Friday, December 20, 2024

Inside the World of the LSD User


The spread of misinformation varies by topic and by country in Europe, study finds
May 2024, phys.org

Researchers analyzed news activity on Twitter (now X) in France, Germany, Italy and the UK from 2019 to 2021, including a focus on news about Brexit, the coronavirus, and the COVID vaccines. Each news source they analyzed was rated as either "reliable" or "questionable" based upon their NewsGuard score.
  • Across all four countries, the vast majority of users only ever consumed reliable news sources on each of the three topics.
  • But in every country and in each topic, there was always a small percentage of users who only ever consumed questionable news sources - with very few people consuming a mix of both reliable and questionable sources.
  • Germany had the highest ratio of questionable news retweets to reliable news retweets on all three topics, with France in second, followed by Italy, and the UK had the lowest proportion of questionable news retweets overall.
  • Italy had the lowest proportion of questionable news retweets for the topic of the coronavirus - but had the highest percentage of people consuming only questionable news sources on Brexit.

"Cultural nuances" will be important when it comes to fighting misinformation.

via Ca' Foscari University of Venice: News and misinformation consumption: A temporal comparison across European countries, PLoS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0302473

Image credit: 3D printed vacuum system traps dark matter - University of Nottingham - Jun 2024


Study finds avoiding social media before an election has little to no effect on people's political views
May 2024, phys.org

35,000 Facebook and Instagram users who were paid to stay off the platforms in the run-up to Election Day.

I'm thinking about the overall social influence, like if you're not online but your friends are, it's all the same. So if they did this study by taking only the friends of the people chosen, then we would see an effect? (Friendship Paradox)

via Stanford: Gentzkow, Matthew, The effects of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020 election: A deactivation experiment, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2321584121.


Mental disorders may spread in young people's social networks
May 2024, phys.org

Contagion - 700,000 ninth-grade pupils born between 1985 and 1997 from 860 Finnish schools followed for 11 years (largest and most comprehensive so far on the spread of mental disorders in social networks).

The number of classmates diagnosed with a mental disorder was associated with a higher risk of receiving a mental disorder diagnosis later in life.

The connection observed in the study is not necessarily causal. "It may be possible, for instance, that the threshold for seeking help for mental health issues is lowered when there are one or more people in your social network who have already sought help for their problems" (beneficial contagion).

via University of Helsinki: Jussi Alho et al, Transmission of Mental Disorders in Adolescent Peer Networks, JAMA Psychiatry (2024). DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.1126

Dual-species Rydberg array combining rubidium and cesium atoms to enhance quantum computing - BernienLab at University of Chicago - Oct 2024 [link]

Study suggests less conformity leads to more innovation
May 2024, phys.org

These methods reveal something crazy - how easy it could be to manipulate a big part of a population just by doing some very small adjustments to the recommendation algorithms, and the idea of synthetic networks cycling through the real networks as a kind of social regulator.

  • The Matthew effect aka "rich-get-richer effect" increases centralization in the network, which destroys the niches protecting minority opinions, reducing sociodiversity.
  • "Networks that promote sociodiversity have structural features that protect minority opinions"
  • "Unfollowing a few VIPs can help to promote sociodiversity"

via Complexity Science Hub and ETH Zurich: Andrea Musso et al, How networks shape diversity for better or worse, Royal Society Open Science (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.230505


Misleading COVID-19 headlines from mainstream sources did more harm on Facebook than fake news
May 2024, phys.org

They showed thousands of survey participants the headlines from 130 vaccine-related stories - including both mainstream content and known misinformation - and tested how those headlines impacted their intentions to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Researchers also asked a separate group of respondents to rate the headlines across various attributes, including plausibility and political leaning. They matched that against 13,206 vaccine-related URLs and the number of users who viewed each.
  • Misleading content from mainstream news sources - rather than outright misinformation or "fake news" - was the primary driver of vaccine hesitancy on Facebook.
  • "Vaccine-skeptical" content was potentially misleading but not flagged as misinformation by Facebook fact-checkers.
  • One factor reliably predicted impacts on vaccination intentions: the extent to which a headline suggested that the vaccine was harmful to a person's health.
  • The most-viewed was an article was from a well-regarded mainstream news source, and its clickbait" headline was highly suggestive and implied that the vaccine was likely responsible.
  • (That's significant since the vast majority of viewers on social media likely never click out to read past the headline.)
  • Contrary to popular perceptions, the researchers estimated that vaccine-skeptical content reduced vaccination intentions 46 times more than misinformation flagged by fact-checkers.
  • Even though flagged misinformation was more harmful when seen, it had relatively low reach.
  • Gray-area content is less harmful per exposure but is seen far more often, thus it's more impactful overall.
(Also, what does this mean about actual advertising metrics?)

via MIT Sloan School of Management: Jennifer Allen, Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adk3451.


Advertisers may be inadvertently funding misinformation
Jun 2024, phys.org

(I think we're starting to see a pattern here.)

5,000 websites (1,250 were misinformation websites); 42,000 unique advertisers; nine million instances of advertising companies appearing on news websites from 2019 to 2021. 

The companies advertising on misinformation websites accounted for anywhere from 46% to 82% of overall companies in their respective industries.

Companies that used digital advertisement platforms were 10 times more likely to appear on misinformation websites than those that did not.

