Driverless cars that are networked and in constant communication on the road could improve the flow of traffic by at least 35%.
The findings were reported by researchers at the University of Cambridge who programmed miniature robotic cars to drive on a multi-lane track where various traffic obstructions occurred. Each tiny robotic car was fitted with motion capture sensors and a Raspberry Pi which enabled them to communicate via WiFi.
Here is how fast America is changing: By the time today’s teenagers hit their 30s, there will be — for the first time ever — more minorities than whites, more old people than children, and more people practicing Islam than Judaism.
The big picture: The slow demographic shifts we’ve watched over decades will finally reach a tipping point in the 2040s. They’ll transform what America looks like, where we live and what we fear.
America’s baby bust isn’t over. The nation’s birth rates last year reached record lows for women in their teens and 20s, a government report shows, leading to the fewest babies in 32 years.
The provisional report, released Wednesday and based on more than 99% of U.S. birth records, found 3.788 million births last year. It was the fourth year the number of births has fallen, the lowest since 1986 and a surprise to some experts given the improving economy.
The fertility rate of 1.7 births per U.S. woman also fell 2%, meaning the current generation isn’t making enough babies to replace itself. The fertility rate is a hypothetical estimate based on lifetime projections of age-specific birth rates.
An example of one of the study’s ultra-processed lunches consists of quesadillas,
refried beans and diet lemonade. Participants on this diet ate an average of 508 calories
more per day and gained an average of 2 pounds over two weeks.
Over the past 70 years, ultra-processed foods have come to dominate the U.S. diet. These are foods made from cheap industrial ingredients and engineered to be super-tasty and generally high in fat, sugar and salt.
The rise of ultra-processed foods has coincided with growing rates of obesity, leading many to suspect that they’ve played a big role in our growing waistlines. But is it something about the highly processed nature of these foods itself that drives people to overeat? A new study suggests the answer is yes.
The study, conducted by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, is the first randomized, controlled trial to show that eating a diet made up of ultra-processed foods actually drives people to overeat and gain weight compared with a diet made up of whole or minimally processed foods. Study participants on the ultra-processed diet ate an average of 508 calories more per day and ended up gaining an average of 2 pounds over a two-week period. People on the unprocessed diet, meanwhile, ended up losing about 2 pounds on average over a two-week period.
The American penal system assumes that being imprisoned is bad enough to deter people convicted of a crime from breaking the law again. But there’s new evidence that prison time doesn’t deter future crimes nearly as well as people tend to assume.
That’s the result of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior. In it, a team of scientists from across the country analyzed 111,110 felons’ cases and discovered that there was no correlation between having served a prison sentence and committing more crimes later on.
Solar power is about to reach an inflection point. A new report released on Thursday claims that installations in the United States will double in just four years’ time, thanks largely to developments in California, which accounted for around half of all installations.
This estimate is from the research group Wood Mackenzie, who along with the Solar Energy Industries Association, found that there are now more than two million photo-voltaic solar installations in the country, just three years after passing the one million mark. The teams expect this pace to increase, reaching three million by 2021 and four million by 2023.
A new study demonstrates how fatty acids can enter the brain and disrupt signaling pathways that lead to depression
An intriguing new study, led by scientists from the University of Glasgow, suggests there is a direct causative link between eating a high-fat diet and the development of depression. The new research demonstrates how certain dietary fats can enter the brain, disrupt specific signaling pathways in the hypothalamus, and subsequently induce signs of depression.
Scientists have long observed a strong correlation between obesity and depression and, while it may seem like the two are simply interlinked through obvious psychological associations, some studies are starting to suggest the connection may actually be underpinned by biological mechanisms.
Credentialed authorities are comically bad at predicting the future. But reliable forecasting is possible.
The bet was on, and it was over the fate of humanity. On one side was the Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich insisted that it was too late to prevent a doomsday apocalypse resulting from overpopulation. Resource shortages would cause hundreds of millions of starvation deaths within a decade. It was cold, hard math: The human population was growing exponentially; the food supply was not. Ehrlich was an accomplished butterfly specialist. He knew that nature did not regulate animal populations delicately. Populations exploded, blowing past the available resources, and then crashed.
Technology is democratizing the power of who gets to live and who does not. Are we ready for the consequences?
This is the second installment of “Privatizing the Apocalypse,” a four-part essay being published throughout October. Read Part 1: “The 50/50 Murder” here.
In 2015, a depressive young German named Andreas Lubitz killed himself, five co-workers, and quite a few strangers. He was one of perhaps 1,000 suicidal mass murderers to strike that year worldwide. But an unusual combination of two factors put Lubitz in a ghoulish class of his own.
First, he hatched and executed his plans without anyone’s help — which was not remarkable in itself. But the second factor was scale — in that he really killed a lot of strangers. As in 144 of them. Lubitz’s victims hailed from 18 countries and included infants, retirees, and all ages between. He killed dozens of times more people than most rampage murderers and almost three times as many as 2017’s Las Vegas shooter, who is (for now) history’s most prolific lone suicidal gunman.
Which doctor would you pick: a physician who is kind and warm, or one who is cold but graduated at the top of the class in medical school?
A new book makes a strong argument for the ones who are kind and warm, not just because they’re more pleasant, but because they have better patient outcomes.
“Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence That Caring Makes a Difference,” written by physician-scientist team Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli, provides overwhelming evidence for the healing power of compassion.
It has become perhaps the most important guiding principle of today’s world of data science: “data is truth.” The statisticians, programmers and machine learning experts that acquire and analyze the vast oceans of data that power modern society are seen as uncovering undeniable underlying “truths” about human society through the power of unbiased data and unerring algorithms. Unfortunately, data scientists themselves too often conflate their work with the search for truth and fail to ask whether the data they are analyzing can actually answer the questions they ask of it. Why can’t data scientists be more like those of the physical sciences that see not “universal truths” but rather “current consensus understanding?”
Given the sheer density of statisticians in the data sciences, it is remarkable how poorly the field adheres to statistical best practices like normalization and characterizing data before analyzing it. Programmers in the data sciences, too, tend to lack the deep numerical methods and scientific computing backgrounds of their predecessors, making them dangerously unaware of the myriad traps that await numerically-intensive codes.
Most importantly, however, somewhere along the way data science became about pursuing “truth” rather than “evidence.”
