A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait takes a look at the question of how far, exactly, the Pleiades star cluster is from Earth. It turns out this question breaks down into a lot of interesting secondary issues.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly starts an interesting discussion around the observation that so many people are uncomfortable with the details of their body.


• Centauri Dreams reports on the exciting evidence of cryovolcanism at Ceres.


• The Crux reports on new suggestions that, although Neanderthals had bigger brains than Homo sapiens, Neanderthal brains were not thereby better brains.


• D-Brief notes evidence that the ability of bats and dolphins to echolocate may ultimate derive from a shared gene governing their muscles.


• Bruce Dorminey notes that astronomers have used data on the trajectory of 'Oumuamua to suggest it may have come from one of four stars.


• Far Outliers explores the Appalachian timber boom of the 1870s that created the economic preconditions for the famed feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys.


• Language Hat notes the unique whistling language prevailing among the Khasi people living in some isolated villages in the Indian state of Meghalaya.


• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicles, notes that the fastest-growing language in the United States is the Indian language of Telugu.


• Jeremy Harding at the LRB Blog writes about the import of the recognition, by Macron, of the French state's involvement in the murder of pro-Algerian independence activist Maurice Audin in 1958.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution praises the diaries of Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian Jewish intellectual alive during the Second World War


• The New APPS Blog takes a look at the concept of the carnival from Bakhtin.


• Gabrielle Bellot at NYR Daily considers the life of Elizabeth Bishop and Bishop's relationship to loneliness.


• Jason Davis at the Planetary Society Blog describes how CubeSats were paired with solar sails to create a Mars probe, Mars Cube One.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers some possible responses from the left to a conservative Supreme Court in the US.


• Roads and Kingdoms takes a look at the challenges facing the street food of Xi'an.


• Rocky Planet examines why, for decades, geologists mistakenly believed that the California ground was bulging pre-earthquake in Palmdale.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel examines how some objects called stars, like neutron stars and white dwarfs and brown dwarfs, actually are not stars.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps notes how China and Europe stand out as being particularly irreligious on a world map of atheism.


• Window on Eurasia notes the instability that might be created in the North Caucasus by a border change between Chechnya and Ingushetia.


• Arnold Zwicky shares some beautiful pictures of flowers from a garden in Palo Alto.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares stunning images, from Jupiter, of the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, and analysis.


• Hornet Stories notes that a reboot of 1980s animation classic She-Ra is coming to Netflix.


• io9 carries reports suggesting that the new X-Men Dark Phoenix movie is going to have plenty of good female representation. Here's to hoping. It also notes that the seminal George Lucas short film "Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB" is viewable for free online, but only for a short while.


• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that IQ score, more than education, is the single biggest factor explaining why a person might become an inventor.


• The NYR Daily looks at the alliance rightfully called "unholy" between religious militants and the military in Pakistan.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer explains how the strong social networks of Italian migrants in Argentina a century ago helped them eventually do better than native-born Argentines (and Spanish immigrants, too).


• Roads and Kingdoms notes the simple joys of pupusas, Salvadoran tortillas, on a rainy day in Vancouver.


• Towleroad reports on interesting research suggesting that gay men are more likely to have older brothers, even suggesting a possible biological mechanism for this.

Window on Eurasia notes reports of fights between Russian and Muslim students at Russian centres of higher education.

You claim that some A.I.s are already conscious. Could you explain why?

I would like to claim we had little, rudimentary, conscious learning systems for at least 25 years. Back then, already, I proposed rather general learning systems consisting of two modules.

One of them, a recurrent network controller, learns to translate incoming data — such as video and pain signals from the pain sensors, and hunger information from the hunger sensors — into actions. For example, whenever the battery’s low, there’s negative numbers coming from the hunger sensors. The network learns to translate all these incoming inputs into action sequences that lead to success. For example, reach the charging station in time whenever the battery is low, but without bumping into obstacles such as chairs or tables, such that you don’t wake up these pain sensors.

The agent’s goal is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain until the end of its lifetime. This goal is very simple to specify, but it’s hard to achieve because you have to learn a lot. Consider a little baby, which has to learn for many years how the world works, and how to interact with it to achieve goals.

