In fact, using ‘cellular agriculture’, there’s no reason why scientists couldn’t grow artificial meat with characteristics from a combination of animals, or enhance lab-grown meat with healthier fats, vitamins or vaccines. We could even taste the flesh of rare animals that nobody would dream of slaughtering for food. Panda burger, anyone?
Why stop with animals ? Cannibalism : it's the new veganism. We'll get arseholes in restaurants demanding the cannibal option or that the staff should change their gloves to handle the human-meat generator...
Achieving a taste and texture that rivals real meat seems to be the easy bit. Following a comment from the critics who tasted his original burger and said it was a bit dry, Post has started to culture fat cells and tissue from cows, which add moisture when mixed in with the muscle fibres. He has also discovered that starving the cells of oxygen can increase the amount of flavour-giving proteins in the final product.
The challenge facing Post and others in the field is upscaling the process. To grow cells industrially requires a large ‘bioreactor’ – a high-tech vat that can provide the perfect conditions for growth but also the movement and stimulation to exercise the cells. The largest existing bioreactor capable of doing this has a volume of 25,000 litres (about one-hundredth the size of an Olympic swimming pool), which Post estimates could produce enough meat to feed 10,000 people. It’s likely that many more of these would be needed to make a viable meat-processing plant.
That's a tiny volume, and much is made of the possibility of reducing the amount of livestock and their huge associated costs. But what about artificial plants ? Vast areas of land are currently dedicated to crops which would otherwise be ecologically diverse forests. Suppose you just need a few large bioreactors to feed a small town - the implications are every bit as big as the first agricultural revolution.
The first crop of cultured meat products will inevitably take the form of burgers, nuggets and other processed meats – unprocessed meat has a complex structure of bone, blood vessels, connective tissue and fat, and grows in specific shapes. Yet it should eventually be possible to grow complex tissue like this too, says Dr Paul Mozdziak, Gibbons’s colleague at North Carolina State University. He and scientists at various cellular agriculture organisations (such as New Harvest, SuperMeat and Future Meat) are keeping an eye on developments in regenerative medicine, the branch of biomedical science concerned with growing replacement organs and tissue for procedures such as skin grafts.
People will always be extremely sensitive about what is on their plate. Despite the welfare and environmental justifications for cultured meat, the thought of your burger coming from a lab rather than a farm is a strange idea. But if artificial meat lives up to its promise and becomes the environmentally friendly, safer, cheaper, and even tastier way to eat meat, the concept of raising animals in their millions for slaughter could very quickly seem much stranger.
Like the idea of getting a human being to drive a car, the prospect of eating meat from a living, emotional animal that's been raised in a muddy field fertilized by its own excrement is likely to eventually seem like a ridiculous thing to do.
Originally shared by BBC Focus Magazine - science and technology
Lab-grown beef burger anyone? #FoodFocus
http://bit.ly/2uhmkfh
Thursday, 13 July 2017
Wednesday, 12 July 2017
Weaponised propaganda in the Trump election
Excellent long read on Cambridge Analytica and other corporate propoganda companies, this time focusing on the election of the Grand High Douchebag rather than Brexit.
In the past, political messaging and propaganda battles were arms races to weaponize narrative through new mediums -- waged in print, on the radio, and on TV. This new wave has brought the world something exponentially more insidious -- personalized, adaptive, and ultimately addictive propaganda. Silicon Valley spent the last ten years building platforms whose natural end state is digital addiction. In 2016, Trump and his allies hijacked them.
Where traditional pollsters might ask a person outright how they plan to vote, Analytica relies not on what they say but what they do, tracking their online movements and interests and serving up multivariate ads designed to change a person’s behavior by preying on individual personality traits.
For Analytica, the feedback is instant and the response automated: Did this specific swing voter in Pennsylvania click on the ad attacking Clinton’s negligence over her email server? Yes? Serve her more content that emphasizes failures of personal responsibility. No? The automated script will try a different headline, perhaps one that plays on a different personality trait -- say the voter’s tendency to be agreeable toward authority figures. Perhaps: “Top Intelligence Officials Agree: Clinton’s Emails Jeopardized National Security.”