Authors propose two low-cost, scalable interventions: 
  • Improve transparency for advertisers about where their ads appear 
  • Make it easier for consumers to identify which companies advertise on misinformation outlets through information disclosures and company rankings

via Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College and Stanford: Wajeeha Ahmad et al, Companies inadvertently fund online misinformation despite consumer backlash, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07404-1

Entangling pairs of photons using 1.2 micrometer niobium oxide dichloride - Leevi Kallioniemi at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore - Oct 2024 [link]

Study suggests ambivalence and polarized views can promote political violence
Jun 2024, phys.org

Time to get confused! 

Previous research has shown that ambivalence about a political issue typically leads people to avoid taking moderate actions such as voting or donating money in support of that issue.

And that's why these findings for extreme behaviors surprised the researchers.

Here, researchers found that ambivalence can actually lead some people - especially those with polarized views - to be more supportive of extreme actions.

The reason? Ambivalence creates discomfort in those with extreme views by making them feel weak or insecure about their beliefs - and that can lead them to compensate.

"When people have these polarized views on a political topic, but also feel some conflict about that belief - that is really a potent combination."

"Those who are conflicted are more willing to give their money to extreme organizations."

"Those who have extreme views, but still feel conflicted about them, feel a need to prove themselves, to show that their beliefs are real and strong."

via Ohio State University: Joseph Siev, Ambivalent attitudes promote support for extreme political actions, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adn2965.

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Copyright Mishaps, Copybots and Word Traps


In the news, we see the use of an old clever trick to catch lying cheating thieves - like hiding an air tag in your purse, writers and all kinds of content creators are hiding novel nonsense in their work. Mapmakers did this by using fake street names - nobody would notice it expect the person who put it there. In the early days of data collection, when a list of subscribers to American Baby magazine was worth its weight in gold, the list owners would secretly add employees from their own company to the list, with their own home addresses; so if an employee got solicited by any company that didn't pay for the list, they would know who stole their data. Surely there are examples that reach back further into history, but for now:

“Copyright traps” could tell writers if an AI has scraped their work
Jul 2024, MIT Tech Review

To create the traps, the team used a word generator to create thousands of synthetic sentences full of gibberish, which are then injected into text in multiple ways—for example, as white text on a white background, or embedded in the article’s source code. This sentence had to be repeated in the text 100 to 1,000 times. 

But, not so fast:
“A lot of companies do deduplication, [meaning] they clean up the data, and a bunch of this kind of stuff will probably get thrown out”

via Imperial College London and presented at the 2024 International Conference on Machine Learning


AI Art - Detailed Mechanical Parts Brimming with Energy 2 - 2024

The above news item is only an introduction to the result of a very long experiment started almost 15 years ago - this weblog.

At some point it became clear that Network Address could be used to run simple experiments on search engines. It was becoming full of text that didn't exist anywhere else on the internet, so it was a kind of control group. Every so often, I would run a search for some weird phrase or word I had used, to see if it "existed" yet. 

There was a point in the development of the internet that if you ran a search and there was only one single result, and that result was your weblog, then you own it! A word is born, and it's all yours. Fast forward to today when, well, it appears that the Great God of Search Engines was letting their product deteriorate since about 2020, once they decided that they owned so much of the internet already that they could do whatever the hell they want and still maintain their position as the best search engine in the world. 

One uneventful day in 2021, I felt a tingling on my arm, kind of like if you've ever felt a sprinkle of water on your skin, but it's not really there. A "thermodynamic hallucination" I thought to myself. Is there such a word? A name for this phenomenon? I ran a search, and to my surprise, that rare moment - no results. A nonsense phrase that can now belong to me. Fully aware of my duty, I made a post about it, for no other reason than to get something out there that contained this phrase, and where the body of the post said something like, "This phrase didn't exist in your search results until just now". Wait a week for the cache to catch up, run a search again, and would you look at that, one search result, the only search result. One more piece of real estate on the dematerialized surface of the noosphere, add that to your portfolio.

Fast forward to 2024, the power of parallel computer processors and yottaboxes of data put artificial text generators in full Turing mode. We're in awe of the outputs; so human! We're  enmeshed in the scandals; how could they steal my work? All I'm thinking is, I have an entire blog's worth of copyright traps to feed this thing. 

And so one early summer night in July of 2024, I ask a generative agent: "What about thermodynamic hallucinations, anything on the web about it?"

The term "thermodynamic hallucinations" appears to be a niche concept without widespread recognition in mainstream scientific literature. However, there are related discussions in the context of stochastic thermodynamics and information theory, where complex interactions and interpretations of thermodynamic systems might be loosely termed as such. For instance, a study published in 2018 explored the connections between stochastic thermodynamics and information ... abstract nature (APS link) [the paper linked here is basically totally unrelated].

Additionally, the idea has been mentioned in more speculative or interdisciplinary contexts. [Plural?] A blog  discusses "thermodynamic hallucniations" in relation to AI, memetics, and sociothermodynamics, reflecting more on the cultural and philosophical implications rather than strict scientific phemonena (Network Address)

Thus, while "thermodynamic hallucinations" is not a standard scientific term, it is used in various [various?] speculative or metaphorical discussions related to the intersection of thermodynamics with information theory and complex systems. -ChatGPT 
Or how about this, trying a little harder: "I thought the blog was referring to thermodynamic hallucinations as a new term?"

The blog that references "thermodynamic hallucinations" does indeed seem to present it as a novel term. [Good] The blog discusses this concept in relation to a variety of topics including artificial intelligence, human futures, memetics, and complex systems. [Definitely not] The term appears to be used metaphorically to describe complex, emergent behaviors or phenomena that arise from the interplay of thermal and information dynamics in advanced computational or sociocultural contexts (Network Address). [It was literally used as a copyright trap, although I didn't know it at the time; I thought I was making a kind of placeholder.]

