Misc Scientific Texts 2

1.
A YOUNG woman walks through a desolate New York City
1000 years from now. Society has fallen. She comes upon the
basement of the New York Public Library. Forcing the door she
finds caverns of hard drives. The worlds knowledge was once
stored here, crucial information for getting by with ease: how to
make medicines, how the internal combustion engine works, how
to plough a field. But the hard drives are long dead, and she
doesnt have a way to read them anyway.
This scenario is the extreme end of a situation that archivists
and data preservationists want to avoid, one in which humanitys
cumulative knowledge is lost. Now, new ways of storing digital
information are giving us a shot at preserving our records, so that
our descendants can know their past better than we know ours.
New Scientist 10 Oct. 2015.
2.
Observations

led

by

the

British

astronomer

Arthur

Eddington during a solar eclipse in 1919 showed how the suns

bulk bent the light reaching Earth from distant stars, just as the
new theory predicted. In the past century, general relativity has
never failed an experimental test, and has become the foundation
of a new picture of an expanding universe that began in a big bang
13.8 billion years ago.
Yet for all its success, general relativity makes many
physicists uneasy. Its prediction of black holes, monsters that suck
in everything they come into contact with, is a perennial cause of
discomfort even though these bodies do seem to exist. The
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theorys incompatibility with quantum theory, which explains how

all the other forces of nature work, including electromagnetism,
remains a problem. Then there is our failure so far to directly
detect gravitational waves, ripples in space-time that are an
essential prediction of the theory. It is time, after a century, to look
back and ask what the next century might bring.

[New

Scientist 10 Oct. 2015.]

3.

Steve Sillett has been hanging out with giants all his working
life. He climbs and studies the canopies of giant redwoods
Had Aristotle hung out among redwoods, he might not have
consigned plants to the bottom rungs of his ladder of life. But he
didnt, and botanists have been tormented by his legacy. For
centuries, few dared challenge his judgement. Now thats finally
changing. In the past decade, researchers have been making the
case for taking plants more seriously. They are finding that plants
have a sophisticated awareness of their environment and of each
other, and can communicate what they sense. There is also
evidence that plants have memory, can integrate massive amounts
of information and maybe pay attention. Some botanists argue that
they are intelligent beings, with a neurobiology all of their own.
Theres even tentative talk of plant consciousness.
Charles Darwin would have approved. He was the first to
seriously question Aristotelian ideas that plants dont have the
stuff of life that animates us and other animals, simply because
they dont move. One of his books, published in 1880, was
provocatively titled The Power of Movement in Plants. But despite
this patronage, plants didnt catch the fancy of biologists
pondering intelligent life for more than a century.
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New Scientist 6 December 2014.

4.
Half a century after computers entered mainstream society,
the data has begun to accumulate to the point where something
new and special is taking place. Not only is the world awash with
more information than ever before, but that information is
growing faster. The change of scale has led to change in state; the
quantitative change has led to a qualitative one. The sciences like
astronomy and genomics, which first experienced the explosion in
the 2000s, coined the term big data. The concept is now migrating
to all areas of human endeavor.
Viktor Mayer-Schnberger & Kenneth Cukier. Big Data. John
Murray Pub., 2013.

5.
Antonio Damasio. Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and Human
Brain. Vintage Books, London, 2006.
Excerpts
I.

I advance the hypothesis (known as the somatic marker

hypothesis) that emotion was in the loop of reason, and that
emotion could assist the reasoning process rather than

II.
III.

necessarily disturb it, as was commonly assumed.

I never suggested that emotion was a substitute for reason.
How did the complex species evolve the smart reasoning
system? The new proposal in Descartes Error is that the
reasoning system evolved as an extension of the automatic
3

emotional system with emotions playing diverse roles in the

reasoning process. For example, emotion may increase the
saliency of a premise and, in so doing, bias the conclusion in
favor of the premise. Emotion also assists with the process of
holding in mind the multiple facts that must be considered
IV.

in order to reach a decision.

When emotion is entirely left out of the reasoning picture, as
happens in certain neurological conditions, reason turns out
to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks

V.

on our decisions.
He had been evaluated previously at another institution
where the opinion had been that there was no evidence of
"organic brain syndrome." In other words, he showed no sign
of impairment when he was given standard intelligence tests.
His intelligence quotient (the so-called IQ) was in the
superior range, and his standing on the Wechsler Adult

VI.

