153 articles from FRIDAY 19.6.2020

Our knowledge of Covid-19 changes every day. Hindsight is misleading when it comes to science | Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz

It’s tempting to look back and say ‘if only we had known’ – but that ignores the realitiesThe results of a Covid-19 study have been announced. Unlike most of the previous results, this study seems immediately to be a game-changer – rather than minor benefits from an expensive drug, or spurious nonsense from a dubious trial, these results show that a cheap and common medication,...

Teaching physics to neural networks removes 'chaos blindness'

Researchers from North Carolina State University have discovered that teaching physics to neural networks enables those networks to better adapt to chaos within their environment. The work has implications for improved artificial intelligence (AI) applications ranging from medical diagnostics to automated drone piloting.

A new social role for echolocation in bats that hunt together

Searching for food at night can be tricky. To find prey in the dark, bats use echolocation, their "sixth sense." But to find food faster, some species, like Molossus molossus, may search within hearing distance of their echolocating group members, sharing information about where food patches are located. Social information encoded in their echolocation calls may facilitate this foraging strategy,...

The UK’s contact tracing app fiasco is a master class in mismanagement

There are advantages to being one of the world’s largest single-payer health-care systems. For the UK’s National Health Service, the NHS, big data is increasingly one of them.  Its Recovery Trial, launched early in the coronavirus outbreak to collect information from across the system, has led to the discovery of dexamethasone as one of the most promising life-saving treatments for the...