News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
From mosquitoes and rats to foxes and birds, the urban environment is transforming animals that live among us – but which new species should we expect next? Life 9 March 2022 By Rob Dunn Pigeons, as well as crows, jays and owls, are thriving in the urban jungle Bjorn Grotting/Alamy TO THE naturalist in me, … Read more
Training artificial intelligences to identify faces or digitise text involves thousands or millions of iterations of a two-stage process known as back-propagation, but a new approach could save time, energy and computing power Technology 10 March 2022 By Matthew Sparkes Cutting training time for AI could make face recognition systems more efficient iStockphoto Artificial intelligence … Read more
An AI tool developed by DeepMind can help historians restore ancient Greek texts with 72 per cent accuracy, and date inscriptions to within 30 years of their true age Humans 9 March 2022 By Carissa Wong The Celsus Library in the ancient city of Ephesus, Turkey Mazur Travel/Shutterstock An artificial intelligence algorithm developed as part … Read more
Exposure to leaded petrol as a child has been linked to an average IQ drop of 2.6 points among US adults, increasing to 5.9 points among those born in the mid-to-late 1960s Health 7 March 2022 By Clare Wilson Fumes from cars using leaded petrol may affect IQ PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy More than half of … Read more
How inanimate molecules first arranged themselves into life is one of the great mysteries. The answer could lie in a systematic exploration of chemical space Technology 2 March 2022 By Katharine Sanderson Graham Carter How did Earth turn from a sterile ball of rock into a lush, green world of living things? This question of … Read more
For more than sixty years, humanity has been searching the cosmos for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. While our efforts have been limited, and the results less than encouraging, that may be about to change. With thousands of exoplanets discoveries in the last two decades alone and next-generation telescopes becoming available, major breakthroughs are expected to … Read more
We tend to think of intelligence as something that describes just one individual. But it’s possible to describe all kinds of collectives as intelligent, too – whether we’re talking about social groups of humans, enclaves of insects, or even the mysterious behavior of slime mold and viruses. By extension, could intelligence be observed on a much … Read more
Genetically identical fruit flies raised in the same environment still learn at different rates, suggesting that random differences in brain development may have evolved to produce variation in a species Life 2 February 2022 By Christa Lesté-Lasserre Fruit flies may have random variance to account for different learning styles Aleksandar Kitanovic / Alamy Genetically similar … Read more
Early, accurate, and simple diagnosis is important in just about every health condition you could name, and that includes heart disease. New research now suggests straightforward eye scans could identify patients with an increased risk of cardiovascular problems later on in life. If this method of diagnosis can be developed, it would be a … Read more
Imagine using any object around you—a frying pan, a glass paperweight—as the central processor in a neural network, a type of artificial intelligence that loosely mimics the brain to perform complex tasks. That’s the promise of new research that, in theory, could be used to recognize images or speech faster and more efficiently than computer … Read more