Friday 31 May 2019

U.S. Postal Service mail, packages are headed to Dallas by self-driving truck

Before letters end up in your mailbox and packages land on your doorstep, many travel hundreds or thousands of miles in the back of a truck. Now, the United States Postal Service is testing what it would take to shuttle that cargo without a driver in the front seat.

* This article was originally published here

FDA approves first test for Zika in human blood

(HealthDay)—The first test to detect the Zika virus in human blood has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

* This article was originally published here

Google's rebellious employees take aim at contractor firms

Google workers on Thursday expanded their rebellion against company practices, sending letters to three firms they say provide contract workers to Google, asking them to end mandatory arbitration for those workers.

* This article was originally published here

Is it fatigue or a stroke? Women shouldn't ignore these warning signs

Stroke is a leading cause of death and disability in the U.S., and women make up nearly 60% of all stroke deaths.

* This article was originally published here

Prescription drug costs steadily soar, yet price transparency is lacking

After reviewing tens of millions of insurance claims for the country's 49 most popular brand-name prescription drugs, a team from Scripps Research Translational Institute found that net prices rose by a median of 76 percent from January 2012 through December 2017—with most products going up once or twice per year.

* This article was originally published here

Flexible generators turn movement into energy

Wearable devices that harvest energy from movement are not a new idea, but a material created at Rice University may make them more practical.

* This article was originally published here

Pediatric nurse practitioner shortage looming

(HealthDay)—There is a looming critical shortage of pediatric nurse practitioners (PNPs), according to a white paper published in the May-June issue of the Journal of Pediatric Health Care.

* This article was originally published here

An approach to enhance machine learning explanations

Researchers at IBM Research UK, the U.S. Military Academy and Cardiff University have recently proposed a new approach to improve the sensitivity of LIME (Local Interpretable Model Agnostic Explanations), a technique for attaining a better understanding ofthe conclusions reached by machine learning algorithms. Their paper, published on SPIE digital library, could inform the development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that provide exhaustive explanations of how they reached a particular outcome or conclusion.

* This article was originally published here

'Slothbot' takes a leisurely approach to environmental monitoring

For environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, infrastructure maintenance and certain security applications, slow and energy efficient can be better than fast and always needing a recharge. That's where "SlothBot" comes in.

* This article was originally published here

Excess cause-specific mortality tied to chronic proton pump inhibitor use

(HealthDay)—Taking proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) is associated with an excess of cause-specific mortality, according to a study published online May 30 in The BMJ.

* This article was originally published here

Hydrogen-power electric flying vehicle: Long road to liftoff

A transportation company is betting its sleek new hydrogen-powered electric flying vehicles will someday serve as taxis, cargo carriers and ambulances of the sky, but experts say they will have to clear a number of regulatory hurdles before being approved for takeoff years in the future.

* This article was originally published here

The hidden but preventable epidemic of lung cancer in women

The use of tobacco products, like smoking cigarettes, is the leading preventable cause of cancer worldwide. And lung cancer is still a leading cause of global deaths.

* This article was originally published here

Understanding identity in online worlds

For Rosa Mikeal Martey, professor in Journalism and Media Communication, the relationship between identity in the offline world and identity construction in a virtual world has always been of research interest. For her dissertation, Martey studied gender identity and perception in online job applications. Her current research involves understanding how social norms develop in digital spaces. "I'm interested in the way people interact with, use, and respond to technology as they perform and craft those identities," she says. "Identity is a fluid category that emerges in different spaces and is influenced by the space itself."

* This article was originally published here

Water governance: Flexibility, uncertainty and participation

Whenever I start a presentation about water governance, I ask the audience if they know what the price of a litre of tap water is. Usually the room goes quiet, shoulders shrug and only a few make a guess, usually an overestimation. My next question is about the price of a litre of petrol. Within a split second, I get the right answer from the audience.

* This article was originally published here

Clinical calculator could spare breast cancer patients five years of unnecessary hormone therapy

New research confirms that an algorithm, called CTS5, can accurately identify patients who are at a significantly low risk of their breast cancer returning at a later stage. In doing so it means some patients may need to take hormone therapy for five years, rather than 10, something that researchers say could have a huge impact both psychologically and physically.

* This article was originally published here

New algorithm may help people store more pictures, share videos faster

The world produces about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Storing and transferring all of this enormous—and constantly growing—number of images, videos, Tweets, and other forms of data is becoming a significant challenge, one that threatens to undermine the growth of the internet and thwart the introduction of new technologies, such as the Internet of Things.

* This article was originally published here

Church, couch, couple: Social psychological connections between people and physical space

Societies and people have reshaped the world many times over. From building cities and communities that live within them, to the smaller changes in a person's home or place of worship, people influence their space. Benjamin Meagher, a social psychologist at Hope College, argues that the space people shape, also shapes the individual, and that social psychology must take an "ecological" view of people in their environment.

* This article was originally published here

Human contact plays big role in spread of some hospital infections, but not others

An observational study conducted in a French hospital showed that human contact was responsible for 90 percent of the spread of one species of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to new patients, but less than 60 percent of the spread of a different species. Audrey Duval of the Versailles Saint Quentin University and Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, and colleagues present these findings in PLOS Computational Biology.

* This article was originally published here