Much of this is done through Facebook dark posts, which are only visible to those being targeted... there’s no way for anyone outside of Analytica or the Trump campaign to track the content of these ads. In this case, there was no SEC oversight, no public scrutiny of Trump’s attack ads. Just the rapid-eye-movement of millions of individual users scanning their Facebook feeds.
“These companies,” Moore says, “have found a way of transgressing 150 years of legislation that we’ve developed to make elections fair and open.”
Research by Woolley and his Oxford-based team in the lead-up to the 2016 election found that pro-Trump political messaging relied heavily on bots to spread fake news and discredit Hillary Clinton. By election day, Trump’s bots outnumbered hers, 5:1.. There's no way to know for sure whether Cambridge Analytica was responsible for subcontracting the creation of those Trump bots.
From now on, the distinguishing factor between those who win elections and those who lose them will be how a candidate uses that data to refine their machine learning algorithms and automated engagement tactics. Elections in 2018 and 2020 won’t be a contest of ideas, but a battle of automated behavior change. The fight for the future will be a proxy war of machine learning. It will be waged online, in secret, and with the unwitting help of all of you.
No, dammit, I don't want a future where elections are decided by who has the best bots. That future is stupid.
https://scout.ai/story/the-rise-of-the-weaponized-ai-propaganda-machine
In the past, political messaging and propaganda battles were arms races to weaponize narrative through new mediums -- waged in print, on the radio, and on TV. This new wave has brought the world something exponentially more insidious -- personalized, adaptive, and ultimately addictive propaganda. Silicon Valley spent the last ten years building platforms whose natural end state is digital addiction. In 2016, Trump and his allies hijacked them.
Where traditional pollsters might ask a person outright how they plan to vote, Analytica relies not on what they say but what they do, tracking their online movements and interests and serving up multivariate ads designed to change a person’s behavior by preying on individual personality traits.
For Analytica, the feedback is instant and the response automated: Did this specific swing voter in Pennsylvania click on the ad attacking Clinton’s negligence over her email server? Yes? Serve her more content that emphasizes failures of personal responsibility. No? The automated script will try a different headline, perhaps one that plays on a different personality trait -- say the voter’s tendency to be agreeable toward authority figures. Perhaps: “Top Intelligence Officials Agree: Clinton’s Emails Jeopardized National Security.”
Much of this is done through Facebook dark posts, which are only visible to those being targeted... there’s no way for anyone outside of Analytica or the Trump campaign to track the content of these ads. In this case, there was no SEC oversight, no public scrutiny of Trump’s attack ads. Just the rapid-eye-movement of millions of individual users scanning their Facebook feeds.
“These companies,” Moore says, “have found a way of transgressing 150 years of legislation that we’ve developed to make elections fair and open.”
Research by Woolley and his Oxford-based team in the lead-up to the 2016 election found that pro-Trump political messaging relied heavily on bots to spread fake news and discredit Hillary Clinton. By election day, Trump’s bots outnumbered hers, 5:1.. There's no way to know for sure whether Cambridge Analytica was responsible for subcontracting the creation of those Trump bots.
From now on, the distinguishing factor between those who win elections and those who lose them will be how a candidate uses that data to refine their machine learning algorithms and automated engagement tactics. Elections in 2018 and 2020 won’t be a contest of ideas, but a battle of automated behavior change. The fight for the future will be a proxy war of machine learning. It will be waged online, in secret, and with the unwitting help of all of you.
No, dammit, I don't want a future where elections are decided by who has the best bots. That future is stupid.
https://scout.ai/story/the-rise-of-the-weaponized-ai-propaganda-machine
Tuesday, 11 July 2017
Boris Johnson being predictably stupid as usual
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has told MPs the European Union can "go whistle" for any "extortionate" final payment from the UK on Brexit. And he said that the government had "no plan" for what to do in the event of no deal being agreed with the EU. He said: "The sums I have seen that they propose to demand from this country appear to be extortionate. Go whistle seems to me to be an entirely appropriate expression," he added.
Asked during Commons questions if there was a strategy, either public or private, for what would happen if there was no agreement on Brexit, Mr Johnson said: "There is no plan for no deal because we are going to get a great deal."
