Hello, everyone. Am very excited to bring to you the second part in today’s double release. This is a collection of excellent science writing from a variety of sources and magazines. I hope you enjoy this as much and more than I enjoyed putting it together.
- The Viruses That Make us Human - Endogenous retroviruses manage to sneak through into either human sperm or egg cells, and now they are part of our genome, whether we like it or not. This is not bad, though. These viruses are the reason why humans have a placenta. Very interesting. Humans are, in a very real sense, part virus.
- Physicists have discovered what makes neural networks so extraordinarily powerful - MIT Technology Review writes about our increasing understanding of neural networks.
The problem is that there are orders of magnitude more mathematical functions than possible networks to approximate them. And yet deep neural networks somehow get the right answer.
The answer is that the universe is governed by a tiny subset of all possible functions. In other words, when the laws of physics are written down mathematically, they can all be described by functions that have a remarkable set of simple properties. - Could Ancient Remedies Hold the Answer to the Looming Antibiotics Crisis? - NYT on what we can do about the scary increasing resistance of microbes to our antibiotics. We need alternate, and ideally long-term, strategies.
We did not so much invent antibiotics as borrow them from the very creatures we were hoping to overpower. - Where Creativity Comes From - Creativity isn’t something that you’d resort to when in danger. It does not make the most evolutionary sense either, since finding innovative solutions is hard. Nice piece from Scientific American on where creativity manifests and how it fits into the whole picture of evolution and survival of the fittest.
- In Mathematics, Mistakes Aren’t What They Used To Be - This piece from Nautilus talks about formal proofs in modern mathematics and the need to be more careful. Even though computers cannot really figure out proofs on their own, they sure can help us.
- Hacker-Proof Code Confirmed - Complements the previous piece well.
Computer scientists can prove certain programs to be error-free with the same certainty that mathematicians prove theorems. The advances are being used to secure everything from unmanned drones to the internet. - What Gives With So Many Hard Scientists Being Hard-Core Endurance Runners? - A lot of endurance runners are found to be long-distance endurance runners. Why? Wired explains, and explains well. If you can survive your PhD and make it out, if you want a blank brain to serve as a fertile ground for new ideas, then running works for you, among other reasons.
- The Green Universe: A Vision - One of my favourite people and physicists, Freeman Dyson talks about ‘Big Space’ and ‘Little Space’ projects, SpaceX, colonisation and the future of the human race. He’s reviewing three books in this piece, but its his views that come forth.
An illustration of Freeman Dyson’s vision of ‘Noah’s Ark culture’—a space operation in which, ‘sometime in the next few hundred years, biotechnology will have advanced to the point where we can design and breed entire ecologies of living creatures adapted to survive in remote places away from Earth.’ Spacecraft resembling ostrich eggs will bring ‘living seeds with genetic instructions’ to planets, moons, and other ‘suitable places where life could take root.’ A new species of warm-blooded plants, ‘kept warm by sunlight or starlight concentrated onto it by mirrors outside,’ will enable the Noah’s Ark communities to survive. - A Nonlinear History of Time Travel - James Gleick, an excellent (and one of my favourite) science writers, talks about the history of time travel. And it’s in-depth, engaging, and pays microscopic attention to detail. You should read the piece just because of the delightful title. It’s an excerpt from his new book Time Travel: A History, which I shall read very soon. It should be very good.
- Taming the quantum spooks - Well, this one is related to the previous one, but it’s very involved and talks about retrocausality and action at a distance. Spooky action at a distance. Can effect precede cause? As a physics student, this was 5000 words of pure mental fun.
Have a great weekend!