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4 articles from ScienceNOW

U.S. math professor gets probation, not prison, in China Initiative case

An applied math professor at Southern Illinois University (SIU), Carbondale, was sentenced today to 1 year of probation—and no prison time—after being found guilty earlier this year of filing incorrect tax returns and failing to report a foreign bank account. Mathematician Mingqing Xiao was prosecuted under a controversial U.S. law enforcement effort launched in 2018, called...

When AI asks dumb questions, it gets smart fast

If someone showed you a photo of a crocodile and asked whether it was a bird, you might laugh—and then, if you were patient and kind, help them identify the animal. Such real-world, and sometimes dumb, interactions may be key to helping artificial intelligence learn, according to a new study in which the strategy dramatically improved an AI’s accuracy at interpreting novel images. The...

How many ants live on Earth?

Counting ants is a bit like counting grains of sand on a beach. But six researchers have proved they were up for the task. They’ve come up with the latest—and most comprehensive—estimate of the number of ants in the world: 20 quadrillion . That’s 12 megatons of biomass—more than all the wild birds and mammals taken together. Ants are important ecosystem...

Microbiologists propose new DNA-based naming system for microbes

A new system for naming certain microbes promises to streamline the process and relieve a backlog created by the thousands of species uncovered through DNA analyses in recent years. In a paper published today in Nature Microbiology , researchers describe SeqCode , a protocol that allows, for the first time, the naming of newly discovered bacteria and other...