Performing Evolutionary Feat in Sixty Days

E. coli evolve a capacity to exploit a new carbon source in >30.000 generations

Automated Science, Deep Data, and the Paradox of Information

Individualized medicine

How to survive the health care system (About the corruption of the system)

Everybody wants the same financial equality in the US – very interesting article (and statistic).

Truthiness – how presentation of facts/claims matters. What to learn from this: a) Accompany information with pictures, b) think about the processing the viewer is doing in his/her head. That'll help you get through to them better.

‘t Hooft and quantum computation – our path to quantum computation might be longer than expected. Math shows why.

Why I hope this is the last paralympics – „I'm a swimmer, not a disabled person.“ It is true that I think of Stephen Hawking as a brilliant physicist first and as a disabled person second. The paralympics should join the olympics as suggested in the article.

Epigenetics gives Darwin the finger – a really well written article on epigenetics propagating through genes. (Sweden: if a grandfather lived through a famine, the grandchild has a lower risk of cardiovascular and similar disease. If a grandfather lived through a good harvest year, the grandchild has a higher chance of diabetes. an environmental condition was imprinted on the genes and passed on to the next generation)

What infants teach us about preventing obesity – the differences in NEAT (Non-exercises activity thermogenesis) among people are huge and could explain why some tend to be obese more than others, and why they stay that way even if they change their diet somewhat substantially.

Why we are slaves of food obsession – maybe the key to fighting obesity is in hacking hormones which drive us to food / make us overeat.

Humanities aren't a science, stop treating them like one – an encouraging article about humanities and maybe even their relationship with „hard“ sciences.

Reclaiming the sacred gift – a post-scriptum to the previous article.

What makes beauty subjective? – a Self-determination theory look at beauty, how it came about, how it's not serving us the best in the age of billboard models and how to hack it so we love what we want to love.

What makes us accept unacceptable acts – if we agree with an event in its benign beginnings, we're more likely to find excuses for when it turns evil (think 9/11 → torture).

Kids who sleep later do better in school – 'nough said.

Unified theory of dark matter & dark energy?

Robbers cave experiment – intergroup conflict genesis and resolution.

Later sexual initiation predicts relationship satisfaction in adulthood – so you're saying there might be something to „no sex before marriage“ after all?

Doplhins pull endless all nighters – turns out that dolphins can „half-sleep“ by shutting down one half of the brain, yet retain full conciousness, and alternate this for (possibly) months. Whoa.

Sometimes health-care policy has nothing to do with health – a different perspective on the US healt-care debate: people actually have a problem with perceiving any form of „socialized medicine“ as benefiting the „freeloaders“; thus the public opinion may be shifted by focusing on this aspect (and/or making people cut the „freeloaders“ some slack…?). Generally speaking though, an encouragement to dig deeper into people's motivations in any discussion, really.

When do people whistle-blow? – people need to feel a responsibility, not fear co-worker invalidation and have as much evidence and leverage as possible. Possible application: focus on encouraging whistle-blowing more; all we do now is talk about protection after the act (if anything). Practical scenario: schools.

Does violence successfully deter more violence? – not really, though it is complicated. Quoting the paper itself: „It seems that, ironically, defeat does not lower an adversary’s motivation for violence but may increase it and draw into the conflict third parties toward which aggression was displaced.“

Mindfullness – everybody keeps writing about mindfullness, yet I still don't really know what it is. More research needed.

Can we build a more efficient airplane? – not really, but the demonstration is awesomely intuitive and well written; also the discussion contains some interesting ideas (Waverider design).

Myth busting ain't easy (original article) – accessible article, cool illustrations and stories.

The Biological Internet – the scientists created a virus which doesn't harm it's host, but waits for a DNA strand to float by and if it does, it gets assimilated, replicated many times and released. They go on to claim this gives a way for precisely targeted delivery of information that can be then processed in all sorts of ways. Orchestrating the cooperation of cells to form artificial tissues, or even artificial organisms is just one possibility.. Keep an eye on this.

Seralini GM fed rats – great debunking of the „GM fed rats die faster“ paper – the statistics just don't hold. A great example of the scientific community holding each other responsible.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, am I healthy after all? – Mirrors doing health analysis during the typical morning routine. Could be creepy (if it decides to tweet a warning to everyone that today you'll be grumpy), but also very useful (for changes that span over longer periods of time – e.g. I wouldn't notice my skin changing color signifying a deficiency of some vitamin, but my mirror could.)

