Computers can now help doctors in diagnosing diseases and assist in monitoring a patient’s vital signs from hundreds of miles away, thanks to improvements in artificial intelligence technology.

Now, CU Boulder researchers are eyeing integrating machine learning into psychiatry through a speech-based mobile app that could tell a patient’s mental health status as good as (and maybe better) what a human is capable of doing.

“We are not in any way trying to replace clinicians,” says Peter Foltz, a research professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science and co-author of a new paper in Schizophrenia Bulletin that lays out the promise and potential pitfalls of AI in psychiatry. “But we do believe we can create tools that will allow them to better monitor their patients.”

Nearly one in five U.S. adults lives with a mental illness, many in remote areas where access to psychiatrists or psychologists is scarce. Others can’t afford to see a clinician frequently, don’t have time or can’t get in to see one.

More details about this over at Neuroscience News.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: GDJ/ Pixabay)

Dating apps such as Grindr and Tinder are now people’s instant method of dating, avoiding the traditional method of one-on-one meetups to find the right match. Using these dating apps save time and money (it’s a date, of course there’s money going to be spent), and they give their users more choices, more potential partners they can match with. With that being said, one of the claims apps and websites have is their ability to use data to filter through profiles for better matches with their personality tests, so that the applications can suggest potential partners to match with their users. But is romantic desire really predictable? Can an algorithm actually predict a romantic match? BBC has the details: 

The issue for scientists who might want to investigate their data, and journalists who want to fact-check their claims, is that the algorithms are the intellectual property of these companies, so they are not publicly available. Their entire business is based on developing smart match-making algorithms and keeping their formulas private.

Joel found that her algorithm could predict actor desire and partner desire, but not compatibility. Not even a little bit. It could only predict negative percentages of variance – which is like being accurate less than 0% of the time. This might sound like a bit of a head scratcher, but, Joel says that her algorithm would have been better off using mean results for every dater rather than offering a tailored response. “It was completely useless,” says Joel. “It really should have done better.”

“My take is that when two people actually meet they form a shared dynamic that is more than the sum of its parts and cannot be predicted a priori,” says Joel. “Their individual preferences do not make up the substance of what they find attractive. My rating of whether I found you funny after meeting you will predict whether I like you, but my desire for a funny person and your measure of whether you are funny do not because we might not agree on a sense of humour.”

Finding a way to make accurate predictions is not going to be straightforward.

image credit: wikimedia commons

Everyone has a hobby, usually something that is very different from their career, but who knew that musician Rod Stewart was a model railroad enthusiast? Well, most likely other model train enthusiasts knew, but now the extent of his hobby is there for all to see, in the magazine Railer Modeller. For 23 years, he's been working to build an intricate model of a city in his attic in Los Angeles.

The scenery and structures are his forte, rather than the locomotives and tracks. "I find beauty in what everyone else sees as ugly - rugged skyscrapers, beaten-up warehouses, things that are very run down."

Photos of the layout show dozens of highly detailed buildings plus bridges, ships, vegetation and streets teeming with vintage cars and taxis.

"When I take on something creative like this, I have to give it 110%," he said. "For me it's addictive. I started, so I just had to finish. I'm lucky I had the room. If I'd have realised at the start it would have taken so long, I'd have probably said, 'No! No! Nah!'"

Read about Stewart's project and see impressive pictures of the model city at BBC News. -via Kottke

David Burge, an antique car expert and respected internet scoundrel, informs us in a Twitter thread that the Maytag Corporation used to make cars.

Although it's most famous for its household appliances, the company founded by F.L. Maytag made cars for several years, starting in 1910. It was most famous for its hill climbing cars. During the Great Depression, it also produced what we would today call go-karts.

That line of go-karts was powered by the same gasoline-fed engine available in its washing machines.

It would make a lot of sense to have household appliances, if they were available at all, powered independently.

The Disney renaissance began with The Little Mermaid in 1989, and the next big princess movie was Beauty and the Beast in 1991. The studio's animation department had a lot riding on the project, mainly to prove that they could continue making magic after Ariel's success. To create buzz for Beauty and the Beast, they proposed screening it at the New York Film Festival, two months before its premiere date -even though the movie wasn't finished.  

The programming team had been putting the finishing touches on that year’s festival slate, which included pictures like Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique and Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse — not exactly the kind of movies among which one would expect to find a musical romance from the Mouse House. Disney was seen as corporate, antiseptic, G-rated, while the New York Film Festival had introduced American audiences to the early work of Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Martin Scorsese.

