Researchers at the SETI Institute say that unusual dark streaks on sun-facing slopes on Mars, debated about for years, may be small landslides caused by a combination of salts and melting ice just below the surface. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/mars-dark-streaks-melting-ice-recurring-slope-lineae…
Tag: Stanford University
Hundreds of fish species, including many we eat, are consuming plastic
As more and more plastic trash permeates the oceans, microplastics are making their way into fish and shellfish, and potentially into humans. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/hundreds-fish-species-consume-microplastics-including-human-food…
Get inspiration and advice from Paulina’s story—and see how she’s using AI to improve healthcare in Ghana!
Meet Paulina, a final-year medical student exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to solve healthcare delivery problems in West Africa. Read on to see how she’s using what she’s learned from her courses to not only expand educational opportunities in her community, but tackle community health projects through programming and data analysis. I […]
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Smartwatches Can Help Detect COVID-19 Days Before Symptoms Appear
Smartwatches and other wearable devices that continuously measure users’ heart rates, skin temperature and other physiological markers can help spot coronavirus infections days before an individual is diagnosed. From a report: Devices like the Apple Watch, Garmin and Fitbit watches can predict whether an individual is positive for COVID-19 even before they are symptomatic or the virus is detectable by tests,…
Facial Recognition Reveals Political Party In Troubling New Research
Researchers have created a machine learning system that they claim can determine a person’s political party, with reasonable accuracy, based only on their face. TechCrunch reports: The study, which appeared this week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, was conducted by Stanford University’s Michal Kosinski. Kosinski made headlines in 2017 with work that found that a person’s sexual preference could be…
Would You Quit If You Had To Return To the Office After the Pandemic?
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: Twenty-nine percent of working professionals say they would quit their jobs if they couldn’t continue working remotely, according to an online survey of 1,022 professionals by LiveCareer, an online resume and job search consulting service. Forty-two percent of the U.S. workforce has been working from home full-time during the pandemic, according to…
Does Jupiter’s moon Europa have geysers? If so, what’s their source?
If watery plumes do burst from Europa’s surface, they might originate not in the moon’s underground ocean, but instead in pockets of brine trapped in the moon’s crust. If that’s so, it could be a source of frustration for those who want to probe Europa’s ocean for possible life. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/jupiter-moon-europa-plumes-salty-water-in-crust…
No Implants Needed For Precise Control Deep Into the Brain
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: In April, Guoping Feng and colleagues at MIT, along with [Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist and bioengineer at Stanford University] demonstrated a minimally invasive optogenetic system that required drilling a small hole in the skull, then being able to control opsin-expressing neurons six millimeters deep into the brain using blue light. This approach…
Samsung, Stanford Make a 10,000 PPI Display That Could Lead To ‘Flawless’ VR
Samsung and Stanford University have developed OLED technology that supports resolutions up to 10,000 pixels per inch — “well above what you see in virtually any existing display, let alone what you’d find in a modern VR headset like the Oculus Quest 2,” reports Engadget. From the report: The newOLED tech uses films to emit white light between reflective layers, one…
Home-Made Covid Vaccine Appeared to Work, but Questions Remained
“Josiah Zayner’s plan was simple: replicate a Covid-19 vaccine that had worked in monkeys, test it on himself and then livestream the experiment online over a period of months,” reports Bloomberg. “Zayner discovered, testing a vaccine is far more complicated than he had imagined.”
Even though his experiment yielded a promising result, Zayner found too many unanswered questions to say that it…