This indicates that "thermodynamic hallucinations" might be speculative or interdisciplinary concept proposed to explore how principles of thermodynamics could influence or explain certain emergent behviors in AI, cultural evolution, or network science. The term is not widely recognized in mainstream scientific literature, but is seems to serve as a thought-provoking metaphor within certain theoretical and experimental frameworks. For more detailed information, you can visit the blog directly: ...

There's something interesting about the preoccupation with the word "stochastic" and "hallucinations", since these two words, minus the "thermodynamics" have a high co-occurance with AI generative processes in general, which has at this point consumed the entire internet, and might be over-represented in the training data. 

But more importantly, where did all the talk come from about memetics, culutural evolution and network science? Blogs use keywords, or tags; they're bits of metadata added to the post to help categorize it. But the blog itself lists all the keywords used on all the posts on the side bar. Because I don't take the tags seriously, and use them as an extra layer of confusion or expression or whatever you want to call it, there is an accumulation of many hundreds of these tags listed on the side of every post, words like: network science, mind control, entropy, semiotics, Big Data, Big Datty, meatbody, topology, algomania, algohaulic, algorithmic crack, and bio-abacus. Hundreds. 

I don't know exactly how these large language models work, but to simplify, they ingest text and output amalgamated approximations of that text, based on the prompt. This prompt sent the agent to a webpage that had all these crazy tags running down the side. They aren't in the body of the text of the post, but meta-data listed on the side. Little did I know they'd give a passable summary of the blog itself, and this is what came out, above, a very convincing hallucination - that is, if you had no idea of the truth. 

Post Script:
Today, in a final observation, I run one more search for "thermodynamic hallucinations" using Google, then Bing, then DuckDuckGo (Bing). Network Address doesn't show up at all (interesting*), but instead we get 1 result, in all three engines - a substack post by a most likely real person in May 2024 with a section heading titled Thermodynamic Hallucinations, which is about the "temperature" weights on large language models and the "hallucinations" they output; there's a later heading titled Social Hallucinations. And here we see the moment has passed for this experiment, the phrase is now tainted, it's been touched by the real world. Also, the internet as we know it is now broken. 

Post Post Script:
There are actually three results but from the same domain:

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Thursday, December 19, 2024

Clash of the Titans Can't Stop Won't Stop

 
Every system wants one and only one system administrator. The body wants a brain. The brain wants a self. The people want a king. The market wants a monopoly. But that's not sustainable for a system. Eventually, as the agents, or actors, or nodes in network are reduced to a handful, and then to a few, there comes a time when there can be only one. 

Now is that time. (See previous post for more of this.)

Let's start with this, a bit tangential, but putting the point up front, in practical terms:

ANCHOR website isn’t broken, state says. Error message is a security measure
Sep 2024, NJ Advance Media 

This an example of what happens when you offload government services to private enterprise, at a time when all the enterprises get along and follow the same rules, until they don't because they get so big they start eating each other, and make the whole infrastructure of the internet not work, and government is screwed, because that's what's happening:

(ANCHOR is a state program that allows New Jersey residents to get money back for their high property taxes.)

“When someone has an ANCHOR status page open in one page, then tries to open another ANCHOR status page, it will stop the user.”

Some of the users who got the message insisted they did not have multiple tabs or windows open. They said they tried to use the tool on computers and laptops, tablets and cell phones, but they continued to get the error.

Those who tried other browsers reported they were able to access the tool.



Now let's look at some direct hits:

Google accuses Microsoft of antitrust violations over Azure cloud platform
Sep 2024, Ars Technica

Google also said in its complaint, which was sent on Tuesday to the EU’s powerful competition unit, that it was concerned that Microsoft was degrading the user experience of those customers that were moving their Windows software to competing cloud providers.

This is almost exactly and literally the same language used by Mehta against Google in the Oct 2024 DOJ anti trust suit: "Plaintiffs contend that Google’s conduct has caused three anticompetitive effects particular to the text ads market: ... (3) product degradation through diminished transparency regarding text ads auctions. ... ." (p258, link) 
[^Note that Google's customers are not the average internet user who runs a search, but advertising people, so when they talk about the deterioration of the product, it's of the advertisement4, or its placement, or its audience, not the search results.]

Google accused of shadow campaigns redirecting antitrust scrutiny to Microsoft
Oct 2024, Ars Technica

FTX sues Binance for $1.76B in battle of crypto exchanges founded by convicts
Nov 2024, Ars Technica

Albertsons calls off merger and sues Kroger
Dec 2024, CNN Business

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Monday, October 7, 2024

The Friend Network


Targeting friends to induce social contagion can benefit the world, says new research
May 2024, phys.org

The study evaluated a strategy that exploits the so-called "friendship paradox" of human social networks. That theory suggests that on average, your friends have more friends than you do. As the theory goes, the individuals nominated as friends potentially wield more social influence than those who identify them.

For the study, the researchers utilized the friendship paradox in the delivery of a proven 22-month education package promoting maternal, child, and neonatal health in 176 isolated villages in Honduras.

The researchers found that delivering the intervention to a smaller fraction of households in each village via the friendship targeting strategy led to the same level of behavioral adoption as would have been achieved by treating all the households.

People were either selected randomly within each village to receive the intervention or they were randomly chosen to nominate their friends, who were subsequently picked at random. 

