Science

people-can-tell-what-you-want-to-know-when-you-shake-wrapped-christmas-gifts

People can tell what you want to know when you shake wrapped Christmas gifts

12 days of Christmas, cognitive neuroscience, epistemic intent, Human behavior, human cognition, human psychology, psychology, Science / /

On the first day of Christmas —

We can tell if it’s about how many objects are inside, or the shape of those objects.

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adorable curly red haired toddler in onesie grinning while holding a wrapped christmas present

Enlarge / Shake, shake, shake: this adorable young child would love to guess what he’s getting for Christmas this year.

Johns Hopkins University

There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: New research shows it’s incredibly easy for people watching others shake boxes to tell what they’re up to.

Christmas Day is a time for opening presents and finally ending the suspense of what one is receiving this year, but chances are some of us may have already guessed what’s under the wrapping—perhaps by strategically shaking the boxes for clues about its contents. According to a November paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, if someone happened to see you shaking a wrapped gift, they would be able to tell from those motions what you were trying to learn by doing so.

“There are few things more delightful than seeing a child’s eyes light up as they pick up a present and wonder what might be inside,” said co-author Chaz Firestone of Johns Hopkins University, who studies how vision and thought interact. “What our work shows is that your mind is able to track the information they are seeking. Just as they might be able to tell what’s inside the box by shaking it around, you can tell what they are trying to figure out when they shake it.” Christmas presents are “the perfect real-life example of our experiment.”

According to Firestone et al., there is a large scientific literature devoted to studying how people represent and interpret basic actions like walking, reaching, lifting, eating, chasing, or following. It’s a vital ability that helps us anticipate the behavior of others. These are all examples of pragmatic actions with a specific aim, whether it be retrieving an object or moving from one place to the next.  Other kinds of actions might be communication-oriented, such as waving, pointing, or assuming an aggressive (or friendly) posture.

The JHU study focused on so-called “epistemic” actions, in which one is seeking information: dipping a toe into the bathtub to see how hot is, for example, testing a door to see if it is locked, or shaking a wrapped box to glean information about what might be inside—like a child trying to guess whether a wrapped Christmas present contains Lego blocks or a teddy bear. “Epistemic actions pervade our lives, and recognizing them does, too,” the authors wrote, citing the ability to tell that a “meandering” campus visitor needs directions, or that someone rifling through shallow drawers is probably looking for keys or similar small objects.

People watched other people shake wrapped boxes for science.

For the first experiment, 16 players were asked to shake opaque boxes. In the first round, they tried to guess the number of objects inside the box (in this case, whether there were five or 15 US nickels). In the second, they tried to guess the shape of a geometric solid inside the box (either a sphere or a cube). All the players scored perfectly in both rounds—an expected outcome, given the simplicity of the task. The videos of those rounds were then placed online and 100 different study participants (“observers”) were asked to watch two videos of the same player and determine which video was from the first “guess the number” round and which was from the second “guess the shape” round.  Almost all the observers guessed correctly.

This was intriguing evidence that the observers could indeed infer the goal of the shaking (what the game players were trying to learn) simply by interpreting their motions. But the researchers wondered to what extent the success of the observers relied on the game players’ success at guessing either the number or shape of objects. So they tweaked the box-shaking game to produce more player error. This time, the videotaped players were asked to determine first whether the box held 9, 12, or 16 nickels, and second, whether the box contained a sphere, cylinder, or cube. Only four out of 18 players guessed correctly. But the success rate of 100 new observers who watched the videos remained the same.

Firestone et al. ran three more variations on the basic experiment to refine their results. With each iteration, most of the players performed shaking motions that were different depending on whether the round involved numbers or shapes, and most of the observers (500 in total) successfully inferred what the players were trying to learn by watching those shaking motions. “When you think about all the mental calculations someone must make to understand what someone else is trying to learn, it’s a remarkably complicated process,” said Firestone. “But our findings show it’s something people do easily.”

DOI: PNAS, 2023. 10.1073/pnas.2303162120  (About DOIs).

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Corvids seem to handle temporary memories the way we do

animal behavior, Biology, neurobiology, Science, working memory / /

Working on memory —

Birds show evidence that they lump temporary memories into categories.

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A black bird with yellow eyes against a blue sky.

Enlarge / A jackdaw tries to remember what color it was thinking of.

Humans tend to think that we are the most intelligent life-forms on Earth, and that we’re largely followed by our close relatives such as chimps and gorillas. But there are some areas of cognition in which homo sapiens and other primates are not unmatched. What other animal’s brain could possibly operate at a human’s level, at least when it comes to one function? Birds—again.

This is far from the first time that bird species such as corvids and parrots have shown that they can think like us in certain ways. Jackdaws are clever corvids that belong to the same family as crows and ravens. After putting a pair of them to the test, an international team of researchers saw that the birds’ working memory operates the same way as that of humans and higher primates. All of these species use what’s termed “attractor dynamics,” where they organize information into specific categories.

Unfortunately for them, that means they also make the same mistakes we do. “Jackdaws (Corvus monedula) have similar behavioral biases as humans; memories are less precise and more biased as memory demands increase,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Communications Biology.

Remembering not to forget

Working memory is where we hang on to items for a brief period of time—like a postal code looked up in one browser tab and typed into a second. It can hold everything from numbers and words to images and concepts. But these memories deteriorate quickly, and the capacity is limited—the more things we try to remember, the less likely the brain is going to remember them all correctly.

Attractor dynamics give the brain an assist with working memory by taking sensory input, such as color, and categorizing it. The highly specific red shade “Fire Lily” might fade from working memory quickly, and fewer specifics will stick around as time passes, yet it will still be remembered as “red.” You lose specifics first, but hang on to the general idea longer.

