Science and Technology News

Market trends and business perspectives

model

The role of the Sun in the spread of viral respiratory diseases

by

Why do most viral epidemics spread cyclically in autumn and winter in the globe’s temperate regions?

According to an interdisciplinary team of researchers of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, the University of Milan, the Lombardy regional agency for the environment and the Don Gnocchi Foundation, the answer is intimately related to our Sun: their theoretical model shows that both the prevalence and evolution of epidemics are strongly correlated with the amount of daily solar irradiation that hits a given location on the Earth at a given time of the year.

The work of the Italian team was recently published in the iScience journal. [Read more…] about The role of the Sun in the spread of viral respiratory diseases

Forecasting elections with a model of infectious diseases

by

Forecasting elections is a high-stakes problem. Politicians and voters alike are often desperate to know the outcome of a close race, but providing them with incomplete or inaccurate predictions can be misleading.

And election forecasting is already an innately challenging endeavor – the modeling process is rife with uncertainty, incomplete information, and subjective choices, all of which must be deftly handled.

Political pundits and researchers have implemented a number of successful approaches for forecasting election outcomes, with varying degrees of transparency and complexity. However, election forecasts can be difficult to interpret and may leave many questions unanswered after close races unfold. [Read more…] about Forecasting elections with a model of infectious diseases

Where were Jupiter and Saturn born?

by

New work led by Carnegie’s Matt Clement reveals the likely original locations of Saturn and Jupiter.

These findings refine our understanding of the forces that determined our Solar System’s unusual architecture, including the ejection of an additional planet between Saturn and Uranus, ensuring that only small, rocky planets, like Earth, formed inward of Jupiter.

In its youth, our Sun was surrounded by a rotating disk of gas and dust from which the planets were born. The orbits of early formed planets were thought to be initially close-packed and circular, but gravitational interactions between the larger objects perturbed the arrangement and caused the baby giant planets to rapidly reshuffle, creating the configuration we see today. [Read more…] about Where were Jupiter and Saturn born?

New deep learning models: Fewer neurons, more intelligence

by

Artificial intelligence has arrived in our everyday lives – from search engines to self-driving cars. This has to do with the enormous computing power that has become available in recent years. 

But new results from AI research now show that simpler, smaller neural networks can be used to solve certain tasks even better, more efficiently, and more reliably than ever before.

An international research team from TU Wien (Vienna), IST Austria and MIT (USA) has developed a new artificial intelligence system based on the brains of tiny animals, such as threadworms. [Read more…] about New deep learning models: Fewer neurons, more intelligence

Related Posts

  • Applying artificial intelligence to science education
    30
    Applying artificial intelligence to science educationA new review published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching highlights the potential of machine learning – a subset of artificial intelligence – in science education. Although the authors initiated their review before the Covid-19 outbreak, the pandemic highlights the need to examine cutting-edge digital technologies as we re-think…
    Tags: learning, intelligence, artificial, news

Smart cruise control steers drivers toward better decisions

by Leave a Comment

Vehicle manufacturers offer smart features such as lane and braking assist to aid drivers in hazardous situations when human reflexes may not be fast enough. But most options only provide immediate benefits to a single vehicle.

What if, like a murmuration of starlings, our cars and trucks moved cooperatively on the road in response to each vehicle’s environmental sensors, reacting as a group to lessen traffic jams and protect the humans inside?

This question forms the basis of Kuilin Zhang’s National Science Foundation CAREER Award research. Zhang, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan Technological University, has published “A distributionally robust stochastic optimization-based model predictive control with distributionally robust chance constraints for cooperative adaptive cruise control under uncertain traffic conditions” in the journal Transportation Research Part B: Methodological. [Read more…] about Smart cruise control steers drivers toward better decisions