What’s more, Beauty and the Beast was only about 60 to 70 percent finished. The “work-in-progress” version incorporated four different stages from the movie’s long, arduous creation: storyboards, rough pencil-sketch animation, cleaned-up black-and-white animation, and final color footage. You could see coffee stains and paper folds and marginalia. Sometimes a character would be accompanied by arrows and hand-scribbled numbers. (The film had been in production for four years but in development for decades. There had been numerous abortive starts, and the project had come close to having the plug pulled on it several times.)

Directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale were very nervous about the film festival screening. Read what happened at Vulture. -via Digg

(Image source: YouTube)

The winners have been announced in the 2019 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. The overall winner is the picture above by Sarah Skinner entitled “Grab life by the…” We hear that the moment ended peacefully, as the cub missed his target. The Spectrum Photo Creatures In The Air Award went to Vlado-Pirsa for this photo entitled "Family disagreement."



See all of this years winners in the competition's gallery, and the 40 finalists here. They are all funny!



-via Earther

Ants are insects well-known to ruin picnics, invade kitchens, and bite unsuspecting children (and adults as well) whenever they get the chance. Despite being considered pests, however, there are many ant species that play an essential role in ecosystem health.

Ants belong to the insect family of Formicidae, within the order of Hymenoptera — the same order that includes wasps and bees. Although they're nearly ubiquitous now, ants were scarce compared to other insects when they first appeared on Earth between 140 million and 168 million years ago, according to The Field Museum. As flowering plants became more common, they provided new food sources for ants, which likely facilitated the insects' movement into new habitats.

Now, ants can be found almost everywhere, except in Antarctica.

They're the most dominant insect on Earth and scientists estimate that there are maybe another 10,000 species of ants left to discover.

What do they do to keep ecosystems healthy? Find out over at Live Science.

(Image Credit: Alexas_Fotos/ Pixabay)

A mason came and made a deal with the Norse gods to build them a great (but expensive) wall to protect Asgard from the enemies outside. Loki drove an even harder bargain. Would the mason be able to complete the wall under the extreme restrictions from the gods? The mythological tale gets a little crazy at the end, and you do not want to miss the punch line. The original saga probably didn't refer to it as a punch line, but that's the way it comes across.  

3D displays have been a field of interest these recent years. Right now, it is in the “radical ideas” phase, and there are many VR technologies on the market. They are, however, unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons. For example, there are some devices which can provide 3D images without the need for goggles or glasses, but they have a number of problems like slow refresh and complicated hardware. Aside from that, they also lack a standardized mode of user interaction. Another example would be a 3D display which can be manipulated by hand, but there is no feedback, which makes it tricky.

This week, researchers are describing a new take on a recent 3D display development that mixes in a key ingredient: sound. The use of ultrasound allows the researchers to both run the display and provide haptic feedback for interactions with it. As an added bonus, the new display can allow audible sound to originate from objects within the display itself.

Conceptually, the display borrows heavily from one we described early last year. The light emitted by the display comes from lasers reflected off the surface of a tiny, hovering sphere. As long as the sphere is reflective, it can display any of the colors you might need for an image. To display an object, the sphere has to be moved around rapidly enough that the human eye registers the line traced by its movement as a single object, rather than detecting that it's the product of motion.

Check out more details over at Ars Technica.

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Children who were born today will be welcomed by a lifetime of climate change-related health problems, warns The Lancet in a report yesterday. The Lancet is one of the oldest and most prestigious medical journals in the world. Now that is saying something.

The Lancet's "Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change" says the new era of climate change will "define the health of an entire generation" — unless there is significant intervention.

The health impacts flagged by the report start at the prenatal level with a heightened risk of low birth weight and neonatal death and continue through childhood and adolescence with potential lung problems, asthma attacks and insect-borne diseases. Older adults would see increasing vulnerability from extreme heat.

The report is a collaborative effort by more than 100 experts from global institutions, including the World Health Organization and World Bank, that tracks the impact of climate change on human health based on 41 indicators.

More details about this saddening but unsurprising news over at Scientific American.

(Image Credit: langll/ Pixabay)

«Бро должен быть рядом, бро - не багаж». "bro gotta be around bro, is not luggage".

Mikhail Galin traveled from Riga, Latvia, to Vladivostok, Russia, with his 22-pound cat Viktor. That's a long trip. Galin booked the flight on Aeroflot, which has a rule that any pet over eight kilograms (18 pounds) must travel in the cargo hold. The rule was not invoked in Riga, but when Galin transferred in Moscow, he was told Viktor would have to fly in cargo.    

