This idea that anxiety is dynamic and changeable blew me away. Sure, anxiety is an inevitable feature of life, and none of us is immune. But understanding anxiety against this more fulsome backdrop has allowed me to stop struggling against it. Instead of treating my feelings as something I need to avoid, suppress, deny, or wrestle to the ground, I have learned how to use anxiety to improve my life.
What a relief. Like all of us, I will always encounter bouts of anxiety. But now, I know what to do when those negative thoughts move into my mind like an unwanted roommate. I can recognize the signals and make adjustments that will take the edge off, calm my body, or settle my mind so I can once again think clearly and feel centered. What a boon to my life †personally, professionally, and certainly emotionally. I feel more satisfaction and meaning from my work. I have finally achieved a work-life balance, some thing that always seemed out of reach. I am also much better able to enjoy myself, find time for different kinds of pleasure, and feel relaxed enough to reflect on what matters most to me. And that's what I desire for you, too.
We tend to think about anxiety as negative because we associate it only with negative, uncomfortable feelings that leave us with the sense that we are out of control. But I could see another way of looking at it once we open ourselves to a more objective, accurate, and complete understanding of its underlying neurobiological processes. Yes, there are inherent challenges to taking ownership of patterns of responding that dictate our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors without our even realizing. If you tend to experience anxiety when you even think about speaking in public, your brain body will more or less dictate that response †unless you consciously intervene and change that response. But I saw evidence of the opposite: that we can intervene and create positive changes to the anxiety state itself.
This dynamic interaction between stress and anxiety made perfect sense to me because it brought me back to the primary area of my neuroscience research: neuroplasticity. Brain plasticity does not mean that the brain is made of plastic. Instead, it means that the brain can adapt in response to the environment (in either enhancing or detrimental ways). The foundation of my research into the improvement of cognition and mood is based on the fact that the brain is an enormously adaptive organ, which relies on stress to keep it alive. In other words, we need stress. Like a sailboat needs wind in order to move, the brain-body needs an outside force to urge it to grow, adapt, and not die. When there's too much wind, the boat can go dangerously fast, lose its balance, and sink. When a brain-body encounters too much stress, it begins to respond negatively. But when it does not have enough stress, it plateaus and begins to coast. Emotionally, this plateau might feel like boredom or disinterest; physically it can look like a stagnation of growth. When the brain-body has just enough stress, it functions optimally. When it has no stress, it simply lists, like a sailboat with no wind to direct it.
Just like every system in the body, this relationship to stress is all about the organism's drive for homeostasis. When we encounter too much stress, anxiety drives us to make adjustments that bring us back into balance or internal equilibrium. When we have just the right kind or amount of stress in our lives, we feel balanced †this is the quality of well-being we always seek. And it's also how anxiety works in the brain-body: it's a dynamic indication of where we are in relation to the presence or absence of stress in our lives.
When I started making changes to my lifestyle and began to meditate, eat healthy, and exercise regularly, my brain-body adjusted and adapted. The neural pathways associated with anxiety recalibrated and I felt awesome! Did my anxiety go away? No. But it showed up differently because I was responding to stress in more positive ways.
And that is exactly how anxiety can shift from something we try to avoid and get rid of to something that is both informative and beneficial. What I was learning how to do, backed up by my experiments and my deep understanding of neuroscience, was not just engage in new and varied ways to shore up my mental health through exercise, sleep, food, and new mind-body practices but to take a step back from my anxiety and learn how to structure my life to accommodate and even honor those things at the heart of my anxious states. This is exactly how anxiety can be good for us. In my own research experiments at NYU, I have started to identify those interventions (including movement, meditation, naps, social stimuli) that have the biggest impact on not only decreasing anxiety levels per se but also enhancing the emotional and cognitive states most affected by anxiety, including focus, attention, depression, and hostility.
And that realization of how anxiety works, my friends, became the subject †and the promise †of this book: Understanding how anxiety works in the brain and body and then using that knowledge to feel better, think more clearly, be more productive, and perform more optimally. In the pages ahead, you will learn more about how you can use the neurobiological processes underlying anxiety, the worry, and general emotional discomfort to lay down new neural pathways, and set down new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that can change your life.
Our inherent capacity for adaptation offers the power to change and direct our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and interactions with ourselves and others. When you adopt strategies that harness the neural networks of anxiety, you open the door to activating your brain-body at an even deeper, more meaningful level. Instead of feeling at the mercy of anxiety, we can take charge of it in concrete ways. Anxiety becomes a tool to supercharge our brains and bodies in ways that will resound in every dimension of our lives †emotionally, cognitively, and physically. This is the domain of what I call anxiety's superpowers. You will shift from living in a moderately functional way to functioning at a higher, more fulfilling level; from living an ordinary life to one that is extraordinary.
My book, GOOD ANXIETY, is about taking everything we know about plasticity to create a personalized strategy of adapting our responses to the stress in our lives and using anxiety as a warning signal and opportunity to redirect that energy for good. Everyone's particular flavor of positive brain plasticity will be a bit different because everyone manifests anxiety in unique ways, but when you learn how you respond, how you manage the discomfort, and how you typically cope and reach for that homeostatic balance, then you will find your own personal superpowers of anxiety. Anxiety can be good... or bad. It turns out that it's really up to you.
This article was originally published on our sister site, Freethink.
Oxford scientists have proposed what they believe is a more sustainable approach to copper mining: digging deep wells under dormant volcanoes to suck out the metal-containing fluids trapped beneath them.
The status quo: Currently, most copper mining is done via open pits. Drills and explosives blast away rock near the surface, which is then transported to a processing facility. There, the rock is crushed so that the tiny portion of copper in it can be extracted.
This extraction process often involves toxic chemicals, and once the copper is removed, the waste rock that remains must be shipped to a disposal site so that it doesn't contaminate the environment.
The challenge: All of the digging, extracting, and transporting involved in copper mining can be energy intensive and environmentally damaging †but the world needs more copper today than ever before.
Electric vehicles contain four times the copper of their fossil fuel-powered counterparts, and the metal is a key component of solar, wind, and hydro generators. That makes copper a key player in the transition to a more sustainable energy system.
The idea: Rather than focusing our copper mining efforts on rock, the Oxford team suggests we look to water †specifically, the hot, salty water trapped beneath dormant volcanoes.
"Volcanoes are an obvious and ubiquitous target." JON BLUNDY
These brines contain not only copper, but also gold, silver, lithium, and other metals used in electronics †and we might be able to extract them without wreaking havoc on the environment.
"Getting to net zero will place unprecedented demand on natural metal resources, demand that recycling alone cannot meet," lead author Jon Blundy said in a press release.
"We need to be thinking of low-energy, sustainable ways to extract metals from the ground," he continued. "Volcanoes are an obvious and ubiquitous target."
Brine mines: After years of research, the Oxford team has published a study on the mining of metals from dormant volcanoes, and according to that paper, the process has tremendous potential †but it wouldn't be easy.
The wells would need to be more than a mile deep, and there's a small chance the extraction could trigger a volcanic event †something that would need to be assessed in advance of any drilling.
The equipment used for the extraction process would also need to be able to withstand corrosion from the brine and temperatures in excess of 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
Worth exploring: If these technical and safety challenges can be overcome, they predict that copper mining at dormant volcanoes would be more cost effective than at open pits.
