Links for 2021-09-09
Are you ready to live forever? — "Impetus Grants provides funding for scientists to start working on what they consider the most important problems in aging biology, without delay. Such work should not be held up by red tape: we offer grants of up to $500k, with decisions made within 3 weeks. Our review process asks "what's the potential for impact" rather than "could this go wrong"." https://www.impetusgrants.com/
MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy: New superconducting magnet breaks magnetic field strength records, paving the way for practical, commercial, carbon-free power. https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusion-energy-0908
Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts (on Ivermectin, the media, biases and rationality) astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-play-in-three
Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.01652
A mutation under strong positive selection in East Asians is linked to enlarged brain in males but the opposite in females. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msab243
Genetic and environmental contributions to IQ in adoptive and biological families with 30-year-old offspring: "We estimated the proportions of the variance in IQ attributable to environmentally mediated effects of parental IQs, sibling-specific shared environment, and gene-environment covariance to be 0.01 [95% CI 0.00, 0.02], 0.04 [95% CI 0.00, 0.15], and 0.03 [95% CI 0.00, 0.07] respectively; these components jointly accounted for 8% of the IQ variance in adulthood. The heritability was estimated to be 0.42 [95% CI 0.21, 0.64]. Together, these findings provide further evidence for the predominance of genetic influences on adult intelligence over any other systematic source of variation." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289621000635
Can room-temperature superconductors transform from a tantalizing glimmer to practical materials? https://www.science.org/news/2021/08/thanks-bit-diamond-smashing-practical-room-temperature-superconductivity-could-be-close
Why words become harder to remember as we get older? Researchers discover this is caused by certain networks in the brain https://www.mpg.de/17419971/0902-nepf-why-words-become-harder-to-remember-as-we-get-older-149575-x
How to Solve Any Problem Using Just Common Sense -- "Contemplating Fermi problems keeps me curious about the world and how things relate to one another." https://web.archive.org/web/20210831171711/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/magazine/fermi-problems.html
New ‘vortex beams’ of atoms and molecules are the first of their kind https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vortex-beam-atom-molecule-quantum-physics
“In total, between 100 and 150 million people were killed by their own, Marxist governments in the twentieth century. To be a Marxist, as far as I understand what that means, is to believe that, knowing all this, we should try again.” https://fakenous.net/?p=327