Category Archives: Issues in Science

Predicting Marine Populations with Phytoplankton

View of Earth from space. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Did you know that the ocean is predicted to warm over 4°C  the next 100 years? There’s certainly more than meets the eye when it comes to understanding the effects of global warming, and knowing how ecosystems change in response to changes in temperature can help make our efforts more focused and accurate.

As a recent PhD graduate from the University of British Columbia, Dr. Joey Bernhardt is already making waves in the science community. Her most recent paper describes the use of phytoplankton to analyze growth rates among species under different temperature conditions. Most of the study’s work actually occurred just last September, and we were lucky enough to be able to meet Dr. Bernhardt to explore the bigger picture issues she’s addressing.

What’s so special about phytoplankton?

Green swirls of phytoplankton in the Baltic Sea. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

To debunk a common misconception: not all of the oxygen we breathe comes from trees. In reality, nearly 50% of the world’s oxygen supply is produced by phytoplankton. What’s more, phytoplankton serve as the basis of marine food webs, so it’s no surprise that they were the main subjects used in Dr. Bernhardt’s study. These remarkable organisms can actually help us make predictions about species populations in the context of global warming.

What issues are being addressed?

2070-2100 global warming predictions map. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

One of the most pressing issues in our global warming narrative surrounds how temperature changes affect species population. While it’s easy to measure population growth rates in the controlled conditions of a lab, Dr. Bernhardt explores whether we can apply these results to the unpredictable, fluctuating temperatures of the outdoor environment.

If we were to disregard the fact that in nature temperatures fluctuate, we will ultimately make inaccurate population predictions. To generate a more realistic sample, Dr. Bernhardt collected phytoplankton off the coast of Vancouver Island and placed them in lab incubators that mimic a natural environment using a variety of temperature settings.

To gain a better understanding of the methodology behind Dr. Bernhardt’s study, check out our video:

https://youtu.be/F5rC4PLMsds

Why should I care?

When a species find themselves in an environment outside of their normal temperature range, they will either die off or relocate to more habitable areas. This now presents an entirely new problem since it’s not always easy for the communities that rely on these populations to pack up and move as well. From an economic standpoint, there are whole industries built upon the reliance that these populations will return, year after year.

The Future of Global Economic and Climate Change Issues

These experiments allow us to see the range of temperatures at which a species can persist. We can then pair this with the knowledge of how temperatures around the globe will shift over time in order to build more sustainable communities.

We take a deeper look into the applications of this technology in our podcast:

Group 213-5: Danny Israel, Christy Lau, Christina Rayos

Self-driving cars, dangerous or safe?

Self-driving cars have been a leading force in car making for a while now. A concerning question that arises with the development of the automatic cars is how safe is it to be safe enough?

WHAT IS THE IMPACT OF COLONOSCOPY TESTING ON COLON CANCER RATES?

The safety features of current self-dring cars developed by Waymo. http://www.justscience.in/articles/impact-colonoscopy-testing-colon-cancer-rates/2017/12/15

For human drivers, we have drivers test to validate the ability to drive on the streets. However, for these self-driving cars, what are the standards? Do the cars have to obtain their driver licence as well before they can go on the road?

In a 2016 study, Kalra and a colleague showed that self-driving cars would have to trek hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of miles to demonstrate with comfortable certainty that they caused fewer fatalities than the average person (about 1.1 per 100 million miles driven). Based on the current number of self-driving cars, that task could take decades or centuries to complete.

Tech developers hardly have that kind of time, so companies like Waymo assess their vehicles’ safety by pairing real driving time with practice on a private track and millions of miles a day in computer simulations.

However, there are still some concerning questions as simulations cannot account for some absurd situations that might occur. The University of Michigan came up with general guidelines for safe self-driving cars. Can self-driving vehicles compensate for contributions to crash causation by other traffic participants, as well as vehicular, roadway and environmental factors?  Can all relevant inputs for computational decisions be supplied to a self-driving vehicle?  Can computational speed, constant vigilance, and lack of distractibility of self-driving vehicles make predictive knowledge of an experienced driver irrelevant?

The hesitance to provide a safe enough vehicle has been one of the major hindering factors when it comes to the development of self-driving vehicles as no company is willing to take the risk in selling potentially dangerous cars.

Therefore, some test similar to the standardized crash test for regular cars should be applied to self-driving vehicles to assess the chances of accidents due to machine error and human driving errors.

Here is a video uploaded by Ted-ed explaining some other dilemmas when it comes to self-driving cars.

Do you know someone with Alzheimer’s? 

