Fun Academic Articles and Findings

[Sain]

This was pretty interesting for everyone RPeing with faceclaims

https://techxplore.com/news/2017-10-neural-networks-result-photorealistic.html
When two competing neural networks result in photorealistic face


Potential for infinite face claims with desired features on demand coming soon?

[HannibalBarca]

The article was an interesting, technical read.  However, at this time, the software is creating faces from a catalogue of celebrity faces, so they are amalgamations of numerous parts of real people's visages, not completely new faces.  I wonder when the software will be able to do what talented artists do, and create a new face.  Although--to be fair, artists, when creating a face from their 'imagination', are probably building from a prior knowledge of faces they have already seen, as well.

[Sain]

https://anu.prezly.com/redefining-knowledge-of-elderly-people-throughout-history#
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfgcivss6A4

This was quite interesting. Leaves a very odd feeling if life span has actually stayed pretty much the same. Definitely need to adjust my fantasy settings according to this...

[Sain]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzpxXZJQNFg

Original article: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10433

Damn these deep mind solutions keep being amazing as well as does the pace at which they're adapted !

[RedRose]

https://anu.prezly.com/redefining-knowledge-of-elderly-people-throughout-history#
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfgcivss6A4

This was quite interesting. Leaves a very odd feeling if life span has actually stayed pretty much the same. Definitely need to adjust my fantasy settings according to this...

That's a topic I love. I never believed the 40 year thing. But 70? I don't know. That does sound high, especially in poor circles, but even richer ones. Maybe if you count only people who do reach adult age. Because yeah, many didn't make it to puberty.

[Sain]

Yeah, most likely dying early and in poor conditions was very common back then.

Here's another interesting read regarding aging from Nature.

Colossal family tree reveals environment's influence on lifespan

If nothing else I'd say that's great motivation to keep a healthy lifestyle, when very little of it can be blamed on genetics

[RedRose]

Fascinating! I love genealogy, grew up on our family tree' stories.

[Sain]

I find this also absolutely fascinating. Imagination starts to race when you think about what sort of world it must have been with proper different races and such in stone age. It's like we once had a fantasy setting here on Earth. Maybe there were more than just neandrenthals and denisovans. Who knows how many there were?


Modern humans interbred with Denisovans twice in history

More at: https://phys.org/news/2018-03-modern-humans-interbred-denisovans-history.html

[Ket]

https://anu.prezly.com/redefining-knowledge-of-elderly-people-throughout-history#


This was quite interesting. Leaves a very odd feeling if life span has actually stayed pretty much the same. Definitely need to adjust my fantasy settings according to this...

The reason they say that the average lifespan during X time period was Y number of years is that they are factoring in infant/child mortality. Those rates were tremendously higher in the past than they are in these days of modern medicine. So, if you've got half your population dying before age 2, and half your population dying around age 70, you're still going to have an average lifespan of 35 years.

If you change the population you're looking at, and average the lifespan of a population who made it past a certain age, then the number will change.

[Oniya]

Yale offers 'The Science of Wellbeing' for free.

'Psychology and cognitive science professor Laurie Santos teaches the course. In it, she covers the science behind positive psychology and behavioral change. Students are required to embark on a self-improvement project throughout the course.'

Thought this might be interesting and useful.

[Sain]

New ant species from Borneo explodes to defend its colony



https://phys.org/news/2018-04-ant-species-borneo-defend-colony.html

Summary: Exploding ants. Banelings are real. BANELINGS ARE REAL?! Nature is mad and amazing.

[Sain]

Genetic adaptations to diving discovered in humans for the first time



https://phys.org/news/2018-04-genetic-humans.html

Couple thousand years and humans have evolved larger spleens to dive?! How nutty is that. Seems like straight out of fantasy. Gonna be more liberal with regional evolutions to my fantasy races too.

[Sain]

Optogenetic study shows that male flies find ejaculation pleasurable



https://phys.org/news/2018-04-optogenetic-male-flies-ejaculation-pleasurable.html

So flies and other very simple creatures actually enjoy sex, possibly even in a very similar manner as humans. Quite amazing stuff. Definitely a thing to consider when writing scifi. Perhaps feeling pleasure from reproduction is a must have for complex organisms to evolve

[Sain]

Stephen Hawking's last paper was just published today.

