Daily Archives: August 15, 2024

Scientists find humans age dramatically in two bursts – at 44, then 60

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[…] The study, which tracked thousands of different molecules in people aged 25 to 75, detected two major waves of age-related changes at around ages 44 and again at 60. The findings could explain why spikes in certain health issues including musculoskeletal problems and cardiovascular disease occur at certain ages.

“We’re not just changing gradually over time. There are some really dramatic changes,”

[…]

The research tracked 108 volunteers, who submitted blood and stool samples and skin, oral and nasal swabs every few months for between one and nearly seven years. Researchers assessed 135,000 different molecules (RNA, proteins and metabolites) and microbes (the bacteria, viruses and fungi living in the guts and on the skin of the participants).

The abundance of most molecules and microbes did not shift in a gradual, chronological fashion. When the scientists looked for clusters of molecules with the largest shifts, they found these transformations tended to occur when people were in their mid-40s and early 60s.

[…]

The first wave of changes included molecules linked to cardiovascular disease and the ability to metabolise caffeine, alcohol and lipids. The second wave of changes included molecules involved in immune regulation, carbohydrate metabolism and kidney function. Molecules linked to skin and muscle ageing changed at both time points. Previous research suggested that a later spike in ageing may occur around the age of 78, but the latest study could not confirm this because the oldest participants were 75.

The pattern fits with previous evidence that the risk of many age-related diseases does not increase incrementally, with Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease risk showing a steep uptick after 60.

[…]

Source: Scientists find humans age dramatically in two bursts – at 44, then 60 | Medical research | The Guardian

Texas AG Latest To Sue GM For Covertly Selling Driver Data To Insurance Companies

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Last year Mozilla released a report showcasing how the auto industry has some of the worst privacy practices of any tech industry in America (no small feat). Massive amounts of driver behavior is collected by your car, and even more is hoovered up from your smartphone every time you connect. This data isn’t secured, often isn’t encrypted, and is sold to a long list of dodgy, unregulated middlemen.

Last March the New York Times revealed that automakers like GM routinely sell access to driver behavior data to insurance companies, which then use that data to justify jacking up your rates. The practice isn’t clearly disclosed to consumers, and has resulted in 11 federal lawsuits in less than a month.

Now Texas AG Ken Paxton has belatedly joined the fun, filing suit (press release, complaint) in the state district court of Montgomery County against GM for “false, deceptive, and misleading business practices”:

“Companies are using invasive technology to violate the rights of our citizens in unthinkable ways. Millions of American drivers wanted to buy a car, not a comprehensive surveillance system that unlawfully records information about every drive they take and sells their data to any company willing to pay for it.”

Paxton notes that GM’s tracking impacted 1.8 million Texans and 14 million vehicles, few if any of whom understood they were signing up to be spied on by their vehicle. This is, amazingly enough, the first state lawsuit against an automaker for privacy violations, according to Politico.

The sales pitch for this kind of tracking and sales is that good drivers will be rewarded for more careful driving. But as publicly-traded companies, everybody in this chain — from insurance companies to automakers — are utterly financially desensitized from giving anybody a consistent break for good behavior. That’s just not how it’s going to work. Everybody pays more and more. Always.

But GM and other automakers’ primary problem is they weren’t telling consumers this kind of tracking was even happening in any clear, direct way. Usually it’s buried deep in an unread end user agreement for roadside assistant apps and related services. Those services usually involve a free trial, but the user agreement to data collection sticks around.

[…]

Source: Texas AG Latest To Sue GM For Covertly Selling Driver Data To Insurance Companies | Techdirt

Singing from memory shows most people can actually sing pitch perfect or very very close

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Psychologists from UC Santa Cruz wanted to study “earworms,” the types of songs that get stuck in your head and play automatically on a loop. So they asked people to sing out any earworms they were experiencing and record them on their phones when prompted at random times throughout the day.

When researchers analyzed the recordings, they found that a remarkable proportion of them perfectly matched the of the original songs they were based upon.

More specifically, 44.7% of recordings had a pitch error of 0 semitones, and 68.9% were accurate within 1 semitone of the original . These findings were published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

“What this shows is that a surprisingly large portion of the population has a type of automatic, hidden ‘perfect pitch’ ability,”

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“Interestingly, if you were to ask people how they thought they did in this task, they would probably be pretty confident that they had the melody right, but they would be much less certain that they were singing in the right key,” Evans said.

“As it turns out, many people with very strong pitch memory may not have very good judgment of their own accuracy, and that may be because they don’t have the labeling ability that comes with true perfect pitch.”

Evans explained that true perfect pitch is the ability to accurately produce or identify a given note on the first try and without a reference pitch. […] scientists are increasingly finding that accurate pitch memory is much more common.

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“People who study memory often think about long-term memories as capturing the gist of something, where the brain takes shortcuts to represent information, and one way our brains could try to represent the gist of music would be to forget what the original key was,” explained Professor Davidenko.

“Music sounds very similar in different keys, so it would be a good shortcut for the brain to just ignore that information, but it turns out that it’s not ignored.

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He noted that the pitch accuracy of participants in the study was not predicted by any objective measures of singing ability, and none of the participants were musicians or reported having perfect pitch. In other words, you don’t have to have special abilities to demonstrate this foundational musical skill.

[…]

Source: Singing from memory unlocks a surprisingly common musical superpower

Researchers figure out how to keep clocks on the Earth, Moon in sync

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[…] Our communications and GPS networks all depend on keeping careful track of the precise timing of signals—including accounting for the effects of relativity. The deeper into a gravitational well you go, the slower time moves, and we’ve reached the point where we can detect differences in altitude of a single millimeter. Time literally flows faster at the altitude where GPS satellites are than it does for clocks situated on Earth’s surface. Complicating matters further, those satellites are moving at high velocities, an effect that slows things down.

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It would be easy to set up an equivalent system to track time on the Moon, but that would inevitably see the clocks run out of sync with those on Earth—a serious problem for things like scientific observations

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Ashby and Patla worked on developing a system where anything can be calculated in reference to the center of mass of the Earth/Moon system. Or, as they put it in the paper, their mathematical system “enables us to compare clock rates on the Moon and cislunar Lagrange points with respect to clocks on Earth by using a metric appropriate for a locally freely falling frame such as the center of mass of the Earth–Moon system in the Sun’s gravitational field.”

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The paper’s body has 55 of them, and there are another 67 in the appendices.

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Things get complicated because there are so many factors to consider. There are tidal effects from the Sun and other planets. Anything on the surface of the Earth or Moon is moving due to rotation; other objects are moving while in orbit. The gravitational influence on time will depend on where an object is located.

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he researchers say that their approach, while focused on the Earth/Moon system, is still generalizable. Which means that it should be possible to modify it and create a frame of reference that would work on both Earth and anywhere else in the Solar System. Which, given the pace at which we’ve sent things beyond low-Earth orbit, is probably a healthy amount of future-proofing.

The Astronomical Journal, 2024. DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ad643a  (About DOIs).

Source: Researchers figure out how to keep clocks on the Earth, Moon in sync | Ars Technica