Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 48

Eric Holloway: Can computer neural networks learn better than human neurons?

Holloway says, they can and do; when artificial intelligence programmers stopped trying to copy the human neuron, they made much better progress. Humans can do things that AI cannot do, as we saw earlier, but those abilities are not due to the superior learning ability of a human neuron:

Brain neurons operate on what is called the “all or nothing” principle. When enough charge is built up by the neuron’s synapses, it neuron fires. But until then, the neuron does absolutely nothing. The neuron can thus be seen as an on–off switch. It is either firing, or it is not. There is no in-between stage. This makes learning difficult.

To understand why the “all or nothing” principle makes learning difficult, think about playing the “hot or cold” search game where you are searching a room for a treasure. A helpful bystander says “Hotter!” as you get closer to the treasure and “Colder!” as you get farther from it. This signal is very effective in helping you locate the treasure.

But what if we tweak the game. Now, the bystander tells you only whether you have found the treasure or not. If you find the treasure, the bystander says “Yes.” If you did not find the treasure, the bystander says “No.” This new version will take quite a bit longer to play because the bystander is really not providing any information that speeds up the game.

Eric Holloway, “Can computer neural networks learn better than human neurons?” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Humans can do things that AI cannot do, as we saw earlier, but those abilities are not due to the superior learning ability of a human neuron.

You may also wish to read: Artificial neural networks can show that the mind isn’t the brain Because artificial neural networks are a better version of the brain, whatever neural networks cannot do, the brain cannot do. The human mind can do tasks that an artificial neural network (ANN) cannot. Because the brain works like an ANN, the mind cannot just be what the brain does. (Eric Holloway)

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At Mind Matters News: Panpsychism: If computers can have minds, why can’t the Sun?

Rupert Sheldrake’s argument that the Sun is conscious cannot be dismissed out of hand by those who insist that computers can become conscious:

Recently, biologist Rupert Sheldrake asked at the Journal of Consciousness Studies, “Is the Sun conscious?” It’s the sort of question that people might have asked before the dawn of modern science (and the usual answer was yes).

Sheldrake is pretty controversial but he is likely right to note a “recent panpsychist turn in philosophy.” Prominent philosopher David Chalmers, who coined the term the “Hard Problem of consciousness,” has also said “We’re not going to reduce consciousness to something physical … it’s a primitive component of the universe.”

But Sheldrake might have added that there is a panpsychist turn in science as well. After all, a mainstream neuroscientist recently argued in a science publication last year that even viruses are intelligent And he’s hardly the only prominent panpsychist in science. Even New Scientist, long a bastion of materialism (naturalism), offers a sympathetic account of panpsychism.

But at what point do we distinguish between panpsychism and animism the ancient belief that everything has a spirit (which must, in many cases, be placated)?

News, “Panpsychism: If computers can have minds, why can’t the Sun?” at Mind Matters News (August 1)

Takehome: If the Hard AI people are right, animism — the belief that inanimate objects (whether the Sun or a computer) can have minds — has been unjustly dismissed.

You may also wish to read: Why panpsychism is starting to push out naturalism. A key goal of naturalism/materialism has been to explain human consciousness away as “nothing but a pack of neurons.” That can’t work. Panpsychism is not dualism. By including consciousness — including human consciousness — as a bedrock fact of nature, it avoids naturalism’s dead end.

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At Evolution News: Recognizing Providence in the History of Life Is a Hint About Our Own Lives

An arena of fine-tuning we can all appreciate, not quantitatively but qualitatively, is how in most events of our lives, things go right, when there are so many more ways that they could go wrong. Just consider how most of the time we arrive safely to where we’re going when we take a trip by car, even in rush-hour traffic. Or, how electricity keeps flowing to our homes, without which we’d be pushed quickly into survival mode. Or how our sense of balance facilitates efficient movement of our physical bodies throughout the day.

David Klinghoffer gives his perspective on this topic, reaching a different conclusion than Dartmouth College physicist Marcelo Gleiser.

Dartmouth College physicist Marcelo Gleiser, writing at Big Think, asks, “Does life on Earth have a purpose?” Obviously, this is more than just a scientific question. It’s a very personal one for each of us. Given the venue, Gleiser’s answer of course is going to be no.

