Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 18, 2019

Marissa Mayer's start-up launches its first app; Crows may be the smartest non-primate animals; Cosmologists dispute recent study claiming that dark energy may not exist; A look at the controversy over a DNA dating application; and a Steem-based citizen science post for Project Feederwatch

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1. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's new startup is deliberately targeting 'mundane' tasks, and the first one is a holiday app that organizes addresses - Former Googler and Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer launched her latest startup, Lumi Labs in March of 2018.The firm has been quiet since launch, but now released its first application, Holiday Helper, which is an app that sends messages to friends and family to gather contact and shipping information, and then prints out pre-completed mailing labels. Mayer says that the focus of the company is this sort of simple, but mundane and time consuming task that people often choose not to complete. As-of now, the product is only available for desktop use. The company's office is located in 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, which is the same space that Google and Paypal occupied as small startups. It's also the location where Mayer started her career with Google.


2. Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates - In 2002, researchers demonstrated that Betty the Crow could use tools, when they showed her bend a piece of wire into a hook and use it to pick up a container of meat from inside of a plastic tube. In the years since then, it has been learned that crows naturally do the same thing with twigs in the wild, which makes the feat only slightly less impressive, because it doesn't imply original invention. Scientists have also trained crows to solve problems requiring as many as eight independent steps, which demonstrate that the bird has some capacity for planning. Finally, scientists have observed a sort of emotional state in crows, noting that crows who have used tools recently are more optimistic than those who haven't, and also that crows - especially young ones - exhibit an enjoyment for play. Overall, although the crow's brain is structured differently than primate brains - crows have densely packed clusters of neurons instead of a neocortex, the two structures have enabled many of the same capabilities. The article also makes the point that cognition in animals adds a new dimension to biology, because it "opens a door to behaviour that isn’t necessarily essential for survival". h/t Daniel Lemire


3. No Dark Energy? No Chance, Cosmologists Contend - Previously covered in Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 2, 2019, a recent paper by Subir Sarkar and a team of collaborators claimed that the need for dark energy in cosmological models arose out of methodological errors in prior work. Now, other scientists have published a rebuttal on arXiv that claims errors in the most recent paper. This paper, by Dave Rubin and student Jessica Heitlauf, has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. It claims that there are four data handling errors in the work by Sarkar et al, and concludes that observations still support the idea that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, thus restoring the need for dark energy in the models. Sarkar and team disagree with the rebuttal, however, and they have posted their own rebuttal to the rebuttal. Claiming to speak for the "cosmological community", Don Scolnic alleges that the work by Sarkar and team attempts to question statistical principles that are not open for debate, and is quoted as saying, "the evidence for dark energy from supernovas alone is significant and secure." Criticisms from the first rebuttal include claims that (i) The removal of corrections for movement of our solar system was unsupported; (ii) The work fails to account for lighting changes that result from dust clouds in space; (iii) The model used an artificially small value to account for distance from Earth; and (iv) The model doesn't satisfy a necessary consistency check. Nothing is ever final, but for now it looks like dark energy is here to stay.


4. Here are some actual facts about George Church’s DNA dating company - Given Church's recent apology for his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein as well as Epstein's idea to preserve his own DNA by use of a baby making factory, this just seems like a really bad idea, right from the get-go. Anyway, the app is called Digid8, and it apparently stems from the well-intentioned idea for people who share a genetic mutation to avoid meeting each other so that their offspring won't suffer from genetic disease when the mutations combine. Church claimed that, "it could be a cheap way to eradicate thousands of diseases that cost 'about a trillion dollars a year, worldwide.'" He also published this FAQ. When it was informally announced on a recent 60 Minutes segment, however, the Internet exploded with concerns about eugenics and potential abuses of the technology.


5. STEEM Citizen Science: Project FeederWatch -- Count #06 Report 2019-2020 Season w/Original Photos - Personally, this is one of my favorite uses of the Steem blockchain. Here is another citizen science post from @etcmike with photos and counts from his birdwatching activities. This post includes siting counts and original photos of the American Goldfinch, Downy Woodpecker, Blue Jay, Red Bellied Woodpecker, and House Finch. The photos were all taken by @etcmike, and are labeled as free for reuse with credit to the author, so here is one of the American Goldfish:
   
   

   

   Click through to see the rest. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @etcmike.)

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