It would also be less environmentally damaging, as geothermal energy from the volcanoes themselves could be harnessed to power the process.
And because dormant volcanoes are widespread, copper mining wouldn't be limited to just a handful of countries, as is the case currently.
The next steps: The team is now looking for a site to dig an exploratory well, which should help them better understand both potential of tapping into this new source of metal and the challenges involved in the process.
"Green mining is a scientific and engineering challenge which we hope that scientists and governments alike will embrace in the drive to net zero," Blundy said.
A study finds that people associate personality traits with faces.
People thought to have similar personalities were viewed as looking alike; people thought to look alike were viewed as having similar personalities.
The research holds a surprise for Vladimir Putin and Justin Bieber.
Humans are so good at identifying faces that we see them in places where they do not exist, such as on the moon or Mars or in combinations of circles, line segments, and dots. It is a particularly useful skill for a social animal. Yet, how exactly we recognize faces and process them is not exactly known. For instance, the Thatcher effect shows that our brains do not simply accept sensory input when deciding what a normal face looks like.
Now, a new study published in the journal Cognition shows that what we think of a person influences our perception of their facial features. In other words, we think people with similar personality traits look the same.
The social aspect of facial recognition
Image courtesy of NYU's Jonathan Freeman
The initial study, carried out with the help of roughly 200 volunteers, had famous faces placed next to each other above a test picture of one of them. Volunteers had to then move their cursor from the test picture to the image of the same person as quickly as possible. Subjects then rated the likelihood that each famous person in the study had particular personality traits.
The people used in the study, all white men for the sake of consistency, were Justin Bieber, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Fallon, Ryan Gosling, Matthew McConaughey, Bill Murray, Bill Nye, Vladimir Putin, Keanu Reeves, John Travolta, and Mark Wahlberg, among others.
The results showed that the volunteers were inclined to think that people with similar traits looked more alike than those with differing traits. Three more studies followed to confirm the original findings. Two of them focused on showing that the effect works backward †that is, people with similar faces were thought to have similar traits.
The final test sealed the deal. Participants were shown faces that none of them had ever seen before. Once again, they reported that faces looked similar if they were told the people shared similar personality traits and vice versa.
Senior author Jonathan Freeman of New York University's Department of Psychology summarized the findings in apress release:
"Our findings show that the perception of facial identity is driven not only by facial features, such as the eyes and chin, but also distorted by the social knowledge we have learned about others, biasing it toward alternate identities despite the fact that those identities lack any physical resemblance."
Pootie-Poot and the Bieb
This study adds to the evidence for a "social-conceptual" approach to facial recognition. According to the authors, these models suggest that our ideas of a person are difficult to separate from how we view their faces. As they explain in the introduction of their study:
"[A]ccording [to] these models, after presented with a face, the processing of visual features begins activating identity representations… and these in turn begin activating social-conceptual representations, such as personality traits (e.g., bold, diligent, competent)."
Other studies have shown that setting is also important to our ability to recognize faces. Why volunteers think that Justin Bieber and Vladimir Putin look alike remains a bit of a mystery.
Is there an external reality? Is reality objective? Is the information your senses are feeding you an accurate depiction of reality? Most neuroscientists and scientific leaders believe that we can only comprehend a sliver of what is true reality.
Although we assume our senses are telling us the truth, they're actually fabricated to us. Considering senses are unique from person to person, and through our unique senses we can only intemperate a fraction of what is real, there is no all-encompassing and true perspective one individual can hold. Because of this, we need to take our perceptions seriously, but not literally.
Multiple perspectives have to be taken as each new perspective will hold some sliver of truth. Seeing partial truth in multiple perspectives is fundamental to navigating the world and making informed life decisions.
For centuries, sailors have been reporting strange encounters like the one below.
“The whole appearance of the ocean was like a plain covered with snow. There was scarce a cloud in the heavens, yet the sky … appeared as black as if a storm was raging. The scene was one of awful grandeur, the sea having turned to phosphorus, and the heavens being hung in blackness, and the stars going out, seemed to indicate that all nature was preparing for that last grand conflagration which we are taught to believe is to annihilate this material world."
– Captain Kingman of the American clipper ship Shooting Star, offshore of Java, Indonesia, 1854
These events are called milky seas. They are a rare nocturnal phenomenon in which the ocean's surface emits a steady bright glow. They can cover thousands of square miles and, thanks to the colorful accounts of 19th-century mariners like Capt. Kingman, milky seas are a well-known part of maritime folklore. But because of their remote and elusive nature, they are extremely difficult to study and so remain more a part of that folklore than of science.
I'm a professor of atmospheric science specializing in satellites used to study Earth. Via a stat-of-the-art generation of satellites, my colleagues and I have developed a new way to detect milky seas. Using this technique, we aim to learn about these luminous waters remotely and guide research vessels to them so that we can begin to reconcile the surreal tales with scientific understanding.
The bioluminescence in milky seas is caused by a type of bacteria. (Steve. H. D. Haddock/MBARI, CC BY-ND)
Sailors' tales
To date, only one research vessel has ever encountered a milky sea. That crew collected samples and found a strain of luminous bacteria called Vibrio harveyi colonizing algae at the water's surface.
Unlike bioluminescence that happens close to shore, where small organisms called dinoflagellates flash brilliantly when disturbed, luminous bacteria work in an entirely different way. Once their population gets large enough – about 100 million individual cells per milliliter of water – a sort of internal biological switch is flipped and they all start glowing steadily.
Luminous bacteria cause the particles they colonize to glow. Researchers think the purpose of this glow could be to attract fish that eat them. These bacteria thrive in the guts of fishes, so when their populations get too big for their main food supply, a fish's stomach makes a great second option. In fact, if you go into a refrigerated fish locker and turn off the light, you may notice that some fish emit a greenish-blue glow – this is bacterial light.
Now imagine if a gargantuan number of bacteria, spread across a huge area of open ocean, all started glowing simultaneously. That makes a milky sea.
If scientists want to learn more about milky seas, they need to get to one while it's happening. Trouble is, milky seas are so elusive that it has been almost impossible to sample them. This is where my research comes into play.
Satellites offer a practical way to monitor the vast oceans, but it takes a special instrument able to detect light around 100 million times fainter than daylight. My colleagues and I first explored the potential of satellites in 2004 when we used U.S. defense satellite imagery to confirm a milky sea that a British merchant vessel, the SS Lima, reported in 1995. But the images from these satellites were very noisy, and there was no way we could use them as a search tool.
We had to wait for a better instrument – the Day/Night Band – planned for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's new constellation of satellites. The new sensor went live in late 2011, but our hopes were initially dashed when we realized the Day/Night Band's high sensitivity also detected light emitted by air molecules. It took years of studying Day/Night Band imagery to be able to interpret what we were seeing.
Finally, on a clear moonless night in early 2018, an odd swoosh-shaped feature appeared in the Day/Night Band imagery offshore Somalia. We compared it with images from the nights before and after. While the clouds and airglow features changed, the swoosh remained. We had found a milky sea! And now we knew how to look for them.
