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Everybody Loves Science!
Case:
"You Look Familiar. Now Scientists Know Why."
--- Quote ---The brain has an amazing capacity for recognizing faces. It can identify a face in a few thousandths of a second, form a first impression of its owner and retain the memory for decades. Central to these abilities is a longstanding puzzle: how the image of a face is encoded by the brain. Two Caltech biologists, Le Chang and Doris Y. Tsao, reported in Thursday’s issue of Cell that they have deciphered the code of how faces are recognized.
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--- Quote ---Advances in machine learning have been made by training a computerized mimic of a neural network on a given task. Though the networks are successful, they are also a black box because it is hard to reconstruct how they achieve their result.
“This has given neuroscience a sense of pessimism that the brain is similarly a black box,” she said. “Our paper provides a counterexample. We’re recording from neurons at the highest stage of the visual system and can see that there’s no black box. My bet is that that will be true throughout the brain.”
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LTK:
To answer the question of why there are so many heavy elements in the universe, astrophysicists have proposed an interesting scenario: what if a black hole collided with a neutron star?
They say the neutron star won't simply be absorbed in one big gulp, because black holes can only consume matter bit by bit. So what'll happen is that the black hole will actually end up inside the neutron star, wearing it like a shell while devouring it from within. A side effect of this is that the neutron star shell - which already tend to rotate thousand of times per second - will accelerate its rotation, eventually spinning so fast that the surface on its equator will break apart and the material gets flung into space, eventually forming conventional matter by gathering protons and electrons.
So to clarify, a black hole - the gravitational pull of which is literally impossible to escape - collided with a neutron star - which is merely pratically impossible to escape from - results in an object with enough energy to launch matter out of both its gravitational wells!
Fucking metal.
LeeC:
The Yeti, or abominable Snowman (which is itself a mistranslation of "that thing there") may have been figured out. After hundreds of reports of yeti sightings, footprints, and remains found, the mystery appears to have been solved. After extensive mDNA testing it appears the Yeti is the Himalayan brown bear and the the Himalayan black bear and in some cases a hybrid of both. The bear species are critically endangered and can be rare to find.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/so-much-abominable-snowman-study-finds-yeti-dna-belongs-bears
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/28/health/yeti-scientific-proof-study/index.html
LTK:
The Myopia Boom (Nature, 2015). The prevalence of myopia has skyrocketed in China, and it's hypothesised that this increase is because children who spend all their time indoors receive too little light for their eyes to develop properly. While children's eyes are developing, they should be spending significant time in illumination of at least 10,000 lux, which is the brightness of an overcast day. Not coincidentally, this is also the strength of illumination used to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder. Light can be pretty essential for good health.
Akima:
Yes, this is a thing. Chinese school-children typically have a "nap-time" at lunch, rather than going out to play in the playground. Various reasons/excuses have been offered for this (the terrible air-pollution in most Chinese cities, for example), but I suspect that it is simply easier for the teachers.
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