Nature involves Science, too! (Nobody Cares...)

[Free]

I'm sure it can be summarized in two paragraphs and I'm not going to sit through this guy babbling on for a quarter of an hour to get there.

I can summarize in 3 short sentences:

"Everything is a fish. Nothing is a fish. Words matter, yet they don't really."

Sometimes those Green boys flail around on the youtubes like 15 year olds who've misplaced their Adderall prescriptions. Especially the younger one. I worry over his video production/editing habits constantly.

 

[Beebo Brink]

ETA: Is Trash Evolving Raccoons Into the Next Household Pet? | Discover Magazine

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Urban foxes headed somewhere too:

Why Urban Foxes Are Getting Smarter Every Year

As cities expand and wild habitats shrink, urban foxes have become increasingly common sights in metropolitan areas worldwide.

www.animalsaroundtheglobe.com

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

ETA: Is Trash Evolving Raccoons Into the Next Household Pet? | Discover Magazine

Hmm, I know what we need. A post human-apocalypse game starring groups of evolved sapient Raccoons. They could call it "Trashborn", they could advance through tech trees by researching and analyzing human tech found in age old dumps and ruins.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

There's been at least a couple of SF novels involving raccoons or bears taking humanity's niche.

 

[Casey Pelous]

 

[Free]

This Microbe 'Plays Dead' in NASA Clean Rooms, and We May Have Sent It to Mars

18 years ago, a sneaky bacteria infiltrated some of the cleanest places on Earth. Scientists finally know how.

gizmodo.com

The tiniest life forms are sometimes the strongest of them all—that is, they’ll survive anywhere and do everything they can to stay alive. Apparently, this even includes faking their own death.

In 2007, NASA found an entirely new bacterium, named Tersicoccus phoenicis, hiding inside two separate clean rooms—spacecraft manufacturing rooms disinfected to the extreme—each located 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) apart. After years of not understanding how exactly it got there, a recent paper published in Environmental Microbiology finally offers an answer: it hibernates, leading scientists to believe it was dead.

“It is not dead. It was playing dead,” Madhan Tirumalai, study lead author and a microbiologist at the University of Houston, told National Geographic back in October. “It is only dormant.”

I don't quite know how "playing dead" benefits a microbe. I'm sure there's some more effective metaphor to help explain the purpose of it going dormant. But interesting nonetheless.

 

[Govi]

Perhaps the original disinfection procedures were a severe enough environment that "playin' possum" mode was evoked. If one thinks about the long history of intense environmental destruction that geology has inflicted on Earth, and the frequency of them, a long duration "playin' possum" mode would definitely be an advantage.

 

[Free]

Perhaps the original disinfection procedures were a severe enough environment that "playin' possum" mode was evoked. If one thinks about the long history of intense environmental destruction that geology has inflicted on Earth, and the frequency of them, a long duration "playin' possum" mode would definitely be an advantage.

Maybe. My problem has more to do with the use of the idiom to describe these microbes' behavior, which by definition implies an adaptation that almost certainly involves some level of intelligence. The ability to withstand serious life-threatening conditions is an amazing Darwinian trick, but I don't see them considering it in any measurable way, like a tiny possum going "Oh shit, here comes a hungry tardigrade. Time to look dead for a bit."

 

[Casey Pelous]

This Microbe 'Plays Dead' in NASA Clean Rooms, and We May Have Sent It to Mars

18 years ago, a sneaky bacteria infiltrated some of the cleanest places on Earth. Scientists finally know how.

gizmodo.com

I don't get why this is so unique -- we've known lots of fungal spores that can lie dormant for ages. Valley Fever, known to its fans as coccidioidomycosis, is caused by a fungal spore that lies dormant in the dirt, primarily in the Central Valley of CA and in Arizona. I'm fairly certain the tetanus bacterium is typically in a dormant state until it enters the body.

 

[Govi]

Some of the exams I took in university were of the variety that I thought of as the "measuring how far you could crawl up the beach to safety" type. The one-celled organisms that survived were the ones that had the genes, etc. to make them survive. Why did they have the genes necessary? Luck. That, to me, is what natural selection is.

Some of the trees nearby are several thousand years old. They didn't make the right decisions in life, they just had the "programming" that allowed them to live that long if chances went their way, even to being the right seed landing in the right spot. We speak of things in such a way, but from our own experience, we know that doing the right thing at the right time when life and limb are at stake is almost always a matter of circumstances, not "intelligence". You were trained and went automatic; you panicked, then turned and braked the right way; but for being startled by that dog wandering the road, you'd never have seen dog nor person that you didn't hit as a result of seeing...