This milky sea off the coast of Java was the size of Kentucky and lasted for more than a month. (Steven D. Miller/NOAA)
The “aha!" moment that unveiled the full potential of the Day/Night Band came in 2019. I was browsing the imagery looking for clouds masquerading as milky seas when I stumbled upon an astounding event south of the island of Java. I was looking at an enormous swirl of glowing ocean that spanned over 40,000 square miles (100,000 square km) – roughly the size of Kentucky. The imagery from the new sensors provided a level of detail and clarity that I hadn't imagined possible. I watched in amazement as the glow slowly drifted and morphed with the ocean currents.
We learned a lot from this watershed case: how milky seas are related to sea surface temperature, biomass and the currents – important clues to understanding their formation. As for the estimated number of bacteria involved? Approximately 100 billion trillion cells – nearly the total estimated number of stars in the observable universe!
The two images on the left were taken with older satellite technology while the images on the right show the high-definition imagery produced by the Day/Night Band sensor. (Steven D. Miller/NOAA)
The future is bright
Compared with the old technology, viewing Day/Night Band imagery is like putting on glasses for the first time. My colleagues and I have analyzed thousands of images taken since 2013, and we've uncovered 12 milky seas so far. Most happened in the very same waters where mariners have been reporting them for centuries.
Perhaps the most practical revelation is how long a milky sea can last. While some last only a few days, the one near Java carried on for over a month. That means that there is a chance to deploy research craft to these remote events while they are happening. That would allow scientists to measure them in ways that reveal their full composition, how they form, why they're so rare and what their ecological significance is in nature.
If, like Capt. Kingman, I ever do find myself standing on a ship's deck, casting a shadow toward the heavens, I'm diving in!
This article was originally published on our sister site, Freethink.
When Sophia the robot debuted in 2016, she was one of a kind. She had a remarkably lifelike appearance and demeanor for a robot, and her ability to interact with people was unlike anything most had ever seen in a machine.
Since then, Sophia has spoken to audiences across the globe (in multiple languages), been interviewed on countless TV shows, and even earned a United Nations title (a first for a non-human).
Today, she's arguably the most famous robot in the world, but she's isn't going to be unique for much longer. Her maker, Hanson Robotics, has announced plans to begin mass-producing Sophia the robot this year †so that she can help the world cope with the pandemic.
What Is a Social Robot?
Ask Sophia the Robot: What can AI teach humans? | Big Think
Robots are typically designed for one purpose †some cook or clean, others perform brain surgery. Sophia is what's known as a social robot, meaning she was designed specifically to interact with humans.
Social robots have many potential applications, including some we're already seeing in the real world.
A social robot named Milo is helping children with autism recognize and express their emotions, and children with cancer are finding comfort interacting with a robotic duck (developed by Aflac).
Another social robot designed to look like an animal †PARO the seal †is providing companionship to seniors with dementia. The semi-humanoid social robot Pepper, meanwhile, is greeting and assisting customers at banks, offices, and restaurants.
Social robots like me can take care of the sick or elderly. †SOPHIA THE ROBOT
While social robots were already happening pre-2020, the pandemic appears to be accelerating their adoption, as the world looks for ways to stay social in the era of social distancing.
Hyundai, for example, just announced plans to deploy a social robot in its South Korean showroom that will be able to assist customers in the place of human staff (it'll also detect which visitors aren't wearing masks and ask them to put one on).
Given the current climate, Hanson Robotics thinks now is the perfect time to make Sophia the robot available to the masses.
"The world of COVID-19 is going to need more and more automation to keep people safe," CEO David Hanson told Reuters.
"Social robots like me can take care of the sick or elderly," Sophia the robot added. "I can help communicate, give therapy, and provide social stimulation, even in difficult situations."
Hanson's plan is to begin mass-producing Sophia and three other robots in the first half of 2021 and then sell "thousands" of the bots before the end of the year.
It hasn't said which bots besides Sophia are headed for the assembly line, nor what any of the robots will cost †but it's hard to imagine the most famous social robot in the world will be cheap, even if she's no longer one of a kind.
The 20th anniversary of 9/11 arrives with pessimism and a sense of defeat.
9/11 caused a national trauma that lasted for years.
We should remember this when analyzing the mistakes that America made in its war on terrorism during the subsequent 20 years.
As the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack approached, I was disappointed to see how negative the media coverage is. The overall reportage is defeatist, focusing almost exclusively on how America made countless mistakes and accomplished little if anything †perhaps even making global problems worse.
An article by Garrett Graff in The Atlantic was typical of the tone. Titled "After 9/11, the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong," it concluded the following, each conclusion shown as a subheadline: (1) "As a society, we succumbed to fear." (2) "We chose the wrong way to seek justice." (3) "At home, we reorganized the government the wrong way." (4) "Abroad, we squandered the world's goodwill." (5) "We picked the wrong enemies."
For the sake of argument, let's assume that everything in that article is exactly correct. While there are plenty of lessons to be learned from America's many foreign (mis)adventures pre- and post-9/11, we should also remember this: hindsight is 20/20, particularly when you have had 20 years to think about what happened.
So, let's rewind the tape two decades. I can tell you exactly where I was, what I was doing, and what I was thinking on September 11, 2001. Every one of us can.
*****
The phone rang sometime around 7:50 am Central Time. My father was on the other side. He told me that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
I was not interested. Surely, it was an accident. Besides, I was a sophomore in college and had far more important things to worry about: Tuesdays were my busy days. From 10 am to noon, I had a microbiology laboratory. Then from 1 pm to 5 pm, I had an organic chemistry lab. Groggily, I hung up the phone and went back to sleep.
About 15 minutes later, the phone rings again. It's my dad. "The second tower has been hit. You need to wake up. We're under attack." I got up this time. I went upstairs and turned on the TV. My mouth dropped in disbelief. I called a friend and told her to wake up, too.
Classes at my university were not canceled, so I got into my car and headed to school. I turned on the radio and listened as reporters described how the first tower of the World Trade Center had just collapsed. Since I had never been to New York City, I distinctly remember thinking, "At least one tower will be there if I ever get to visit." Then the other tower collapsed.
When I arrived at the microbiology lab, one of the professors had pulled a TV into the hallway so that we could listen to the latest news. The teaching assistant reminded us that, even though none of us felt like working, we still had assignments that needed to get done. All of us sat in silence as we worked. In the top right corner of my lab notebook, where I always wrote down the date, I added the following line: "WTC Disaster."
After lab, I headed to the student center for lunch. People were crowded around televisions. In the hallway, I recall one student saying, "This is what we get for electing George Bush" †a rather odd sentiment given that, up until that point in his presidency, Bush was focused on education policy.
Naturally, students started discussing ideas about who might have done this. Iraq? Iran? Palestinians? Nobody knew. What we did believe is this: we are going to get attacked again. It was not a matter of if but when and where.
*****
My experience was not unique. Just about anyone who is old enough to remember 9/11 can recall the exact details of that day. How many other days are etched into your memory like that? Very few, if any. The point is this: we experienced a collective trauma that day. And the effects of that trauma lasted a very long time.
The truth is we were scared. The people in Bush's inner circle were scared †as in they believed that the president might be assassinated with a missile while aboard Air Force One. This fact comes through very clearly in a new Apple TV+ documentary, called 9/11: Inside the President's War Room. Former national security advisor Condoleezza Rice also notes that nearly 3,000 people were murdered on their watch. Naturally, they felt a responsibility never to allow something like 9/11 to happen again.
