http://ift.tt/GNVgXA RSS feed for motherboard.vice.com en Sat, 25 Jun 2016 14:05:31 +0000 http://ift.tt/298JeZQ Sat, 25 Jun 2016 14:00:00 +0000
The bare existence of Stack Overflow is something to behold. In defiance of literally every other comment ecosystem, it is intensely productive and on-topic. If trolling exists within this software engineering Q&A Library of Babel, I've yet to encounter it. Instead, there exist dense stacks of usefulness: solutions, explanations, code. So much code. Also: brutal condescension, which is ultimately just the price of entry.
Stack Overflow is considered to be one of the most successful question and answer sites ever. 92 percent of questions posted about expert topics get answered, with a median time-to-answer of 11 minutes. Which is bonkers. It's fast enough to nearly obviate conventional web searching, as evidenced by an ever-increasing abundance of repeated questions. Why search when someone chasing upvotes is assuredly going to provide a brand new answer just for you in about the same amount of time?
As robust as it may seem, the continued success of Stack Overflow isn't guaranteed. Indeed, since 2014, the site has been in decline, as noted in a pre-print (paywalled) paper published this week in IEEE Software. New site users are falling, while question/answer failure rates are increasing. In 2014, for example, the proportion of questions that were either deleted or that went unanswered rose to nearly 40 percent. In 2011, it was about 22 percent. In the same period, the proportion of active users—those who posted an average of one question and one answer per month—fell from 15 percent to 5 percent. The site is now overwhelmingly lurkers. (Lurking, it should be noted, is highly reasonable given that SO functions in many cases as de facto technical documentation.)
The IEEE paper is interested in Stack Overflow as a case study in how to ensure sustainability in a community question answering (CQA) site, generally. Stack Overflow is far from doomed, but it may need to change.
"Besides the aggregate numbers, direct feedback from community members in various Internet discussions and blogs points out the emerging problems that threaten Stack Overflow’s long-term sustainability," the authors, Ivan Srba and Maria Bielikova of Slovak University of Technology, write.
Image: Bielikova and Srba
In posts appearing within the Meta Stack Overflow portion of the site—where questions are asked regarding the site itself—complaints about content quality have appeared in sigificant numbers since 2014, according to the paper. Here, site users have identified three primary groups of users that can be singled out as having contributed to the site's overall decline. For anyone that's spent much time on Stack Overflow, these types should be familiar enough. Because they are annoying.
First, there are the "help vampires." When I noted above that in many cases it may be easier to just ask a new question rather than search for an answer given the community's amazingly quick response times, this is who actually does that. The result is tedious, often duplicated content. "Help vampires are interested only in getting answers to their questions; they don’t return the help they’ve received back to the community," Bielikova and Srba write.
Next are the noobs. I know the noobs because I get emails from the noobs every time I write a how-to about programming. Noobs are characterized by asking only the most basic-ass shit and seem to have no willingness or interest in learning anything. Don't teach me how to do something, tell me how to do something. I don't know how people like this get through their day as functioning adults.
Finally, we have the reputation collectors. These are users that go out and try to answer as many questions as possible as quickly as possible in an effort to gain votes and, thus, to increase their site reputations. Given that some employers are now asking potential developer employees for Stack Overflow links, this seems a natural consequence. Reputation collectors can frequently be found reanswering answered questions with almost or even completely identical answers in the hope that someone will see theirs and upvote it.
"Fortunately, the Stack Overflow community also contains caretakers—experts who want to keep the system clean with valuable content," the paper explains. "Caretakers regularly search for interesting questions and provide good answers. Their presence is essential, and motivating them to stay active and devoted to the community is important."
That's the qualitative stuff. The paper next did a quantitative analysis based on Stack Overflow's open dataset, finding that in general good quality questions and answers (based on upvote numbers) have been in decline. While the total number of good questions has remained stable, the proportion of good questions had gone down owing to an overall increase in total questions. This indicates a stable core, but also that the site's growth consists largely of garbage.
"This finding confirms our hypothesis as well as the community perception that the system was flooded by content that nobody cared about, while really interesting content was getting rarer," Bielikova and Srba write. Brutal.
