Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for February 24, 2020

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Authored by @remlaps

Global greening confirms the existence of and also mitigates climate change; Artificial intelligence discovers powerful antibiotic that even kills drug-resistant bacteria; An AI system rewrites text in a way that confuses other AI systems; A TEDed video on the nature and meaning of Viking runes; and a Steem essay announcing a new community for coronavirus discussions

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

First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemPeak*, StemGeeks.

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  1. Characteristics, drivers and feedbacks of global greening - The planet has been getting greener - more rich with vegetation - since 1981. In some places, this is because of increases in farms and improvements in forestry, but it is also happening in places with low human footprints like deserts and tundra regions. These researchers suggest that (i) this provides compelling evidence of the existence of "climate change; (ii) the main driver of the greening is from carbon dioxide (CO2) fertilization, a long-used technique in greenhouses, whereby plants grow better when they are breathing more CO2; and (iii) the existence of more and healthier green plants will help to mitigate future effects of climate change by expanding the Earth's capability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. -h/t Daniel Lemire

  2. Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time - According to a team at MIT, halicin is the first antibiotic to be created through the use of a machine learning algorithm that was created by directing an artificial intelligence (AI) agent towards databases of existing compounds. The team also says that the antibiotic is effective against "some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria, and it acts through a mechanism that is different from previous antibiotics. MIT's Regina Barzilay says that it is a first of its kind discovery, and James Collins adds that it is among the most powerful of antibiotics. The discovery was made by training the AI to find molds that would kill bacteria, based upon their atomic and molecular structure and knowledge about how effective they are at killing the E coli bacteria. The training database contained atomic and molecular information from 2500 drugs and natural compounds along with data about how effective they were at killing E coli, and the candidate database contained 6,000 compounds that are under investigation as possible treatments for a variety of diseases. In a matter of hours, the algorithm came up with halicin (name inspired by "Hal from 2001.) Next, the team turned its attention to a larger candidate database with 107 million compounds. From this pool, in a period of three days, the AI gave back a list of 23 possible antibiotics, of which two seem to be especially potent. Future plans are to run the algorithm through an even larger database, and also to tailor it towards finding antibiotics that target specific bacteria. The results were published in the journal, Cell. Jacob Durrant, an unaffiliated researcher from the University of Pittsburgh is quoted saying that the research is remarkable, and that,
    Given typical drug-development costs, in terms of both time and money, any method that can speed early-stage drug discovery has the potential to make a big impact.
    -h/t Communications of the ACM: Artificial Intelligence

  3. This Technique Uses AI to Fool Other AIs - Along with colleagues, MIT's Di Jin has developed an adversarial technique to confuse artificial intelligence (AI) text interpreters by making use of word substitution on a small portion of a text. For example, changing the sentence:
    The characters, cast in impossibly contrived situations, are totally estranged from reality.
    to
    The characters, cast in impossibly engineered circumstances, are fully estranged from reality.
    caused an AI system to switch its rating of the sentence from negative to positive. In contrast, people generally consider the two sentences to mean the same thing. The team tested their adversarial technique against a suite of popular AI algorithms and datasets, and they were able to reduce accuracy from 90% to 10%. At a time when AI is increasing in use for job candidate screening, assessing medical claims, and processing legal documents. The technique has been implemented in the TextFooler github repository.

  4. Spells, threats, and dragons: The secret messages of Viking runestones - Jesse Byock - According to this video, the Vikings navigated from Scandanavia to European and American shores and forged new trade routes to the middle east for about 300 years, starting in the 8th century (CE). Their success is attributed to the advanced technology of their "long boats" and expertise at navigation. What they did not do, however, is leave behind monuments. Instead, archaeologists can learn about Vikings from fragments of bone, bark, and stone that can be found in graves, bogs, and sites of ancient settlements. Additionally, the Vikings also scratched runes into household goods like pottery and clothing that can still be found. Deciphering the runes is difficult, however, because of the absence of standards and regional differences in pronunciation. Many runes have been deciphered, though. Some contain evidence of their interaction with other cultures, like "love conquers all", which originated as a Latin phrase by the poet, Virgil. Others include memorials for the dead, poetry, mythology, and even magical spells that were meant to promote healing, safety in travel, or victory in battle. Although the era of viking conquest ended around the 11th century, these runes were in continued use for another 800 years.