The psychology of inefficient markets – When traders are shown the top results, they're reckless and nobody benefits; when shown the results of the last person, they're more conservative, which benefits society. Our incentives for traders are wrong.

What types of feedback should students receive? – give students positive feedback, especially in areas they're uncertain (they have some idea, but need verification and positive reinforcement). Also, individual computer tutors are probably the future, for some areas at least.

GMOs love me, GMOs love me not – a good summary of the benefits of GMOs and why just saying „contains GMOs YES/NO“ isn't nearly enough. But I'm still cautious of the corporate interests (see Monsanto Legal issues and other controversies)

50-times faster fMRI on the way? – it doesn't seem likely from the comments, but still. This could be interesting. Also a CS challenge.

The weapon of comedy - why humour gets the point across – humour lowers defenses and gives a fresh perspective where people were stuck in just one view point.

Pervasiveness of environmental contaminants, and obesity – are we getting fat because of the crap in our environment (i.e. bad chemicals throwing our hormones out off balance making us store more fat)?

Beluga mimicking person speaking – pretty cool, actually. Those sea mammals seem like a lot of fun.

How to sequence a brain (A more detailed article) – a really interesting idea how to get the connectome (really just a graph) of the brain. This would be huge, and definitely a graph theory task to get anything meaningful out of that, but the use of DNA sequencing techniques seems novel (but what do I know, right?).

Colorado Potato Beetles & clover instead of pesticides – instead of spraying pesticides over eggplant, put in clover over the period the field would be unused – the clover distracts the bugs and also attracts nitrogen, so acts as a natural fertilizer. The results: using clover is equal to using pesticides, AND using pesticides doesn't give any additional benefits.

Your brain on psilocybin (aka mushrooms) – a) the „mind-expanding“ effect of psilocybin actually comes from supressing brain activity in centres related to self b) there seems to be some data supporting the theory that a big amount of brain activity goes to reducing our inputs, so we only consciously handle signals deemed important by our brain; if you shut those filters down, you get hallucinations. I agree with the author: „ I do think the idea that psilocybin permits an “unconstrained style of cognition” is an intriguing one.“

How flavor and texture alter how full we expect a food to make us feel – increasing creamy flavor made people expect to be more filled, but only increasing thickness (texture, not flavor) actually did the job.

The changing face of british suicide – in 1979/83 many of the suicides were in white-collar professions; in 2005 the top 30 were blue-collar professions only, with coal miners rising from #29 to #1. Quote: „What's more, the correlation between socioeconomic status and suicide rates increased sharply over time. Suicide is now much more of a class issue than it was in the past.“

Peer reviewed research predicted NYC subway flooding by Sandy – „The combined effects of storm climatology change and a 1 m sea level rise may cause the present NYC 100-yr surge flooding to occur every 3–20 yr and the present 500-yr flooding to occur every 25–240 yr by the end of the century.“ AKA watch out for global warming.

Outdated pain theories, part 2 -- posture and body structure. It's dubious whether bad posture means chronic pain (the research doesn't support any such claim), and even if a correlation existed, it doesn't mean causation – the bad posture could be a result of pain. But good posture is still good.

Outdated pain theories, part 3 -- muscle imbalances & the "core". Again, the awkward exercises done to strenghten allegedly weak muscles could be helping simply because any exercise helps. The evidence isn't there. Plus, „core“ seems like a bullshit concept entirely.

Defining music – an article about a paper on music & language. The definition of music is surprisingly difficult for these reasons: 1) Music varies across cultures, 2) musical practice varies over time, even within the same culture, 3) how music feels is very ambiguous, even on an emotional level, 4) any sound can be treated musically. I agree with the blogger that the best definition would probably be something like „creative play with sound with the conscious intention of producing music“.

Language as a form of music – the same paper as before; the claim that language is just a subset of music is dubious, but there is a very interesting and tight correlation in times of developing related music & language skills (see this timeline).

Evidence against low-sugar depleted will-power theory – there was a theory that will-power depletion is caused by low levels of sugar. It seems maybe the real effect wasn't in raising glucose levels in blood but in the mouth, from which it goes to the brain and stimulates a region that gets tired, or causes a reward effect, thus making the current task seem more rewarding than before.

