The ability of royal jelly to help heal wounds is yet another great reason to love (and save) the bees.

The new process may provide a revolutionary, all-purpose flu vaccine.

By monitoring the number of times people look for flu information on Wikipedia, researchers may be better able to estimate the severity of a flu season.

Hoping to better protect loggerheads, scientists get creative in finding a way to track the years that baby turtles spend in the ocean.

Enormous holes in sea ice called polynyas are explained with help of robot floats, satellites and tech-equipped seals.

Wolf puppies pick up on human cues and can catch and return balls.

Scientists got rats to drive little cars, and it could help improve mental health treatments for humans.

insects in German forests and grasslands have declined by about one-third in just the past decade.

Researchers have improved the process by which plants get rid of toxic compounds, and this improves their overall growth.

Study finds cockatoo called Snowball taught himself to dance and researchers want to understand how.

This problem has plagued physicists ever since the laws of motion were first conceived.

Scientists have discovered a fossilized shark head and many other fossils in Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky.

This PCB maker is capable of printing/manufacturing any circuit board fed through a computer software.

"Mission AI is about giving people access to the research that is defining our future so that they can participate in problem-solving on implementing AI with the research and business communities." -- Charlie Oliver

The other day I wrote about the challenge in addressing the pandemic—a worldwide science/engineering problem—using our existing science and engineering infrastructure, which is some mix of government labs and regulatory agencies, private mega-companies, smaller companies, university researchers, and media entities and rich people who can direct attention and resources. The current system might be the […]

North Carolina researchers are now trying to spread the word about their tried-and-true decontamination method for surgical masks.

The post Researchers Have Found a Way to Sterilize and Reuse Face Masks During Pandemic appeared first on Good News Network.

Video games often get a bad rap for isolating young people. However, they might be an effective treatment for older adults with depression. Scientists from several universities, including the University of Connecticut, are investigating.

A "virus" decimated in-game cities. Player behavior may prove instructive for researchers projecting the spread of covid-19.

Companies have unleashed hundreds of CBD pet health products accompanied by glowing customer testimonials claiming the cannabis derivative produced calmer, quieter and pain-free dogs and cats. But some of these products are all bark and no bite. “You’d be astounded by the analysis we’ve seen of products on the shelf with virtually no CBD in […]

The study will add a "real-time" element to what UW researchers already know about social isolation, loneliness and their related health risks.

Dr. Priya Sampathkumar gets asked by her two teen-aged sons every day when they can expect to see NBA games again. She’s among the doctors desperately trying to answer that question — and the NBA is now trying to help. Sampathkumar is on the staff at the Mayo Clinic, which is starting to get support […]

With smartphones and automated technologies taking care of our information for us, the means to store information outside of our brains is endless. But does this “information offloading” have an impact on the brain’s memory function?

Have you seen the photos of the Himalayas, with unusually clear blue skies? These have been matched by reports that China's carbon emissions have dropped by a quarter. Some people are speculating that air pollution has dropped in Australia too, because more of us have been staying at home, driving less and staying away from airports. But is that true? And what happens when things swing back into gear?

A cat is filmed in the Simpson Desert eating a kangaroo carcass over several days, as part of a study into the environmental impact of dead animals.

Summer's bushfires have cast doubt on the sustainability of the critically endangered mountain pygmy-possum population in Victoria's High Country, with scientists unable to access research grounds after.

Researchers are scouring the planet for drought and heat resistant crops as many Australian grain farmers face another failed winter season.

A team of Chinese researchers has developed a new technique to use 3D printers to bind the electronic materials to the clothing textiles and enable them to harvest biomechanical energy from human motion.

A snap from a snapping shrimp (known as the pistol shrimp) can create extreme pressures that will produce a flash of light and temperatures of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, producing plasma (a state of matter in which electrons are freed from their atoms).

A team of engineers at Tufts University has developed a series of 3D printed metamaterials with unique microwave or optical properties.

