super-science breakthrough compendium thread

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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Oct 21, 2016 12:56 pm

You're welcome, Smoky.

Drew, it's kind of like, "It sounds like a good thing, but does it do what it promises?" If the carbon this "new"technology sequesters is to be later used as a fuel, the process actually increases the technology's carbon footprint beyond that which it would were the carbon simply burned initially. This is due to the intense energy demanded in order to develop the new technology, build it and operate it. Then the carbon sequestered is burned.
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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby smoking since 1879 » Sat Nov 26, 2016 11:03 pm

Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images

We study, for the first time, automated inference on criminality based solely on still face images. Via supervised machine learning, we build four classifiers (logistic regression, KNN, SVM, CNN) using facial images of 1856 real persons controlled for race, gender, age and facial expressions, nearly half of whom were convicted criminals, for discriminating between criminals and non-criminals. All four classifiers perform consistently well and produce evidence for the validity of automated face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding the topic. Also, we find some discriminating structural features for predicting criminality, such as lip curvature, eye inner corner distance, and the so-called nose-mouth angle. Above all, the most important discovery of this research is that criminal and non-criminal face images populate two quite distinctive manifolds. The variation among criminal faces is significantly greater than that of the non-criminal faces. The two manifolds consisting of criminal and non-criminal faces appear to be concentric, with the non-criminal manifold lying in the kernel with a smaller span, exhibiting a law of normality for faces of non-criminals. In other words, the faces of general law-biding public have a greater degree of resemblance compared with the faces of criminals, or criminals have a higher degree of dissimilarity in facial appearance than normal people.


https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135
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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby identity » Sat Nov 26, 2016 11:29 pm

In other words, the faces of general law-biding public have a greater degree of resemblance compared with the faces of criminals, or criminals have a higher degree of dissimilarity in facial appearance than normal people.


Are they suggesting that there is a "hard-wired" predisposition to criminality/antisocial behaviour that manifests as "a higher degree of dissimilarity in facial appearance than normal people" and that it is not the facial difference/otherness itself that results in social exclusion/alienation and the associated denial of opportunities in every sphere of life (naturally leading some to a grasping of "opportunity" in whatever way they can, for example, through crime)? What about highly corrupt individuals such as most politicians and CEOs who, because they look "normal," are very clever, and are socially adept and belong to the "right" social networks, never got caught or charged for their criminality? We need software that will identify these most dangerous of criminal entities (not that we don't already know who they are...)!
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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby norton ash » Sun Nov 27, 2016 12:06 am

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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby Harvey » Sun Nov 27, 2016 5:56 am

They have a point. Look at George W Bush or Tony Blair.

Even more serious point, what is their definition of criminal? Is it a convicted criminal or a successful criminal? The ones who get caught and are prosecuted or those who re-write and are above the law? Even more serious point, which laws? Which crimes? What percentage of those crimes would not be crimes in a sane and just society? How many of the convictions are contested?

Accepting any part of the researchers argument 'at face value' is problematic. What they are trying to achieve is a model with predictive power, and clearly, the definition of 'normal' is as much a part of the selection for 'non normal' as class is a selection for likelihood of conviction. "..controlled for race, gender, age and facial expressions," but perhaps not class.
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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby Luther Blissett » Fri Mar 10, 2017 6:08 pm

I really can't wrap my mind around this, but blame the Independent.

Time crystals: New form of matter once thought to break laws of physics created by scientists
Strange material repeats a crystal-like structure in the fourth dimension, time, rather than just in space

A new kind of matter – dubbed a “time crystal” – has been created by two teams of scientists in a feat once considered theoretically impossible.

Normal crystals, anything from diamonds to snowflakes, have atoms arranged in a repeating three-dimensional lattice.

However the atoms in time crystals – the existence of which was first suggested in 2012 – repeat a pattern across the fourth dimension, time.

This essentially means they should oscillate forever without any external influence.

Before their apparent creation, some researchers had expressed doubt that time crystals could be made as perpetual motion contradicts the laws of physics.

But it is thought to be possible partly because of the strange way matter behaves at the quantum level.

A time crystal seems to be a closed system, so no energy is lost to the outside world. And it also appears to have properties similar to superconductors so electrons can move without any resistance.

This allows the observed motion to continue, theoretically at least, for all time.

The practical applications are thought to be far off, but it is believed the crystals’ unique properties could help make quantum computing a reality.

Prototype quantum computers exist, but need to be heavily shielded from the slightest interference from the outside world. The crystals could help protect the stored information, overcoming one of the greatest obstacles to the widespread use of computers many millions of times faster than the ones used today.