Intelligence, foolish or not, is when you test a possibly live-wire before you touch it: with the back of your hand so that any electrically caused involuntary muscle contraction pulls your hand out of contact (foolish?), or with a suitable voltmeter (not foolish?).

With the advent of LLMs which do such a good job of mimicking intelligence, like many others, I wonder if we constitute a carbon-based LLM. I watch my husband's dogs solve problems, learn behaviors, solve access to the cabinet door behind which we keep the bin, open a door latch, remember that "crate" means get in the crate and get a tasty reward, etc. We, as intelligent beings, cannot consciously form a family of useful proteins out of meat and cabbage, but our bodies can. We certainly did not choose that system, it chose us. Or rather, a near infinity of different events formed us.

Apparently, I'm trying to make up for not posting much recently, since I've been rambling.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

With the advent of LLMs which do such a good job of mimicking intelligence, like many others, I wonder if we constitute a carbon-based LLM.

Nope. LLMs don't create models of the world and reason about them.

I watch my husband's dogs solve problems, learn behaviors, solve access to the cabinet door behind which we keep the bin, open a door latch, remember that "crate" means get in the crate and get a tasty reward, etc.

Your dog is creating models and reasoning about them. It is intelligent. Large language models are not.

 

[Casey Pelous]

Nope. LLMs don't create models of the world and reason about them....

To be fair, neither do most people.

 

[Free]

To be fair, neither do most people.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Yeh that's funny ha ha but it's also funny sheesh. Birds actually reason better than LLMs.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Your dog is creating models and reasoning about them. It is intelligent. Large language models are not.

This misunderstanding of what exactly LLMs are doing seems to be pervasive. The LLM's total lack of judgment is difficult for people to recognize when the result of a query sounds like a reasoned commentary. It's a clever magic trick, an illusion, that looks so real that many people simply accept it.

Explaining how LLMs work is complicated enough that it's not an easy magic trick to explain. I have only the most rudimentary understanding, but it's just enough to break the spell.

 

[Casey Pelous]

This misunderstanding of what exactly LLMs are doing seems to be pervasive. The LLM's total lack of judgment is difficult for people to recognize when the result of a query sounds like a reasoned commentary. It's a clever magic trick, an illusion, that looks so real that many people simply accept it.

Explaining how LLMs work is complicated enough that it's not an easy magic trick to explain. I have only the most rudimentary understanding, but it's just enough to break the spell.

Best short explanation I have seen: "It's just autocomplete on steroids."

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Kilauea again - but this time one of the lava fountains was so huge that it stretched all the way across the caldera and destroyed camera V3, one of the three livecams that the USGS had set up in different locations around the crater rim to monitor the eruption. You can watch a recap here, including V3's final moments at the very end:


There is still a fountain in progress at the time I'm posting this,, though it's much smaller now. You'll have to watch from V1 or V2 now though, unless/until USGS installs another camera somewhere else on the rim. It's too bad, V3 always had the best views IMO!

V2:

 

[Free]

 

[Free]

These dogs eavesdrop on their owners to learn new words

“Under the right conditions, some dogs present behaviors strikingly similar to those of young children.”...

arstechnica.com

When it comes to cognitive ability, not all dogs are created equal. Most dogs can learn simple action cues like “sit” or “down.” But so-called “gifted word learner” (GWL) dogs exhibit a remarkable ability to learn the names of objects—for example, learning the names of specific toys so well that they can retrieve them from a large pile of toys on command. And according to a new study published in the journal Science, they can even learn labels for new toys just by overhearing their owners talking about those toys. Per the authors, this suggests that GWL dogs have sociocognitive skills that are functionally comparable to those of 18-month-old human toddlers.

Co-author Claudia Fugazza of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, has been studying canine behavior and cognition for several years as part of the Genius Dog Challenge. For instance, the group’s 2022 study discovered that dogs store key sensory features about their toys—notably what they look like and how they smell—and recall those features when searching for the named toy. Prior studies had suggested that dogs typically rely on vision, or a combination of sight and smell, to locate target objects. GWL dogs can also identify objects based on verbal labels.

In that 2022 study, all the dogs—regardless of whether they were GWL dogs or typical dogs—successfully picked out the target toys in both light and dark conditions, though it took them longer to locate the toys in the dark. Most relied on visual cues, even though dogs possess an excellent sense of smell. However, the dogs sniffed more frequently and longer when searching for the toy in the dark.