This year, more candidates with degrees in science, medicine and engineering ran for Congress than ever before. Of the nearly two-dozen new candidates in this crop, at least seven won seats in the House of Representatives.
This year, scientists, doctors and engineers ran for office like never before. Here’s how they did.
We as human have to live with a lot of unfortunate realities, including the fact that a lot of the things we love end up being bad for us. We all know by now that if we binge on tasty treats too much we’ll end up eating ourselves into an early grave, but in recent years it’s become increasingly clear that coffee, a well known vice of millions and millions of people, is actually pretty good for you.
Recent studies have shown that being a regular coffee drinker can reduce your risk of all kinds of ailments, including heart attack and stroke. Now, a new research effort reveals that dark roast coffee is particularly good at warding off some nasty brain conditions, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
Wormholes — yawning gateways that could theoretically connect distant points in space-time — are usually illustrated as gaping gravity wells linked by a narrow tunnel.
But their precise shape has been unknown.
Now, however, a physicist in Russia has devised a method to measure the shape of symmetric wormholes — even though they have not been proven to exist — based on the way the objects may affect light and gravity. [8 Ways You Can See Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in Real Life].
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have recently developed a new model that enables fast and accurate object detection in high-resolution 4K and 8K video footage using GPUs. Their attention pipeline method carries out a two-stage evaluation of every image or video frame under rough and refined resolution, limiting the total number of evaluations necessary.
In recent years, machine learning has attained remarkable results in computer vision tasks, including object detection. However, most object recognition models typically perform best on images with a relatively low resolution. As the resolution of recording devices is rapidly improving, there is a rising need for tools that can process high-resolution data.
“We were interested in finding and overcoming the limitations of current approaches,” Vít Růžička, one of the researchers who carried out the study told TechXplore. “While plenty of data sources record in high resolution, current state-of-the-art object detection models, such as YOLO, Faster RCNN, SSD, etc., work with images that have a relatively low resolution of approximately 608 × 608 px. Our main objective was to scale the object detection task to 4K-8K videos (up to 7680 × 4320 px) while maintaining high processing speed. We also wanted to understand if and by how much we can benefit from high resolution compared to using low-resolution images, in terms of accuracy of the models.”
#ParkerSolarProbe
Parker Solar Probe is alive and well after skimming by the Sun at just 15 million miles from our star’s surface. This is far closer than any spacecraft has ever gone — the previous record was set by Helios B in 1976 and broken by Parker on Oct. 29 — and this maneuver has exposed the spacecraft to intense heat and solar radiation in a complex solar wind environment.
“Parker Solar Probe was designed to take care of itself and its precious payload during this close approach, with no control from us on Earth — and now we know it succeeded,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency headquarters in Washington. “Parker is the culmination of six decades of scientific progress. Now, we have realized humanity’s first close visit to our star, which will have implications not just here on Earth, but for a deeper understanding of our universe.”
We hear a lot about Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and that’s because we have extremely fancy hardware floating around and, in some cases, cruising on the surface of those planets. The planets that lie further away from the Sun don’t get nearly as much attention, but they may soon, as NASA is currently spitballing some missions that will give us a better look at Uranus than we’ve ever gotten.
These maps sketch out the remnants of long-lost landmasses trapped within drifting continental plates called cratons. While some cratons are already well-understood, Antarctica’s lithospheric structure is tough to examine because of its remote location and the enormous ice sheets that obscure its underlying geology.
“These gravity images are revolutionizing our ability to study the least understood continent on Earth—Antarctica,” said study co-author Fausto Ferraccioli, science leader of geology and Geophysics at the British Antarctic Survey, in a statement. “In East Antarctica, we see an exciting mosaic of geological features that reveal fundamental similarities and differences between the crust beneath Antarctica and other continents it was joined to until 160 million years ago.”
