Friday, December 16, 2022

Wordtracker


Fermented foods and fiber may lower stress levels, says new study
Oct 2022, phys.org

"psychobiotic" diet - prebiotic and fermented foods

via APC Microbiome in Cork, Ireland: Kirsten Berding et al, Feed your microbes to deal with stress: a psychobiotic diet impacts microbial stability and perceived stress in a healthy adult population, Molecular Psychiatry (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41380-022-01817-y



Jet lagged plants pave the way to first digital plant
Nov 2022, phys.org

Not just "digital plants" but also "clock-mutant plants" - they mutated the clock genes of a plant, then tehy developed a computational model of these clock mutants using clock gene activity, metabolic and physiological models (in silico, digital twins, etc.)

via University of Edinburgh: Andrew Millar et al, The Arabidopsis Framework Model version 2 predicts the organism-level effects of circadian clock gene mis-regulation, in silico Plants (2022). DOI: 10.1093/insilicoplants/diac010


Quantum dots form ordered material
Nov 2022, phys.org

"Self organizing optoelectronic metamaterial" - a three-dimensional superlattice where quantum dots act like atoms in a crystal

via University of Groningen: Jacopo Pinna et al, Approaching Bulk Mobility in PbSe Colloidal Quantum dots 3D Superlattices, Advanced Materials (2022). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202207364


Researchers unlock light-matter interactions on sub-nanometer scales, leading to 'picophotonics'
Nov 2022, phys.org

"Picophotonics" - picometer-scale electromagnetic waves

via Purdue University: Sathwik Bharadwaj et al, Picophotonics: Anomalous Atomistic Waves in Silicon, Physical Review Applied (2022). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevApplied.18.044065

AI Art - Golden Child - 2022

The unimon, a new qubit to boost quantum computers for useful applications
Nov 2022, phys.org

"Unimon" - a superconducting qubit that unites in a single circuit the desired properties of increased anharmonicity, full insensitivity to dc charge noise, reduced sensitivity to magnetic noise, and a simple structure consisting only of a single Josephson junction in a resonator to make high-fidelity qubit gates

Bonus - we are currently living in the "noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era"

via Aalto University, IQM Quantum Computers, and VTT Technical Research Center: Eric Hyyppä et al, Unimon qubit, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34614-w


Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
Nov 2022, phys.org

  • Earth weighs six ronnagrams; a six followed by 27 zeroes.
  • Jupiter, that's two quettagrams; a two followed by 30 zeros.
  • Hellabytes and Brontobytes were not official, because the abbreviation of H and B were already taken.
  • The only letters that were not used for other units or other symbols were R and Q, hence Ronna and Quetta.

via the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures.


Fluxonium qubits bring the creation of a quantum computer closer
Nov 2022, phys.org

Quantum words - Fluxonium quibit - operates at a low frequency of about 600 MHz, giving it a longer life cycle and a greater precision of operations, so they are used to make longer algorithms

via Russian National University of Science and Technology: Ilya N. Moskalenko et al, High fidelity two-qubit gates on fluxoniums using a tunable coupler, npj Quantum Information (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41534-022-00644-x
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Diamonds Are a Laser's Best Friend


Diamond mirrors for high-powered lasers
May 2022, phys.org

High-powered lasers do high-powered damage, so the materials that interact with them (like a laser gun) need to be strong. Diamonds with nano-structures etched into them do the job. 

via Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: Haig A. Atikian et al, Diamond mirrors for high-power continuous-wave lasers, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-30335-2

Image credit: Thermoelectrics - Vienna University of Technology - 2022 [link]


'Life-like' lasers can self-organize, adapt their structure, and cooperate
Jul 2022, phys.org

I don't understand this at all. But I like the sound of it. 

Next, the team will study how to improve the lasers' autonomous behavior to render them even more life-like. 

via Imperial College London: Riccardo Sapienza, Self-organized lasers from reconfigurable colloidal assemblies, Nature Physics (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-022-01656-2


Why lasers are being used to write inside diamonds
Oct 2022, BBC News

The laser can make atomic-scale changes to create circuitry inside the diamond. That could be useful for making instruments for radiation detection, where a diamond's durability is also an asset. Potentially such circuitry could also be used in quantum computers.