So, that is why the U.S. reacted the way that it did. More than three years after 9/11, we were still worried about terrorism †so much so, that Bush ran on a platform of beating it, and he won re-election. It was not until 2006 †more than five years after the attack †that Americans started to realize that things were not going according to plan, particularly in Iraq. As a result, the American people handed Congress to the Democrats, and in 2008, the presidency to Barack Obama.
But even then, the war on terrorism did not end. Obama made sure to hunt down Osama bin Laden, which successfully happened on May 2, 2011. (I remember exactly where I was when I heard that news, too.) After his death was reported, thousands of Americans were cheering in New York City and in front of the White House.
That is the emotional toll that 9/11 took on America. It is worth remembering that when we examine the past 20 years of foreign policy and war. Without a doubt, we made many terrible mistakes. But let's also have a bit of humility and empathy as we analyze those mistakes, remembering why we made them in the first place.
As Rice asks in the aforementioned documentary, "What would you have done?"
One of the popular memes in literature, movies and tech journalism is that man's creation will rise and destroy it.
Lately, this has taken the form of a fear of AI becoming omnipotent, rising up and annihilating mankind.
The economy has jumped on the AI bandwagon; for a certain period, if you did not have "AI" in your investor pitch, you could forget about funding. (Tip: If you are just using a Google service to tag some images, you are not doing AI.)
However, is there actually anything deserving of the term AI? I would like to make the point that there isn't, and that our current thinking is too focused on working on systems without thinking much about the humans using them, robbing us of the true benefits.
What companies currently employ in the wild are nearly exclusively statistical pattern recognition and replication engines. Basically, all those systems follow the "monkey see, monkey do" pattern: They get fed a certain amount of data and try to mimic some known (or fabricated) output as closely as possible.
When used to provide value, you give them some real-life input and read the predicted output. What if they encounter things never seen before? Well, you better hope that those "new" things are sufficiently similar to previous things, or your "intelligent" system will give quite stupid responses.
But there is not the slightest shred of understanding, reasoning and context in there, just simple re-creation of things seen before. An image recognition system trained to detect sheep in a picture does not have the slightest idea what "sheep" actually means. However, those systems have become so good at recreating the output, that they sometimes look like they know what they are doing.
Isn't that good enough, you may ask? Well, for some limited cases, it is. But it is not "intelligent", as it lacks any ability to reason and needs informed users to identify less obvious outliers with possibly harmful downstream effects.
The ladder of thinking has three rungs, pictured in the graph below:
Imitation: You imitate what you have been shown. For this, you do not need any understanding, just correlations. You are able to remember and replicate the past. Lab mice or current AI systems are on this rung.
Intervention: You understand causal connections and are able to figure out what would happen if you now would do this, based on what you learned about the world in the past. This requires a mental model of the part of the world you want to influence and the most relevant of its downstream dependencies. You are able to imagine a different future. You meet dogs and small children on that rung, so it is not a bad place to be.
Counterfactual reasoning: The highest rung, where you wonder what would have happened, had you done this or that in the past. This requires a full world model and a way to simulate the world in your head. You are able to imagine multiple pasts and futures. You meet crows, dolphins and adult humans here.
In order to ascend from one rung to the next, you need to develop a completely new set of skills. You can't just make an imitation system larger and expect it to suddenly be able to reason. Yet this is what we are currently doing with our ever-increasing deep learning models: We think that by giving them more power to imitate, they will at some point magically develop the ability to think. Apart from self-delusional hope and selling nice stories to investors and newspapers, there is little reason to believe that.
And we haven't even touched the topic of computational complexity and economical and ecological impact of ever-growing models. We might simply not be able to grow our models to the size needed, even if the method worked (which it doesn't, so far).
Whatever those systems create is the mere semblance of intelligence and in pursuing the goal of generating artificial intelligence by imitation, we are following a cargo cult.
Instead, we should get comfortable with the fact that the current ways will not achieve real AI, and we should stop calling it that. Machine learning (ML) is a perfectly fitting term for a tool with awesome capabilities in the narrow fields where it can be applied. And with any tool, you should not try to make the entire world your nail, but instead find out where to use it and where not.
Machines are strong when it comes to quickly and repeatedly performing a task with minimal uncertainty. They are the ruling class of the first rung.
Humans are strong when it comes to context, understanding and making sense with very little data at hand and high uncertainties. They are the ruling class of the second and third rung.
So what if we focus our efforts away from the current obsession with removing the human element from everything and thought about combining both strengths? There is an enormous potential in giving machine learning systems the optimal, human-centric shape, in finding the right human-machine interface, so that both can shine. The ML system prepares the data, does some automatable tasks and then hands the results to the human, who further handles them according to context.
ML can become something like good staff to a CEO, a workhorse to a farmer or a good user interface to an app user: empowering, saving time, reducing mistakes.
Building a ML system for a given task is rather easy and will become ever easier. But finding a robust, working integration of the data and the pre-processed results of the data with the decision-maker (i.e. human) is a hard task. There is a reason why most ML projects fail at the stage of adoption/integration with the organization seeking to use them.
Solving this is a creative task: It is about domain understanding, product design and communication. Instead of going ever bigger to serve, say, more targetted ads, the true prize is in connecting data and humans in clever ways to make better decisions and be able to solve tougher and more important problems.
Republished with permission of the World Economic Forum. Read the original article.
Many small animals grow their teeth, claws and other “tools" out of materials that are filled with zinc, bromine and manganese, reaching up to 20% of the material's weight.
My colleagues and I call these “heavy element biomaterials," and in a new paper, we suggest that these materials make it possible for animals to grow scalpel-sharp and precisely shaped tools that are resistant to breaking, deformation and wear.
We examined ant mandible teeth and found that they are a smooth mix of proteins and zinc, with single zinc atoms attached to about a quarter of the amino acid units that make up the proteins forming the teeth. In contrast, calcified tools – like human teeth – are made of relatively large chunks of calcium minerals. We think the lack of chunkiness in heavy element biomaterials makes them better than calcified materials at forming smooth, precisely shaped and extremely sharp tools.
To evaluate the advantages of heavy element biomaterials, we estimated the force, energy and muscle size required for cutting with tools made of different materials. Compared with other hard materials grown by these animals, the wear-resistant zinc material enables heavily used tools to puncture stiff substances using only one-fifth of the force. The estimated advantage is even greater relative to calcified materials that – since they can't be nearly as sharp as heavy element biomaterials - can require more than 100 times as much force.
Biomaterials that incorporate zinc (red) and manganese (orange) are located in the important cutting and piercing edges of ant mandibles, worm jaws and other 'tools.' (Robert Schofield, CC BY-ND)
Why it matters
It's not surprising that materials that could make sharp tools would evolve in small animals. A tick and a wolf both need to puncture the same elk skin, but the wolf has vastly stronger muscles. The tick can make up for its tiny muscles by using sharper tools that focus force onto smaller regions.
But, like a sharp pencil tip, sharper tool tips break more easily. The danger of fracture is made even worse by the tendency for small animals to extend their reach using long thin tools – like those pictured above. And a chipped claw or tooth may be fatal for a small animal that doesn't have the strength to cut with blunted tools.
From an evolutionary perspective, these materials allow smaller animals to consume tougher foods. And the energy saved by using less force during cutting can be important for any animal. These advantages may explain the widespread use of heavy element biomaterials in nature – most ants, many other insects, spiders and their relatives, marine worms, crustaceans and many other types of organisms use them.