Researchers at Virginia Tech are integrating electronic sensors into personalized 3D printed prosthetics, a development that could lead to more affordable electric-powered prosthetics.

Australians suffering acute mental health episodes in rural and remote areas are increasingly having to travel far from family and friends for life-saving treatment, leading to calls for more specialist clinicians in the country.

Where have all the barra gone? Research concludes 2019 has had the lowest recording of juvenile barramundi in the Daly River in over a decade as the beloved fish "failed to breed".

Researchers say an online tool to help understand where Australia's Bogong moths have disappeared to is starting to show promising results.

Researchers find a common disease in honey bees can be transmitted to native bees through flowers, causing them to die about three times the rate of the normal mortality.

Researchers swap lab coats for waders and wellies in a quest to battle a tiny parasite that threatens the $150 million dollar tuna industry.

Australian scientists develop a drought-tolerant beer grain they hope will be a saving grace for some Australian farmers.

The University of Texas at Austin is hosting Bridging Transportation Researchers (BTR) Online Conference  on August 11-12, 2020. TRB is pleased to cosponsor this event. This zero-carbon, zero-cost conference will host multiple Zoom-based tracks to virtually and globally unite transportation engineers, planners, and policymakers to discuss a wide range of transportation research topics and results, including: Multi-modal transportation network and systems Travel demand forecasting, including connecte...

Given all we know about facial recognition tech, it is literally jaw-dropping that anyone could make this claim… especially without being vetted independently.

A group of Harrisburg University professors and a PhD student have developed an automated computer facial recognition software capable of predicting whether someone is likely to be a criminal.

The software is able to predict if someone is a criminal with 80% accuracy and with no racial bias. The prediction is calculated solely based on a picture of their face.

There's a whole lot of "what even the fuck" in CBS 21's reprint of a press release, but let's start with the claim about "no racial bias." That's a lot to swallow when the underlying research hasn't been released yet. Let's see what the National Institute of Standards and Technology has to say on the subject. This is the result of the NIST's examination of 189 facial recognition AI programs -- all far more established than whatever it is Harrisburg researchers have cooked up.

Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men, depending on the particular algorithm and type of search. Native Americans had the highest false-positive rate of all ethnicities, according to the study, which found that systems varied widely in their accuracy.

The faces of African American women were falsely identified more often in the kinds of searches used by police investigators where an image is compared to thousands or millions of others in hopes of identifying a suspect.

Why is this acceptable? The report inadvertently supplies the answer:

Middle-aged white men generally benefited from the highest accuracy rates.

Yep. And guess who's making laws or running police departments or marketing AI to cops or telling people on Twitter not to break the law or etc. etc. etc.

To craft a terrible pun, the researchers' claim of "no racial bias" is absurd on its face. Per se stupid af to use legal terminology.

Moving on from that, there's the 80% accuracy, which is apparently good enough since it will only threaten the life and liberty of 20% of the people it's inflicted on. I guess if it's the FBI's gold standard, it's good enough for everyone.

Maybe this is just bad reporting. Maybe something got copy-pasted wrong from the spammed press release. Let's go to the source… one that somehow still doesn't include a link to any underlying research documents.

What does any of this mean? Are we ready to embrace a bit of pre-crime eugenics? Or is this just the most hamfisted phrasing Harrisburg researchers could come up with?

A group of Harrisburg University professors and a Ph.D. student have developed automated computer facial recognition software capable of predicting whether someone is likely going to be a criminal.

The most charitable interpretation of this statement is that the wrong-20%-of-the-time AI is going to be applied to the super-sketchy "predictive policing" field. Predictive policing -- a theory that says it's ok to treat people like criminals if they live and work in an area where criminals live -- is its own biased mess, relying on garbage data generated by biased policing to turn racist policing into an AI-blessed "work smarter not harder" LEO equivalent.

The question about "likely" is answered in the next paragraph, somewhat assuring readers the AI won't be applied to ultrasound images.

With 80 percent accuracy and with no racial bias, the software can predict if someone is a criminal based solely on a picture of their face. The software is intended to help law enforcement prevent crime.