Gleiser’s own case rests on the part played by chance in life’s history. For example, the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs:

If we changed one or more of the dramatic events in Earth’s history — say, the cataclysmic impact of the asteroid that helped eliminate the dinosaurs 66 million years ago — life’s history on Earth would also change. We probably would not be here asking about life’s purpose. The lesson from life is simple: In Nature, creation and destruction dance together. But there is no choreographer.

His argument: The Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction cleared the field for mammals, allowing ultimately for the rise of “intelligent, technology-savvy humans.” No asteroid –> no humans. The asteroid was a chance, unchoreographed event. Therefore, says Dr. Gleiser, no “choreographer” intended our existence.

The Role of Providence

This is a remarkably shallow conclusion. As luck would have it (if you want to put it that way), I’ve been thinking about the role of providence, as I see it, in my own path of life. Any of us can point to certain pivotal events in our past — a seemingly chance meeting, a piece of advice received, an idea that came to us unbidden — that need not have occurred, but did. And because they did, we found the path to our current place (marriage, relationships, friendships, work, the whole thing) laid out before us.

Gleiser’s argument about the history of life is just a separate application of the depressing view that denies anything in our life paths could have been intended for us. That the view is depressing doesn’t mean that it is mistaken. That it can be asserted doesn’t mean that it is correct.

Purposeful Information

To decide about providence in the rise of complex life, you would have to look at a much wider suite of evidences than the fact that an asteroid doomed the dinosaurs. Scientific proponents of intelligent design have done this, noting vast evidence of extraordinarily careful tuning in physics, chemistry, and biology, from the Big Bang itself, to the origin of life, to the series of biological “big bangs” through which bursts of purposeful information infused the biosphere. 

The most recent treatments of this theme include biologist Michael Denton’s The Miracle of Man and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis. Meyer’s book points to three scientific discoveries that demand a conclusion of purpose behind the cosmos (that the universe has a beginning, that it was fine-tuned for life from the start, that life is a form of information-processing technology). On the radical discontinuities in evolution that bespeak purpose and creativity, see Meyer and paleontologist Günter Bechly’s chapter (“The Fossil Record and Universal Common Ancestry”) in the volume Theistic Evolution.

“The Wheel Has Turned”

From a different perspective, Denton explains this beautifully and profoundly. What Gleiser terms “intelligent, technology-savvy humans” are exactly what almost countless coincidences in nature have been set just so in order to permit. As Dr. Denton has written here about this “prior fitness” for human beings, creatures capable of manipulating fire, and therefore of engaging in technological invention:

Even though many mysteries remain, we can now, in these first decades of the 21st century, at last answer with confidence Thomas Huxley’s question of questions as to “the place which mankind occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things.” As matters stand, the evidence increasingly points to a natural order uniquely fit for life on Earth and for beings of a biology close to that of humans, a view which does not prove but is entirely consistent with the traditional Judeo-Christian framework….

“Mysteries remain,” as Denton acknowledges. Yet, “The wheel has turned.” Modern science calls us to recognize the role of providence in the history of the cosmos, of our planet, and of life. If that is true in cosmology and biology, it’s a hint that it might be true, too, on the far smaller scale of our individual biographies.

Full article at Evolution News.

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At Symmetry Magazine: Why aren’t neutrinos adding up?

Mara Johnson-Groh writes:

Of all the known elementary particles, neutrinos probably give physicists the most headaches. 

An artist’s illustration of a black hole. Black holes are one kind of cosmic accelerator that could be sending us high-energy neutrinos. Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

These tiny fundamental bits of matter are the second most common particle in the universe yet are anything but ordinary. Since their discovery, they have taunted scientists with bizarre behaviors, some of which physicists have yet to comprehend.

One source of confusion has showed up in the results from short-distance neutrino experiments, in which neutrinos are measured after traveling somewhere between a few meters and a kilometer. When scientists measure neutrinos in these experiments, the results don’t always match their predictions. Sometimes there are too many of certain types of neutrinos, while in others there are too few. 

Short-baseline anomalies

At the heart of the short-distance miscounts are so-called short-baseline neutrino experiments. Such experiments typically have a well-understood source or a beam of neutrinos in one location and, some distance away, a detector that can identify one or more of the three different known types of neutrinos—electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino. These experiments look to see if what interacts with the detector is what scientists expect, based on what they know about the neutrinos coming from the source.

