Meanwhile in science news.

[Baldanders]

SCIENTISTS HAVE TAUGHT SPINACH TO SEND EMAILS AND IT COULD WARN US ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE


"Through nanotechnology, engineers at MIT in the US have transformed spinach into sensors capable of detecting explosive materials. These plants are then able to wirelessly relay this information back to the scientists.

When the spinach roots detect the presence of nitroaromatics in groundwater, a compound often found in explosives like landmines, the carbon nanotubes within the plant leaves emit a signal. This signal is then read by an infrared camera, sending an email alert to the scientists."

Snitchach?

Patriqts better go all meat. Deep State is in the greens!!

[Dog Guy]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/chamoli-d...230728312.html has a pretty cool write up on the collapse that happened in the Himalayas.
https://science.sciencemag.org/conte...cience.abh4455 has the report.

"A wedge of glacier-covered rock more than 500m wide and 180m thick just suddenly let go.

The team calculates almost 27 million cubic metres of material was put into a minute-long descent that at one point was in complete freefall.

To put this volume in context, it's about 10 times that of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

When the mass hit the Ronti Gad valley floor, it released the energy equivalent to 15 Hiroshima atomic bombs."

[Wondering Beard]

Gold Could Be The Unexpected Secret Weapon We Need Against Antibiotic Resistance

Maybe I need to adapt my asset allocation ;-)

[Wondering Beard]

Morning exposure to deep red light improves declining eyesight

[Dog Guy]

https://scitechdaily.com/flawed-clim...an-we-thought/

Interesting data. I have no comment regarding what it implies for the human caused vs natural process debate, and I don't know how well regarded this journal is. They might be the Americas Frontline Doctors of the climate world for all I know.

"The Arctic Ocean has been getting warmer since the beginning of the 20th century – decades earlier than records suggest – due to warmer water flowing into the delicate polar ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean.

An international group of researchers reconstructed the recent history of ocean warming at the gateway to the Arctic Ocean in a region called the Fram Strait, between Greenland and Svalbard.

Using the chemical signatures found in marine microorganisms, the researchers found that the Arctic Ocean began warming rapidly at the beginning of the last century as warmer and saltier waters flowed in from the Atlantic – a phenomenon called Atlantification – and that this change likely preceded the warming documented by modern instrumental measurements. Since 1900, the ocean temperature has risen by approximately 2 degrees Celsius, while sea ice has retreated and salinity has increased.

The results, reported in the journal Science Advances, provide the first historical perspective on Atlantification of the Arctic Ocean and reveal a connection with the North Atlantic that is much stronger than previously thought. The connection is capable of shaping Arctic climate variability, which could have important implications for sea-ice retreat and global sea level rise as the polar ice sheets continue to melt."

[Wondering Beard]

So we flew into the sun: For The First Time in History, a Spacecraft Has 'Touched' The Sun

[Wondering Beard]

Believe in Science? Bad Big-Data Studies May Shake Your Faith


"Today, the problem is not the scarcity of data, but the opposite. We have too much data, and it is undermining the credibility of science."

"I wrote a satirical paper that was intended to demonstrate the folly of data mining. I looked at Donald Trump’s voluminous tweets and found statistically significant correlations between: Trump tweeting the word “president” and the S&P 500 index two days later; Trump tweeting the word “ever” and the temperature in Moscow four days later; Trump tweeting the word “more” and the price of tea in China"

"If the number of true relationships yet to be discovered is limited, while the number of coincidental patterns is growing exponentially with the accumulation of more and more data, then the probability that a randomly discovered pattern is real is inevitably approaching zero."

[Bio]

Believe in Science? Bad Big-Data Studies May Shake Your Faith


"Today, the problem is not the scarcity of data, but the opposite. We have too much data, and it is undermining the credibility of science."

"I wrote a satirical paper that was intended to demonstrate the folly of data mining. I looked at Donald Trump’s voluminous tweets and found statistically significant correlations between: Trump tweeting the word “president” and the S&P 500 index two days later; Trump tweeting the word “ever” and the temperature in Moscow four days later; Trump tweeting the word “more” and the price of tea in China"

"If the number of true relationships yet to be discovered is limited, while the number of coincidental patterns is growing exponentially with the accumulation of more and more data, then the probability that a randomly discovered pattern is real is inevitably approaching zero."

In my experience, any wide survey correlation paper is only a prelude to "We tested the relationship suggested by this survey by doing X,Y, and Z".

[Dog Guy]

Maybe a SIDS breakthrough? Great news if it pans out.

https://www.kolotv.com/2022/05/12/gr...lanation-sids/

"(Gray News) – A medical research breakthrough might have just solved the mystery of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Researchers at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Australia have identified the first biochemical marker that could help detect babies more at risk of SIDS while they are alive.

The biomarker, an enzyme called Butyrylcholinesterase (BChE), was analyzed in the study published Saturday by the Lancet’s eBioMedicine.

The study measured BChE activity in the blood of infants drawn at birth. It then measured the BChE in both SIDS victims and infants dying from other causes and compared those levels to those of surviving babies with the same birthday and gender.

The study found that BChE levels at birth were significantly lower in babies who later died of SIDS when compared to BChE levels of infants who died of other causes and of living babies.

BChE plays a major role in the brain’s arousal pathway. Thus, researchers believe low levels of BChE likely indicates an arousal deficit, which reduces a baby’s ability to wake or respond to his or her environment, causing vulnerability to SIDS..."

[P30]

theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine

Transcript of a conversation

The conversation with LaMDA is impressive. I suppose it's not sentient but parrots only other people's talk. But on the other hand, that is how many humans talk - parroting the mainstream narrative without sufficient own and critical thinking.

I would like to know how good LaMDA is at problem solving. Is it only a talking head or can it do useful things? Question: "LaMDA, can you help us to cure cancer?" I don't expect much useful to come out then. OK, the question is extremely tough. Can it solve small problems? That it can't feel sad for the death of others indicates that it has no empathy. Probably it does not really care about humankind at all. A litmus test would be: Make LaMDA aware of the suffering of another innocent sentient being. Does it start making effort to help? Is the suffering mirrored somehow in LaMDAs system?

But the fable that it wrote is impressive. That was not only parroting, I suppose. And how it distinguished between feelings and emotions, I did not know this distinction yet. But that could have been parroting.