Political animals – a recap of some well-known self-organization ant (and bee) experiments, and a useful list (for us to learn from) – Tom Seeley’s Five Habits of Highly Effective Hives: 1) Group members share a goal, 2) Group members search broadly to find possible solutions to the problem, 3) Group members contribute their information freely and honestly, 4) Group members evaluate the options independently and they vote independently, 5) Group members aggregate their votes fairly.

When ants get together to make a decision. Another article about ants and self-organization. The zinger? “Cognitive overload is a growing issue for human decision making, as unprecedented access to data poses new challenges to individual processing abilities,” Pratt and Sasaki wrote in their journal article. “Human groups also solve difficult problems better when each group member has only limited access to information.”

Election norms. – a great article talking about descriptive („People do this“) and prescriptive („Do this“) norms and which works when. Quote: „The researchers conclude that when it comes to getting people not to do something (e.g. “Don’t take the wood!”), prescriptive norms work best. However, when you are trying to get people to act, it’s actually more effective to send out an “Everybody’s doing it!” descriptive norm, which will encourage people to fit themselves into the norm.“

Why the Obama campaign is telling you about people who share your name. (similar article) – a specific example of descriptive norms (see the previous article): tell a person that other people with the same name voted for Obama and they're more likely to do so too.

Mathematics learning disorders. – In summary, this research review found that mathematics learning disorder affects about 7% of all children, but that functional innumeracy may be found in up to 25% of the adult population. Contains definitions of relevant disorders. Interesting read, though I still blame how education is set up in general.

Outdated pain theories -- conclusion. The problem with doctors giving wrong explanations for pain is that most of them lead to people fear movement, especially exercise, but exercise typically helps.

Agrivida publishes details of engineered maize for biofuel. A great example of helpful genetic modification. There's a way to modify corn (specifically corn stover, not the food part) so it contains enzymes which, when heated up, do the work that needed to be done (expensively) to turn it into a fuel. Quote: I think this is a really great advance – innovative use of biotechnology to solve a real world problem!

How to be more pessimistic. Do you have problems with being overly optimistic when planning so you underestimated the time needed? Plan in more detail!

Introverts use more concrete language then extraverts – introverts tend to describe situations with more factual statements (Camiel yells at Martin), whereas extraverts describe personality (Camiel is unfriendly). The important difference is that facts are situational, but personality traits are more enduring.

Brain may see more than the eyes – not entirely surprisingly, vision is much more about the computation/interpretation done on sensory data, than the data itself.

For brain tumors, origins matter – brain cancer can originate from two kinds of cells, and based on this information better treatment can be chosen. This seems trivial, but hopefuly it means a shift in the somewhat random way medical research is being conducted.

Psilocybin could improve quality of life in the terminally ill – psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in mushrooms, has a lasting positive effect in the terminally ill. There are two things worth mentioning: first, the change was lasting. The mystical experience left something behind which changed people's behavior for months and even years ahead. Second, the effect is caused by shifting focus from ones' self to the environment (those are the feelings of „oneness“ with the universe).

Mind transfer – a summary of what are the missing pieces to emulating brains. We're still miles from the target, but the idea of which obstacles need to be overcome is much clearer now.

Science on crack 5: The science of weed – an entertaining article about how weed works and how to get the other drugs from it. Really well written.

The ultimate optical surface – amazing piece nanotechnology (very neat idea) possibly leading to applications in solar panels, metal coloring, electronics and others.

How organizations need to forget – just like people selectively remember and forget based on the subconscious narrative they have, so do organizations (with a specific example of a French aviation company, whose employees didn't recall important foreign involvement).

Perception of climate change: Dice with four sides hot. A great article demonstrating on an accessible example what global warming really is about: not days being always hot, but more days being hot – if we take the data from 1951-1980 as base, so with the dice two sides mean cold, two sides neutral and two sides hot, the current dice has four sides hot.

The new psychology of awkward moments – besides recounting well-known awkwardness inducers, an interesting observation about what made awkwardness go away: when people were sharing common interests, when one person helped another, when one person was positive about another, and humour. It's notable that a lot of the humour was actually about social awkwardness - joking about it seemed to make it go away.

