Wow! The Kilogramm just got redefined!!! 🤩

Originally shared by Eli Fennell

Kilogram Redefined for 21st Century (and Beyond)

Ever since the 1800’s, the kilogram has been defined by a literal, physical object: a platinum iridium cylinder, locked away in a vault and France and only rarely removed for reweighing.

On the one hand, there is a very imprecise way to define a unit of weight that often needs to be very precise. For example, the Earth is not a perfect sphere, and therefore very slight gravitational differences on different parts of our planet mean the relation between weight and mass is less than perfect. On the other hand, objects lose mass over time no matter how well preserved from the elements, and this cylinder is no exception, and has been losing mass.

The new measure of a kilogram will be based on an application of Planck’s constant, which thus should be valid across time and space. The cylinder will no doubt be retired now to some museum, a relic of how we once measured the universe little more sensible in retrospect than the arbitrary measures in the English measuring systems which the new metric measurements eventually replaced (everywhere, at least, except in the United States).

#BlindMeWithScience #Physics #Kilogram

https://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-the-definition-of-a-kilogram-has-changed //cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

That’s… Interesting…

Originally shared by Eli Fennell

VR Experiences Can Generate Enduring Compassion

One much touted potential humanitarian benefit of Virtual Reality technologies is their potential to improve human empathy and sympathy, by allowing us to virtually walk-a-mile in each other’s shoes, from each other’s perspectives.

Of course, many technologies have claimed they could break down barriers and build compassion between humans. Social Media was one, and we’ve seen that the results don’t always generate a net benefit to humanity.

Previous research into this issue was hampered by either the immaturity of the technology and the media produced for it, by using small sample sizes mostly of college students (not unusual, sadly, in the Social Psychological literature), and looking only at short term measures of empathy.

New research out of Stanford University has now shown that, given the right conditions at least, virtual experiences can generate enduring, stable gains in empathy. More than 560 Participants, from teenagers to late octogenarians, either interacted with a Virtual Reality experience from the Standford Virtual Human Interaction Lab called “Becoming Homeless”, in which they vicariously faced and experienced daily challenges of homeless life, or performed a conceptually similar alternative task.

2-month follow-ups revealed stable gains in compassionate attitudes towards the homeless compared with control groups which either interacted with a 2D version of the scenario or did other tasks such as reading a narrative about homelessness, i.e. other things which might have boosted empathy.

Given that other research has found that empathy increases when one asks others about their perspectives more than when one simply tries to imagine their perspective (i.e. ‘Put Yourself In Their Shoes’; http://bit.ly/2J7AqVO), it actually makes a great deal of sense that the 3D Immersive scenario which forces the person to more-or-less literally take a different perspective generates greater empathy, sympathy, and general compassion than other approaches.

Thus, VR may not simply be a source of new entertainment experiences, but a new way for people and groups to get to know and understand each other. This may be especially true when combined with the emerging haptics technology (e.g. http://bit.ly/2CRyjFv, http://bit.ly/2P7pIUZ).

#BlindMeWithScience #VR #VirtualReality

https://news.stanford.edu/2018/10/17/virtual-reality-can-help-make-people-empathetic///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Wow, that’s a major breakthrough!!! 🤩🤩

Originally shared by Eli Fennell

Researchers Create Human Egg Cells From Blood Cells

A team of Japanese Researchers has succeeded, for the first time, in creating human eggs cells from adult human blood cells. Their technique involves extracting the blood cells and turning them into induced pluripotent stem cells, placed inside miniature ovaries created from mouse embryonic cells, where they transform into egg cells.

The current product of this process is immature egg cells, but in the future it will almost certainly be possible to produce mature, and therefore reproductively viable, egg cells by this technique, and to create such cells from nearly any type of adult DNA-containing cell.

The ramifications of this are hard to overstate. An end to infertility issues? Quite likely. New techniques of creating ‘Designer Babies’, even before the fetal stage (and thus avoiding any legal barriers that apply or may some day apply only at fetal stages and beyond)? Probably. A means for LGBTQ+ people to have babies together which are wholly the product of their own DNA? Possibly. Getting pregnant by willing or unwilling Dead People, Celebrities, or anyone else for whom a single DNA-bearing cell sample can be obtained? A near certainty, barring probable laws against or severely curtailing such things.

