
The fate of the planet
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From engineered pandemics to city-toppling cyber attacks to nuclear annihilation, life on Earth could radically change, and soon. Scientists will forecast the fate of the planet at a press conference during the 2021 APS April Meeting.
Professor Junsuk Rho's research team at POSTECH develops wearable gas sensors that display instantaneous visual holographic alarm.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has sped up the process of detecting flooded buildings immediately after a large-scale flood, allowing emergency personnel to direct their efforts efficiently. Now, a research group from Tohoku University has created a machine learning (ML) model that uses news media photos to identify flooded buildings accurately within 24 hours of the disaster.
Researchers from Skoltech and a major European bank have developed a neural network that outperforms existing state-of-the-art solutions in using transactional banking data for customer credit scoring.
Drones could soon be adopted as essential tools for various agricultural tasks; however, with respect to their use in farm management, research is still lacking. To address this issue, researchers in Japan compared drones to well-established technologies for spraying pesticide over rice paddy fields. Using statistical data, the researchers explore both advantages and limitations of drones and whether they currently offer an edge regarding costs, capacity, and management efficiency.
A new approach to antibody drug development is helping to optimise these treatments. Researchers at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel are using machine learning methods to help them find antibodies that better meet the requirements placed on them, such as ensuring they are better tolerated by the body.
Words categorize the semantic fields they refer to in ways that maximize communication accuracy while minimizing complexity. Recent studies have shown that human languages are optimally balanced between accuracy and complexity. For example, many languages have a word that denotes the colour red, but no language has individual words to distinguish ten different shades of the colour. These additional words would complicate the vocabulary and rarely would they be useful to achieve precise communication.
Some snake species slither across the ground, while others climb trees, dive through sand or glide across water. Today, scientists report that the surface chemistry of snake scales varies among species that negotiate these different terrains. The findings could have implications for designing durable materials, as well as robots that mimic snake locomotion to cross surfaces that would otherwise be impassable. The researchers will present their results at ACS Spring 2021.
New research shows how to measure the super-short bursts of high-frequency light emitted from free electron lasers (FELs). By using the light-induced ionization itself to create a femtosecond optical shutter, the technique encodes the electric field of the FEL pulse in a visible light pulse so that it can be measured with a standard, slow, visible-light camera.
Artificial intelligence could be one of the keys for limiting the spread of infection in future pandemics. In a new study, researchers at the University of Gothenburg have investigated how machine learning can be used to find effective testing methods during epidemic outbreaks, thereby helping to better control the outbreaks.