New Psychology Theory Enables Computers to Mimic Human Creativity
“A dealer in antique coins gets an offer to buy a beautiful bronze coin. The coin has an emperor’s head on one side and the date “544 B.C.” stamped on the other. The dealer examines the coin, but instead of buying it, he calls the police. Why?
Solving this “insight problem” requires creativity, a skill at which humans excel (the coin is a fake — “B.C.” and Arabic numerals did not exist at the time) and computers do not. Now, a new explanation of how humans solve problems creatively — including the mathematical formulations for facilitating the incorporation of the theory in artificial intelligence programs — provides a roadmap to building systems that perform like humans at the task.
Ron Sun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor of cognitive science, said the new “Explicit-Implicit Interaction Theory,” recently introduced in an article in Psychological Review, could be used for future artificial intelligence.
“As a psychological theory, this theory pushes forward the field of research on creative problem solving and offers an explanation of the human mind and how we solve problems creatively,” Sun said. “But this model can also be used as the basis for creating future artificial intelligence programs that are good at solving problems creatively.”"
Read more at Science Daily (Thanks Stephen)
WikiLeaks: new diplomatic cables contain UFO details, Julian Assange says
Assange said there were some references to extraterrestrial life in yet-to-be-published confidential files obtained from the American government. He did not disclose what information was contained in the diplomatic memos obtained by the whistleblowing website. It also remains unclear when they will be published.
Mr Assange said his website, under considerable strain in recent days over its “Cablegate” series of leaks, received emails from “weirdos” claiming to have seen UFOs.
Mr Assange’s comments were made during a webchat with The Guardian, during which he confirmed his team were taking security precautions due to “threats against our lives”.
Full article at Telegraph
Science: A Challenge to TV Orthodoxy – Brian Cox
The put-him-in-your-pocket-and-take-him-home Professor Brian Cox uses this year’s Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture to address the main challenges in bringing science to television. His speech addresses the problems that he faced in his own series for momentarily dismissing astrology and Dr Ben Goldacre’s treatment in the press around the MMR vaccines. He also visits the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle which Cox describes as “factually total bollocks” even though he defends the right of the makers to broadcast it.
Via AMB
NASA Finds New Life
“NASA has discovered a new life form, a bacteria called GFAJ-1 that is unlike anything currently living in planet Earth. It’s capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything.
NASA is saying that this is “life as we do not know it”. The reason is that all life on Earth is made of six components: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.
That was true until today. In a surprising revelation, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon and her team have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today, working differently than the rest of the organisms in the planet. Instead of using phosphorus, the newly discovered microorganism—called GFAJ-1 and found in Mono Lake, California—uses the poisonous arsenic for its building blocks. Arsenic is an element poisonous to every other living creature in the planet except for a few specialized microscopic creatures.
According to Wolfe Simon, they knew that “some microbes can breathe arsenic, but what we’ve found is a microbe doing something new—building parts of itself out of arsenic.” The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding organisms in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth. Like NASA’s Ed Weiler says: “The definition of life has just expanded.”"
Read more at Gizmodo (Thanks @HorzaGobachul)
Man eats nothing but potatoes for two months
“Chris Voight, executive director of the Washington Potato Commission, set himself the task of cutting out all other foodstuffs for 60 days to prove the nutritional value of the starchy vegetable. His challenge was an attempt to prove to the US Government that the potato should remain a part of the school lunch programme, amid claims from the US Institute of Medicine that it should be replaced by other vegetables. For 60 days, the 45-year-old denied himself all foods except potatoes, seasoning such as salt and pepper, and a little oil to cook them in.
As he ended his trial at midnight on Monday, Mr Voight, denied that the experiment had damaged his health, claiming it had helped him lose 21 pounds and lower his cholesterol. He told the Today programme: “I absolutely feel great. I’ve always had lots of good energy on this diet, I’ve had no strange side effects, I sleep well at night. I just had my last medical exam today and it came back fabulous.” Such a diet may be enough to put most people off potatoes for life, but in his interview, recorded hours before the end of his diet, Mr Voight said the experience hadn’t deterred him in the slightest. He said: “Actually I plan on eating potatoes tomorrow, it’s just I’m planning on putting something on them and eating something with them, not just potatoes any more. “I want some salsa on some nice beef tacos with some grilled potatoes and maybe some ice cream and some milk.”
The only negative health impact Mr Voight would admit to suffering during his potato marathon was a deficiency in some fat-soluble vitamins such as Vitamins A and E, but he added: “Luckily I was a little overweight so there was a natural store of a lot of those in me already.” He accepted, however, that eating nothing but potatoes was not a “sustainable diet”.”
Read more at The Telegraph (Thanks Johnny5)
Weatherwatch: Snowflakes
“The first snowflakes of the season have arrived for many of us, and what beauties they are. Back in 1611 Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer, tore himself away from the stars for a while and admired snowflakes instead, noticing that almost every snowflake had six sides. He postulated that this was because it was the most efficient way for frozen moisture to pack together.
Despite not knowing about the existence of atoms and molecules, Kepler was thinking along the right lines. We now know that water molecules determine the shape of a snowflake, with the oxygen atoms usually arranging themselves in hexagonal layers. The average snowflake contains as many as 180bn molecules of water.