Aside from time, the other thing that kills working memory is distractions. Less noise—meaning distracting factors inside and outside the brain—will make it easier to distinguish Fire Lily among the other reds. If a hypothetical customer was browsing paint swatches for Sandstone (a taupe) and London Fog (a gray) in addition to Fire Lily, remembering each color accurately would become even more difficult because of the increased demands on working memory.

Bias can also blur working memory and cause the brain to remember some red hues more accurately than others, especially if the brain compartmentalizes them all under “red.” This can happen when a particular customer has a certain idea of the color red that leans warmer or cooler than Fire Lily. If they view red as leaning slightly warmer than Fire Lily, they might believe a different, warmer red is Fire Lily.

In living color

To find out if corvids process stimuli using short-term memory with attractor dynamics, the researchers subjected two jackdaws to a variety of tests that involved remembering colors. Each bird had to peck on a white button to begin the test. They were then shown a color—the target color—before being shown a chart of 64 colors. The jackdaws had to look at that chart and peck the color they had previously been shown. A correct answer would get them their favorite treat, while responses that were close but not completely accurate would get them other treats.

While the birds performed well with just one color, their accuracy went down as the researchers challenged them to remember more target colors from the chart at once. They were more likely to pick colors that were close to, but not exactly, the target colors they had been shown—likely because there was a greater load on their short-term memory.

This is what we’d see if a customer had to remember not only Fire Lily, but Sandstone and London Fog. The only difference is that we humans would be able to read the color names, and the jackdaws only found out they were wrong when they didn’t get their favorite treat.

“Despite vastly different visual systems and brain organizations, corvids and primates show similar attractor dynamics, which can mitigate noise in visual working memory representations,” the researchers said in the same study.

How and why birds evolved attractor dynamics still needs to be understood. Because avian eyesight differs from human eyesight, there could have been differences in color perception that the research team was unable to account for. However, it seems that the same mechanisms for working memory that evolved in humans and other primates also evolved separately in corvids. “Birdbrain” should be taken as a compliment.

Communications Biology, 2023. DOI:  10.1038/s42003-023-05442-5

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people-exaggerate-the-consequences-of-saying-no-to-invites

People exaggerate the consequences of saying no to invites

Behavioral science, invites, Science / /

Just say no —

People are more understanding of the reasons for rejections than most of us think.

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A green envelope with a white card within it.

Enlarge / The invitation might be nice, but you can feel free to say no.

The holidays can be a time of parties, events, dinners, outings, get-togethers, impromptu meetups—and stress. Is it really an obligation to say yes to every single invite? Is not showing up to Aunt Tillie’s annual ugly sweater party this once going to mean a permanent ban? Turning down some of those invitations waiting impatiently for an RSVP can feel like a risk.

But wait! Turning down an invite won’t necessarily have the harsh consequences that are often feared (especially this time of year). A group of researchers led by psychologist and assistant professor Julian Givi of West Virginia University put test subjects through a series of experiments to see if a host’s reaction to an invitation being declined would really be as awful as the invitee feared. In the experiments, those who declined invitations were not guilted or blacklisted by the inviters. Turns out that hosts were not so upset as invitees thought they would be when someone couldn’t make it.

“Invitees have exaggerated concerns about how much the decline will anger the inviter, signal that the invitee does not care about the inviter, make the inviter unlikely to offer another invitation in the future, and so forth,” the researchers said in a study published by the American Psychological Association.

You’re invited…now what?

Why are we so nervous that declining invitations will annihilate our social lives? Appearing as if we don’t care about the host is one obvious reason. The research team also thinks there is an additional explanation behind this: we mentally exaggerate how much the inviter focuses on the rejection, and underestimate how much they consider what might be going on in our heads and in our lives. This makes us believe that there is no way the inviter will be understanding about any excuse.

All this anxiety means we often end up reluctantly dragging ourselves to a holiday movie or dinner or that infamous ugly sweater party, and saying yes to every single invite, even if it eventually leads to holiday burnout.

To determine if our fears are justified, the psychologists who ran the study focused on three things. The first was declining invitations for fun social activities, such as ice skating in the park. The second focus was how much invitees exaggerated the expected consequences of declining. Finally, the third focus was on how invitees also exaggerated how much hosts were affected by the rejection itself, as opposed to the reasons the invitee gave for turning down the invite.

The show (or party, or whatever) must go on

There were five total experiments that assessed whether someone declining an invitation felt more anxious about it than they should have. In these experiments, invitees were the subjects who had to turn down an invitation, while hosts were the subjects who were tasked with reacting to a declined invitation.

The first experiment had subjects imagining that a hypothetical friend invented them to a museum exhibit, but they turned the invitation down. The invitee then had to describe the possible negative consequences of saying no. Other subjects in this experiment were told to imagine being the one who invited the friend who turned them down, and then report how they would feel.

Most of those imagining they were the invitees overestimated what the reaction of the host would be.

Invitees predicted that a rejected host would experience anger and disappointment, and assume the invitee didn’t care enough about the host. Long term, they also expected that their relationship with the host would be damaged. They weren’t especially concerned about not being invited to future events or that hosts would retaliate by turning them down if they issued invites.

The four remaining experiments slightly altered the circumstances and measured these same potential consequences, obtaining similar results. The second experiment used hosts and invitees who were couples in real life, and who gave each other actual invitations and rejections instead of just imagining them. Invitees again overestimated how negative the hosts’ reactions would be. In the third experiment, outside observers were asked to read a summary of the invitation and rejection, then predict hosts’ reactions. The observers again thought the inviters would react much more negatively than they actually did.

In the fourth experiment, stakes were higher because subjects were told to imagine the invitation and rejection scenario involving a real friend, albeit one who was not present for the experiment. Invitees had to predict how negative their friend’s reaction would be to their response and also their friend’s opinion on why they might have declined. Those doing the inviting had to describe their reactions to a rejection and predict their friend’s expectations about how they would react. Invitees tended to predict more negative reactions than hosts did.

