Here’s why the distinction is important and why sloppy reporting by both journalists and law enforcement paint a false connection between mental illness and mass shootings. Mental illness is something that approximately 1 in 5 Americans suffer. So you can understand the concern when politicians, law enforcement, and other well-meaning pundits suggest we need to […]
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Humans, once in constant motion as hunters and gatherers, are moving less than ever. At first, this trend seemed like progress: Transferring our heavy and dangerous work to animals, then machines, enabled more people to live longer. As recently as the 1950s, doctors considered exercise dangerous for people over age 40; for heart disease, which […]
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When the Environmental Protection Agency approved the spraying of certain antibiotics three years ago to fight a deadly bacterial infection decimating Florida’s orange groves, growers thought they might have found a silver bullet. But public health advocates reacted with alarm, warning that the large-scale use of medically important drugs in agriculture could help fuel antibiotic […]
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Ever felt as if the joy of a big win was contaminated with the stress of imagining when the pendulum would swing the other way and something awful would happen to balance it out? If so, you’re not alone: Often, when driven people care about something and finally experience whatever they’ve been hoping to achieve […]
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Major League Baseball has its problems. Attendance has slipped, fans complain the pace of play has slowed, players are convinced the baseballs are juiced and even the people running it admit its fusty rules could use an upgrade. Yet its players might take comfort in one promising bit of news: they appear to have longer […]
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During an extended period of travel last year, my husband and I lent our house in the Ozarks to an older couple who were having work done on their own house. We returned after a month away to a spotless house and two hostess gifts. But there was also a distinctive smell in the air: […]
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Safety concerns at a prominent military germ lab have led the government to shut down research involving dangerous microbes like the Ebola virus. “Research is currently on hold,” the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Fort Detrick, Md., said in a statement on Friday. The shutdown is likely to last months, […]
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In June 2013, in a Target parking lot in Wilsonville, Ore., an estimated 50,000 bumblebees dropped dead. Shoppers reported bees falling from branches and crawling on the ground. Piles of carcasses scattered beneath dozens of linden trees marked the largest mass bee kill ever recorded. The Oregon Department of Agriculture later determined that a pesticide […]
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Who knew modern knitting machines could be so complicated? The type of whole-garment method that’s used to produce socks, gloves, sportswear, shoes, car seats, and other textiles requires knowledge of the low-level language used to create knitting machine routines. It’s expert-level stuff, and the stakes are high — even minor mistakes can ruin an entire […]
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SEATTLE — Jackie Rath says she was sexually assaulted by four different men, including a stepfather and a stepbrother, by the time she was 16. That is also when her mom went to prison for murdering a boyfriend’s lover. Rath, now 38, was the third generation in her family to endure a traumatized childhood that […]
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Enjoy! Screen Time Might not Be as Bad for Mental Health as We Thought: Isn’t it starting to feel like there’s going to be as many conflicting reports on screen time and mental health as there is for marijuana and mental health? Surely it’s not just me. Now on the reports of the negative mental […]
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It’s a well-established fact that mammography reduces breast cancer mortality. The high rate of false-positive recalls associated with alternative screenings has accelerated the development of AI-driven systems from IBM, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and elsewhere. But they aren’t perfect, because most models operate on a single screening exam as opposed to more […]
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Acute kidney injury, or AKI, is a condition in which the kidneys stop filtering waste products from the blood. It occurs quickly (in two days or less) and debilitates an estimated 1 in 5 hospitalized patients in the U.K. and 1 in 4 hospitalized patients in the U.S. Worse still, because it’s difficult to detect, […]
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If you’ve ever become frustrated by a virtual assistant’s inability to answer questions satisfactorily, not to worry — researchers at Amazon are on the case. In a newly published paper presented in Paris last week at the ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, a team from the Seattle company’s Alexa AI […]
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In the jungles of Ivory Coast, monkeys and chimps forage for food, sleep in trees and travel in groups. Not far behind follow primatologists, like Jan Gogarten, a postdoctoral researcher at the Robert Koch Institute in Germany. Dr. Gogarten was spending a lot of time in the jungle tracking mangabey monkeys when his attention was […]
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Conventional AI development pipelines require processing power — and lots of it. It’s estimated that the computational baseline for AI research has been doubling every few months, resulting in a 300,000 times increase from 2012 to 2018. While that’s contributed to breakthroughs like highly dexterous robots and skilled poker-playing algorithms, the environmental costs have been […]
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ImageTeachers crowded the lobby of the Arizona Senate last year as state lawmakers debated the budget. CreditMatt York/Associated Press Do politicians care what voters want? New evidence may suggest they don’t — and many voters are skeptical, too. A 2018 survey by the Pew Research Center reports that less than half the country says elected officials […]
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Humor, it has been said, “can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process.” Well, get out the scalpels: We have dad jokes to analyze. According to a new study, people find even the most groan-inducing one-liners funnier when they are paired with a laugh track. And the type of […]
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The Food and Drug Administration almost never tests products itself. But in May, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a randomized trial, conducted by F.D.A. researchers, to determine whether the chemicals in four commercially available sunscreens are absorbed through the skin into the bloodstream. Four times daily, subjects were coated […]
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If you’ve ever wished Minecraft had an Alexa-like assistant that could perform any task asked of it, you’re in luck. Facebook researchers recently argued for an interactive, collaborative Minecraft bot for natural language understanding (NLU) research. They posit that the constraints of Minecraft make it well-suited to experiments in various NLU subfields, and to this […]
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