As far as fixing things, the paper offers two main solutions. The first is to shift the site's focus from being "asker-oriented" to "answerer-oriented." The basic idea is that instead of routing every question about a particular topic to potential answerers, there should be some diversification or retro-filtering to ensure that variations on the same question or super-easy questions aren't bombarding experts.
The second solution is also a bit vague, suggesting that CQA sites can benefit by involving whole communities rather than just small pools of experts. If top-quality experts are ignoring unappealing questions, leading to higher failure rates, than maybe those questions should somehow be sprayed out at the larger Stack Overflow populace.
In any case, I thought the paper was more interesting for the problems it highlights than the solutions. Stack Overflow's talent for self-regulation is really, truly impressive and, sure, results in some dickishness, but asking bad or lazy questions is its own kind of dickishness. It would be a shame to see it erode further.
]]> http://ift.tt/28U4MLc Michael Byrne for Motherboard questions and answers stack overflow stack exchange forums trolls help vampires IEEE software engineering Papers findings http://ift.tt/28YBrSl Sat, 25 Jun 2016 13:00:00 +0000The year is 207X, and people apparently still say “fuckboy,” which should stick out as much as me saying “daddy-o” today. Glitch City, a neo-megatropolis you’d recognize from Akira or Deus Ex, is crumbling. Jobs are scarce, everyone’s injected with nanomachines, and the law is enforced by a clandestine guard. But that’s not much concern to Jill, star of the new cyberpunk game VA-11 HALL-A. She lives in a crap apartment and works in a crappier bar. She’s mostly concerned with getting cocktails right and earning a decent tip, and in this video game you’ll save the future one dirty glass at a time.
Though you’ll (sadly) never see Norm, Cliff or Frasier walk through the doors (there’s a George Costanza shoo-in if that’s any consolation), VA-11 HALL-A is the cross section of Cheers and Ghost in the Shell. Your goal, as the jingle echoes, is to make the bar where everybody knows your name. It’s played similarly to a visual novel, but instead of conversation trees and awkward flirting the entirety of the game is played by serving drinks.
Barflies from the strange future file in to vent, gossip, meet with friends or drink alone. Regulars, lost souls, cops, media despots, cam girls, hackers, sex androids, weirdos, bounty hunters, dogs in people clothes all find their way to the bar stool. Some of their lives overlap and some are perfect strangers. How they interact with you and others depends on how well you know their “usual” and how strong you make it.
This may seem like a shallow way to engage with others, but everyone’s got a story and so does every drink. You’ll catch on quick that VA-11 HALL-A’s version of Harvey Levin wants the biggest most synthesized beer you have on tap, while it’s rendition of Hatsune Miku is so green around liquor she barely knows how to hold a glass. Some don’t know what they're looking for until you pour it, and being able to judge their character, and therefore their drink, will determine just how effective your lubrication is in conversation. Keeping Jill happy at home with balancing rent and small joys like posters, hologram-bonsai trees and vintage video games, will help her stay focused during her work shift, and make her more attuned to cocktail suggestions.
Feel the burn. Image: Sukeban Games
While it exist in a world of flying cars and androids, what makes VA-11 HALL-A memorable apart from the genre fictions it imitates is how low to the ground it feels. Sure, there’s an urban war brewing outside, but inside this dead-end cathedral is just people. Chatter about current events and politics, morality, and sex. There’s a lot of sex talk, obviously, but not in a gratuitous or unrealistic way, more a round of “never have I ever” over a row of shots. Jill’s own sexless lonely life is a dartboard to customers with more hyperactive labidos, and she feels vulnerable, and you’ll feel vulnerable, but it gets shrugged off, and another drink is poured.
Cyberpunk fiction is often alluring for sprawling kingdoms dense with grime, clutter and crime. VA-11 HALL-A takes place in one very specific corner, and that’s what makes it so engaging. Even in a future where geopolitics have melted into chaos, where parents augment their babies with cat ears, where your next date may be a robot with a DNA scanning tongue, it turns out most people just wants a little bit of cowboy talk and a god damn drink.
]]> http://ift.tt/28U4ALT Zack Kotzer for Motherboard gaming pc VA-11 HALL-A bars cheers ghost in the shell visual novels cyberpunk http://ift.tt/28WP1pf Fri, 24 Jun 2016 20:00:00 +0000Sometimes being paranoid can save your butt, or, at least in this case, your checking account.
