Science and Technology links (June 9th, 2018)

  1. A woman with late-stage breast cancer has been successfully cured using immunotherapy. She was preparing to die. She is now going to live hopefully many more years in good health.
  2. Deep learning generalizes poorly, in at least some cases:

    (…) when images are scaled to half their original size and randomly translated, the accuracy of deep learning is less than 50%. For comparison, the previous methods achieved over 70% accuracy, and this was considered poor performance.

  3. People with high IQ (a measure of intelligence) as well as people with fast reaction times are less likely to die.
  4. Looking young is a sign of good health: Perceived age—which is widely used by clinicians as a general indication of a patient’s health—is a robust biomarker of ageing that predicts survival.
  5. While treating various neurodegenerative disorders with stem cells, we accidentally observed a transition of hair colorations from mostly grey to black in 4 elderly patients.
  6. Ibuprofen (a common analgesic) depress testicular function, including testosterone production.
  7. Analogue non-volatile memory can accelerate the neural-network training by two orders of magnitude.
  8. Some antibodies blocks inflammation, protecting mice from hardened arteries and liver disease:

    The antibody also prolonged the life of the mice. After 15 months, all of the antibody-producing mice were alive, compared to 54 percent of the control mice.

  9. If robots are stealing our jobs, they are doing a poor job at it. There are more job openings in the US than there are people available. I’m no economist, but I’d expect to see raising wages.
  10. Asians eat less rice as they get richer.

Published by

Daniel Lemire

A computer science professor at the University of Quebec (TELUQ).

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