Researchers produce nanodiamonds capable of delivering medicinal and cosmetic remedies through the skin
Sep 2022, phys.org

Laser-based optical method quantifies nanodiamond penetration into layers of the skin and determines their location and concentration within body tissue in a non-invasive manner — eliminating the need for a biopsy. Much like trucks that make deliveries, artificial diamonds can deliver various medications to intended targets.

via Bar-Ilan University: Channa Shapira et al, Noninvasive Nanodiamond Skin Permeation Profiling Using a Phase Analysis Method: Ex Vivo Experiments, ACS Nano (2022). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.2c03613

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Wearing the Future


Encrypted, one-touch, human-machine interface technology unveils user physiology
Sep 2022, phys.org

"Cryptographic bio-human machine interface," or CB-HMI, uses thin hydrogel-coated chemical sensors to collect and detect particular circulating molecules on the skin through natural perspiration.

via UCLA and Stanford: Shuyu Lin et al, A touch-based multimodal and cryptographic bio-human–machine interface, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2201937119



First electronic skin with a mesh structure for long-term attachment with no discomfort
Oct 2022, phys.org

World's first nanomesh-structured electronic skin device (organic field-effect transistor) that can measure and process bio-signals for a prolonged period.

via Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology: Gihyeok Gwon et al, An All‐Nanofiber‐Based Substrate‐Less, Extremely Conformal, and Breathable Organic Field Effect Transistor for Biomedical Applications, Advanced Functional Materials (2022). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202204645


Standalone sweat sensor provides immediate readout
Oct 2022, phys.org

Fully-integrated soft skin patch includes all the essential components that are required for wearable sensors: two integrated batteries, a microcontroller, sensors, the circuit, and a stretchable non-light-emitting display called electrochromic display.

via University of California San Diego: Lu Yin et al, A stretchable epidermal sweat sensing platform with an integrated printed battery and electrochromic display, Nature Electronics (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-022-00843-6


A high-resolution, wearable electrotactile rendering device that virtualizes the sense of touch
Oct 2022, phys.org

Wearable tactile rendering system can mimic the sensation of touch with high spatial resolution and a rapid response rate.

High-frequency alternating stimulation strategy lowering the operating voltage under 30 V allows it to be non-invasive, but also they used a novel super-resolution strategy that can render tactile sensation at locations between physical electrodes, instead of only at the electrode locations.

via City University of Hong Kong and Tencent's Robotics X Laboratory: Weikang Lin et al, Super-resolution wearable electrotactile rendering system, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abp8738

AI Art - Enveloper - 2022

Printable circuits that can work on fabric, plastic and even fruit
Oct 2022, phys.org

Method of creating liquid metal circuitry using a desktop laser printer that could place the electronics onto many types of surfaces.

via Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tianjin University, China: Rui Guo et al, Thermal Transfer-Enabled Rapid Printing of Liquid Metal Circuits on Multiple Substrates, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (2022). DOI: 10.1021/acsami.2c08743


Skin-like electronics could monitor your health continuously
Nov 2022, phys.org

Wearables became skin at some point.

via Argonne National Laboratory: Shilei Dai et al, Intrinsically stretchable neuromorphic devices for on-body processing of health data with artificial intelligence, Matter (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2022.07.016


Researchers eye embroidery as low-cost solution for making wearable electronics
Nov 2022, phys.org

Embroidering power-generating yarns onto fabric has allowed researchers to embed a self-powered, numerical touch-pad and movement sensors into clothing. 

via North Carolina State University: Yu Chen et al, Flexible, durable, and washable triboelectric yarn and embroidery for self-powered sensing and human-machine interaction, Nano Energy (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.nanoen.2022.107929


A self-powered ingestible sensor opens new avenues for gut research
Dec 2022, phys.org

Wearables vs ingestibles:

Battery-free, pill-shaped ingestible biosensing system designed to provide continuous monitoring in the intestinal environment.