Cybersecurity consultant Benjamin Tedesco was on vacation in Vienna, Austria, about to withdraw some cash, when he noticed something there was something off about the ATM machine he was going to use: there was a little bit of suspicious glue around the credit card reader, which otherwise looked perfectly normal.
“Being security paranoid, I repeated my typical habit of checking the card reader with my hand as I have 100’s of times,” Tedesco, who works for security company Carbon Black, wrote in a blog post. “Today’s the day when my security awareness paid off!”
That’s how he found a credit card skimmer, a perfect replica of the actual card reader glued on top of it, designed to steal his credit card information.
“And just because I’m paranoid,” he says in a video, showing how the skimmer comes off with a bit of a tug.
The inside of the skimmer (Image: Benjamin Tedesco)
Credit card skimmers, despite years of banks and credit card companies fighting against them, are still a problem. And criminals are always trying to outsmart the latest protections or countermeasures, getting better, and faster, at turning regular-looking ATMs, or even payment terminals, into automated credit card-stealing machines.
So, as Tedesco puts it in the video, “always check for ATM skimmers.” In other words, always be vigilant. And a bit paranoid.
]]> http://ift.tt/28U4LXA Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai for Motherboard Scam Me If You Can credit card skimmer skimming Fraud video credit card fraud cybersecurity vienna Carbon Black http://ift.tt/28SSpwf Fri, 24 Jun 2016 19:30:00 +0000If you’ve spent any time around health nuts or fitness fanatics, there’s a chance you’ve heard about the merits of butter coffee. The drink, made from mixing butter and medium-chain triglyceride (MCT) oil with coffee, is touted by popularizer Dave Asprey as a “biohack” that can give consumers the "clarity and energy to rip it up for hours."
Asprey, a Silicon Valley veteran who aspires to live until he is nearly 200, sells a variety of brain-stimulating products through his Bulletproof Nutrition website and accompanying Bulletproof Coffee store in Santa Monica. He’s one of many diet gurus currently promoting a high-fat, low-starch diet, and butter coffee is at the center of his program.
Like other so-called superfoods, butter coffee has inspired a cult of true believers who attribute all kinds of miraculous effects to consumption of the beverage.
“It’s rocket fuel,” said Jerrod Epps, a CrossFit enthusiast from Maryland. “You are beyond awake when you consume this stuff, you spring awake, and you aren’t hungry for hours.”
At the urging of Epps and several other acquaintances, I recently visited Asprey’s Bulletproof Coffee and ordered a large coffee (made from mold-free grounds) containing grass-fed butter and collagen. A sign inside the store jokingly informed patrons that frequent consumption of the drink can both stimulate neural activity and cause one’s pants to fit more snugly.
“It’s a cup of coffee mixed with fat,” nutritionist Matt Jenkins told Motherboard. “You are drinking a cup full of fat, with all the benefits and drawbacks that go along with that. There’s nothing wrong with consuming full fat items, but you can’t get much value from that if you’re indiscriminately consuming lots of calories. You have to watch your intake of carbs, proteins, and everything else, especially if you’re not exercising.”
As other coffee shops have sprung up serving the drink, some of the wilder claims made about its virtues have been disputed. Writing for Vox, Julia Belluz described Asprey’s high-fat diet (of which butter coffee, particularly hisexpensive branded variant, is a staple) as “everything that’s wrong with eating in America,” and his belief that he has identified certain supposedly anti-inflammatory foods as “outright misleading at worst.”
Nutritionist Jenkins wasn’t nearly as critical but did urge caution. “Butterfat is fine if you keep to its suggested serving size. A gram of fat is extremely calorie-rich and can sustain you for a long time, so that part about it keeping you full is accurate. If you’re going to eat lots of grams of fat, you will need to reduce consumption of other nutrients.”
Personal trainer and mixed martial artist Marc Sestok has been consuming butter coffee since 2011 and has noticed that it helps him wake up much faster. “The main reason why I converted is because of my daily schedule. I train clients starting at 5:30 a.m. nonstop most days until at least noon. The biggest effects I’ve noticed are a suppression of appetite, mental clarity, and if I use too much in one cup, diarrhea!”
