[Popular STEM] Curating the Internet: STEM digest for May 29, 2021
Teaching robotics to Pre-Kindergarteners; Supplementation with a form of vitamin B3 restores youthful characteristics in mice; In psychology, economics, and general interest science, nonreplicable studies get more traction than replicable ones; Microsoft and OpenAI collaborate to create program-code from natural language; and A quadruped robot with a tail design that was inspired by cheetah tails
Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
- Sphero indi Brings Robotics to Pre-Kindergarten - With the Sphero indi, children as young as pre-Kindergarten are able to express their creativity through robotics. The device is programmed to react in particular ways to different colors, and young children can control its motion by positioning those colors on the device's path.
Here is a video:
And as long as we're talking about robotics, don't forget IEEE Spectrum's weekly robotics roundups. Covering topics from space exploration, terrestrial flight, and industrial robotics to robotic soccer, these videos could fuel a month's worth of discussion in this post's replies:
- Video Friday: Intelligent Drone Swarms (May 21)
- Video Friday: Digger Finger (May 28)
- Nicotinamide riboside attenuates age-associated metabolic and functional changes in hematopoietic stem cells - Researchers study the effect of supplemenation in mice with nicotinamide riboside (NR), a form of vitamin B3. They find that it, "restores youthful metabolic capacity by modifying mitochondrial function in multiple ways including reduced expression of nuclear encoded metabolic pathway genes, damping of mitochondrial stress and a decrease in mitochondrial mass and network-size". As a result, they conclude that NR supplementation might be used in support of healthy ageing by enabling a healthier, more youthful, hematopoietic system. -h/t Daniel Lemire
- Nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones - As written by Jonathan Swift in 1710, "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it." Reliable science depends upon the ability of researchers to replicate each other results. However, this study of "published papers in top psychology, economics, and general interest journals", finds that replication of results is the exception instead of the rule. These researchers' main observation is that nonreplicable papers are cited more often than replicable ones. Further, they observe that when nonreplicable papers are cited, the fact that replication has not been successful is only mentioned 12% of the time. Interestingly, they also report that experts are good at predicting which papers will fail replication, suggesting that publishers have lower standards for reproducibility when a paper gives "interesting" or surprisng results. -h/t Daniel Lemire
- AI Could Soon Write Code Based on Ordinary Language - This past Tuesday, Microsoft and OpenAI announced plans to make use of OpenAI's GPT-3 technology in order to convert from natural language into computer code in Microsoft's Open Source PowerFX programming language. This is the first use of GPT-3 in a commercial endeavor, and it builds on Microsoft's billion dollar investment in the platform. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, described the plan, saying that the new tool would read a natural language description of the problem and generate a list of potentially relevant formulas that the human programmer could choose from. Microsoft VP, Charles Lamanna, is quoted as saying that, "GPT-3 can help people tackle complex challenges and empower people with little coding experience". Other projects have already generated code from natural language, including a previous project by OpenAI that produced Python code, and another by IBM whose Project CodeNet is reported to accelarate coding times from a year to a month. This project may also be facilitated by Microsoft's ownership of GitHub, but the article closes with this paragraph:
Exactly how Microsoft, OpenAI, and GitHub will work together on AI for coding is still unclear. In 2018, soon after Microsoft acquired GitHub, the company detailed efforts to use language models to power semantic code search, the first in a series of applied research initiatives involving AI. Such a capability could make it easier for a programmer to search and use code using natural language.
-h/t Communications of the ACM - The Cheetah's Fluffy Tail Points the Way for Robots With High-Speed Agility - Back to robotics for a closing YouTube video embed. Minitaur is a walking quadruped from Carnegie Mellon with a tail that was inspired by the cheetah's tail. The paper that describes the work is, Enabling Dynamic Behaviors With Aerodynamic Drag in Lightweight Tails
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There are some other posts I've read that discuss the effectiveness of NR in various metabolic functions. In a recently published Harvard paper, scientists have claimed that elderly coronavirus patients should be given anti-ageing drugs (NAD boosters) to make their immune systems 'younger' so they can fight the virus faster.
NAD boosters are supplements that contain nicotinamide riboside, a form of vitamin B3. When taken as a supplement, the body converts the nicotinamide riboside to NAD+ - the prized coenzyme in youngsters. [News Link]
Interesting! Thank you for the additional information. I had no idea about this, but it definitely makes sense, given the article above.
It is good to see that robotic technology is thinking of the smallest of the house and Sphero indi offers children to learn to code in a simpler way, of course this is not an advanced block coding, through the interface they can program Indi to do what they order, what seemed interesting to me apart from the fact that the game has a color sensor is that children can manually control the Indi through the application and something that also surprised me was the price. $ 125.
Thanks for the reply. I agree that it's good to see this sort of capability for young children. Much like Legos, I think that being able to direct a robot like in this fashion will teach a structured way of thinking that will be useful in many aspects of the children's lives.
I think that this type of mechanism will make children familiarize themselves with the robotic era that is approaching, this is worth the beginning for them.