via University of California San Diego: Ernesto De la Paz et al, A self-powered ingestible wireless biosensing system for real-time in situ monitoring of gastrointestinal tract metabolites, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-35074-y


Compliant and conductive carbon nanomaterial for on-skin electronics
Nov 2022, phys.org

Carbon nanomaterial called hydrogen-substituted graphdiyne (HsGDY) coupled with a single-crystal copper catalyst provides an inherent softness and flexibility that is ideal for on-skin applications.

via King Abdullah University of Science and Technology: Yichen Cai et al, Graphdiyne-Based Nanofilms for Compliant On-Skin Sensing, ACS Nano (2022). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.2c06169

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Scientist Fingers

Implantable Sensor - Shangbin Liu Penn State Tsinghua University - 2022
Researchers developed a flexible, implantable sensor that can continuously monitor nitric oxide in the knee of a rabbit. The gas may indicate the onset of damage-induced osteoarthritis. Shangbin Liu Penn State Tsinghua University, 2022 [link]

Rhizosphere-on-a-chip - Carlos Jones, ORNL, US Dept of Energy - 2022 [link]

Single-Crystal Organometallic Perovskite Optical Fiber - Dr Lei Su at Queen Mary University of London - 2022 [link]

Recycled Plastic - Patrick Campbell University of Colorado Boulder - 2022 [link]

Ionic Circuit - Woo-Bin Jung Harvard SEAS - 2022 [link]

800,000 Lab-grown Brain Cells Play Pong - Cortical Labs - 2022 [link]

Single-cell electrorotation microfluidic device - Texas A and M Engineering - 2022 [link]

Spectrometer on a chip - Oregon State and Aalto University - 2022 [link]

Programmable bacteria electronics - Brandon Martin at Rice University - 2022 [link]

Hydrophobic film - Sahar Babaeipour at Aalto University - 2022 [link]

Fragment of Winchcombe meteorite - The Trustees of the Natural History Museum of London - 2022 [link]

All-perovskite tandem solar cell with power conversion efficiency of 27.4% - Aaron Demeter at University of Toronto Engineering - 2022 [link]

Anterior teeth with a huge dental calculus deposit from Copper Age Italy 3.000 BC - Andrea Quagliariello - 2022 [link]

Hydrogen-substituted graphdiyne coupled with a single-crystal copper catalyst - Vincent Tung, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology - 2022 [link]


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Thursday, November 17, 2022

A Small Machine Conjuring


Some everyday materials have memories, and now they can be erased
Oct 2022, phys.org

I know they're just talking about a piece of paper but still this whole thing just creeps me out, and from both sides:

"We can find out the history of a material by doing some tests or erase a material's memory and program a new one to prepare it for consumer or industrial use."

via Penn State: Nathan C. Keim et al, Mechanical annealing and memories in a disordered solid, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo1614

Image credit: AI Art - A Small Machine Conjuring - 2022

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Step Away From the Machine


First, the image seen above is from a series of protest photos by a man named Chauncey Hare. That's him in his own photo, sitting in his cubicle at the EPA. He thinks big business and their big owners are taking over the world, and he's probably right. 

One thing that's pretty certain -- we are not in control, not of the world at large, and not even of ourselves. 

Image credit: Chauncey Hare - Self Portrait at EPA - 1980 [Protest Photos]
Chauncey Hare, "Self Portrait at EPA" (1980), from Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare’s Photographic Work by Robert Slifkin (MACK, 2022), Chauncey Hare Photograph Archive, BANC PIC 2000.012.14:023- 024—ffALB. This photograph was made by Chauncey Hare to protest and warn against the growing domination of working people by multi-national corporations and their elite owners and managers. (© The Regents of the University of California, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley) https://hyperallergic.com/741181/chauncey-hare-quitting-your-day-job/

Researcher offers new explanation for consciousness
Oct 2022, phys.org

Deepak Chopra's pissed:
"In a nutshell, our theory is that consciousness developed as a memory system that is used by our unconscious brain to help us flexibly and creatively imagine the future and plan accordingly," explained corresponding author Andrew Budson, MD, professor of neurology. "What is completely new about this theory is that it suggests we don't perceive the world, make decisions, or perform actions directly. Instead, we do all these things unconsciously and then—about half a second later—consciously remember doing them."