Sestok also noted that adhering to an efficacious high-fat diet requires tremendous focus and discipline. “You’ve got to get your bloodwork done, because from anecdotal evidence I can say it can screw up some people’s lipid profiles. I practice fasting and follow a high fat diet, and I keep my carbohydrate intake very low. It takes a while for your body to adjust to a high-fat diet, but it’s kept my energy levels high as I’ve pursued the world’s hardest sport, MMA, aggressively.”
When I ordered a version of this drink at Toronto’s Extra Butter Coffee, however, the sales pitch was curiously devoid of any discussion of its nutritional properties.
“It tastes really good,” explained the barista. “It’s like a super heavy cream. You should try it while you’re here.”
]]> http://ift.tt/28U4xQj Oliver Lee Bateman for Motherboard food coffee Butter fats diet nutrition Bulletproof Coffee caffeine exercise CrossFit http://ift.tt/28WHuGW Fri, 24 Jun 2016 19:01:00 +0000More than 1.2 million people sought asylum in European countries last year, and in response to one of the largest human migrations the EU has ever seen, hundreds of miles of border fences have been constructed since 2015 to keep refugees out.
Soon, Europe will contain more border walls than it did during the Cold War. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, European countries have spent approximately $570 million on 750 miles of fencing—cement, electric, chain-link, and barbed wire—both inside and outside the trade bloc. When refugee numbers saw their highest levels in 2015, instead of offering sanctuary, several countries hastily built “temporary” walls to “safeguard” their national borders. Many pointed out that feelings of xenophobia were also at work in the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” referendum, in which voters ultimately opted to leave the EU on Thursday.
Map of the European refugee crisis in 2015. Image: Wikipedia
Refugees aren’t the only ones shut out by these fences. Over the last decade, EU nations have failed to consider the dire consequences that anti-immigration fences present to native wildlife, a new study published this week in PLOS Biology argues. Not only do Europe’s border fences trap and kill vulnerable species, they also cut off seasonal transboundary migration routes, and can even restrict population gene flow.
“We hypothesise that 9/11 was the main driver, when the risk of terrorism and drug dealers coming in meant that governments were closing their borders to reduce the risk while conservationists were driving for a more open system to allow wildlife to cross,” the study’s co-author, Matt Hayward, told the BBC.
Interestingly, the end of the Cold War marked a fortuitous time for conservation biology in Europe. New international laws and agencies, like the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, helped to foster in a new age of cooperation and open-access. And as tensions across Europe continued to thaw, researchers were able to collaborate on projects aimed at protecting migratory species that roamed across national borders.
“In part due to the harmonisation of legislation across borders and restored connectivity, Europe has witnessed a tremendous recovery of its large carnivore and herbivore populations in recent decades,” the study notes.
But now, many biologists are concerned that recent anti-immigration measures could stall, or even undo, the monumental strides that conservationists have achieved over the past several decades. According to the study’s observations, between 15,534 and 18,641 miles of new border fences pose a threat to wildlife in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
A large percentage of these fences might even be illegal, as they appear to have been built in opposition to rules set forth by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the EU’s own Habitats Directive, the study adds.
A border security fence constructed along the border between Slovenia and Croatia separates three large carnivore populations. Image: Linnell et al./PLOS Biolog
In Slovenia, the 2015 construction of a razor-wire security fence along its Croatia border disrupted the habitat of brown bear (Ursus arctos), gray wolf (Canis lupus), and Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) populations in the Northern Dinaric Mountains. Brown bear already suffer from habitat fragmentation and hunting in Slovenia, and half of the country’s resident gray wolf packs have home ranges across the border in Croatia. Lynx numbers, which are notoriously small, are especially vulnerable to inbreeding if individuals aren’t able to move between subpopulations.
However, the authors acknowledge that—if done right—border walls don’t have to be detrimental to wildlife. Both Mongolian gazelle (Procapra gutturosa) and Asiatic wild ass (Equus hemionus) actually profit from the pastoral refuge and poaching protection provided by fences as the Mongolian-Chinese border.
