Saturday 8 June 2019

'Hurry up!': G20 urged to speed up digital tax

Top G20 finance officials agreed Saturday there was an urgent need to find a global system to tax internet giants like Google and Facebook but clashed on the best way to do it.

* This article was originally published here

Infusing machine learning models with inductive biases to capture human behavior

Human decision-making is often difficult to predict and delineate theoretically. Nonetheless, in recent decades, several researchers have developed theoretical models aimed at explaining decision-making, as well as machine learning (ML) models that try to predict human behavior. Despite the achievements associated with some of these models, accurately predicting human decisions remains a significant research challenge.

* This article was originally published here

Disturbed sleep linked to mental health problems in natural disaster survivors

Preliminary results from a new study suggest that sleep disturbances are associated with mental health problems among survivors of a natural disaster even two years after the event.

* This article was originally published here

AI tool helps radiologists detect brain aneurysms

Doctors could soon get some help from an artificial intelligence tool when diagnosing brain aneurysms—bulges in blood vessels in the brain that can leak or burst open, potentially leading to stroke, brain damage or death.

* This article was originally published here

Dashing the dream of ideal 'invisibility' cloaks for stress waves

Whether Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, which perfectly steers light waves around objects to make them invisible, will ever become reality remains to be seen, but perfecting a more crucial cloak is impossible, a new study says. It would have perfectly steered stress waves in the ground, like those emanating from a blast, around objects like buildings to make them "untouchable."

* This article was originally published here

Mississippi seeks seafood disaster amid spillway complaints

Mississippi's governor wants the federal government to declare a fisheries disaster as freshwater from a Mississippi River spillway gushes into what's normally a partly salty estuary, killing countless oysters and crabs.

* This article was originally published here

Crucial to life, oceans get chance in climate spotlight

Armed with better data than ever before, scientists have in recent months sounded the alarm over the rising pace of global warming and the parlous state of Nature.

* This article was originally published here

Teens sleep longer, are more alert for homework when school starts later

Preliminary findings from a new study of middle school and high school students suggest that they got more sleep and were less likely to feel too sleepy to do homework after their district changed to later school start times.

* This article was originally published here

Mojo Vision shows off display technology for augmented reality

What meets the eye is important—but in the case of entering the realm of augmented reality, how it meets the eye is an issue. A California company is on that case. They have technology to let AR users keep in the flow eyes-up. Hands-free.

* This article was originally published here

Trial finds vitamin D does not prevent type 2 diabetes in people at high risk

Taking a daily vitamin D supplement does not prevent type 2 diabetes in adults at high risk, according to results from a study funded by National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), part of the National Institutes of Health. The Vitamin D and Type 2 Diabetes (D2d) study enrolled 2,423 adults and was conducted at 22 sites across the United States. These findings were published June 7 in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the 79th Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association in San Francisco.

* This article was originally published here

How to speed up the discovery of new solar cell materials

A broad class of materials called perovskites is considered one of the most promising avenues for developing new, more efficient solar cells. But the virtually limitless number of possible combinations of these materials' constituent elements makes the search for promising new perovskites slow and painstaking.

* This article was originally published here

Using a simulation framework to study spine behaviors of quadruped robots

Researchers at the Robert Bosch center for cyber physical systems in Bangalore, India, have recently proposed a simulation framework to systematically study the effects of spinal joint actuation on the locomotion performance of quadruped robots. In their study, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, they used this framework to investigate the spine behaviors of a quadruped robot called Stoch 2 and their effects on its bounding performance.

* This article was originally published here