Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for July 23, 2019

Studying pain; Rare Roman glass unearthed in the UK; Flying ants detected on weather radar; Microsoft's billion dollar bet on artificial intelligence; An Internet Protocol (IPV4) addressing tutorial

Straight from my RSS feed:

Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

1. How do we measure pain, anyway? - Because the phenomenon of pain is a subjective experience, it is difficult for one person to describe it to another. And because of this difficulty, science has yet to gain a fundamental understanding of what pain is, despite the existence of numerous foundations that are dedicated to researching it. The difficulty with understanding pain is why, in animals, scientists are restricted to only studying pain-like behaviors - reflexes, voluntary motions, and changes in emotion. Normal testing involves injuring an animal, and then observing changes in pain-like behaviors, then medicating the animal and observing if the behavior reverts towards the baseline. A newer test, called the grimace scale involves humans coding for changes in animals facial expressions, but this is limited by the inconsistency of animal responses, and by the tendencies for racial and gender bias in the humans doing the coding. Because of these difficulties - and others (like the difficulty of altering belief in animals) - many of the medicines that make it through animal testing result in failures when they're tried on humans. h/t RealClear Science


2. Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved - A first-of-its-kind discovery has been made in Britain, with an 1,800 year-old glass shard that was once part of a made in the Ukraine fish bottle that originated somewhere near the Black Sea. The piece was lost after making its way to Roman Britain, then unearthed in 2017. After consultation with numerous experts, it was finally matched to a glass container at the Corning Museum of Glass. There is only one other known example of a Roman fish bottle. The fragment is on display where it was discovered, in the Chedworth Roman Villa in Gloucestershire. h/t archaeology.org


3. England Is Being Invaded By a Swarm of Flying Ants That Can Be Seen From Space - Although it may sound surprising, this happens every summer. A swarm of ants was detected on weather radar during a mating flight. In order to ensure the strength of her offspring, the ant queen out-flies all but the strongest male suitors. The rest either lose their wings, or fall prey to predators. After mating, the queen chews off her wings and falls to the ground to spawn a new colony and live out the remainder of her Earth-bound life (up to 15 years). This is referred to as nuptial flight or flying ant day. Scientists suspect that the ants showed up on their radar this year because of improvements in the technology.


4. Microsoft is investing $1 billion in OpenAI to create brain-like machines - OpenAI will help to train AI computing services in Microsoft's Azure environment, and will also seek to develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This is part of Microsoft's strategy to stay relevant in the face of competition from the likes of Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Many researchers believe that AGI is impossible, but OpenAI hopes to get there with massive scaling and incremental improvements on existing deep-learning techniques. Microsoft is betting big that it will work.


5. STEEM Course: IP Version 4 Addressing And Subnetting Deep Dive (Part 3) - Part 3 of this series by @joshman discusses variable length subnet masks (VLSM) and classless interdomain routing (CIDR). It also contains links to part 1 and part 2 (A beneficiary setting of 5% has been assigned to @joshman.)).

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