Can we keep human inconsistency from confusing expert advice?

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Everyone has biases. And everyone knows that everyone has biases, and that these biases affect our judgements. Bias is explainable, and our brains like things they can explain.

One of the leading explainers of our biases is economist Daniel Kahneman, famed for a Nobel win and his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He's now teamed with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein to write a book... that's... not about bias. Entitled Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement, it deals with—you guessed it—noise, the variability among human judgements that is the result of humans being variable. We have distinct temperaments and personalities; we are different from each other, and we are different from ourselves, certainly from year to year but also even from hour to hour.

All of that noise is totally OK. But it is totally not OK when it means that one petty thief is granted bail while another must await trial in jail, or one asylum seeker gets admitted into the US while another does not, or one child at risk of abuse gets shunted into foster care while another stays put—all because they saw a particular judge on a particular morning.

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Genetic tricks of the longest-lived animals

Enlarge / Bats, remarkable little things. (credit: Bernd Wolter / EyeEm)

Life, for most of us, ends far too soon—hence the effort by biomedical researchers to find ways to delay the aging process and extend our stay on Earth. But there’s a paradox at the heart of the science of aging: The vast majority of research focuses on fruit flies, nematode worms and laboratory mice, because they’re easy to work with and lots of genetic tools are available. And yet, a major reason that geneticists chose these species in the first place is because they have short lifespans. In effect, we’ve been learning about longevity from organisms that are the least successful at the game.

Today, a small number of researchers are taking a different approach and studying unusually long-lived creatures—ones that, for whatever evolutionary reasons, have been imbued with lifespans far longer than other creatures they’re closely related to. The hope is that by exploring and understanding the genes and biochemical pathways that impart long life, researchers may ultimately uncover tricks that can extend our own lifespans, too.

Everyone has a rough idea of what aging is, just from experiencing it as it happens to themselves and others. Our skin sags, our hair goes gray, joints stiffen and creak—all signs that our components—that is, proteins and other biomolecules—aren’t what they used to be. As a result, we’re more prone to chronic diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes—and the older we get, the more likely we are to die each year. “You live, and by living you produce negative consequences like molecular damage. This damage accumulates over time,” says Vadim Gladyshev, who researches aging at Harvard Medical School. “In essence, this is aging.”

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Building a better edible

Enlarge / "Digital generated image of popsicles organized into rainbow colored pattern on pink surface," thanks Getty Images. (credit: Getty Images)

Lo Friesen reaches for a plastic bag the size of a pillowcase filled with dark green plant matter. “Here we have some more material for our edibles clients,” she says. “Just giant bags of weed."

Behind her, something is making a soft, regular chirping noise, like a little bird. Friesen turns and gestures at a silver contraption made of pipes and cylinders. “These are our machines,” she says. “This is where the material goes in.”

Friesen is a cannabis extractor in Seattle. Her company, Heylo Cannabis, is part of a whole ecosystem of suppliers, processors and distributors that has sprouted up since Washington state legalized marijuana in 2012. In this food chain, Friesen is somewhere between the plant growers and the retailers that sell to consumers. With the help of the chirping machines, her team separates and distills the various compounds found in the raw cannabis plant—the essence of weed. The result is a kind of oily, maple syrup–colored liquid that gently sloshes in glass flasks and jars in her lab.

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Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense

Sunspring, a short science fiction movie written entirely by AI, debuted exclusively on Ars in June 2016. (video link)

Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that's not entirely what it seems. It's about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it's the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to "go to the skull" before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn't the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that's what we'd call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.

Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer, initially called Jetson. As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor." Then Sharp randomly assigned roles to the actors in the room. "As soon as we had a read-through, everyone around the table was laughing their heads off with delight," Sharp told Ars. The actors interpreted the lines as they read, adding tone and body language, and the results are what you see in the movie. Somehow, a slightly garbled series of sentences became a tale of romance and murder, set in a dark future world. It even has its own musical interlude (performed by Andrew and Tiger), with a pop song Benjamin composed after learning from a corpus of 30,000 other pop songs.

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The SolarWinds hackers aren’t back—they never went away

Enlarge / "And people reliably click on these emails? Really?" (credit: Kremlin official photo)

The Russian hackers who breached SolarWinds IT management software to compromise a slew of United States government agencies and businesses are back in the limelight. Microsoft said on Thursday that the same “Nobelium” spy group has built out an aggressive phishing campaign since January of this year and ramped it up significantly this week, targeting roughly 3,000 individuals at more than 150 organizations in 24 countries.

The revelation caused a stir, highlighting as it did Russia's ongoing and inveterate digital espionage campaigns. But it should be no shock at all that Russia in general, and the SolarWinds hackers in particular, have continued to spy even after the US imposed retaliatory sanctions in April. And relative to SolarWinds, a phishing campaign seems downright ordinary.

“I don’t think it’s an escalation, I think it’s business as usual,” says John Hultquist, vice president of intelligence analysis at the security firm FireEye, which first discovered the SolarWinds intrusions. “I don’t think they’re deterred and I don’t think they’re likely to be deterred.”

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Deepfake maps could really mess with your sense of the world

Enlarge / A macro shot of the city of Seattle, Washington, on a map. (credit: Getty Images)

Satellite images showing the expansion of large detention camps in Xinjiang, China, between 2016 and 2018 provided some of the strongest evidence of a government crackdown on more than a million Muslims, triggering international condemnation and sanctions.

