China has 50 per cent fewer pigs – but how many of them actually died?

The fight against African swine fever is intensifying, and millions of pigs have died. But we don’t know how much of the drop in numbers is due to reduced production Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2223444-china-has-50-per-cent-fewer-pigs-but-how-many-of-them-actually-died/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

A quarter of all pigs have died this year due to African swine fever

The hunt is on for a vaccine for African swine fever, after a quarter of the world’s domestic pigs have died this year, including half of all the pigs in China Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2222501-a-quarter-of-all-pigs-have-died-this-year-due-to-african-swine-fever/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

What’s the birthstone for November?

Happy birthday November babies!  Your birthstone, the topaz, can be blue, pale green, yellow, pink, red, purple, brown and even black. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/november-birthstone-topaz…

Why The ‘Not-Com’ Stock Bubble Is Popping

“In the dot-com bubble, public investors got hosed,” remembers The Atlantic. “Today, it’s public investors that are doing the hosing.” When the web browser Netscape went public on August 9, 1995 — the day many cite as the beginning of the dot-com bubble — its stock skyrocketed from $28 to $75 in a matter of hours, even though the company wasn’t…

Machine Learning Can’t Flag False News, New Studies Show

Current machine learning models aren’t yet up to the task of distinguishing false news reports, two new papers by MIT researchers show. From a report: After different researchers showed that computers can convincingly generate made-up news stories without much human oversight, some experts hoped that the same machine-learning-based systems could be trained to detect such stories. But MIT doctoral student Tal…

Alexei Leonov, the First Human To Walk In Space, Has Died At Age 85

The Russian space agency confirmed Friday that legendary cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first human to walk in space and later the commander of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that docked with a NASA Apollo capsule, has died after a long illness. CBS News reports: An accomplished amateur artist and a widely respected statesman in the international space community, Leonov remained a lifelong…

Transgenic Mosquitoes Transferred Their Genes Into a Natural Population

Long-time Slashdot reader cccc828 shares a Nature article “about genetically modified mosquitoes that were supposed to reduce the mosquito population. However, instead of dying, some survived, spreading the new genes.” In an attempt to control the mosquito-borne diseases yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, and Zika fevers, a strain of transgenically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes containing a dominant lethal gene has been developed…