ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 390

Dreams of the Stone Age dated for first time in southern Africa

By Sarah Wild

Scientists have directly dated Stone Age rock paintings in southern Africa reliably for the first time. Their work reveals that early hunter-gatherer peoples created art at three sites in the region, some 5,700 years ago (A. Bonneau et al. Antiquity 91, 322–333; 2017). And the findings open the door for archaeologists and other researchers to date thousands more rock paintings in this part of Africa — and so piece together the lives and development of ancient people there.

The study focused on paintings in present-day Botswana, South Africa and Lesotho created by the San people, whose direct descendants still live in the area. The San have been much studied, but many mysteries remain about how they lived, and how they interacted with other groups — such as early farmers.

“If we are able to date depictions of livestock and material goods associated with incoming groups, we may be able to start unravelling the nature of interactions between groups in this early contact,” says David Pearce, an archaeologist and director of the Rock Art Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and a co-author of the latest study.

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Artificial intelligence prevails at predicting Supreme Court decisions

By Matthew Hutson

“See you in the Supreme Court!” President Donald Trump tweeted last week, responding to lower court holds on his national security policies. But is taking cases all the way to the highest court in the land a good idea? Artificial intelligence may soon have the answer. A new study shows that computers can do a better job than legal scholars at predicting Supreme Court decisions, even with less information.

Several other studies have guessed at justices’ behavior with algorithms. A 2011 project, for example, used the votes of any eight justices from 1953 to 2004 to predict the vote of the ninth in those same cases, with 83% accuracy. A 2004 paper tried seeing into the future, by using decisions from the nine justices who’d been on the court since 1994 to predict the outcomes of cases in the 2002 term. That method had an accuracy of 75%.

The new study draws on a much richer set of data to predict the behavior of any set of justices at any time. Researchers used the Supreme Court Database, which contains information on cases dating back to 1791, to build a general algorithm for predicting any justice’s vote at any time. They drew on 16 features of each vote, including the justice, the term, the issue, and the court of origin. Researchers also added other factors, such as whether oral arguments were heard.

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Scientists Surprised to Find No Two Neurons Are Genetically Alike

By Simon Makin

The past few decades have seen intensive efforts to find the genetic roots of neurological disorders, from schizophrenia to autism. But the genes singled out so far have provided only sketchy clues. Even the most important genetic risk factors identified for autism, for example, may only account for a few percent of all cases.

Much frustration stems from the realization that the key mutations elevating disease risk tend to be rare, because they are less likely to be passed on to offspring. More common mutations confer only small risks (although those risks become more significant when calculated across an entire population). There are several other places to look for the missing burden of risk, and one surprising possible source has recently emerged—an idea that overturns a fundamental tenet of biology and has many researchers excited about a completely new avenue of inquiry.

Accepted dogma holds that—although every cell in the body contains its own DNA—the genetic instructions in each cell nucleus are identical. But new research has now proved this assumption wrong. There are actually several sources of spontaneous mutation in somatic (nonsex) cells, resulting in every individual containing a multitude of genomes—a situation researchers term somatic mosaicism. “The idea is something that 10 years ago would have been science fiction,” says biochemist James Eberwine of the University of Pennsylvania. “We were taught that every cell has the same DNA, but that’s not true.” There are reasons to think somatic mosaicism may be particularly important in the brain, not least because neural genes are very active.

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White House aims for Thursday signing of religious liberty executive order

By TIMOTHY ALBERTA and SHANE GOLDMACHER

President Donald Trump has invited conservative leaders to the White House on Thursday for what they expect will be the ceremonial signing of a long-awaited—and highly controversial—executive order on religious liberty, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.

Two senior administration officials confirmed the plan, though one cautioned that it hasn’t yet been finalized, and noted that lawyers are currently reviewing and fine-tuning the draft language. Thursday is the National Day of Prayer, and the White House was already planning to celebrate the occasion with faith leaders.

The signing would represent a major triumph for Vice President Mike Pence—whose push for religious-freedom legislation backfired mightily when he served as governor of Indiana—and his allies in the conservative movement.

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Einstein’s Love Life Gets Messy in Nat Geo’s ‘Genius’

By Hanneke Weitering

Albert Einstein may have been a genius in the sciences, but when it came to women, he couldn’t have been more clueless.

In the second episode of “Genius” – which airs tonight (May 2) at 9 p.m. ET on the National Geographic Channel – watch young Einstein make the first of many mistakes that would characterize his messy love life.

Nat Geo’s 10-part global event series shines a light on the more tumultuous side of Einstein’s personal life. Last week’s series premiere dove right in to the chaos with violent scenes of Nazi Germany and a taste of Einstein’s lifelong debauchery.

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Neutron stars that slow down could be eating ‘backwards’ gas

By Leah Crane

Gobbling gas from a neighbour should make neutron stars spin faster, but sometimes the exact opposite happens. Now there might be an explanation: the gas arrives “backwards”.

