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Flat Pasta That Turns Into 3-D Shapes - Just Add Boiling Water

The engineers are in the kitchen, again.
Source: nytimes.com

Human remains from Mary Rose show diversity of Tudor crew

A team of researchers with Cardiff University, the Mary Rose Trust, HM Naval Base and the British Geological Survey's National Environmental Isotope Facility has found evidence of racial diversity among the crew of the Mary Rose—a warship from the time of King Henry the VIII. In their paper published...
Source: phys.org

APOD: 2021 April 18 - Rainbow Airglow over the Azores

"A spectacular sky is visible through this banded airglow, with the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy running up the image center, and M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, visible near the top left."
Source: nasa.gov

Constructing Transformers For Longer Sequences with Sparse Attention Methods

"We show that carefully designed sparse attention can be as expressive and flexible as the original full attention model. Along with theoretical guarantees, we provide a very efficient implementation which allows us to scale to much longer inputs. As a consequence, we achieve state-of-the-art results...
Source: googleblog.com

The Next Trick: Pulling Coronavirus Out of Thin Air

Thermo Fisher Scientific’s new air sampler can help monitor for airborne pathogens, and signals renewed interest in bioaerosol surveillance.
Source: nytimes.com

APOD: 2021 March 23 - Mars over Duddo Stone Circle


Source: nasa.gov

Heisenberg on Helgoland - the value of spending time in natural surroundings

"It was finally time to use his strange calculus to calculate the energy of a real physical system. As his excitement mounted he kept on making mistakes and correcting them, but finally he had it. When he looked at it he was struck with joy and astonishment. Out of the dance of calculations emerged an...
Source: fieldofscience.com

5 failures of political leaders during a public health crisis

“There are five traps political leaders can fall into when it comes to a public health emergency: 1. delay and downplay; 2. fudge the science; 3. isolation from the international community; 4. absence; and 5. double standards.” Sophie Harman Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University...
Source: qmul.ac.uk

How to Virtually Become a Doctor

Medical schools and students alike have had to adapt to remote cadaver dissections and bedside-manner training via Zoom.
Source: nytimes.com

Opinion: VC Jim Breyer: Silicon Valley still has a bright future. But Austin's time is now

My decision to start Breyer Capital Austin has more to do with Austin's strengths than any of the Bay Area's flaws.
Source: cnn.com

Israel Reveals Newly Discovered Fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls

The finds, ranging from just a few millimeters to a thumbnail in size, are the first to be unearthed in archaeological excavations in the Judean Desert in about 60 years.
Source: nytimes.com

Contactless Sleep Sensing in Nest Hub

“People often turn to technology to manage their health and wellbeing, whether it is to record their daily exercise, measure their heart rate, or increasingly, to understand their sleep patterns. Sleep is foundational to a person’s everyday wellbeing and can be impacted by (and in turn, have an impact...
Source: googleblog.com

Tiny Town, Big Decision: What Are We Willing to Pay to Fight the Rising Sea?

On the Outer Banks, homeowners in Avon are confronting a tax increase of almost 50 percent to protect their homes, the only road into town, and perhaps the community’s very existence.
Source: nytimes.com

The pandemic forced a massive remote-work experiment. Now comes the hard part

In March 2020, companies across the US abruptly shuttered their offices and instructed employees to work from home indefinitely as a result of the pandemic.
Source: cnn.com

Opinion: The UK has a huge rubbish problem – but building new waste incinerators isn’t the answer

Some take waste directly from businesses, but the vast majority burn the contents of our wheelie bins – and around 12 per cent of that is plastic
Source: independent.co.uk

PAIRED: A New Multi-agent Approach for Adversarial Environment Generation

This Google AI blog describes a method for machine learning using paired agents. The gap between the one that did the best and the one that did the worst is regret. That feeling of 'could have done' better is what pushes the 'unsupervised environment design' algorithm towards a better solution. "The...
Source: googleblog.com

Study shows conversations rarely end when people want them to end

"A team of researchers from Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and the University of Virginia has found that conversations between people usually do not end when either partner in the conversation wants them to end. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National...
Source: phys.org

New Technique Reveals Centuries of Secrets in Locked Letters

M.I.T. researchers have devised a virtual-reality technique that lets them read old letters that were mailed not in envelopes but in the writing paper itself after being folded into elaborate enclosures.
Source: nytimes.com

Simulations suggest Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere will last only another billion years

A pair of researchers from Toho University and NASA Nexus for Exoplanet System Science has found evidence, via simulation, that Earth will lose its oxygen-rich atmosphere in approximately 1 billion years. In their paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, Kazumi Ozaki and Christopher Reinhard...
Source: phys.org

The Technology Behind Cinematic Photos

There has been some work by teams at Google looking at analysing images to extract their 3D features. They launched a new feature called 'cinematic photos' and this blog posted by Per Karlsson and Lucy Yu, Software Engineers, of Google Research tries to explain how it works. "Looking at photos from...
Source: googleblog.com