This should be straightforward, but unlike most other particles, neutrinos are shape-shifters. Instead of being one thing their whole lives, neutrinos change their type—or “flavor,” as physicists say—as they travel. Similar to how photons travel as waves but interact as particles, each neutrino travels as a probabilistic mix of the three different flavors. Only when it interacts does it settle on a single one. Physicists call this neutrino oscillation.

Of the three different neutrinos, each has a different probability of interacting as each of the three flavors. Additionally, each has a unique mass, so it travels at its own speed. In the end, this means each flavor has a greater likelihood of showing up at some distances than others. The theoretical framework that describes neutrino oscillations tells physicists how many neutrinos of each flavor should show up at different distances. 

Over long distances, neutrinos have sufficient time to change flavors—and this is well supported by experiments that study neutrinos traveling to Earth from the sun and experiments that analyze neutrino beams sent halfway across a continent. Over short distances, neutrinos don’t have as much time to oscillate and shift to a different flavor. 

But time after time in these short-baseline experiments, including experiments at beam lines and at nuclear reactors, predictions seem to be wrong. In some experiments, too many electron neutrinos appear, while in others, too few show up. These counting mismatches are called short-baseline anomalies. 

Ghosts in the machine

A potential explanation for short-baseline anomalies could be that there’s something wrong in the experiments.

But the miscounting shows up again and again in different types of experiments. 

While there are not yet any satisfactory explanations of what might be missing from the Standard Model to allow the anomaly, physicists are still exploring new ideas. 

Sterile neutrinos

Another explanation for the anomalies is the influence of one or more additional, as-yet undetected type of neutrino. These neutrinos would interact only through gravity, not the weak nuclear force as other neutrinos do, earning them the name “sterile neutrinos.”

Recently, the MicroBooNE experiment, a large liquid-argon particle detector at Fermilab, has been on the look-out for sterile neutrinos, whose signature would be revealed by extra electrons. So far, they haven’t found proof of a fourth neutrino. While the results don’t look promising for sterile neutrinos, scientists haven’t fully ruled them out, Machado says.

Neutrinos from the darkness

If sterile neutrinos aren’t to blame, the anomalies could be coming from an entirely different kind of neutrino—a dark neutrino.

Unlike sterile neutrinos, which would add to the three-neutrino framework as a fourth neutrino flavor, the proposed dark neutrinos would be another breed altogether. Dark neutrinos would be a part of what’s known as the dark sector, an area of physics that includes things like dark energy, dark matter and other particles that mediate interactions between the dark sector and the everyday particles we know. 

Over the next couple of years, several neutrino experiments will look specifically at the short-baseline anomalies. Experiments such as MicroBooNE are currently looking for signatures of light sterile neutrinos. Other experiments, like Fermilab’s full Short-Baseline Neutrino program and a Sterile Neutrino Search at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, will look for signatures that can differentiate between sterile neutrinos and other exotic varieties, like dark neutrinos. 

“These are all experiments that the community has been investing in over the last decade, and now we’re finally seeing them happen,” Karagiorgi says. “The next few years are going to be very exciting.”

Complete article available at Symmetry Magazine.

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At Sci Tech Daily: Nanoscale Rotors Constructed From DNA – Smallest Flow-Driven Motors in the World

Delft University Of Technology researchers report in an article published in Nature Physics.

Scientists have constructed the smallest flow-driven motors in the world. Inspired by iconic Dutch windmills and biological motor proteins, they created a self-configuring flow-driven rotor from DNA that converts energy from an electrical or salt gradient into useful mechanical work. The results open new perspectives for engineering active robotics at the nanoscale. The paper by Delft University of Technology researchers will be published today in Nature Physics.Artist impression of the flow-driven DNA rotor. Credit: Cees Dekker Lab / SCIXEL

Rotary motors have been the powerhouses of human societies for millennia. We can look back in history to the windmills and waterwheels across the Netherlands and the world.