"If you look at lion populations around Africa, the best way to conserve them is to have them behind fences in large-scale national parks,” Hayward said. “So conservation fencing by itself is not a bad thing; it’s where we don't consider the impacts or carry out environmental assessments with these border fences—that’s where the damage is done.”
Moving forward, the study stresses that European governments should fully, and transparently, evaluate the potential harm that border walls could present to native species. Additionally, high-tech monitoring tools and wildlife-friendly fencing materials can also help to mitigate some of the negative impacts.
But most of all, the authors hope that in the face of geopolitical strife, conservationists will recognize the benefits of international partnerships, and strengthen their alliances across borders for the sake of animals that have none.
]]> http://ift.tt/298JcB7 Sarah Emerson for Motherboard European Border Fences Brexit eu anti-immigration wildlife conservation border wall CITES gray wolf Eurasian lynx brown bear Slovenia Croatia migration routes humanitarian crisis PLOS Biology http://ift.tt/28YxCe2 Fri, 24 Jun 2016 19:00:00 +0000Christien Levien believes the easiest way to improve access to justice—which is a pressing issue in Canada and other countries, where plenty of people can’t afford to hire a lawyer when they need one—is putting a “lawyer in your pocket” through an app that will give you basic legal information. That’s the idea behind Legalswipe, a free app designed to inform people of their legal rights as they relate to interactions with the police.
The criminal defence lawyer said the idea came out of his own experience. “When I was in my first year of my undergraduate degree, I was assaulted by a police officer. Having to go through the local complaint system to obtain justice, I realized it is so arduous and difficult. People have these same issues and just don’t know where to turn.”
Launched in July 2015, the app has seen 20,000 downloads, mostly in Toronto, where Levien is based. The app also allows users to video-record their interactions with a police and send emergency messages to certain contacts when activated.
Levien believes free apps like his are critical, because there are “huge financial barriers” to getting legal information. This sort of technology can help “level the playing ground” and empower those who have been “historically vulnerable,” he said.
Seeing a lawyer is so expensive that many can’t afford it
A growing community of lawyers, policymakers and activists feel the same way. They call themselves Legal Hackers, and they’re hoping to drag their profession into the digital age. Toronto is the latest city to launch a chapter of the group, joining others all over the world, from Boston to Barcelona to Kuala Lumpur.
In May, about 30 people met at a pub downtown to discuss creating new technologies to solve legal problems. One of the most important is how to ensure people have access to basic legal services, when seeing a lawyer is so expensive that many can’t afford it.
Scott Allan, who isn't a lawyer but believes the legal field could use more “efficiency,” led the meet-up. He acknowledged that lawyers have long resisted it. “Law and government are two of the last groups to get online in a proper way,” he said, attributing it partly to age and a “generation gap.” But of course, free apps could also threaten some lawyers’ income. It’s already being eroded by the democratization of certain legal services. At Walmart, for instance, people can now get a $99 will.
Until more people can afford a lawyer, many say this is a necessary step.
When it comes to access to civil justice, the 2011 World Justice Project ranked Canada ninth place out of 12 Western European and North American countries. The same report showed that Canada ranked 16th out of the 23 high-income countries, falling behind countries like Australia, Japan, Estonia, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
The report partially attributes the lack of legal accessibility to “affordability.”
"Federal leadership is needed. We can’t just leave it to private actors and hope it works out”
This might be changing. Increased provincial funding and recent boosts by the federal government means 400,000 more Ontarians are eligible for Legal Aid than they were 18 months before, as David Field, CEO of Legal Aid Ontario, noted in a recent op-ed. The province has also said it will improve financial eligibility, and the federal government has dedicated an additional $118 million to legal aid plans across Canada in the next five years, he said.
Legal Hackers isn’t the only Toronto group who thinks the industry could use a technological makeover.
Over the last few months, the LegalX Cluster at MaRS, an incubator that hopes to support Canadian science, technology and social innovation, has been backing startups like Beagle, a service that allows users to upload a contract and highlights the key clauses and fine print; Knomos, a platform that hopes to increase access to justice by allowing users to visualize legal information in a way that will help them understand their rights; and Small Claims Wizard, a platform guiding users through the Ontario Small Claims Court process step by step.