No words. So stupid. I had no idea. They should have sent a poet.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-40571123
Asked during Commons questions if there was a strategy, either public or private, for what would happen if there was no agreement on Brexit, Mr Johnson said: "There is no plan for no deal because we are going to get a great deal."
No words. So stupid. I had no idea. They should have sent a poet.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-40571123
Airships versus fusion power
It would be interesting to plot a graph of how frequently airships are predicted to be the aircraft of the future over time, along with claims of fusion energy's perpetually imminent breakthrough.
Standing in the middle of what used to be a sugar cane field four miles from the south Brazilian city of São Carlos is a huge arched hangar. Inside the purpose-built structure is an aviation first for Brazil – a new design that could change the way the country develops.
It also happens to be a form of flying machine that has all but disappeared since the 1930s. It is the first manned airship ever built in Brazil. It has already flown in private and is now due to make its first public flight this July. This is part of a £35m ($44.6m) project to make Brazil a centre of the airship industry. The company behind it has even built a new factory ready to manufacture a fleet of airships.
The ADB-3-3 looks like the kind of airship you find in a faded photo in a history book - or flying over the Super Bowl. It is about the size of a small Airbus airliner and underneath its huge helium-filled envelope is a gondola that can take six people, and two engines that can move it through the air at a maximum speed of 55mph (95km/h).
It is the prototype of the smallest of a range of airships that its developer, Airship do Brasil (ADB), hopes will soon lead to a giant design that can carry 30 tonnes of cargo – or even a small tank. Their first goal is to get the ADB-3-3 certified safe to fly commercially and into production. Then in 2018 they hope to begin development of the cargo airship.
“Brazil has lots of reasons to want to use airships. They have so much hard-to-get-to territory that they cannot afford to build roads, railways and airports everywhere they need them. It’s the tarmac, the rails and the airport buildings that cost all the money.... And Airship do Brasil are steaming along nicely, but the jump from a small demonstrator airship to a large cargo-carrying airship is perhaps the biggest challenge for any airship company – and no one has done it successfully since the 1930s.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170711-can-brazil-bring-the-airship-back-from-the-dead
Standing in the middle of what used to be a sugar cane field four miles from the south Brazilian city of São Carlos is a huge arched hangar. Inside the purpose-built structure is an aviation first for Brazil – a new design that could change the way the country develops.
It also happens to be a form of flying machine that has all but disappeared since the 1930s. It is the first manned airship ever built in Brazil. It has already flown in private and is now due to make its first public flight this July. This is part of a £35m ($44.6m) project to make Brazil a centre of the airship industry. The company behind it has even built a new factory ready to manufacture a fleet of airships.
The ADB-3-3 looks like the kind of airship you find in a faded photo in a history book - or flying over the Super Bowl. It is about the size of a small Airbus airliner and underneath its huge helium-filled envelope is a gondola that can take six people, and two engines that can move it through the air at a maximum speed of 55mph (95km/h).
It is the prototype of the smallest of a range of airships that its developer, Airship do Brasil (ADB), hopes will soon lead to a giant design that can carry 30 tonnes of cargo – or even a small tank. Their first goal is to get the ADB-3-3 certified safe to fly commercially and into production. Then in 2018 they hope to begin development of the cargo airship.
“Brazil has lots of reasons to want to use airships. They have so much hard-to-get-to territory that they cannot afford to build roads, railways and airports everywhere they need them. It’s the tarmac, the rails and the airport buildings that cost all the money.... And Airship do Brasil are steaming along nicely, but the jump from a small demonstrator airship to a large cargo-carrying airship is perhaps the biggest challenge for any airship company – and no one has done it successfully since the 1930s.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170711-can-brazil-bring-the-airship-back-from-the-dead
Saturday, 1 July 2017
The Dunning-Kruger effect has been known since antiquity
Dunning & Kruger ? Couple of amateur hacks...
Corbyn dealing with dissent
Ah, so that's what's been happening during my internet absence. How utterly astonishingly unpredictable.
Can we please now agree that Corbyn is neither a) nice b) sensible or c) even a better choice than May ? How in God's name do you expect anti-austerity measures to be even remotely credible if we exit the single market ?
Sigh...