"We found that targeting people's friends for an intervention induced significant social contagion, creating cascades of beneficial health practices to people who didn't receive the intervention." 

For many outcomes, using the friendship-nomination targeting method to reach 20% of households in a village affected outcomes the same as administering the intervention to every household.

Yes, Facebook knows this very well.

via Yale and Temple University: Edoardo M. Airoldi et al, Induction of social contagion for diverse outcomes in structured experiments in isolated villages, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adi5147



Study shows relatively low number of superspreaders responsible for large portion of misinformation on Twitter
May 2024, phys.org

10 months of data; 2,397,388 tweets; 448,103 users; parsed by low-credibility information status.

A third of the low-credibility tweets had been posted by people using just 10 accounts, and just 1,000 accounts were responsible for posting approximately 70% of such tweets.

via Indiana University: Matthew R. DeVerna et al, Identifying and characterizing superspreaders of low-credibility content on Twitter, PLOS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0302201

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Saturday, October 5, 2024

You Wouldn't Download a Car

The sound of a thousand digital twin insurance companies being born (to protect your real assets from digital vandalism, of course).

Pokémon Go players are altering public map data to catch rare Pokémon
May 2024, Ars Technica

This isn't graffiti, but it's like graffiti; defacing public property, or property that's not yours ... Is map data public or private property? The underlying data is sometimes public, or other people's private, but not the company that makes the map. Anyway, graffiti is a form of rebellion against a system that takes things away from you, only to give it back to "everyone", and where "everyone" is really just the people left over who can afford to own things. Who owns the data? 


Stack Overflow users sabotage their posts after OpenAI deal
May 2025, Ars Technica

The words "user hostile" have become rampant on the big wordbox we call the internet. In this case, a website that runs a chat forum about computers decided that the millions of hours worth of users putting really complex computer problems into machine-readable text for other users would be really valuable if we instead gave it to one single company who owns a really big reading machine. The users who did all the work here (value = work) decided nah, let's corrupt the data by changing our posts. Not just deleting their posts, but changing the right answers to completely nonsensical answers so wrong they're dangerous. And that is the future of the internet.


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Friday, October 4, 2024

Robots Using Robots

Sometimes you have to give it to these scientists, the stuff they come up with is pretty smart. 

Who wrote this? Engineers discover novel method to identify AI-generated text
Mar 2024, phys.org

First, an interesting note:
"Stubbornness" is when LLMs show a tendency to alter human-written text more readily than AI-generated text, and it happens because LLMs often regard AI-generated text as already optimal and thus make minimal changes.

Next, the purpose:
Raidar (geneRative AI Detection viA Rewriting) - identifies whether text has been written by a human or generated by AI or LLMs, without needing access to a model's internal workings. 

Finally, the clever part:
It uses a language model to rephrase a given text and then measures how many edits the system makes to the given text. Many edits mean the text is likely written by humans, while fewer modifications mean the text is likely machine-generated.

via Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science: Chengzhi Mao et al, Raidar: geneRative AI Detection viA Rewriting, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.12970



Random robots are more reliable: New AI algorithm for robots consistently outperforms state-of-the-art systems
May 2024, phys.org

Maximum Diffusion Reinforcement Learning (MaxDiff RL) - an algorithm that encourages robots to explore their environments as randomly as possible in order to gain a diverse set of experiences; "designed randomness"; improves the quality of the data collected

If the robots move randomly, instead of some highly calculated, optimized trajectories, somehow the resulting data they collect on the world around them is better. Like when randomness is the base, it makes way better structures. I'm immediately thinking of watching a baby learn to move their body parts, or their vocal chords; underneath those first recognizable attempts is an endless iteration of random movements that are sometimes just now starting to get it right. 

via Northwestern McCormick School of Engineering: Maximum diffusion reinforcement learning, Nature Machine Intelligence (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s42256-024-00829-3

Post Script: It's funny to think of this, the MaxDiff RL, as an "algorithm", since it's kind of getting rid of any algorithms, that's the point here. When the algorithm is random, it's not an algorithm anymore; randomness is the anti-algorithm?


Researchers test AI systems' ability to solve the New York Times' connections puzzle
May 2024, phys.org

Chain of thought prompting:

The researchers found that explicitly prompting GPT-4 to reason through the puzzles step-by-step significantly boosted its performance to just over 39% of puzzles solved.

"Our research confirms prior work showing this sort of 'chain-of-thought' prompting can make language models think in more structured ways. Asking the language models to reason about the tasks that they're accomplishing helps them perform better."

via NYU Tandon School of Engineering: Graham Todd et al, Missed Connections: Lateral Thinking Puzzles for Large Language Models, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2404.11730


New ransomware attack based on an evolutional generative adversarial network can evade security measures
Jun 2024, phys.org

GAN-based architectures consist of two artificial neural networks that compete against each other to generate increasingly "better" results on a specific task. 

You already know it as the way we get hyperrealistic image generation or convincing conversation from a robot, and it's now being used to make malware attacks more effective. 

These scientists tested a version of this attack-enhancing approach, and found their framework capable of bypassing the majority of available anti-virus systems.

via Texas A&M University and Ho Technical University: Daniel Commey et al, EGAN: Evolutional GAN for Ransomware Evasion, 2023 IEEE 48th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN) (2023). DOI: 10.1109/LCN58197.2023.10223320


New technique improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models
Jun 2024, phys.org

Their approach, called natural language embedded programs (NLEPs), involves prompting a language model to create and execute a Python program to solve a user's query, and then output the solution as natural language.