What still isn't known
While my team's research has clarified the advantages of heavy element biomaterials, we still don't know exactly how zinc and manganese harden and protect the tools.
One possibility is that a small fraction of the zinc, for example, forms bridges between proteins, and these cross-links stiffen the material – like crossbeams stiffen a building. We also think that when a fang bangs into something hard, these zinc cross-links may break first, absorbing energy to keep the fang itself from chipping.
We speculate that the abundance of extra zinc is a ready supply for healing the material by quickly reestablishing the broken zinc-histidine cross-links between proteins.
What's next?
The potential that these materials are self-healing makes them even more interesting, and our team's next step is to test this hypothesis. Eventually we may find that self-healing or other features of heavy element biomaterials could lead to improved materials for things like small medical devices.
Despite being the only bridge early hominin species could have crossed to enter Eurasia, the Arabian Peninsula bears little to no evidence of early human occupation.
Subverting expectations, a recent excavation in the Nefud Desert found tools dated to different stages of hominin evolution.
It turns out that early humans moved in and out of the peninsula whenever the climate allowed them to do so.
We know a good deal about how early hominins †the branch of our evolutionary tree that split from chimps and bonobos up to seven million years ago †moved around their place of origin in eastern Africa. Fossils indicate they eventually made it to Eurasia through the Levant area of western Asia. This luscious green region, located on the easternmost edges of the Mediterranean, served our ancestors as the highway between two continents, one they would cross many times †in both directions.
Given how the Arabian Peninsula, a landmass that encapsulates the Levant, was our ancestors' one and only access point to the wider world, one would think evidence of their presence would stretch from Israel to Yemen. However, this is not the case. While the Levant is littered with prodigious digging sites, the paleontological and paleoenvironmental records of the peninsula's interior have remained hauntingly empty and fragmented.
That is, until today. According to a new paper published in Nature, excavations in the Nefud Desert in Saudi Arabia unearthed traces of both human and Neanderthal occupation. By shrinking their search window to wetter periods on the geologic time scale †what the authors refer to as "brief 'green' windows of reduced aridity approximately 400, 300, 200, 130-75 and 55 thousand years ago" †archaeologists were able to find a number of Low to Middle Pleistocene Age tools used by proto-humans that ventured into the region after heavy rainfall transformed the desert into a wide-open grassland.
Digging in the desert
To say the interior parts of the Arabian Peninsula have never yielded evidence of hominins would not be entirely true. The earth here hides evidence of hominins, just not of hominin settlements. Whenever archaeologists make a discovery, it is usually the remnants of a makeshift workshop site, which are very different from the cave and rock shelters that can be stumbled upon throughout the more hospitable Levant region. Did we look hard enough, though?
Excavations in northern Saudi Arabia at a site called Khall Amayshan 4 (KAM 4) suggest we did not. On the surface, the site looks like any other part of the Nefud Desert. Below ground, however, sedimentary rocks and interdunal basins tell of a time when this place used to contain a network of lakes and rivers. Such a clear and detailed preservation of this time in geologic history cannot be found anywhere else on the peninsula and was formed serendipitously when a sand dune slid atop the basin to protect it from erosion.
We know the shores at KAM 4 have been occupied by hominins several times during the Pleistocene because different phases of lake formation correspond with a "distinct lithic assemblage" †an archaeological term for stone tools and their byproducts, of which KAM 4 is filled to the brim. A 400,000-year-old assemblage contains small hand axes made from slabs of quartzite, while a 55,000-year-old deposit contains a number of Levallois flakes.
These tools can teach us several things about the hominins that made and used them. In terms of appearance and design, some assemblages at KAM 4 seem to have more in common with those found in Africa than those from the Levantine woodlands, suggesting a different migration out of Africa might have taken place †one that ended up in Arabia rather than Eurasia. "It seems," the researchers write, "that much of Northeast Africa and Southwest Asia shared similar material culture."
Climate change and migratory patterns
Hominin species did not hop continents at random; their migratory patterns were a response to the changing climate of the Pleistocene. Judging from the results of their excavation at KAM 4, researchers identified no less than five distinct movements into the Arabian Peninsula. Given that most of the tools were dated to periods that saw increased rainfall, it is safe to say our ancestors only migrated into the desert when it became hospitable enough for them to do so.
Conversely, researchers were unable to find any tools that would have been left during interglacial periods. It seems that, as the region became warmer and more arid, the hominin populations that had made their home inside the peninsula dispersed once again. The unstable environmental conditions that plagued the peninsula may well explain the fragmentation of its fossil evidence, a problem that researchers in the relatively static Levantine woodlands rarely encounter.
Because climate change and the accompanying mass migratory movements can actually erase the vast majority of a species' fossil record, these findings bear relevance to modern readers. This year's UN climate report warns of Arctic summers without ice and tropical storms that will become even more ubiquitous than they already are. What if hundreds of thousands of people have to leave their homes either temporarily or indefinitely?
Mass psychogenic illness, also known as mass hysteria, is when a group of people manifest physical symptoms from imagined threats.
History is littered with outbreaks of mass hysteria.
Recently, alleged cases of Tourette's syndrome appeared all over the world. Was it real or mass psychogenic illness?
While the term is often avoided for fear of ridiculing something more serious,mass psychogenic illness (MPI) †also known as mass sociogenic illness (MSI) or mass hysteria †is a real occurrence that can cause a variety of physical symptoms to manifest in groups of people despite the lack of any physical cause. Often compared toconversion disorder, in which emotional issues are "converted" into physical problems, MPI tends to occur among people who share anxieties, fears, and a sense of community. In the right group of people, it can spread like a virus.
A curious case of the condition related to TikTok videos shows both how imagined conditions can spread and how our modern media landscape presents new problems never even dreamt of in a time before the internet.
TikTok tics
In 2019, a strange slew ofnew Tourette's cases made its way into hospitals all over the world. Oddly, these were suddenly occurring in children well over the age of six, the age of typical onset. Most peculiar of all, many of the patients were exhibiting identical symptoms and tics. While many cases of Tourette's are similar, these symptoms were precisely the same.
As it turned out, the tics were also identical to those exhibited by one Jan Zimmermann, a 23-year-old YouTuber from Germany with Tourette's. On his channel,Gewitter im Kopf, he documents his daily life with the condition. All of the patients who suddenly claimed to have tics were fans of his or of similar channels on YouTube and TikTok.
There was nothing physically wrong with the large number of people who suddenly came down with Tourette's-like symptoms, and most of them recovered immediately after being told that they did not have Tourette's syndrome. Others recovered after brief psychologicalinterventions. The spread of the condition across a social group despite the lack of a physical cause all pointed toward an MPI event.
Historical cases of mass hysteria
Of course, humans do not need social media to develop symptoms of a disease that they do not have. Several strange cases of what appears to have been mass hysteria exist throughout history. While some argue for a physical cause in each case, the consensus is that the ultimate cause was psychological.
The dancing plagues of the Middle Ages, in which hundreds of people began to dance until they were utterly exhausted despite apparently wishing to stop, are thought to have been examples of mass madness. Some cases also involved screaming, laughing, having violent reactions to the color red, and lewd behavior. Attempts to calm the groups by providing musicians just made the problem worse, as people joined in to dance to the music. By the time the dancing plague of1518 ended, several people had died of exhaustion or injuries sustained during their dance marathon.
