‘There has been a growing interest in neural networks recently. Just a few weeks ago, I posted about a neural network which created realistic faces based on the blurry photos it was fed with.

Now, a programmer named Aldo Cortesi has created an even stranger algorithm — one that draws silhouettes for nonexistent animals, some of which look plausible and others which look like nothing you’ve ever seen before.
In a post about the project, Cortesi wrote that he was indeed inspired by algorithms that generate human likenesses.
Check out the photos over at Futurism….’

— via Neatorama

Apparently, birds share their songs like we used to pass around mixtapes. White-throated sparrows in western Canada began singing a variant on the familiar classical sparrow call (“Old-Sam-Peabody-Peabody-Peabody”) about fifty years ago. The variant was syncopated differently, ending in doublets rather than triplets (“Old-Sam-Peabuh-Peabuh-Peabuh–Peabuh”). According to a newly-published study that took twenty years to complete, the novel version of the song has spread all across Canada. New birds appear to adopt the variant version when they winter with birds who sing it the new way. Initially thought to be characteristic only of “an isolated, peripheral population doing their own thing”, it was showing up as Far East as Ontario and by 2019 it was a certified hit, having taken over completely from the Yukon to Ontario and encroaching in the Northeastern US. 

— via The New York Times

Opinion by Laurence J. Kotlikoff (professor of economics at Boston University) and Michael Mina (assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health):

‘Simple at-home tests for the coronavirus, some that involve spitting into a small tube of solution, could be the key to expanding testing and impeding the spread of the pandemic. The Food and Drug Administration should encourage their development and then fast track approval.

One variety, paper-strip tests, are inexpensive and easy enough to make that Americans could test themselves every day. You’ would simply spit into a tube of saline solution and insert a small piece of paper embedded with a strip of protein. If you are infected with enough of the virus, the strip will change color within 15 minutes.

Your next step would be to self-quarantine, notify your doctor and confirm the result with a standard swab test — the polymerase chain reaction nasal swab. Confirmation would give public health officials key information on the virus’s spread and confirm that you should remain in quarantine until your daily test turned negative.

E25Bio, Sherlock Biosciences, Mammoth Biosciences, and an increasing number of academic research laboratories are in the late stages of developing paper-strip and other simple, daily Covid-19 tests. Some of the daily tests are in trials and proving highly effective.

The strips could be mass produced in a matter of weeks and freely supplied by the government to everyone in the country. The price per person would be from $1 to $5 a day, a considerable sum for the entire population, but remarkably cost effective….’

— via The New York Times