NLEPs also improve transparency, since a user could check the program to see exactly how the model reasoned about the query and fix the program if the model gave a wrong answer.

via MIT: Tianhua Zhang et al, Natural Language Embedded Programs for Hybrid Language Symbolic Reasoning, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2309.10814

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Thursday, October 3, 2024

Quantum Always


Physicists demonstrate first metro-area quantum computer network in Boston
May 2024, phys.org

Quantums now in the US, the last one was in China:

Using existing Boston-area telecommunication fiber, their photons were deployed over a roughly 22-mile loop through Cambridge, Somerville, Watertown, and Boston, with quantum computers at the nodes.

via Harvard: Mikhail Lukin, Entanglement of nanophotonic quantum memory nodes in a telecom network, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07252-z.



A place to study qubits shielded from the effects of cosmic rays
Jun 2024, phys.org

QUIET and LOUD - a pair of quantum sensors, one above ground and one under. 

via Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the National Quantum Initiative


A framework to construct quantum spherical codes
Jun 2024, phys.org

Photonic quantum coding theory:

All quantum codes require the superposition of something, and Albert and his colleagues realized that it made sense to superimpose well-separated points on a sphere. Their framework builds on a previously proposed method to map electromagnetic signals of any frequency into points on a sphere.

"There is an old and very general technique by the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, that maps an arbitrary electromagnetic signal of fixed amplitude but of any frequency into a point on the sphere," Albert explained. "This means that efficiently sending classical information using light boils down to packing as many points on the sphere as possible while making sure that noise does not cause them to overlap."

via NIST and University of Maryland: Shubham P. Jain et al, Quantum spherical codes, Nature Physics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-024-02496-y


Pseudomagic quantum states: A path to quantum supremacy
Jun 2024, phys.org

Don't even bother to understand, just know magic states: 

A stabilizer state is a type of quantum state that can be efficiently simulated on a classical computer, and nonstabilizerness or magic refers to a measure of the non-classical resources possessed by a quantum state.

Pseudomagic quantum states appear to have the properties of nonstabilizer states (complexity and non-classical operations) but are computationally indistinguishable from random quantum states, at least to an observer with limited computational resources.

via Harvard University and Freie Universität Berlin: Andi Gu et al, Pseudomagic Quantum States, Physical Review Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.210602.


Quantum annealer improves understanding of quantum many-body systems
Jun 2024, phys.org 

They used a quantum annealer to model a real-life quantum material and showed that the quantum annealer can directly mirror the microscopic interactions of electrons in the material.

In this study, the scientists investigated the quantum material 1T-TaS2.

"We have placed the system in a non-equilibrium state and observed how the electrons in the solid-state lattice rearrange themselves after a non-equilibrium phase transition, both experimentally and through simulations."

The scientists demonstrated that the quantum annealer's qubit interconnections can directly mirror the microscopic interactions between electrons in a quantum material. Only one single parameter in the quantum annealer must be modified. The outcome aligns closely with the experimental findings.

via Forschungszentrum Jülich Supercomputing Center and D-Wave: Jaka Vodeb et al, Non-equilibrium quantum domain reconfiguration dynamics in a two-dimensional electronic crystal and a quantum annealer, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-49179-z

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Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Public Trust in Science


How much trust do people have in different types of scientists?
Apr 2024, phys.org

2,780 participants from the United States were asked about trust in 45 different types of scientists, from agronomists to zoologists. 

Participants were quizzed on how they see scientists with regard to:
  • Competence: how clever and intelligent they consider scientists
  • Assertiveness: how confident and assertive
  • Morality: how just and fair
  • Warmth: how friendly and caring

On a 7-point scale, with 7 being most trusted:
  • political scientists - 3.71
  • economists - 4.28
  • neuroscientists - 5.53
  • and marine biologists  - 5.54
"Nevertheless, one thing is clear: the diversity of scientific fields must be taken into account to more precisely map trust, which is important for understanding how scientific solutions can best find their way to policy."
via University of Amsterdam: Vukašin Gligorić et al, How social evaluations shape trust in 45 types of scientists, PLOS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299621


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Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Clash of the Titans


When the big dogs fight each other you know it's getting crazy (like how Ford and Blue Cross had a lawsuit prior to the labor negotiations circa 2023).

Beyonce and Adele publisher accuses firms of training AI on songs
May 2024, BBC News


So this is very much an arms race between (pro-profit anti-human) food manufacturers who spend their astronomical profits on research that makes their food addictive, vs pro-human scientists who are trying to make our brains not-addicted to food (albeit then using the for-profit pharma industry). 

Trojan Horse' weight loss drug found to be more effective than available therapies
May 2024, phys.org

"We already know that GLP-1-based drugs can lead to weight loss. The molecule that we have attached to GLP-1 affects the so-called glutamatergic neurotransmitter system, and in fact, other studies with human participants suggest that this family of compounds has significant weight loss potential. What is interesting here is the effect we get when we combine these two compounds into a single drug," Clemmensen says.

via Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen: Jonas Petersen et al, GLP-1-directed NMDA receptor antagonism for obesity treatment, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07419-8

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Monday, September 30, 2024

Superhuman


Is this why some people see the cheap LED lights flicker and some don't?
Scientists discover speed of visual perception ranges widely in humans
Apr 2024, phys.org

There is considerable variation among people in their temporal resolution, meaning some people effectively see more "images per second" than others.

