Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 12, 2020

Hunter gatherers wear fitbits and researchers say they're just as sedentary as modern societies.; A caution against harming the weakest students by moving classes online; Physicist suggests that dark matter may be comprised of a six-quark particle (hexaquark); Audit finds hospitals at risk of hacking do to obsolete systems; and a Steem essay describing the profession of an underwater archaeologist

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.

1. Modern hunter-gatherers are just as sedentary as we are - This article reports on a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). In the study, the researchers asked 28 members of a modern hunter-gatherer tribe to wear fitbits. They found that the research subjects spent 10 hours per day with no discernible motion, this is more time than the typical person from America, Netherlands, or Australia, all of whom average about 9 hours per day. However, two differences were found. First, the hunter-gatherers spent more of their sedentary time kneeling or squatting, both of which require more effort than sitting in a chair. Second, when the research subjects were active, they were very active - far exceeding medical recommendations for daily exercise. -h/t RealClear Science


2. Beware of Hurting Our Weakest Students when Moving Classes Online - This article asserts that at least 40 US colleges and universities have cancelled in-person classes and switched to online learning in response to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Citing papers from 2017 and 2013, Mark Guzdial argues that the cost of the switch will be decreased learning and lower grades, in particular for the weakest students. To minimize the risk, the author calls for professors and administrators to be aware of it, work to provide needed assistance, and also suggests following advice from a Twitter thread by Chinmay Kulkarni. On a personal note, one of the schools that switched from in-person to online is the local state-run university that's just a couple miles from my home, where I earned my first master's degree. I earned my second master's degree from a fully online university, so I guess I was ahead of the coronvirus curve.;-)


3. A Wild, Six-Quark Particle Might Have Been Dark Matter All Along - It has long been observed that gravitational observations predict that the universe should have much more matter than we have been able to observe. The gap between what should be there and what is there has been explained by hypothesizing the existence of dark matter, and theorists predict that there should be much more dark matter than there is matter. A leading candidate particle to explain this dark matter is the WIMP, weakly interacting massive particle. However, after decades of seeking the WIMP, it has not been found, so some theorists are looking for new explanations. One, Glennys Farrar, suggests that dark matter could be comprised of so-called hexaquarks or sexaquarks, particles that are comprised of six connected quarks. According to her modeling, these particles could have condensed out of the primordial universe at just the density that would be needed to explain today's gravitational observations. Her work suggests that a hexaquark that's built out of two up-quarks, two down-quarks, and two strange-quarks could be stable and tightly bound. More, the model predicts the existence of the "right amount" of dark matter without any specific tuning. To find these particles, she suggests looking for them after being captured in the Earth's gravity and fused into the nuclei in the Earth's crust. The article also adds that another team of researchers has found expereimental evidence to support the existence of hexaquarks. On the other hand, Farrar herself is not persuaded by the evidence, since it would require a large positive charge for the hexaquark. -h/t RealClear Science


4. Hospital devices exposed to hacking with unsupported operating systems - I've seen this - in different contexts - once or twice over the course of my career. Usually it's a financial problem that masquerades as a technical problem. Accounting people tend to look at IT expenditures as transactional instead of basing them upon a product's lifecycle. As a result, software licenses and support agreements expire, product experts leave and don't get replaced, source code repositories get lost or decommissioned, and over time it becomes impossibly expensive to maintain a secure environment. In this case, an audit by Palo Alto Networks found that 83% of devices like CAT scan, X-Ray, and MRI machines still depend upon outdated technologies and can't be patched against known security vulnerabilities. That number went up dramatically after 2018, which corresponds with the end of life for Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system. -h/t OS news


5. Steem @liquidtravel: My Job As An Underwater Archaeologist - This post describes the author's work as an underwater archaeologist. The post begins by discussing the nature of subdisciplines in the field including maritime, nautical, riverine, and submerged site archaeology as well as water saturated sites. It then goes on to define some terms, and provide an outline for an underwater archaeological investigation. These steps, from research through publication, are briefly described at the beginning of the section, and then the essay goes on to elaborate on a number of them in more detail. The essay also includes photos and descriptions of the tools of the trade in actual use. Some of these tools include magnetometers, sonar devices, and metal detectors. A couple interesting observations from the article are that (i) The fields of history and archaeology complement and inform each other; and (ii) Until recently, nearly all underwater archaeological discoveries were made by free divers or divers with scuba gear. More recently, discoveries are also being made with hydrographic surveying. A discovery made through the use of underwater archaeology was previously discussed in Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for February 11, 2020. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @liquidtravel.)

This post will also appear on my pre-Steem blog, chescosteve.blogspot.com.

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