But not every snowflake has six sides. Thanks to “Snowflake Bentley” (Wilson A Bentley), who lived in Vermont in the US at the turn of the 19th century, we know that snowflakes can take on many shapes. He was the first to photograph a single snowflake crystal, and in his lifetime he took over 5,000 photos of snowflakes, categorising them into 80 types, including needles, columns and a wide variety of hexagonal forms.
As a result of his work, meteorologists were able to show that shape is determined by the weather conditions inside the cloud. Six pointed star snowflakes tend to form in the upper part of clouds, where temperatures are coldest. Lower in the cloud, where it is warmer, columns, needles and hexagonal plates can form too.”
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks @incognitoDBer)
US embassy cables culprit should be executed, says Mike Huckabee
“The Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has called for whoever leaked the 250,000 US diplomatic cables to be executed.
Huckabee, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination at the last election but is one of the favourites for 2012, joined a growing number of people demanding the severest punishment possible for those behind the leak, which has prompted a global diplomatic crisis.
His fellow potential Republican nominee Sarah Palin had already called for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be “hunted down”, and an adviser to the Canadian prime minister has echoed her comments.
Huckabee said: “Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.”
He added, according to Politico: “They’ve put American lives at risk. They put relationships that will take decades to rebuild at risk. They knew full well that they were handling sensitive documents they were entrusted.
“And anyone who had access to that level of information was not only a person who understood what their rules were, but they also signed, under oath, a commitment that they would not violate. They did … Any lives they endangered, they’re personally responsible for and the blood is on their hands.”"
Read more at The Guardian
How to create temperatures below absolute zero
“ABSOLUTE zero sounds like an unbreachable limit beyond which it is impossible to explore. In fact there is a weird realm of negative temperatures that not only exists in theory, but has also proved accessible in practice. An improved way of getting there, outlined last week, could reveal new states of matter.
Temperature is defined by how the addition or removal of energy affects the amount of disorder, or entropy, in a system. For systems at familiar, positive temperatures, adding energy increases disorder: heating up an ice crystal makes it melt into a more disordered liquid, for example. Keep removing energy, and you will get closer and closer to zero on the absolute or kelvin scale (-273.15 °C), where the system’s energy and entropy are at a minimum.
Negative-temperature systems have the opposite behaviour. Adding energy reduces their disorder, and hence their temperature. But they are not cold in the conventional sense that heat will flow into them from systems at positive temperatures. In fact, systems with negative absolute temperatures contain more atoms in high-energy states than is possible even at the hottest positive temperatures, so heat should always flow from them to systems above zero kelvin.
Creating negative-temperature systems to see what other “bizarro world” properties they might have is tricky. It is certainly not done by cooling an object down to absolute zero. It is, however, possible to leap straight from positive to negative absolute temperatures.”
Read more at New Scientist
‘Trillions’ of Earths orbit red stars in older galaxies
“Astronomers say the Universe may contain three times the number of stars as is currently thought.
Their assessment is based on new observations showing other galaxies may have very different structures to our Milky Way galaxy.
The researchers tell the journal Nature that more stars probably means many more planets as well – perhaps “trillions” of Earth-like worlds.
The Yale University-led study used the Keck telescope in Hawaii.
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There are possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars”
Professor Pieter Van Dokkum
Yale University
It found that galaxies older than ours contain 20 times more red dwarf stars than more recent ones.
Red dwarfs are smaller and dimmer than our own Sun; it is only recently that telescopes have been powerful enough to detect them.
According to Yale’s Professor Pieter van Dokkum, who led the research, the discovery also increases the estimate for the number of planets in the Universe and therefore greatly increases the likelihood of life existing elsewhere in the cosmos.
“There are possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars,” he said. “Red dwarfs are typically more than 10 billion years old and so have been around long enough for complex life to evolve on planets around them. It’s one reason why people are interested in this type of star.”"
Read more at BBC News
Partial reversal of aging achieved in mice
“Harvard scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute say they have for the first time partially reversed age-related degeneration in mice, resulting in new growth of the brain and testes, improved fertility, and the return of a lost cognitive function. In a report posted online by the journal Nature in advance of print publication, researchers led by Ronald A. DePinho, a Harvard Medical School (HMS) professor of genetics, said they achieved the milestone in aging science by engineering mice with a controllable telomerase gene. The telomerase enzyme maintains the protective caps called telomeres that shield the ends of chromosomes.
As humans age, low levels of telomerase are associated with progressive erosion of telomeres, which may then contribute to tissue degeneration and functional decline in the elderly. By creating mice with a telomerase switch, the researchers were able to generate prematurely aged mice. The switch allowed the scientists to find out whether reactivating telomerase in the animals would restore telomeres and mitigate the signs and symptoms of aging. The work showed a dramatic reversal of many aspects of aging, including reversal of brain disease and infertility.
While human applications remain in the future, the strategy might one day be used to treat conditions such as rare genetic premature aging syndromes in which shortened telomeres play an important role, said DePinho, senior author of the report and the director of Dana-Farber’s Belfer Institute for Applied Cancer Science. “Whether this would impact on normal aging is a more difficult question,” he added. “But it is notable that telomere loss is associated with age-associated disorders and thus restoration of telomeres could alleviate such decline.” The first author is Mariela Jaskelioff, a research fellow in medicine in DePinho’s laboratory.”
Read more at Harvard Science (Thanks Christopher C)