Finally, the fifth experiment also had subjects working individually, this time putting themselves in the place of both the host and invitee. They had to read and respond to an invitation rejection scenario from the perspective of both roles, with the order they handled host and invitee randomized. Those who took the host role first realized that hosts usually empathize with the reasons someone is not able to attend, making them unlikely to predict highly negative reactions to a declined invitation when they were asked later.

Overestimation

Despite their differences, these experiments all point in a similar direction. “Consistent with our theorizing, invitees tended to overestimate the negative ramifications of the invitation decline,” the researchers said in the same study.

Evidently, Aunt Tilly will not be gravely disappointed if her favorite niece or nephew cannot make it to her ugly sweater party this year—some events just happen to be scheduled at especially inconvenient times. This study, however, didn’t test the ramifications of declining invites for more significant but less frequent events, such as weddings and baby showers. Based on the results for smaller events, it’s likely that the thought of turning such an invite down will result in even more anxiety. The key question is whether the hosts will be less understanding for big events.

Givi and his team still note that accepting invitations can have positive effects. Human beings benefit from being around other people, and isolation can be detrimental. Still, we need to remember that too much of a good thing can be too much—everyone needs time to recharge. Even with the heavy feeling of obligation that comes with being invited somewhere, turning down one or two invites will probably not start a holiday apocalypse—unless your aunt is an exception.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023.  DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000443.supp

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Banks use your deposits to loan money to fossil-fuel, emissions-heavy firms

banking, climate change, fossil fuels, Policy, Science, syndication / /

Money for something —

Your $1,000 in the bank creates emissions equal to a flight from NYC to Seattle.

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High angle shot of female hand inserting her bank card into automatic cash machine in the city. Withdrawing money, paying bills, checking account balances and make a bank transfer. Privacy protection, internet and mobile banking security concept

When you drop money in the bank, it looks like it’s just sitting there, ready for you to withdraw. In reality, your institution makes money on your money by lending it elsewhere, including to the fossil fuel companies driving climate change, as well as emissions-heavy industries like manufacturing.

So just by leaving money in a bank account, you’re unwittingly contributing to worsening catastrophes around the world. According to a new analysis, for every $1,000 dollars the average American keeps in savings, each year they indirectly create emissions equivalent to flying from New York to Seattle. “We don’t really take a look at how the banks are using the money we keep in our checking account on a daily basis, where that money is really circulating,” says Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, which published the analysis. “But when we look under the hood, we see that there’s a lot of fossil fuels.”

By switching to a climate-conscious bank, you could reduce those emissions by about 75 percent, the study found. In fact, if you moved $8,000 dollars—the median balance for US customers—the reduction in your indirect emissions would be twice that of the direct emissions you’d avoid if you switched to a vegetarian diet.

Put another way: You as an individual have a carbon footprint—by driving a car, eating meat, running a gas furnace instead of a heat pump—but your money also has a carbon footprint. Banking, then, is an underappreciated yet powerful avenue for climate action on a mass scale. “Not just voting every four years, or not just skipping the hamburger, but also where my money sits, that’s really important,” says Foley.

Just as you can borrow money from a bank, so too do fossil fuel companies and the companies that support that industry—think of building pipelines and other infrastructure. “Even if it’s not building new pipelines, for a fossil fuel company to be doing just its regular operations—whether that’s maintaining the network of gas stations that it owns, or maintaining existing pipelines, or paying its employees—it’s going to need funding for that,” says Paddy McCully, senior analyst at Reclaim Finance, an NGO focused on climate action.

A fossil fuel company’s need for those loans varies from year to year, given the fluctuating prices of those fuels. That’s where you, the consumer, comes in. “The money that an individual puts into their bank account makes it possible for the bank to then lend money to fossil fuel companies,” says Richard Brooks, climate finance director at Stand.earth, an environmental and climate justice advocacy group. “If you look at the top 10 banks in North America, each of them lends out between $20 billion and $40 billion to fossil fuel companies every year.”

The new report finds that on average, 11 of the largest US banks lend 19.4 percent of their portfolios to carbon-intensive industries. (The American Bankers Association did not immediately respond to a request to comment for this story.) To be very clear: Oil, gas, and coal companies wouldn’t be able to keep producing these fuels—when humanity needs to be reducing carbon emissions dramatically and rapidly—without these loans. New fossil fuel projects aren’t simply fleeting endeavors, but will operate for years, locking in a certain amount of emissions going forward.

At the same time, Brooks says, big banks are under-financing the green economy. As a civilization, we’re investing in the wrong kind of energy if we want to avoid the ever-worsening effects of climate change. Yes, 2022 was the first year that climate finance surpassed the trillion-dollar mark. “However, the alarming aspect is that climate finance must increase by at least fivefold annually, as swiftly as possible, to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change,” says Valerio Micale, senior manager of the Climate Policy Initiative. “An even more critical consideration is that this cost, which would accumulate to $266 trillion until 2050, pales in comparison to the costs of inaction, estimated at over $2,000 trillion over the same period.”

Smaller banks, at least, are less likely to be providing money for the fossil fuel industry. A credit union operates more locally, so it’s much less likely to be fronting money for, say, a new oil pipeline. “Big fossil fuel companies go to the big banks for their financing,” says Brooks. “They’re looking for loans in the realm of hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes multibillion-dollar loans, and a credit union wouldn’t be able to provide that.”

This makes banking a uniquely powerful lever to pull when it comes to climate action, Foley says. Compared to switching to vegetarianism or veganism to avoid the extensive carbon emissions associated with animal agriculture, money is easy to move. “If large numbers of people start to tell their financial institutions that they don’t really want to participate in investing in fossil fuels, that slowly kind of drains capital away from what’s available for fossil fuels,” says Foley.