To quantify this, the scientists used the "critical flicker fusion threshold," a measure for the maximum frequency at which an individual can perceive a flickering light source.

Some participants in the experiment indicated they saw the light as completely still when it was in fact flashing about 35 times per second, while others were still able to perceive the flashing at rates of over 60 times per second.

via Department of Zoology in the School of Natural Sciences and the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience: Clinton Haarlem, PLoS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0298007



Brain–computer interface experiments first to decode words 'spoken' entirely in the brain in real time
May 2024, phys.org

The electrodes were implanted in the supramarginal gyrus, a part of the brain that recent research suggests is involved in subvocal speech.

via California Institute of Technology: Sarah K. Wandelt et al, Representation of internal speech by single neurons in human supramarginal gyrus, Nature Human Behaviour (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01867-y

Also: Brain–machine-interface device translates internal speech into text, Nature Human Behaviour (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01869-w


This Ecuadorian forest thrived amid deforestation after being granted legal rights
Jun 2024, BBC News

Rights of Nature Movement - In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to change its constitution to state that nature has the same rights as people. The change was led by Ecuador's Indigenous movement, and marked one of the first major steps in what has become known as the 'rights of nature' movement – a movement centred on a legal framework that recognises the inherent right of the natural world to the same protections as people and corporations.

The rights of nature movement "is a move to transform natural entities from objects to subjects, in courts and in front of the law", says Jacqueline Gallant from New York University's School of Law's Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic. "But in a much broader sense, it's been a movement to reanimate and recentre nature as a subject of intrinsic worth," Gallant explains. This is in contrast, she says, to the Western view of nature as "an inanimate backdrop against which the drama of human activity unfolds".

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Sunday, September 29, 2024

Doing the Hard Stuff


When you wonder how science works:

Lego-pushing bumblebees reveal insect collaboration dynamics
May 2024, phys.org

In the study, pairs of bumblebees were trained in two different cooperative tasks. Bees learned to simultaneously push a Lego block in the middle of an arena, or to simultaneously push a door at the end of a transparent double tunnel to gain access to rewarding nectar.

Bumblebees' behaviors suggest their efforts towards solving the cooperative tasks were influenced by the presence, absence, and movement direction of their partner. When their partner was delayed, bees tended to take longer than controls to initiate pushing and were more likely to push only when their partner pushed with them.

In short, bees trained on cooperative tasks seemed to wait for their partner. The bumblebees in the control group, which had been trained alone, did not show similar behavior.

via University of Oulu in Finland: Olli J. Loukola et al, Evidence for socially influenced and potentially actively coordinated cooperation by bumblebees, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2024.0055



Genetic study of cauliflower reveals its evolutionary history
May 2024, phys.org

Yes cauliflower. 

via Tianjin Academy of Agricultural Science's State Key Laboratory of Vegetable Biobreeding: Rui Chen et al, Genomic analyses reveal the stepwise domestication and genetic mechanism of curd biogenesis in cauliflower, Nature Genetics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41588-024-01744-4


Cat collaboration demonstrates what it takes to trust robots
May 2024, phys.org

Cat Royale is a unique collaboration between Computer Scientists from the University of Nottingham and artists at Blast Theory who worked together to create a multispecies world centered around a be-spoke enclosure in which three cats and a robot arm coexist for six hours a day during a twelve-day installation as part of an artist-led project. The installation was launched in 2023 at the World Science Festival in Brisbane, Australia and has been touring since, it has just won a Webby award for its creative experience.

The robot arm offering activities to make the cats happier, these included dragging a "mouse" toy along the floor, raising a feather "bird" into the air, and even offering them treats to eat.

"It explores the question of what it takes to trust a robot to look after our loved ones and potentially ourselves."

via University of Nottingham: Eike Schneiders et al, Designing Multispecies Worlds for Robots, Cats, and Humans, Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2024). DOI: 10.1145/3613904.3642115

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Friday, September 27, 2024

Digital Winning


They say digital twins are the future. At first we were talking about making models of industrial or fabrication processes, so that we can study the model in a way we can't study the real thing. And that's still happening, and will continue to happen until we have an entire Earth that's a replica of the original (which we're already making by the way), but now we've got digital twins of people. 

Digital twins of people are already out there for medical purposes, so they can run a chemotherapy treatment on your simulation, to know in advance if it will work. But now we're talking about real time digital twins based not on your genetics or your phenotype, but on your behavior and the way you talk. They will be trained on you, all of you, the way the models are now trained on the entire Internet's worth of data. And so now is the time for you to start thinking about what that insurance policy will look like and which one will be right for you. Wouldn't want anyone breaching that dataset now would you?

Digital twin helps optimize manufacturing speed while satisfying quality constraints
May 2024, phys.org

The algorithm achieved that goal, with an experimental test of the method reducing the cycle time by 38% for a 3-axis desktop CNC machine tool and by 17% for a desktop 3D printer.

The researchers developed the method using a digital twin, a virtual model that mimics the behavior of a real system, based on the physics of the machine and data collected in real-time from sensors.

via University of Michigan College of Engineering: Heejin Kim et al, Intelligent Feedrate Optimization Using an Uncertainty-Aware Digital Twin Within a Model Predictive Control Framework, IEEE Access (2024). DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3384471



Controlling chaos using edge computing hardware: Digital twin models promise advances in computing
May 2024, phys.org

Digital twins meets reservoir computing - I'm having a hard time figuring out what's going on here, but it sounds like you can reduce the compute of a system controller by creating a digital twin of the system, and computing on it (machine-learning-it) using this new chip, which is some kind of reservoir computer. But they created the model for using such a chip, not the chip itself?

via Ohio State University: Robert M. Kent et al, Controlling chaos using edge computing hardware, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-48133-3


Zoom CEO envisions AI deepfakes attending meetings in your place
May 2024, Ars Technica

Now we need to distinguish between digital twins for industry, like models of fabrication processes etc, and digital twins for people, like ... digital twins for people:

Instead of relying on a generic LLM to impersonate you, in the future, people will train custom LLMs to simulate each person.