“These rotary motors, driven by a flow, also feature prominently in biological cells. An example is the FoF1-ATP synthase, which produces the fuel that cells need to operate. But the synthetic construction at the nanoscale has thus far remained elusive,” says Dr. Xin Shi, postdoctoral researcher in the lab of professor Cees Dekker in the department of Bionanoscience at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).

Given the demonstrated limitations of unguided evolutionary processes to generate even a single functional protein, doesn’t the existence of rotary flow-driven motors in biological cells suggest something other than a naturalistic origin?

“Our flow-driven motor is made from DNA material. This structure is docked onto a nanopore, a tiny opening, in a thin membrane. The DNA bundle of only 7 nanometer thickness self-organizes under an electric field into a rotor-like configuration, that subsequently is set into a sustained rotary motion of more than 10 revolutions per second,” says Shi, first author of the publication in the journal Nature Physics.

DNA origami

“For already 7 years, we have been trying to build such rotary nanomotors synthetically from the bottom up. We use a technique called DNA origami, in collaboration with Hendrik Dietz’s lab from the Technical University of Munich,” adds Cees Dekker, who supervised the research. This technique uses the specific interactions between complementary DNA base pairs to build 2D and 3D nano-objects. The rotors harness energy from a water and ion flow. This is established through an applied voltage or even simpler: by having different salt concentrations on the two sides of the membrane. The latter is actually one of the most abundant energy sources in biology that powers various critical processes, including cellular fuel synthesis and cell propulsion.

Solving a puzzle

This achievement is a milestone, as it is the first-ever experimental realization of flow-driven active rotors at the nanoscale. When the researchers first observed the rotations, however, they were puzzled: how could such simple DNA rods exhibit these nice, sustained rotations? The puzzle was solved in discussions with theorist Ramin Golestanian and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen. They modeled the system and revealed the fascinating self-organization process where the bundles spontaneously deform into chiral rotors that then couple to the flow from the nanopores.

From simplicity to rational design

“This self-organization process truly shows the beauty of simplicity,” says Shi. But the importance of this work does not stop at this simple rotor itself. The technique and physical mechanism behind it establish an entirely new direction of building synthetic nanomotors: flow-driven nanoturbines, which is, a surprisingly unexplored field by scientists and engineers. “You would be surprised how little we knew and achieved on building such flow-driven nanoturbines, especially given the millennia-old knowledge we have on building their macroscale counterparts, and the critical roles they fulfill in the life itself,” says Shi.

In a further step (which is in preprint) the group has used the knowledge they learned from building this self-organized rotor to make the next important advance: the first rationally designed nanoscale turbine. “Like how science and technologies always work, we started from a simple pinwheel, now are able to recreate the beautiful Dutch windmills, but this time with a size of only 25 nm, the size of one single protein in your body,” says Shi, “and we demonstrated their ability to carry loads.”

Steam engine

Next to better understanding and mimicking motor proteins such as FoF1-ATP synthase, the results open new perspectives for engineering active robotics at the nanoscale. Shi: “What we have demonstrated here is a nanoscale engine that is truly able to transduce energy and do work. You could draw an analogy with the first invention of the steam engine in the 18th century. Who could have predicted then how it fundamentally changed our societies? We might be in a similar phase now with these molecular nanomotors. The potential is unlimited, but there is still a lot of work to do.”

Sci Tech Daily

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At Science News: A new James Webb telescope image reveals a galactic collision’s aftermath

Infrared cameras reveal patterns of star formation previously concealed by dust.

Lisa Grossman writes:

A newly released image from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, shows the Cartwheel Galaxy still reeling from a run-in with a smaller galaxy 400 million years ago.

Bright, dusty spokes connect the inner and outer rings of the Cartwheel Galaxy in this new James Webb Space Telescope image, giving fresh insight into rare double-ringed galaxies. The two galaxies to the left are neighbors. NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI AND WEBB ERO PRODUCTION TEAM

The Cartwheel Galaxy, so called because of its bright inner ring and colorful outer ring, lies about 500 million light-years from Earth. Astronomers think it used to be a large spiral like the Milky Way, until a smaller galaxy smashed through it. In earlier observations with other telescopes, the space between the rings appeared shrouded in dust.

