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The Science Thread

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basilio said:
How many people here follow Professor Brian Cox ? Exceptional scientist and communicator. Just watched his latest series on The Forces of Nature.
Fascinating ideas and the trips to various parts of the globe and different cultures to explore the ideas is brilliant. Well worth the time.

[video]http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/forces-of-nature-with-brian-cox/ZW0469A001S00[/video]
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He's an excellent communicator in all strands of science. The best I've seen.
 
pixel said:
Brought across from the off-topic discussion in another thread:

The Mystery Of Dark Energy

http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/727305283889/the-mystery-of-dark-energy

It's an update on recent theories on Cosmology. I heartily recommend watching it while it's still available at "SBS on Demand".
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I am not able to view that particular documentary without setting up an account and downloading a specific app.

Are you able to give a summation of the case presented for the dark energy hypothesis?

If it's similar to the basis for belief in dark matter, then it most certainly contains at least one critical flaw.
 
You learn something new every day. Interesting video on the square root of 2 and how it relates to the A series of paper sizes (A4 etc.)

 
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Capilano Honey is pleased to confirm the launch of the world’s first clinically-tested prebiotic honey, Beeotic.
Consuming prebiotic rich foods can help the good bacteria in your gut grow, improving the good-to-bad bacteria ratio and therefore helping improve your digestive health.
Hitting shelves from 19 September, Beeotic is the result of extensive research and a world-first clinical study conducted through the University of New South Wales (UNSW) to identify the widely recognised, but until now unproven, prebiotic health potential of select Australian honeys. The focus of the clinical study was to scientifically validate the specifications of a prebiotic honey to deliver consumers certainty around its potential health and wellness benefits.
The clinical study found that at a dose of 14mL, approximately one tablespoon per day, certain honeys significantly raised the levels of good bacteria and suppressed potentially harmful bacteria in the digestive tract. Furthermore, levels of good bacteria decreased once the participants stopped taking the honey for a period of time.
Capilano has made considerable investment into developing industry-first testing methods to identify honeys that deliver this prebiotic content. Each batch of Beeotic honey is independently tested for particular sugar profiles in order to identify which honeys contain the required prebiotic components. Nothing is added, nothing is taken away, Beeotic is just 100 per cent pure Australian honey. Capilano has a provisional patent filed in order to protect the product.
The product was recently listed with the Therapeutic Goods Administration and Capilano’s Queensland facility has been licenced to manufacture, which involved an upgrade to quality systems, plant and equipment.
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Probably good for the CZZ share price (very nice packaging), but honey is just straight sugar so... you know, you can get those prebiotics in low-sugar yoghurts if you like that sort of thing?
 
Gringotts Bank said:
you know, you can get those prebiotics in low-sugar yoghurts if you like that sort of thing?
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I think you are talking about probiotics. eg the actual bacteria

A prebiotic is what allows the probiotics to grow and multiply, it sets up the favourable conditions in the gut for the good bacteria, sugar is not just sugar and honeys aren't just honey, different types of honey have different benefits.

probiotic - a microorganism introduced into the body for its beneficial qualities

Prebiotic - a non-digestible food ingredient that promotes the growth of beneficial microorganisms in the intestines.

There are various types of sugar derived from different sources. Simple sugars are called monosaccharides and include glucose (also known as dextrose), fructose, and galactose. The table or granulated sugar most customarily used as food is sucrose, a disaccharide.
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different honeys contain different molecules of sugar, and other elements are different between honeys also, flavour, colours etc are different, but not just that, the are lots of other differences, that make honey from different sources active in other ways.
 
OCD cure in under 20 minutes - one symptom, anyway. Very cool. Howie had/has an extreme, chronic case, apparently. I've just been reading up about him online.

 
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IBM’s Watson gives proper diagnosis for Japanese leukemia patient after doctors were stumped for months

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/ibm-watson-proper-diagnosis-doctors-stumped-article-1.2741857

My comment....

What I find fascinating, even scary, about trends in AI is that it will soon reach a point where machines understanding of things (medicine, science whatever) will start increasing at not just an exponential rate, but an explosive rate.

Let's take this scenario. We have two scientists that are renowned in two different areas of science. Perhaps chemistry and evolutionary biology. Both are experts in their own fields, but likely only have the knowledge of an intelligent layperson in the field of the other. Although projects can bring people from different disciplines together to work on common problems, it may be that one person who has expertise in diverse disciplines is able to gain an insight into problems that a group of people with the same overall body of knowledge cannot (perhaps due to personal rivalries, communication skills etc.). If our two renowned scientists were tasked with acquiring the same expertise in the other scientist's discipline as they have in their own, it would probably not be possible, particularly if achieving that skill level required a lifetime of study and practice.

Now we have two robots that each have been fed the knowledge of those two disciplines (one each) as Watson has on medicine. I am looking a few years into the future with this scenario. The robots may have equivalent skills in their area of expertise as the respective renowned scientists had. But for one of the robots to acquire the expertise of the other may simply be a trivial communications task of perhaps downloading a few gigabytes of code. And that doesn't just apply to two disciplines. It could apply to all bodies of knowledge, the only constraints being memory capacity and processing capability which are increasing exponentially annually (Moore's Law where it still holds).

And where you may have only a dozen or so scientists that have similar knowledge levels of our two scientists in their areas of discipline, you could create thousands of robots with the multi-discipline advanced knowledge.

I would think that this capability is probably less than 10 years away and its potential for good and bad is likely beyond our comprehension, but hopefully not beyond our control, which would be very scary indeed.
 
bellenuit said:
I would think that this capability is probably less than 10 years away and its potential for good and bad is likely beyond our comprehension, but hopefully not beyond our control, which would be very scary indeed.
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As long as we have control over the power switch.
 
Very interesting article in The Guardian on a computer program that analyses the data in scientific papers and then flags errors, or possibly deliberate fraud. Well worth a read.
The long read
The hi-tech war on science fraud
The problem of fake data may go far deeper than scientists admit. Now a team of researchers has a controversial plan to root out the perpetrators

by Stephen Buranyi


Wednesday 1 February 2017 17.00 AEDT

748 Shares
342 Comments

One morning last summer, a German psychologist named Mathias Kauff woke up to find that he had been reprimanded by a robot. In an email, a computer program named Statcheck informed him that a 2013 paper he had published on multiculturalism and prejudice appeared to contain a number of incorrect calculations – which the program had catalogued and then posted on the internet for anyone to see. The problems turned out to be minor – just a few rounding errors – but the experience left Kauff feeling rattled. “At first I was a bit frightened,” he said. “I felt a bit exposed.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/01/high-tech-war-on-science
 
I love these multiple choice questions where an algo does its best to trick you but actually gives you the answer...

Q:What do the letters DNA stand for?

If we look at the frequecy of word fragments in the multiple choice:

oxy (2)
ribo (2)
nucleic (3)
acid (2)

too ez!

6/10 - Cool I passed yr10
 

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