Chances are you answered yes because Alzheimer’s is currently the sixth largest cause of death in the United States, and it continues to rise. Between 2000-2017, Alzheimer’s has increased by 145% and now affects about 5.8 million people in USA. Alzheimer’s is a degenerative brain disease that has no cure. It often starts with loss of memory and can lead to loss of communication and even death. Such individuals can require specialized care in later stages, which can put pressure on medical systems and family. Most people see symptoms after their 65thbirthday. It is generally accepted that amyloid plaques (protein fragments that get stuck in the brain) are somehow linked to Alzheimer’s, but the exact relationship is not known. A recent study from MIT suggests brain waves could be used to get rid of such plaques and help improve memory.

Gamma Way Treatments May Be Key to Fighting Alzheimer’s

Researchers at MIT, led by senior author Li-Huei Tsai, exposed a group of mice to gamma brain waves and stimulating sounds. The brain is made up of many types of neurons, which are specialized cells, that must communicate with each other. They do this through electrical signals, and if these signals cycle about 25-80 times per second they are labelled as gamma waves. Gamma waves are thought to play an important role in memory and cognition and previous research has shown they may play a role in reducing brain amyloids.

Courtesy: Pexels | Photo Credit: Pixabay | A researcher peers into a microscope.

The MIT researchers had previously performed similar experiments with only audio or only gamma ray stimulation. Both of these experiments had shown positive results for mice memory. The mice were better able to navigate mazes and identify objects. The decided to build on those previous projects by subjecting the mice to both types of treatments. The results were resoundingly positive and resulted in a “… very dramatic reduction of amyloid,” explained Dr. Tsai. Mice were once again better able to remember and navigate mazes and recognize objects. However, even though initial results are promising, more research needs to be done to determine whether this treatment is safe and effective for humans. Also, the mice stopped showing improvement if the treatments were stopped for a week, meaning treatment may have to be recurring to provide any benefit.

Caring for Those with Alzheimer’s Is Not Easy

Courtesy: Pexels | Photo Credit: Matthias Zomer | People with Alzheimer’s need specialized care and support.

Caring for people with Alzheimer’s is no small task. Not only does it require immense resources and specialized care, but it can also weigh on family members and caregivers. In 2018 alone, $277 billion US dollars were spent on Alzheimer’s care, and this number is expected to grow as the population ages. Currently, a number for prescription drugs exist to slow down the disease in its early stages but there is no definite treatment. This research could lead the way for one of the first treatments that could actually reverse the effects of this disease. About 95% of Alzheimer’s affects those above 65, which means younger generations may still be able to reap the rewards of continued research in this field.

-Sukhman Bhuller

Immortality?

What defines immortality? If immortality is defined by “living” beyond the grave as a physical body with a personality and ability to interact with the world, then computer science is on the edge of this scary yet fascinating phenomenon.

https://www.sciencealert.com/images/articles/processed/shutterstock_225928441_web_1024.jpg

What is it:

In the past few years, researchers have developed many different types of AI technology to capture and store human data, with the potential of building Virtual Reality replicas of the deceased. This AI technology is based on the idea of “augmented reality,” where an AI programme uses the technological imprint – past social media – left behind by someone to build a digital replica of them. Lifenaut, a branch of the Terasem Movement, for example, gathers human personality data for free with the hope of creating a foundational database to one day transfer into a robot or holograph. While this technology is still in its experimental stages, at least 56,00 people have already stored mind-files online, each containing the person’s unique characteristics, including their mannerisms, beliefs, and memories. According to researchers, in about fifty years, millennials will have reached a point in their lives where they will have generated zettabytes (1 trillion gigabytes) of data, which is enough to create a digital version of themselves.

How:

The prospective application of this technology is that loved ones may use robot reincarnation as a way to grieve or commemorate someone who passed away. VR replicas will be able to speak with the same voice as the dead person, ask questions, and even perform simple tasks. They may be programmed to contain memories and personality, so family members could dynamically converse and interact with them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=89&v=KYshJRYCArEConcerns:

Concerns:

Of course, digital-afterlife technology is a revolutionary concept that brings major ethical and practical implications. Some believe that VR replicas of loved ones are a normal, new way to mourn the deceased, similar to current ways people use technology to remember their loved ones, such as watching videos or listening to voice recordings. The problematic part of this application is that it does not seem like a healthy way to grieve. Allowing people to clutch onto digital personas of deceased individuals out of fear and delusion could effectively inhibit people from moving on with their life. The other consequence that this AI technology threatens is the potential of robots achieving high intelligence, becoming so advanced they could replicate the human race. Some futurists thus believe that it is essential to program chips with preventative technology into robots to battle this apocalyptic risk. There are also significant social implications to consider with VR replicas. Should the right to create these replicas be based solely on wealth? The prospect of people having the ability to buy immortality, even in digital form, is certainly problematic, as it perpetuates troubling societal disparity. Ultimately, there are far too many harmful individual and societal consequences of VR human replication technology for it be a worthwhile or necessary AI innovation.

