PopSci releases the terrifying news that computers can decode our humor now. We can’t tell jokes over their little silicon heads any more – they’ve got an algorithm to detect sarcasm:
SASI, a Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification, can recognize sarcastic sentences in product reviews online with pretty astounding 77 percent precision. To create such an algorithm, the team [...]
New Scientist uncorks a biological scandal involving research into the naughty things bats do after dark:
University College Cork in Ireland is coming under international pressure to lift a punishment meted out to one of its academics. Dylan Evans, a psychologist at the university’s school of medicine, has been saddled with a two-year period of intensive monitoring and counselling [...]
Yep. Science Daily says it’s a good idea to talk to children using grown-up language:
Academic language is characterised by difficult, abstract words and complex sentence structures. The language often contains a lot of clauses and conjunctions and due to the methods of argument and analysis it has a scientific appearance.
…
Henrichs demonstrated that children are already confronted with academic [...]
after Ann Druyan
I send for you my heartbeat,
the rhythms of my latest dream.
You are just now finding the frozen clicks
of muscles, cooling like just-parked cars.
Through endless fields of fire and dust,
we send whale song, one noisy kiss.
Every other romance
is nothingness now, every whale
a great cage of bone and blue air.
But fast to you, bright Ophiuchus,
one whispered love is dancing.
More [...]
The Christian Science Monitor (reprinting LiveScience) has published the greatest science headline I think I’ve ever read:
School-bus sized squid actually quite friendly, study finds.
The colossal squid, with its half-ton mass and razor-sharp tentacle hooks, seems pretty fierce. But new research suggests that the school-bus sized cephalopods are actually pretty mellow.
Not only that, but the story’s pretty interesting. I [...]
That’s what Sydney’s Daily Telegraph wants me to hear when they tell me about a strange malfunction affecting the Voyager 2 space probe:
But now the spacecraft is sending back what sounds like an answer: Signals in an unknown data format!
The best scientific minds have so far not been able to decipher the strange information – is it a [...]
Science magazine brings us a step closer to a Pleistocene Park by reporting on the creation of living mammoth blood:
By inserting a 43,000-year-old woolly mammoth gene into Escherichia coli bacteria, scientists have figured out how these ancient beasts adapted to the subzero temperatures of prehistoric Siberia and North America. The gene, which codes for the oxygen-transporting protein [...]
In case you were wondering, what with all the climate change talk nowadays, LiveScience reminds us that there’s still a hole in the sky:
First, the good news: Since the 1989 Montreal Protocol banned the use of ozone-depleting chemicals worldwide, the ozone hole has stopped growing. Additionally, the ozone layer is blocking more cancer-causing radiation than any time in a [...]
This video is from Essential Cell Biology, 3rd Edition by Alberts, Bray, Hopkin, Johnson, Lewis, Raff and Roberts (and apparently not from Tokyo Institute of Technology as credited elsewhere). They meant for this video to be educational; it is sublime. The root of all life as an aesthetic experience.
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