your science briefing for 01.29.2015
AI programmers crash and burn, the toxic positivity lurking in countries ranked as the world's happiest, why Neanderthals fell into an evolutionary bottleneck, and more...
Bosses of Big Tech companies have been very openly salivating at the idea of firing as many of their programmers as possible to replace them with AI. Aside from the many, many moral, economic, technical, and philosophical problems with this attitude, there is also the fact that based on real world performance data, AI programmers are simply bad at their jobs. Like, really bad. As in can only do 15% of advertised tasks, and even those tasks are done poorly… (Futurism)
Despite evolution having been taught in schools for the better part of a century now, a lot of people simply don’t understand it. Thanks to heavily biased or just bad teaching of the theory, widespread lies of the creationist movement, and shortcuts verging on oversimplification in popular science content, there are far too many misconceptions about evolution floating around… (Nautilus)
Sometimes, in countries that score highly on the world happiness index, “don’t worry, be happy” isn’t a song lyric or a motto, it’s a command. Because if you’re not happy in one of the happiest countries on the planet, the society will assume that the problem must be you… (Nature)
Human evolution was a messy process, with a lot of interbreeding and hybridization in our genetic and fossil record. Modern humans still carry genes from Denisovans and Neanderthals, giving us better chances to survive and thrive. But why didn’t this work for the Neanderthals? A new hypothesis says that an antigen Rh factor in their blood made for a serious blood type mismatch between Neanderthals and other hominids, making it much more difficult for them to hybridize and survive… (LiveScience)
Another day, another disturbing new study about microplastics. This time, scientists found that tiny plastic particles can travel through blood vessels, attracting clumps of immune cells which can build clots in tight curves around blood vessels. The kind of clots that can trigger heart attacks and strokes… (Science)