Exposure to others' suffering even worse than being shot at

We usually think that trauma from war is related to the fact that soldiers have been under constant threat of death. New research shows a slightly different picture.

* This article was originally published here

Google rolled out fix for Nest cam look-through

Finders, weepers. That seemed to be a suitable tweak to the old saying, when the news hit that a former owner of a used Nest Indoor Cam could access the new owner's video feed.

* This article was originally published here

Researchers report new understanding of thermoelectric materials

The promise of thermoelectric materials as a source of clean energy has driven the search for materials that can efficiently produce substantial amounts of power from waste heat.

* This article was originally published here

Emaciated polar bear found in Russia taken for treatment

An emaciated polar bear seen roaming around an industrial city in Russia far south of its normal sea ice hunting grounds is being transported to a zoo for examination and treatment.

* This article was originally published here

Neural networks taught to recognize similar objects on videos without accuracy degradation

Andrey Savchenko, Professor at the Higher School of Economics (HSE University), has developed a method that can help to enhance image identification on videos. In his project, a network was taught by a new algorithm and can now make decisions on image recognition and classification at a rate 10 times faster than before. This research was presented in the paper "Sequential three-way decisions in multi-category image recognition with deep features based on distance factor" published in Information Sciences.

* This article was originally published here

Antibiotic resistance in spore-forming probiotic bacteria

New research has found that six probiotic Bacillus strains are resistant to several antibiotics. Genetic analysis of other Bacillus strains has shown genes that contribute to antibiotic resistance towards various types of drugs and methods in which they can still grow in their presence. The research is presented at ASM Microbe, the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

* This article was originally published here

First-ever successful mind-controlled robotic arm without brain implants

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with the University of Minnesota, has made a breakthrough in the field of noninvasive robotic device control. Using a noninvasive brain-computer interface (BCI), researchers have developed the first-ever successful mind-controlled robotic arm exhibiting the ability to continuously track and follow a computer cursor.

* This article was originally published here

Scientists map huge undersea fresh-water aquifer off US Northeast

In a new survey of the sub-seafloor off the U.S. Northeast coast, scientists have made a surprising discovery: a gigantic aquifer of relatively fresh water trapped in porous sediments lying below the salty ocean. It appears to be the largest such formation yet found in the world. The aquifer stretches from the shore at least from Massachusetts to New Jersey, extending more or less continuously out about 50 miles to the edge of the continental shelf. If found on the surface, it would create a lake covering some 15,000 square miles. The study suggests that such aquifers probably lie off many other coasts worldwide, and could provide desperately needed water for arid areas that are now in danger of running out.

* This article was originally published here

Your brain activity can be used to measure how well you understand a concept

As students learn a new concept, measuring how well they grasp it has often depended on traditional paper and pencil tests. Dartmouth researchers have developed a machine learning algorithm, which can be used to measure how well a student understands a concept based on his or her brain activity patterns. The findings are published in Nature Communications.

* This article was originally published here

Possible signal pathway in the fight against obesity-related fatty liver disease identified

A research group from the Medical University of Vienna reports how the hormone leptin stimulates the liver to export lipids and reduce the fat production in the liver. This occurs due to the activation of neurons in the brain stem. These findings provide new approaches for the fight against non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which often occurs in connection with obesity. The results were just published in Nature Communications.

* This article was originally published here

Locking up kids damages their mental health and leads to more disadvantage. Is this what we want?

Reports this week of an Indigenous boy with a disability held naked for days in a Brisbane police cell have once again raised the issue of how best to treat our most vulnerable young offenders, and the impact of their incarceration.

* This article was originally published here

Northern lights' social networking reveals true scale of magnetic storms

Magnetic disturbances caused by phenomena like the northern lights can be tracked by a 'social network' of ground-based instruments, according to a new study from the University of Warwick.

* This article was originally published here

Researchers see around corners to detect object shapes

Computer vision researchers have demonstrated they can use special light sources and sensors to see around corners or through gauzy filters, enabling them to reconstruct the shapes of unseen objects.

* This article was originally published here

Imaging results, health data combine in AI model to predict breast cancer

Women know the drill: Breast cancer is too commonly a cancer diagnosis to be ignored, as early detection could make a difference. While false positives may cause an enormous amount of undue stress, false negatives have an impact on how early a cancer is detected and subsequently treated.

* This article was originally published here

Acropolis Museum marks 10-year anniversary with new extension

Greece's Acropolis Museum has opened to the public a new section housing the remains of an ancient Athens neighbourhood to mark its 10-year-anniversary, organisers said Friday.

* This article was originally published here

Rare recessive mutations pry open new windows on autism

Over the past decade, autism spectrum disorder has been linked to mutations in a variety of genes, explaining up to 30 percent of all cases to date. Most of these variants are de novo mutations, which are not inherited, affect just one copy of a gene, and are relatively easy to find. The lab of Timothy Yu, MD, Ph.D., at Boston Children's Hospital chose a road less travelled, tracking rare recessive mutations in which a child inherits two "bad" copies of a gene.

* This article was originally published here

Burnout: Sleepless firefighters at risk of exhaustion and mental health conditions

Sleep disturbances and mental health challenges are putting close to half of America's firefighters at high risk of emotional fatigue and exhaustion, new research shows.

* This article was originally published here

PizzaGAN gets the picture on how to make a pizza

Is nothing sacred? Who would dare to even attempt to talk about a machine-learning experiment that results in the perfect (gasp) pizza? It is difficult to contemplate, but a research quintet did not shy away from trying, and they worked to teach a machine how to make a great pie.

* This article was originally published here

Spintronic memory cells for neural networks

In recent years, researchers have proposed a wide variety of hardware implementations for feed-forward artificial neural networks. These implementations include three key components: a dot-product engine that can compute convolution and fully-connected layer operations, memory elements to store intermediate inter and intra-layer results, and other components that can compute non-linear activation functions.

* This article was originally published here