The infants and children huddled in the stone boathouses. The women pressed in next to them. The men crowded in last. They’d all fled Herculaneum on August 24, 79 A.D. as Mount Vesuvius rained destruction on the city, as it did Pompeii and other Roman settlements near the Bay of Naples. While Pompeii was consumed […]
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Ever heard of FlyHash? It’s an algorithm inspired by fruit flies’ olfactory circuits that’s been shown to generate hash codes — numeric representations of objects — with superior performance compared with classical algorithms. Unfortunately, because FlyHash uses random projections, it can’t learn from data. To overcome this limitation, researchers at Princeton, the University of San […]
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Computer vision systems generally excel at detecting objects but struggle to make sense of the environments in which those objects are used. That’s because they separate observed actions from physical context — even those that do model environments fail to discriminate between elements relevant to actions versus those that aren’t (e.g., a cutting board on […]
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American women have just achieved a significant milestone: They hold more payroll jobs than men. But this isn’t entirely good news for workers, whether they’re men or women. The difference is small, but it reflects the fact that women have been doing better in the labor market compared with men. One big reason is that […]
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Childhood obesity is a major public health problem, and has been for some time. Almost 20 percent of American children are affected by obesity, as well as about 40 percent of adults. Over all, this costs the United States around $150 billion in health care spending each year. Pediatricians like me, and many other health […]
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This week’s Psychology Around the Net explores how anxiety looks in children, how managers can work with employees dealing with depression, why young girls are struggling more with mental health issues than their male counterparts, a new bill that would make mental health a priority for first responders, and more. Anxiety is Different […]
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SAN FRANCISCO — It has become common wisdom that too much time spent on smartphones and social media is responsible for a recent spike in anxiety, depression and other mental health problems, especially among teenagers. But a growing number of academic researchers have produced studies that suggest the common wisdom is wrong. The latest research, […]
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Some 66 million years ago, forests burned to the ground and the oceans acidified after the Chicxulub meteorite hit Earth in the Gulf of Mexico. Around the same time, on the other side of the planet, erupting volcanoes were busy covering much of the Indian subcontinent with lava, forming the Deccan Traps. One of these […]
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Are stories and personal narratives always a change agent for good? Or can they also be used for less altruistic purposes? And what happens when you add the multiplying power of celebrity and influencers into the mix of a good narrative? Humans tend to be a trusting bunch. When someone tells us a story, most […]
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Venus is our toxic twin. Its chemical makeup, size and density is similar to our world’s, although its hellish temperatures can melt lead, and its atmosphere is rife with sulfuric acid. But it may be even more Earthlike than we knew. A paper published last week in Science Advances demonstrates that Venus might still harbor […]
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Scientists have sequenced the genome of one of the deadliest snakes in the world, the Indian cobra, and have taken a big step toward developing new and better treatments for their bites. Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that thousands of people are bitten by snakes in the United States every year, […]
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Bioluminescence might seem uncommon, even alien. But biologists think organisms evolved the ability to light up the dark as many as 50 different times, sending tendrils of self-powered luminosity coursing through the tree of life, from fireflies and vampire squids to lantern sharks and foxfire, a fungus found in rotting wood. Despite all this diversity, […]
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