Science is Cool....

[Fish]

This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.

Post pictures, vidoes, stories, or links. Ask questions. Share science.

Why should I care?:

[Fish]

Google Scientists recently... wait.... what? Google Scientists? Google is employing scientists now?

Anyway, Google Scientists recently created a "brain", an AI system that is capable of "learning". What's the first thing the AI taught itself? Finding cat pics online. Yup....

Google Brain Teaches Itself to Recognize — What Else? — Cats
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors, which they turned loose on the Internet to learn on its own. Presented with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos, what did Google’s brain do? What millions of humans do with YouTube: looked for cats.

The neural network taught itself to recognize cats, which, John Markoff of The New York Times reports, is actually no frivolous activity. This week the researchers will present the results of their work at a conference in Edinburgh. The Google scientists and programmers will note that while it is hardly news that the Internet is full of cat videos, the simulation nevertheless surprised them. It performed far better than any previous effort by roughly doubling its accuracy in recognizing objects in a challenging list of 20,000 distinct items.

The research is representative of a new generation of computer science that is exploiting the falling cost of computing and the availability of huge clusters of computers in giant data centers. It is leading to significant advances in areas as diverse as machine vision and perception, speech recognition and language translation.

Google scientists said that the research project had now moved out of the Google X laboratory and was being pursued in the division that houses the company’s search business and related services. Potential applications include improvements to image search, speech recognition and machine language translation.

[Frankie]

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[BossChief]

So, I think this is kinda scary and thought I'd share in this thread rather than starting a new one.

A family member of mine is a high ranking official at the Ames research facility in northern California. He has always shared facinating things with me when I ask direct questions. I was out there last month I asked him at dinner if he thinks there is anything to this whole mayan calendar thing and if I should expect to prepare for anything out of the ordinary.

This is a full eye contact guy that is a total straight shooter. If I ask, he ALWAYS answers without beating around the bush.

This time was different.

He immediately looked down, wouldn't look at me at all and said "you know, Paul...I really don't know"

I'm going back out there in a few days and am contemplating asking again, thinking maybe it was due to the public setting that he didn't want to talk openly about it...but he got "shook" when I asked him.

Do you guys think it would be rude to ask again?

[Fish]

I have very little worry about any Mayan prophecies. The Mayans were incredibly advanced in some ways. But they were not prophets or experts in future events. The amazing part about the Mayan calendar was its chronological accuracy, not its ability to predict future events. It was simply math, not prediction of any sort. The were masters of astronomy, and the cyclical patterns of the heavens. Which allowed them to project their calendars into the future thousands of years with astonishing accuracy. But that's very different than predicting any actual events that would/could occur at those future times other than astronomical stuff. Predicting the position or phase of the moon has nothing to do with the world ending by fire and brimstone and raining frogs and rivers of blood.

Also remember that there are many different Mayan calendars. And most of them have already cycled past the supposed end of the world date, due to the invention of leap years in the Gregorian calendar. Some of them won't cycle for many many years after Dec. 2012.

[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by KC Fish

I have very little worry about any Mayan prophecies. The Mayans were incredibly advanced in some ways. But they were not prophets or experts in future events. The amazing part about the Mayan calendar was its chronological accuracy, not its ability to predict future events. It was simply math, not prediction of any sort. The were masters of astronomy, and the cyclical patterns of the heavens. Which allowed them to project their calendars into the future thousands of years with astonishing accuracy. But that's very different than predicting any actual events that would/could occur at those future times other than astronomical stuff. Predicting the position or phase of the moon has nothing to do with the world ending by fire and brimstone and raining frogs and rivers of blood.

Also remember that there are many different Mayan calendars. And most of them have already cycled past the supposed end of the world date, due to the invention of leap years in the Gregorian calendar. Some of them won't cycle for many many years after Dec. 2012.

This. And even if the world ends, WTF are you going to do about it other than make peace with God?

Futile worrying if you ask me.

[Dave Lane]

I think it would be a waste of time but not rude. The Mayans didn't "know" anything or even predict the end of the world. Just the end of an age. I'd be more scared of a rabbits foot.




It might have fleas.

Originally Posted by BossChief

So, I think this is kinda scary and thought I'd share in this thread rather than starting a new one.

A family member of mine is a high ranking official at the Ames research facility in northern California. He has always shared facinating things with me when I ask direct questions. I was out there last month I asked him at dinner if he thinks there is anything to this whole mayan calendar thing and if I should expect to prepare for anything out of the ordinary.

This is a full eye contact guy that is a total straight shooter. If I ask, he ALWAYS answers without beating around the bush.

This time was different.

He immediately looked down, wouldn't look at me at all and said "you know, Paul...I really don't know"

I'm going back out there in a few days and am contemplating asking again, thinking maybe it was due to the public setting that he didn't want to talk openly about it...but he got "shook" when I asked him.

Do you guys think it would be rude to ask again?

[BossChief]

I guess I've been thinking of it a lot because I think if there was nothing to it, he would have made a joke or answered quickly.

Him saying he didn't know was one thing out of the ordinary...looking away was totally not like him.

He probably had lots ofother stuff on his mind and I'm overthinking things...