While the new report didn’t go so far as to exhaustively analyze the lending habits of the thousands of banks in the US, Foley says there’s a growing number that deliberately don’t invest in fossil fuels. If you’re not sure about what your bank is investing in, you can always ask. “I think when people hear we need to move capital out of fossil fuels into climate solutions, they probably think only Warren Buffett can do that,” says Foley. “That’s not entirely true. We can all do a little bit of that.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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Rocket Report: Vulcan stacked for launch; Starship aces test ahead of third flight

rocket report, Science, Space / /
Electron returned to flight successfully this week.

Enlarge / Electron returned to flight successfully this week.

Rocket Lab

Welcome to Edition 6.24 of the Rocket Report! This will be the final edition of this newsletter until January 4—hey, space enthusiasts need a holiday break too! And given all that’s expected to happen in 2024 in the world of launch, a bit of a recharge seems like a smart move. Stephen and I wish everyone happy holidays and a healthy and prosperous new year. Until then!

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Ranking the top 10 US launch companies of 2023. Oops, we did it again and published a list of the most accomplished US commercial launch companies. It’s no surprise that SpaceX is atop the list, but what comes after is more intriguing, including a new company in second position. I hope the list sparks debate, discussion, and appreciation for the challenge of operating a successful rocket company.

This is a really hard business … The article closes with this message, which I think is a fitting way to end the calendar year and kick off the holiday season: “As ever, I remain in awe of all the talented engineers and business people out there trying to make a go of it in the launch industry. This is a difficult and demanding business, replete with problems. I salute your hard work and hope for your success.”

New Shepard finally flies again. With redesigned engine components, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket took off from West Texas and flew to the edge of space on Tuesday with a package of scientific research and technology demonstration experiments, Ars reports. This was the first flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket since September 12, 2022, when an engine failure destroyed the booster and triggered an in-flight abort for the vehicle’s pressurized capsule during an uncrewed flight.

Does “soon'” really mean soon? … It took 15 months for Blue Origin to return to flight with New Shepard, but Tuesday’s successful launch puts the company on a path to resuming human missions. So when will Blue Origin start flying people again? “Following a thorough review of today’s mission, we look forward to flying our next crewed flight soon,” said Erika Wagner, a longtime Blue Origin manager who co-hosted the company’s webcast of Tuesday’s flight. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s space reporting is to sign up for his newsletter, we’ll collect his stories in your inbox.

Electron successfully returns to flight. Rocket Lab successfully launched a Japanese radar imaging satellite on the first flight of its Electron rocket since a failure nearly three months ago, Space News reports. The Electron lifted off from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 11: 05 pm ET on December 14. The vehicle deployed its payload, the QPS-SAR-5 or Tsukuyomi-1 satellite, for Japanese company iQPS, afterward.

A record number of launches this year … The launch was the first for Electron since a September 19 failure during a launch of another radar-imaging satellite for Capella Space. On that mission, the first stage performed as expected, but the second stage’s engine appeared to shut down immediately after ignition, preventing it from reaching orbit. The launch was the 10th flight of the Electron this year, including one launch of a suborbital version of Electron called HASTE. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Shetland approved for UK launches. SaxaVord Spaceport on the small island of Unst has been given approval from the Civil Aviation Authority to begin orbital launches in 2024, the BBC reports. It will be the first fully licensed spaceport in Western Europe able to launch vertically into orbit. It permits up to 30 launches a year that will be used to take satellites and other payloads into space.

Launches this summer? … The site, which is the first spaceport in Scotland, has several launch operators around the world currently developing rockets. It is anticipated that German rocket firm HyImpulse will attempt sub-orbital launches as early as this August. Full orbital launches are expected to take place at SaxaVord from 2025. Cornwall Spaceport was the UK’s first licensed spaceport; however, its rockets are launched horizontally and carried by an aircraft. (submitted by gizmo23 and Ken the Bin)

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galaxy-scale-winds-spotted-in-the-distant-universe

Galaxy-scale winds spotted in the distant Universe

astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, Science, Space / /

Out in the wind —

These winds can drive gas out of galaxies, shaping their future evolution.

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Image of a galaxy with a purple blob superimposed on its center.

Enlarge / X-ray emissions (purple) superimposed on a visible light image of a galaxy shows the galaxy winds being launched. CREDIT: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Ohio StateH-alpha and Optical: NSF/NOIRLab/AURA/KPNO/CTIO; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Spitzer/ Optical: ESO/La Silla Observatory.

One of the ways massive stars, those at least 10-times bigger than the Sun, reach their end is in a supernova—an enormous explosion caused by the star’s core running out of fuel.

One consequence of a supernova is the production of galactic winds, which play a key role in regulating star formation. Although galactic winds have already been observed in several nearby galaxies, a team of scientists has now made the first direct observations of this phenomenon in a large population of galaxies in the distant Universe, at a time when galaxies are in their early stages of formation.

Feedback

According to the study’s lead author, Yucheng Guo, of the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, galactic winds are an important part of the galaxy evolution models.

“It was assumed there should be galactic winds that can regulate galaxies’ growth. However, it was very difficult to directly observe these winds. With our study, we show that at the early stage of the Universe, every normal galaxy had such winds,” Guo said.

According to Guo, galactic winds form a key part of the so-called feedback process that is important in our understanding of galaxy evolution. “Galactic winds originate as a result of star formation activity. These winds inject a lot of energy and momentum into the gas, resulting in it [being] expelled from the galaxy. If there is not enough gas in the galaxy, the star formation stops. This is called the feedback process,” he said.

According to Guo, galactic winds also enable exchange of matter between galaxies and their surroundings. “Each galaxy is surrounded by a gas halo. Galaxies can breathe out as well as breathe in gas,” Guo said.

Hard to see

He said that traditionally it has been very difficult to observe galactic winds, because the gas halos are almost transparent.