Do you believe in immortality?

No, and one life is enough for me.” – Albert Einstein

~ Angela Wei

Open AI Creates Text Generator Too Dangerous To Release

Open AI, a Silicon-Valley company devoted to developing artificial intelligence to benefit humanity, has recently created an algorithm so good at generating fake text they have deemed it too dangerous to release.

The first step in creating the text generator, GPT-2, was to collect text from the internet by following the most up-voted links on Reddit. This created 40 gigabytes worth of human selected training text for the algorithm. The next step was to set up the computation of probabilities to suggest the next most probable words to use. So, given a sentence to begin with, GPT-2 then recommends a string of words to follow, the quality of which are freakishly good.

As I mentioned in my last article, this capacity for people to use computers to generate fake content is bad news given the advent of fake news. GPT-2 is yet another tool that allows for the mass flooding of fake news into our communication channels.

Researchers from Cambridge University have created a browser-based game that allows you to rise to power using an army of fake news generating computer bots. Incredibly, the researchers are using the data generated from the game to help fuel research on media literacy and education. This is one of the ways that we can fight back, to become more educated and spot fake news.

A second, yet more concerning way that researchers are fighting back, is by using machine learning to spot machine generated text. Researchers at MIT, IBM, and Harvard, have created an algorithm called GLTR, Giant Language model Test Room, who’s inner workings are similar to that of Open AI’s GPT-2, but who’s job is to calculate the probability that the text was written by a computer. They have also made a website where you can try it out. This battle of the machines is quite concerning as there is no malicious actor at the moment, and yet the race is on with researches trying to outdo each other at a rapid rate.

While artificial intelligence does not seem to be in any way dangerous yet, it does look like the spinning wheel of progress is already unstoppable with advances racing forward faster than safety measures can be placed.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n95f-eqZdw

Many experts suggest creating safety measures before creating dangerous algorithms: Source

For those who are interested in hearing more, Siraj Raval has an extremely informative, while funny and not too long, video describing the implications of GPT-2 and how it works.

~Danny

P.S. The game is really cool!

Also, if you’re at all into computers, Siraj Raval has a great channel! (Seriously).

 

Here’s a little comedic relief

 

 

Glowing Pickles and OLEDs

Did you know that a pickle will glow if you pass electrical current through it?

“A pickle glowing due to electrical current” (source: Wikimedia Commons, available under CC BY 3.0)

This phenomenon, while it is peculiar and at first seemingly inapplicable, is a simple example of the same physical principles that underlie the beauty of our modern smartphone displays. An electrical current heats water in the pickle. The pickle rapidly dries out near the electrodes (here the electrodes are the forks at the ends of the pickle), causing sparks to leap between drier and wetter regions of the pickle. Sodium atoms throughout the pickle are then excited by these sparks to emit a characteristically yellow-orange light.

The same effect occurs in smartphone displays made from Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (OLEDs). However, instead of sodium, a film of some organic compound situated between two electrodes (of which one or more is transparent) is excited by electrical current to emit visible light. This approach to producing light differs from previous LED technologies that relied on a “backlight” (a fixed arrangement of LEDs) to produce visible light from electrically excited compounds.

These organic compounds are rarely simple molecules. Take, for example, an iridium-based chemical complex known as Ir(mppy)3, shown here.

“A diagram of Ir(mppy)3” (source: Wikimedia Commons, available as part of the public domain)

We will not discuss the structure or nomenclature of this compound, but it is worth mentioning that the compound is phosphorescent (it emits light without heat nor combustion) and will emit green light in response to electrical current. Other compounds similar to Ir(mppy)3 have been discovered to produce red and blue light. In application, these three colours (red, green, blue) may be added in different proportions to produce the many visible colours that we see (known as the RGB colour model).

It is noteworthy that the discovery of a blue LED was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics, emphasizing the modern and increasing relevance of OLED research.

New research seeks to overcome limits on the efficiency, lifespan, and cost of OLEDs. For example, while OLEDs are often a low-power alternative to the former backlight-based LED technologies, displaying images with white backgrounds (such as most web pages) using OLEDs require as much as three times the power of common LEDs. The metals used in OLEDs (such as iridium) are also rare and often expensive, meaning that consumer technologies derived from OLEDs come at a greater cost to both their users and the environment.

With cost and efficiency in mind, the Wolf Research Group at UBC has explored the use of copper (which is abundant on Earth) and other elements in place of iridium to produce candidate compounds for OLED technologies. Breakthroughs like these push us towards new innovations to benefit consumer technologies, and materials science overall.

– Eric Easthope