[Fish]

You're probably right. The thing is, everything we know about the Mayans has come from scientists/historians with no agenda for hiding information. Quite the opposite, everything they learned is pretty much readily available to anyone who wants to learn. It's essentially out of the US government, or any other organization's control as far as hiding any information about it. And everything that is known indicates that the Mayans had no intentions of predicting the end of time/civilization/etc. Or predicting anything for that matter, other than where the moon or Venus might be positioned exactly 6 months from now.

Some of the most knowledgeable people in the world regarding Mayan culture and history have said the entire Mayan end of world idea is totally bunk and completely a product of misinformation and overactive imagination. That's good enough for me..

[Sofa King]

Originally Posted by KC Fish

If you have time to kill... watch this ****ing documentary about the Mantis Shrimp, aka the Ninja Shrimp. One of the most fascinating crazy creatures I've learned about in quite a while. Seriously worth 45 minutes...

I skipped to the middle of that movie.

I laughed out loud at 13:49 in that movie. hilarious.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by Sofa King

I skipped to the middle of that movie.

I laughed out loud at 13:49 in that movie. hilarious.

.... you would....

[Fish]

Science's Long—and Successful—Search for Where Memory Lives

After more than a century of searching, an answer was recently found, strangely enough, just eight miles from Grauman’s. Although not located on any tourist map, the scene of the discovery can be reached easily from Hollywood Boulevard by heading west on Sunset to the campus of UCLA. There, amid one of the densest clusters of neuroscience research facilities in the world, stands the Gonda (Goldschmied) Neuroscience and Genetics Research Center. And sitting at a table in the building’s first-floor restaurant, the Café Synapse, is the neuroscientist who has come closer than anyone ever thought possible to finding the place where memories are written in the brain.

That spot, the physical substrate of a particular memory, has long been known in brain research as an engram. Decades of scientific dogma asserted that engrams exist only in vast webs of connections, not in a particular place but in distributed neural networks running widely through the brain. Yet a series of pioneering studies have demonstrated that it is possible to lure specific memories into particular neurons, at least in mice. If those neurons are killed or temporarily inactivated, the memories vanish. If the neurons are reactivated, the memories return. These same studies have also begun to explain how and why the brain allocates each memory to a particular group of cells and how it links them together and organizes them—the physical means by which the scent of a madeleine, the legendary confection that sparked Marcel Proust’s memory stream, leads to remembrance of things past.

“It’s amazing,” says neurobiologist Alcino Silva, codirector of the UCLA Integrative Center for Learning and Memory. “For the last hundred years, scientists have been looking for the engram in the brain. We have now gotten to the point that we know enough about memory and how memories are formed that we can actually find the engram, and by finding it, we can manipulate it.”

The implications of that finding hold promise for the treatment of human memory disorders. On the one hand, it points the way toward the selective targeting of neurons that hold memories of events so traumatic that people are disabled by them. That violent attack that you cannot get over? Deactivate those neurons in the amygdala that are linked to it, and you might still remember the attack but be freed from the unbearable pall of fear. With 3.5 percent of U.S. adults estimated to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) over the course of a given year, an effective new treatment would mark a mental-health milestone.

While PTSD sufferers remember too well, those with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia suffer the opposite problem. And just as Silva and others studying engrams have demonstrated the ability to delete memories, they have also shown they can strengthen them. This past July Silva’s colleague Sheena Josselyn, a neurobiologist at the University of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, reported that her lab improved memory in mice bred to have the equivalent of Alzheimer’s. Using the same tools effective in creating and then purging fear, she boosted an entire brain region, the hippocampus, known to be critical for forming long-term memories.

Offering up what he concedes is a “science fiction kind of idea,” Silva wonders if physicians treating patients with Alzheimer’s “could direct memories to those regions of the brain that remain strong. Especially in neurodegenerative disorders, you have parts of the brain that are healthy and others that are not. If we find strategies to funnel memories to those parts that are still intact, we may be able to extend function longer.”

More in the link....

[Huffmeister]

Originally Posted by BossChief

He immediately looked down, wouldn't look at me at all and said "you know, Paul...I really don't know"

He was probably looking down so you couldn't see his eyes rolling as he was thinking "Jesus, not this crap again."

[prhom]

http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/Pres...er-ice-hot.asp

Attention CP expert physicists: if you can explain why warm water freezes faster than cool water you can win £1000. Pretty cool stuff.

[Ebolapox]

Originally Posted by BossChief

So, I think this is kinda scary and thought I'd share in this thread rather than starting a new one.

A family member of mine is a high ranking official at the Ames research facility in northern California. He has always shared facinating things with me when I ask direct questions. I was out there last month I asked him at dinner if he thinks there is anything to this whole mayan calendar thing and if I should expect to prepare for anything out of the ordinary.

This is a full eye contact guy that is a total straight shooter. If I ask, he ALWAYS answers without beating around the bush.

This time was different.

He immediately looked down, wouldn't look at me at all and said "you know, Paul...I really don't know"

I'm going back out there in a few days and am contemplating asking again, thinking maybe it was due to the public setting that he didn't want to talk openly about it...but he got "shook" when I asked him.

Do you guys think it would be rude to ask again?

[ThaVirus]