Now, JWST’s infrared cameras have peered through the dust and found previously unseen stars and structure (SN: 7/11/22). The new image shows sites of intense star formation throughout the galaxy that were triggered by the collision’s aftereffects. Some of those new stars are forming in spokelike patterns between the central ring and the outer ring, a process that is not well understood.

Ring galaxies are rare, and galaxies with two rings are even more unusual. That strange shape means that the long-ago collision set up multiple waves of gas rippling back and forth in the galaxy left behind. It’s like if you drop a pebble in the bathtub, says JWST project scientist Klaus Pontoppidan of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “First you get this ring, then it hits the walls of your bathtub and reflects back, and you get a more complicated structure.”

The effect probably means that the Cartwheel Galaxy has a long road to recovery ahead — and astronomers don’t know what it will look like in the end.

As for the smaller galaxy that caused all this mayhem, it didn’t stick around to get its picture taken. “It’s gone off on its merry way,” Pontoppidan says.

Science News

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The Intelligent Design Audiopaper Project

I was thinking recently, about how many audiobooks are consumed by people these days. I would guess that the main reason behind this consumption is convenience. Many people just don’t have the time, or don’t create the time, to really sit down and get their head in a book. But I understand that for many, it can also be due to personal preference, financial considerations, lack of space, being visually impaired, or learning difficulties.

If non of these issues are barriers, I would always encourage reading (and ideally taking notes), rather than simply listening. On balance, the evidence does suggest that good reading is a much more efficient way of retaining information than listening, on its own. In general, listening is a much more passive way of learning. Having said this, if (due to the various factors I mentioned), it’s a choice between not having any informational input, and taking in text material via audio, I would of course advocate for using material like audiobooks, podcasts, YouTube videos etc.

While thinking about this, it struck me as being  quite strange that there’s nothing much out there in terms of ‘audiopapers’. We’ve all heard of audiobooks…but have you ever heard of an audiopaper? Especially of a scientific or philosophical nature. Well now you have!

Running with that thought, I picked up a paper that I happened to be studying, turned on my recording equipment, and tried reading the whole paper out loud. The paper I read was by philosopher of science, Dr. Del Ratzsch ‘Design: What Scientific Difference Does It Make?’ (2004). Being fairly pleased with the result, I posted it on the Design Disquisitions YouTube channel. 

Ratzsch is a friendly critic of mainstream ID, although he proposes his own arguments for design in some of his writings. At the same time as being critical though, he provides some excellent responses to many criticisms of ID, from a philosophical standpoint. In this particular paper he argues against the in principle refusal to allow design into science. 

Having done this first audio recording, I’m definitely planning on doing many more. I’ll be picking out some quite well known papers, specifically in the Intelligent Design field, (from both pro and anti-ID perspectives), as well as some lesser known, perhaps long forgotten ones. I hope to breath new life into them, if I feel they have noteworthy content. I’ll also be reading from some straight up biology papers as well as some from a philosophy of science approach.

I understand that these days there’s lots of software out there that one can use to turn text into audio, but in my opinion, robotic voices are a major turn off. Distracting even! I’ve no idea if this will be of benefit to anyone, and I haven’t got the best voice (I certainly won’t be taking up a job as an audiobook reader). But give it a try and let me know what you think. Feel free to download and use it in anyway you like. Pretend it’s a podcast. Even better than just listening, simultaneously reading and listening could increase concentration and absorption of information. 

On my blog I’ll also be writing some posts reviewing the papers in question.

If you have any suggestions of papers you’d like to be turned into audio material, I’d appreciate any suggestions in the comments.

Audiopaper-Design: What Scientific Difference Could It Make? (Dr. Del Ratzsch/2004)

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At Evolution News: An Evolutionary Mathematician Flunks Biology

Physicist Brian Miller writes:

Jason Rosenhouse, a mathematician who teaches at James Madison University, is the author of the recent book The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism. The purpose of the book is to discredit the mathematical and algorithmic arguments presented by ID proponents against the plausibility of undirected evolution crafting complex novelties. Rosenhouse focuses much of his critique on William Dembski’s design-detection formalism based on specified complexity. Dembski responded in detail to Rosenhouse’s arguments, highlighting Rosenhouse’s confusion over Dembski’s theoretical framework and its application to biological systems (here, here). Rosenhouse in turn responded to Dembski’s critique. His counter-response, published at Panda’s Thumb, reveals that his opposition to Dembski is not based on any flaws in the substance of Dembski’s work but instead on Rosenhouse’s unassailable faith in the limitless creative power of natural selection. 