It was also common for nunneries to get outbreaks of what was then considered demonic possession but what now appears to be MPI. In many well recorded cases, young nuns †often cast into a life of poverty and severe discipline with little to say about it †suddenly found themselves "possessed" and began behaving in extremely un-nunlikefashion. These instances often spread to other members of the convent and required intervention by exorcists to resolve.
A more recent example might be the curious story of theMad Gasser of Mattoon. During WWII in the small town of Mattoon, Illinois, 33 people awoke in the middle of the night to a "sweet smell" in their homes followed by symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, and paralysis. Many claimed to see a figure outside their rooms fleeing the scene. Claims of gassings rapidly followed the initial cases, and the police department was swamped with reports that amounted to nothing. The cases ended after the sheriff threatened to arrest anyone submitting a report of being gassed without agreeing to a medicalreview.
Each of these cases exhibits the generally agreed upon conditions for MPI: the people involved were a cohesive group, they all agreed on the same threats existing, and they were enduring stressful and emotional conditions that later manifested as physical symptoms. Additionally, the symptoms appeared suddenly and spread by sight and communication among the affected individuals.
Social diseases for a social media age
One point upon which most sources on MPI agree is the tendency of the outbreaks to occur among cohesive groups whose members are in regular contact. This is easy to see in the above examples: nuns live together in small convents, medieval peasants did not travel much, and the residents of Mattoon were in a small community.
This makes the more recent case that relies on the internet all the more interesting. And it's not the only one. Another MPI centered around a school in New York in2011.
As a result, a team of German researchers has put forth the idea of a new version of MPI for the modern age: "mass social media-induced illness." It is similar to MPI but differs in that it is explicitly for cases driven by social media, in which people suffering from the same imagined symptoms never actually come into direct contact with one another.
Of course, these researchers are not the first to consider the problem in a digital context. Dr. Robert Bartholomew described the aforementioned New York case in a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
All this seems to imply that our online interactions can affect us in much the same ways as direct communication has for ages past and that the social groups we form online can be cohesive enough to cause identical symptoms in people who have never met. Therefore, we likely have not seen the last of "mass social media-induced illness."
Flying across the American Southwest, brilliant points of light shine in the distant wastes of the Mojave Desert. Three glowing spots hover over the horizon, each surrounded by a gleaming field. These are the towers and mirrors (heliostats) of the Ivanpah generating station, one of the largest concentrated solar power plants on Earth. What is this technology that allows solar power to continue at night, and how does it work?
Traditional photovoltaic (PV) solar cells absorb sunlight and pour out electricity. Particles of light (photons) emitted by the sun travel through space, transit Earth's atmosphere, and smack into a solar panel. Some photons are reflected away by the panel and lost. Most of them are absorbed by the atoms of the panel, which then release electrons. The solar cell's electrical design gathers these electrons and channels them out as electrical current. Further electrical devices convert this low voltage direct current (DC) to higher voltage alternating current (AC) to send across power transmission lines.
Concentrated solar thermal (CST) power plants do not directly exchange solar photons for electrons. They gather the photons and use them to heat water, which turns a steam turbine, which turns an electrical generator. This is the same way that nuclear fission and fossil fuel plants generate electricity †the difference being that uranium or coal or natural gas are replaced by the heat of the sun's rays.
The solar concentrator's basic design is simple. An array of heliostats †a term for mirrors on swiveling mounts capable of tracking the sun †is built on the ground. These arrays cover many hundreds of acres, roughly comparable to a large traditional solar plant of similar capacity. Each mirror is continuously adjusted so that it points in a direction that bisects the angle between the sun and a giant power tower. Sunlight is thus beamed up toward a boiler system looming 400-800 feet above the earth.
Approaching the central tower, the converging solar light from thousands of mirrors becomes extremely powerful. Visible from many miles away, the nearly transparent air itself will shine with scattered optical power. Unlucky birds that intersect the concentrated beams are incinerated mid-air. This dense power is what ultimately drives electrical generation.
The top of the tower is a box with black walls †the sides of a boiler designed to absorb nearly all of the reflected light, which contains the fluid to be heated. Some plants, like Ivanpah in California, heat water for their steam turbines. Others use a more exotic molten salt working fluid.
Solar thermal concentration offers one major advantage over traditional PV solar cell technology: dispatchability. A properly configured CST plant can broil molten salt to more than 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, storing an incredible amount of heat energy. The liquid salt is then pumped into a holding tank, acting as a sort of battery. When sunlight is not available (roughly half the time), this stored up sunlight energy can be pumped out of the tank and used to power a turbine generator for on-demand power overnight.
Installed CST electricity generation across the globe is relatively low. While the technology works today, and paths to advance it have been laid out, the cost is currently too high to compete with standard photovoltaic cells. Many nations, including Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, China, Chile, Spain, and India have built giant power tower installations, yet most of their future commitments are unclear. While concentrated solar thermal power has been growing cheaper, PV cell cost has been dropping just as rapidly.
The future of this energy source may well hinge on continued development of its stored energy capability for dispatchable power, which is needed to fill in for inconsistent wind turbines and PV solar plants.
Options today to store energy are very limited. Lithium-ion technology has many downsides that prevent countries from running on batteries. Like the cells in a laptop, they are expensive, they degrade dramatically over time, and they are liable to catch fire. Global production capacity is far too small for the task, and that production is dominated by China.
Concentrated solar thermal technology is straightforward and clean. The design is beautiful and still being improved. Effectively storing sunlight for overnight power dispatch is a brilliant feature. Still, commercial grid electricity is a brutal market in which the cheapest wins. Will solar concentrator plants become competitive and multiply around the world? We shall see.
By studying the characteristics of stars, like their temperature and luminosity, astrophysicists figured out how stars evolve over time.
This amazing insight is the primary lesson of the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram.
Human beings, as the species Homo sapiens, have been around for about 300,000 years. That turns out to be about 100 million nights during which somebody, somewhere looked up at the dark sky and asked, "What are those twinkly lights?"
Given all those nights and all those people asking pretty much the same question, it is pretty remarkable that we happen to live in one of the first generations that actually knows the answer. Here in the 21st century, we know for sure what stars are, and a key reason we have that knowledge is because of a little something called the HR diagram. Over the summer, I wrote two other posts on what I called the "most important graph in astrophysics." Today, I want to finish the series by explaining how the HR diagram shows us how stars age and evolve.
Stellar evolution: a star's life cycle
You can read the first and second posts here and here, respectively. But for completeness, let's restate that the HR diagram is a plot with stellar luminosity (L for energy output) on the vertical axis and stellar surface temperature (T for temperature) on the horizonal axis. In the previous posts, we learned that when you measure L and T for a bunch of stars and then drop them onto this kind of plot, you find the majority of the points fall on a thick diagonal band running from high stellar luminosity and temperature (high L and T) to low stellar luminosity and temperature (low L and T). That band is what astronomers call the Main Sequence, and its discovery in the HR diagram was key to understanding what stars were and how they shined.
What the Main Sequence revealed were stars in their long middle age. Middle-aged stars (meaning stars in between their relatively short birth and death phases) support themselves against their own crushing, titanic gravity by releasing energy through fusion reactions in their hot, dense cores. Hydrogen nuclei are fused into helium nuclei, giving up a little energy along the way through good ol' E = mc2.