"Even our thoughts are not generally under our conscious control. This lack of control is why we may have difficulty stopping a stream of thoughts running through our head as we're trying to go to sleep, and also why mindfulness is hard," adds Budson.

via Boston University School of Medicine: Andrew E. Budson et al, Consciousness as a Memory System, Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology (2022). DOI: 10.1097/WNN.0000000000000319


Scientists identify pathway that triggers mice to scratch when they see others do the same
Oct 2022, phys.org

"Contagious itching" is controlled through a visual pathway, that surprisingly, operates independently of the visual cortex.

You can see without a visual cortex. What else do we not-see?

via Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis: Fang Gao et al, A non-canonical retina-ipRGCs-SCN-PVT visual pathway for mediating contagious itch behavior, Cell Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2022.111444.


A handful of universities seem to control flow of ideas, people in academia
Oct 2022, phys.org

Just network science telling us what to do, as usual:

The structure of the American professoriate -- five U.S. universities have trained 1-in-8 tenure-track faculty members serving at the nation's institutions of higher learning.

(University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University; University of Michigan; Stanford University; and University of Wisconsin-Madison)

via University of Colorado at Boulder: Daniel Larremore, Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty members hiring and retention, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05222-x


Post Script:
Scientists obtain effects through virtual reality comparable to those of psychedelic drugs
Sep 2022, phys.org

They design virtual reality intersubjective group spaces where participants experience together the collective emergence, fluctuation and dissipation of their own bodies, and which produce responses similar to those triggered by psychoactive drugs.

Something about this says Robert Heinlein to me. A social science fiction perhaps. 

via Intangible Realities Laboratory at the Citius Intelligent Technologies Research Centre, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; and ArtSci International Foundation in Bristol: David R. Glowacki et al, Group VR experiences can produce ego attenuation and connectedness comparable to psychedelics, Scientific Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-12637-z

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Art x Science


AI art is moving fast and breaking things (sorry Getty Images Holdings). But the part that really blows my mind is that it makes a perfect composition, every single time.

The picture above was trained on billions of images. Some of them -- but certainly not all of them -- are actual artwork or at least professional commercially-designed imagery, and yet, after digesting basically every image on the internet, this is what comes out. 

It's perfect: balance, contrast, rhythm, movement, emphasis, pattern, unity; the seven principles of design, they're all there. 

If you mix every paint color together, you get brown. If you took a program that learned how to drive by watching all the cars out on the road, the result would be a car accident. Yet, when we digest every picture on the internet, this is what comes out. The prompt was "complementary color scheme of insect eyes", but that doesn't really matter. You could literally write "shitty amateur artist garbage" and it would produce an image that would win a local art contest.

Anyway, here's some insight into what our eyes want: 

Color composition preferences in art paintings are determined by color statistics
Oct 2022, phys.org

Color composition preferences of 31,353 participants, for 1,200 paintings with artificially manipulated color compositions where the hue angle was rotated by 90, 180, and 270 degrees.

Participants always preferred the original. But not for the reasons expected -- the "matching-to-nature" hypothesis.

Instead, these statistical color properties predicted preference: 
  • asymmetric red–green distribution
  • correlation between lightness and blue–yellow distribution
  • correlation between red–green and blue–yellow 

It was revealed for the first time that color compositions found in paintings do not simply imitate natural scenes, but have their own unique features, which is linked to preferences of observers and the attractiveness of certain color schemes.

via Toyohashi University of Technology: Shigeki Nakauchi et al, Regularity of colour statistics in explaining colour composition preferences in art paintings, Scientific Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-18847-9

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Tuesday, November 1, 2022

Pandemic Surprise


Serendipitous backyard experiment shines light on producing polymers
Sep 2022, phys.org

With the COVID shutdown, the scientists at QUT's Soft Matter Materials Group, like the rest of the world, switched to working from home which meant limited time in the university research labs.

Where safe and practicable, the scientists looked for ways to take their work home with them.