Rosenhouse’s Response

Rosenhouse responds to Dembski and his colleagues by asserting that their research has no relevance to biological evolution. This, in his mind, is for several key reasons. First, he claims that probabilities cannot be reliably assessed for the origin of biological structures:

Anti-evolutionists routinely present spurious probability calculations meant to refute evolution. In a lengthy chapter on probability, I explain that a proper calculation must take place in the context of what mathematicians refer to as a “probability space”. For our purposes, this means that you must have a good grasp on the range of possible outcomes, as well as an understanding of the probability distribution appropriate to those outcomes. In the context of the evolution of complex adaptations, we never have what we need to do this. As Harvard biologist Martin Nowak put it, “You cannot calculate the probability that an eye came about. We don’t have the information to make this calculation.”

Imagination Superseding Evidence

Rosenhouse’s response to Dembski ultimately fails since it is based on what he imagines to be true about biology instead of what has been empirically demonstrated. The assertion that probabilities cannot be evaluated for biological systems is highly misleading. Exact probabilities are typically impossible to compute but calculating upper bounds to probabilities is often tractable. 

Douglas Axe demonstrated for the beta-lactamase enzyme that the upper bound for the enzyme’s larger domain is 1 functional sequence in every 1077 randomly selected ones. Rosenhouse attempts to discredit this estimate by citing Arthur Hunt’s critique, but he fails to acknowledge that Axe and others showed that such negative assessments reflect misunderstandings of his research and the technical literature (here, here, here, here).

In addition, Ola Hössjer, Günter Bechly, and Ann Gauger published a mathematical model for the time required for coordinated mutations to appear in a population. Their model demonstrates that for most animals the time available for major transitions is insufficient for even a few new regulatory sequences to emerge. Yet the evolution of a structure as simple as a lens for a vertebrate eye requires dozens if not hundreds of such specified sequences (here, here). An upper bound to the probability for such a large quantity of specified complexity to arise is minuscule. 

Parallels with Human Engineering

In addition, engineers working with biologists have concluded that living systems demonstrate the same specified patterns as is seen in human engineering. For instance, leading experts in bacterial flagella have not simply concluded that these molecular machines resemble rotary motors. Instead, they concluded that they are rotary motors (here, here, here). And flagellar navigation systems perform perfect robust adaptation, which is only achievable by two classes of control modules (here, here). The conclusion that such biological systems display specified complexity is indisputable. 

Finally, the view that nature provides the information for evolutionary searches conflicts with a torrent of recent literature that demonstrates that evolutionary/adaptive processes almost exclusively tweak preexistent structures or choose from a preexistent library of traits (here, here, here). Genetic information is never gained in significant quantities, but it is at best maintained and often lost (here, here, here). In short, Rosenhouse’s belief in the creative power of evolutionary processes is based not on hard data but on his faith in the philosophy of scientific materialism and on circular reasoning. 

Full article at Evolution News.

Arguments and counter-arguments serve a purpose in arriving at a truthful conclusion. But what if one side simply jumps ship when the waves of counter-argument become unassailable?

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At Live Science: Solar storm from hole in the sun will hit Earth on Wednesday (Aug. 3)

Ben Turner writes:

Thankfully, the storm is classified as weak.

High-speed solar winds from a “hole” in the sun’s atmosphere are set to hit Earth’s magnetic field on Wednesday (Aug 3.), triggering a minor G-1 geomagnetic storm.

An artist’s illustration of a solar storm (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) made the prediction after observing that “gaseous material is flowing from a southern hole in the sun’s atmosphere,” according to spaceweather.com. 

Coronal holes are areas in the sun’s upper atmosphere where our star’s electrified gas (or plasma) is cooler and less dense. Such holes are also where the sun’s magnetic field lines, instead of looping back in on themselves, beam outward into space. This enables solar material to surge out in a torrent that travels at speeds up to 1.8 million miles per hour (2.9 million kilometers per hour), according to the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco.

