Studying Alzheimer's through a video game; Lessons learned about dietary hype; Floating cities inch closer to reality; New data coming to the Department of Energy's college scorecard; and more...
Business, News, Science, Technology, or whatever gets my attention.
Straight from my RSS feed:
Ten links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
- A Video Game for Detecting Alzheimer's Disease - The Sea Hero Quest video game was created by neuroscientists in order to measure spacial orientation abilities in people. The game scenarios were designed from the scientific literature, and distributed through a cell phone app. In this manner, the researchers gained consent and access to data from millions of people in almost every country. Aside from Alzheimer's, age, gender, and socio-economic factors were also linked with orientation skills. h/t RealClear Science
- Lessons From the Great Antioxidant Lie - Early studies in the 1990s showed potential health benefits from antioxidants, and a booming industry was built on hyping these studies. However, later controlled studies did not confirm the expected benefits. The article offers four general lessons from this history: (i) Test tube studies rarely translate to actual human findings; (ii) Scientists can get too attached to their ideas; (iii) Be skeptical of things that seem too good to be true; and (iv) When it comes to diet, ignore the hype.
- Floating cities are getting far closer to reality than ever before — but they won't be the libertarian utopias billionaires have proposed - Historical efforts at floating cities have been aimed at promoting human flourishing and incubating ideas through the creation of independent sea-born societies. In contrast, the UN is currently reviewing plans for Oceanix City, which is a prototype for a design that is autonomous, but not independent. Instead, it would serve as a solution for homelessness, providing low-rent housing, and it would be managed by local governments.
- Finally, students can comparison shop the cost of their college majors - With an expanding scorecard from the Department of Education, prospective students will be able to compare average debt levels by major at a specific college or else compare average debt levels across colleges for the same major. Critics warn that it may not go far enough in protecting students and claim that regulation may be needed.
- “Great dismay:” When a lack of originality is tough to swallow - Researchers submitted a surgical repair for a swallowing disorder to the European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery as "novel", but it turns out that the repair had already been described in earlier literature. The 2013 paper with 2 citations has now been withdrawn.
- A Curious Sequence of Prime Numbers - Because of computational difficulty, only 51 terms are known from the Euclid-Mullin sequence. It is an infinite sequence of prime numbers that is generated by taking the smallest prime factor from the sum of 1 and the product of all previous numbers in the sequence. It begins with the numbers: 2, 3, 7, 43, 13, 53, 5, 6221671, and 41 is the smallest prime number that is not known to be in the sequence. The article speculates that it may be an alternative natural order of the set of prime numbers.
- Stronger than aluminum, a heavily altered wood cools passively - In a recently published technique, researchers say they are able to improve the utility of wood by boiling it in concentrated hydrogen peroxide which removes lignin polymers from the material and leaves behind cellulose polymers. The resultant product is then compressed and hardened into a material that is strong, naturally reflects sunlight, and radiates heat from inside a structure, thus providing a passive cooling mechanism. The researchers modeled the material's use as a covering in a variety of environments, and determined that it could reduce energy usage for cooling by an average of 35%, and up to 50% in a dense urban setting.
- Statistics Say Screens Aren't Destroying Today's Teens - Despite a flood of news stories decrying the harm of screen time for teenagers, recent research does not support the hype. According to the video, a 2017 study found that the effect is statistically significant, but the effect size is tiny, so cutting screen time would not have a practical effect on mental health, and a 2019 study found that the cause may be reversed - teens with depression are motivated to seek more screen time. Finally, the effect was first observed in a large multivariate study, which makes it more likely to be a false positive. h/t RealClear Science
- STEEM Wasps Display Ability Once Thought Limited to Humans - As covered in my May 9 Interesting Links Post, here is another report, by @ribbitingscience, on the Nature paper which described an experiment which showed that wasps are able to use transitive inference at a level that exceeds random chance. In other words, they can recognize experimentally that if A > B and B > C, then A > C. In addition to describing the finding, @ribbitingscience also points out that this would probably be a useful skill because wasps utilize a shifting hierarchical social organization. (5% of this post's rewards will go to @ribbitingscience)
- STEEM THE AUTOMATION OF THE ECONOMY - In this commentary, @migueliglesias argues that the ever-increasing drive for more advanced technology and productivity means that the human laborer is being replaced by robots and other technologies. This article takes the viewpoint that the transformation is unavoidable and it will be accompanied by two financial trends: (i) Universal Basic Income will provide sustenance income for displaced workers; and (ii) International capital flows will reverse from the cheap labor of the developing world to the automated labor of the developed world. (@migueliglesias will receive 5% of the rewards from this post.)
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