Science 2.0

Am thrilled to report here that Scilight just launched a new gold open-access journal , " Brain, AI and Cognition ", of which I am the editor in chief. Below you can see the front page of a leaflet I will soon be distributing at the AI4X conference in Singapore, where I am due to give an invited talk (the two events are unrelated, but I think it will be a good place to do some advertisement of th…

What would you do if you disappeared, only to appear 24 hours later, with no memory of anything that happened and no change in you at all? And then the next day it happened again, except the time lapse doubled. What would your family do? I don't know about you, but my alibi would not hold up. If I disappeared for three days, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had better be with me when I return, or th…

A 1979 seismic event was a different kind of earthquake, and it is has intrigued scientists ever since. A new look at old data has provided some additional answers. On Feb. 24th, 1979, seismographs recorded a magnitude 3.8 earthquake under Randolph, Utah, located near the Idaho and Wyoming borders. Yet no one felt a thing and the seismic data made no obvious sense. Because its focal depth was 50 …

In times of social rancor and strife, most will fight each other, but societies are saved by those who think about the bigger issue. There is a lesson humans could learn from wasps. Polistes canadensis wasps are more like China than a democracy, so when their ruler dies, power struggles and social turmoil result. Amidst the violence and chaos, individuals compensate by helping the group rather th…

Europe alone has so much unpublished, un-catalogued biological data that it is challenging to take surveys and estimates about extinction risk and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the EU's claim it will protect 30 percent of land and sea by 2030 seriously. A new paper revealed government's don't even know what they are not protecting already. The work revealed 40 years of gathered but …

In 1994, United States President Bill Clinton fulfilled a campaign promise to his constituents by exempting supplements from any real FDA oversight. Scientists objected on the grounds that heavy marketing of alternatives to medicine would undermine confidence in actual medicine.(1) read more

A new computer estimate says that the ocean is an important carbon sink that absorbs 40 to 60 percent of China's anthropogenic CO2 emissions but tropical cyclones prevent the oceans from absorbing more. Understanding the impact of the ocean on sequestering carbon is important, because China builds two new coal plants each week and emits more pollution than the rest of the top 10 countries combine…

Five days are left to apply to a 2-year research position at INFN-Padova, to work in the context of the EIC-Pathfinder-2025 winning project " PHINDER " on the simulation of the apparatus. PHINDER (Picosecond-scale Photonic Heterogeneous Integrated Neuromorphic Detector) is a consortium of seven research institutes led by Lulea Technology University (Sweden), including Universidad de Oviedo, Eindh…

Nowadays it has become exceedingly hard to distinguish legitimate academic endeavours from scam in my mailbox. Not even AI filters can sort stuff out properly: my inbox often contains invitations to fake conferences, or to publish with non-existing journals, while my spam folder at times contains honest invitations of academic value. I could touch the reality of the problem a few months ago, when…

Every now and then, for one reason or another, an academic will have to update one's own CV. This is a chore in general - once you get tenure, why should you care to keep a detailed record of your past activities? - but it also carries some benefits. In fact, by sifting through the data (hard disk folders containing talks, large databases of publications, mailbox) you can get a bird's eye view of…

Though numerical models and popular films like An Inconvenient Truth projected Arctic ice collapse due to global warming and then climate change, the reverse was true in the real world. Ice expanded. That changed in 2015 and a new model estimates why. The authors say the Southern Ocean which surrounds Antarctica has gotten warmer, bringing salty water from the deep up to the surface. Those water …

You may have read that Asian cultures respect the elderly more than Europe but Asian senior citizens may not agree. However, it may not be that young people have gotten less respectful, it could be that young people are wealthier than in the past. And that makes them lonelier. Over the last 40 years, the wealth of countries like the United States and Japan have increased substantially. Poor peopl…

[For the first part of this two-part post, see here] Alas, we are all offenders. When we get stuck in a highway queue, with the clock ticking and our meeting time dangerously approaching, we often act irrationally, driven by instinct rather than rational thinking. But this needs not be so. Back home, as we sit in our old armchair with a long drink in our hand and coolly ponder at the problem, eva…

A new tool drawing on billions of uses of more than 20,000 words and diverse real-world texts claims to have found that human language is systematically biased, but not against things. It is instead biased toward safety and that has impacted everything from psychology claims to how Large Language Models (LLMs, colloquially called Artificial Intelligence and AI). read more

I was reached this evening by the news of the passing of a dear friend, Enrico Stomeo. Enrico was an architect by profession, but for me he was rather defined by his activity as an amateur astronomer - in fact, if I had to define what a serious amateur astronomer is, I would more or less consciously be describing him. [ Above, a recent picture of Enrico ] The Associazione Astrofili Veneziani read…

Californis is the largest dairy producer in the United States. It is also the most anti-science state, distrustful of the modern world. That is why coastal cities had measles parties until the COVID-19 pandemic happened; they believed the MMR vaccine caused autism in children. They love raw milk because they believed pasteurization eliminates magical nutrition that scientists can't detect. read m…

There are concerns about projected warming on the Earth’s surface and in the lower atmosphere even while the planet’s upper atmosphere has cooled. It's not a paradox, it's a pattern and a recent paper described the mechanics of how it works. The short answer is that carbon dioxide (CO2) reacts differently to wavelengths of light. Closer to earth, CO2 traps it but it makes the stratosphere better …

Nobody likes to wait in line. Whether you are sitting in your car waiting to reach the toll booths, on a plane waiting to disembark along with the other passengers, or in a queue at the ticket office, you may experience a range of feelings ranging from perplexity (“What am I doing here?”) to impatience (“Why is this not moving forward?”), to annoyance (“What is that idiot in the front chatting ab…

The Supreme Court recently issued another ruling that seeks to end racial discrimination. most recently in specially-created political districts. What has not been an issue, because it was not obvious like universities and Louisiana politics, is how grants get chosen. A new study says that there was a component of racial favoritism in science funding as well, and it's only been revealed in the wa…

We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology laughs at that notion. The next time you go on vacation, a new tool can show you how many places your vacation destination has been. Paleolatitude.org can do that, right down to the movements of small tectonic and ‘lost continents’ now called Greater Adria, the Tethys Himalayas or Argoland, which we kno…