This situation inspired the researchers to continue their experiment using sunlight and Dr. Delafresnaye installed the experiment on her outdoor barbecue table and left it in what the research paper calls "Australian sunshine" for four hours.

It's an unprecedented methodology for the production of microspheres, which are used in a wide range of applications including drug delivery, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and paints. Normally they use a laser or LED to start and stop a reaction; this uses sunshine.

via Queensland University of Technology: Laura Delafresnaye et al, Microspheres from light—a sustainable materials platform, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32429-3



And since so many of us became armchair epidemiologists during the pandemic, automatically rejecting any study that was not peer-reviewed...

Most preprint studies of COVID-19 hold up through peer-review: study
Oct 2022, phys.org

Comparing preprint manuscripts to the eventual published versions of the individual studies, about 90 percent of those 1,606 data points were still in the text after peer review. 

(fyi the National Institutes of Health has promoted preprint manuscripts as a way to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.)

via University of Wisconsin-Madison:  Lindsay Nelson et al, Robustness of evidence reported in preprints during peer review, The Lancet Global Health (2022). DOI: 10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00368-0

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Fractals in the News


It's fractals all the way down -- if you've been waiting for fractals to have their moment, that time is coming. It took the advent of computers for us to discover fractals in the first place, but then it was used for video game graphics and psychedelic art, and that's it for about 40 years. Now we're using the Large Hadron Collider, the most advanced piece of scientific equipment created, to discover that fractals are not only found in all living things, but in the furthest depths of physics - the Bose Einstein Condensate (BECs are an integral part of quantum computing, metamaterials and intelligent matter, and will be a key technology in the future). 


Study proposes mathematical tool to help understand fractal structure of quark-gluon plasma
Jun 2022, phys.org

When hadrons are accelerated to relativistic velocities and made to collide with each other their confinement is interrupted and the quarks and gluons scatter, forming a plasma that lasts only a tiny fraction of a second, but observation of it has produced important discoveries about the nature of material reality.

Quark-gluon plasma has a fractal structure. When it disintegrates into a stream of particles propagating in various directions, the behavior of the particles in the jets is similar to that of the quarks and gluons in the plasma. Moreover, it decays in a cascade of reactions with a pattern of self-similarity over many scales that is typical of fractals.

"Fractal theory explains BEC formation"

Deppman questions whether fractal structures could also be present in electromagnetism. This would explain why so many natural phenomena, from lightning to snowflakes, have fractal structures, as they are all governed by electromagnetic forces. It might also explain why Tsallis statistics are present in so many phenomena. "Tsallis statistics have been used to describe scale transformation invariance, a key ingredient of fractals," he said.

via Large Hadron Collider by the European Organization for Nuclear Research-research: E. Megías et al, Nonlinear Klein–Gordon equation and the Bose–Einstein condensation, The European Physical Journal Plus (2022). DOI: 10.1140/epjp/s13360-022-02511-2

Post Script:
Creating an ultrafast optoelectronic switch using a Bose-Einstein condensate of polaritons
Sep 2022, phys.org

Terahertz polariton switch.

via Universities in Shanghai, Xiamen, Shandong, Nanjing, Shanxi and NYU: Fei Chen et al, Optically Controlled Femtosecond Polariton Switch at Room Temperature, Physical Review Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.057402


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Memetics in a Name


What's in a name? Glimmers of evolution in naming babies, choosing a dog, study finds
Jun 2022, phys.org

Newberry, an assistant professor of complex systems, says examining trends in the popularity of baby names and dog breeds can be a proxy for understanding ecological and evolutionary change. The names and dog breed preferences themselves are like genes or organisms competing for scarce resources. In this case, the scarce resources are the minds of parents and dog owners. His results are published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

Results:
  • The more popular a name becomes, the less likely future parents are to follow suit. Same goes for popular dog breeds.
  • When a name is most rare — 1 in 10,000 births — it tends to grow, on average, at a rate of 1.4% a year. But when a name is most common — more than 1 in 100 births — its popularity declines, on average, at 1.6%.