Guo and his team overcame this hurdle by using the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on the Very Large Telescope. “The instrument is able to observe the galaxies at redshift z ≈ 1, which corresponds to 7 billion years of the cosmic evolution.” Guo said at that wavelength, the MUSE instrument is able to detect and directly observe the emission from magnesium atoms in the galactic winds.

He said the other important feature of the research is that they managed to observe the galactic winds in more than 100 galaxies. “We also managed to detect the average shape of these winds, which is like an ice cream cone,” he said.

Guo said the direct observation of the galactic winds outside the local Universe was the first step of their research. “We still don’t know about their physical properties such as size, power, and also how they change with time and in different kinds of galaxies.”

Nature, 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06718-w


Dhananjay Khadilkar is a journalist based in Paris.

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Government makes an app to cut down government’s role in solar permitting

Energy, green, green energy, NREL, photovoltaics, renewable energy, Science, solar, Sustainability / /
Aerial view of houses with roof-top solar panels.

Enlarge / NREL has taken some of the hassle out of getting permits for projects like these.

Can government agencies develop software to help cut bureaucratic red tape through automation? The answer is “yes,” according to the promising results achieved by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which has saved thousands of hours of labor for local governments by creating a tool called SolarAPP+ (Solar Automated Permit Processing Plus) for residential solar permits.

“We estimate that automatic SolarAPP+ permitting saved around 9,900 hours of… staff time in 2022,” NREL staff wrote in the report, “SolarAPP+ Performance Review (2022 Data). “Based on median timelines, a typical SolarAPP+ project is permitted and inspected 13 business days sooner than traditional projects… SolarAPP+ has eliminated over 134,000 days in permitting-related delays.”

SolarAPP+ automates over 100 compliance checks in the permitting process that are usually the responsibility of city, county, or town employees, according to Jeff Cook, SolarAPP+ program lead at NREL and first author of the report. It can be more accurate, thorough, and efficient than a time-pressured local government employee would be.

Saving time and money

Sometimes, the cost of permitting can be higher than the cost of solar hardware, Cook said. It depends on the specifics of the project.

“We knew that residential rooftop solar volume was increasing across the country,” Cook said. “It took us… 20 years to get to a million PV installations. And I think we got to 2 million PV installations just a few years later. And so there’s a lot of solar volume out there. And the problem is that each one of those systems needs to be reviewed for code compliance. And so if you need a human to review that, you’ve got a million applications.”

“When regulations make it unnecessarily difficult for people to quickly install solar and storage systems, it hurts everyone,” said Senator Scott Wiener (D-Calif.) in a press statement. “It hurts those who want to install solar. And it hurts communities across California, which are being negatively impacted by climate change. We need to make it easier for people to use renewable energy—that’s just a no-brainer. Expediting solar permitting is something we can do to make this a reality.”

A coalition of stakeholders from the solar industry, the US Department of Energy, and the building code-development community requested that NREL develop the software, Cook said. The organizations represented included UL Solutions and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. (UL Solutions is a company that addresses a broad range of safety issues; initially, it focused on fire and electrical safety.)

“What we identified is the community need for the software and we identified that there was a gap in the private sector,” Cook said. “There was no incentive to do it from any active members of the private sector, but a real potential opportunity or value to the public good if such a software existed and was publicly available and free for a local government to adopt.”

Cook estimates that hundreds of thousands of hours in plan review time would have been required to manually approve all of the residential solar permits in the United States in recent years. Approving a permit for a residential solar project can take local government staff 15 minutes to an hour, and around 30 percent of the applications are later revised.

A flood of applications

“It just inundates the staff with work that they have to do,” Cook said.

“We are seeing about 750 residential requests over the past 12 months, which is about double the number of applications we saw two years ago,” said Kate Gallego, mayor of Phoenix, at the SolarAPP+ Industry Roundtable. “When I ask people in industry what we can do to speed up deployment of solar, they ask, ‘Can you do permitting faster?’ We’re at about 30 days now. We want to get that permitted as fast as possible, but we don’t want to sacrifice safety, and we want to make sure we’re not just doing it quickly, but well. That’s why this partnership was very attractive to me.”

Up to five separate departments may review the permits—the ones that oversee structural, electrical, fire, planning, and zoning decisions, Cook said.

“There’s usually a queue,” Cook said. “Just because it takes the jurisdiction only 15 minutes to review doesn’t mean that you send it to them today—they review it an hour later and get back to you. The average is, across the country, a seven-day turnaround, but it can be 30 days plus. It really varies across the country depending on how much volume of solar is in that space.”

Government makes an app to cut down government’s role in solar permitting Read More »

study:-“smarter”-dogs-think-more-like-humans-to-overcome-their-biases

Study: “Smarter” dogs think more like humans to overcome their biases

animal behavior, animal cognition, animals, Biology, Dogs, Science, spatial bias / /

who’s a smart doggo? —

Both the shape of a dog’s head and cognitive ability determine degree of spatial bias.

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dog in a harness approaching a blue dish on the floor

Enlarge / Look at this very good boy taking a test to determine the origin of his spatial bias for a study on how dogs think.

Eniko Kubinyi

Research has shown that if you point at an object, a dog will interpret the gesture as a directional cue, unlike a human toddler, who will more likely focus on the object itself. It’s called spatial bias, and a recent paper published in the journal Ethology offers potential explanations for why dogs interpret the gesture the way that they do. According to researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, the phenomenon arises from a combination of how dogs see (visual acuity) and how they think, with “smarter” dog breeds prioritizing an object’s appearance as much as its location. This suggests the smarter dogs’ information processing is more similar to humans.