Joanna Lehrer, a Toronto lawyer who focuses on criminal defence and youth justice, thinks getting kids to think about the law at a young age might be one way to increase access to justice. She plans on organizing a hackathon that would host three schools from varying socioeconomic neighborhoods around Toronto. The idea is to encourage students to think about how they interact with the justice system and how those interactions can be improved.
“I believe students will learn from each other’s realities and that can form really powerful partnerships,” Lehrer told me. “I think it’s really important in criminal justice, but I recognize that other youth may be dealing with other issues that may have legitimacy as well.”
Lehrer heard about the Legal Hackers meet-up through social media, and hopes to use the network to connect with others interested in similar issues.
But how do people even find out about the online legal tools that are out there?
Gaylene Schellenberg, a lawyer with the legislation and law reform directorate at the Canadian Bar Association, says federal leadership is needed to coordinate among public and private initiatives, and to make sure efforts aren’t duplicating or doubling up.
“The current situation is quite disjointed and federal leadership is needed. We can’t just leave it to private actors and hope it works out.”
Kristian Justesen Director of Public Legal Information & Access at Legal Aid Ontario, echoes this sentiment. “The reality of the system is that so many things are connected and they all impact one another. For example, if a court doesn’t allow documents to be filed electronically, then that slows down what we do next.”
Justesen is hopeful that the industry will see some big changes over the next few years, and not just at organizations like LAO. The courts have a “real appetite” to see what they can do to make the system work better and faster, he believes.
People are always best off speaking to a lawyer, but many of them can’t afford the hundreds of dollars in billing fees that come with it. Until legal services are more affordable and accessible to all, technology can help fill the gap.
]]> http://ift.tt/298J8RQ Samar Warsi for Motherboard Law lawyer lawyers access to justice Justice legal tech apps legal hackers Canada Toronto http://ift.tt/28WEI4o Fri, 24 Jun 2016 18:55:00 +0000Everyone loves videos of animals being wacky. Especially kittens. The latest viral video of an animal being wacky is completely unlike any you’ve seen before, though.
The Alice Springs Reptile Center in Australia’s Northern Territory posted a video that the staff felt “deserves to go viral” in the form of a snake shedding its skin, “accidentally enter[ing] its sloughed skin,” and getting stuck, repeatedly going around and around in a perfect circle. This proceeded to go on for three hours before the snake busted out through a hole in the shed skin.
According to the Facebook post from the Center, “It's a Stimson's Python and has managed to shed completely within itself with its tail finishing inside its 'sloughed mouth!' So the Stimmy now fully sloughed is just going round and round inside its sloughed skin!” Those are a lot of exclamation points! The person maintaining their Facebook page had never seen anything like it in 30 years of working with reptiles, so there was excitement in the air.
Don’t worry about the snake’s health: It’s fine, and it wasn’t biting itself. “If the snake is healthy, and they don't get it snagged on anything, the skin usually comes off in one piece. But in a perfect circle? Well, that's very unusual.”
]]> http://ift.tt/28U4u79 David Bixenspan for Motherboard science animals Reptiles ouroboros snakes videos http://ift.tt/292rtww Fri, 24 Jun 2016 18:00:00 +0000A mutant bearded dragon. The animal lacks all scales. Image: Michel Milinkovitch
Lizard scales and feathers seem like they’re a long way from human hair. But it turns out that fur, feathers, and scales all evolved from one common ancestor, no matter how different these adornments seem: they can all be traced back to a lizardlike creature that roamed the Earth some 310 million years ago.
“In my lab, we try to understand the biological and physical mechanisms responsible for the emergence of the complexity and diversity of life,” evolutionary geneticist Michel Milinkovitch of the University of Geneva told me over the phone. He’s an author on a new study, published Friday in Science Advances, that describes an evolutionary link between fur, feathers, and scales.
This question has actually been hotly debated for years. Fur, feather, and scales are all “very different structures,” said Milinkovitch, who's also affiliated with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. “It’s difficult to see how you could modify something ancestral into something as different as hair, and a feather.”
And, unlike the teeth or bones of ancient creatures, these soft appendages aren’t well-preserved in the fossil record, so it’s difficult to trace their evolution in that way.