Since 1990, our agents have tried to do the same thing, using an additional recurrent network — an unsupervised module, which essentially tries to predict what is going to happen. It looks at all the actions ever executed, and all the observations coming in, and uses that experience to learn to predict the next thing given the history so far. Because it’s a recurrent network, it can learn to predict the future — to a certain extent — in the form of regularities, with something called predictive coding.

• Antipope Charlie Stross wonders about the interactions between parasite loads and the intelligence of the inhabitants of off-world colonies.


• Bad Astronomy shares a stunning mosaic of the Milky Way Galaxy.


• blogTO notes the construction of a viewing platform for Toronto plane spotters.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog examines why we call other people stupid.


• Imageo notes how Arctic sea ice is trending at record low levels.


• Language Hat looks at the ways in which the English language is changing.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money and the Volokh Conspiracy consider whether the FBI announcement of the expansion of the Weiner E-mail search to target Hillary Clinton was legal.


• Marginal Revolution reports that GM crops are apparently not increasing yields particularly.


• Progressive Download's John Farrell reports on the politics of bashing Darwin and evolution.


• Spacing considers a recent election outcome for mayor in Saskatoon.


• Torontoist reports on the Russell Hill subway crash of 1995.


• Window on Eurasia considers the prospect of Russians turning against Putin and argue his regime's fascist turn will be continuing.

• Atlas Obscura looks at the 18th century British tradition of installing hermits in gardens.


• Bloomberg looks at Brexit proponents who say the United Kingdom can arrange a better deal with the European Union than Switzerland, notes continued anger after the housing collapse, and studies prospects for light rail in Los Angeles.


• CBC notes the death of K-Tel founder Phil Kives and looks at fracking damage in Oklahoma.


• MacLean's notes that a former PQ minister who blames Liberal strength on English and Allophone voters does not know demographics.


• National Geographic looks at Pripyat as a modern equivalent to Pompeii.


• Open Democracy looks at the particular dynamics behind right-wing populism in Estonia.


• Quartz notes the rise of the megacity.


• The Toronto Star notes lessons Toronto can take from New York City on building better streets.


• Vice looks at how the ability to learn does not require a nervous system.


• Wired looks at the reason for the odd roads of Kansas.

At first, Fan Hui thought the move was rather odd. But then he saw its beauty.

“It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move,” he says. “So beautiful.” It’s a word he keeps repeating. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.

The move in question was the 37th in the second game of the historic Go match between Lee Sedol, one of the world’s top players, and AlphaGo, an artificially intelligent computing system built by researchers at Google. Inside the towering Four Seasons hotel in downtown Seoul, the game was approaching the end of its first hour when AlphaGo instructed its human assistant to place a black stone in a largely open area on the right-hand side of the 19-by-19 grid that defines this ancient game. And just about everyone was shocked.

“That’s a very strange move,” said one of the match’s English language commentators, who is himself a very talented Go player. Then the other chuckled and said: “I thought it was a mistake.” But perhaps no one was more surprised than Lee Sedol, who stood up and left the match room. “He had to go wash his face or something—just to recover,” said the first commentator.

Even after Lee Sedol returned to the table, he didn’t quite know what to do, spending nearly 15 minutes considering his next play. AlphaGo’s move didn’t seem to connect with what had come before. In essence, the machine was abandoning a group of stones on the lower half of the board to make a play in a different area. AlphaGo placed its black stone just beneath a single white stone played earlier by Lee Sedol, and though the move may have made sense in another situation, it was completely unexpected in that particular place at that particular time—a surprise all the more remarkable when you consider that people have been playing Go for more than 2,500 years. The commentators couldn’t even begin to evaluate the merits of the move.

Then, over the next three hours, AlphaGo went on to win the game, taking a two-games-to-none lead in this best-of-five contest. To date, machines have beaten the best humans at chess and checkers and Othello and Jeopardy!. But no machine has beaten the very best at Go, a game that is exponentially more complex than chess. Now, AlphaGo is one win away.

For all its apparent simplicity, a new experimental study showing that mouse-like rodents can be nice to each other now stands at the vanguard of a scientific revolution. The paper, published in the journal Science and promoted under the headline, “Empathy More Common in Animals than Thought,” could never have been published in the late 20th century, said University of Michigan psychologist Stephanie Preston. Not only would it have been rejected, she said, it would have been ridiculed.

