In a usual year, there can be over 200 sightings of great white sharks in False Bay near Cape Town, South Africa, which is one of the best-known predator hot spots in the world. However, this year has been baffling to scientists — the great white sharks were gone. The researchers state that the reason may be the orcas, who love to chow down shark liver, or it may be human activity.

Shark Spotters, a local charity that monitors the city’s beaches daily and warns swimmers if sharks are near, has not recorded a single confirmed white shark sighting this year—not even during the summer months, from January to April, when the fish usually come close to shore.

The boats that take tourists to watch sharks hunt seals at Seal Island, in the middle of False Bay, have not recorded sightings either. Sharks tagged along the South African coast have not “pinged” any of the receivers located in the bay since January 2017, and white shark bite marks have been missing from whale carcasses floating in the bay this year.

Find out more about this story over at Science Magazine.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Well, for ImageNet, the golden standard for image classification, this photo of severe flooding in the midwestern US is a toilet.

When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, Andrew Weinert and his colleagues, researchers from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, attempted to assess the damage to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In their hands were a large amount of aerial shots (80,000) of the region taken by the Civil Air Patrol right after the disaster. There’s a problem, however.

...there were too many images to sort through manually, and commercial image recognition systems were failing to identify anything meaningful. In one particularly egregious example, ImageNet, the golden standard for image classification, recommended labeling an image of a major flooding zone as a toilet.

“There was this amazing information content, but it wasn’t accessible,” says Weinert.

They soon realized this problem isn’t unique. In any large-scale disaster scenario, teams of emergency responders like FEMA could save significant time and resources by reviewing details of on-the-ground conditions before their arrival. But most computer vision systems are trained on regular day-to-day imagery, so they can’t reliably pick out relevant details in disaster zones.

The realization compelled the team to compile and annotate a new set of photos and footage specific to emergency response scenarios. They released the data set along with a paper this week in the hopes that it will be used to train computer vision systems in the future. 

The data set includes over 620,000 images and 96.5 hours of video that encompass imagery from all 50 states of the US. Most of the media were sourced from government databases or Creative Commons videos on YouTube; a small fraction were also filmed by the Lincoln Lab staff themselves.

The AI could be a great help in disaster response, should the problem be fixed.

(Image Credit: MIT Lincoln Laboratory)

Inside a microprocessor are tiny electronic switches that collectively do computations. These tiny switches are called transistors. Usually, transistors are made up with silicon. This microprocessor’s transistors, however, are different.

The transistors inside this microprocessor are not made with silicon. Rather, they are made with carbon nanotubes.

By devising techniques to overcome the nanoscale defects that often undermine individual nanotube transistors (SN: 7/19/17), researchers have created the first computer chip that uses thousands of these switches to run programs.

The prototype, described in the Aug. 29 Nature, is not yet as speedy or as small as commercial silicon devices. But carbon nanotube computer chips may ultimately give rise to a new generation of faster, more energy-efficient electronics.

This is “a very important milestone in the development of this technology,” says Qing Cao, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign not involved in the work.

Check this in more detail over at Science News.

(Image Credit: G. Hills et al/ Nature 2019)

What do you do when you see someone being bullied? Will you stand up and defend the victim? Will you remain passive? Or will you reinforce the bully?

The three choices mentioned above are the usual responses to seeing someone being bullied, according to a study from social psychologists in Finland and California. While standing up and defending the victim may be the ideal response, and remaining passive because of fear a common response, the third choice maybe something unnoticed but is also a common response. So why do people join a bully?

A group of researchers suggests it might be something they call social contagion. According to Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, who write about the links between our behaviors and our social networks in their book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, many human behaviors spread through social contact, including some that are often assumed to be biological or acquired independently, such as obesity and fertility.

Research published in 2015 in the journal Sociological Science has shown that generous and helpful behavior is “contagious”—that is, if you do something nice for someone, you increase the likelihood that they’ll do something nice for someone else.

[...]

Unfortunately, the same is true in the other direction. For example, a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that observing someone engaging in “socially irresponsible behaviors” such as littering can lead to the same behaviors in the person who is observing them. Other studies have confirmed this kind of “contagion” of such behaviors.

F. Diane Barth also has another explanation for why people support bullies. Check it out on Psychology Today.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: succo/ Pixabay)

Television shows have both influenced and reflected our society in different ways, such as the way we perceive political and cultural realities. They have inspired people to live in a certain way. It turned out that for some, television shows’ influences extended to the way they decorate and arrange their homes!

