observing three-fourths of the night sky through their 1.8 meter telescope at Haleakala Observatories on Maui, Hawaii, scanning three billion objects in the Milky Way 12 times in five different filters. Those objects included stars, galaxies, asteroids and other celestial bodies.

Wow … this is mind blowing at the very least …

See the image above? That’s the result of half a million 45-second exposures taken over four years. They’re releasing even more detailed images and data in 2017 — for now, you can check out what the team released to the public on the official Pan-STARRS website.