Declining Life Expectancy in the United States
This Viewpoint reviews the social and economic drivers of declines in longevity in the US, especially among lower socioeconomic status groups, and proposes policy options for the Biden-Harris administration to mitigate the trend, including an increase in the federally mandated minimum wage. Atheendar...
Source: jamanetwork.com
Abundant Rain Turns Namibia Green
The landscape has been transformed by the wettest rainy season since 2011. "January 2021 saw rainfall totals double to triple the norm in the northeastern, central, and southern parts of Namibia. According to a weather monitor in Windhoek, 228 millimeters (9 inches) of rain fell in January; the long-term...
Source: nasa.gov
'Concerning' rise in pre-teens self-injuring.
"The rate of hospital admissions for nine to 12-year-olds who self-injure has doubled in six years." "In 2019-20, before the coronavirus pandemic, there were 16 hospital admissions per 100,000 nine to 12-year-olds, up from eight in 2013-14. Self-injury admissions for girls in this age group were twice...
Source: bbc.com
Brain-Based Learning, Myth versus Reality: Testing Learning Styles and Dual Coding | Science-Based Medicine: Ed. Note: Today
Brain-Based Learning, Myth versus Reality: Testing Learning Styles and Dual Coding | Science-Based Medicine: Ed. Note: Today we present a guest post from Josh Cuevas, a cognitive psychologist and assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of North Georgia. Enjoy! "Since early on...
Source: sciencebasedmedicine.org
3D Scene Understanding with TensorFlow 3D
Posted by Alireza Fathi, Research Scientist and Rui Huang, AI Resident, Google Research "The growing ubiquity of 3D sensors (e.g., Lidar, depth sensing cameras and radar) over the last few years has created a need for scene understanding technology that can process the data these devices capture. Such...
Source: googleblog.com
Stonehenge: Did the stone circle originally stand in Wales?
Archaeologists now believe the stone circle stood 150 miles from its current location in Wiltshire. "One of Britain's biggest and oldest stone circles has been found in Wales - and could be the original building blocks of Stonehenge. Archaeologists uncovered the remains of the Waun Mawn site in Pembrokeshire's...
Source: bbc.com
Using whale songs to image beneath the ocean
Using whale songs to image beneath the ocean’s floor: Seismic data generated by whale songs helps build a picture of the ocean's base. "The song of a fin whale is not exactly the sort of thing you'd typically describe as musical. It's generally in the area of 20Hz, which sounds more like a series of...
Source: arstechnica.com
Word of the day: deprecated
Geek talk. The tech behind this blog which takes any link that I find interesting and, instead of curating it for LinkedIn / Twitter / Facebook, curates it here on something I have control over broke. I accidentally upgraded the server to PHP8 and an old function in PHP each() no longer worked. Took...
Introducing Open-AI's DALL-E.
Ever wondered what an armchair in the shape of an avocado might look like? Introducing Open-AI's DALL-E.
Does this help with accessibility by explaining things in pictures from written words? Does it risk replacing humans in the creative industry with machines?
"DALL·E: Creating Images from...
Source: openai.com
11 TOPS photonic convolutional accelerator for optical neural networks: Convolutional neural networks, inspired by biological
11 TOPS photonic convolutional accelerator for optical neural networks: Convolutional neural networks, inspired by biological visual cortex systems, are a powerful category of artificial neural networks that can extract the hierarchical features of raw data to provide greatly reduced parametric complexity...
Source: nature.com
Asteroid sample arrives in Japan after six-year space odyssey: Samples of an asteroid 300 million km from Earth arrived
Asteroid sample arrives in Japan after six-year space odyssey: Samples of an asteroid 300 million km from Earth arrived in Japan on Tuesday to applause and smiles, the climax of a six-year odyssey by a space probe pursuing the origins of life.
Source: reuters.com
MMR, smoking, and 'in-vitro' models in COVID-19
Good summary of current science news topics for coronavirus in Reuters. Strong responders to MMR II vaccine (since 1979) have less severe disease with COVID-19, cigarette smoke increases risk, and a useful 'in-vivo' model for further study of how SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses might be treated.
Source: reuters.com
Meet Nazirini AI App developer in Uganda
Machine learning meets African agriculture: Developers using TensorFlow to fight crop pests in Uganda. Meet Nazirini one of the developers.
Source: blog.google
Victorian hologram keeps music in touch with lockdown audience
"Victorian hologram keeps music in touch with lockdown audience: Musicians are using an interactive hologram based on Victorian technology to reach fans in the locked down world of the coronavirus pandemic." The two musicians join a pianist who is live on stage. They are made to appear on stage because...
Source: reuters.com
The Plastic Pandemic: COVID-19 trashed the recycling dream: Recyclers struggle as oil world invests hundreds of billions
The Plastic Pandemic: COVID-19 trashed the recycling dream: Recyclers struggle as oil world invests hundreds of billions to make new plastic
Source: reuters.com
Covid-19: The global crisis — in data: Charts and maps show paradoxes of a pandemic that has claimed a million lives
Covid-19: The global crisis — in data: Charts and maps show paradoxes of a pandemic that has claimed a million lives
Source: ig.ft.com
Photographer 'Devastated' After Her Unsplash Photo Was Used in 'Crass' UK Ad Campaign
Photographer 'Devastated' After Her Unsplash Photo Was Used in 'Crass' UK Ad Campaign: Atlanta photographer Krys Alex is speaking out after a portrait she took and posted to Unsplash was used in a controversial UK ad campaign.
Source: petapixel.com
Stripe acquires Nigeria's Paystack for over $200 million to expand its footprint in Africa
Africa is a great opportunity for ecommerce in coming decades and Nigeria's Paystack has been growing fast. "Stripe is a San Francisco-based fintech startup that provides payments infrastructure for businesses. Its software and APIs are used by millions of companies of all sizes to accept payments,...
Source: techstartups.com
"Black in Tech Berlin" campaigns for the employment of young black engineers | Africanews
"Black in Tech Berlin" campaigns for the employment of young black engineers | Africanews
Source: africanews.com
The tyranny of merit.
The Insufferable Hubris of the Well-Credentialed: A four-year college degree has become necessary for dignified work. Michael Sandel says that’s a huge mistake. "The meritocratic hubris of elites is the conviction by those who land on top that their success is their own doing, that they have risen...
Source: chronicle.com
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