Television also offered outright fantasy, the chance to escape into outer space or back in time. Shows like The Waltons, Happy Days, Mad Men, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel took the style of a few decades before their air dates and repackaged it as nostalgia, throwback glamour, or kitsch parody. Sometimes the fantasy was closer to home: a world just a little more polished than our own, where the people were prettier and the apartments nicer than their inhabitants could really afford. The gritty metropolises that characters once hoped to escape evolved into the quirky, cupcake-dispensing playgrounds of young adults who don’t want to grow up. Whether shows were set in suburbs or cities, and whether their characters were wealthy or struggling, the interiors audiences saw on television night after night, year after year, affected how they decorated their own homes. From I Love Lucy to Friends, here are some of the most influential small-screen interiors we’ve seen over the years.

Curbed walks us through a timeline of the different television shows that revolutionized different homes from I Love Lucy, to The Jetsons, Frasier, Friends, and many more!

Would you like your home to be inspired by a show’s set as well?

(Image: Set of Central Perk/Friends at Warner Bros. Studios by Moviefan/Wikipedia)

It's a controversial topic especially since there are people who claim to have died, went to heaven, and lived to tell the tale but what is the truth behind these "out-of-body" or "life-after-death" experiences?

Over the last decade, Dr. Sam Parnia of NYU’s Langone School of Medicine has tracked the brain activity of thousands of subjects in the United States and Europe, charting what happens to the brain in the minutes and hours after cardiac arrest — when the heart ceases to beat. He said that following the loss of heartbeat, brain function ceases “almost instantaneously” and the body stops producing basic reflexes such as gag reflex or pupil dilation.

However, Parnia said, a surprising number of patients who have been brought back to life report having had the capacity to see or hear even after being officially declared dead. Some clinically dead patients who have been revived, he said, describe “watching doctors and nurses working… having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them.”

Given this, how can we then explain what happens in somebody's brain or body when they are declared clinically dead but were able to be revived several minutes or maybe even a longer period of time later?

(Image credit: Sharon McCutcheon/Unsplash)

It would be appropriate to mention a little bit of The Matrix when we're talking about the discourse on reality as an aspect of a technological simulation, or more like a projection of things that have been configured in a computer program.

If we were to humor the thought, what then would be outside the simulation? One curious individual asked this question in connection with Elon Musk's statement about the realm external to the simulation. And here's an answer to that:

In April 2019 an interview of Elon Musk conducted by Lex Fridman was uploaded to the YouTube website. Fridman is a teacher and research scientist in artificial intelligence (AI) who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The pair discussed a variety of topics including the possibility of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

In the context of AGIs, Fridman asked Musk what question he would ask an AGI system if one would be created. And his question was simply what's outside the simulation?

It's an interesting question and one could follow the trail and go down the rabbit hole to see what would come up on the other side but seeing as we have no means of completely knowing whether we are in a simulation or not, we can only hope that there will be someone from the outside who would awaken us to the truth of reality.

(Image credit: Martin Sanchez/Unsplash)

Anybody is susceptible to cracking under pressure and what other place is there which would be a perfect setting for a crime to take place than academia? Sure, other settings would be possible but there is a certain kind of thrill and curiosity when such things occur inside schools and campuses.

A history of the academic mystery mirrors the rise and fall of academia itself, and particularly, women’s place within academia. The more women who have become academics, the lower the status of their profession and the size of their salaries.

Early academic mysteries are concerned with fighting for a place for women within academia, and more broadly, for women’s right to live as intellectuals. Academic mysteries from the 70s and 80s often featured female professors at the top of their game, with jobs that were a clear result of hard work and education, yet with plenty of jealous and old-fashioned colleagues waiting for the slightest misstep to swoop and say “I told you so.”

In this list, Molly Odintz sums up several great reads for academic mysteries and research noir. If you are ever interested in finding a good book about mysteries or thrillers set in academia, you can check out the list for some recommendations.

(Image credit: Sidharth Bhatia/Unsplash)

Driving a car requires that one exercise extreme care and caution so as not to cause injury, harm, damage, or even the death of someone or destruction of property. But there was one man from Wales who admitted that driving his car when it had another car attached above it was a "stupid thing to do". Because of it, he was penalized.

Glyndwr Wyn Richards, 51, was caught on camera driving a Volkswagen Passat with a Skoda Octavia strapped to its roof through an industrial estate in Aberystwyth, Wales, in March.

Prosecutor Ceri Ellis-Jones said Police Constable Phil Westbury had been sent a WhatsApp message showing footage of the car being driven by Richards with another car on top.

Ms. Ellis-Jones said police had sought information from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) about regulations on vehicle loads and how items should be secured safely.

In the end, he received three penalties on his driving license, was fined GBP80, and was ordered to pay costs of GBP115.

(Image credit: Independent Digital News & Media Limited)

In an interview with Lisa Lutz, Olivia Rutigliano from Crime Reads asks the famed crime fiction writer how she is able to write beautifully complex, competent, and brilliant women investigators and characters in her mystery novels, something that has mostly been written with male characters in mind.

