Friday 10th May 2024

What I wish more people knew about deadly allergic reactions | Psyche Ideas

is a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy at Princeton University in New Jersey, US. In addition to avoiding her allergens, she spends her time researching people’s perceptions of social and political phenomena.

Last year, I nearly died because I was too polite to stick with saying No to a pastry. A loved one had baked it for my belated 30th birthday celebration. I declined politely at first. But they’d gone out of their way to make something. Was I rude for refusing? They offered a second, different baked good. No thank you. At the third offer, I relented and took a bite. Within seconds, my mouth felt tingly. Half an hour later, I was at the Emergency Room.

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One of Monet's Late Haystack Paintings Could Sell for More Than $30 Million

The sale of “Meules à Giverny” (1893) will coincide with the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris

In the late 19th century, Claude Monet created an astonishing series of haystack paintings, which are now among the Impressionist artist's most recognizable works. Later this month, one of those pieces—Meules à Giverny (1893)—will go to auction at Sotheby's in New York, where it's expected to fetch more than $30 million. 

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Hallucinogenic Plant Unearthed Beneath an Ancient Maya Ball Court

Researchers have found evidence of a nearly 2,000-year-old ceremonial offering at the site in present-day Mexico

At the site of an ancient Maya ball court, researchers have identified a bundle of ceremonial mind-altering plants—which may have been used as an offering to higher powers during the court’s construction.

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Dice Snakes Fake Their Own Deaths With Gory, Poop-Filled Theatrics

When attacked by a predator, the reptiles can play dead with convincing detail, employing blood and feces for the show

The nonvenomous, water-loving reptiles—named for their dotted underbellies—are some of the animal kingdom’s most dramatic actors, new research finds.

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Spend the Night in the Musée d'Orsay's Clock Room on the Evening of the Olympics Opening Ceremony

Airbnb will allow two travelers to book a one-night stay in the storied Paris museum, where they will watch the ceremony from a balcony overlooking the Seine

When the Olympics kick off in Paris on July 26, the opening ceremony will take place along the Seine. Instead of parading around inside a stadium, athletes will float down the river on boats representing each national delegation.

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Astronomers Discover an Atmosphere on a Hot, Rocky Exoplanet With an Ocean of Magma

It’s the best evidence yet of an atmosphere on a rocky planet outside our solar system, researchers say, and studying the distant world could provide insight into Earth's early days

Astronomers have spotted signs of an atmosphere on an exoplanet 41 light-years away from Earth—the best evidence to date for a rocky planet with an atmosphere outside our solar system, according to a statement from NASA.

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Locks of Beethoven's Hair Are Unraveling the Mysteries of His Deafness and Illnesses

Researchers found high levels of lead, mercury and arsenic in the German composer’s hair, which may help explain some of his many ailments

German composer Ludwig van Beethoven began losing his hearing in his 20s, a fact that deeply upset and embarrassed him. Over the years, his hearing loss worsened, and by the time he died at age 56 in 1827, the composer was totally deaf.

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Will Better Superconductors Transform the World? | Quanta Magazine

If superconductors — materials that conduct electricity without any resistance — worked at temperatures and pressures close to what we would consider normal, they would be world-changing. They could dramatically amplify power grids, levitate high-speed trains and enable more affordable medical technologies. For more than a century, physicists have tinkered with different compounds and environmental conditions in pursuit of this elusive property, but while success has sometimes been claimed, the reports were always debunked or withdrawn. What makes this challenge so tricky?

In this episode, Siddharth Shanker Saxena, a condensed-matter physicist at the University of Cambridge, gives co-host Janna Levin the details about why high-temperature superconductors remain so stubbornly out of reach..

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Game Theory Can Make AI More Correct and Efficient | Quanta Magazine

Imagine you had a friend who gave different answers to the same question, depending on how you asked it. "What's the capital of Peru?" would get one answer, and "Is Lima the capital of Peru?" would get another. You'd probably be a little worried about your friend's mental faculties, and you'd almost certainly find it hard to trust any answer they gave.

That's exactly what's happening with many large language models (LLMs), the ultra-powerful machine learning tools that power ChatGPT and other marvels of artificial intelligence. A generative question, which is open-ended, yields one answer, and a discriminative question, which involves having to choose between options, often yields a different one. "There is a disconnect when the same question is phrased differently," said Athul Paul Jacob, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Could Technological Change Solve the Problem of Inequality? - Medium (No paywall)

Today, a lot of people are making claims about how AI will be able to equalize many things by making it possible to have individualized teaching of many basic subjects, greater access to pre-digested information tailored to your demands, serving as a free research associate, democratizing access to dealing with bureaucratic drudge tasks, etc. And yet, we have heard these claims before.

The computer, coupled with the web, was supposed to have been a democratizing agent by bringing information to people’s fingertips while making easier the solution of semi-technical tasks such as creating and filling out business forms, doing a large number of advanced calculations without need of supplementary equipment, access to orders of magnitude more books and papers than any physical library contained, cheap access to music, and videos, as well as promoting learning through recordings of classes in many subjects from some of the most renowned universities in the world. Etc., etc. This is eerily similar to many of the more modest promises made for the invention of movies or the phonograph, and likely goes back to the earliest tools and innovations such as the ax, the wheel, writing, and paper.

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