Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 8, 2019

Uses and limitations of statistical knowledge; IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos; Limited trial shows potential to reverse aging; The search for a room temperature superconductor; A 55 year old search for 3 cubes that sum to 42 has been completed

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Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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What Statistics Can and Can’t Tell Us About Ourselves - The article, by mathematician Hannah Fry, lists a number of examples where statistics that tell us a great deal about groups of people are useless for telling us things about individuals. For example, we know that for every 1,000 people that take statins, 18 of them will benefit by delaying or avoiding heart attacks. But none of those 1,000 people will ever know if they were one of the people that the drug helped. The article also describes the use of p values in science for determining whether an effect is coincidental or not, but points out that even this methodology suffers from problems, saying that many high profile studies are now believed to be based on wild coincidences, saying, "This issue has only been exacerbated in the era of Big Data. The more data that are collected, cross-referenced, and searched for correlations, the easier it becomes to reach false conclusions." To mitigate against this weakness, the article suggest that researchers should declare hypothesis before examining any data, and everyone should become more comfortable with accepting uncertainty. Every question, it says, can't be answered with either "yes" or "no". h/t Daniel Lemire

Video Friday: Misty Robotics Begins Shipping Its Programmable Personal Robot - IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos contains videos of: A quadruped that climbs stairs, avoids obstacles, and recovers from slipping or being pushed; A biologically inspired robotic hand that plays piano; A start-up business that specializes in object detection for bin picking, indoor navigation, and object detection; more videos from the DARPA underground robotics challenge; a robotic vacuum that doubles as a home surveillance device; and more...

Here's that robotic vacuum:

First hint that body’s ‘biological age’ can be reversed - After one year of taking a cocktail consisting of growth hormone and two diabetes medications [dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and metformin], researchers report that subjects reversed their epigenetic clocks by an average of 2 ¹/ ₂ years. Growth hormone is believed to regenerate the thymus, but it also causes diabetes, which is the reason for the two diabetes medications. The study is limited, however, because it only had 9 subjects and no control group. (Metformin was mentioned previously in comments to Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for August 22, 2019 by @valued-customer.) h/t RealClear Science

Hydride predicted to be superconductive at room temperature - Superconducting materials are very useful in a variety of areas, including lossless power transmission, CERN's particle collider, and magnets for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, existing materials require cold temperatures that are expensive to maintain. So, scientists are searching for superconducting materials that work at warmer temperatures. One possibility, hydrides, offers a vast range of candidate materials, and analysis show that some should operate as superconductors at high temperatures (up to 77 C). However, for materials that have been examined to date, prohibitively high pressures are needed, so the search continues.

STEEM Sum of three cubes for 42 finally solved—using real life planetary computer - The problem has been open since 1954, and was now solved by an international team led by University of Bristol and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). How do you find three integers for a diophantine equation such that x3+y3+z3=k where k is a number from 1 through 100? 42 was the last holdout. It took over a million hours of computer time to find the solution, which is: X = -80538738812075974 Y = 80435758145817515 Z = 12602123297335631. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @flemingfarm)

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