Labour MPs who back staying in the EU single market have vowed to keep the pressure up on the government and their own leadership in the Brexit process. Fifty Labour MPs defied Jeremy Corbyn's orders and backed single market membership in a vote on Thursday. Three of them were subsequently sacked as frontbenchers. The BBC understands the rebels think up to 90 Labour MPs back their cause and they could work with Tory MPs who also want a "soft Brexit" in future votes.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-40460591
Can we please now agree that Corbyn is neither a) nice b) sensible or c) even a better choice than May ? How in God's name do you expect anti-austerity measures to be even remotely credible if we exit the single market ?
Sigh...
Labour MPs who back staying in the EU single market have vowed to keep the pressure up on the government and their own leadership in the Brexit process. Fifty Labour MPs defied Jeremy Corbyn's orders and backed single market membership in a vote on Thursday. Three of them were subsequently sacked as frontbenchers. The BBC understands the rebels think up to 90 Labour MPs back their cause and they could work with Tory MPs who also want a "soft Brexit" in future votes.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-40460591
Sunday, 25 June 2017
Rescuing frogs from swimming pools, the easy way
I think every pool should have one.
http://www.boredpanda.com/invention-animals-rescue-pool-rich-mason-froglog/
http://www.boredpanda.com/invention-animals-rescue-pool-rich-mason-froglog/
What does "theory" actually mean ?
Alternative title : Ten Times Scientists Didn't Use The Word Theory To Mean A Well-Tested Model That's Almost A Fact Because That's Not What The Damn Thing Means So Just Get Over It Already.
Admittedly, I do keep flip-flopping on whether "theory" means, "incredibly well-tested" model or something else. This post should definitively clear that up by making it abundantly clear than everything is much more complicated than that.
Clearly there are some theories which do extraordinarily well - sometimes so well that theory and fact are indistinguishable. It might be fair to start to describe these as laws, not theories - the law of gravity, the law of evolution. Both of these things are established factual processes. Yet even these are like Russian dolls : within them we find detailed theoretical models of how they occur, and within those we find competing hypotheses as to how particular aspects proceed and even rivals to the theory - but not the laws. Gravity is a thing. Evolution happens. It's the mechanisms by which these things occur that's open to debate (at least a little bit), not their very existence.
Even if we were to insist that hypothesis only means, "explanation with little or no testing" (which it does) and theory only means, "well-tested explanation" (which it doesn't), then it wouldn't be easy to distinguish between the two. No strict criteria of what "well tested" means exists. It's probably impossible anyway, given the incredibly diverse nature of theories. You can't equate cat emotions with the distortion of spacetime around a black hole, or at least you shouldn't.
The reality is, though, that the vast majority of theories fall somewhere between these two extremes. They aren't just speculations based on limited data, and they aren't so convincing that no other explanations are plausible. They've had some testing and they generally work, but they have room for improvement. Some of them might turn out to be completely wrong, others just need tweaking.
I'm all for rigorous definitions wherever that's possible and appropriate. But in the case of "theory" I think that neither is the case. The simple truth of the matter is that science isn't always purely objective. It's a murky, messy business of turning facts into models, testing those models, rejecting some while provisionally tolerating others. Pretending that it's more objective than it actually is won't work, because it simply isn't true. Would it be nice if it was ? Sure ! But that's not what it's like, and that murkiness is sometimes what makes it fun.
No definition will stop the most ardent from bullshitting about science, because these people simply do not care - and you can't argue with someone who doesn't care, you can only have shouting matches. But for the rest, let's not set ourselves up for disaster by pretending we know things we do not. Simply admit the plain truth of it - that we know hardly anything for certain, but we're far, far more confident about some things than others. If this leaves people feeling lost and insecure, then that would be a good start. Perhaps (and I say this cautiously, knowing how damaging bullshit and stupidity can be) then they'd stop the chest-thumping for a moment, begin to realise that not everything can be quantified, and actually learn how to think.
Admittedly, I do keep flip-flopping on whether "theory" means, "incredibly well-tested" model or something else. This post should definitively clear that up by making it abundantly clear than everything is much more complicated than that.