Other aerial images—of nuclear installations in Iran and missile sites in North Korea, for example—have had a similar impact on world events. Now, image-manipulation tools made possible by artificial intelligence may make it harder to accept such images at face value.

In a paper published online last month, University of Washington professor Bo Zhao employed AI techniques similar to those used to create so-called deepfakes to alter satellite images of several cities. Zhao and colleagues swapped features between images of Seattle and Beijing to show buildings where there are none in Seattle and to remove structures and replace them with greenery in Beijing.

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Heads up! The cardiovascular secrets of giraffes

Enlarge / Three-month baby giraffe of Niger (Giraffa camelopardalis) named "Kano" looks on at the zoological park Zoo de la Fleche in La Fleche, northwestern France, on May 4, 2021. (credit: Jean-Francois MONIER / AFP / Getty Images)

To most people, giraffes are merely adorable, long-necked animals that rank near the top of a zoo visit or a photo-safari bucket list. But to a cardiovascular physiologist, there’s even more to love. Giraffes, it turns out, have solved a problem that kills millions of people every year: high blood pressure. Their solutions, only partly understood by scientists so far, involve pressurized organs, altered heart rhythms, blood storage—and the biological equivalent of support stockings.

Giraffes have sky-high blood pressure because of their sky-high heads that, in adults, rise about six meters (almost 20 feet) above the ground—a long, long way for a heart to pump blood against gravity. To have a blood pressure of 110/70 at the brain—about normal for a large mammal—giraffes need a blood pressure at the heart of about 220/180. It doesn’t faze the giraffes, but a pressure like that would cause all sorts of problems for people, from heart failure to kidney failure to swollen ankles and legs.

In people, chronic high blood pressure causes a thickening of the heart muscles. The left ventricle of the heart becomes stiffer and less able to fill again after each stroke, leading to a disease known as diastolic heart failure, characterized by fatigue, shortness of breath and reduced ability to exercise. This type of heart failure is responsible for nearly half of the 6.2 million heart failure cases in the US today.

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Amazon devices will soon automatically share your Internet with neighbors

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If you use Alexa, Echo, or any other Amazon device, you have only 10 days to opt out of an experiment that leaves your personal privacy and security hanging in the balance.

On June 8, the merchant, Web host, and entertainment behemoth will automatically enroll the devices in Amazon Sidewalk. The new wireless mesh service will share a small slice of your Internet bandwidth with nearby neighbors who don’t have connectivity and help you to their bandwidth when you don’t have a connection.

By default, Amazon devices including Alexa, Echo, Ring, security cams, outdoor lights, motion sensors, and Tile trackers will enroll in the system. And since only a tiny fraction of people take the time to change default settings, that means millions of people will be co-opted into the program whether they know anything about it or not.

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Ancient cemetery tells a tale of constant, low level warfare

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When archaeologists in the 1960s unearthed a 13,400-year-old cemetery at Jebel Sahaba in Sudan, it looked like they’d stumbled across the aftermath of a large-scale battle fought during the Pleistocene. At least half the people buried at the site, which straddles the banks of the Upper Nile, bore the marks of violence: broken skulls, arrow and spear tracks gouged in bones, and stone projectiles still embedded in their bodies.

The site now lies at the bottom of the human-made Lake Nasser, created by the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s. But the remains now reside in the British Museum’s collection (for better or worse), and anthropologists Isabelle Crevecoeur of the University of Bordeaux and Daniel Antoine of the British Museum recently re-examined the skeletons. With more modern microscope technology, the anthropologists noticed some skeletal trauma that the original archaeologists had missed. It turned out that about two thirds of the population of the ancient cemetery had bones damaged by either blunt-force trauma or—most often—by projectiles like spears and arrows. That included three out of four adults and roughly half the children.

Since the 1960s, archaeologists have thought of Jebel Sahaba as the earliest example of large-scale warfare between groups of people. But despite all the evidence of violence, the bones of the 13,000-year-old dead don’t actually seem to tell the story of a pitched battle with massive casualties. Instead, it looks like people along the Upper Nile Valley at the end of the Pleistocene lived with the constant threat of smaller-scale fighting, which affected men, women, and children alike. If you’re a gamer, think of it as living in a PvP zone in the midst of an environmental crisis.

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The best Memorial Day sales we can find on laptops, video games, and more tech

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Memorial Day weekend has arrived, which means it's time for a special holiday edition of the Dealmaster's usual deals roundup.

As is often the case, this year's crop of Memorial Day sales aren't explicitly focused on electronics as much as mattresses, appliances, and other home goods. Those who can hold out for more sweeping sales events like Amazon Prime Day or Black Friday will generally find better prices on a wider selection of tech.

That said, we've pored through the various Memorial Day sales on offer and have still found a number of good deals on recommended video games, laptops, headphones, and other gadgets happening this weekend. Among the highlights are Sony and Epic's ongoing sales on PlayStation and PC games, respectively: the former has brought larger-than-usual price drops on a number of PS4 and PS5 exclusives, while the latter has doled out a recurring coupon that lets you take $10 off almost any game priced at $15 or higher.

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Stardew Valley: The Board Game—a loving production but a mixed review from Grandpa

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Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

Stardew Valley: The Board Game was a surprise February announcement. Somehow this colorful collaboration between Cole Medeiros and Stardew Valley's sole developer Eric Barone was kept hush-hush for two years. When it was finally announced, it sold out quickly.

Given the long development time and the obvious demand, expectations were high for this cardboard adaptation to deliver on its potential. Unfortunately, there’s a few sticks and crumpled refuse mixed in with the game's gifts of starfruit and ore.

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