I actually feel a bit sad for what he is proposing. Thinking that universe was infinite had certain romantic charm.

e. The video in that article is rreally really interesting. I recommend listening to it.

[midnightblack]

Cosmology is certainly the definitive field of thought-provoking and moving ideas. Fractal multiverses than span out into eternity, the false vacuum that decays, annihilating all existence and so forth. However, I've grown to regard most of this stuff as a kind of pseudo-physics, as it isn't really falsifiable. Sure, it's quite a commanding display of mathematics mixed with lofty implications regarding space and time, but somehow it always fails to deliver a prediction that can be objectively tested.

About a century ago, Einstein's own ideas seemed just as weird to the scientific community, but he always found a way to put them to a simple test. His work on general relativity ultimately came up with a pretty basic prediction: the trajectory of a light ray curves in the vicinity of massive objects. Long story short, one solar eclipse and a crazy astronomer later, and poof, the theory was tested and turned out to be true.

[Heathcliff Moors]

My fave is a scientific body down here in Australia that did a study on why people eat fast food. Ok.. the result is ground breaking - Because we like it. That is the actual the result. They could have given me half the amount of funding and I would have told them the same thing in less time.

[RedRose]

That, and it's cheap and convenient. French people are crazy about McDonald's.

[Sain]

There can be surprising side costs for making even a simple study like that in a manner that would satisfy the scientific community. It's also good to often go to the original article after seeing the press release versions. Sometimes the subject of the study may have been very different from what is later reported in the more public media

No super fun articles this week alas, or I may have missed some...

[Sain]

Researchers ask Americans 'What does God look like?'

"God's perceived face, based on the aggregated responses of surveyed American Christians. Credit: Joshua Jackson et al"
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-06-americans-god.html#jCp

This I thought really cool Now that'd be a writing prompt if you had a plot with the researcher meeting said God. Would be really fun to see results of similar thing from a global set.

[gaggedLouise]

This has to be the most awesome "backup hard drive" technology ever. Current size: 360 TB - projected lifespan even in an environment a bit hotter than Earth: same as the age of the universe.  (in room temoerature, it would last much longer than that)

And what an amazing funky name! :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_memory_crystal

[Sain]

This has to be the most awesome "backup hard drive" technology ever. Current size: 360 TB - projected lifespan even in an environment a bit hotter than Earth: same as the age of the universe.  (in room temoerature, it would last much longer than that)

And what an amazing funky name! :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_memory_crystal

That's really cool. I wonder how the research has progressed on that since 2010.

[RedRose]

https://www.psypost.org/2018/07/study-finds-women-including-feminists-attracted-benevolently-sexist-men-51693
Very interesting. I am biased as I am generally attracted to very old school type but I definitely know girls who do NOT want someone to help them put on their coat or invite them, so I don't know.

https://www.psypost.org/2013/10/self-entitled-women-are-more-likely-to-endorse-benevolent-sexism-study-finds-20644

lol that made me laugh. I do see how it can feel entitled.

[midnightblack]

Maybe not exactly academic, but certainly one of the most unsettling uses of an oscilloscope that I've yet to see. 

And it fits the NIИ soundtrack so disturbingly well. The stuff of bad dreams. shivers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMli33ornEU&feature=youtu.be

[Oniya]

Oh - Quake the FPS!  Here I was thinking someone captured an earthquake on an oscilloscope.  (I was wondering how the sine waves in the thumbnail could have gone that chaotic.)

[gaggedLouise]

Read last month about someone who had launched the inventive project of collecting people's night dreams in the Third Reich - she interviewed friends and casual acquaintances and asked them to share some of their dreams or even write them down.  Eventually, after the war, she put out a book. The most intriguing example cited by the guy who was writing about that book (sorry, can't retrieve the article now) was about an ordinary Joe - not a Nazi sympathizer, but not an activist against them either, and not a Jew, gay man or any similar "target group" - who dreamt that one day at work, no less a bigwig than Goebbels showed up. Of course like everybody else, our man greeted him and gave a Nazi salute - BUT the weird twist: Goebbels offers no response, he silently refuses to acknowledge the greeting. Whenever his gaze reaches the man again, it's either a cold, blank stare or a vaguely menacing look, as if saying "there is something wrong with you and I've noticed; don't think you will get away with this!".