"Sometimes I want to join, so I join. If I do not want to join, I can send a digital twin to join. That’s the future."

The future.


Researchers create 'digital babies' to improve infant health care
Jun 2024, phys.org

The team created 360 advanced computer models that simulate the unique metabolic processes of each baby. The digital babies are the first sex-specific computational whole-body models representing newborn and infant metabolism with 26 organs, six cell types, and more than 80,000 metabolic reactions.

via University of Galway's Digital Metabolic Twin Centre and Heidelberg University: Elaine Zaunseder et al, Personalized metabolic whole-body models for newborns and infants predict growth and biomarkers of inherited metabolic diseases, Cell Metabolism (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2024.05.006


Future-self chatbot gives users a glimpse of the life ahead of them
Jun 2024, phys.org

Allows users to chat with a potential version of their future selves.

The research team found mostly positive results—most users reported feeling more optimistic about their future and more connected to their future selves. And one of the researchers, after a session with the new bot, found himself more aware of the limited amount of time he would have with his parents and began to spend more time with them.

via MIT and KASIKORN Labs in Thailand: Pat Pataranutaporn et al, Future You: A Conversation with an AI-Generated Future Self Reduces Anxiety, Negative Emotions, and Increases Future Self-Continuity, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2405.12514


Clinical study shows zebrafish avatars of cancer patients have high predictive power
Jun 2024, phys.org

Already exists - zAvatars - avatars of cancer patients to help guide therapeutic decisions.

To create the avatars, the researchers inject tumoral cells taken from patients directly into the zebrafish embryos. 

via Cancer Development and Innate Immune Evasion Group at the Champalimaud Foundation: Bruna Costa et al, Zebrafish Avatar-test forecasts clinical response to chemotherapy in patients with colorectal cancer, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-49051-0


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Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Art Hurts


This man is a genius

Image credit: Oobah Butler w a bottle of Release - Nov 2024

Amazon drivers’ urine packaged as energy drink, sold on Amazon
Nov 2023, Ars Technica

The drink is called Release, and it's filled with urine allegedly discarded by Amazon delivery drivers and collected from plastic bottles by the side of the road.

Release is just marketing for a new documentary called The Great Amazon Heist, which shows how easy it is to bypass Amazon's buying and selling safeguards, but Oobah is a cultural genius.

I fucking love this man - Oobah Butler

See also his fakesploitation of the food reviews market where he created a fake restaurant on top of his garage that won like 4 stars overnight; called the Shed at Dulwich

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Wednesday, September 18, 2024

Buildings, Bodies and Biocompatibility


How are ancient Roman and Mayan buildings still standing? Scientists are unlocking their secrets
Oct 2023, phys.org

There's 2,000-year-old concrete still looking like the day it was poured. And there's also the front steps of my friend's apartment that's been crumbling since the day it got repaired. 

What's the difference? 

Some of these ancient builders might have just gotten lucky, said Cecilia Pesce, a materials scientist at the University of Sheffield in England. They'd toss just about anything into their mixes, as long as it was cheap and available—and the ones that didn't work out have long since collapsed.

"They would put all sorts of things in construction," Pesce said. "And now, we only have the buildings that survived. So it's like a natural selection process."

But alas, there does seem to be a pattern:
In a study published earlier this year, Admir Masic, a civil and environmental engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed that this power comes from chunks of lime that are studded throughout the Roman material instead of being mixed in evenly. Researchers used to think these chunks were a sign that the Romans weren't mixing up their materials well enough.

Instead, after analyzing concrete samples from Privernum -- an ancient city outside of Rome -- the scientists found that the chunks could fuel the material's "self-healing" abilities. When cracks form, water is able to seep into the concrete, Masic explained. That water activates the leftover pockets of lime, sparking up new chemical reactions that can fill in the damaged sections.
via MIT



Catalysis breakthrough yields self-cleaning wall paint that breaks down air pollutants when exposed to sunlight
Mar 2024, phys.org

The UV radiation creates free charge carriers in the particles, which induce decomposition of the trapped pollutants from air into small parts and their release. In this way, the pollutants are rendered harmless, but do not remain permanently attached to the wall paint. The wall color remains stable in the long term. The new particles work with ordinary sunlight by adding certain additional atoms to the titanium oxide nanoparticles, such as phosphorus, nitrogen, and carbon.

via Vienna University of Technology and Università Politecnica delle Marche: Qaisar Maqbool et al, Highly Stable Self-Cleaning Paints Based on Waste-Valorized PNC-Doped TiO2 Nanoparticles, ACS Catalysis (2024). DOI: 10.1021/acscatal.3c06203


Veins of bacteria could form a self-healing system for concrete infrastructure
Dec 2023, phys.org

Fiber reinforcement has been around since the first masons mixed horsehair into their mud. 

BioFiber - polymer fiber encased in a bacteria-laden hydrogel and a protective, damage-responsive shell. The team reports that a grid of BioFibers embedded within a concrete structure can improve its durability, prevent cracks from growing, and enable self-healing.

