This week, a method for predicting follow-up earthquakes, and the issues with deep learning systems in AI.
In this episode:
00:47 Which is the big quake?
A new technique could allow seismologists to better predict if a larger earthquake will follow an initial tremor. Research Article: Real-time discrimination of earthquake foreshocks and aftershocks; News and Views: Predicting if the worst earthquake has passed
07:46 Research Highlights
Vampire bats transmitting rabies in Costa Rica, and why are some octopuses warty? Research Article: Streicker et al.; Research Article: Voight et al.
10:03 Problems for pattern-recognition
Deep-learning allows AIs to better understand the world, but the technique is not without its issues. News Feature: Why deep-learning AIs are so easy to fool
16:31 News Chat
We roundup the 2019 Nobel Prizes for science. News: Biologists who decoded how cells sense oxygen win medicine Nobel; News: Physics Nobel goes to exoplanet and cosmology pioneers; News: Chemistry Nobel honours world-changing batteries
Lifespan, by geneticist David Sinclair and journalist Matthew LaPlante, provides a vision of a not-too-distant future in which living beyond 120 will be commonplace. For Sinclair and LaPlante, the answer lies in understanding and leveraging why we age…
Listen to the latest from the world of science, with Benjamin Thompson and Shamini Bundell. This week, modelling embryonic development, and an analysis of male dominated conferences.
“Remote procedures have the potential to transform how we deliver care when treating the most time-sensitive illnesses such as heart attack and stroke. The success of this study paves the way for large-scale, long-distance telerobotic platforms across the globe, and its publication in Lancet’s EClinicalMedicine demonstrates the transformative nature of telerobotics,” 
Researchers have identified how Salmonella ‘persister’ cells can spread antibiotic resistance genes in mice intestines. 
“What is memory without forgetting?” asks Oliver Hardt, a cognitive psychologist studying the neurobiology of memory at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “It’s impossible,” he says. “To have proper memory function, you have to have forgetting.”
A nanotube microprocessor: Scientists are looking beyond silicon, by constructing a computer chip using carbon nanotubes.
“A healthy diet and lifestyle are generally recognized as good for health, but this study is the first large randomized controlled trial to look at whether lifestyle changes actually influence Alzheimer’s disease-related brain changes,” said Susan Landau, a research neuroscientist at Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, and principal investigator of the add-on study.
The first question is often ‘why haven’t we been back?’ Fifty years since humans stepped onto the surface of a foreign planetary body there has not been another event to rival it. Not in space, nor back here on Earth.
Boomers Daily 