And this is why Darwin got his idea for natural selection from language-trees:
"Natural selection is incredibly hard to measure. You're asking, for an entire population, who lived, who died and why. And that's just a crazy thing to try to ask. By contrast, in names, we literally know every single name for the entire country for a hundred years."

via University of Michigan: Mitchell Newberry, Measuring frequency-dependent selection in culture, Nature Human Behaviour (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01342-6


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Laughing With Robots


Sharing a laugh: Scientists teach a robot when to have a sense of humor
Sep 2022, phys.org

In the shared-laughter model, a human initially laughs and the AI system responds with laughter as an empathetic response. This approach required designing three subsystems — one to detect laughter, a second to decide whether to laugh, and a third to choose the type of appropriate laughter.

The scientists gathered training data by annotating more than 80 dialogues from speed dating, a social scenario where large groups of people mingle or interact with each other one-on-one for a brief period of time. In this case, the matchmaking marathon involved students from Kyoto University and Erica, teleoperated by several amateur actresses.

"Our biggest challenge in this work was identifying the actual cases of shared laughter, which isn't easy, because as you know, most laughter is actually not shared at all," Inoue said. "We had to carefully categorize exactly which laughs we could use for our analysis and not just assume that any laugh can be responded to."

via the Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University: Can a robot laugh with you?: Shared laughter generation for empathetic spoken dialogue, Frontiers in Robotics and AI (2022). DOI: 10.3389/frobt.2022.933261



Engineers Gave a Car a Pair of Eyes to Make Future Roads Safer For Pedestrians
Oct 2022, Science Alert
 
In one of the more unusual experiments we've seen recently, researchers attached a large pair of cartoonish googly eyes to the front of a small, self-driving vehicle – and it turns out that this kind of anthropomorphic tweak could actually improve pedestrian safety.

Not unusual at all, I've been waiting for this exact thing to happen.

There was a gender split in the results of their virtual reality experiments. For men, the eyes only really helped in dangerous situations, warning them to pause when they might otherwise proceed. For women, the eyes boosted confidence by signaling it was safe to cross.

via University of Tokyo: Can Eyes on a Car Reduce Traffic Accidents? Chia-Ming Chang et al. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications. September 2022 Pages 349–359. https://doi.org/10.1145/3543174.3546841

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Monday, October 31, 2022

We Are The Climate Change


Investigation examines fossil fuel industry influence at elite American universities
Sep 2022, phys.org

Memetics Supreme -
Investigative journalist Paul Thacker examines how oil and gas companies have funded research to try to weaken messages on climate change, capture academia, and protect their interests, much like tobacco companies did half a century ago.

As one example, Thacker reports how a paper published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) helped alter American energy policy and kicked off a fracking boom.

Thacker describes how, at the turn of the century, a fresh crop of research centers to confront global warming began popping up at prestigious American universities including Princeton, Stanford and MIT.

Ironically, he reports that the seeds for these academic centers were planted by fossil fuel companies, echoing a scheme by tobacco companies in the 1950s to counter research showing smoking was harmful, by funding university-based scientists.

Princeton extended its partnership with ExxonMobil two years ago.

Ben Franta, a Stanford student who is finalizing his Ph.D. on the history of climate disinformation, claims that professors began criticizing him for raising problems and possibly threatening their funding. 

Stanford did not answer questions.

via an investigation by the British Medical Journal: Investigation: Stealing from the tobacco playbook, fossil fuel companies pour money into elite American universities, The BMJ (2022). DOI: 10.1136/bmj.o2095

Totally unrelated image credit: AI Art - Cosmic Horrors in My Cereal - 2022


Oil giant Shell appoints renewables head as boss
Sep 2022, BBC News

It's Me Not You - "Shell filed its appeal against the ruling in March this year, with Mr van Beurden previously saying that Shell should not be responsible for reducing its customers' emissions."


