Month: July 2017

A federal judge on Friday overturned Utah's so-called "ag-gag" ban on filming private agribusiness and slaughterhouse operations without permission. US District Judge Robert Shelby said the measure, enacted in 2012, violated the First Amendment.

The named plaintiff, Amy Meyer, in 2013 faced up to six months in prison for filming—from the side of a public road—a sick cow being moved in a tractor at a slaughterhouse.

"I was shocked when I was the one charged with a crime instead of that animal's abusers," Meyer said after the ruling. "It should never be a crime to tell the story of an animal who is being abused and killed, even if it's for food."

Several weeks ago, artist and coder Janelle Shane tried to train a neural network to name paint colors. The results were...not good. "Stanky Bean" was a kind of dull pink, and "Stoner Blue" was gray. Then there were the three shades of brown known as "Dope," "Burble Simp," and "Turdly."

These results were so bad that they turned the corner into delightful hilarity, and Shane's blog post about them went viral. Almost immediately, AI coders started offering tips on how she could tweak the algorithm to get better results. So Shane dutifully went back to the virtual drawing board, adjusted the AI's creativity levels, and gave it some new datasets. The results were...well, you decide.

First, Shane realized that part of the initial problem was that she'd cranked up the neural net's "temperature" variable, which meant that it was picking less likely (or "more creative") possibilities as it generated paint names letter-by-letter. So she turned the temperature variable down, and found that the names were still pretty silly but they at least matched the colors most of the time. Plus, the colors themselves seemed more varied:

Netflix

The science fiction fairy tale Okja begins with a press conference so insane that it's actually believable. In the near future, the Mirando corporation is trying to boost its stock prices by announcing a new project: superpigs, giant food animals whose poop is environmentally friendly. They'll feed the world without polluting it! That's when things get really weird—and mesmerizing.

Mirando's new president Lucy Mirando (played with demented gusto by Tilda Swinton) is also introducing herself to the world at this media circus. She's like some kind of YouTube star crossed with a biotech exec, talking in hyperactive confessional mode about how she's so much cooler than her twin sister Nancy, the company's previous president. And don't even get her started on their crazy, evil father who made Mirando into an animal-torture factory. He was awful. Now that Lucy is in charge, however, everything is going to be wonderful! And beautiful! When Lucy's not hunting the world for "miracles" like the superpig, she designs uniforms for her private security force. That's just how creative she is. You won't want to miss the new scientific wonders coming from Mirando!

Enlarge / Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Getty images)

The US Justice Department announced criminal charges against former Audi manager Giovanni Pamio late last week. The 60-year-old manager was on a team concerned with thermodynamics in Audi’s diesel engine department between 2006 and 2015—the years when Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche were producing diesel vehicles that included "defeat device" software. The illegal software killed the cars' emissions control system when the the cars sensed that they were being driven in real-world conditions and not in a lab where emissions were to be detected and reported to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

According to the Justice Department, Pamio and his team realized that it would be impossible to meet nitrogen oxide (NO_x) emissions standards without the addition of a large tank for urea formula, called AdBlue, which would have neutralized some of the emissions. The addition of the large AdBlue tank would "interfere with features considered to be attractive to customers, such as a high-end sound system," the Department of Justice said.

Pamio then allegedly "directed Audi employees to design and implement software functions to cheat the standard US emissions tests," and gave false information to US regulators about how those software functions worked.

Enlarge / A scanning electron micrograph of Neisseria gonorrhoeae. (credit: NIH)

At least three people in three different countries have turned up with cases of completely incurable gonorrhea—and it’s unclear what happened to all of them and if they’re spreading the infection to others, officials at the World Health Organization report.

These cases highlight two big concerns about gonorrhea: one is that resistance to last-line drugs is alarmingly popping up around the world and appears to be increasing; and the second is that we have lousy surveillance and data on this.