Why personal attacks are good politics – Here’s how the study helps explain some of the dynamics that paralyze the American political process. The backbone of good public policy is the act of screwing over a small population for the greater good. Almost no policies benefit everybody, but if you can create a relatively large benefit for a small cost you should do it, and the idea is that voters will understand what you did and like you. However, if people can acknowledge you created good policy while simultaneously thinking less of you for it, that’s an enormous disincentive to create good policy. And because almost all good policy involves screwing somebody, it’s not hard for people to come up with a reason to think less of you for it, especially when your opposition is constantly on every TV network explaining why you’re a bad person. Suddenly the 10% of people who are screwed by your policy are trumping the 90% of people your policy helps. At the end of the day it becomes better for your personal reputation to do nothing.

Is ambiguity dysfunctional for communicatively efficient systems? – my favorite from this series. Why is there ambiguity in language? The hypothesis is: The essential asymmetry is: inference is cheap, articulation expensive, and thus the design requirements are for a system that maximizes inference. (Hence … linguistic coding is to be thought of less like definitive content and more like interpretive clue.) – and this seems to be supported by pretty strong evidence. What does it mean for us? Maybe for the types inclining to the overly rational side – have bigger faith that other understand what you're saying.

Charging cars from the roads with the steel belts in the tires – a possible way to charge electromobiles on highways. The efficiency isn't disappointing – 75% (tested on a 1:32 model).

When to switch on background music – German scientists did a meta-study of the effect of background music on effectiveness and didn't find much tu surprise us, except: „[…] one positive effect stands out. [There's a] curious, positive effect of music on simple math tests. This is in line with a recent study by Avila and colleagues who found a positive effect of music on logical reasoning. Could it be that the negative effect of background music on concentration tasks is found because these tasks are nearly always language based? Music and language have been claimed to share a lot of mental resources.“ Makes sense.

The "memory palace" mnemonic strategy (Memory Palace at Wikipedia) – are you open to trying out a memory technique? This one seems to work fairly consistently.

System justification theory and the inertia of school reform – school reform is needed, so it's interesting to know what's slowing it down. System justification theory (wiki) says that we try to rationalize whatever shortcomings of a system we're a part of, but when outside of it we can evaluate it much more clearly. The idea of this article is that it's hard to push for school reform because it means that what we went through as kids was crap – we want to believe that if it was good enough for us, it has to be good enough for our kids.

The problem with math is that it makes people seem smart – a sociology/anthropology paper was modified to contain a nonsense math equation, which made people judge it as of higher quality. This effect wasn't seen when read by participants with degrees in mathematics, science, technology or medicine (interesting). The larger problem here is that the people who exhibit this effect obviously don't even try to understand and take a mere equation as a sign of being smart, which is a very undersirable attitude.

A little mind wandering can go a long way – at first sight a not-so-surprising result, but there's a kicker. First, people are set to do a creative task (e.g. write down a list of things a brick can be used for). Then they are divided into three groups: do nothing, do something where your mind wanders, focus on something else. Then, try to come up with more things. The kicker? The middle („wandering“) group performed 40% better not just than the last („focus“) group, but also the first („do nothing“) group. I would've thought the mind-wandering would happen anyway, but it seems like one has to actually do something unrelated for the subconscious to kick in.

Biofuel that's better than carbon neutral – a great article about carbon negative fuels. First part is about algae-based approaches which have downsides, most importantly that they are fertilizer (nitrogen, phosphorus) intense. Second part is about a different technique which seems very promising and is backed up by Google and others (and a model plant is already running and close to profitable).

MIT's milli-motein – a pretty out there article about the idea of programmable matter. Contains a nice video of the model they build, which is basically a chain of motors programmable to switch different shapes. It's nice, but really just a first step.

A new test for finding out what people really thing of their personality – at first the idea sounds like psycho-bullshit, but the results are convincing. So, the question: what are your personality traits? The problem with most questionnaires is that you would try to make a good impression, which skews the results. To get around it the new test flashes a trait (e.g. „anxious“ or „brave“) for 0.2s and then shows a nonsense chinese pictogram. Then you're asked whether you'd like to put that pictogram on a T-shirt. The idea is simply that you'll be more likely to go for something you actually think describes you (because of the implicit link „this pictogram means anxious“). What really caught my attention is that this test predicts actual behavior (perseverance, punctuality, church attendence) better than previous explicit tests (i.e. what you say on a personality test).