Galin refused to store Viktor in the plane’s cargo hold on the eight-hour flight to Vladivostok. So he forfeited his ticket, and then took to Facebook to find a good Samaritan in Moscow with a cat that resembled Viktor, but weighed less than 18 pounds.

That is how he found Phoebe, the cat that would act a Viktor’s body double. Galin then used his Aeroflot miles to book a business class seat to Vladivostok the next day. That cat’s owners met Galin at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, where it was weighed in Viktor’s place.

Once Aeroflot’s animal handlers were satisfied they were looking at a suitably-sized cat, the gang made their way back to the terminal and swapped out Viktor’s body double. The two boarded the plane in business class on a ticket Galin bought with his Aeroflot miles.

He would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for social media. Galin posted the story on Facebook, which went viral in Russia. Aeroflot got word of the subterfuge and suspended Galin from their loyalty program. He lost the 370,000 miles he had already accumulated. Read the details of the story at NBC.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Mikhail Galin)

Blood flow can stop and even reverse in the upper bodies of astronauts, NASA scientists state in their report.

The study could have some major implications with regards to prolonged trips through deep space, as we’re still trying to identify the exact effects of spending long periods in microgravity.

The study looked at periodic ultrasound tests of 11 healthy astronauts who staffed the International Space Station.

The results were alarming: blood flow had either stagnated or reversed in the left internal jugular vein, a major blood vessel on the side of the neck, in seven crew members. The tests also found a clot and a partial clot in two of the crew members after their return to Earth.

These clots could have some serious effects on an astronaut’s health. Find out more about this at Futurism.

(Image Credit: WikiImages/ Pixabay)

When reporter Allie Conti went on vacation in September this year, she accidentally uncovered an Airbnb scam when she herself became its victim.

Conti and her friends paid $1,200 to Airbnb to stay at an apartment in Chicago. As they were about to check in, however, the host called to say that the apartment was already flooded.

He offered another property of his instead but that alternative turned out to be pretty dingy. Even worse, the host kicked out Conti and her friends after just two days — forcing them to find a hotel at the last minute.

The host never offered Conti and her friends a refund. Fortunately, when Conti published her article, Airbnb itself refunded her. But what of the host?

When Conti researched her horrible host, she found that the same people responsible for scamming her also managed Airbnb listings in eight cities across the US.

Find out more about the story over at Recode.

(Image Credit: TeroVesalainen/ Pixabay)

YouTuber bored1980 is from New Zealand, lived in Europe for years, and has now moved to Florida. A lot of things in America struck him as really strange. The biggest number of them have to do with cars and traffic, which is not surprising. What color are taillights in other countries? He is confused about tipping early in the list, then later marvels at what great customer service America has. Hmm, maybe its because they need you to tip. And yes, ignoring climate change is a Florida thing. The rest of us are concerned. -via Digg

In articles on the history of chocolate, we learn that cocoa was used in the Americas for thousands of years, and brought to Europe by the Spanish conquistadors. But England usually isn't part of the story, and when it is, we just learn that the English didn't know what to do with chocolate. Even on the continent, it took quite some time before consumers developed a taste for the strange import.

“Strange” is an understatement. At first, many Europeans simply couldn’t stand chocolate. Benzoni, an Italian traveler in 1500s Nicaragua, said that chocolate was more fit for pigs than humans. A Jesuit traveller in the 1500s compared the foam—one of the most important aspects of the beverage for indigenous Americans—to feces.

By the early 1600s, however, tastes were changing. Maybe it was because Spaniards had spent a century sipping chocolate in diplomatic meetings with indigenous leaders, part of the strategic military alliance that enabled European conquest. Maybe it was the addictive shock of caffeine in the era before coffee and tea captured Europe. Or maybe, as Norton argues, it was a result of the ever-permeable nature of colonial relationships, in which—without intending to, often without wanting to—the colonizer can’t help but take on the tastes and habits of the colonized.

England owes it first chocolate recipe to a botanist named William Hughes who caught a ride to the New World in the 1630s as a sailor on a pirate ship. What he learned was later published in a book that extolled the wonders of cocoa and gave England a recipe for hot cocoa that turned the nation on to the wonder of chocolate. Read the story of William Hughes, complete with his cocoa recipe, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Mahendra Singh)