PNAS: Scientific proof that social media ‘bots make everything worse
Massimo Stella, Emilio Ferrara, and Manlio De Domenico
And you can prove that ‘bots make things worse without involving the word “Trump.”
Societies are complex systems, which tend to polarize into subgroups of individuals with dramatically opposite perspectives. This phenomenon is reflected—and often amplified—in online social networks, where, however, humans are no longer the only players and coexist alongside with social bots—that is, software-controlled accounts.
To test the influence of bots, the researchers look at a particular event — the 2017 vote on Catalan independence from Spain. They looked at “4 millions Twitter posts generated by almost 1 million users,” broke them into the pro and con groups, and showed that the most extreme examples of both groups … were bots.
We show that bots act from peripheral areas of the social system to target influential humans of both groups, bombarding Independentists with violent contents, increasing their exposure to negative and inflammatory narratives, and exacerbating social conflict online. Our findings stress the importance of developing countermeasures to unmask these forms of automated social manipulation.
Here’s the thing about bots: They don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, getting embarrassed at school, or being ostracized by their friends. They can say things that are absolutely unthinkable, and keep saying them, until pleny of people are thinking, and saying the same things. Bots take the old concept of the Overton Window and automate it, allowing policy to be driven to the extremes in record time.
If technology in the form of smart phones and the Internet had questionable affects on how people live and relate, technology in the form of social media bots seems to be much more comprehensible: They’re bad.
Political Science
PNAS: Prevention much, much better than ‘cure’ on flood control
Z. Kundzewicz, D. Hegger, P. Matczak, and P. Driessen
Both the United States and Europe face major threats to both life and property from flood damage, and it’s nice to see that occasionally the United States does something right policy-wise.
The United States has been the global leader, showing the path of flood-risk reduction.
Go us! Except … that sentence references the Flood Control Act of 1936. So it’s really more ‘go FDR.’ That act allowed the government to limit building in flood prone areas by offering to assist families and businesses damaged by floods — so long as they don’t persist in rebuilding in flood-prone areas. Under this plan, the US has relocated whole towns and restricted building along wide sections of waterfront. This action has turned out to be well-nigh infinitely more effective than just trying to engineer our way out of floods through building floods and levees, because those constructions literally only move the problem somewhere else and generate a false sense of security for those on the other side of “flood control measures.”
It is important to emphasize that floods constitute a hazard only when humans encroach on flood-prone areas, as others have pointed out. Hence, preventive measures aim to decrease the consequences of flooding by decreasing the exposure of people and property via prohibiting or discouraging development in areas at risk.
With rising sea levels and an increase in extreme rain events, severe floods can be expected to occur at an ever increasing rate. That’s going to make trying to level, dam, and seawall ourselves out of this mess impossible. It’s time to start moving people out of low-lying areas — like, say, the entire state of Florida — before they’re neck-deep.
Medicine and Health
PNAS: How strong does a cough have to be? Pretty darn strong.
Burton Dickey
Cough is one of the most common symptoms for seeking medical care. If cough is going to cause that much trouble, it better be worth it, and the clinical evidence is that indeed it is. Patients with impaired cough due to neuromuscular disease or postoperative sedation suffer high rates of atelectasis and pneumonia due to the failure to clear secretions from the airways, and there is evidence that a heightened cough reflex improves health.
What follows is a detailed analysis of that delightful substance known as “mucus,” it’s physical properties, and why it’s so darned important that a cough be able to expel that stuff from the body. And honestly … it’s fascinating.
Mucus is a remarkable and protean substance, with properties on the border between a viscous fluid and a soft elastic solid.
A “remarkable and protean substance”? Well heck, why wouldn’t I want more, more, more of that? Except, you know, for the part about drowning with lungs filled with remarkable, protean goo.
Climate Change
PNAS: Climate change could turn the Amazon basin from a carbon sink to a carbon source
Sirui Wang, Qianlai Zhuang, Outi Lähteenoja, Frederick Draper, and Hinsby Cadillo-Quiroz
These researchers looked at a particular part of the Amazon, but their results have widespread implications.
