hkl @hkl@qoto.org

🔴 **The 8 worst technology failures of 2024**

By Antonio Regalado

_“They say you learn more from failure than success. If so, this is the story for you: MIT Technology Review’s annual roll call of the biggest flops, flimflams, and fiascos in all domains of technology.”_

🔗 https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/12/17/1108883/the-8-worst-technology-failures-of-2024/

#Fails #Tech #Technology

Saturn's icy moon Enceladus captured by the Cassini spacecraft. The moon's surface is covered with fractures, folds, and ridges; signs of a tectonically active world.

Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI

Another resource to share: free and high-quality art for life sciences https://bioart.niaid.nih.gov/

Good quality drawings and schematics are very important to convey your science to others, although sometimes we scientists don't have time to make these, or cannot pay for tools like biorender. I really appreciate this initiative from NIH

An unhealthy outlier...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure?time=earliest..latest

Mysterious Cause of Massive Elephant Die-Off in 2020 Finally Revealed
https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-cause-of-massive-elephant-die-off-in-2020-finally-revealed?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Environment @environment-ScienceAlert

Scientists Urge Ban on 'Mirror Life' Before It Endangers Global Health
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-urge-ban-on-mirror-life-before-it-endangers-global-health?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Health @health-ScienceAlert

Fine, detailed newsletter post by @davetroy about the evolving state of social media. His analysis of Bluesky is especially interesting.

https://america2.news/without-sky-social-media-and-the-end-of-reality/

He ain't heavy, he's my brother 😅 A Twite and a Snow Bunting getting along just fine. In Finnish: vuorihemppo & pulmunen. 🇫🇮🪶❄️ #birds #birdsofmastodon #birdphotography #birdwatching #naturephotography #nature

A stunning time-lapse of Earth setting below the Moon's horizon captured by the Japanese spacecraft Kaguya as it orbits the Moon.

Credit: JAXA/NHK

World's oldest-known wild bird lays an egg in Hawaii at age 74
https://apnews.com/article/oldest-bird-lays-egg-wisdom-hawaii-5e7867ba9c8a51373d4d570f73fa7c2d?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into U.S. News @u-s-news-AssociatedPress

🔴 **‘Brain rot’: Oxford word of the year 2024 reflects ‘trivial’ use of social media**

Harry Taylor

_Oxford University Press said the term “gained new prominence in 2024 as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media”._

🔗 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/dec/02/brain-rot-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024

#BrainRot #English #Language #Word #WordOfTheYear #SocialMedia

This is what a rocket launch looks like from space.

Western bluebird

Time-lapse of the Sun circling the horizon at the South Pole during early March.

Video credit: Robert Schwarz
Source: https://vimeo.com/208466944

A different edit of the same encounter

still struggling but maybe you get the idea

#bird #birds #hummingbird #hummingbirds #BirdPhotography #BirdInFlight #BIFPhotography #NikonZ8 #Nature #outdoors

Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results #neuroscience #cogsci #neuroAI www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Large language models surpass ...

When I was a PhD student, I attended a talk by the late Robin Milner where he said two things that have stuck with me.

The first, I repeat quite often. He argued that credit for an invention did not belong to the first person to invent something but to the first person to explain it well enough that no one needed to invent it again. His first historical example was Leibniz publishing calculus and then Newton claiming he invented it first: it didn’t matter if he did or not, he failed to explain it to anyone and so the fact that Leibniz needed to independently invent it was Newton’s failure.

The second thing, which is a lot more relevant now than at the time, was that AI should stand for Augmented Intelligence not Artificial Intelligence if you want to build things that are actually useful. Striving to replace human intelligence is not a useful pursuit because there is an abundant supply of humans and you can improve the supply of intelligent humans by removing food poverty, improving access to education, and eliminating other barriers that prevent vast numbers of intelligent humans from being able to devote time to using their intelligence. The valuable tools are ones that do things humans are bad at. Pocket calculators changed the world because being able to add ten-digit numbers together orders of magnitude faster allowed humans to use their intelligence for things that were not the tedious, repetitive, tasks (and get higher accuracy for those tasks). If you want to change the world, build tools that allow humans to do more by offloading things humans are bad at and allowing them to spend more time on things humans are good at.

Longer videos work on another platform, so let's try them here. This #Neuroscience video is a morphological rendering of two parallel pathways in the #Drosophila anterior visual pathway, from Hulse et al. 2021. It was rendered with #Blender3d driven by neuVid.

Wow, TRISCO (née TRIC-DISCO) is out in Science! This cool approach allows imaging of mRNA transcripts throughout the cleared mouse brain. It uses a signal amplification step with in situ Hybridization Chain Reaction (isHCR) and combines it with DISCO-style solvent-based #tissueclearing to make the brain transparent.

Whole-brain spatial transcriptional analysis at cellular resolution
Kanatani et al., Science 2024
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adn9947

#neuroscience #lightsheet #microscopy #isHCR #mRNA #TRISCO