One of the teams, led by researchers at Maryland University, created the first time crystal from electrically charged atoms of the element ytterbium.

They used an electric field to levitate 10 of these atoms above a surface, then repeatedly hit them with a pulse from a laser.

The atoms began to flip in a regular pattern by themselves, but they did so in an odd way. Rather than moving at the same rate as the laser pulses, they flipped at half the pace.

The researchers compared this to hitting a piano key twice, but just getting one note, or squeezing a sponge regularly but seeing it rebound only once every second squeeze.

This, apparently, is the tell-tale sign of a time crystal. The purported breakthrough was revealed in October last year, but the scientific world has been waiting to see the full details in a peer-reviewed journal.

The Maryland team and another led by experts at Harvard University have now published separate papers in Nature, one of the world’s leading journals.

Professor Andrew Potter, of Texas University at Austin, who was part of the Maryland-led team, said: “This opens the door to a whole new world of non-equilibrium phases.

“We’ve taken these theoretical ideas that we’ve been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory.

“Hopefully, this is just the first example of these, with many more to come.”

However, in a commentary published by Nature, one leading expert in the field suggested more research was needed to prove without doubt that time crystals truly exist.

Professor Chetan Nayak, of University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote that based on our current knowledge it had been natural to see if it was possible to “spontaneously break the time-translational symmetry of the laws of physics”.

But he said it was possible that the unusual flipping motion seen in the purported time crystals might not last forever.

“Both groups present evidence of a time crystal,” Professor Nayak said, “but their combined results point to the need for experiments that truly show that the oscillations remain in phase over extended times and are not washed out by the inevitable fluctuations.”
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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 16, 2017 12:21 pm

Scientists use solar power to produce hydrogen from biomass
Anmar Frangoul
Wednesday, 15 Mar 2017 | 8:07 AM ET

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a technique that uses solar power to produce clean hydrogen from biomass.

In a news release on Tuesday the university said that up until now lignocellulose – the main component of plant biomass – had only been converted into hydrogen via a gasification process that uses high temperatures to "decompose it fully."

The university said that the new technique involved the addition of catalytic nanoparticles to alkaline water containing biomass.

The solution is put in front of a lab based light mimicking solar light, and was described as being "ideal" for absorbing the light and turning the biomass into gaseous hydrogen.

"There's a lot of chemical energy stored in raw biomass, but it's unrefined, so you can't expect it to work in complicated machinery, such as a car engine," David Wakerley, from the University of Cambridge's Department of Chemistry, said in a statement.

"Our system is able to convert the long, messy structures that make up biomass into hydrogen gas, which is much more useful," Wakerley added.

"We have specifically designed a combination of catalyst and solution that allows this transformation to occur using sunlight as a source of energy. With this in place we can simply add organic matter to the system and then, provided it's a sunny day, produce hydrogen fuel."

Different types of biomass, including wood and leaves, were used, and did not need to be processed prior to the experiments, the university said.

"Our sunlight-powered technology is exciting as it enables the production of clean hydrogen from unprocessed biomass under ambient conditions," Erwin Reisner, head of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Sustainable SynGas Chemistry, where the technology was developed, said.

"We see it as a new and viable alternative to high temperature gasification and other renewable means of hydrogen production," Reisner added, before going on to say that a range of potential commercial options were being explored.
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/15/scientis ... omass.html
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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby Iamwhomiam » Thu Mar 16, 2017 2:38 pm

While a great improvement, it is still a fossil or carbon-based fuel the needs to be burned which releases carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. No More Burning needs to be policy.

I still applaud this development while recognizing we must insist oil and gas industries capture as much natural gas (methane) as is technologically possible to burn to power civilization or to flare it off without taking it as a loss for tax purposes.
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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Sep 02, 2017 1:54 pm

Space15 bursts of radio emission detected from dwarf galaxy 3 billion light years away

15 bursts of radio emission detected from dwarf galaxy 3 billion light years awaybrian wang | September 2, 2017 |

Image

Last Saturday, a telescope in a remote area of West Virginia picked up those 15 bright radio burst signals from a distant corner of the universe, and yesterday, a group of astronomers and astrophysicists shared preliminary results on their observations.

They detected 15 bursts above our detection threshold of 10 sigma in the first two 30-minute scans. They include the detection signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of each burst, along with a very rough estimate of pulse energy density assuming a 12 Jy system equivalent flux density, 300 us pulse width, and uniform 3800 MHz bandwidth.