There's a big difference between "going to be" and "is," and researchers using actual science should know better than to use both phrases to describe their AI efforts. One means scanning someone's face to determine whether they might eventually engage in criminal acts. The other means matching faces to images of known criminals. They are far from interchangeable terms.

If you think the above quotes are, at best, disjointed, brace yourself for this jargon-fest which clarifies nothing and suggests the AI itself wrote the pullquote:

“We already know machine learning techniques can outperform humans on a variety of tasks related to facial recognition and emotion detection,” Sadeghian said. “This research indicates just how powerful these tools are by showing they can extract minute features in an image that are highly predictive of criminality.”

"Minute features in an image that are highly predictive of criminality." And what, pray tell, are those "minute features?" Skin tone? "I AM A CRIMINAL IN THE MAKING" forehead tattoos? Bullshit on top of bullshit? Come on. This is word salad, but a salad pretending to be a law enforcement tool with actual utility. Nothing about this suggests Harrisburg has come up with anything better than the shitty "tools" already being inflicted on us by law enforcement's early adopters.

I wish we could dig deeper into this but we'll all have to wait until this excitable group of clueless researchers decide to publish their findings. According to this site, the research is being sealed inside a "research book," which means it will take a lot of money to actually prove this isn't any better than anything that's been offered before. This could be the next Clearview, but we won't know if it is until the research is published. If we're lucky, it will be before Harrisburg patents this awful product and starts selling it to all and sundry. Don't hold your breath.

1. Researchers build the world's fastest 'soft' robot, THREE TIMES faster than the last record holder  Daily Mail
2. Soft robots can now run like cheetahs and swim like marlins  Engadget
3. Inspired by cheetahs, researchers build fastest soft robots yet  Tech Xplore
4. Meet the world's fastest soft Robot!  NEWS9 live
5. Fastest Soft Robots To-Date Developed by Researchers  Unite.AI
6. View Full coverage on Google News

Belgian waffles may be about to become more environmentally friendly.

ARCH, the National Respite Network and Resource Center in the United States of America identified that evidence-based research on respite care has, to large extent, been lacking. Across ages, needs and settings, respite is based upon the premise that providing caregivers periodic relief from daily, ongoing caregiving responsibilities will directly benefit them in terms of their physical health, immediate and long-term psychological health, and social-emotional relationships with family members. These benefits are assumed to result in secondary benefits for care receivers and even larger societal benefits in the form of cost benefits or improved employee productivity. Some research studies point to the merits of these assumptions. However, evidence-based research supporting this premise - or going beyond it to demonstrate how to best provide respite care that results in maximum benefits - has not been available. This report presents the findings of an expert panel composed of academics, researchers, service providers, advocates, policymakers and administrators representing a range of age groups, disabilities and professional disciplines. Over a period of 18 months the panel explored the current status of respite research, proposed strategies to overcome barriers to research, and developed a plan to encourage rigorous research in key areas.

Researchers have uncovered a potential means to profile and track online users using a novel approach that combines device identifiers with their biometric information. The details come from a newly published research titled "Nowhere to Hide: Cross-modal Identity Leakage between Biometrics and Devices" by a group of academics from the University of Liverpool, New York University, The Chinese

A team of Princeton biologists found that division of labor and political polarization — two social phenomena not typically considered together — may be driven by the same processes in ant societies.

A team of Princeton researchers led by Bridgett vonHoldt found that microbes are linked to cancer in a threatened species: the Santa Catalina foxes, found only on one island off the California coast.

Using sophisticated algorithms to explore regions of the genome whose roles in cancer have been largely uncharted, an international team of researchers including from Princeton has opened the door to a new understanding of the disease’s genetic origins.

A county-by-county analysis of the United States by Princeton University researchers suggests that rural counties with high populations of people over 60 and limited access to health care facilities could eventually be among the hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

The new material could have applications in robotics and medicine.

The virus simmered quietly in Cuba for about a year before infecting thousands.