On planets with strong magnetic fields, like our own, this barrage of solar debris is absorbed, triggering geomagnetic storms. During these storms, Earth’s magnetic field gets compressed slightly by the waves of highly energetic particles. These particles trickle down magnetic-field lines near the poles and agitate molecules in the atmosphere, releasing energy in the form of light to create colorful auroras, similar to the ones that make up the Northern Lights. 

Note: Earth’s magnetic field stems from a complex geo-dynamo produced in the core of our planet. Its key role in ensuring the long-term habitability of Earth is well-established.

The storm produced by this debris will be weak. As a G1 geomagnetic storm, it has the potential to cause minor fluctuations in power grids and impact some satellite functions — including those for mobile devices and GPS systems. It will also bring the aurora as far south as Michigan and Maine.

This storm comes as the sun ramps up into its most active phase of its roughly 11 year-long solar cycle.

Astronomers have known since 1775 that solar activity rises and falls in cycles, but recently, the sun has been more active than expected, with nearly double the sunspot appearances predicted by NOAA. Scientists anticipate that the sun’s activity will steadily climb for the next few years, reaching an overall maximum in 2025 before decreasing again. 

Scientists think the largest solar storm ever witnessed during contemporary history was the 1859 Carrington Event, which released roughly the same energy as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. After slamming into Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles fried telegraph systems all over the world and caused auroras brighter than the light of the full moon to appear as far south as the Caribbean. If a similar event were to happen today, scientists warn, it would cause trillions of dollars in damage and trigger widespread blackouts, much like the 1989 solar storm that released a billion-ton plume of gas and caused a blackout across the entire Canadian province of Quebec, NASA reported.

Live Science

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At Science Daily: Fiddler crab eye view inspires researchers to develop novel artificial vision

Artificial vision systems find a wide range of applications, including self-driving cars, object detection, crop monitoring, and smart cameras. Such vision is often inspired by the vision of biological organisms. For instance, human and insect vision have inspired terrestrial artificial vision, while fish eyes have led to aquatic artificial vision. While the progress is remarkable, current artificial visions suffer from some limitations: they are not suitable for imaging both land and underwater environments, and are limited to a hemispherical (180°) field-of-view (FOV).

Fiddler crabs can look all around, without the need to move their eyes. https://biology.anu.edu.au

To overcome these issues, a group of researchers from Korea and USA, including Professor Young Min Song from Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in Korea, have now designed a novel artificial vision system with an omnidirectional imaging ability, which can work in both aquatic and terrestrial environments. Their study was made available online on 12 July 2022 and published in Nature Electronics on 11 July 2022.

“Research in bio-inspired vision often results in a novel development that did not exist before. This, in turn, enables a deeper understanding of nature and ensure that the developed imaging device is both structurally and functionally effective,” says Prof. Song, explaining his motivation behind the study.

The inspiration for the system came from the fiddler crab (Uca arcuata), a semiterrestrial crab species with amphibious imaging ability and a 360° FOV. These remarkable features result from the ellipsoidal eye stalk of the fiddler crab’s compound eyes, enabling panoramic imaging, and flat corneas with a graded refractive index profile, allowing for amphibious imaging.

Accordingly, the researchers developed a vision system consisting of an array of flat micro-lenses with a graded refractive index profile that was integrated into a flexible comb-shaped silicon photodiode array and then mounted onto a spherical structure. The graded refractive index and the flat surface of the micro-lens were optimized to offset the defocusing effects due to changes in the external environment. Put simply, light rays traveling in different mediums (corresponding to different refractive indices) were made to focus at the same spot.

To test the capabilities of their system, the team performed optical simulations and imaging demonstrations in air and water. Amphibious imaging was performed by immersing the device halfway in water. To their delight, the images produced by the system were clear and free of distortions. The team further showed that the system had a panoramic visual field, 300o horizontally and 160o vertically, in both air and water. Additionally, the spherical mount was only 2 cm in diameter, making the system compact and portable.

Science Daily

It’s worth highlighting this quote: “These remarkable features result from the ellipsoidal eye stalk of the fiddler crab’s compound eyes, enabling panoramic imaging, and flat corneas with a graded refractive index profile, allowing for amphibious imaging.” Does this sound like intelligent design or the result of unguided, random evolutionary processes?

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