The scales of a corn snake. Image: Michel Milinkovitch
To complicate the picture even more, when mammals and birds grow in embryo, their hair and feathers develop from a similar primordial structure called a “placode”—a thickening of the epidermis with columnar cells that leads to the expression of certain genes. Biologists have wondered for a long time how exactly to explain this connection, because birds and mammals evolved from different forks on the evolutionary tree.
And reptile scales were thought not to come from an anatomical placode at all. That left some thinking that birds and mammals must have independently developed placodes as they evolved into the feathery, furry creatures that populate our world today.
In 2015, a Yale University team published work showing that certain molecular signatures are expressed during the development of alligator scales, hair, and feathers. That got everyone riled up again about whether these signatures could suggest a common origin, or just that the same genes were being used to develop very different traits.
“It isn’t crazy to think that some genes are being used to make [similar] structures, but don’t come from the same ancestor,” Milinkovitch told me. It happens in nature all the time: Hox genes, which are found in many creatures, from humans to fruit flies, can lay out the organization of different parts in different creatures, he explained.
In this new study, Milinkovitch and his co-author, Nicolas Di-Poï, demonstrate that scales in reptiles actually do develop from a placode that has the same anatomical and molecular signatures as those in birds and mammals. It’s just that nobody had apparently ever seen it before. They discovered this by using cutting-edge molecular and other techniques to analyze the skin of crocodile, snake, and lizard embryos as they developed.
From bottom to top: bearded dragons that are: "normal," heterozygous mutant (it received only one copy of the mutated EDA gene) and homozygous mutant (it received two copies of the EDA mutation). The homozygous mutant lacks all scales, while the heterozygous mutant has scales that are reduced in size. Image: Michel Milinkovitch
The authors also looked at the bearded dragon, which comes in three types: a normal, "wild-type" animal; another with one copy of a natural genetic mutation, inherited from its mother or father, that has smaller scales; and a third that is completely naked and without scales, because it has inherited two copies of the mutation, one from each of its parents.
In comparing their genomes, they found that naked lizards have a mutation on a gene called ectodysplasin-A (EDA). When that same gene is disrupted in humans and mice, it can cause problems with development of teeth, nails, and hair, Milinkovitch said.
“We realize now that lizards have anatomical placodes we didn’t see before,” Milinkovitch told me. (As for why other scientists hadn’t seen these previously, “It’s very transitory and you have to look at the right place at the right time,” he said. “Now that we know where to look, and when, it’s not too difficult.”)
This research tells us something about where all of us hairy, furry mammals come from—from humans and hedgehogs to dolphins, which are born with whiskers on their snout, Milinkovitch noted—and it’s also a reminder of an ancient connection we share with lizards and birds, no matter how distant and tenuous that link seems today.
It helps explain the incredible diversity of our world.
“We are trying to understand what I like to call the emergence of beauty,” Milinkovitch said. “Because when things are complex and diverse, they are beautiful.”
]]> http://ift.tt/28U4X9h Kate Lunau for Motherboard evolution hair scales feathers dinosaur feathers genetics biology evolutionary biology evolutionary history common ancestor http://ift.tt/292rvEA Fri, 24 Jun 2016 16:54:00 +0000Statistically, the odds of a shark attack ruining your otherwise tranquil beach holiday are very low. If your vacation destination is the remote Reunion Island located in the Indian Ocean, that risk of an unpleasant interaction with one of nature's fiercest apex predators is considerably higher.
Between 2011 and 2015, this small French territory several hundred miles off the coast of Madagascar suffered 18 attacks, 7 of which were fatal–a staggering 13 percent of all of the world's shark attack fatalities.
Residents of the island have turned to science to better understand the surge in attacks, searching for solutions that would protect their loved ones and a tourism industry that is vital to the local economy. The island has become something akin to an experimental research lab, with scientists searching for insight into the shark's behavior, and residents searching for ways to protect themselves in the water.
While scientific research on the island has provided valuable insight, several low-tech protective measures have been most effective in getting residents and tourists back into the water with some semblance of safety. Protective nets provide safe harbor for swimmers, and "vigies", volunteer underwater bodyguards, serve as lookouts for surfers, allowing them to take advantage of the island's world class waves.
