Several companies are offering people in mourning a chance to chat with a “simulation” of a deceased loved one. Some say it feels like they’re speaking to them from beyond the grave, while others find it disconcerting and manipulative. Ethicists Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska from the University of Cambridge are the latest to voice their concerns over the risks of the "digital afterlife industry." Here’s more from Science Alert: https://flip.it/C6.06y #Science#AI#Ethics#Humans
When Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai erupted in January 2022, the underwater volcano in the South Pacific unleashed the most intense lightning storm ever recorded and set off a mega-tsunami that was hundreds of feet high. Research indicated the eruption was fueled by two merging magma chambers. Now, scientists are looking at another potential trigger. Live Science has more: https://flip.it/ZAjd2N #Science#Geology#Volcano#Eruption#Tonga
Many years ago, on another platform, someone said that humans are digestive tracts that eventually evolved nervous systems and brains, and not the other way around.
And that has forever changed how I think about being human.
"Now, thanks to a new, immersive visualization produced on a NASA supercomputer, viewers can plunge into the event horizon, a black hole’s point of no return."
French chemist Antoine Lavoisier died #OTD in 1794.
He is best known for his development of the law of conservation of mass, which states that mass is neither created nor destroyed in chemical reactions. This principle helped to debunk the phlogiston theory, which was a prevailing theory at the time that suggested substances released a material called "phlogiston" when they burned. He also made significant contributions in understanding respiration as a form of combustion.
"We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation."
Elements of Chemistry (1790), pp. xviii.
Chemicals in vapes could be highly toxic when heated, research finds | AI analysis of 180 vape flavors finds that products contain 127 ‘acutely toxic’ chemicals, 153 ‘health hazards’ and 225 ‘irritants’ https://www.byteseu.com/90750/#Science
Thought about hypothesis testing as an approach to doing science. Not sure if new, would be interested if it's already been discussed. Basically, hypothesis testing is inefficient because you can only get 1 bit of information per experiment at most.
In practice, much less on average. If the hypothesis is not rejected you get close to 0 bits, and if it is rejected it's not even 1 bit because there's a chance the experiment is wrong.
One way to think about this is error signals. In machine learning we do much better if we can have a gradient than just a correct/false signal. How do you design science to maximise the information content of the error signal?
In modelling I think you can partly do that by conducting detailed parameters sweeps and model comparisons. More generally, I think you want to maximise the gain in "understanding" the model behaviour, in some sense.
This is very different to using a model to fit existing data (0 bits per study) or make a prediction (at most 1 bit per model+experiment). I think it might be more compatible with thinking of modelling as conceptual play.
I feel like both experimentalists and modellers do this when given the freedom to do so, but when they impose a particular philosophy of hypothesis testing on each other (grant and publication review), this gets lost.
Incidentally this is also exactly the problem with our traditional publication system that only gives you 1 bit of information about a paper (that it was accepted), rather than giving a richer, open system of peer feedback.
Choose hypotheses where both possibilities are exciting (i feel like a lot of null hypotheses are borderline stupid, and that makes them bad null hypotheses. If you look at things like engineering in space, when something goes wrong in a spacecraft and you only have a 2 min window of communication with 2 days to get an answer... people find way to maximize the info out of their null hypotheses)
I want to understand this, but I can’t grok more than the headline and the potential applications. Is anyone able to explain it to someone whose physics knowledge is Year 12 + Vertasium? Like, how do massless photons even have momentum?! #science#lazyweb https://mastodon.social/@ScienceScholar/112401789379876027
Researchers found that as chimpanzees aged, they became more skilled at using tools by age six | Beyond this age, chimps continued to hone their skills and display more advanced maneuvers to suit different tasks. https://www.byteseu.com/89406/#Science