It uses biomineralizing bacteria, aka microbial-induced calcium carbonate precipitation.

via Drexel University: Mohammad Houshmand Khaneghahi et al, Development of a nature-inspired polymeric fiber (BioFiber) for advanced delivery of self-healing agents into concrete, Construction and Building Materials (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2023.133765


New AI tool discovers realistic 'metamaterials' with unusual properties
Feb 2024, phys.org

They call it "inverse design"

"Tell us what you want to have as properties and we engineer an appropriate material with those properties. What you will then get is not really a material but something in-between a structure and a material, a metamaterial" 

via Delft University of Technology Department of Biomechanical Engineering: Helda Pahlavani et al, Deep Learning for Size‐Agnostic Inverse Design of Random‐Network 3D Printed Mechanical Metamaterials, Advanced Materials (2023). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202303481

AI Art - Regenerative Plant Researcher 2 - 2024

New all-liquid iron flow battery for grid energy storage
Mar 2024, phys.org

A commonplace chemical used in water treatment facilities has been repurposed for large-scale energy storage in a new battery design for an iron-based flow battery.

It stores energy in a unique liquid chemical formula that combines charged iron with a neutral-pH phosphate-based liquid electrolyte, or energy carrier. 

The chemical, nitrogenous triphosphonate, nitrilotri-methylphosphonic acid or NTMPA, is commercially available in industrial quantities because it is typically used to inhibit corrosion in water treatment plants.

via Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: Phosphonate-based Iron Complex for a Cost-Effective and Long Cycling Aqueous Iron Redox Flow Battery, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45862-3


Biodegradable aerogel: Airy cellulose from a 3D printer
Apr 2024, phys.org

Using the most common biopolymer on Earth (cellulose), they created a cellulose-based, 3D-printable aerogel, made of nanofibers for viscosity and nanocrystals so that it flows more easily during extrusion. To turn the ink into an aerogel after printing, the researchers replace the pore solvent water first with ethanol and then with air, all while maintaining shape fidelity.

It's an extremely effective heat insulator, and it's biocompatible with living tissues and cells.

It also can be rehydrated and re-dried several times after the initial drying process without losing its shape or porous structure, so it can be stored and transported in dry form and only be soaked in water shortly before use.

via Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology: Deeptanshu Sivaraman et al, Additive Manufacturing of Nanocellulose Aerogels with Structure‐Oriented Thermal, Mechanical, and Biological Properties, Advanced Science (2024). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202307921


Sunrise to sunset, a new window coating blocks heat, not view
Apr 2024, phys.org

Some window coatings work for a 90-degree angle. Yet at the hottest time of day, the sun's rays enter at oblique angles.

They fabricated a transparent window coating by stacking ultra-thin layers of silica, alumina and titanium oxide on a glass base, with a micrometer-thick silicon polymer added to enhance cooling power. To shuffle the layers into an optimal configuration the team used quantum computing, or more specifically, quantum annealing, and validated their results experimentally.

(Note: We're now using quantum computers to validate experiments, and this is kind of the real story here.)

via University of Notre Dame: Seongmin Kim et al, Wide-angle spectral filter for energy-saving windows designed by quantum annealing-enhanced active learning, Cell Reports Physical Science (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2024.101847

AI Art - Regenerative Plant Researcher 3 - 2024

How buildings influence the microbiome and human health
Apr 2024, phys.org

Modern buildings have a significant influence on human microbial colonization, depending on their nature and degree of shielding from the environment, and that this aspect should be taken into account in future architecture in terms of healthy and microbiome-friendly building conditions.

Buildings interrupt contact with microorganisms from the environment.

Future architecture should restore permeability for microorganisms.

Buildings themselves must be viewed as complex organic systems in the sense of countless interdependent microbial communities, which also have an impact on the human metaorganism.

Taken together, this has negative consequences, for example by creating new niches for disease hosts and vectors in buildings, concentrating waste and toxic substances or reducing ventilation and the entry of sunlight.

According to the researchers, one aim could therefore be to plan and construct the built environment in future in such a way that the focus is not on complete isolation from the natural, microbial environment. On the contrary: buildings can be opened up to nature again and made more nature-friendly.

This can be achieved, for example, by using less toxic building materials and creating an overall greater structural permeability to external, particularly microbial, influences.

via Kiel University Collaborative Research Center 1182 Origin and Function of Metaorganisms and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in Toronto, Columbia University, University of Oregon, California Institute of Technology: Thomas C. G. Bosch et al, The potential importance of the built-environment microbiome and its impact on human health, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2313971121


Intelligent liquid: Researchers develop metafluid with programmable response
Apr 2024, phys.org

This came out in April 2024 - How the hell was this not in any other headlines? This is literally the T-1000 

They developed a programmable metafluid with tunable springiness, optical properties, viscosity and can transition between a Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid.

It's a suspension of small, elastomer spheres between 50 to 500 microns that buckle under pressure,  changing the characteristics of the fluid.

A new class of fluid.

With this metafluid, no sensing is needed. The liquid itself responds to different pressures, changing its compliance to adjust the force of the gripper to be able to pick up a heavy bottle, a delicate egg and a small blueberry, with no additional programming.

Also this line:

"We show that we can use this fluid to endow intelligence into a simple robot"
(Because that is exactly what we all want right now.)

via Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences:  Katia Bertoldi, Shell buckling for programmable metafluids, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07163-z.

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