We use a process-based biogeochemistry model to quantify the carbon accumulation for peatland ecosystems in the Pastaza-Marañon foreland basin in the Peruvian Amazon from 12,000 y before present to AD 2100. We find that warming accelerates peat carbon loss, while increasing precipitation slightly enhances peat carbon accumulation at millennial time scales. With these impacts, our simulations suggest that the basin might lose up to 0.4 Pg⋅C by AD 2100, with the largest loss from palm swamp. If this loss rate is true for all Amazonia peatlands, we project that these carbon-dense peatlands may switch from a current carbon sink into a future source in this century.
This doesn’t even account for loses in carbon storage due to other human activities, such as timbering and clearing land for slash and burn agriculture. The basin itself, the great mass of matted vegetation that covers thousands of square miles, could begin to outgas carbon, making the problem still worse in the process — another sign that we are very near to a critical tippling point.
NPR: Climate change could make your pancakes taste much worse.
Barbara Moran
A study published last week in Global Change Biology warns that without the snowpack, maple trees are projected to grow about 40 percent slower. As climate change reduces the amount of deep snow in New England, the study says this spells trouble for the trees — and for humans — as the trees not only give us syrup, but eat up a chunk of carbon pollution.
"If temperatures keep increasing and the snowpack keeps shrinking, it suggests that our maple forests are going to not grow as much, and therefore not sequester as much carbon," says Pamela Templer, a biology professor at Boston University and senior author for the study.
National Geographic: Ice loss in Greenland is unprecedented and frightening.
Alejandra Borunda
For a few days in July of 2012, it was so hot in the Arctic that nearly the entire surface of the Greenland ice sheet turned to slush.
It was so uncharacteristically warm that scientists, emerging from their tents high on the peak of the ice sheet, sank up to their knees in the suddenly soft snow. And then, that snow started melting.
Near the edge of the ice sheet, bright blue puddles collected on the flat white surface. Rivulets of melt trickled down, braiding into fat, gushing rivers. The meltwater punched through gullies and spilled down crevasses. One river near the edge of the ice sheet was so swollen that it swept away a bridge that had been there for decades. So much water spilled out of the guts of the ice sheet that year that global sea levels rose by over a millimeter.
Biology
PNAS: How did eukaryotic cells originate?
Gloria Lee, Nicholas Sherer, et. al.
Life on Earth got started remarkably early — just about as soon as there could be life on Earth. But how that life made the jump from simple, bacteria-level cells to the more complex cells that make up large lifeforms remains a bit of a mystery. This is a complex one, but interesting if you want to understand why it took so long to make what seemed to be a simple, but critical, jump on the road to complex life.
Phylogenetic evidence suggests that the invasion and proliferation of retroelements, selfish mobile genetic elements that copy and paste themselves within a host genome, was one of the early evolutionary events in the emergence of eukaryotes. Here we test the effects of this event by determining the pressures retroelements exert on simple genomes. We transferred two retroelements, human LINE-1 and the bacterial group II intron Ll.LtrB, into bacteria, and find that both are functional and detrimental to growth. We find, surprisingly, that retroelement lethality and proliferation are enhanced by the ability to perform eukaryotic-like nonhomologous end-joining (NHEJ) DNA repair. We show that the only stable evolutionary consequence in simple cells is maintenance of retroelements in low numbers,
NBC: Consider this trolling disguised as wildlife news.
Alex Wild
Wasps pull off the most staggering feats in the animal kingdom. The tropical jewel wasp, Ampulex, hacks the neurology of its cockroach prey with a surgically placed sting to the brain, allowing her to drive the roach pliantly back to her burrow. Other spider-eating wasps direct their hapless arachnids to abandon the stereotypical circular orb webs and, instead, the reprogrammed spiders spin comfortable silk hammocks to house developing wasp cocoons. Some Polistes paper wasps — yes, the familiar striped menaces under your eaves — are among the few insects with social skills so keenly developed as to memorize the faces of their nest mates, treating each with respect or scorn appropriate to their social status in the colony. Wasps do drama worthy of any telenovela.
I am not going to feel sorry for wasps. I should feel sorry for wasps, but ...
Image
As usual, today’s image comes from Andy Brunning at Compound Interest. Visit Andy’s site for a larger, easier to read version of the infographic.