So, picture it: A civilisation past its peak, that’s invented AI but can no longer build it, relying on ancient black boxes to tell it what to do. Nobody understands how the box knows, but experience suggests that it’s better to follow its advice.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Life-or-Death Algorithms: The Black Box of AI in Medicine, and How to Avoid It
So all those space operas with oxygen-atmosphere planets that have no apparent biome are not necessarily complete bollocks. Huh.
(Via Winchell Chung.)
Originally shared by Thorfinn Hrolfsson
Alien imposters: Planets with oxygen don’t necessarily have life
Source: Johns Hopkins University
In their search for life in solar systems near and far, researchers have often accepted the presence of oxygen in a planet’s atmosphere as the surest sign that life may be present there. A new Johns Hopkins study, however, recommends a reconsideration of that rule of thumb.
Simulating in the lab the atmospheres of planets beyond the solar system, researchers successfully created both organic compounds and oxygen, absent of life.
The findings, published on Dec. 11, 2018, in ACS Earth and Space Chemistry, serve as a cautionary tale for researchers who suggest the presence of oxygen and organics on distant worlds is evidence of life there.
Oxygen makes up 20 percent of Earth’s atmosphere and is considered one of the most robust biosignature gases in Earth’s atmosphere. In the search for life beyond Earth’s solar system, however, little is known about how different energy sources initiate chemical reactions and how those reactions can create biosignatures like oxygen. While other researchers have run photochemical models on computers to predict what exoplanet atmospheres might be able to create, no such simulations to He’s knowledge have before now been conducted in the lab.
The research team performed the simulation experiments in a specially designed Planetary HAZE (PHAZER) chamber in the lab of Sarah Hörst, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences and the paper’s co-author. The researchers tested nine different gas mixtures, consistent with predictions for super-Earth and mini-Neptune type exoplanet atmospheres; such exoplanets are the most abundant type of planet in our Milky Way galaxy. Each mixture had a specific composition of gases such as carbon dioxide, water, ammonia, and methane, and each was heated at temperatures ranging from about 80 to 700 degrees Fahrenheit.
He and the team allowed each gas mixture to flow into the PHAZER setup and then exposed the mixture to one of two types of energy, meant to mimic energy that triggers chemical reactions in planetary atmospheres: plasma from an alternating current glow discharge or light from an ultraviolet lamp. Plasma, an energy source stronger than UV light, can simulate electrical activities like lightning and/or energetic particles, and UV light is the main driver of chemical reactions in planetary atmospheres such as those on Earth, Saturn and Pluto.
After running the experiments continuously for three days, corresponding to the amount of time gas would be exposed to energy sources in space, the researchers measured and identified resulting gasses with a mass spectrometer, an instrument that sorts chemical substances by their mass to charge ratio.
The research team found multiple scenarios that produced both oxygen and organic molecules that could build sugars and amino acids—raw materials for which life could begin—such as formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
“People used to suggest that oxygen and organics being present together indicates life, but we produced them abiotically in multiple simulations,” He says. “This suggests that even the co-presence of commonly accepted biosignatures could be a false positive for life.”
Journal Reference:
Chao He, Sarah M. Hörst, Nikole K. Lewis, Julianne I. Moses, Eliza M.-R. Kempton, Mark S. Marley, Caroline V. Morley, Jeff A. Valenti, Véronique Vuitton. Gas Phase Chemistry of Cool Exoplanet Atmospheres: Insight from Laboratory Simulations. ACS Earth and Space Chemistry, 2018
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsearthspacechem.8b00133
https://releases.jhu.edu/2018/12/17/alien-imposters-planets-with-oxygen-dont-necessarily-have-life/
Every time I’m tempted to complain about working with undocumented software I remember the ENIAC Six, six women who had to invent computer programming. Some scientists and engineers had built the first electronic computer, and hired these women (who were human “computers” along the lines of Hidden Figures) to run it. They had to basically teach themselves electrical engineering, take things apart that they weren’t supposed to touch, and talk to people they’d been told not to talk to in order to figure out how it worked.