Neutron stars are dense, fast-spinning stellar corpses that can pull material from a smaller orbiting star, spooling it into a disc before gobbling it up. This material carries momentum, which is why the neutron star should end up spinning faster.

But when Demos Kazanas at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and his colleagues looked at 18 years’ worth of X-ray observations of neutron stars in binary systems in the Small Magellanic Cloud, they found that half were slowing down.

“That’s harder to understand, because you’d think that they’d be tending to spin up if our current understanding of their evolution is correct,” says Tim Kallman, also at NASA Goddard, who wasn’t involved in the work.

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New AI Tech Can Mimic Any Voice

By Bahar Gholipour

Even the most natural-sounding computerized voices—whether it’s Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa—still sound like, well, computers. Montreal-based start-up Lyrebird is looking to change that with an artificially intelligent system that learns to mimic a person’s voice by analyzing speech recordings and the corresponding text transcripts as well as identifying the relationships between them. Introduced last week, Lyrebird’s speech synthesis can generate thousands of sentences per second—significantly faster than existing methods—and mimic just about any voice, an advancement that raises ethical questions about how the technology might be used and misused.

The ability to generate natural-sounding speech has long been a core challenge for computer programs that transform text into spoken words. Artificial intelligence (AI) personal assistants such as Siri, Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and the Google Assistant all use text-to-speech software to create a more convenient interface with their users. Those systems work by cobbling together words and phrases from prerecorded files of one particular voice. Switching to a different voice—such as having Alexa sound like a man—requires a new audio file containing every possible word the device might need to communicate with users.

Lyrebird’s system can learn the pronunciations of characters, phonemes and words in any voice by listening to hours of spoken audio. From there it can extrapolate to generate completely new sentences and even add different intonations and emotions. Key to Lyrebird’s approach are artificial neural networks—which use algorithms designed to help them function like a human brain—that rely on deep-learning techniques to transform bits of sound into speech. A neural network takes in data and learns patterns by strengthening connections between layered neuronlike units.

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Science wins reprieve in US budget deal

By Sara Reardon & Erin Ross

Funding for US science agencies will stay flat or even increase over the next several months, under a US$1-trillion spending deal announced on 30 April. The plan devised by Congress, which covers the remainder of the 2017 budget year, avoids the sharp cuts to science proposed by US President Donald Trump.

The biggest winner is the National Institutes of Health (NIH), whose budget would rise by $2 billion compared to the 2016 level, for a total of $34 billion. The National Science Foundation would remain steady at just under $7.5 billion, while NASA’s budget would rise by about 2%, to $19.7 billion. And the Environmental Protection Agency, which Trump wants to cut by 31% in fiscal year 2018, would receive roughly $8.1 billion, a decrease of about 1% from 2016.

“From our perspective this is a great package, so we can put [fiscal year 2017] behind us and move on with our lives,” says Jennifer Zeitzer, director of legislative relations at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Rockville, Maryland.

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Judge won’t hear gay adoptions because it’s not in a child’s ‘best interest’

By Andrew Wolfson

A family court judge who sits in Barren and Metcalfe counties has announced he will no longer hear adoption cases involving “homosexual parties” because he believes allowing a gay person to adopt could never be in the child’s best interest.

Judge W. Mitchell Nance, who begins court each day by requiring everyone to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, said in an order this week that he would recuse himself from all adoptions involving gay people.

Nance cited a judicial ethics rule that says a judge must disqualify himself when he has a personal bias or prejudice.

He said in the order issued Thursday that “as a matter of conscience” he believes that “under no circumstance” would “the best interest of the child be promoted by the adoption by a practicing homosexual.” Kentucky state law allows gay couples to adopt, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that all states must permit same-sex marriage.

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DOE freezes millions in high-tech energy grants and gags staff

By Jeffrey Mervis

The Department of Energy (DOE) has stopped processing the paperwork on tens of millions of dollars in research that its Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has agreed to fund.

DOE officials aren’t saying why they have taken this unusual step, dubbed a “no-contract action.” It went into effect earlier this month and affects more than a dozen projects across four new ARPA-E programs. The move, first reported by Politico Pro, includes a gag order on ARPA-E program managers, leaving investigators in the dark about the status of their grants. The resulting uncertainty is having a devastating impact on research teams, scientists say, and even threatens the viability of small companies for whom these major awards are so important.

Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D–TX), the top Democrat on the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, is concerned that the apparent contracting freeze might violate federal laws requiring agencies to spend appropriations from Congress—in this case, the $291 million that ARPA-E received for the 2016 fiscal year that ended last September. On Wednesday she wrote to DOE Secretary Rick Perry reminding him that “diversion or impoundment of this money would be contrary to law” and asking him whether the agency “is currently subject to a ‘no-contract action’ or similar action and, if so what the parameters are.”

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