Qué invadimos ahora

UNESCO

Science communication: disinformation and fake news

Being well informed as a citizen or not depends on our ability and motivation to detect falsehood, but also on other social factors that increase or decrease the chances that we are exposed to the correct information. This is the conclusion of the recently published study entitled Sciences audiences, misinformation and fake news 1. Its objective has been to review what is known about the misinformation that exists in scientific issues to improve the communication of science and identify what is missing in it.

The study offers a panoramic view on how and why citizens are incorrectly informed on issues related to science. In the first place it warns of the terms: misinformation, disinformation and uniformed. All refer to the erroneous information but they have differences. Misinformation is the one that probably arose by accident; disinformation is a type of misinformation that arises intentionally false and uninformed, which can be accidental or intentional. The distinctions between these terms, as well as other concepts such as “rumor” or “fake news”, have not always been clearly defined in research related to these topics, which makes it difficult sometimes to compare some data with others.

As the authors of the study say, handling incorrect information can have specific causes and consequences, especially if the citizen is especially active at the time of transmitting information and, especially, if this citizen is, on that information that is disseminated, poorly informed. For the authors, both characteristics imply that this citizen will hardly abandon his beliefs and opinions to accept new ones. This is related to what he calls “epistemic knowledge” of science, that is, the levels of information or misinformation that non-experts have about the scientific process and how they transform that information into knowledge based on the findings produced by science. An example of epistemic knowledge is that which is reflected in the results of the survey of US Science and Engineering Indicators. This survey measures general knowledge about scientific facts and its authors consider that it is related to the level of formal education of citizens and the scientific training they have. The latest survey reflects results such as the following: one in three Americans misunderstood the concept of probability; half of the population was not able to make a correct description of a scientific experiment and three out of four could not describe the main topic of a scientific study.

Another issue about the existence and dissemination of false scientific news is that of the belief in conspiracy theories, that is, those created intentionally by a group of people seeking a common benefit. According to the study, those who believe in these theories are people who, on the one hand, trust more in their intuition than in their conscious reasoning and, on the other, do not believe in falsehoods but rather support these theories to defend their ideology or to affirm your membership in a group. As the study states, the persistence of these conspiratorial beliefs is the result of politicians, the media and other agents who use them as fallacious tools to reinforce their ideas.

To this it is added that citizens have a low level of media literacy, that is, they can not analyze and evaluate the messages they receive in terms of truthfulness and quality. Therefore, apart from the fact that communication platforms are changing their algorithms, platforms such as Politifact.com and Factcheck.org have also emerged, as a countermeasure, to verify the information and disprove the fake news or hoaxes.

Naukas

Aires acondicionados sin consumo eléctrico

La alta demanda de aires acondicionados agravará los problemas ambientales por el alto consumo energético y los químicos tóxicos de estos aparatos. Sin embargo, existe un prototipo que transforma la energía térmica en una onda acústica para así lograr el enfriamiento sin usar gases tóxicos ni electricidad.

Según la Agencia Internacional de Energía (AIE) seis mil millones de aires acondicionados pueden llegar a consumir el 37% de la electricidad mundial. El aumento de la demanda en China e India por la instalación masiva de este tipo de aparatos los va a convertir en una catástrofe ambiental en el actual contexto de cambio climático.

Existe una alternativa para fabricar un aire acondicionado que no requiere de electricidad para funcionar. Se basa en los principios de termoacústica y fue diseñado en la ciudad de Enschedeen, en los Países Bajos.

La tecnología, que SoundEnergy presentó en el CES de Las Vegas, usa un proceso similar al de un motor Stirling, que se conceptualizó por primera vez hace 200 años, a principios del siglo XIX.
De energía térmica a onda acústica.

SoundEnergy es la empresa que ha presentado un prototipo (THEAC-25) que toma la energía térmica y la transforma en una onda acústica. Después viaja a través de un bucle infinito presurizado en donde se amplifica, lo que la hace más fuerte.