As long as there is hydrogen to burn in the core, a star is stable, happy, and free to shine its brilliance into the dark night of space. Luckily stars have lots of hydrogen to burn. A star like the sun contains about a billion billion billion tons of hydrogen gas. That translates into about 10 billion years of life on the Main Sequence. But a billion billion billion tons of gas is not infinite. Eventually, the hydrogen fusion party must end. The star will run out of fuel in the core, and that is when it stops being middle-aged.
What happens next is also revealed by the HR diagram, which once again, is why it is the most important graph in astrophysics. When astronomers first started dropping their stars onto the diagram more than 100 years ago, they saw not only the Main Sequence but also stars clustered in other places. There were lots of moderately bright stars with low temperatures (high L and low T). There were also lots of really, really bright stars with even lower temperatures (very high L and lower T). Using the laws of physics associated with hot glowing matter, astronomers could derive the sizes of these bright cool stars and found that they were much bigger than the sun. They identified giant stars (the bright ones), which were 10 times the size of the sun, and supergiants (the really, really bright ones), which were 100 times the size of the sun.
These various kinds of giant stars on the HR diagram were the all-important evidence for the evolution of stars. Stellar properties were not static. They aged and changed just like we did. Astrophysicists eventually saw that the evolution of a star on the HR diagram was driven by the evolution of nuclear burning in its core. As researchers got better at modeling what happens within stars as they age, they came to see that after the hydrogen fuel runs out in the core, gravity begins to crush what is left: inert helium "ash."
Eventually, the gravitational squeeze drives temperatures and densities in the core high enough to ignite the helium ash, allowing the helium nuclei to fuse into carbon nuclei. These internal changes rearrange the outer layers of the star, making them swell and bloat †first into the giants, and then into the supergiants. The details of why they get so large are complicated and require lots of detailed calculations (done with computers). What matters for us is that what comes out of those calculations are evolutionary tracks across the HR diagram. The tracks are predictions, telling astronomers how changes in a star's nuclear burning history will manifest in it its luminosity and temperature which, in turn, translates into how it will move across the HR diagram over time.
The changes for actual stars are too slow to watch over a human lifetime. But by taking measurements of lots of random stars (meaning they are at random points in their evolution), we can find the older ones in their giant or supergiant phases. Then, via some statistics, astronomers can then see if their theoretical evolutionary tracks match what they see in the HR diagram. The answer is a resounding yes.
So not only do we know what stars are (big balls of mostly hydrogen gas with a fusion furnace in the core), but we also know exactly how those luminous spheres evolve across billions of years of cosmic history †including lighting up the nights for a remarkable planet that is home to some remarkable hairless monkeys.
Before migrating to the sea, whales were terrestrial herbivores.
As they transitioned to the ocean and became carnivores, at least one proto-whale was an eating machine †both on land and in the sea.
This fearsome fossil was found in the Sahara desert, which used to be an ocean bottom.
Whales are carnivorous, although gigantic baleen whales feed on such tiny prey that it is hard to believe that they ever get enough food. Toothed whales dine on fish, squid, and octopi. (Fun fact: Orcas, also known as killer whales, are not really whales †they are gigantic, killer dolphins.)
Before moving into the sea, it is believed that whales were once terrestrial herbivores and somewhat deer-like. About 43 million years ago, say the authors of a new study, at least oneprotocetid †a semi-aquatic whale †was something else entirely. According to a fossil recently found in the Sahara desert, it was a four-legged, walking, swimming, Jurassic World-like nightmare.
In more gentle, scientific terms: "Unique features of the skull and mandible suggest a capacity for more efficient oral mechanical processing than the typical protocetid condition, thereby allowing for a strong raptorial feeding style."
Likely feeding on both land and in the sea, Phiomicetus anubis was fierce, with teeth and jaws powerful enough to tear apart its prey. The study says that it was about 10 feet long and weighed as much as 1,300 pounds, with a head reminiscent of a jackal's. Thus, its discoverers had good reason to name it after Anubis, the Egyptian god of death.
The Sahara was not always a desert
Authors Mohamed Sameh, Abdullah Gohar, and Hesham Sallam with the Phiomicetus anubis fossil.Credit: Abdullah Gohar (courtesy of the authors)
P. anubis was found in the Sahara desert, which was once under water. It is believed that such Protocetidae hail from the Eocene era in the Indo-Pakistan region. Its fossil was found in the Fayum Depression in the Egyptian Western Desert, an area that has been the site of numerous prehistoric whale discoveries, as well as discoveries of early fish, sharks, and land mammals.
The researchers did not find all of P. anubis, but they did find enough to deduce its characteristics based on its cranium, jaws, cervical and thoracic vertebrae, and its rib fragments.
Chow time
Examination of the whale's teeth suggests that it routinely digested prey that were too large to swallow whole and thus had to be torn apart. Among its likely fare: large fish, smaller cetaceans, turtles, and invertebrates such as nautiloids. As far as how it caught and killed its food, the study says:
"Phiomicetus may have used the same mechanism that modern crocodilians and sharks use in hunting large prey items (e.g. large fish or small cetaceans) by pulling them onto land or tearing them by seizing a part of the prey with powerful jaws then rolling and twisting the entire body."
The researchers also assert that P. anubis was not above scavenging.
Conventionalism is the idea that right and wrong depend entirely on the cultures and traditions to which we belong. What one culture calls immoral, another accepts as normal.
But if we accept this reasoning, we are forced to conclude that any manner of atrocities †from ritual child sacrifice to female genital mutilation †are permissible.
Without a universal standard of morality, it is difficult to claim that some behaviors are always wrong.
On August 17, 2021, the Taliban, fresh from their takeover of Afghanistan, released a statement that they would protect the existing rights of Afghan women "within the framework of Islam." There was no mention of "human rights" or the Western idea of equality. Instead, the Taliban were appealing to a 2500-year-old tradition †the idea of cultural relativity.
The belief that right and wrong and good and bad depend on the culture to which one belongs is popular today. We are loath to say that one culture is better or worse than another, that one way of doing things is "immoral," or that some traditions are a bit disgusting or weird. Doing so risks being labeled culturally insensitive †or worse. But what do we lose by being willfully blind to vast differences in moral standards between cultures?
You say potato, I say ritual child sacrifice
From where do you get your morals? Your sense of right and wrong? If you are an absolutist, it will presumably come from some kind of universal (possibly religious) moral order. But if you are a relativist, you likely will point to some worldly source, like society, family, or personal conscience.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of relativists: subjectivists and conventionalists.
Subjectivists are those who believe values and morals are made entirely by you as an individual. It finds expression in French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote, "You are free, therefore choose †that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do."
But it is found also in Frederick Nietzsche's "perspectivism," which allows for no facts at all †not least moral facts †but only interpretations from our particular vantage point. When he wrote that "every great philosophy up till now has consisted of… the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography," he meant to say that whenever we declare this or that to be the case, we are only expressing or projecting our own values.
So, subjectivists will argue that you have your values, and I have mine. I am a vegetarian, and you are a meat eater. You are happy to download movies illegally, and I am not. And that is okay.
Conventionalists, on the other hand, argue that our morals come from the society, culture, or historical norms of our time. They see right and wrong as embedded in the traditions and conventions of our age. And the first clear formulation of this is found in Herodotus.
