Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 3, 2020
Dogs' noses can sense the ambient warmth of their prey from a meter and a half away; "Fake news" didn't have much impact on the 2016 election; An attempt at estimating numbers of unreported cases of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19); Xerox offers $24 per share to buy HP. HP says no thank you.; and a Steem "citizen science" photo-essay with bird photography and sighting counts
Straight from my RSS feed | Whatever gets my attention |
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.
- New sense discovered in dog noses: the ability to detect heat - It is commonly known that dogs' noses are 100 million times more sensitive to scent than humans'. New here is that their noses can also be used to detect weak thermal radiation, such as body heat from warm-blooded prey. According to the article, this helps to explain how dogs with poor vision, smell, and hearing are still able to hunt. The discovery was made by training a trio of dogs to choose between a warm (31° C) object and an object at ambient temperatures. The dogs were tested in double-blind experiments and demonstrated the ability to accomplish the task at distances up to 1.6 meters. After that, dogs were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI while being presented with objects that were emitting weak or neutral radiation. The FMRI scans revealed more brain activity in response to the warm objects. All experiments were said to be done in a way that the dog could not see or smell the objects. -h/t Daniel Lemire
- “Fake News” Web sites May Not Have a Major Effect on Elections - Accroding to a New study in Nature Human Behavior, although "fake news" web sites received substantial traffic during the 2016 election, it turns out that most people also had online access to reliable news sites, and the unreliable sites represented a small fraction of total news consumption. The authors performed the most systematic examination to date of news consumption during the 2016 election, and they concluded that fake or fraudulent news sites may have had a small effect on public opinion, but they had little effect on individuals' opinions about Donald Trump or decisions to go to the polling stations. The study is consistent with previous work finding that substantial numbers of people had some exposure to "fake news", the majority of such exposure was highly concentrated among, "a small number of conservatives".
- BBC Report: 210 Dead In Iran From Coronavirus. How Many Are Infected? - Official numbers at the time this article was published said that 34 Iranians had died from the novel coronavirus. However, A report from Al Arabiya suggests that the number is more like 210. By extrapolating from a 2% fatality rate, this article suggests that the total number of Iranian cases is in the neighborhood of 10,000 - not 388 as the official sources are currently reporting. Globally, the article says that it's impossible to get reliable infection numbers for three reasons: (i) The virus has spread fast and far, outpacing health officials ability to test; (ii) Testing kits aren't perfect, and sometimes give false negatives; and (iii) Authoritarian countries like Iran and China are known for doctoring statistics in order to present their countries in the most favorable light. In conclusion, the article says if you back into the number of cases from the mortality rate, a 2% rate would suggest 143,350 cases - far higher than the 83k being reported at the time of publication. The seasonal flu mortality rate is about 0.1%, so if the novel coronavirus has the same mortality rate, then that would suggest that the fatality count of 2,867 suggests that almost 3 million people (2,867,000) have been infected. So their best esimate is that the total number of cases around the globe actually lies between about 150,000 and 3,000,000. -h/t RealClear Science
- Xerox launches official tender for HP shares - Xerox made an official tender offer for HP today (March 2). The offer is $18.40 in cash and 0.149 Xerox shares for every HP share. This values HP at $24 per share, or about $27 billion, and it is up from a $22 per share offer that the company made in November. This valuation is about three times the market valuation for Xerox. HP's leadership has already rejected the offer, saying that $24 per share is too low, but Xerox says they will take it directly to the shareholders and try to replace the current board.
- Steem @etcmike: Citizen Science: Project FeederWatch -- Count #17 Report 2019-2020 Season w/Original Photos - Citizen science is still one of my favorite uses for the Steem blockchain. This is the latest post in a series of reports and photos from the author's bird watching activities. This post documents bird watching activities from Feb 29 and March 1. The original photos include a Hawk, Hairy Woodpeckers, Downy Woodpeckers, Northern Cardinals, a Red-winged Blackbird, a Mourning Dove, and a Dark-eyed Junco. The post also contains information about each of the species, and the total observations, which amounted to 11 species and 45 individuals.
The photos are labeled for reuse with credit, so here is one of a cardinal
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