Science

39 posts

Daylight Savings Time: It’s Good For You?

Daylight saving time finally ends this Sunday at 2 a.m. — remember to set your clocks back one hour when you go to bed Saturday night — and for many of us, that’s depressing. The day seems to fly by. It’s dark before it’s time to start thinking about dinner.

The seven-month period of daylight saving time is mandated by governments which began implementing the time switch during World Wars I and II to save energy and resources for the war effort. From World War II until recently, daylight saving in the U.S. ran from April until mid-October. Continue reading →

Researchers Say Zombies Are Bad For Your Health

Any Sci-fi fan or Systems Administrator will tell you: Zombies are bad for business. This holds true whether your managing a theme park, a mission critical webserver, or especially the ecology of the human body. Zombie processes on a webserver are ones that are supposed to terminate but instead they hang around eating up resources and wasting processor time. The same is true in the human body. “Zombie cells” are no longer able to divide like normal cells. Instead they hang around releasing toxins and presumably making one crave human flesh and to start talking with a lisp. I may have made up that last part. Continue reading →

Endangered Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombat Born in the Wild

The northern hairy-nosed wombat is one of the most endangered creatures in the world, ranked as critically endangered.  In the 1980s, the estimated number of surviving wombats was as low as 35 before a breeding and protection program gradually increased the population.  Still, wombats are slow breeders (each fertile female will have no more than 1 baby wombat, known as a joey, every 2-3 years) and by 2003, there was still only estimated to be 113 wombats, including 30 fertile females.  All these wombats were in a single location:  Epping Forest National Park in northern Queensland, Australia.  This concentration made the wombat vulnerable to being made extinct in a single stroke if a natural disaster hit the park, and one only needs to remember the gigantic floods which covered Queensland in January this year for a reminder of how easily that could occur.

Continue reading →

Vaccine Triumphs Over Polio in India

Polio was one of the most feared diseases of the 20th century.  In 99% of cases, it causes no symptoms or very mild symptoms and may go effectively unnoticed, making it easy for people to be unwitting carriers and spreaders of the virus and leading to an explosion of polio epidemics in the early 20th century as transport improved, population density in cities increased and it became easier for a virus like polio to reach a critical mass of people.  Meanwhile, in that last 1% of sufferers polio infects the spinal cord, leading to paralysis or death.  Even worse, young children tends to be particularly susceptible, leading to polio becoming known in some areas as infantile paralysis disease.  There is still no known cure for polio.

In 1952 in the United States alone, polio caused 3,145 recorded deaths and 21,269 recorded cases of mild to disabling paralysis.

Continue reading →

‘I’m not artificial intelligence; I’m natural pure genius!’

In 1950, the mathematician Alan Turing came up with an elegant way of testing a computer’s ability to “act” like a human. If machines could truly “think,” they would surely be able to communicate in such a way that humans wouldn’t know they were interacting with a computer.

The Turing Test was born. Then in 1991, researchers and technologists turned Turing’s thought-experiment into an actual competition: The Loebner Prize.The goal is to trick human judges into believing they’re chatting (via text) with an actual human.

So Discover Magazine decided to arrange a conversation between of the world’s top-ranked computer chatbots, ALICE and Jabberwacky. Continue reading →