    Here is the video:

    -h/t RealClearScience Videos


  5. Steem @indextrader24: COVID-19 Community - Pandemic information and news - discussions and background information - emerging infectious diseases - This post announces a new Steem community, Coronavirus Pandemic. The group was established in order to help people protect their health by exchanging news and background information from around the world. The introduction post is written in English and German, but the community's first couple entries are exclusively in German, so it remains to be seen whether it will be suitable for English-only speakers. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @indextrader24.)

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(Edited)

I am not confident that anyone believes in 'climate unchange'. Certainly everyone I have spoken with believes climate does change, and has throughout prehistory, long before the theory of anthropogenic influence was proposed.

Therefore theories of why climate changes need to incorporate the mechanisms whereby climate has changed before our potential influence on it began, and AGW alarmists utterly neglect to do so. Conflating an increase in CO2 well below known prehistoric levels with existentially harmful climate change is insuperable from extant data. Such moderate increase in CO2 is not associated with climate changes in the past, and in fact, CO2 is shown to be a driver of climate change only when extraordinary vulcanism occurs, such as the Siberian Traps, that are estimated to have released 170 thousand billion tons of CO2 over a 1 million year period.

This is far more than humanity will ever release.

Using data from a site that strongly advocates the AGW alarmist propaganda,the current global production is 34 billion tons of CO2 from anthropogenic sources (36 - 2). Per that level of CO2 production, it will take 5000 years to effect the harm the Siberian Traps did to the climate, and expecting current technology and CO2 production to continue unaltered during that time is utterly unreasonable.

Carbon is extraordinarily valuable, highly undervalued today, because it is the basis for life itself. We are carbon based lifeforms, and so is all life on Earth. CO2 is the base on which all photosynthesis and ecosystems dependent on it rests, and all evidence shows that up to about an order of magnitude higher CO2 levels than today's photosynthetic plants benefit from increasing levels of CO2. As the greening of the globe reveals, the natural biosphere of Earth is benefiting from our CO2 production today, and will for a long time.

I must refute the claim that a measurable increase in CO2 well below prehistoric levels that did not effect climate change is proof of climate change.

Thanks!

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Personally, I hate the term "climate change". I think it's meaningless, for just the reason you mentioned. But, it's the term that the authors used. (Probably because it was required by reviewers and editors at Nature, I suspect.)

Their point on confirming "climate change" was that areas that were previously ice covered are turning green, which does confirm warming in some regions, thus - "climate change". I couldn't disagree with that. Of course, by itself it doesn't confirm the source of the warming, and it doesn't confirm any sort of global phenomenon. But that's just basic logic. The authors didn't say any of that... at least not in the Abstract, which is the part I focused on.

The main points that I thought were important from the article were: (i) the confirmation of wide-spread greening that is caused by CO2 fertilization; and (ii) The confirmation that this greening removes additional CO2 from the atmosphere.

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(Edited)

Thanks for the clarification. Too often the lack of contextual communication written words convey deprives us of better understanding.

I am confident that the rise in CO2 is claimed to be the cause of climate change by the authors, due to the stated wording of the link. I am a bit flummoxed because the link at the beginning of the portion of the post dealing with the article leads back to your post, and not the article.

Edit: the link to Lemire's blog did get me to the Nature article, and I am reading it now.

"The greening phenomenon, together with warming, sea-level rise and sea-ice decline, represents highly credible evidence of anthropogenic climate change."

It appears my assumption was correct.

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I am confident that the rise in CO2 is claimed to be the cause of climate change by the authors, due to the wording of the article.

Yeah, it was certainly implied. I think that you probably can't get past the gatekeepers peer reviewers at Nature without advancing that viewpoint, at least by implication.

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