Robots, Lasers, Smog and the Moon
For the majority of people, science perhaps seems to advance in sudden leaps or the iconic ‘breakthrough’ that opens up new doors wide. The truth is much more systematic, plodding and much less exciting. Science progresses constantly, but at the tortoise’s consistent pace, rather than the hare’s bounding leaps.
Here, I intend to bring about a wider understanding of some of the less-dramatic but still important discoveries and developments around the world of ‘science’, from technology, to biology, to astronomy and more. The scientific discoveries of today are the cultural icons of tomorrow. Where would we be nowadays without the invention of the smartphone, or wireless internet or the electric engine? Those all started somewhere much more basic and less overtly exciting; perhaps the discoveries here will form the foundation of a future revolutionary technology or a further understanding of our reality.
I selected a wide variety of topics for this first post to paint a better picture of the nature of scientific progress. These articles discuss technology, sociology, astronomy and more; my intent is to cast a wider net to garner wider interest. Scientific journals and articles can be difficult to parse for those inexperienced with them, and it is my intent to do decipher the basic idea of the discoveries and share them on this blog.
The world of science is a deep and fascinating one that, in my opinion, not nearly enough people participate in. With my blog, I hope to spread that interest and fascination to a wider audience.
- Artificial Intelligence Learning the Human Side of Language
An experiment conducted by computer scientists at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA has begun to tackle one of the great drawbacks of modern interpretive artificial intelligences. English is a language of inflection and expression, and the same word can mean multiple different things depending on context.
By analyzing facial and audio patterns and implementing ways for the AI to interpret those patterns, the AI was able to more accurately understand the meaning of a sentence. The article uses the word ‘sick’ as an example of this; with a disgusted facial expression, it has one very clear meaning, but when paired with an expression and tone of excitement, ‘sick’ can mean something very different.
The scientists cited specific words that can have both positive and negative contexts, such as ‘expectations’ or ‘guy’ as the largest variations between tone and pitch for the purpose of interpretation. Other words, those with “inherent polarity” such as ‘don’t’ or ‘great’ had a much smaller variation.
What this can mean for the future is that artificial intelligences could become much more adept at detecting sarcasm and other inflections in our language. Perhaps this elicits ideas of Skynet to some, but computers that are able to more clearly understand our intentions is surely a useful tool for the future.
2. Air Pollution May Contribute to Lower Happiness Levels
While an altogether unsurprising headline, the seemingly-obvious must be researched all the same. Assumptions are dangerous to scientific progress; it is always important to remember that correlation is not causation. What appears to be true may, while still true, be due to a completely different factor. This rather humorous website provides many illustrations of seeming-related factors that are anything but.
While this is not an example of the so-called spurious correlation, the method used to come to the conclusion is interesting. The study used posts on Sina Weibo, a popular Chinese social media platform, across 144 Chinese cities to document a ‘happiness index’. The study used approximately 210 million posts to collect it’s data across 2014.
The data was cross-referenced with an ‘Air Quality Index’ to create the results. The study’s conclusions can’t be called absolute at this point, but several interesting potential conclusions are interesting. It is apparent at this point that the most sensitive to pollution are residents of the cities on the extremes, that is, the most and least polluted cities. In addition, overall, the happiness index of women appeared to be more severely affected.
3. Impact Witnessed During Recent Lunar Eclipse
On January 21st, millions around the Americas witnessed a Total Lunar Eclipse, but for some lucky astronomers, professional and amateur alike. A meteoroid, roughly basketball-sized, impacted the moon, creating a flash of light visible to enhanced viewing.
From this small amount of information, scientists calculated the size, speed and energy of the object. The findings resulted in a relatively small range estimate for the meteoroid, estimating it to be roughly 10–27 cm wide (approx. 4–11 inches) and mass of 7–40 kg (approx. 15–88 lbs). While these numbers seem wide at first glance, it’s important to understand the scale. The moon is 239,900 miles from earth, and with the relatively limited data available, an accuracy as close as this is impressive.
A smaller relative margin of error was found in the energy released. In only 0.30 seconds, approximately 4,000,000 joules of light energy were released, allowing scientists to infer an impact energy equivalent to 0.3–0.5 tons of TNT. It is this energy that was used to estimate the mass and diameter of the meteoroid.
What’s more, the authors of the article highlight the fact that their results are in a large part thanks to the “timely collaboration between professional and amateur astronomers”. With the advent of more accurate and powerful tools available to average citizens, and the rise of formerly-niche passions such as stargazing, it is quite intriguing to hear that scientists can use the information provided by hobbyists for real scientific conclusions.
4. Lasers Delivering Sound
Scientists at MIT have proven that it is possible to deliver sound directly to a human’s ears with nothing more than a laser. By using a laser to agitate water vapor in the air, audible sound was produced.
This has several interesting implications for future applications, as proposed by the abstract of the article. They refer to the process as “photoacoustic communications”, and could have potential uses for discrete or long-distant communications in an environment with large amounts of noise.
While at the current time, the only noise able to be transferred is a slight buzzing noise, the fact that it is consistent and audible implies that further application is possible. Future experiments may find methods to refine and stabilize this technology to a point that it becomes easily usable.
Perhaps in ten or twenty years, this form of communication will be the mainstay. Only those in the direct path of the laser could potentially hear the sound, so the privacy applications are quite potent. Two people could have a private conversation across a crowded auditorium, or you could listen to music as loud as you wanted without disturbing those around you. Regardless of future applications, this proof-of-concept certainly shines light on doors to be opened in the future.
All articles were found and sourced through ScienceNews.