How do you write your women characters—are there essential qualities you feel a good female protagonist must have? 

Lisa Lutz: I don’t know. It really depends on the story. I mean, sure, there are similarities—I don’t tend to write about women who put on a front, whether it’s physical or emotional. There’s enough of that bullshit in life. I like my characters to be difficult, amusing (in varying degrees), slightly insane (also to varying degrees). Write what you know, they say.

I also have to admit that when I write women I’m thinking about what I want to put out in the universe. I’m not saying that I think Isabel or Alex would be anyone’s role model, but if they help one person be a little less uptight or more themselves (because sometimes uptight is your personality, and I think you should own that) then I’ve done my job or part of my job.

Read more of the interview on Crime Reads.

For many inventions and innovations, the key is to address a certain problem in a novel way, or in a way that is different from past methods which would make whatever process they are improving more efficient or less costly.

In this regard, engineers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have devised a thin piece of glass that has the ability to do what cameras, sensors, and deep neural networks do but in a more compact material which they call a "smart" glass.

Embedding artificial intelligence inside inert objects is a concept that, at first glance, seems like something out of science fiction. However, it’s an advance that could open new frontiers for low-power electronics. 

Now, artificial intelligence gobbles up substantial computational resources (and battery life) every time you glance at your phone to unlock it with face ID. In the future, one piece of glass could recognize your face without using any power at all.

(Image credit: Sam Million Weaver)

These researchers at McMaster University were always found where the storm was, and you’ll see them collecting data about spiders! Apparently, they found that “extreme weather events such as tropical cyclones may have an evolutionary impact on populations living in storm-prone regions, where aggressive spiders have the best odds of survival.”

"It is tremendously important to understand the environmental impacts of these 'black swan' weather events on evolution and natural selection," says lead author Jonathan Pruitt, an evolutionary biologist and Canada 150 Chair in McMaster's Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour.

The research was tedious and challenging, given that they sampled 240 colonies throughout storm-prone coastal regions. For each species, they studied the inherited personality traits - docile and aggressive - and analyzed their behavior post-tropical cyclone events. The process and some details may be found here!

Image Credit: Joseph T Lapp

Do you debate with yourself? I do. Are you always aware of what you’re thinking? If yes, does that mean you’re always aware? Will you be able to know what you were thinking before you become aware of it?

Sounds circular, doesn’t it?

Whatever was happening, it’s likely that your true inner experience – what you were thinking about just before you started trying to figure out what you were thinking about – is now lost to the mists of time.

Interrogating what’s going on inside our own minds doesn’t seem like it should be a difficult task. But by trying to shine a light on those thoughts, we’re disturbing the very thing we want to measure in the first place. Or as American philosopher William James put it in 1890: “The attempt at introspective analysis… is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.”

[...]

...for psychologists like Fernyhough and Hurlburt, researching inner speech is not an easy task. Simply asking people what they’re thinking about won’t necessarily prompt an accurate answer, says Hurlburt. That is partly because we’re not used to paying close attention to our wandering minds, but also because the questions that surveys tend to ask about our thoughts might prompt us to answer in a particular way – something he thinks leads people to report more inner speaking than they truly experience.

Hurlburn uses a method of investigation called Descriptive Experience Sampling. Here, you go about your normal day-to-day activities and carry around a device with you which, when it beeps, you tune in to what was going on in your mind right before the sound. Then you take note of it, whether it’s words, pictures, and emotion, physical sensation, or something else.

What did the voice within you say when you’re done reading this?

Coven of Trash Witches

They double, double toil and trouble. Their fire burns and their caldron bubbles. Adding cans of tuna fish and bones of an old steak. Your trash is about to meet a hellish fate. 

Halloween is right around the corner. Are you looking to add a dangerously fun piece of custom apparel to your fall wardrobe? Behold the charming Coven of Trash Witches available at the NeatoShop.

This devilishly fun design is available on a large selection of apparel. We specialize in curvy and Big and Tall sizes. We carry baby 6 months all the way to 10XL shirts. We know that fun and Halloween loving people come in every size. 

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great gifts. New items arriving all the time.   

A young man once asked Winston Churchill to what did he attribute his success in life. Churchill responded:

Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down. And never sit down when you can lie down.

Sloths take a similar approach. Unlike most mammals, they aren't endothermic--that is, their bodies produce little internal heat. This is just as well, as the tree leaves that they consume offer little caloric value. Camila Mazzoni of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany explained to the BBC:

“The thermo-regulation that most mammals have to do requires a lot of energy,” says Mazzoni. “But because sloths don’t have it, it means they require a lot less energy.

“But this means they can only live in the tropics, and not high up in the mountains where the temperature gets quite low. 

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Sergio Delgado