One of the proposals involves widening the stretch near the military land

Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, according to a new paper by Australian astrobiologists. In research aiming to understand how life might develop, the scientists realised new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets...

Dec 21, 2023

Artificial intelligence is poised to remove human limitations inherent in many systems, including information and logistical bottlenecks in decision-making.

The Covid pandemic has strained global supply chains, causing freight backlogs that have driven up costs. Now, some companies are looking for longer-term solutions to prepare for future supply-chain crises, even if those strategies come at a high cost. Photo Illustration: Jacob Reynolds

Fast rail, a high frequency Metro, and a duplicate M1, are just some of the multi-billion-dollar "fixes" aimed at getting South East Queensland moving again. But is it enough to solve the transport woes?

Where's the beef? In California, it is still available, but meat eaters might need to settle for cuts other than prime steaks. The industry is dealing with production backups caused by coronavirus pandemic.

Attribution methods provide insights into the decision-making of machine learning models like artificial neural networks. For a given input sample, they assign a relevance score to each individual input variable, such as the pixels of an image. In this work we adapt the information bottleneck concept for attribution. By adding noise to intermediate feature maps we restrict the flow of information and can quantify (in bits) how much information image regions provide. We compare our method against ten baselines using three different metrics on VGG-16 and ResNet-50, and find that our methods outperform all baselines in five out of six settings. The method's information-theoretic foundation provides an absolute frame of reference for attribution values (bits) and a guarantee that regions scored close to zero are not necessary for the network's decision. For reviews: https://openreview.net/forum?id=S1xWh1rYwB For code: https://github.com/BioroboticsLab/IBA

This brief examines the global shortage of the personal protective equipment (PPE) needed to tackle COVID-19 and suggests policy implications.

RNA viruses form a dynamic distribution of mutant swarms (termed "quasispecies") due to the accumulation of mutations in the viral genome. The genetic diversity of a viral population is affected by several factors, including a bottleneck effect. Human-to-human transmission exemplifies a bottleneck effect, in that only part of a viral population can reach the next susceptible hosts. In the present study, two lineages of the rhesus rotavirus (RRV) strain of rotavirus A were serially passaged five times at a multiplicity of infection (MOI) of 0.1 or 0.001, and three phenotypes (infectious titer, cell binding ability, and specific growth rate) were used to evaluate the impact of a bottleneck effect on the RRV population. The specific growth rate values of lineages passaged under the stronger bottleneck (MOI of 0.001) were higher after five passages. The nucleotide diversity also increased, which indicated that the mutant swarms of the lineages under the stronger bottleneck effect were expanded through the serial passages. The random distribution of synonymous and nonsynonymous substitutions on rotavirus genome segments indicated that almost all mutations were selectively neutral. Simple simulations revealed that the presence of minor mutants could influence the specific growth rate of a population in a mutant frequency-dependent manner. These results indicate a stronger bottleneck effect can create more sequence spaces for minor sequences.

IMPORTANCE In this study, we investigated a bottleneck effect on an RRV population that may drastically affect the viral population structure. RRV populations were serially passaged under two levels of a bottleneck effect, which exemplified human-to-human transmission. As a result, the genetic diversity and specific growth rate of RRV populations increased under the stronger bottleneck effect, which implied that a bottleneck created a new space in a population for minor mutants originally existing in a hidden layer, which includes minor mutations that cannot be distinguished from a sequencing error. The results of this study suggest that the genetic drift caused by a bottleneck in human-to-human transmission explains the random appearance of new genetic lineages causing viral outbreaks, which can be expected according to molecular epidemiology using next-generation sequencing in which the viral genetic diversity within a viral population is investigated.

Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), for people who lost income due to COVID-19, provides $2,000 a month for up to four months.

What is this recommendation about? Obviously this recommendation is an attempt of the Commission to manage administative barriers to placing PPE (personal protective equipment) and medical devices on the market that would be needed in the struggle to get the current Covid-19 pandemic under control. In my view you can also see this as a […]

The Congress leader demanded that 1 lakh tests should be done from the current 40,000 as the country has testing kits in stock.

And an unprecedented pandemic of Covid-19 continues to rise! The toll has been ascending every single hour at a much faster rate showing no sign of descent in its trajectory, sweeping off the entire world with fear, anxiety, infections, and deaths. For the first time in history, next to 2009’s H1N1 swine flu virus outbreak, […]

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