Interesting Links: June 8, 2019

Jupiter's moons will be visible through binoculars next week; Philadelphia orchestra receives its largest-ever financial gift; A solid that melts at two different temperatures; Rat brains operate using self-organizing criticality; and more...

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Business, News, Science, Technology, or whatever gets my attention.

Straight from my RSS feed:

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Ten links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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1. You'll Be Able to See Jupiter's Moons With a Pair of Binoculars Next Week - From the Earth's perspective, Jupiter will be at its brightest of the year on June 10, and it will be at its closest to the Earth on June 12. This confluence in timing will provide the ability for back-yard astronomers to see the planets moons through a pair of binoculars or small telescope. Also, a total solar eclipse is coming on July 2. It will be visible in South America and the South Pacific.


2. Philadelphia Orchestra receives largest gift in its history - Just 8 years after its bankruptcy declaration, the Philadelphia has received its largest gift ever, in the form of a $55 million grant from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Of the total, $50 million will go to increasing the orchestra's endowment to $212 million, and the rest will go towards operations. Based on numbers from 2015 and 2016, the orchestra's annual revenue is in the neighborhood of $55 million. @lisa.palmer, @cmp2020, and myself have tickets to see them perform four @beethoven symphonies next year as part of their celebration of the 250th anniversary of his birth.


3. The mysterious crystal that melts at two different temperatures - Emil Fischer published in 1896 about an odd crystal, acetaldehyde phenylhydrazone (APH), that melted at two different temperatures. One batch might melt at 65 (C), and another might melt at 100 (C). Colleagues and competitors told him he must be mistaken, but his work was duplicated in other labs. That generation of scientists died off, however, and the puzzle was forgotten for almost a century. About a decade ago, chemist, Terry Threlfall, stumbled across the original paper, and reopened the puzzle. Earlier this year, Threlfall and colleagues published the solution. It turns out that APH is the first known solid that melts into two distinct liquids. Which liquid arises is dependent upon the existence of contamination that is so subtle as to be nearly undetectable. h/t RealClear Science


4. Rat brains provide even more evidence our brains operate near tipping point - As covered in [Interesting Links: May 25, 2019], scientists from Brazil studied the brains of rats when they transitioned between sleep and wakefulness and determined that the transition follows a critical phase transition model, which is similar to how avalanches occur haphazardly in piles of sand when a pile's size reaches some critical threshold. In addition to observing the critical phase transition, the research also suggested that the rat brain state hovers at a level near to the critical threshold.


5. AI mavericks want to build a better brain for industrial robots - The CEO of robust.ai is critical of the current AI focus on deep learning, saying that it lacks many qualities of human intelligence, including common sense. His company plans to improve on this by developing a new platform for cognitive intelligence that can be used by many varieties of robots. h/t Communications of the ACM


6. This Robot Ostrich Can Ride Around on Hovershoes - Hovershoes - single wheeled skates - bridge the gap between fast, efficient, wheeled robots and robots with legs that can go anywhere a human can go. But the problem is that the hovershoes are hard to use - even for a human. Cassie the robot ostrich, however, has figured it out.
   
   

   Video here:
   

NASA will allow private astronauts on the ISS for $11,250-$22,500 a day - It's the first step in creating a sustainable economy in low earth orbit (LEO) and developing new LEO habitats.

A Missed Alzheimer’s Opportunity? Not So Much - After a recent article, Pfizer is being accused of ignoring evidence that a drug, Enbrel, could be useful in fighting Alzheimer's disease. Derek Lowe argues here that they may have had good reasons for declining to pursue trials, including the fact that it would have been very costly and had a near-zero chance of success. Lowe also suggests that many of the numbers people are citing for levels of evidence are wildly inaccurate. In summary, Lowe argues: "You can purchase Enbrel on the open market and run a trial of your own, if you so desire – but what you will find (unless you are fabulously wealthy and spending your own money) is that coming up with funding will be very difficult, because these data are still insufficient to go right into a large human trial in an area as fraught as Alzheimer’s." h/t RealClear Science

STEEM Bees First Insects Shown to Connect Symbols & Numbers - @ribbitingscience reports on a recent study where two groups of bees were trained to recognize numerical concepts. One group was trained to associate a symbol with a quantity, and the other was trained to associate a quantity with a symbol. This makes bees the first invertebrate species to be able to associate symbols with numbers. However, unlike earlier research with apes and birds, bees were unable to reverse the association. (5% of the rewards from this post will go to @ribbitingscience)

STEEM Conservation of natural resources: Malthusians vs Cornucopians: - @kwadjobonsu describes two perspectives towards conservation. In the Malthusian perspective, increasing numbers of mouths to feed always leads to resource exhaustion, although the process can be delayed by conservation and recycling. In the Cornucopian perspective, improved technology and efficiency stays ahead of resource needs. (5% of the rewards from this post will go to @kwadjobonsu)

About this series

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