In two reports in PLOS Medicine, the WHO warned of the dangers of drug-resistant gonorrhea infections, which can cause infertility and increase the risk of contracting other infections in those left untreated. Summarizing the latest surveillance data, WHO researchers found worldwide incidence of drug-resistant infections and announced that these are on the rise. However, while the data is worrying, it doesn’t actually demonstrate international increases—because there just isn’t enough data to do so.

Enlarge (credit: Elle Cayabyab Gitlin)

Earlier this year, I brought you the story of how my cats—Tux, Tuffy, and Nigel—donated their poo to science. While that was—if you'll excuse the pun—mainly for shits and giggles, Tuffy ended up following up on that research, although not by choice. I put him in a follow-up study to see if a fecal microbiome transplant could cure his inflammatory bowel disease. The little chap's gut flora showed a textbook response to the treatment, and it did what drastic changes to his diet and twice-daily doses of powerful steroids couldn't: it ended the chronic diarrhea that was absolutely no fun for anyone involved.

Here, kitty

As DNA and RNA sequencing has gotten faster and cheaper, they've allowed scientists to delve deeper into cataloguing the communities of microbes that live on our skin and in our guts. And the results have been quite interesting. For example, location matters. While everyone's microbiome—like their genome—is unique, the assortment of bacteria that live behind my ears is far more similar to those living behind someone else's ears than they are to the bacteria that live on my hands.

While that may just be academically interesting, many hope that a better understanding of the microbiome will lead to improvements in human health. By combining microbiome data with medical histories, it's possible to correlate different conditions with different microbial populations. And although that's resulted in some overstated claims, what's become clear is that the microbiome can have real consequences to our health—particularly if the microbiome changes following exposure to antibiotics, antibacterial soaps, or environmental chemicals.

Enlarge / Four images from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color data from the spacecraft's Ralph instrument to create this enhanced color global view of Pluto. (credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University/SWRI)

Humanity's expansion into the Solar System seems to be a recurrent theme around here. We dedicated a podcast to The Expanse and reviewed the book Beyond Earth, which imagines humanity colonizing Saturn's moon Titan. Recently, we got a chance to look at a different take on humanity's travels to other worlds, one that goes a step beyond political drama and existential threats.

Instead, it's all about planetary tourism. Set up like a travel guide, with chapters for each planet and Pluto, Vacation Guide to the Solar System imagines a future in which people spend a couple of decades to do a round-trip to Saturn and don't want to miss any of the major sights when they get there. And, while Vacation Guide is anything but a hard science book, you'll probably end up smarter for having read it. Which is the entire point.

Guerillas in space

The book's authors, Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich, belong to a group called Guerilla Science, which uses art, installations, performances, and more to try to insert a little science into the lives of people who weren't necessarily looking for it. The group started the Intergalactic Travel Bureau as a bit of a performance—members of Guerilla Science would act as travel planners and ask people what they were interested in before suggesting a planet that would suit those tastes. Eventually, the made-up bureau morphed into an actual storefront in Manhattan.

Enlarge / This plaque honoring Robert Recorde is at the Tenby Museum in Wales. (credit: Tenby Museum)

Robert Recorde was one of those people so irritatingly extraordinary that you're almost glad when they come to a tragic end. In the 16th century, he made advances in economics, medicine, theology, and poetry. But his greatest contribution is taught to every elementary school child, and it arguably laid the groundwork for modern computer science. He invented the equals sign.

From urine to popular science

Recorde was born in 1510 in Tenby, Wales. At age 14, he went to Oxford University. At age 21, he was teaching mathematics there, although scholarship wasn't his first career goal. Over the next few years, he also earned a degree in medicine and wrote the exquisitely titled monograph The Urinal of Physick, detailing what a physician could learn from a patient's urine.

Either medicine proved less fascinating than Recorde had anticipated, or less lucrative. Over the next decade, he moved from medicine to finance and oversaw mints in Bristol, London, and Dublin. The writer's life, however, clearly appealed to him. He produced a large and varied body of work: theological tracts defending Protestantism, poems, and most importantly, textbooks.