Most dramatically: Could this become the basis for a radical evolutionary change in human reproduction, resulting in as-yet-unknowable changes to our species, perhaps even the eventual end of sex itself as a human behavior? That is, remarkably, not even remotely outside the realm of possibility, though this would likely take many, many generations to develop.

These are just some of the issues raised by this, alongside the ever present question regarding all such technologies: if everyone can make babies of their own, then how will we ever hope to solve the problem of Orphans? Each such innovation reduces the available pool of potential parents for children who have lost their caretakers, been abandoned, or simply been unwanted.

#BlindMeWithScience #Biology #ReproductiveHealth

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/20/649552734/scientists-create-immature-human-eggs-from-stem-cells?ft=nprml&f=1007 //cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

😅😅😅

Originally shared by Eli Fennell

Machine Learning ‘Translates’ Bat Talk and Hears a Lot of Fighting

Researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel adapted a Machine Learning algorithm originally used for human voice recognition for a different, but related, purpose: to see if it could tease meaning out of the squeals of bats, or more specifically Egyptian Fruit Bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus).

Until now, most researchers in the field supposed that all bat squeals meant the same thing, usually some variation on a warning call, while others have been eager but, due to the difficulty of the task, unable to challenge this convention.

By feeding the algorithm over 15,000 bat calls, and comparing its results afterwards with video of the behaviors of the bats making the calls, they were able to classify ~60% of bat squeals into four categories, each involving disputes: over food, over sleeping position, in response to unwanted mating advances, and what might be called ‘comfort zone’ disputes when one bat sits too close to another. They also found variations in how the same bats speak to different individuals, as is often observed in highly social mammals.

Given the great density and crowdedness of typical bat populations, this may be likened to the sort of frequent dust ups observed in groups of human roommates living in close quarters with each other. As with all such research,

though, it’s important to remember the Hard Problem of Consciousness: mapping objective behaviors onto subjective states, even within our own species let alone between species.

I can’t help but wonder if dispute may be the wrong word in some cases, rather than something like beseechment, lively discussion, or banter. What appears to be a fight about food, might instead be the bat equivalent of each bat shouting, “Pass the potato salad here, please!”

Then again, they do say that familiarity breeds contempt. Maybe bats, with their extremely crowded and intimate cohabitation patterns, are the ultimate living proof of this principle.

#BlindMeWithScience #AI #Biology

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-translate-bat-talk-and-they-argue-lot-180961564///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Have I posted about that yet? If I have doesn’t matter, because that guy brings it on point!

Originally shared by Eli Fennell

Google Unveils Dataset Search for Researchers

The Internet Age has brought access to almost unfathomable volumes of data to the masses. For Researchers in the Sciences, Technologies, and other fields, this has been an even greater boon than it has been for most people. Countless hours in Research Libraries and handwriting correspondences to researchers and institutions, while not entirely eliminated, have been replaced with searchable indexes of Journals, Citations, and more, available anywhere that has internet access, with an increasing amount of these sorts of information becoming free to access and use.

Given the even more urgent necessity for good Search Algorithms to help modern Researchers, it isn’t surprising that Google, the Search Giants, long ago threw their own hat in the ring with Google Scholar, a free-to-access dedicated Search Engine for Researchers. Google Scholar also offers integration with Subscription Research Databases provided by Universities and other research Institutions, Organizations, and Facilities, to allow access to Paywalled Sources provided by these Databases to their users.

Now, they want to do much the same thing for an area which has, to-date, remained stubbornly arcane and old fashioned: Dataset Search.

Surprisingly (as I can personally attest), modern Researchers often find it quite difficult to access, and find relevant information within, the many publicly available datasets published by both public and private research agencies, publishers, institutions, and even individual researchers. This has always been the case, but the situation to-date has only slightly improved, even as other areas of research-related indexing and searching have taken leaps and bounds. Oftentimes, knowing how to find the right datasets can depend on word-of-mouth and fortuitous discovery, especially for cross-disciplinary research.

