Artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) can provide better answers to patients than physicians. Eating chocolate might affect your brain and cognitive functions. It may not make you smarter, but it might brighten your mood. Obesity may shorten your disease-free lifespan. A supplement called Netrin-1 appears to rejuvenate the bone marrow. Prior research indicated that high status individuals … Continue reading Science and Technology links (May 6 2023)
Ovaries age quickly in women. By the age of 40, most ovaries are poorly functional. However, there is an ongoing clinical trial to check whether the drug rapamycin might slow down this aging. It is one out of several initiatives to post-pospone and maybe reverse procreative aging in women. Glycine, a cheap supplement, might prolong … Continue reading Science and Technology links (April 29 2023)
There are many theories regarding what biological aging. Animals can differ by up to six orders of magnitude (100000x) in longevity. Some animal species like the lobster or the naked model rate do not exhibit measurable biological aging (they have negligible senescence) whereas trees and other plants often have negative aging (they get more fit … Continue reading Science and Technology links (April 22 2023)
Some university professors include ‘trigger warnings’ in their course material, to warn students that potentially disturbing content may be encountered. According to Birdgland et al., the research on the effectiveness of trigger warnings suggests that not beneficial, the triggers themselves cause anxiety. Switching 12% of the global livestock from pigs and chicken to ruminants (e.g., … Continue reading Science and Technology links (April 15 2023)
Robert Metcalfe won the Turing Award (the ‘Computer Science Nobel Prize’) for his work on early networking. According to DBLP, Metcalfe published 11 journal articles and 7 peer-review conference papers. Metcalfe was denied his PhD at first. Among other things, he is known for the following law: Metcalfe’s law states that the financial value or … Continue reading Science and Technology links (April 11 2023)
In 1500, China was the largest economy in the world, followed by India and France. The USA did not exist yet. In 1700, 4% of human beings lived in France. In the mid 18tg century, there are 25 million inhabitants in France and 5.5 million in England. Yet France had slipped to a sixth place … Continue reading Science and Technology links (March 11 2023)
Kenny finds that the returns due to education are declining. Rich countries are spending more on education, with comparatively weaker test results. It costs more than ever to train a PhD student, but it takes ever longer for them to complete their studies. There 25 times more crop researchers today than in the 1970s, but … Continue reading Science and Technology links (February 12 2023)
For under $600, one can buy a 20-terabyte disk on Amazon. Unless you work professionally in multimedia, it is more storage than you need. However, having much storage it, by itself, of little use if you cannot access it. Thankfully, you can buy a 1-terabyte “disk” for $200 that provides over 6 GB/s of bandwidth. … Continue reading Science and technology links (January 15 2023)
OpenAI made public a new tool called ChatGPT. It is widely regarding as a practical breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Given a question, it can produce a coherent essay-length answer. Last week, my employer held a meeting to discuss how it will impact college classes. OpenAI expects to make a billion dollars in 2024 with ChatGPT. … Continue reading Science and Technology links (December 25 2022)
As we focus on some types of unfortunate discrimination (race, gender), we may become blind to other types of discrimination. For example, tend to discrimate against ugly people, short men, old people, and so on. Life may have emerged on Earth thanks to ‘aqueous microdroplets’. Naked mole rats are long-lived mammals. We believe that they … Continue reading Science and Technology links (December 11 2022)
In Molière’s famous play, Tartuffe, the main characters is outwardly pious but fundamentally deceitful. Are people who insist on broadcasting their high virtue better people, or are they more like Tartuffe? Dong et al. (2022) conclude that people who say that they have good values are not necessarily better people in practice, but they are … Continue reading Science and Technology links (November 26 2022)
Doctors in Israel are toying with polygenic screening: it is a way to make it more likely that your baby will grow up to be healthy. In 2021, 337 million prescriptions were written for antidepressants in US, according to the New York Times. Students in private schools do better in India than those attending government-run … Continue reading Science and Technology links (October 16 2022)
Attractive female students get better grades. They lose this benefit when courses move online. A research paper is much more likely to be highly ranked if the author is famous. The USA has many more prisoners than police officers (three prisoners for every police officer), while every other developed country has the reverse ratio. Diluting … Continue reading Science and Technology links (September 16 2022)
A standard dataset in artificial-intelligence research has ten percent of its images mislabeled. Yet state-of-the-art algorithms achieve better-than-90% classification on the same dataset. (Credit: Leo Boytsov) Despite the reeducation camps and the massive trauma, families that did well before the Chinese socialist revolution are still doing well. In other words, it is difficult and maybe … Continue reading Science and Technology links (September 12 2022)
Increase in computing performance explain up to 94% of the performance improvements in field such as weather prediction, protein folding, and oil exploration: information technology is a a driver of long-term performance improvement across society. If we stop improving our computing, the consequences could be dire. The coral cover of the Great Barrier Reef has … Continue reading Science and Technology links (August 7 2022)
Compared to 1800, we eat less saturated fat and much more processed food and vegetable oils and it does not seem to be good for us: Saturated fats from animal sources declined while polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils rose. Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) rose over the twentieth century in parallel with increased consumption of processed foods, … Continue reading Science and Technology links (July 23 2022)
Becoming a physician increases the use of antidepressants, opioids, anxiolytics, and sedatives, especially for female physicians. When trying to reproduce results in cancer researchers, independent researchers find that the benefits are typically grossly exaggerated. A large planet has been found orbiting two suns. It is orbiting from very far away. NASA sent a probe in … Continue reading Science and Technology links (December 19th 2021)
It used to be that all the exciting new processors came from Intel and AMD, and they were meant for your PC. The mobile revolution changed that: it lead to the production of fantastic processors that used little energy. We are now moving back into laptops and servers. The leading supplier of servers is probably … Continue reading Science and Technology links (December 4th 2021)
Government-funded research is getting more political and less diverse: The frequency of documents containing highly politicized terms has been increasing consistently over the last three decades. The most politicized field is Education & Human Resources. The least are Mathematical & Physical Sciences and Computer & Information Science & Engineering, although even they are significantly more … Continue reading Science and Technology links (Novembre 28th 2021)
Pacific rougheye rockfish can live hundreds of years while other rockfish barely live past ten years. Female condors can reproduce without males. The phenomenon is known as parthenogenesis and it occurs in birds such as chickens. It does not happen in mammals naturally as far as we know. Chimpanzees can thrive in virtual reality. People … Continue reading Science and Technology links (Novembre 13rd 2021)