Captive beluga whales make epic journey from China to Iceland sanctuary

Two beluga whales from a Shanghai aquarium arrived in Iceland on Wednesday to live out their days in a unique marine sanctuary that conservationists hope will become a model for rehoming some 3,000 of the creatures currently in captivity.

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Teaching artificial intelligence to connect senses like vision and touch

In Canadian author Margaret Atwood's book The Blind Assassin, she says that "touch comes before sight, before speech. It's the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth."

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Toward artificial intelligence that learns to write code

Learning to code involves recognizing how to structure a program, and how to fill in every last detail correctly. No wonder it can be so frustrating.

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Serotonin linked to somatic awareness, a condition long thought to be imaginary

An international team spearheaded by researchers at McGill University has discovered a biological mechanism that could explain heightened somatic awareness, a condition where patients experience physical discomforts for which there is no physiological explanation.

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Ediacaran dinner party featured plenty to eat, adequate sanitation, computer model shows

Earth's first dinner party wasn't impressive, just a bunch of soft-bodied Ediacaran organisms sunk into sediment on the ocean floor, sharing in scraps of organic matter suspended in the water around them.

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Investigating coral and algal 'matchmaking' at the cellular level

What factors govern algae's success as "tenants" of their coral hosts both under optimal conditions and when oceanic temperatures rise? A Victoria University of Wellington-led team of experts that includes Carnegie's Arthur Grossman investigates this question.

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A new approach for unsupervised paraphrasing without translation

In recent years, researchers have been trying to develop methods for automatic paraphrasing, which essentially entails the automated abstraction of semantic content from text. So far, approaches that rely on machine translation (MT) techniques have proved particularly popular due to the lack of available labeled datasets of paraphrased pairs.

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People with multiple physical conditions have faster brain decline, higher suicide risk

Having arthritis, or diabetes, or heart disease can change a person's life, getting in the way of daily activities and requiring special diets and medicines.

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Marriage may not aid financial savings for those who favor immediate rewards

A study of married couples in Vietnam suggests that, when one spouse tends to favor immediate rewards, marriage does not help them commit to saving money. Hisaki Kono of Kyoto University, Japan, and Tomomi Tanaka of the World Bank, US, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

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Mobile crisis service reduces youth ER visits for behavioral health needs, says study

Children and youth with acute behavioral health needs who are seen through Connecticut's Mobile Crisis Intervention Service—a community-based program that provides mental health interventions and services to patients 18 years and younger—have a lower risk of experiencing a follow-up episode and are less likely to show up in an emergency room if and when another episode occurs.

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New time-banking system utilizes blockchain tech to measure one's value to society

Citizens from the island of Aneityum in the Republic of Vanuatu are working with faculty from Binghamton University, State University of New York to test their true value as humans.

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Creating 3-D images with regular ink

This month, 5,000 distinctive cans of Fuzzy Logic beer will appear on local shelves as part of Massachusetts-based Portico Brewing's attempt to stand out in the aesthetically competitive world of craft beer.

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SPFCNN-Miner: A new classifier to tackle class-unbalanced data

Researchers at Chongqing University in China have recently developed a cost-sensitive meta-learning classifier that can be used when the training data available is high-dimensional or limited. Their classifier, called SPFCNN-Miner, was presented in a paper published in Elsevier's Future Generation Computer Systems.

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Summer is coming! Here's why you need to protect your children's eyes

Should we buy sunglasses for children? And if so, how do we choose a quality product?

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Locally-based Haitian social entrepreneurs empower disaster-stricken villages

Steffen Farny, Ewald Kibler and Simon Down report how communities can better cope and move on from the trauma of natural disasters, and build hope for the future. Farny says, "Aside from the physical damage, the aftermath of a natural disaster can also create a cultural trauma, so we wanted to look beyond the first phase of disaster response and focus on the longer-term repercussions and approaches to rebuilding." They turned their attention to the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake of 2010, which killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and collapsed the government in the process.

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Reducing brain inflammation could treat tinnitus and other hearing loss-related disorders

Inflammation in a sound-processing region of the brain mediates ringing in the ears in mice that have noise-induced hearing loss, according to a study publishing June 18 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Shaowen Bao of the University of Arizona, and colleagues.

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Applying active inference body perception to a humanoid robot

A key challenge for robotics researchers is developing systems that can interact with humans and their surrounding environment in situations that involve varying degrees of uncertainty. In fact, while humans can continuously learn from their experiences and perceive their body as a whole as they interact with the world, robots do not yet have these capabilities.

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Study reveals key locations for declining songbird

Many of North America's migratory songbirds, which undertake awe-inspiring journeys twice a year, are declining at alarming rates. For conservation efforts to succeed, wildlife managers need to know where they go and what challenges they face during their annual migration to Latin America and back. For a new study published by The Condor: Ornithological Applications, researchers in six states assembled an unprecedented effort to track where Prothonotary Warblers that breed across the eastern U.S. go in winter—their "migratory connectivity"—and found that nearly the entire species depends on a relatively small area in Colombia threatened by deforestation and sociopolitical changes.

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Corsica's 'cat-fox': On the trail of what may be a new species

In the forest undergrowth of northern Corsica, two wildlife rangers open a cage to reveal a striped, tawny-coated animal, one of 16 felines known as "cat-foxes" in the area and thought to be a new species.

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U.S. youth suicide rate reaches 20-year high

(HealthDay)—Suicide rates among teens and young adults have reached their highest point in nearly two decades, a new study reports.

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