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"A Bayesian analysis showed that participants had high expectations and performed descriptively better irrespective of the AI description when a sham-AI was present. Using cognitive modeling, we could trace this advantage back to participants gathering more information."

Agnes Mercedes Kloft, Robin Welsch, Thomas Kosch, and Steeven Villa. 2024. "AI enhances our performance, I have no doubt this one will do the same": The Placebo effect is robust to negative descriptions of AI. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 299, 1–24. doi.org/10.1145/3613904.364263

@science @technology

attribution: Madhav-Malhotra-003, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

The History of Ions: Unveiling the Electric Charge

"Around 1830, Faraday posited the existence of charged particles within molecules that migrate between electrodes during electrolysis—an idea ahead of its time."

historyofsciences.blogspot.com

@science

attribution: Science History Institute, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

AI deception: A survey of examples, risks, and potential solutions

"Large language models and other AI systems have already learned, from their training, the ability to deceive via techniques such as manipulation, sycophancy, and cheating the safety test. AI’s increasing capabilities at deception pose serious risks, ranging from short-term risks, such as fraud and election tampering, to long-term risks, such as losing control of AI systems."

DOI: doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2024.

@science

"Researchers publish largest-ever dataset of neural connections

A cubic millimeter of brain tissue may not sound like much. But considering that that tiny square contains 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and 150 million synapses, all amounting to 1,400 terabytes of data, Harvard and Google researchers have just accomplished something stupendous."

news.harvard.edu/gazette/story

@science

DeepMind’s AI can ‘predict how all of life’s molecules interact with each other’

"AlphaFold 3 is able to envision how the complex shapes and networks of molecules – present in every cell in the human body – are connected and how the smallest of changes in these can affect biological functions that can lead to diseases."

independent.co.uk/news/science

@science

"...our data suggested that the Japanese population could be best modeled by admixtures of three ancestral components (hereafter K1 to K3). K1 to K3 were the highest in Okinawa, Northeast, and West, respectively (Fig. 1D and table S4). K1 (Okinawa) component maintains a relatively stable fraction of around 12% in Hondo subgroups, except for South (which is a region adjacent to Okinawa), with a higher proportion of 22%. K2 (Northeast) and K3 (West) components showed a cline from West to East."

Xiaoxi Liu et al., Decoding triancestral origins, archaic introgression, and natural selection in the Japanese population by whole-genome sequencing. Sci. Adv. 10, eadi8419 (2024). DOI: doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adi8419

@science

Science Doesn't Understand How Ice Forms

"What starts off as a simple desire to get a macro shot of a droplet of water freezing quickly leads George to the very edge of scientific knowledge and a shocking fact about most of the water on Earth."

length: 10 minutes 31 seconds

youtu.be/24TB1vPuzIU

@chemistry @science

The art of the bee

"As I set out to write a book on honey bee biology, I kept Humboldt as an aspirational model. Rather than write the typical biology text that reflected an excavation of levels of biological organization like taxonomy, biogeography, physiology, anatomy, etc., I built chapters around themes relating to honey bee impacts, behavior, and ecology."

blog.oup.com/2024/05/the-art-o

@bookstodon @science @biology

"Infant mortality rates have plummeted over the last 50 years.

Globally, they’ve fallen by over two-thirds, from around 10% in 1974 to less than 3% today.

The study’s researchers estimate that 40% of this decline is due to vaccines."

Hannah Ritchie (2024) - “Vaccines have saved 150 million children over the last 50 years” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'ourworldindata.org/vaccines-ch' [Online Resource]

@science

Scientists are trying to get cows pregnant with synthetic embryos

"Synthetic embryos are clones, too—of the starting cells you grow them from. But they’re made without the need for eggs and can be created in far larger numbers—in theory, by the tens of thousands."

technologyreview.com/2024/05/0

@science

Video of sun’s surface shows solar rain, eruptions and coronal moss

"Scientists say the observations of the sun’s complex surface dynamics could help resolve the question of why the sun’s atmosphere is so much hotter than its surface – a longstanding paradox in solar physics."

theguardian.com/science/articl

@science @astronomy

Space Day Reading List 2024

"Space has fascinated authors, scientists, storytellers, and children alike. From a brief history of the moon to a collection of diverse stories connected to the stars, our Space Day reading list will deepen your love and appreciation of the cosmos."

yalebooks.yale.edu/2024/05/03/

@bookstodon @science

What happens when the permafrost thaws? | The Royal Society

"Around 11% of the Earth's land mass is covered by permafrost. But its delicate balance is being threatened by climate change."

length: 8 minutes 14 seconds

youtu.be/SUxsAZKx-94

@science @climatechange

"Even though it was hoped that machines might overcome human bias, this assumption often fails due to a problematic or theoretically implausible selection of variables that are fed into the model and because of small size, low representativeness, and presence of bias in the training data [5.]."

Suchotzki, K. and Gamer, M. (2024) 'Detecting deception with artificial intelligence: promises and perils,' Trends in Cognitive Sciences [Preprint]. doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.04.

@science @psychology

attribution: Madhav-Malhotra-003, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

"While ChatGPT-4 correlates closely with established risk stratification tools regarding mean scores, its inconsistency when presented with identical patient data on separate occasions raises concerns about its reliability."

Heston TF, Lewis LM (2024) ChatGPT provides inconsistent risk-stratification of patients with atraumatic chest pain. PLOS ONE 19(4): e0301854. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0

@science

"They discuss the mathematics of gravity, including the work of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, gravitational waves, black holes, and recent developments in the field."

zencastr.com/z/rRvdO2Xn

@science

How Cambridge bred eugenics

"The term “eugenics” (from the Greek for ‘well born’) was birthed here in Cambridge by Trinity’s own Francis Galton in 1883. Galton was inspired by his cousin Charles Darwin and adapted the idea of natural selection to presuppose that the survival of the fittest had been distorted by social welfare policies."

varsity.co.uk/science/27401

@histodon @histodons

"In most work in the history of science, the approach is to show how a particular event or outcome was the result of various social and intellectual influences. Bayesian history of science, on the other hand, focuses on the lines of evidence relevant to the historical development to see if the direction taken by an individual or group of scientists was consistent or inconsistent with the evidence at hand."

Henry Small; Bayesian history of science: The case of Watson and Crick and the structure of DNA. Quantitative Science Studies 2023; 4 (1): 209–228. doi: doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00233

@science

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