The authors wanted to investigate whether spatial bias in dogs is sensory or cognitive, or a combination of the two. “Very early on, children interpret the gesture as pointing to the object, while dogs take the pointing as a directional cue,” said co-author Ivaylo Iotchev. “In other words, regardless of the intention of the person giving the cue, the meaning for children and dogs is different. This phenomenon has previously been observed in dogs using a variety of behavioral tests, ranging from simple associative learning to imitation, but it had never been studied per se.”

Their experimental sample consisted of dogs used in a previous 2018 study plus dogs participating specifically in the new study, for a total of 82 dogs. The dominant breeds were border collies (19), vizslas (17), and whippets (6). Each animal was brought into a small empty room with their owner and one of the experimenters present. The experimenter stood 3 meters away from the dog and owner. There was a training period using different plastic plates to teach the dogs to associate either the presence or absence of an object, or its spatial location, with the presence or absence of food. Then they tested the dogs on a series of tasks.

An object feature conditioning test involving a white round plate and a black square plate.

Enlarge / An object feature conditioning test involving a white round plate and a black square plate.

I.B. Iotchev et al., 2023

For instance, one task required dogs to participate in a maximum of 50 trials to teach them to learn a location of a treat that was always either on the left or right plate. For another task, the experimenter placed a white round plate and a black square plate in the middle of the room. The dogs were exposed to each semi-randomly but only received food in one type of plate. Learning was determined by how quickly each dog ran to the correct plate.

Once the dogs learned those first two tasks, they were given another more complicated task in which either the direction or the object was reversed: if the treat had previously been placed on the right, now it would be found on the left, and if it had previously been placed on a white round plate, it would now be found on the black square one. The researchers found that dogs learned faster when they had to choose the direction, i.e., whether the treat was located on the left or the right. It was harder for the dogs to learn whether a treat would be found on a black square plate or a white round plate.

The shorter a dog's head, the higher the

Enlarge / The shorter a dog’s head, the higher the “cephalic index” (CI).

I.B. Iotchev et al., 2023

Next the team needed to determine differences between the visual and cognitive abilities of the dogs in order to learn whether the spatial bias was sensory or cognitively based, or both. Selective breeding of dogs has produced breeds with different visual capacities, so another aspect of the study involved measuring the length of a dog’s head, which prior research has shown is correlated with visual acuity. The metric used to measure canine heads is known as the “cephalic index” (CI), defined as the ratio of the head’s maximum width multiplied by 100, then divided by the head’s maximum length.

The shorter a dog’s head, the more similar their visual acuity is to human vision. That’s because there is a higher concentration of retinal ganglion cells in the center of their field of vision, making vision sharper and giving such dogs binocular depth vision. The testing showed dogs with better visual acuity, and who also scored higher on the series of cognitive tests, also exhibited less spatial bias. This suggests that canine spatial bias is not simply a sensory matter but is also influenced by how they think. “Smarter” dogs have less spatial bias.

As always, there are a few caveats. Most notably, the authors acknowledge that their sample consisted exclusively of dogs from Hungary kept as pets, and thus their results might not generalize to stray dogs, for example, or dogs from other geographical regions and cultures. Still, “we tested their memory, attention skills, and perseverance,” said co-author Eniko Kubinyi. “We found that dogs with better cognitive performance in the more difficult spatial bias task linked information to objects as easily as to places. We also see that as children develop, spatial bias decreases with increasing intelligence.”

DOI: Ethology, 2023. 10.1111/eth.13423  (About DOIs).

Study: “Smarter” dogs think more like humans to overcome their biases Read More »

daily-telescope:-a-simple-shot-of-the-milky-way-high-above-france-and-spain

Daily Telescope: A simple shot of the Milky Way high above France and Spain

daily telescope, Science, Space / /

Daily moment of zen —

“Both the daytime and nighttime vistas there were just bloody marvelous.”

–

The Milky Way Galaxy above the Pyrenees, right on the French and Spanish border.

Enlarge / The Milky Way Galaxy above the Pyrenees, right on the French and Spanish border.

bulbs_01_frizzle

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s December 21, and today’s image showcases our very own Milky Way Galaxy above the Pyrenees mountain range, which separates Spain from the rest of Europe.

It was sent in by a reader who captured it while hiking through the mountains and in their words bivvying—a new word for “minimalist camping” that I learned about five minutes ago. I’m jealous. Hiking through the Pyrenees and gazing at the stars at night sounds like a wonderful dream. The photographer told me they are no great astrophotographer, but that the skies were so dark and brilliant that even this single exposure photo taken with a Fuji X100 APS camera looks stunning.

“It’s still one of my favorite starry skies memories from hiking the Haute Randonnée Pyrénéenne, a high mountain route going all the way coast to coast along the French‑Spanish border,” the photographer said. “Because both the daytime and nighttime vistas there were just bloody marvelous.”

I have greatly enjoyed writing these Daily Telescope entries and seeing the amazing work you all have sent in. We’ve published everything from the very best images taken by NASA’s space telescopes down to iPhone photos. We all share the skies, and see and document them in our own way. Thank you so much for your submissions; there have been many more than we can publish. But I treasure them all and your time in sending them in. I can’t wait to see what delights the new year will bring. Until then, happy holidays, and may your stars be merry and bright.

Source: bulbs_01_frizzle

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

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great-british-bake-off’s-festive-christmas-desserts-aren’t-so-naughty-after-all

Great British Bake Off’s festive Christmas desserts aren’t so naughty after all

baking, chemistry, cooking shows, Food science, Great British Bake Off, health, nutrition, Science / /

A Christmas miracle? —

Study: Several ingredients actually reduce rather than increase risk of death or disease.

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four smiling people at a festive picnic table munching on a tasty snack

Enlarge / Great British Bake Off judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith (top) and presenters Alison Hammond and Noel Fielding.

