New Kind of Memory for AI

AI researchers have typically tried to get around the issues posed by by Montezuma’s Revenge and Pitfall! by instructing reinforcement-learning algorithms to explore randomly at times, while adding rewards for exploration—what’s known as “intrinsic motivation.” But the Uber researchers believe this fails to capture an important aspect of human curiosity. “We hypothesize that a major weakness of current intrinsic motivation algorithms is detachment,” they write. “Wherein the a...

 Human Females Menstruate to Eliminate Unviable Fetuses

From a female perspective, pregnancy is always a huge investment. Even more so if her species has a hemochorial placenta. Once that placenta is in place, she not only loses full control of her own hormones, she also risks hemorrhage when it comes out. So it makes sense that females want to screen embryos very, very carefully. Going through pregnancy with a weak, inviable or even sub-par fetus isn't worth it. That's where the endometrium comes in. You've probably read about how the endometriu...

 1.6 Grams of Protein a Day Per Kilogram of Weight

To answer the simplest question of whether taking in more protein during weight training led to larger increases in muscle size and strength, the researchers added all of the results together. [...] But those who did ramp up their protein gained an extra 10 percent or so in strength and about 25 percent in muscle mass compared to the control groups. The researchers also looked for the sweet spot for protein intake, which turned out to be about 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weig...

 Review Your Social Media Timeline to Improve Your Sense o...

In an experiment at Cornell, stressed college students randomly assigned to scroll through their own Facebook profiles for five minutes experienced boosts in self-affirmation compared to students who looked at a stranger’s Facebook profile. The researchers believe self-affirmation comes from reminiscing on past meaningful interactions — seeing photos they had been tagged in and comments their friends had left — as well as reflecting on one’s own past posts, where a person chooses how ...

 Considering Art Creative but Engineering Not as a Questio...

In retrospect, Cohen and MacKeith made a number of questionable assumptions that undermine that conclusion. To be fair, these assumptions were quite common among psychologists at the time and still persist to a significant degree among the public. One of these assumptions is that some activities, such as the arts, are inherently creative, whereas others, such as science or engineering, are not. Another assumption is that creativity is a function of one's ability to fantasize, which is to say,...

 Children's Attention Spans are Short, and Education Deman...

The 2016 paper, “Off-task behavior in elementary school children,” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Learning and Instruction, and was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the Department of Education. The researchers also kept track of how the teachers were instructing students during these observations. Not surprisingly, students went off task more frequently during whole-group instruction than during small group or individual work. Length of lesson matters...

 Underreported Atheists

The authors of the study, published earlier this year, adopted a novel way to measure atheist identity. Instead of asking about belief in God directly, they provided a list of seemingly innocuous statements and then asked: “How many of these statements are true of you?” Respondents in a control group were given a list of nine statements, such as “I own a dog” and “I am a vegetarian.” The test group received all the same statements plus one that read, “I do not believe in God.”...

 Argonauts: Organizations of Similar Interest

Over the next few years, the nascent Argonaut Council for Responsible Science recruited heavily from organizations with similar interests such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Institute for a Transhuman Future, the Lifeboat Institute, and the Singularity Foundation. Researchers at government organizations such as the UK’s Bletchley Park and the Chinese Machine Intelligence Directorate quietly subscribed as well. In most cases, these new argonauts kept their original affiliation, gi...

 pplapi.com

pplapi.com (pronounced “people API”) is a web-based data service that provides access to a synthetic world population, n = 7, 171, 922, 938. Researchers can submit queries to pplapi.com using its Application Programming Interface (API) to obtain samples consisting of synthetic agents drawn from this population. Because researchers do not need to host the synthetic population themselves, pplapi.com reduces start-up costs associated with using synthetic agents in research. pplapi.com provid...

 Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Proteins

We all know that exercise is important for a strong and healthy body. Less appreciated is that exercise seems also to be important for a strong and healthy mind, boosting memory and learning, while possibly delaying age-related cognitive decline [1]. How is this so? Researchers have assembled a growing body of evidence that suggests skeletal muscle cells secrete proteins and other factors into the blood during exercise that have a regenerative effect on the brain. Now, an NIH-supported study...