Thursday 20 June 2019

Protesters urge ASEAN leaders to ban trash imports

Protestors in Bangkok on Thursday dumped plastic waste in front of a government building and called on Southeast Asian leaders to ban imports of trash from developed countries.

* This article was originally published here

Bank of England to mull access for likes of Facebook's Libra

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney is open to the idea of letting new payment services such as Facebook's upcoming Libra hold funds with the central bank—something previously limited to commercial banks.

* This article was originally published here

New study maps how ocean currents connect the world's fisheries

A new study published in the journal Science finds that the world's marine fisheries form a single network, with over $10 billion worth of fish each year being caught in a country other than the one in which it spawned.

* This article was originally published here

Russians capture hungry polar bear roaming Arctic city

Russian officials said Thursday that scientists have captured a hungry polar bear found roaming the streets of an Arctic city, hundreds of kilometres from its natural habitat, and would take it to a zoo to recover.

* This article was originally published here

Sugars that coat proteins are a possible drug target for pancreatitis

Pancreatitis is an inflammation of the pancreas that accounts for 275,000 hospitalizations in the United States annually. Patients who suffer from hereditary pancreatitis have a 40 to 50 percent lifetime risk of developing pancreatic cancer.

* This article was originally published here

Animals may have more than one means of surviving hypoxia

A tidepool crustacean's ability to survive oxygen deprivation though it lacks a key set of genes raises the possibility that animals might have more ways of dealing with hypoxic environments than had been thought.

* This article was originally published here

How do birth defects affect childhood cancer risk?

(HealthDay)—Children with birth defects may be at increased risk for childhood cancer, a new study finds.

* This article was originally published here

Compact, low-cost fingerprint reader could reduce infant mortality around the world

A team of Michigan State University researchers have created Infant-Prints—a low-cost, high-resolution and portable solution to accurately identify infants in an effort to help reduce infant mortality around the world.

* 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

From one brain scan, more information for medical artificial intelligence

MIT researchers have devised a novel method to glean more information from images used to train machine-learning models, including those that can analyze medical scans to help diagnose and treat brain conditions.

* This article was originally published here

Vanilla makes milk beverages seem sweeter

Adding vanilla to sweetened milk makes consumers think the beverage is sweeter, allowing the amount of added sugar to be reduced, according to Penn State researchers, who will use the concept to develop a reduced-sugar chocolate milk for the National School Lunch Program.

* This article was originally published here

Sudden death in epilepsy and breathing troubles linked to bad gene

In sudden death in epilepsy, people stop breathing for no apparent reason and die. Now, a group of UConn neuroscientists have a lead as to why.

* This article was originally published here

Scientists map toxic proteins linked to Alzheimer's

A team of researchers from McMaster University has mapped at atomic resolution a toxic protein linked to Alzheimer's disease, allowing them to better understand what is happening deep within the brain during the earliest stages of the disease.

* This article was originally published here

Why do people faint?

Maybe it's a bride standing in a hot chapel, or an exhausted runner after a race. It could be someone watching a medical procedure on television or a donor at a blood drive.

* This article was originally published here

SPFCNN-Miner: A new classifier to tackle class-unbalanced data

Researchers at Chongqing University in China have recently developed a cost-sensitive meta-learning classifier that can be used when the training data available is high-dimensional or limited. Their classifier, called SPFCNN-Miner, was presented in a paper published in Elsevier's Future Generation Computer Systems.

* This article was originally published here

Creating 3-D images with regular ink

This month, 5,000 distinctive cans of Fuzzy Logic beer will appear on local shelves as part of Massachusetts-based Portico Brewing's attempt to stand out in the aesthetically competitive world of craft beer.

* This article was originally published here

Physicists show novel Mott state in twisted graphene bilayers at 'magic angle'

A University of Oklahoma physics group sheds light on a novel Mott state observed in twisted graphene bilayers at the 'magic angle' in a recent study just published in Physical Review Letters. OU physicists show the Mott state in graphene bilayers favors ferromagnetic alignment of the electron spins, a phenomenon unheard of in conventional Mott insulators, and a new concept on the novel insulating state observed in twisted graphene bilayers.

* This article was originally published here

Researchers use biological evolution to inspire machine learning

As Charles Darwin wrote in at the end of his seminal 1859 book On the Origin of the Species, "whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." Scientists have since long believed that the diversity and range of forms of life on Earth provide evidence that biological evolution spontaneously innovates in an open-ended way, constantly inventing new things. However, attempts to construct artificial simulations of evolutionary systems tend to run into limits in the complexity and novelty which they can produce. This is sometimes referred to as "the problem of open-endedness." Because of this difficulty, to date, scientists can't easily make artificial systems capable of exhibiting the richness and diversity of biological systems.

* This article was originally published here