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I Want To Believe


Why narcissists are more likely than others to believe in conspiracy theories
Aug 2022, phys.org

The researchers suggest that paranoia can lead to openness regarding conspiracy theories and that the need to remain in control during times of uncertainty, such as a pandemic, can lead narcissists to seize on outlandish claims to make themselves feel like they are still in control of their lives. And antagonism comes to the fore when others challenge their views regarding conspiracy theories, which only serves to bolster their support of them.

via University of Kent, the Polish Academy of Sciences and the University of Cambridge: Aleksandra Cichocka et al, Why do narcissists find conspiracy theories so appealing?, Current Opinion in Psychology (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101386



Conspiracy theories flourish on YouTube, study reports
Oct 2022, phys.org

The study examined 38,564 YouTube comments on 3 COVID-19 news videos on Fox News, Vox, and China Global Television Network, and featuring American business magnate and philanthropist Bill Gates, and found conspiracy theories dominated.

"A major implication of our study is that YouTube needs to redesign the space to provide social moderation infrastructure," said Dr. Gray. "Otherwise, the discursive strategies of conspiracy theorists will continue to evade detection systems, pose insurmountable challenges for content creators, and play into the hands of content producers who benefit from and/or encourage such activity."

Remember that 2.8% of Reddit's 2019 revenue can be traced back to unpaid moderators and other user user contributions that generate profit such as training algorithms, targeting advertising, and recruiting new users. It's called a "data labor subsidy".

Also note this report ignores the engagement engine that extracts value from its users, powered by cheap news and social outrage. These algorithms amplify information and condition behaviors that make money. We're engineering outrage on purpose, and conspiracy theories are just a secondary symptom of an infected network.

via University of Sydney:  Lan Ha et al, Where conspiracy theories flourish: A study of YouTube comments and Bill Gates conspiracy theories, Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review (2022). DOI: 10.37016/mr-2020-107


New research shows US Republican politicians increasingly spread news on social media from untrustworthy sources
Oct 2022, phys.org

Under attack: 

A study analyzing millions of tweets has revealed that Republican members of the U.S. Congress are increasingly circulating news from dubious sources, compared to their European counterparts. (They used NewsGuard, which assesses the credibility and transparency of news websites against nine journalistic criteria and identifies relevant details about the website's ownership, funding, credibility and transparency practices.)

Compared to the period 2016 to 2018, the number of links to untrustworthy websites has doubled over the past two years 2020 to 2022 (from 2.4% to 5.5%;  0.4%  for Democrats and around 0.215% for conservative British Tory members).

via Graz University of Technology in Austria and University of Bristol: Social media sharing of low quality news sources by political elites, PNAS Nexus (2022). DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2207.06313


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Panoptic Supremacy


EU to unveil landmark law to force Big Tech to police illegal content
Apr 2022, Financial Times via Ars Technica

Dark patterns - techniques that dupe people into unwillingly clicking:

"The controversial practice of targeting users online based on their religion, gender or sexual preferences will be banned under the Digital Services Act, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions."



Satellites will act as thermometers in the sky
Jul 2022, BBC News

Satellite Vu is attracting a lot of interest with its plans to fly a network of spacecraft to map heat signatures across the planet.

Such observations have long been made, but not at the resolution (3-4m) and frequency (several times a day) that the London firm is promising.

This will allow Satellite Vu to map the temperature profiles of individual buildings, offices and factories.

"With infrared, what you see in daytime, you can see at night. And whereas most other Earth observation data-sets are looking at the outside of buildings, we can even get an inference of what's going on inside - whether there's activity in that building, whether a house is occupied, whether there's productive machinery in a factory," said Anthony Baker, CEO and co-founder of Satellite Vu.

The data will also provide intelligence to the financial and insurance sectors - and even the military - by showing how temperatures in a scene have changed. It's possible, for example, to see that planes recently left an airfield from the cool "ghost images" they leave behind having earlier shadowed the ground from the Sun.


Inside Fog Data Science, the Secretive Company Selling Mass Surveillance to Local Police
Sep 2022, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Summarizing for context:
Finally, evidence suggests that Fog’s service relies on using advertising identifiers to link data together, so simply disabling your ad ID may stymie Fog’s attempts to track you. One email suggests that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency initiative — which made ad ID access opt-in and resulted in a drastic decrease in the number of devices sharing that information — made services like Fog less useful to law enforcement. And former police analyst Davin Hall told EFF that the company wanted to keep its existence secret so that more people would leave their ad IDs enabled. 


