Links for 2022-01-09
The 3-4-7 miracle. Why is this one not super famous? (starting at 08:45: The Coin rotation paradox) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEN0o9ZGmOM
After single injection, paralyzed animals regained ability to walk within four weeks. Bioactive scaffolds with enhanced supramolecular motion promote recovery from spinal cord injury. https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2021/11/dancing-molecules-successfully-repair-severe-spinal-cord-injuries/
Designer cytokine makes paralyzed mice walk again. Transneuronal delivery of hyper-interleukin-6 enables functional recovery after severe spinal cord injury in mice. https://news.rub.de/english/press-releases/2021-01-15-paraplegia-designer-cytokine-makes-paralyzed-mice-walk-again
Enhanced rationality in autism spectrum disorder: “Empirical evidence strongly suggests that individuals with ASD display enhanced rationality: judgments that are more objective and decision-making that is less biased than that of neurotypical individuals.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S136466132100125X
Goldfish can learn to navigate a small robotic vehicle on land. The authors trained goldfish to drive a wheeled platform that reacts to the fish’s movement. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166432821005994?dgcid=author
A Glimpse of the Deep: Finding a Creature in Ethereum's Dark Forest: “This monster was watching Ethereum for an obscure mistake deep in the process of creating a transaction: the reuse of a number while signing a transaction. I went searching for this creature, laid bait, saw it in the wild, and found unexplained tracks. To understand how this bot works, we need to begin by reviewing ECDSA and digital signatures.” https://bertcmiller.com/2021/12/28/glimpse_nonce_reuse.html
A big jump: SOTA moves from 81% to 86% on the very interesting ARC-Hard leaderboard ("The ARC dataset contains 7,787 genuine grade-school level, multiple-choice science questions, assembled to encourage research in advanced question-answering.") https://leaderboard.allenai.org/arc/submissions/public
Don't take psychedelics: "Results revealed significant shifts away from ‘physicalist’ or ‘materialist’ views, and towards panpsychism and fatalism, post use." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01209-2
Shared understanding of color among sighted and blind adults — “…congenitally blind and sighted individuals share in-depth understanding of object color. Blind and sighted people share similar intuitions about which objects will have consistent colors, make similar predictions for novel objects, and give similar explanations…” https://www.pnas.org/content/118/33/e2020192118
Sci-fi types of medical implants will soon become reality [WaPo] https://archive.fo/bLNxG
China has moon's south pole in its sights with 3 missions launching this decade https://www.space.com/china-upcoming-moon-missions-details
NASA’s Retiring Top Scientist Says We Can Terraform Mars and Maybe Venus, Too [NYT] https://web.archive.org/web/20220104111706/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/science/jim-green-nasa-mars.html
Forty years squandered by IQ environmentalists — “Even the strongest environmentalist evidence (based on Flynn’s opinion in 1980) has since weakened. The follow-up of the largest transracial adoption study showed a decrease in IQ for African American children adopted by White parents (Weinberg et al., 1992), a blow to the environmental hypothesis. Moreover, with the advent of DNA ancestry tests, all the admixture studies Flynn (1980) analyzed are obsolete. Forty years later, the environmentalists camp has little to show for their efforts. On the other hand, the hereditarians did the research Flynn suggested. They conducted the admixture studies. They collected heritability values for different groups. They created the genetically sensitive studies. The hereditarians spent 40 years strengthening their arguments and their data, while the environmentalists squandered their time. Now, the indirect evidence still supports the hereditarian hypothesis, and much of the direct evidence does, too. As a result, a majority of 21st century intelligence scholars subscribe to the hereditarian hypothesis (Rindermann et al., 2020).” https://russellwarne.com/2020/05/11/forty-years-squandered-by-iq-environmentalists/