Official "Science News" Thread

[rogue]

After 65 Years, Supercomputers Finally Solve This Unsolvable Math Problem

I'm curious as to the algorithm they used as it wasn't described because there would be no reason to try every combination of integers. For example, if all 3 terms end in 1, then they cannot yield a result that ends in 2.

[rogue]

Emojis are increasingly coming up in court cases. Judges are struggling with how to interpret them

The way words mean

The brain, the criminal and the courts

Crows love cheeseburgers. And now they’re getting high cholesterol.

Working In While Eating Out: The Evolution of Doing Business While Dining

Fast radio bursts from space have baffled scientists for years. But an explanation may come soon.

Six Brain Hacks To Learn Anything Faster

13 English Expressions with Surprisingly Funny Origins (Including 'Spill the Beans')

[axn]

Originally Posted by rogue

After 65 Years, Supercomputers Finally Solve This Unsolvable Math Problem

I'm curious as to the algorithm they used as it wasn't described because there would be no reason to try every combination of integers. For example, if all 3 terms end in 1, then they cannot yield a result that ends in 2.

https://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=24251 has some more info.

[ewmayer]

A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked | The Atlantic - Oddly, the webpage header for this article carries the rather different title "Does Free Will Exist? Neuroscience Can't Disprove It Yet":

Neuroscientists know that for people to make any type of decision, our neurons need to gather evidence for each option. The decision is reached when one group of neurons accumulates evidence past a certain threshold. Sometimes, this evidence comes from sensory information from the outside world: If you’re watching snow fall, your brain will weigh the number of falling snowflakes against the few caught in the wind, and quickly settle on the fact that the snow is moving downward.

But Libet’s experiment, Schurger pointed out, provided its subjects with no such external cues. To decide when to tap their fingers, the participants simply acted whenever the moment struck them. Those spontaneous moments, Schurger reasoned, must have coincided with the haphazard ebb and flow of the participants’ brain activity. They would have been more likely to tap their fingers when their motor system happened to be closer to a threshold for movement initiation.

This would not imply, as Libet had thought, that people’s brains “decide” to move their fingers before they know it. Hardly. Rather, it would mean that the noisy activity in people’s brains sometimes happens to tip the scale if there’s nothing else to base a choice on, saving us from endless indecision when faced with an arbitrary task. The Bereitschaftspotential would be the rising part of the brain fluctuations that tend to coincide with the decisions. This is a highly specific situation, not a general case for all, or even many, choices.

Other recent studies support the idea of the Bereitschaftspotential as a symmetry-breaking signal. In a study of monkeys tasked with choosing between two equal options, a separate team of researchers saw that a monkey’s upcoming choice correlated with its intrinsic brain activity before the monkey was even presented with options.

In a new study under review for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Schurger and two Princeton researchers repeated a version of Libet’s experiment. To avoid unintentionally cherry-picking brain noise, they included a control condition in which people didn’t move at all. An artificial-intelligence classifier allowed them to find at what point brain activity in the two conditions diverged. If Libet was right, that should have happened at 500 milliseconds before the movement. But the algorithm couldn’t tell any difference until about only 150 milliseconds before the movement, the time people reported making decisions in Libet’s original experiment.

In other words, people’s subjective experience of a decision—what Libet’s study seemed to suggest was just an illusion—appeared to match the actual moment their brains showed them making a decision.

The funny thing is, the term Bereitschaftspotential still works perfectly well for the new "random ebb and flow" paradigm. Instead of describing some kind of involuntary decision-making process, it can simply be take to refer to, paraphrasing the article, one's motor system happening to be close to a threshold for movement initiation based, in the absence of external stimuli, on the random ebb and flow of brain activity.

[ewmayer]

Study Finds the Universe Might Be 2 Billion Years Younger | Associated Press --

From the article:

"Jee and outside experts had big caveats for her number. She used only two gravitational lenses, which were all that were available, and so her margin of error is so large that it’s possible the universe could be older than calculated, not dramatically younger."

IOW, the error bars are so large that the study in fact tells us *nothing* useful about the age of the universe. Quite frankly, I'm surprised a study using a miniscule 2 data points got published, especially in a leading journal like Science. Would it have been that outrageous to reject for publication with a note to effect of "interesting methodology, but come back to us when you've got enough data points to shrink the error bars under a billion years"?

[rogue]

MIT Future of Work Report: We Shouldn’t Worry About Quantity of Jobs, But Quality

Something Special Is Happening in Rural America

Astronomers may have just detected the most massive neutron star yet

New Proof Solves 80-Year-Old Irrational Number Problem

This Simple Structure Unites All Human Languages

How the Black Turtleneck Came to Represent Creative Genius

Libraries and Archivists Are Scanning and Uploading Books That Are Secretly in the Public Domain

Seeing the Beautiful Intelligence of Microbes

First look: Wildlife Photographer of the Year 55

On 9/11, Luck Meant Everything

Venus’ Ocean of Air and Clouds

Scientists Discover New Evidence of the Asteroid That Killed Off the Dinosaurs

NASA’s Hubble Finds Water Vapor on Habitable-Zone Exoplanet for 1st Time

Physicists Finally Nail the Proton’s Size, and Hope Dies

Metaphors Are Us

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by rogue

Something Special Is Happening in Rural America

NYT working the happy-Pollyanna propaganda hard -- and here's a bunch of cheap and super-strong opioids with which to kill yourself once you realize that you could not possibly be happier than here and now in your corner of flyover country, amongst all the happenin' Deplorables.