Intelligence Scale indicated no abnormality.

His problems were found not to result from "organic disease"
or "neurological dysfunction"in other words, brain disease
but instead to reflect "emotional" and "psychological"
adjustment problemsin other words, mental troubleand
would be thus amenable to psychotherapy. Only after a series
of therapy sessions proved unsuccessful was Elliot referred
to our unit.

VII.

(The distinction between diseases of "brain" and "mind,"

between "neurological" problems and "psychological" or
"psychiatric" ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that

VIII.

permeates society and medicine.

It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and
mind. Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on
people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while
diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and
emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which
sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed
for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation,
and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary
problem.)

Why Neuroscience Needs Hackers

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-neuroscience-needshackers/

Brain researchers are overwhelmed with data. Hackers can help

By Daniel Goodwin | Aug 18, 2015
There was a time when neuroscientists could only dream of
having such a problem. Now the fantasy has come true, and they
are struggling to solve it. Brilliant new exploratory devices are
overwhelming the field with an avalanche of raw data about the
nervous system's inner workings. The trouble is that even starting
to make sense of this bonanza of information has become a
superhuman challenge.
Just about every branch of science is facing a similar
disruption. As laboratory-bench research migrates into the digital
realm, programming is becoming an indispensable part of the
process. At the same time, previously dependable sources of
financial support are drying up. The result has been a painful
scarcity of jobs and grantswhich, in turn, is impelling far too
many gifted researchers to focus on their narrow areas of
specialization rather than investing time and energy into acquiring
new, computer-age skills. In fields where data growth is especially
out of control, such as neuroscience, the demand for computer
expertise is growing as quickly as the information itself.
Science urgently needs hackershackers in the original, Tech
Model Railroad Club of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
sense of the word. Their engineering and design skills will be
useful, but what is most desirable is the true hacker's
resourcefulness, curiosity and appetite for fresh challenges.
6

Particularly in a field like neuroscience, helpers could be

invaluable in exploring the daunting wilderness of newly revealed
neural networks.
A few pioneers are leading the way. One is H. Sebastian
Seung, a professor at the Neuroscience Institute and in the
department of computer science at Princeton University. A few
years ago he and his collaborators set out to map the retina's
neural connections. As they collected an overwhelming mass of
electron microscopy data, the question was how they would ever
manage to interpret it all. Seung's familiarity with state-of-the-art
computing told him that no artificial-intelligence algorithm in
existence could possibly handle the task alone.
The solutionthen almost unheard of in lab sciencewas to
enlist thousands of human volunteers alongside a state-of-the art
AI and harness their collective brainpower. On December 10, 2012,
Seung and his team launched the online game EyeWire, in which
players score points by helping to improve a neural map. About a
year and a half later the game's creators published their first
discoveries in Nature, together with a note sharing coveted coauthor credit with the 2,183 players who had reached the game's
top ranks and made the paper possible. (Scientific American is part
of Springer Nature.)
Hackers are finding their own routes into neuroscience. In
late 2013 Brooklyn, N.Y.based designers Joel Murphy and Conor
Russomanno
computer

introduced

OpenBCI,

interfacebasically

an

open-source
a

brain-

home-brewed

electroencephalographic device. Kits and plans are available from

their Web site for just a fraction of a standard EEG's cost, and by all
accounts it works just as well as the big-budget models. Their two7

monthlong Kickstarter campaign sold nearly 1,000 units and

caught the attention of academic research labs. It's just another
example of how traditional barriers are crumbling between
institutional science and individuals with new ideas. In fact, some
labs have begun posting research challenges with cash prizes on
crowdsourcing sites such as Kaggle and InnoCentive. These days if
a research entity chooses not to explore such collaborative
approaches, it is in danger of being left behind.
The software-design community has demonstrated over the
past 20 years that massive online collaborations can work wonders.
Today the physical sciences are only beginning to discover that
potential. Established scientists would do well to recognize that
true hackers are motivated by challenge and honest pride in seeing
what they can do.