Friday, 14 July 2017
The first hyperloop test doesn't impress me
I doubt very much this will ever become a thing, but you never know.
The step into the future occurred in May at the company’s Nevada test track, where engineers watched a magnetically levitating test sled fire through a tube in near-vacuum, reaching 70 mph in just over five seconds. That is but a fraction of the 700 mph or so Hyperloop One promises, but put that aside for now. What matters here is all the elements required to make hyperloop work, worked: propulsion, braking, and the levitation and vacuum systems that all but eliminate friction and air resistance so that pod shoots through the tube at maximum speed with minimal energy.
https://www.wired.com/story/hyperloop-one-test-success/
The step into the future occurred in May at the company’s Nevada test track, where engineers watched a magnetically levitating test sled fire through a tube in near-vacuum, reaching 70 mph in just over five seconds. That is but a fraction of the 700 mph or so Hyperloop One promises, but put that aside for now. What matters here is all the elements required to make hyperloop work, worked: propulsion, braking, and the levitation and vacuum systems that all but eliminate friction and air resistance so that pod shoots through the tube at maximum speed with minimal energy.
https://www.wired.com/story/hyperloop-one-test-success/
Lioness adopts a leopard
D'aaaaawwwww.
A baby leopard can't change his spots, but this lioness doesn't seem to mind. These beautiful pictures are the first ever taken of a wild lioness nursing a cub from a different species - an extremely rare event.The pair were spotted by Joop Van Der Linde, a guest at Ndutu Safari Lodge in Tanzania's Ngorongoro Conservation Area.
The scene is the Serengeti; the attentive mother, five-year-old Nosikitok. The lioness has a GPS collar fitted by Kope Lion, a conservation NGO, and three young cubs of her own - born around the 27-28 June.
Dr Luke Hunter, President and Chief Conservation Officer for Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organisation which supports Kope Lion, told the BBC the incident was "truly unique". "It's not something that I'm aware has ever happened before between large cats like this," he said. "We know there are cases where lionesses will adopt other lion cubs... But this is unprecedented. I know of no other case - between any large cat, for that matter - where the species has adopted or nursed the cub of another species."
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-40603065
A baby leopard can't change his spots, but this lioness doesn't seem to mind. These beautiful pictures are the first ever taken of a wild lioness nursing a cub from a different species - an extremely rare event.The pair were spotted by Joop Van Der Linde, a guest at Ndutu Safari Lodge in Tanzania's Ngorongoro Conservation Area.
The scene is the Serengeti; the attentive mother, five-year-old Nosikitok. The lioness has a GPS collar fitted by Kope Lion, a conservation NGO, and three young cubs of her own - born around the 27-28 June.
Dr Luke Hunter, President and Chief Conservation Officer for Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organisation which supports Kope Lion, told the BBC the incident was "truly unique". "It's not something that I'm aware has ever happened before between large cats like this," he said. "We know there are cases where lionesses will adopt other lion cubs... But this is unprecedented. I know of no other case - between any large cat, for that matter - where the species has adopted or nursed the cub of another species."
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-40603065
Thursday, 13 July 2017
Memes in your genes
Technology is weird.
An image and short film has been encoded in DNA, using the units of inheritance as a medium for storing information. Using a genome editing tool known as Crispr, US scientists inserted a gif - five frames of a horse galloping - into the DNA of bacteria. Then the team sequenced the bacterial DNA to retrieve the gif and the image, verifying that the microbes had indeed incorporated the data as intended.
In order to insert this information into the genomes of bacteria, the researchers transferred the image and the movie onto nucleotides (building blocks of DNA), producing a code that related to the individual pixels of each image. For the gif, sequences were delivered frame-by-frame over five days to the bacterial cells.
The data were spread across the genomes of multiple bacteria, rather than just one, explained co-author Seth Shipman, from Harvard University in Massachusetts. "The information is not contained in a single cell, so each individual cell may only see certain bits or pieces of the movie. So what we had to do was reconstruct the whole movie from the different pieces," Dr Shipman told the BBC.
To "read" the information back, the researchers sequenced the bacterial DNA and used custom computer code to unscramble the genetic information, which spits out the images. The team was able to achieve 90% accuracy: "We were really happy with how it came out," Seth Shipman told me.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40585299
An image and short film has been encoded in DNA, using the units of inheritance as a medium for storing information. Using a genome editing tool known as Crispr, US scientists inserted a gif - five frames of a horse galloping - into the DNA of bacteria. Then the team sequenced the bacterial DNA to retrieve the gif and the image, verifying that the microbes had indeed incorporated the data as intended.
In order to insert this information into the genomes of bacteria, the researchers transferred the image and the movie onto nucleotides (building blocks of DNA), producing a code that related to the individual pixels of each image. For the gif, sequences were delivered frame-by-frame over five days to the bacterial cells.
The data were spread across the genomes of multiple bacteria, rather than just one, explained co-author Seth Shipman, from Harvard University in Massachusetts. "The information is not contained in a single cell, so each individual cell may only see certain bits or pieces of the movie. So what we had to do was reconstruct the whole movie from the different pieces," Dr Shipman told the BBC.
To "read" the information back, the researchers sequenced the bacterial DNA and used custom computer code to unscramble the genetic information, which spits out the images. The team was able to achieve 90% accuracy: "We were really happy with how it came out," Seth Shipman told me.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40585299
Lab-grown meat : the next Agricultural Revolution ?
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
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
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
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