Originally Posted by rogue

Scientists Discover New Evidence of the Asteroid That Killed Off the Dinosaurs

Non-paywalled version of this one:

https://cnnews9.com/2019/09/10/scien...treet-journal/

[rogue]

Big Question About Primes Proved in Small Number Systems

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by rogue

Big Question About Primes Proved in Small Number Systems

See also the arXiv posting On the Chowla and twin primes conjectures over $\mathbb F_q[T]$

[ewmayer]

o Fungus-Farming Ants Might Hold the Secret to Fighting Drug-Resistant Microbes - Discover Magazine

o Spiders Use Earth's Electric Field to Fly Hundreds of Miles | The Atlantic: Scientists are finally starting to understand the centuries-old mystery of “ballooning.”

On October 31, 1832, a young naturalist named Charles Darwin walked onto the deck of the HMS Beagle and realized that the ship had been boarded by thousands of intruders. Tiny red spiders, each a millimeter wide, were everywhere. The ship was 60 miles offshore, so the creatures must have floated over from the Argentinian mainland. “All the ropes were coated and fringed with gossamer web,” Darwin wrote.

Spiders have no wings, but they can take to the air nonetheless. They’ll climb to an exposed point, raise their abdomens to the sky, extrude strands of silk, and float away. This behavior is called ballooning. It might carry spiders away from predators and competitors, or toward new lands with abundant resources. But whatever the reason for it, it’s clearly an effective means of travel. Spiders have been found two-and-a-half miles up in the air, and 1,000 miles out to sea.

It is commonly believed that ballooning works because the silk catches on the wind, dragging the spider with it. But that doesn’t entirely make sense, especially since spiders only balloon during light winds. Spiders don’t shoot silk from their abdomens, and it seems unlikely that such gentle breezes could be strong enough to yank the threads out—let alone to carry the largest species aloft, or to generate the high accelerations of arachnid takeoff. Darwin himself found the rapidity of the spiders’ flight to be “quite unaccountable” and its cause to be “inexplicable.”

But Erica Morley and Daniel Robert have an explanation. The duo, who work at the University of Bristol, has shown that spiders can sense the Earth’s electric field, and use it to launch themselves into the air.

o Neutrino Experiment Reveals (Again) That Something Is Missing from Our Universe Live | Science -- Couple of unfortunate journalistic boners in an otherwise-interesting article. My corrections to the key passage in bold:

KATRIN is basically a very big machine for counting the super-high-energy electrons that burst out of a sample of tritium — a radioactive form of hydrogen. with one proton and two neutrons in each atom. Tritium is unstable, and one of its neutrons decays into a proton with accompanying emission of an electron-neutrino pair. KATRIN looks for the electrons and not the neutrinos because the neutrinos are too faint to precisely measure. And the machine uses tritium gas, according to Hamish Robertson, a KATRIN scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Washington, because it's the only electron-neutrino source simple enough to get a good mass measurement from.

Neutrinos are more or less impossible to precisely measure on their own because they have so little mass and tend to skip out of detectors without interacting with them. So to figure out the mass of the neutrinos, Robertson told Live Science, KATRIN counts the most energetic electrons and works backward from that number to deduce the neutrino's mass. The first results from KATRIN have been announced, and the researchers came to an early conclusion: Neutrinos have a mass no higher than 1.1 electron volts (eV).

Electron volts are the units of mass and energy physicists use when talking about the smallest things in the universe. (At the scale of fundamental particle, energy and mass are measured using the same units, and the neutrino-electron pairs have to have combined energy levels equivalent to the mass-energy difference between their source neutron and the proton into which it decays, a difference of roughly 1.3 million electron volts.) The Higgs boson, which lends other particles their mass, has a mass of 125 billion EV. Protons, the particles at the center of atoms, have masses of about 938 million eV. Electrons have a rest mass of a mere 510,000 eV. This experiment confirms that neutrinos are incredibly tiny.

That (neutron – proton – electron) rest mass difference still leaves (1.3 – 0.5) MeV unaccounted for, nearly all of which is covered by the “super-high-energy electron” bit – unlike the residual proton which remains in the nucleus, the electron goes flying off at nearly the speed of light, as does its decay-paired neutrino. i.e. both carry off a total mass/energy of roughly the full (neutron – proton) difference of 1.3 MeV. The tricky part is that even a low-rest-mass neutrino can have a very high mass/energy in near-speed-of-light flight, and it very difficult to determine the speed (as opposed to the total energy) of the emitted particles, so how does one determine first how much of the 1.3 MeV goes into each of the electron and the neutrino, and second, how much of the mass/energy fraction going into the neutrino is the relativistic component, and how much is the rest-mass component? That’s where a crucial quantum-mechanical quirk of such Tritium – to – He3 days comes in: “Usually, that extra energy gets distributed pretty evenly between the electron and the neutrino. But sometimes most or all of the remaining energy gets dumped into one particle or another. In that case, all of the energy left over after the neutrino and electron are formed is dumped into the electron partner, forming a super-high-energy electron”, i.e. in that case the accompanying emitted neutrino is more or less at rest.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

<snip>
o Spiders Use Earth's Electric Field to Fly Hundreds of Miles | The Atlantic: Scientists are finally starting to understand the centuries-old mystery of “ballooning.”

<snip>

One mark of a true scientist is willingness to say, "I can't explain this" or "I don't understand this."

I notice that the Atlantic article is from July 2018.

Also from July 2018, Spiders go ballooning on electric fields.