Then they could start on the job they were hired for. (See the book Broad Band for more.)
This is another woman in the same mould.
Originally shared by Self-Rescuing Princess Society
“In an age when computers were in their infancy and few women were involved in their development, Berezin (pronounced BEAR-a-zen) not only designed the first true word processor; in 1969, she was also a founder and the president of the Redactron Corp., a tech startup on Long Island that was the first company exclusively engaged in manufacturing and selling the revolutionary machines.”
“Berezin joined the Electronic Computer Corp. in 1951 as the only woman in a shop of engineers in Brooklyn. ‘They said to me, “Design a computer,”‘ she was quoted as saying in the 1972 Times profile. ‘I had never seen one before. Hardly anyone else had. So I just had to figure out how to do it. It was a lot of fun — when I wasn’t terrified.'”
Peter Diamandis, so apply a 90% hype discount as usual, but some interesting ideas that would make for good fiction in the next wave of cyberpunk.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
How the Spatial Web Will Transform Every Element of Our Careers https://suhub.co/2ErIvWa
Meditating appears to change how you learn.
Originally shared by Neuroscience News
Meditation Adapts the Brain to Respond to Better Feedback
Researchers found that participants who meditated were more successful in selecting high-probability pairings indicating a tendency to learn from positive outcomes.
The research is in Journal of Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience. (full open access)
Fans of Lois McMaster Bujold will have the phrase “uterine replicator” ringing in their heads at this point.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Disrupting Reproduction: Two New Advances in Tech-Assisted Baby-Making
If literary fiction isn’t formulaic, then why can so much of it be summarized as “Broken people descend through helplessness into hopelessness?”
Discuss.
Originally shared by Standout Books
In broad strokes, genre fiction foregrounds story, literary fiction foregrounds character.
Find out more with ‘What You Need To Know About Literary Fiction’.
Self-Rescuing Princess Society will enjoy this one.
Turns out that the exclusion of female and non-Western philosophers from the canon is a relatively recent project.
Originally shared by Irina T.
”Another crucial female Muslim philosopher is Nana Asma’u (1793-1864) from the Sokoto Caliphate in today’s northern Nigeria. Like other girls and boys before British colonisation, Asma’u started school when she was five. Her father was a scholar who argued for women’s rights, and he chatted with her daily about reading and writing, as Jean Boyd and Beverly Mack outline in their ground-breaking collections of her texts and life. In adult life, Asma’u became a political leader and a founder of the educational network Yan Taru (‘The Associates’), which is still active today. She wrote in the Fulfulde, Hausa and Arabic languages, and her first text had the fitting title: ‘Warning for the Negligent and Reminder for the Intelligent Regarding the Ways of the Pious’. She argued for humility between people, and for
good relations with one’s relatives, servants, and comrades. This is shown by being cheerful with them; doing good things for them; serving them; never acting as if superior to them; consulting them in many matters; helping them financially and physically; not coveting their possessions; not covering up any of their blameworthy affairs that one may discover, and not excusing them for such things; not boasting to them of wealth, position, or nobility; visiting their sick ones; and offering them advice without any pretence or excessive conceit.”
Plentiful hackables for a cyberpunk present.
Originally shared by HACKADAY
Liberating the Birds: electric scooter hacking has taken an interesting twist.
A few months ago, several companies started deploying electric scooters on the sidewalks of cities around the United States. These scooters were standard, off-the-shelf electric scooters made in China, loaded up with battery packs, motors, and a ‘brain…
http://hackaday.com/2018/12/07/liberating-birds-for-a-cheap-electric-scooter/
Originally shared by Micro SF/F Fiction
“Welcome to Magic School. Here is your schedule.”
“Thanks! But…”
“Yes?”
“This is just ‘Ethics’ and ‘Human rights’ and things like that.”
“Correct, that’s the first year curriculum.”
“Do we have to learn all this?”
“Of course! What do you think this is, software engineering?”