Clearly there are some theories which do extraordinarily well - sometimes so well that theory and fact are indistinguishable. It might be fair to start to describe these as laws, not theories - the law of gravity, the law of evolution. Both of these things are established factual processes. Yet even these are like Russian dolls : within them we find detailed theoretical models of how they occur, and within those we find competing hypotheses as to how particular aspects proceed and even rivals to the theory - but not the laws. Gravity is a thing. Evolution happens. It's the mechanisms by which these things occur that's open to debate (at least a little bit), not their very existence.
Even if we were to insist that hypothesis only means, "explanation with little or no testing" (which it does) and theory only means, "well-tested explanation" (which it doesn't), then it wouldn't be easy to distinguish between the two. No strict criteria of what "well tested" means exists. It's probably impossible anyway, given the incredibly diverse nature of theories. You can't equate cat emotions with the distortion of spacetime around a black hole, or at least you shouldn't.
The reality is, though, that the vast majority of theories fall somewhere between these two extremes. They aren't just speculations based on limited data, and they aren't so convincing that no other explanations are plausible. They've had some testing and they generally work, but they have room for improvement. Some of them might turn out to be completely wrong, others just need tweaking.
I'm all for rigorous definitions wherever that's possible and appropriate. But in the case of "theory" I think that neither is the case. The simple truth of the matter is that science isn't always purely objective. It's a murky, messy business of turning facts into models, testing those models, rejecting some while provisionally tolerating others. Pretending that it's more objective than it actually is won't work, because it simply isn't true. Would it be nice if it was ? Sure ! But that's not what it's like, and that murkiness is sometimes what makes it fun.
No definition will stop the most ardent from bullshitting about science, because these people simply do not care - and you can't argue with someone who doesn't care, you can only have shouting matches. But for the rest, let's not set ourselves up for disaster by pretending we know things we do not. Simply admit the plain truth of it - that we know hardly anything for certain, but we're far, far more confident about some things than others. If this leaves people feeling lost and insecure, then that would be a good start. Perhaps (and I say this cautiously, knowing how damaging bullshit and stupidity can be) then they'd stop the chest-thumping for a moment, begin to realise that not everything can be quantified, and actually learn how to think.
In Theory
Things that are true. Things that might be true but, then again, might not be. The set of things we currently think might be true or might not be true and the methods we use to establish if we think they might be true or not.
"I fairly won the election which was rigged by Russia", says Trump
Waaait... he's saying that Obama failed to prevent the Russians interfering in a rigged election which he won ?
Well okay then.
President Donald Drumpf has accused his predecessor Barack Obama of inaction over alleged Russian interference in the US election in 2016. Mr Drumpf said Mr Obama had learned well before the 8 November poll about the accusations and "did nothing". His comments followed an article in the Washington Post which said that Mr Obama learned last August of President Vladimir Putin's "direct involvement".
The alleged meddling is the subject of high-level investigations in the US. President Putin has repeatedly denied any Russian interference into the presidential election.
Mr Drumpf tweeted on Friday: "The Obama Administration knew far in advance of November 8th about election meddling by Russia. Did nothing about it. WHY?"
He followed that up with two more tweets on Saturday, the second saying: "Obama Administration official said they "choked" when it came to acting on Russian meddling of election. They didn't want to hurt Hillary?"He repeats the argument in an interview with Fox News, which will air on Sunday.
"If he had the information, why didn't he do something about it? He should have done something about it. But you don't read that. It's quite sad."
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40395433
Well okay then.
President Donald Drumpf has accused his predecessor Barack Obama of inaction over alleged Russian interference in the US election in 2016. Mr Drumpf said Mr Obama had learned well before the 8 November poll about the accusations and "did nothing". His comments followed an article in the Washington Post which said that Mr Obama learned last August of President Vladimir Putin's "direct involvement".
The alleged meddling is the subject of high-level investigations in the US. President Putin has repeatedly denied any Russian interference into the presidential election.
Mr Drumpf tweeted on Friday: "The Obama Administration knew far in advance of November 8th about election meddling by Russia. Did nothing about it. WHY?"
He followed that up with two more tweets on Saturday, the second saying: "Obama Administration official said they "choked" when it came to acting on Russian meddling of election. They didn't want to hurt Hillary?"He repeats the argument in an interview with Fox News, which will air on Sunday.
"If he had the information, why didn't he do something about it? He should have done something about it. But you don't read that. It's quite sad."
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40395433
Saturday, 24 June 2017
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