Mark Bourdillon/Love Productions/Channel 4

The Great British Bake Off (TGBBO)—aka The Great British Baking Show in the US and Canada—features amateur bakers competing each week in a series of baking challenges, culminating in a single winner. The recipes include all manner of deliciously decadent concoctions, including the occasional Christmas dessert. But many of the show’s Christmas recipes might not be as bad for your health as one might think, according to a new paper published in the annual Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal, traditionally devoted to more light-hearted scientific papers.

TGBBO made its broadcast debut in 2010 on the BBC, and its popularity grew quickly and spread across the Atlantic. The show was inspired by the traditional baking competitions at English village fetes (see any British cozy murder mystery for reference). Now entering its 15th season, the current judges are Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith, with Noel Fielding and Alison Hammond serving as hosts/presenters, providing (occasionally off-color) commentary. Each week features a theme and three challenges: a signature bake, a technical challenge, and a show-stopper bake.

The four co-authors of the new BMJ study—Joshua Wallach of Emory University and Yale University’s Anant Gautam, Reshma Ramachandran, and Joseph Ross—are avid fans of TGBBO, which they declare to be “the greatest television baking competition of all time.” They are also fans of desserts in general, noting that in medieval England, the Catholic Church once issued a decree requiring Christmas pudding four weeks before Christmas. Those puddings were more stew-like, containing things like prunes, raisins, carrots, nuts, spices, grains, eggs, beef, and mutton. Hence, those puddings were arguably more “healthy” than the modern take on desserts, which contain a lot more butter and sugar in particular.

But Wallach et al. wondered whether even today’s desserts might be healthier than popularly assumed and undertook an extensive review of the existing scientific literature for their own “umbrella review.” It’s actually pretty challenging to establish direct causal links in the field of nutrition, whether we’re talking about observational studies or systemic reviews and meta-analyses. For instance, many of the former focus on individual ingredients and do not take into account the effects of overall diet and lifestyle. They also may rely on self-reporting by study participants. “Are we really going to accurately report how much Christmas desserts we frantically ate in the middle of the night, after everyone else went to bed?” the authors wrote. Systemic reviews are prone to their own weaknesses and biases.

“But bah humbug, it is Christmas and we are done being study design Scrooges,” the authors wrote, tongues tucked firmly in cheeks. “We have taken this opportunity to ignore the flaws of observational nutrition research and conduct a study that allows us to feel morally superior when we happen to enjoy eating the Christmas dessert ingredients in question (eg, chocolate). Overall, we hoped to provide evidence that we need to have Christmas dessert and eat it too, or at least evidence that will inform our collective gluttony or guilt this Christmas.”

The team scoured the TGBBO website and picked 48 dessert recipes for Christmas cakes, cookies, pastries, and puddings, such as Val’s Black Forest Yule Log, or Ruby’s Boozy Chai, Cherry and Chocolate Panettones. There were 178 unique ingredients contained in those recipes, and the authors classified those into 17 overarching ingredient groups: baking soda, powder and similar ingredients; chocolate; cheese and yogurt; coffee; eggs; butter; food coloring, flavors and extracts; fruit; milk; nuts; peanuts or peanut butter; refined flour; salt; spices; sugar; and vegetable fat.

Wallach et al. identified 46 review articles pertaining to health and nutrition regarding those classes of ingredients for their analysis. That yielded 363 associations between the ingredients and risk of death or disease, although only 149 were statistically significant. Of those 149 associations, 110 (74 percent) reduced health risks while 39 (26 percent) increased risks. The most common ingredients associated with reduced risk are fruits, coffee, and nuts, while alcohol and sugar were the most common ingredients associated with increased risk.

Take Prue Leith’s signature chocolate Yule log, for example, which is “subtly laced with Irish cream liqueur.” Most of the harmful ingredient associations were for the alcohol content, which various studies have shown to increase risk of liver cancer, gastric cancer, colon cancer, gout, and atrial fibrillation. While alcohol can evaporate during cooking or baking, in this case it’s the cream filling that contains the alcohol, which is not reduced by baking. (Leith has often expressed her preference for “boozy bakes” on the show.)

By contrast, Rav’s Frozen Fantasy Cake contains several healthy ingredients, most notably almonds and passion fruit, and thus carried a significant decreased risk for disease or death. Ditto for Paul Hollywood’s Stollen, which contains almonds, milk, and various dried fruits. “Overall, without the eggs, butter, and sugar, this dessert is essentially a fruit salad with nuts,” the authors wrote. That is, of course, a significant caveat, because the eggs, butter, and sugar kinda make the dessert. But Wallach et al. note that most of the dietary studies condemning sugar focused on the nutritional effects of sugar-sweetened beverages, and none of TGBBO Christmas dessert recipes used such beverages, “no doubt because they would have resulted in bakes with a soggy bottom.”

The BMJ study has its limitations, relying as it does on evidence from prior observational studies. Wallach et al. also did not take into account how much of each ingredient was used in any given recipe. Regardless of whether the recipe called for a single berry or an entire cup of berries, that ingredient was weighted the same in terms of its protective effects countering the presumed adverse effects of butter. Would a weighted analysis have been more accurate? Sure, but it would also have been much less fun.

So, is this a genuine Christmas miracle or an amusing academic exercise in creative rationalization? Maybe we shouldn’t overthink it. “It is Christmas so just enjoy your desserts in moderation,” the authors concluded.

BMJ, 2023. DOI: 10.1136/bmj‑2023‑077166  (About DOIs).

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spacex-completes-static-fire-test-in-push-toward-third-starship-launch

SpaceX completes static fire test in push toward third Starship launch

Science, Space, spacex, starship / /

IFT-3 goes whee? —

The rocket and test equipment looked undamaged after the test.

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Ship 28 is seen after being moved to SpaceX's launch site in South Texas.

Enlarge / Ship 28 is seen after being moved to SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas.

SpaceX

Just one month after the second flight of its massive Starship rocket, SpaceX is making progress toward a third attempt.

