Category: Science, Nature, & Technology

Kevin Esvelt argues that the tremendous power of CRISPR can only be contained if scientists are open about their research.

Source: One Man’s Plan to Make Sure Gene Editing Doesn’t Go Haywire – The Atlantic

More often than not, scientists keep their plans to themselves, only unveiling the details of their research once their results are in and their publications are accepted by an academic journal. “Virtually all of science is done in secret before the moment of publication,” says Esvelt. “This is an insane way of setting up your scientific system. No one in their right mind would set it up this way.”

“Even beginning to do the work in the lab means you’re making a decision that could affect people out of a lab,” he says. “For gene drive, the closed-door model is morally unacceptable. You don’t have the right to go into your lab and build something that is ineluctably designed to affect entire ecosystems. If it escapes into the wild, it would be expected to spread and affect people’s lives in unknown ways. Doing that in secret denies people a voice.”

Stevan Harnad’s “Subversive Proposal” came of age last year. I’m now teaching students younger than Stevan’s proposal, and yet, very little has actually changed in these 21 years.

Source: bjoern.brembs.blog » Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience, by Björn Brembs

we are currently spending about US$ 10b annually on legacy publishers, when we could publish fully open access for about US$200m per year if we only were to switch publishing to, e.g. SciELO, or any other such system. In fact, I’d argue that the tax payer has the right to demand that we use their tax funds only for the least expensive publishing option.

While many of the consequences of wasting these infrastructure funds on publishers have become apparent only more recently, the indefensibility of ever-increasing subscription pricing in a time of record-low publishing costs, was already apparent 20 years ago. Hence, already in 1994, it became obvious that one way of freeing ourselves from the subscription-shackles was to make the entire scholarly literature available online, free to read. Collectively, these two decade-long concerted efforts of the global OA community, to wrestle the knowledge of the world from the hands of the publishers, one article at a time, has resulted in about 27 million (24%) of about 114 million English-language articles becoming publicly accessible by 2014. Since then, one single woman has managed to make a whopping 48 million paywalled articles publicly accessible. In terms of making the knowledge of the world available to the people who are the rightful owners, this woman, Alexandra Elbakyan, has single-handedly been more successful than all OA advocates and activists over the last 20 years combined.

RE: Sci-Hub

 

For reference consideration, Wikipedia has about 5.4 million content pages in English (2017-06) and has an annual budget on the order of $60 million.

Surveys in German nature reserves point to a dramatic decline in insect biomass

Source: Where have all the insects gone? | Science | AAAS

A weather station for biodiversity

Researchers in Germany hope to develop a set of automated sensors that will monitor the abundance and diversity of plants, animals, and fungi with the help of pattern recognition and DNA and chemical analysis.

The mass of insects collected by monitoring traps in the Orbroicher Bruch nature reserve in northwest Germany dropped by 78% in 24 years.

…
In 1989, the group’s traps in one reserve collected 17,291 hover flies from 143 species. In 2014, at the same locations, they found only 2737 individuals from 104 species.

The Wow! Signal has baffled astronomers and space investigators for decades. But the mystery appears to have finally been explained by Antonio Paris, who has shown that comets haloed by hydrogen are the cause.

Source: The 40-Year Old Mystery of the “Wow!” Signal Was Just Solved

These comets, known as 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs, have clouds of hydrogen gas millions of kilometers in diameter surrounding them. The Wow! Signal was detected at 1420MHz, which is the radio frequency hydrogen naturally emits. Notably, the team has verified that the comets were within the vicinity at the time, and they report that the radio signals from 266/P Christensen matched those from the Wow! signal.

If technology can mold us, and technologists are the ones who shape that technology, we should demand some level of ethics training for technologists. And that training should not be limited to the university context; an ethics training component should also be included in the curriculum of any developer “bootcamp,” and maybe in the onboarding process when tech companies hire new employees.

Source: Rethinking Ethics Training in Silicon Valley – The Atlantic, by Irina Raicu