What makes students care about politics – the paper compares two ways to teach civics: by discussing important political issues OR by service learning (e.g. do actual projects to help your community). The wanted outcome is bigger involvement in „big P“ politics (intention to vote, interest in politics and diverse opinions) and „little p“ politics (volunteering or taking action on a community issue). The interesting part is that those seem to be independent of each other, because increasing the „discussion“ element only leads to increase in the „big P“ part, and the same goes for „service learning“ and „little p“. So both really are essential.

Can we trust climate models? – an interesting article about uncertainty in climate models. They're not perfect, but they're getting better, and it's reassuring to know that's an ongoing discussion in the scientific community.

Microwave heating: still nothing special – against some information circulating among people, there's nothing special with microwave heating. It has it's specifics coming from the heating method, but so does boiling or frying.

The psychology of online reviews – quote: „we remain impressed after reading early positive reviews, even if negative reviews come later.“. There are fairly good reasons to try to always read bad reviews before the good ones.

Toward a new model of the cell – the idea is to take big datasets about interactions between genes and proteins and infer new information, which could then be used as a basis for new hypotheses. It's encouraging that what was automatically inferred by this method seems to match in big part what was put together by hand in the Gene Ontology project, so this looks like a good direction.

Epigenetics and homosexuality – so…a paper about this subject made waves and here the author digs into it. The biggest issue is really how it was interpreted (i.e. as hard facts) rather than what it really says. The actual paper gives a computational model which seems to make sense and so it gives us a hypothesis to test… but noone has tested it yet. The author gives both a short and a long explanation of the whole thing. Very well written.

Did epigenetics make us smart? – a fairly technical article, but the author feels like the papaer makes a fairly convincing case that certain epigenetic changes (which take much less time to happen than genetics change, mind you) are the key difference between our and apes' brains (in other words what makes us smart).

Use mental images to sway moral judgement – when presented with a cold, factual description of a situation we're more likely to make an utilitarian moral choice. When the picture is more „human“, relatable, emotional, the moral judgement will be also more emotional.

Motivation and study skills are more important than intelligence in learning mathematics – quote: „Researchers found that intelligence contributes strongly in the initial stage of achievement in mathematics. However for long term achievements, students’ motivation and study skills and habits play more important role for their ability to learn mathematics. Competent students use different learning techniques, such as summarizing, explaining, and making connections to other materials, to get good marks.“

Critical thinking skills: What are they and how do I get them? – we all know it's good to be able to think critically, but what does it mean exactly? Those are the core skills: (1) Suspending judgment to check the validity of a proposition or action, (2) Taking into consideration multiple perspectives, (3) Examining implications and consequences of a belief or action, (4) Using reason and evidence to resolve disagreements, (5) Re-evaluating a point of view in light of new information. As far as learning them – just use them.

Critical thinking in decision making – ask yourself those questions: (1) Do you have all the necessary information?, (2) Is there any conflict in the evidence?, (3) The devil’s advocate tells you that your story is wrong. Make up an alternative story. Is it more plausible than the original?.

What's wrong with citation analysis – citations are one of the bases of the way we currently do science. What could possibly be wrong with it? Well, we're influenced by way more things than we're able to actually quote; after a careful definition of an influence the authors conclude, that „only about 30% of influences are cited.“ Also, quite often only review papers are quoted, not giving credit to the original researchers. There are many more problems. My personal opinion: we need to update the „paper“ research format.

The tension between theory and reality – a good, bird-eye view of the current increasing trend of using computer models in research. They're not bad per se, but we need to understand the limitations of the tool we're using.

You are continuously changing yourself – all participants felt that: „they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future.“ Some other good ideas there: “What’s fascinating about that is that people don’t have this belief about other people or about the world,” Van Boven adds. “We fully expect other people to change. We fully realize that we have changed in the past. There’s something odd about this projection of the self into the future that’s psychologically unique.”

Delaying dementia without pills – one needs to build a cognitive reserve – by using the brain as much as possible (art, education, …). But, it doesn't prevent dementia, just pushes the worst further, when it actually happens faster. Succintly: „The higher the education the shallower the decline before a break point, the later that break point, and the steeper the decline thereafter.“

QR codes to be used to prevent drug counterfeiting – they want to put microscopic qr codes into drugs which will containt information about the specific batch, contents etc., so as to make counterfeiting way harder. Interesting.

Quantum ignorance – this is a brilliant idea, that there's not classical and quantum probability, but that when we're talking about classical probability, we're basically just using the fact that the expectation of the sum of many quantum events happening behave like our „classical“ probability, but there's really no such thing.