Reunion Island stands as a fascinating case study of man's intersection with nature. As researchers better understand the habits of these animals, and residents continue to implement non-violent preventative measures, there's hope for a peaceful co-existence between humans and sharks.
Presented by The Shallows. In Theaters June 24.
The Runcible "anti-smartphone." All images from Monohm
New technologies, once they’re embraced, always produce a backlash. Instead of buying CDs or digital downloads, some people embrace records. Instead of typing on a computer, there’s a subset that insists on using a typewriter, or doing it by hand. Some offices experiment with dropping Slack for a week. And some people, like actor Eddie Redmayne, ditch their iPhone for an old-school analog cell phone.
Then there’s the Runcible: the so-called “anti-smartphone,” an odd, round, pocket-watch-shaped device that’s supposed to give time back to the consumer, and will be available in the fall of 2016. (It’s available through pre-order now.)
Monohm, the Berkeley-based company behind this device, hopes it will make users question how they interact with their phones. It’s a worthy question: globally, there are estimated to be over 2 billion smartphone users, and in the US alone, 46 per cent of them say their smartphone is something they “couldn’t live without.” By 2020, according to some estimates, there will over 6.3 billion smartphone subscriptions worldwide.
The Runcible—which Monohm calls the first “anti-smartphone”—doesn’t look anything like an iPhone or Android device. And it’s purposefully silent. The phone “will never beep, alert, or otherwise interrupt you,” according to its manufacturer, the idea being that it will help users create a “more civilized relationship with [their] digital life.”
The base model sells for USD $399, the premium for $499.
Some might rightfully question whether it’s worth carrying an expensive phone that never pings an alert. “No exceptions! No alerts, no sounds, no interruptions ever,” said Aubrey Anderson, founder of Monohm, when I asked him about this. Emergency situations, it would seem, are not where the Runcible will shine.
But the Runcible is less an actual smartphone, than a symbol of revolt against the current state of technology. “It started with design fatigue. I was taking note of the new designs,” he said, “and it was just boring as hell. It was a big cycle of rectangles. I’d always wanted to do something a bit different.”
So Anderson turned to pre-smartphone technologies, and found that round tools—compasses, pocket watches, a smooth rock—were common. “Round comes up a lot for humans. Could we put the brain of a smartphone into the form of that?”
He believes that we’d all be better off if our smartphones interfered with our lives less. “Smartphones tend to build value by bothering you. [The Runcible is] doing everything we can do to keep you from getting sucked into your Twitter feed,” said Anderson. “It’s designed to facilitate you keeping your head up in the world more often."
The phone includes all the functionality we’ve come to expect—email, social media, and GPS—but it just does it all a little bit differently. The Runcible’s mapping app, for example, won’t suggest the fastest route, but rather the most interesting and most scenic—a feature which, though fun for a few times, I can imagine might start to feel very tired, very quickly. The email app might only show you a handful of emails, rather than your entire inbox. Its individual parts can be replaced, repaired or updated, which actually sounds like a great idea, sidestepping the planned obsolescence of so many other devices. And it’s worth noting that the phone is built around open-source software, making these features highly customizable.
Critics say the phone is farcical. “The Runcible has little chance of succeeding,” Paul Levinson, professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, told me in an email interview, “except as a joke or a quirky cult item. People want smartphones that do more, not fewer, things.”
But Anderson is speaking to a real problem that many relate to. We all know the feeling of sitting across someone at the dinnertable whose head is buried in a screen, or having a conversation interrupted by a pinging device. Even with so much new technology that exists to connect us, “I don’t feel like I’m closer to people,” he told me. “It’s not to lay the blame entirely on smartphones, but it’s part of the problem.”
“I think that people are always seeking a more harmonious relationship with technology,” Levinson agreed. “but that comes not from less, but better, technology.”
The Runcible is fun and yes, it does suggest the idea that technology could—and likely should—be designed in a way that is less intrusive. But all things considered, it’s essentially a $400 wood-and-wire medallion to indicate that you are willing to take a stand against the mainstream.
Until better, and less intrusive, tech comes along, you can always switch to airplane mode.
]]> http://ift.tt/28U4tzW Kieran Delamont for Motherboard monohm runcible smartphone iphone android Reviews internet addiction twitter slow tech Motherboard
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