Technology

Nature is out to kill everything so a newborn animal must learn to walk on its legs as fast as possible to avoid predators. Learning the precise coordination of leg muscles and tendons takes some time and initially baby animals rely heavily on hard-wired spinal cord reflexes. More advanced and precise muscle control lead to the nervous system becoming well adapted to the young animal’s leg muscles and tendons. No more uncontrolled stumbling – the young animal can now keep up with the adults. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Stuttgart wanted to…

Bored Ape Yacht Club has been exposed as a ironic or post ironic racist meme using modified Nazi iconography mixed with one of the oldest and worst types of anti Black iconography.   The crypto currency crash has taught us all that it was foolish to trade hard tangible, trade able money for intangible non legal tender and call it an investment.   NFTs have taught us not only will people do this, they will then trade their currency for artwork that is a cryptoracist anti-Black meme.   This is not the oh "everything's racist" kinda racist.  It's face…

The public are often baffled why environmental journalists attend climate conferences in person, using the rationalization that they do their jobs better if they can talk to people outside formal interviews. What salesperson doesn't feel the same way?  Science conferences are also well-attended, groups hosting them even note their high attendance, but the belief that any benefit from flying there and staying in a hotel is meaningful is usually held by people who enjoy going to conferences rather than empirical data.  A new paper finds that advocates and critics are right; there is a…

By coating soft robots in materials that allow them to move and function in a more purposeful way, scientists could design machines with arms made of flexible materials and robots embedded in their surface. Coating the surface of nanoparticles in a responsive, active material could mean tailoring the size and shape of drug delivery capsules and have a dramatic effect on how a drug interacts with cells in the body. This ‘active matter’ could mark a turning point in the design of robots and make it possible to determine the shape, movement and behavior of a soft solid not by its natural…

Protection of personal data in the Internet Age is a big worry but solutions may be lacking. A smartwatch may seem secure, but the neural network processing that health information is using private data that could still be stolen by a malicious agent through a side-channel attack - one in which secret information is gathered by indirectly exploiting a system or its hardware. In one type of side-channel attack, a hacker could monitor fluctuations in the device’s power consumption while the neural network is operating to extract protected information that “leaks” out of the device. Current…

A recent study found that a virtual reality experience is able to reduce stress among COVID-19 frontline healthcare workers. Healthcare is never the calmest field. The pay is good but the COVID-19 pandemic added to stress substantially. While virtual food can never take the place of real food, virtual stress relief might be as good as a walk in the park. The experiments used 102 recruits from three COVID-19 units located in the United States, adults aged 18 years and older who could read and speak in English and were currently employed by the healthcare system. It involved viewiing a 360…

Elec-trickery? In the eponymous British children’s television, a magician called Catweazle finds himself transported from the 11th to the 20th century, and all sorts of things like motor cars, telephone (“telling bones” as he call them) and electricity (“electrickery”).  Now, in the 21st century, we find ourselves wanting to keep the power going without ever-increasing the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide, OK in the days of the dinosaurs, but the Sun was not quite so luminous then. So here are some informative videos I have watched recently on efforts to achieve this. 1  Thorium…

Implicit Racism tests say you are a bigot, it is only a question of how much. Social justice warriors and others in the humanities insist that even a field like astronomy is inevitably a reflex of the power of the socially privileged. Given that science is always under fire from all sides, is there a way for science to guide technology on ways to help the public find trustworthy sources without 'Who Watches The Watchmen' and 'Follow The Money' claims polluting the discourse? A new paper looks at social media algorithms and finds that it is possible - if companies stop highlighting content…

Unless you see yourself as a human with a Dogecoin dog atop your neck, avatars are not very realistic. The lack of realism in the digital realms, combined with how tedious VR glasses are, means conferences, meetings and discussions with work colleagues are only slightly more advanced than conference calls of 40 years ago. You very much know you are on one. But the more realistic the avatars’ appearance and behavior, the more likely it is that people will gain a sense of real social interaction and feel like they are at a conference and not on a conference call. The hurdles are…

An examination of undergraduate textbooks commonly used for linguistics courses and another of over 1,000 articles published in linguistics journals finds persistent gender bias. Gender bias is subjective, which makes it both ironic and ideal for a linguistics paper. The authors rely on the scourge of evidence-based thinking, implicit bias, which controversially contends everyone is biased, it is just how biased that needs to be determined. Even when you are conscious of implicit bias you are still doing it, the belief goes. Linguists examine the structure and interpretation of example…