Google Dataset Search hopes to solve this problem, though surprisingly not (as yet) through the company’s traditional Algorithmic Magic. Instead, the initial offering relies on ranking and presenting Datasets by the use Schema.org web markup, which depends on publishers and hosts of data repositories to ensure that this is both done and done accurately. This Schema information allows those who ‘Own’ (originated/generated/published) the data to both ‘Claim’ it, so the Search Engine knows the Origin and Authority of the datasets, and to provide specific information about the nature and content of the datasets.

Depending on third-parties to make accurate and standardized web markup on all of their datasets in a timely manner would have been a Fool’s Errand for any company except Google, which was able to use its market dominance and reputation to cajole all of their Dataset Search Partner Universities to standardize their Schemas in under a year. Beyond Universities, their other Partner Agencies have also been stepping up quickly to get onboard with this effort, as well. This will help Google both rank Datasets in Search, and integrate their Knowledge Panel into these results.

In the future, they may also experiment with Algorithms, Machine Learning, and other techniques for ranking and displaying dataset results, but for now the marriage of Schema markup and the Google Search brand name and power are uniquely well suited to the task of organizing and surfacing the right datasets from the countless open sources now available online.

#BlindMeWithScience #OpenAccess #DatasetSearch

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06201-x?WT.feed_name=subjects_computational-biology-and-bioinformatics //cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Science Funders From 11 European Nations Adopt Radical Open Access Plan

Originally shared by Eli Fennell

Science Funders From 11 European Nations Adopt Radical Open Access Plan

11 European science funding agencies, from as many nations, which collectively contribute nearly $9bn U.S. worth of research grants annually, have joined together on an ambitious Open Access Plan: ‘Plan S’.

Plan S calls for immediate, free-to-read access to research published under grant funding from any of the organizations involved, along with liberal (typically free-of-cost) licenses to download, reuse, and translate research findings. Most radically, it bans researchers from publication in about 85% of major research journals, which typically lock this research up behind paywalls.

It is no exaggeration to say that this plan spells doom for the major Subscription Journal Publishers as we know them, and they’re not happy. The decision is facing push back, of course, but the journals are rather powerless against the people who actually write the cheques. Much of this research is at least partly publicly funded, anyways, which makes the presence of paywalls all the more galling.

I, for one, say good riddance to Science paywalls! May they die swiftly and ingloriously! Science depends on the free and open exchange, review, and reuse of findings, as well as anything relevant to the findings, such as the procedures used to obtain them, the personnel and organizations involved, etc…

Research behind paywalls is research that cannot benefit the collective whole of humanity’s great Enlightenment Project known as Scientific Inquiry.

#BlindMeWithScience #PlanS #OpenAccess

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06178-7 //cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

If this turns out without huge side effects or even with NO side effects whatsoever then this will help millions of…

If this turns out without huge side effects or even with NO side effects whatsoever then this will help millions of people survive! And help genetic researchers so much more to understand how to cure any type of diseases! 🤯

Originally shared by Eli Fennell

Researchers Find Way To Turn Type-A Blood Into Type-O Blood

Type O- Blood is the so-called Universal Donor blood type, because it can be given in emergency transfusion situations to people of any blood type, without rejection. Consequently, medical demand for this blood type outstrips its proportion in the general populace.

So, any way to increase this supply can only be a good thing, saving potentially countless lives. It is fortunate, then, that Researchers from the University of British Columbia may have found a way to convert at least one other blood type into the Universal Donor type.

Specifically, the researchers identified a type of gut microbe (i.e. which naturally lives in the human gut) which secretes an enzyme that, when introduced to Type-A blood samples, strips away the specific Type-A markers, leaving behind a substance seemingly indistinguishable to the body from Type O-. This process is also remarkably efficient, because it works on whole blood, rather than requiring any sophisticated chemical processing techniques.

Of course, there will need to be proper human clinical testing before this can become an approved solution, but the Researchers seem fairly confident that human bodies will accept this ‘artificial’ O- Blood just as it would any conventional sample of Universal Donor blood. If their confidence proves justified, it may well solve in a single stroke the issue of Universal Donor blood shortages in modern medicine. It also suggests that future techniques may well be developed for converting other blood types, as well.

#BlindMeWithScience #MedicalScience #Biology

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45244770 //cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js