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People, bicycles, cars or road, sky, grass: Which pixels of an image represent distinct foreground persons or objects in front of a self-driving car, and which pixels represent background classes?

This task, known as panoptic segmentation, is a fundamental problem that has applications in numerous fields such as self-driving cars, robotics, augmented reality and even in biomedical image analysis.

At the Department of Computer Science at the University of Freiburg Dr. Abhinav Valada, Assistant Professor for Robot Learning and member of BrainLinks-BrainTools focuses on this research question. Valada and his team have developed the state-of-the-art “EfficientPS” artificial intelligence (AI) model that enables coherent recognition of visual scenes more quickly and effectively.

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This new paper argues that continued economic growth on Earth will hit a thermodynamic limit within the third millenium, if economic activities and energy consumption cannot be decoupled. The maximum size would be up to 7000 times the current one. An in-space economy would offer a way out.

“Energy Limits to the Gross Domestic Product on Earth” https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.05244

(Image: Wikipedia — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sky_mile_tower.jpg)

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MONDAY, May 11, 2020 (HealthDay News) — An experimental vaccine seems to give monkeys extended protection from an HIV-like infection — by “waking up” an arm of the immune system that vaccines normally do not.

Experts cautioned that animal research often does not pan out in humans. The decades of work toward an HIV vaccine has been a clear example. But, researchers said, this vaccine works differently, targeting two “arms” of the immune system.

And they think the work potentially has broader lessons for vaccines being developed for other viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

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There may be hope yet for a universal flu vaccine — one powerful dose of immunisation that can provide long-lasting protection for multiple influenza strains, all in a single shot.

A discovery like that would be a holy grail for public health, and after more than a decade of careful research, a specific version called FLU-v is now moving into the last rounds of clinical testing.

So far, researchers say the results have been “very encouraging”, and the vaccine has successfully passed phase I and phase II clinical trials. Although trials in these phases are limited to assessing the safety of the vaccine, there’s also evidence it might be effective.

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O,.o!

An international consortium found a remarkable global spread of strains of a multi-resistant bacterium that can cause severe infections—Stenotrophomonas maltophilia. The study, published under the supervision of the Research Center Borstel Leibniz Lung Center (FZB), provides for the first time a systematic understanding of the global phylogeny of S. maltophilia strains and shows ways to efficiently monitor the pathogen using a genomic classification system. DZIF scientists from Lübeck, Borstel and Braunschweig are involved in the study.

S. maltophilia strains occur in several natural and human associated ecosystems. The bacterium was long regarded as relatively unproblematic but is now considered to be one of the most feared hospital , as it frequently causes infections and is resistant to a number of antibiotics. This can be particularly dangerous for immune-compromised patients or for patients with underlying inflammatory lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis. Although almost any organ can be affected, infections of the respiratory tract, bacteraemia or catheter-related infections of the bloodstream are the most common. In view of the increasing importance of this pathogen and the often-severe clinical consequences of an , knowledge about the and about the local and global transmission of S. maltophilia bacteria is urgently needed.

Scientists from a total of eight countries initially established a genotyping method that enables the standardised analysis of the different genomes of S. maltophilia strains. The DZIF teams around Prof. Stefan Niemann (FZB), Prof. Jan Rupp, (Clinic of Infectiology and Microbiology, Campus Lübeck) and Prof. Ulrich Nübel from the Leibniz Institute DSMZ (German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures GmbH) in Braunschweig were involved.

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The present paper addresses the high Reynolds number, two-dimensional, steady laminar flow separation phenomenon near an interior (concave) corner. A very fast Alternating Direction Implicit finite difference approach is used to solve the Interacting Boundary Layer approximation to the Navier Stokes equations in a conformal plane. Solutions are presented for corner angles up to 18° for Reynolds numbers (based on forebody length) up to 108. Convergence properties and accuracy levels are identified in order to provide reliability estimates of the results. Limitations to the numerical algorithm for large separation regions at high Reynolds numbers are identified.

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Almost a millennium ago, a major upheaval occurred in Earth’s atmosphere: a giant cloud of sulphur-rich particles flowed throughout the stratosphere, turning skies dark for months or even years, before ultimately falling down to Earth.

We know this event happened because researchers have drilled and analysed ice cores — samples taken from deep within ice sheets or glaciers, which have trapped sulphur aerosols produced by volcanic eruptions reaching the stratosphere and settling back on the surface.

Ice can thus preserve evidence of volcanism over incredibly long timescales, but pinpointing the precise date of an event that shows up in the layers of an ice core is still tricky business.

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