News by Subject Mathematics

Why we dream is a divisive topic within the scientific community, and the neuroscience field is saturated with hypotheses. Inspired by techniques used to train deep neural networks, Tufts University neuroscience researcher Erik Hoel (@erikphoel) argues for a new theory of dreams: the overfitted brain hypothesis. The hypothesis, described May 14 in a review in the journal Patterns, suggests that the strangeness of our dreams serves to help our brains better generalize our day-to-day experiences.

Cooperation plays a crucial role in evolution. A team of scientists around Laura Schmid from the Chatterjee group at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria has now created a new model that shows how different kinds of cooperative strategies among humans develop. Using their unified framework, they show how an individual's experience and the reputation of others influence the emergence of successful cooperation.

In 2020, stores sold out of garden seed, coops and rabbit cages. Meat shortages led many to wonder what to eat for protein when supply chains are disrupted and some people turned to gathering eggs, raising animals and growing their own food. A team from Michigan Tech and the University of Alaska assessed backyard protein sources: They looked at how a typical household with a typical backyard can raise chickens, rabbits or soybeans to meet its protein needs.

Trained to see patterns by analyzing thousands of chest X-rays, a computer program predicted with up to 80 percent accuracy which COVID-19 patients would develop life-threatening complications.

Skoltech scientists have created a new monitoring system for agricultural applications that performs real-time image segmentation on board the drone to identify hogweed. The new approach holds great promise for farming: it could be used to monitor other crops, identify various vegetative indicators, assess plant health, and detect plant detect plant diseases by applying multispectral imagery.

Instead of relying on software to tackle computationally intensive puzzles, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) took an unconventional approach. They created a design for an electronic hardware system that directly replicates the architecture of many types of networks.