The paper would have violated a longstanding prohibition against anthropomorphism – the attribution of human motives or feelings to animals. This taboo made some sense, in that scientists risked clouding their careful observations if they projected their own feelings or motives onto animals. But in recoiling from anthropomorphism, biology cozied up to an opposing assumption – that non-human animals had no emotions, no feelings and no inner lives.

Now, scientists are starting to question this longstanding belief.

The subject of the new experiment is the prairie vole, a social, monogamous creature native to the North American Midwest. Both sexes care for offspring. When researchers subjected one member of a mated pair to an electric shock, the unharmed vole groomed its distressed mate for as much as 10 minutes. Prairie voles primarily comforted family members this way – engaging less in consoling behavior toward strangers. The closely related but more promiscuous meadow vole showed no such comforting behavior at all.

It’s not the first time scientists have observed rodents showing kindness. A famous 2012 experiment suggested that even rats could be generous. Experimenters created a tiny enclosure – the size of a rat coffin – that another rat could learn to open from the outside. Though the enclosure took some effort to open, rats more often than not freed trapped companions – even if it meant delaying a treat of chocolate chips and then having to share it.

Long the domain of science fiction, researchers are now working to create software that perfectly models human and animal brains. With an approach known as whole brain emulation (WBE), the idea is that if we can perfectly copy the functional structure of the brain, we will create software perfectly analogous to one. The upshot here is simple yet mind-boggling. Scientists hope to create software that could theoretically experience everything we experience: emotion, addiction, ambition, consciousness, and suffering.

“Right now in computer science, we make computer simulations of neural networks to figure out how the brain works," Anders Sandberg, a computational neuroscientist and research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, told Ars. "It seems possible that in a few decades we will take entire brains, scan them, turn them into computer code, and make simulations of everything going on in our brain.”

Everything. Of course, a perfect copy does not necessarily mean equivalent. Software is so… different. It's a tool that performs because we tell it to perform. It's difficult to imagine that we could imbue it with those same abilities that we believe make us human. To imagine our computers loving, hungering, and suffering probably feels a bit ridiculous. And some scientists would agree.

But there are others—scientists, futurists, the director of engineering at Google—who are working very seriously to make this happen.

For now, let’s set aside all the questions of if or when. Pretend that our understanding of the brain has expanded so much and our technology has become so great that this is our new reality: we, humans, have created conscious software. The question then becomes how to deal with it.

[H]ere’s the idea I want to test on you all. I asked myself, “Would it be possible for social insect colonies on some other planet to evolve to have language and technology – in other words, a civilization?”

Of course, the idea of swarm intelligence, or hive-mind intelligence, has been around forever in science fiction. To give but one example, Frank Schatzing’s The Swarm posits an undersea alien made of single-celled, physically unconnected organisms that collectively have considerable intelligence. But I need to examine the idea with much more rigor than can be done in fiction.

I refined the question by deciding that, as on earth, the individual insects would have brains too small for serious cognition. The unit of analysis would not be individual bugs but colonies of bugs. The intelligence would have to emerge from their interaction.

After much thought, my answer to the question is “No – but…”

Let me explain both the No and the but. It is these explanations on which I want your feedback.

Research published earlier this year claiming chimpanzees can learn each others' language is not supported, a team of scientists concludes after reviewing the study.

The scholarship in question, published in the journal Current Biology in February, centered on the examination of two sets of chimpanzees in the Edinburgh Zoo: one that had been captive for several years in the facility and one that had recently arrived from the Beekse Bergen Safari Park in the Netherlands. Over a three-year period, the researchers claimed that the latter set had altered their sounds to those of the former set when communicating about a common object, apples, resulting in what they saw as a newly shared vocalization.

The original study team, which included faculty from the University of York, the University of Zurich, and the University of St. Andrews, posited that the findings "provide the first evidence for vocal learning in a referential call in non-humans." This was offered as evidence that chimpanzees can learn different calls for the same object, which was widely interpreted as an important finding for the study of language evolution.

But a review of the Current Biology study by researchers at the German Primate Center in Göttingen, the University of Kent, and New York University, suggests these conclusions are off-base.

"There are a number of problems with the original study," observes James Higham, an assistant professor in NYU's Department of Anthropology and a co-author of the new analysis, which also appears in Current Biology. "Some of these relate to the methods used while others are fundamentally a misrepresentation of what the data actually show."