Science

Big Data forum adopts a new declaration to support the SDGs

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https://council.science/news/big-data-forum-adopts-a-new-declaration-to-support-the-sdgs/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=big-data-forum-adopts-a-new-declaration-to-support-the-sdgs

Big Data forum adopts a new declaration to support the SDGs

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https://council.science/news/big-data-forum-adopts-a-new-declaration-to-support-the-sdgs/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=big-data-forum-adopts-a-new-declaration-to-support-the-sdgs

Highlights

We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World.

We don’t have original copies of anything, not of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Herodotus, or the Bible. Instead of originals, we find ourselves dealing with copies. These were first written on scrolls but later in books – the Romans called books codexes – starting in the first century AD. Did I say copies? That’s actually not correct either. We don’t have first copies of anything. What we do have is copies of copies, most of which date hundreds of years after the original was penned. Even many of our copies are not complete copies.

To most fully acclimate the reader to how tenuous this process is, this essay will focus on three different texts. The first will be a very well-known work that was never lost. Nevertheless, almost no one read it in earnest until the nineteenth century. I will then focus on a text that was lost to history, but that we were able to recover from the annals of time. Such examples are fortuitous. Our third example will be a text that we know existed, but of which we have no copies, and consider what important ramifications its discovery could hold. Finally, we’ll turn our attention again to the Villa of the Papyri and the gold mine of texts discovered there that new technologies are currently making available to classicists.

However, many of the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri remain not only unread, but also unopened. This is because the eruption of Vesuvius left the scrolls carbonized, making it nearly impossible to open them. Despite this obstacle, Dr. Brent Seales pioneered a new technology in 2015 that allowed him and his team to read a scroll without opening it. The technique, using X-ray tomography and computer vision, is known as virtual unwrapping, and it was first used on one of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, specifically the En-Gedi scroll, the earliest known copy of the Book of Leviticus (likely 210–390 CE). The X-rays allow scholars to create a virtual copy of the text that can then be read like any other ancient document by those with the proper language and paleography skills. Using Dr. Seales’s technique, scholars have been able to upload many of the texts online. A group of donors led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross have offered cash prizes to teams of classicists who can decipher the writings. The race to read the virtually unwrapped scrolls is known as the Vesuvius Challenge.

Highlights

When seawater gets cold, it gets viscous. This fact could explain how single-celled ocean creatures became multicellular when the planet was frozen during “Snowball Earth,” according to experiments.

A series of papers from the lab of Carl Simpson proposes an answer linked to a fundamental physical fact: As seawater gets colder, it gets more viscous, and therefore more difficult for very small organisms to navigate. Imagine swimming through honey rather than water. If microscopic organisms struggled to get enough food to survive under these conditions, as Simpson’s modeling work has implied, they would be placed under pressure to change — perhaps by developing ways to hang on to each other, form larger groups, and move through the water with greater force. Maybe some of these changes contributed to the beginning of multicellular animal life.

The experiment comes with a few caveats, and the paper has yet to be peer-reviewed; Simpson posted a preprint on biorxiv.org earlier this year. But it suggests that if Snowball Earth did act as a trigger for the evolution of complex life, it might be due to the physics of cold water.

It is difficult to precisely date when animals arose, but an estimate from molecular clocks — which use mutation rates to estimate the passage of time — suggests that the last common ancestor of multicellular animals emerged during the era known as the Sturtian Snowball Earth, sometime between 717 million and 660 million years ago. Large, unmistakably multicellular animals appear in the fossil record tens of millions of years after the Earth melted following another, shorter Snowball Earth period around 635 million years ago.

The paradox — a planet seemingly hostile to life giving evolution a major push — continued to perplex Simpson throughout his schooling and into his professional life. In 2018, as an assistant professor, he had an insight: As seawater gets colder, it grows thicker. It’s basic physics — the density and viscosity of water molecules rises as the temperature drops. Under the conditions of Snowball Earth, the ocean would have been twice or even four times as viscous as it was before the planet froze over.

As large creatures, we don’t think much about the thickness of the fluids around us. It’s not a part of our daily lived experience, and we are so big that viscosity doesn’t impinge on us very much. The ability to move easily — relatively speaking — is something we take for granted. From the time Simpson first realized that such limits on movement could be a monumental obstacle to microscopic life, he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it. Viscosity may have mattered quite a lot in the origins of complex life, whenever that was.

“Putting this into our repertoire of thinking about why these things evolved — that is the value of the entire thing,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it was Snowball Earth. It doesn’t matter if it happened before or after. Just the idea that it can happen, and happen quickly.”

Highlights

Amanda Randles wants to copy your body. If the computer scientist had her way, she’d have enough data — and processing power — to effectively clone you on her computer, run the clock forward, and see what your coronary arteries or red blood cells might do in a week. Fully personalized medical simulations, or “digital twins,” are still beyond our abilities, but Randles has pioneered computer models of blood flow over long durations that are already helping doctors noninvasively diagnose and treat diseases.

Her latest system takes 3D images of a patient’s blood vessels, then simulates and forecasts their expected fluid dynamics. Doctors who use the system can not only measure the usual stuff, like pulse and blood pressure, but also spy on the blood’s behavior inside the vessel. This lets them observe swirls in the bloodstream called vortices and the stresses felt by vessel walls — both of which are linked to heart disease. A decade ago, Randles’ team could simulate blood flow for only about 30 heartbeats, but today they can foresee over 700,000 heartbeats (about a week’s worth). And because their models are interactive, doctors can also predict what will happen if they take measures such as prescribing medicine or implanting a stent.

It’s a lot of data. We’re running simulations with up to 580 million red blood cells. There’s interactions with the fluid and red blood cells, the cells with each other, the cells with the walls — you’re trying to capture all of that. For each model, one time point might be half a terabyte, and there are millions of time steps in each heartbeat. It’s really computationally intense.

The United Nations Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB): Mobilizing science for a sustainable future

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https://council.science/blog/the-united-nations-scientific-advisory-board-science-sustainable-future/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-united-nations-scientific-advisory-board-science-sustainable-future

Rebuilding trust in science: Challenges and responsibilities in a polarized world

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https://council.science/blog/rebuilding-trust-in-science-challenges-and-responsibilities-in-a-polarized-world/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rebuilding-trust-in-science-challenges-and-responsibilities-in-a-polarized-world

Broadening horizons: Local knowledge to strengthen foresight practices

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https://council.science/blog/broadening-horizons-local-knowledge-foresight-practices/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=broadening-horizons-local-knowledge-foresight-practices

Looting of the Sudan National Museum – more is at stake than priceless ancient treasures

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https://council.science/news/looting-of-the-sudan-national-museum-more-is-at-stake-than-priceless-ancient-treasures/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=looting-of-the-sudan-national-museum-more-is-at-stake-than-priceless-ancient-treasures

Edit: The paper is total nonsense. Sorry for wasting people's time.

https://youtu.be/Yk_NjIPaZk4?si=dasxM2Py-s654djW

AI was born at a US summer camp 68 years ago. Here’s why that event still matters today

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https://council.science/blog/ai-was-born-at-a-us-summer-camp-68-years-ago-heres-why-that-event-still-matters-today/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ai-was-born-at-a-us-summer-camp-68-years-ago-heres-why-that-event-still-matters-today

A review of the degrowth literature (561 studies) find that 'few studies use quantitative or qualitative data...' and those that do 'tend to include small samples or focus on non-representative cases'. Finally, 'large majority (almost 90%) are opinions rather than analysis'.

Call for proposals: Website support and maintenance

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https://council.science/news/call-proposals-website-support-maintenance/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=call-proposals-website-support-maintenance