On Wednesday, at 1: 37 pm local time in South Texas, the company performed a static fire test of the next Starship—which bears the serial number Ship 28. The test of the rocket’s six engines appeared to be nominal as the Raptors ignited for a handful of seconds. The rocket and ground support equipment looked undamaged after the test.

Also this week SpaceX rolled the booster to be used for the next attempt—Booster 10—to the launch site at its Starbase facility in South Texas. The vehicle has since been lifted onto the orbital launch mount. Presumably this rocket, too, will undergo a static fire test in the coming days.

After these tests are complete the Starship upper stage is likely to be stacked on top of the booster to complete the launch vehicle. At this point it seems likely that the hardware for “Integrated Flight Test 3” would be substantially ready to launch.

With this third flight, SpaceX will seek to fly further into a profile that will see Starship ultimately make a controlled landing into the ocean north of Kauai, Hawaii. SpaceX may also perform an in-space propellant transfer test, but this has not been confirmed.

Starship’s second launch attempt, on November 18, was notably more successful than the first attempt in April 2023. The second flight test demonstrated substantial improvements in engine reliability and provided valuable data about a challenging “hot staging” maneuver to separate the Super Heavy booster from the Starship upper stage.

Another test flight soon?

Recently Kathy Lueders, SpaceX’s general manager for the Starbase launch site near Brownsville, said the company will target the first quarter of next year for this third test flight. “It would be great if we were in the first quarter, definitely,” she said. “Elon [Musk] obviously would probably say the end of December, but I don’t think we’ll get there.”

Since the second test flight occurred, neither the company nor SpaceX founder Elon Musk has provided a technical update on what ultimately went wrong with the Starship upper stage, which failed a few minutes into its flight, or why the booster was ultimately lost after it separated from the Starship vehicle.

Booster 10, with a few holiday decorations, is rolled to the launch site in South Texas.

Enlarge / Booster 10, with a few holiday decorations, is rolled to the launch site in South Texas.

SpaceX

However, far fewer modifications have been made to the rocket hardware or the launch site ahead of this third attempt, suggesting that at least some of the problems may have been flight software-related.

SpaceX has yet to receive regulatory approval for a third launch of Starship. The Federal Aviation Administration characterized the second attempt in November as a “mishap,” while acknowledging that no injuries or public property damage were reported.

After the anomaly, the agency said, via the social media site X, that “the FAA will oversee the @SpaceX-led mishap investigation to ensure SpaceX complies with its FAA-approved mishap investigation plan and other regulatory requirements.” The FAA has provided no additional information in the month since then.

SpaceX completes static fire test in push toward third Starship launch Read More »

contact-tracing-software-could-accurately-gauge-covid-19-risk

Contact-tracing software could accurately gauge COVID-19 risk

Biology, COVID-19, epidemiology, infectious diseases, SARS-CoV-2, Science / /

As it turns out, epidemiology works —

Time spent with infected individuals is a key determinant of risk.

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A woman wearing a face mask and checking her phone.

It’s summer 2021. You rent a house in the countryside with a bunch of friends for someone’s birthday. The weather’s gorgeous that weekend, so mostly you’re all outside—pool, firepit, hammock, etc.—but you do all sleep in the same house. And then on Tuesday, you get an alert on your phone that you’ve been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. How likely are you to now have it?

To answer that question, a group of statisticians, data scientists, computer scientists, and epidemiologists in the UK analyzed 7 million people who were notified that they were exposed to COVID-19 by the NHS COVID-19 app in England and Wales between April 2021 and February 2022. They wanted to know if—and how—these app notifications correlated to actual disease transmission. Analyses like this can help ensure that an app designed for the next pathogen could retain efficacy while minimizing social and economic burdens. And it can tell us more about the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

Over 20 million quarantine requests

The NHS COVID-19 app was active on 13 to 18 million smartphones per day in 2021. It used Bluetooth signals to estimate the proximity between those smartphones while maintaining privacy and then alerted people who spent 15 minutes or more at a distance of 2 meters or less from a confirmed case. This led to over 20 million such alerts, each of which came with a request to quarantine—quite a burden.

The researchers found that the app did, in fact, accurately translate the duration and proximity of a COVID-19 exposure to a relevant epidemiological risk score. The app assessed a contact’s risk by multiplying the length of contact, the proximity of contact, and the infectiousness of the index case as determined by how long it had been since the index case started showing symptoms or tested positive.

There was an increasing probability of reported infection as the app’s risk score increased: more contacts whom the app deemed were at a high transmission risk did go on to test positive for COVID-19 within the following two weeks than those who were notified but had lower risk levels. (That’s positive tests that were reported by using the app. Some of the high-risk people probably did not test at all, did not report their test results, or did not report them within the allotted time. So this is an underestimation of the correlation between notification of risk and infection.)

More exposure = higher risk

When the researchers separated the factors contributing to the risk of an exposure, they found that duration was the most important indicator. Household exposures accounted for 6 percent of all contacts but 41 percent of transmissions.

One caveat: The app didn’t record any contextual variables that are known to impact transmission risk, like if people live in an urban or rural area, was the meeting indoors or outdoors, was it during the week or over the weekend, was anyone vaccinated, etc. Including such data could make risk assessment more accurate.

Based on their work, the researchers suggest that an “Amber Alert” stage could have been introduced to the app, in which people deemed to have an interim degree of risk would be guided to get a PCR test rather than immediately jumping to quarantine. Including this intermediate Amber Alert population could have significantly reduced the socioeconomic costs of contact tracing while retaining its epidemiological impact or could have increased its effectiveness for a similar cost. Performing analyses like this early on in the next pandemic to determine how it is transmitted might minimize illness and strain on society.

Nature, 2023.  DOI:  10.1038/s41586-023-06952-2

Contact-tracing software could accurately gauge COVID-19 risk Read More »