ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 528

Scientists Turn To 3D Printing, Digital Simulations To Treat Heart Disease

Health and Medicine





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Patient-specific aorta models with diseased coronary arteries. Alison Marsden, Author provided

My mother bought her first GPS in the 1990s. A few months later, she came home angry because it had directed her to the wrong side of the city, making her an hour late. “That’s too bad,” I said, and we went on with our lives. We both understood that commercial GPS was a new technology and wasn’t infallible, but one wasted hour was a small price to pay for the 99 percent of driving trips on which it worked correctly. We knew that with further testing and user feedback, GPS technology would continue to improve.

The Other Opioid Crisis – People In Poor Countries Can’t Get The Pain Medication They Need

Health and Medicine





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Hard to get. Morphine pills image via www.shutterstock.com.

There are two opioid crises in the world today. One is the epidemic of abuse and misuse, present in many countries but rising at an alarming rate in the United States. The other crisis is older and affects many more people around the world each year: too few opioids.

Which Students Are Most Likely To Drop Out Of University?

Editor's Blog





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Students aged 25 and over are twice as likely to drop out than students aged 19 and under. from www.shutterstock.com

Almost since taking office, Education Minister Simon Birmingham has reiterated the Coalition’s commitment to allowing universities to recruit as many students as they wish. It is what the higher education sector has called “the demand driven system”.

Birmingham has, however, emphasised that universities should not admit students who are unlikely to complete their program. University attrition rates have increased from 12.5% in 2009 before the demand driven system was phased in to 14.8% in 2014.

The Long And The Short Of It: Eight Reasons Why Short Men Come Up Short

Plants and Animals





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The long and the short of it is: it sucks to be short if you’re a man. from www.shutterstock.com.au

Spurned by women, more likely to end up in jail, doomed to earn less, destined to languish in poorly paid jobs, plagued by feelings of inferiority and coming up short where coming up matters most, you’d think life had dealt the short straw to short men. And maybe it has.

Short Men Tend To Be Poorer

Is It Bad To Pop Your Pimples?

Health and Medicine





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Trying to pop pimples can actually make your skin worse. Runs With Scissors/Flickr, CC BY

To squeeze or not to squeeze? I’ll admit that I’m no skin saint. I have stood in front of the mirror on a number of occasions as a teenager with a big pimple staring right back at me. And yes, despite being advised not to, I have squeezed, picked and popped.

But is this really a crime against the skin?

The answer is yes. Squeezing and trying to pop pimples is definitely not the best solution and can actually make your skin worse.

How Pimples Form

Will Self-Driving Cars Reduce Energy Use And Make Travel Better For The Environment?

Technology





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Google

I started learning driving only three years ago, and – inevitably – failed my first test. Naturally, I was disappointed: but then it occurred to me that I could avoid the whole issue, if only I could get my hands on a driverless car. And this triggered the research question: what would the overall impact on travel demand, energy use and carbon emissions be if driverless cars were readily available to the likes of you and me?

How To Build A Time Machine

Physics





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Is there a Dr in the house? James Bowe/flickr, CC BY

Every now and again, we all indulge in dreams about travelling in time. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to return to that specific point in the past to change a bad decision or relive an experience – those halcyon days of childhood, that night you won an Oscar – or to zip ahead to see how things turn out in the far future.

Waterfall-Climbing Cavefish Walks Like A Land Animal

Plants and Animals





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Dorsal view of Cryptotora thamicola resting on the bottom of glass tank. D.S./NJIT

A blind, walking cavefish in Thailand can climb up steep, slippery rocks in rapidly flowing water thanks to a pelvis bone that’s remarkably similar to that of four-legged landlubbers. The findings, published in Scientific Reports this week, could help us understand the transition from finned to limbed appendages that took place some 420 million years ago.

The Fastball Gets Its Scientific Due in New Documentary

The baseball season is almost here. To get you up to speed, the excellent new documentary Fastball opens today in select theaters.

Fastball is all about, you guessed it, the heater, the cheese, the hummer, the hard stuff, from the perspective of pitchers, hitters, umpires—and scientists, who talk about everything from the physics governing the trajectory of the ball to the physiology of the strain on the pitcher’s arm to the psychology of hurling a potentially deadly projectile at another human being to the neuroscience of the batter’s perception and reaction.

At high speeds, the ball may appear to the hitter to rise. Of course, the ball is actually still going down due to gravity as it approaches the plate from any pitcher throwing overhand, no matter how fast. It’s just not falling as much as the batter’s brain is accustomed to from watching slower pitches. But I did not know til I saw the movie that, for some hitters facing the very hardest throwers, the ball can completely disappear.

“The idea of the ball disappearing was really fascinating to me. Because all these hall of famers were talking, they all were saying the same thing, that these few really special guys, the Koufaxes and the Fellers, that the ball would disappear.”

Fastball director , after a preview of the film March 22nd at the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center on the campus of Montclair State University in New Jersey.

 “And so I mentioned that to these professors of perception and cognition and all that, and they immediately understood. Because they explained that when the eye tracks an object in motion, you’re not actually on the ball the whole way. You’re actually racing your eyes ahead to where you think the ball’s going to go. And most of us can go about a tenth of a second ahead. And the people with the greatest vision in the world can go two-tenths of a second ahead. Which is exactly the distance, the amount of time that it basically takes to swing, like 0.17 [seconds] for the swing. So if you’re going two-tenths of a second ahead of where the ball is, and that’s when you’re triggering your swing, and then the ball isn’t there, it has literally disappeared in the part of your brain that registers vision. So they’re absolutely telling the truth when they say the ball disappeared.”

In addition to opening at theaters, the movie Fastball is also available on various streaming platforms, including iTunes. Catch it!

—Steve Mirsky

(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)

Microsoft’s Chatbot Quickly Converted To Bigotry By The Internet

Technology





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The image is as confused as Microsoft seems to have been when it launched Tay on the world. Microsoft

The path to Skynet just got a little clearer, as an experiment in artificial intelligence went horribly wrong. Microsoft created a chatbot and released it onto social media to learn from fellow users. Unfortunately, the creation picked up some very nasty habits.