Desde el punto de vista de la aplicación, es una bomba de calor impulsada por calor o por calor solar, que requiere la conexión de tres circuitos externos a la aplicación.

El equipo proporciona hasta 25 kW de potencia de enfriamiento durante las horas de sol. La salida de frío puede alcanzar hasta los -25 ° C.

Los sistemas tradicionales de aire acondicionado utilizan fluidos químicos que son altamente dañinos para el medio ambiente. El único gas que usa THEAC-25 es el argón. El 0,94% de nuestra atmósfera está compuesta de este gas, por lo que no afecta al calentamiento global.

Ecoinventos

music sounds

comunidades

Existe uma ‘comunidade internacional do batá’ - como existe do samba, da capoeira, do maracatu, etc. Essas ‘comunidades’ criam amizades, estreitam laços e misturam culturas, contribuindo para a criação de um sentimemto de unidade planetária, que vai na direção oposta da mentalidade de divisão e exclusão que alguns preferem adotar. Ontem tive o prazer de reunir na minha casa, um catalão que toca comigo aqui no Rio, @fertamarit , e um inglês, @robertoarcari que eu conheci em Londres há alguns anos, e que veio ao Rio tocar no carnaval. Só a cultura salva - e salve a cultura popular, que salva mais que todas as outras!

xu-hongfei

http://www.xu-hongfei.com/

Azufaifar

Ruta Cambio Climático

Esta ruta permite conocer la problemática asociada al cambio climático en la zona semiárida almeriense y poner en valor los hábitats de azufaifos o artos blancos (Ziziphus lotus), como se conocen en Almería. Incluye dos itinerarios (Norte y Sur), de ida y vuelta por el mismo sendero, y de baja dificultad que permiten visualizar aspectos claves para comprender el efecto del cambio climático sobre los ecosistemas semiáridos que dependen del agua subterránea. Ambos se complementan en la información que ofrecen a través de diversos hitos o puntos de información donde se podrá descargar información adicional vinculada al ecosistema del Azufaifar.

Collaborative knowledge for understanding and adaptation of global change

In collaboration with teachers from non-university educational centres, we are setting up a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course or CAEM, Curso Abierto en Línea Masivo) to promote interaction between students and teachers from all educational levels with the aim of generating collaborative knowledge related to global change adaptation. The CAESCG objective will be to give attractive, technical, scientific content that the users of MOOC could benefit from and which would contribute to their dynamism. We think that using this and another TIC tools will be useful to improve the students’ personal experience, to become collective and expanded in time and space. We hope this will improve the perception of change patterns of ecosystems over the last decades at a global level and their impact on the services provided to the people and, consequently, to our wellbeing.

The experience is developed in the framework of the “Analysis of the teaching-learning process in innovating formats” project, a researching and educational innovation project supported by the Ministry of Education of the Andalusian Regional Government.

imaging brains

Recently, the journal Science showed in its cover an amazing image of a close up into the fly brain. This is the result of the combined effort of two research groups working on imaging. The first one (Boyden’s) had developed a way to increase the size of preserved samples, like a brain slice, up to 4 times by using an absorbable polymer similar to the one used in baby diapers and dosing it with water while at the same time making them transparent. The second technique, lattice light-sheet microscope from the Betzig lab 1, is based on an ultrathin sheet of light which illuminates only the part in the microscope’s plane of focus. That helps out-of-focus areas stay dark, keeping a specimen’s fluorescence from being extinguished. This characteristic, together with its speed, made it a plausible ideal choice for the microscope to image huge chunks of expanded brains, and so it was. Even though the samples had to be repositioned and the image data acquired repositioned and stitched so as to rebuild the whole 3D data set (with the huge amount of data that implies), the whole acquisition time
was relatively short: 62 hours.


They traced proteins, tiny cellular protrusions known as dendritic spines, and dopaminergic neurons. And that is just an example of the range of possibly interesting things to investigate with such a technique. Depending on labelling, in the future, it would be possible to track neuron connections, examine neurotransmitter or neuron type distribution…

Mapping ignorance

LEO LEOBONS