Breakthrough Listen is a global astronomical initiative launched in 2015 by Internet investor and philanthropist Yuri Milner and cosmologist Stephen Hawking. As part of their program to observe nearby stars and galaxies for signatures of extraterrestrial technology, the Listen science team at UC Berkeley added FRB 121102 to their list of targets. In the early hours of Saturday, August 26, UC Berkeley Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Vishal Gajjar observed the location of FRB 121102 using the Breakthrough Listen backend instrument at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. The instrument accumulated 400 TB of data on the object over a five hour observation, observing the entire 4 to 8 GHz frequency band. This large dataset was searched for signatures of short pulses from the source over a broad range of frequencies, with a characteristic dispersion, or delay as a function of frequency, caused by the presence of gas in space between us and the source. The distinctive shape that the dispersion imposes on the initial pulse is an indicator of the amount of material between us and the source, and hence an indicator of the distance to the host galaxy.

Analysis by Dr. Gajjar and the Listen team revealed 15 new pulses from FRB 121102. As well as confirming that the source is in a newly active state, the high resolution of the data obtained by the Listen instrument will allow measurement of the properties of these mysterious bursts at a higher precision than ever possible before.

The observations also show for the first time that FRBs emit at higher frequencies (with the brightest emission occurring at around 7 GHz) than previously observed. The extraordinary capabilities of the Listen backend, which is able to record several gigahertz of bandwidth at a time, split into billions of individual channels, enable a new view of the frequency spectrum of FRBs, and should shed additional light on the processes giving rise to FRB emission.

When the recently-detected pulses left their host galaxy our entire Solar System was just 2 billion years old. Life on Earth consisted of only single-celled organisms, and it would be another billion years before even the simplest multi-cellular life began to evolve. Whether or not FRBs eventually turn out to be signatures of extraterrestrial technology, Breakthrough Listen is helping to push the frontiers of a new and rapidly growing area of our understanding of the Universe around us.

Breakthrough Listen is a scientific program in search for evidence of technological life in the Universe. It aims to survey one million nearby stars, the entire galactic plane and 100 nearby galaxies at a wide range of radio and optical bands.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/09/1 ... -away.html
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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 02, 2018 7:15 pm

n
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Tue Jan 02, 2018 8:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby Blue » Tue Jan 02, 2018 7:32 pm

seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 02, 2018 5:15 pm wrote:
Speed breeding technique sows seeds of new green revolution

Pioneering new technology is set to accelerate the global quest for crop improvement in a development which echoes the Green Revolution of the post war period.

The speed breeding platform developed by teams at the John Innes Centre, University of Queensland and University of Sydney, uses a glasshouse or an artificial environment with enhanced lighting to create intense day-long regimes to speed up the search for better performing crops.

Using the technique, the team has achieved wheat generation from seed to seed in just 8 weeks. These results appear today in Nature Plants.

This means that it is now possible to grow as many as 6 generations of wheat every year - a threefold increase on the shuttle-breeding techniques currently used by breeders and researchers.

Dr Brande Wulff of the John Innes Centre, Norwich, a lead author on the paper, explains why speed is of the essence:

"Globally, we face a huge challenge in breeding higher yielding and more resilient crops. Being able to cycle through more generations in less time will allow us to more rapidly create and test genetic combinations, looking for the best combinations for different environments."

For many years the improvement rates of several staple crops have stalled, leading to a significant impediment in the quest to feed the growing global population and address the impacts of climate change.

Speed breeding, says Dr Wulff, offers a potential new solution to a global challenge for the 21st century.

"People said you may be able to cycle plants fast, but they will look tiny and insignificant, and only set a few seed. In fact, the new technology creates plants that look better and are healthier than those using standard conditions. One colleague could not believe it when he first saw the results."

The exciting breakthrough has the potential to rank, in terms of impact, alongside the shuttle-breeding techniques introduced after the second world war as part of the green revolution.

Dr Wulff goes on to say: "I would like to think that in 10 years from now you could walk into a field and point to plants whose attributes and traits were developed using this technology."

This technique uses fully controlled growth environments and can also be scaled up to work in a standard glass house. It uses LED lights optimised to aid photosynthesis in intensive regimes of up to 22 hours per day.

LED lights significantly reduce the cost compared to sodium vapour lamps which have long been in widespread use but are ineffective because they generate much heat and emit poor quality light.

The international team also prove that the speed breeding technique can be used for a range of important crops. They have achieved up to 6 generations per year for bread wheat, durum wheat, barley, pea, and chickpea; and four generations for canola (a form of rapeseed). This is a significant increase compared with widely used commercial breeding techniques.

