Monday, 3 June 2019

From viruses to social bots, researchers unearth the structure of attacked networks

The human body's mechanisms are marvelous, yet they haven't given up all their secrets. In order to truly conquer human disease, it is crucial to understand what happens at the most elementary level.

* This article was originally published here

Water filters, efficient cookstoves improve health in vulnerable Rwandan populations

A large-scale program to deliver water filters and portable biomass-burning cookstoves to Rwandan homes reduced the prevalence of reported diarrhea and acute respiratory infection in children under 5 years old by 29 percent and 25 percent, respectively, according to new findings published today in the journal PLOS Medicine.

* This article was originally published here

Say cheers to lighter summer drinks

(HealthDay)—Want to celebrate longer days and warmer nights with fewer calories? Try these smart ways to cut the calories from favorite cocktails.

* This article was originally published here

Researchers find slowdown in Earth's temps stabilized nature's calendar

Sometimes referred to as nature's calendar, phenology looks at the seasonal life cycle of plants and animals and is one of the leading indicators of climate change. It's the observance of natural occurrences like the first formation of buds and flowers in the spring and the changing colors of leaves in the fall. According to researchers at the University of New Hampshire, when the rate of the Earth's air temperature slows down for a significant amount of time, so can phenology.

* This article was originally published here

Exotic pets can become pests with risk of invasion

A large proportion of successful vertebrate invasions can be traced to the global exotic pet trade. However, surprisingly little is known about the economic, social, and ecological factors that shape the trade and how they influence the establishment of self-sustaining populations of non-native species.

* This article was originally published here

An AI taught itself to play a video game and now it's beating humans

Since the earliest days of virtual chess and solitaire, video games have been a playing field for developing artificial intelligence (AI). Each victory of machine against human has helped make algorithms smarter and more efficient. But in order to tackle real world problems—such as automating complex tasks including driving and negotiation—these algorithms must navigate more complex environments than board games, and learn teamwork. Teaching AI how to work and interact with other players to succeed had been an insurmountable task—until now.

* This article was originally published here

Research team develops bioinks to print therapeutics in 3-D

A team of researchers at Texas A&M University has developed an innovative way to print therapeutics in 3-D for regenerative medicine.

* This article was originally published here

Stanford Doggo: a highly agile quadruped robot

Researchers at Stanford University have recently created an open-source quadruped robot called Stanford Doggo. Their robot, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv and set to be published by IEEE Explore, exceeds the performance of many state-of-the-art legged robots in vertical jumping agility.

* This article was originally published here

REPLAB: A low-cost benchmark platform for robotic learning

Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a reproducible, low-cost and compact benchmark platform to evaluate robotic learning approaches, which they called REPLAB. Their recent study, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, was supported by Berkeley DeepDrive, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Google, NVIDIA and Amazon.

* This article was originally published here