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Energy Everywhere


'Night-time solar' technology can now deliver power in the dark
May 2022, phys.org

A semiconductor device called a thermoradiative diode, composed of materials found in night-vision goggles, was used to generate power from the emission of infrared light.

via University of New South Wales School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering: Michael P. Nielsen et al, Thermoradiative Power Conversion from HgCdtTe Photodiodes and Their Current–Voltage Characteristics, ACS Photonics (2022). DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.2c00223

The image shows a piece of Comet Leonard's tail breaking off and being carried away by the solar wind; said to be one of the best comet photographs in history by astronomer Dr Ed Bloomer, one of the competition judges.


A thermal management material that responds to heat or cold by folding or unfolding without need for a power source
Sep 2022, phys.org

Made with polymer subunits each designed to behave differently depending on ambient temperature: the material would lay flat under normal conditions until the ambient temperature reached a certain point. At that point, the top layer would roll itself up into a tube, exposing the dark substrate below. They suggest it could be a thermal management device that requires zero energy to run.

via Nankai University: Quan Zhang et al, Bioinspired zero-energy thermal-management device based on visible and infrared thermochromism for all-season energy saving, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2207353119


Inexpensive device that can harvest energy from a light breeze and store it as electricity
Oct 2022, phys.org
 
When exposed to winds with a velocity as low as 2 meters per second (about 5 mph), the device can produce a voltage of three volts and generate electricity power of up to 290 microwatts, which is sufficient to power a commercial sensor device and for it to also send the data to a mobile phone or a computer. The device can easily be mounted on the sides of buildings.

via Nanyang Technological University, Singapore: Chaoyang Zhao et al, A cantilever-type vibro-impact triboelectric energy harvester for wind energy harvesting, Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.ymssp.2022.109185


Dancers' moves help to power Glasgow music venue
Oct 2022, BBC News

Glasgow arts venue SWG3 has switched on a system that creates renewable energy from the body heat on its dancefloor.

Dancers' heat is piped via a carrier fluid to 200m (650ft) bore holes that can be charged like a thermal battery.

The energy then travels back to the heat pumps, is upgraded to a suitable temperature and emitted back into SWG3.

The owners say this will enable them to completely disconnect the venue's gas boilers, reducing its carbon emissions by about 70 tonnes of CO2 a year.

"When you start dancing, medium pace, to the Rolling Stones or something, you might be generating 250W.

"But if you've got a big DJ, absolutely slamming basslines and making everyone jump up and down, you could be generating 500-600W of thermal energy."


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Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Lexical Projections


Lattice distortion of perovskite quantum dots induces coherent quantum beating
Sep 2022, phys.org

Quantum beating - Using ensemble-level femtosecond polarized transient absorption, the researchers observed clear bright-exciton fine structure splitting in solution-processed CsPbI3 perovskite quantum dots, which is manifested as exciton quantum beats (periodic oscillations of kinetic traces).

via Chinese Academy of Sciences: Yaoyao Han et al, Lattice distortion inducing exciton splitting and coherent quantum beating in CsPbI3 perovskite quantum dots, Nature Materials (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-022-01349-4



TypoSwype: An image recognition tool to detect typosquatting attacks
Oct 2022, phys.org

Typosquatting - exploits the human tendency to misspell words when typing quickly or to misread words when they have small topographical errors, like google-goigle or facebook-fqcebook

via Ensign InfoSecurity in Singapore: Joon Sern Lee, Yam Gui Peng David, TypoSwype: An imaging approach to detect typo-squatting. arXiv:2209.00783v1 [cs.CR], arxiv.org/abs/2209.00783


The polypill could help with avoiding millions of premature deaths, heart attacks and strokes every year
Oct 2022, phys.org

Polypill - one pill that does a few different things all at once 

via McMaster University: Salim Yusuf et al, The polypill: from concept and evidence to implementation, The Lancet (2022). DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)01847-5


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