Speed breeding, when employed alongside conventional field-based techniques, can be an important tool to enable advances in understanding the genetics of crops.

"Speed breeding as a platform can be combined with lots of other technologies such as CRISPR gene editing to get to the end result faster," explains Dr Lee Hickey from the University of Queensland.

The study shows that traits such as plant pathogen interactions, plant shape and structure, and flowering time can be studied in detail and repeated using the technology.

The speed breeding technology has been welcomed by wheat breeders who have become early adopters.

Ruth Bryant, Wheat Pathologist at RAGT Seeds Ltd, Essex, UK, said: "Breeders are always looking for ways to speed up the process of getting a variety to market so we are really interested in the concept of speed breeding. We are working closely with Dr Wulff's group at the John Innes Centre to develop this method in a commercial setting."

Dr Allan Rattey, a wheat crop breeder with Australian company Dow AgroSciences, has used the technology to breed wheat with tolerance to pre-harvest sprouting (PHS) a major problem in Australia.

"Environmental control for effective PHS screening and the long time taken to cycle through several cycles of recurrent selection were major bottle necks. The speed breeding and targeted selection platform have driven major gains for both of these areas of concerns."

The full paper: Speed breeding is a powerful tool to accelerate crop research and breeding is available at Nature Plants.
http://www.sciencecodex.com/speed-breed ... ion-618078


What??? I'm really surprised you would post this slad. There are so many things wrong with this I don't know where to begin. Wheat crops in and of themselves are sickening people, not feeding them. Dow AgroSciences? That Dow??? We do not need to speed up and modify real food to "feed the world." We need to get off the corporate train of CRAAP: Chemically Rearranged Animals And Plants that they sell us as "food."

This is not good science or nutrition. This is green washing. Fake news.
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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 02, 2018 8:01 pm

I deleted it would you like to delete your repeat of it?

thanks for letting me know...sorry for the mistake

I didn't mean to commit a crime

from now on I will stick to what I know ...trump :)
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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby Blue » Tue Jan 02, 2018 8:18 pm

Hey friend - you didn't commit a crime. Your mistake was easy to make since greenwashing is everywhere.
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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Jan 02, 2018 8:23 pm

Wheat, dow and corporate famine fallacies aside, I think this sounds very cool. First, because LED vs sodium lamp energy footprint reduction is cool. Second, because for botanists, plant scientists, horticulturists all, the ability to simply study generations of the same plant and its genetics in a shorter period of time is cool. Given that the author says it can be *combined* with CRISPR, it seems speed breeding is distinct from (if beneficial for) genetic modification. Given how lo-fi the tek sounds (glasshouses or artificial environments and LEDs), this also sounds extremely portable / scalable. Really all this seems to be saying is there's been a fairly analogue but paradigmatic breakthrough in the ability to observe more plants in less time. I don't see how that wouldn't also be useful to organic farmers as much as admittedly satanic wheat magnates, no?

edit: op removed?
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Re: super-science breakthrough compendium thread

Postby Blue » Tue Jan 02, 2018 8:50 pm

liminalOyster » Tue Jan 02, 2018 6:23 pm wrote:Wheat, dow and corporate famine fallacies aside, I think this sounds very cool. First, because LED vs sodium lamp energy footprint reduction is cool. Second, because for botanists, plant scientists, horticulturists all, the ability to simply study generations of the same plant and its genetics in a shorter period of time is cool. Given that the author says it can be *combined* with CRISPR, it seems speed breeding is distinct from (if beneficial for) genetic modification. Given how lo-fi the tek sounds (glasshouses or artificial environments and LEDs), this also sounds extremely portable / scalable. Really all this seems to be saying is there's been a fairly analogue but paradigmatic breakthrough in the ability to observe more plants in less time. I don't see how that wouldn't also be useful to organic farmers as much as admittedly satanic wheat magnates, no?

edit: op removed?


From the original:

"Globally, we face a huge challenge in breeding higher yielding and more resilient crops. Being able to cycle through more generations in less time will allow us to more rapidly create and test genetic combinations, looking for the best combinations for different environments."

For many years the improvement rates of several staple crops have stalled, leading to a significant impediment in the quest to feed the growing global population and address the impacts of climate change


Increased yields of staple crops in and of itself is nothing but increased capital distribution and has absolutely nothing to do with healthy feeding of humans. Humans thrive without dependencies upon commodities likes wheat, corn and soybeans that are saturated in toxic chemicals. In fact most illnesses are attributed to these very CRAAP items that are in all mainstream restaurants and groceries.

Useful to organic farmers? Um, I've worked on an organic farm and the answer is no.
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