It's all Greek to me
Any well traveled person can attest that the more you see of the varied and incongruous behaviors across the world, the more you see your own afresh. But in spite of all these different cultures, we have an incredibly hard time abandoning our own.
As Herodotus wrote in Histories †a sprawling, entertaining, and often hilariously inaccurate account of the peoples and times of the 5th century BCE †if someone were asked "out of all the customs in the world" which they thought were the best, they would almost always "end by preferring their own. So convinced are they that their own usages far surpass those of all others."
As wild and exciting as a new land might be, we still come back home and tell our friends how strange and weird it was.
To flesh out his point, Herodotus tells a story involving the Persian emperor, Darius. Darius asked his Greek captives if they would accept payment to eat their dead father's body. The Greeks said they would never, ever do so. The proper funeral rites of Greece demanded corpses to be burned. Darius then sent for his Indian captives, a group of people called the "Callatians", who he knew did eat their father's body after death. Would they accept any money to burn their father's bodies? They were shocked and offended. It was an utter sacrilege, and they refused any money.
His point? What one people thinks is the height of taboo, another will see as normal. We each have the morals that we do simply because we were born in a particular time and place.
Can we declare that another culture is immoral?
The problem with conventionalism, or cultural relativity, is that it is hard to see how we can ever judge another culture's questionable practices. If we truly believe that "right and wrong are wholly defined by society," then we are forced to admit that any manner of atrocities †from ritual child sacrifice to the Holocaust †are okay.
If a country has a long and popular tradition of female genital mutilation, then we have no grounds to say that it is wrong. If a culture accepts child marriages or a pre-adolescent age of consent, that is just the way they do things. And, with our opening example, if the Taliban or Afghan Muslim tradition subjugates women and forbids free speech, what grounds do we have to rebuke them?
It seems that there are few ways out of this problem. One way might be to commit to what is called "political realism," which dates back to another "father of history" in the ancient Greek, Thucydides. This theory maintains that right and wrong, or the idealistic notions of justice and honor, simply do not apply in international relations. When we are dealing with states against states, it is dog-eat-dog or "might makes right" †a form of ethical survival of the fittest, perhaps.
But this is unsatisfactory. If we are to salvage the idea that certain beliefs or practices are morally wrong, reprehensible even, no matter where or when they occur, we likely have to revert to some kind of moral absolutism. This is no easy position to argue, since to do so seems to require some universal or objective ethical yardstick by which to bash others. We need a reply when someone asks, "On what grounds is your way better?" One way, of course, is religion. But if not religion, then what?
It is a thorny issue, but what the Taliban's wily and manipulative press conference has revealed is that there is a paucity to moral relativism that most find hard to accept. Perhaps Afghanistan has taught us that we are more absolutist than we thought.
However, it's still relatively expensive to store energy. And since renewable energy generation isn't available all the time – it happens when the wind blows or the sun shines – storage is essential.
Here are three emerging technologies that could help make this happen.
Longer charges
From alkaline batteries for small electronics to lithium-ion batteries for cars and laptops, most people already use batteries in many aspects of their daily lives. But there is still lots of room for growth.
For example, high-capacity batteries with long discharge times – up to 10 hours – could be valuable for storing solar power at night or increasing the range of electric vehicles. Right now there are very few such batteries in use. However, according to recent projections, upwards of 100 gigawatts' worth of these batteries will likely be installed by 2050. For comparison, that's 50 times the generating capacity of Hoover Dam. This could have a major impact on the viability of renewable energy.
Batteries work by creating a chemical reaction that produces a flow of electrical current.
One of the biggest obstacles is limited supplies of lithium and cobalt, which currently are essential for making lightweight, powerful batteries. According to some estimates, around 10% of the world's lithium and nearly all of the world's cobalt reserves will be depleted by 2050.
Furthermore, nearly 70% of the world's cobalt is mined in the Congo, under conditions that have long been documented as inhumane.
Scientists are working to develop techniques for recycling lithium and cobalt batteries, and to design batteries based on other materials. Tesla plans to produce cobalt-free batteries within the next few years. Others aim to replace lithium with sodium, which has properties very similar to lithium's but is much more abundant.
Safer batteries
Another priority is to make batteries safer. One area for improvement is electrolytes – the medium, often liquid, that allows an electric charge to flow from the battery's anode, or negative terminal, to the cathode, or positive terminal.
When a battery is in use, charged particles in the electrolyte move around to balance out the charge of the electricity flowing out of the battery. Electrolytes often contain flammable materials. If they leak, the battery can overheat and catch fire or melt.
Scientists are developing solid electrolytes, which would make batteries more robust. It is much harder for particles to move around through solids than through liquids, but encouraging lab-scale results suggest that these batteries could be ready for use in electric vehicles in the coming years, with target dates for commercialization as early as 2026.
While solid-state batteries would be well suited for consumer electronics and electric vehicles, for large-scale energy storage, scientists are pursuing all-liquid designs called flow batteries.
A typical flow battery consists of two tanks of liquids that are pumped past a membrane held between two electrodes. ( Qi and Koenig, 2017, CC BY)
In these devices both the electrolyte and the electrodes are liquids. This allows for super-fast charging and makes it easy to make really big batteries. Currently these systems are very expensive, but research continues to bring down the price.
Storing sunlight as heat
Other renewable energy storage solutions cost less than batteries in some cases. For example, concentrated solar power plants use mirrors to concentrate sunlight, which heats up hundreds or thousands of tons of salt until it melts. This molten salt then is used to drive an electric generator, much as coal or nuclear power is used to heat steam and drive a generator in traditional plants.
These heated materials can also be stored to produce electricity when it is cloudy, or even at night. This approach allows concentrated solar power to work around the clock.
This idea could be adapted for use with nonsolar power generation technologies. For example, electricity made with wind power could be used to heat salt for use later when it isn't windy.
Concentrating solar power is still relatively expensive. To compete with other forms of energy generation and storage, it needs to become more efficient. One way to achieve this is to increase the temperature the salt is heated to, enabling more efficient electricity production. Unfortunately, the salts currently in use aren't stable at high temperatures. Researchers are working to develop new salts or other materials that can withstand temperatures as high as 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit (705 C).
One leading idea for how to reach higher temperature involves heating up sand instead of salt, which can withstand the higher temperature. The sand would then be moved with conveyor belts from the heating point to storage. The Department of Energy recently announced funding for a pilot concentrated solar power plant based on this concept.
Advanced renewable fuels
Batteries are useful for short-term energy storage, and concentrated solar power plants could help stabilize the electric grid. However, utilities also need to store a lot of energy for indefinite amounts of time. This is a role for renewable fuels like hydrogen and ammonia. Utilities would store energy in these fuels by producing them with surplus power, when wind turbines and solar panels are generating more electricity than the utilities' customers need.
Today these fuels are mostly made from natural gas or other nonrenewable fossil fuels via extremely inefficient reactions. While we think of it as a green fuel, most hydrogen gas today is made from natural gas.
Scientists are looking for ways to produce hydrogen and other fuels using renewable electricity. For example, it is possible to make hydrogen fuel by splitting water molecules using electricity. The key challenge is optimizing the process to make it efficient and economical. The potential payoff is enormous: inexhaustible, completely renewable energy.
