Once the COVID-19 pandemic is over, a lot of things will go back to normal. We’ll stop wearing masks. We’ll crowd into restaurants. We’ll walk whatever direction we want to down grocery store aisles. But some changes that the pandemic spurred might be here to stay. Among them: the expansion of telepsychiatry. “This will be...
When COVID-19 hit the U.S., many experts warned that America’s colleges and universities could be devastated. Some of them predicted enrollment declines of up to 20%. So far, those initial forecasts were worse than what has actually taken place. One month into the fall semester of the 2020-2021 academic year, overall enrollment was only 3%...
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, space- and ground-based observations have shown that Earth’s atmosphere has seen significant reductions in some air pollutants. However, scientists wanted to know how much of that decline can be attributed to changes in human activity during pandemic-related shutdowns, versus how much would have occurred in a pandemic-free 2020. Using...
Movie ratings can determine a movie’s appeal to consumers and the size of its potential audience. Thus, they have an impact on a film’s bottom line. Typically, humans do the tedious task of manually rating a movie based on viewing the movie and making decisions on the presence of violence, drug abuse and sexual content....
The audio on the otherwise shaky body camera footage is unusually clear. As police officers search a handcuffed man who moments before had fired a shot inside a pizza parlor, an officer asks him why he was there. The man says to investigate a pedophile ring. Incredulous, the officer asks again. Another officer chimes in,...
In their paper published in Frontiers of Physics, Franco Vazza (astrophysicist at the University of Bologna) and Alberto Feletti (neurosurgeon at the University of Verona) investigated the similarities between two of the most challenging and complex systems in nature: the cosmic network of galaxies and the network of neuronal cells in the human brain. Despite the...
Deep learning is everywhere. This branch of artificial intelligence curates your social media and serves your Google search results. Soon, deep learning could also check your vitals or set your thermostat. MIT researchers have developed a system that could bring deep learning neural networks to new — and much smaller — places, like the tiny...
For decades, scientists have been warning about potential future effects of global climate change, including more frequent wildfires, longer periods of drought, and sharp increases in the number, duration, and intensity of tropical storms. And since the start of 2020, we’ve seen natural disasters in record-breaking numbers, from the wildfires that ravaged California and Colorado,...
Inspired by work on infants, researchers at the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE ) investigated whether dogs’ behaviors are guided by human displays of preference or by the animals’ own choices. They found that dogs’ looking times, but not fetching behavior, were influenced by the owner’s expression of preference. Although the studies did not demonstrate that...
When a frightful creature startles you, your brain may activate its fear-processing circuitry, sending your heart racing to help you escape the threat. It’s also the job of the brain’s fear-processing circuits to help you learn from experience to recognize which situations are truly dangerous and to respond appropriately–so if the scare comes from a...
