State initiative to address disparities in mother's milk for very low birth weight infants

Researchers at Boston Medical Center initiated a statewide quality improvement imitative to increase mothers' ability to produce and provide milk for very low birth weight infants at their discharge, as well reduce the racial/ethnic disparities in milk production and provision to these infants. A new study, published June 18th in Pediatrics, indicates that the initiative yielded positive results on improving rates of prenatal human milk education, early milk expression and skin to skin care among mothers of very low birth weight infants during initial hospitalization, but did not lead to sustained improvement in mother's milk provision at hospital discharge.

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New time-banking system utilizes blockchain tech to measure one's value to society

Citizens from the island of Aneityum in the Republic of Vanuatu are working with faculty from Binghamton University, State University of New York to test their true value as humans.

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'Self-healing' polymer brings perovskite solar tech closer to market

A protective layer of epoxy resin helps prevent the leakage of pollutants from perovskite solar cells (PSCs), according to scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST). Adding a "self-healing" polymer to the top of a PSC can radically reduce how much lead it discharges into the environment. This gives a strong boost to prospects for commercializing the technology.

* This article was originally published here

Skinflow: A soft robotic skin based on liquid transmission

Researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and the University of Bristol have recently developed a new soft robotic skin-like sensor that is based on fluidic transmission. This sensor, presented at the second IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft), could have interesting applications in a variety of fields, ranging from robotics to virtual reality (VR).

* This article was originally published here

Facebook takes on the world of cryptocurrency with 'Libra' coin

Facebook unveiled plans Tuesday for a new global cryptocurrency called Libra, pledging to deliver a stable virtual money that lives on smartphones and could bring over a billion "unbanked" people into the financial system.

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A miniature robot that could check colons for early signs of disease

Engineers have shown it is technically possible to guide a tiny robotic capsule inside the colon to take micro-ultrasound images.

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Spintronic memory cells for neural networks

In recent years, researchers have proposed a wide variety of hardware implementations for feed-forward artificial neural networks. These implementations include three key components: a dot-product engine that can compute convolution and fully-connected layer operations, memory elements to store intermediate inter and intra-layer results, and other components that can compute non-linear activation functions.

* This article was originally published here

Trump moves to weaken Obama climate policy, bolster coal industry

The Trump administration on Wednesday unveiled its final plan to rewrite a major Obama-era climate change policy, replacing proposed regulations that cracked down on coal-burning power plants with a weaker alternative.

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The dynamics of workplace sexual harassment in the US

A new Gender, Work & Organization analysis of U.S. data from 1997-2016 provides new insights into workplace sexual harassment.

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Investigating coral and algal 'matchmaking' at the cellular level

What factors govern algae's success as "tenants" of their coral hosts both under optimal conditions and when oceanic temperatures rise? A Victoria University of Wellington-led team of experts that includes Carnegie's Arthur Grossman investigates this question.

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Compact, low-cost fingerprint reader could reduce infant mortality around the world

A team of Michigan State University researchers have created Infant-Prints—a low-cost, high-resolution and portable solution to accurately identify infants in an effort to help reduce infant mortality around the world.

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I, Chatbot: Getting your news from a talkative automaton

"Do you ever lie to your friends?," Jam asks, popping up in a private message box at the bottom of your screen.

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What do Aboriginal Australians want from their aged care system? Community connection is number one

The Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population is ageing at a much faster rate than the non-Indigenous population.

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Family, community bonds help decrease mental health problems of former child soldiers

Acceptance and support from communities and families appear to lessen the toll of mental health conditions experienced by former child soldiers transitioning to early adulthood, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and other institutions. The study appears in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

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Locally-based Haitian social entrepreneurs empower disaster-stricken villages

Steffen Farny, Ewald Kibler and Simon Down report how communities can better cope and move on from the trauma of natural disasters, and build hope for the future. Farny says, "Aside from the physical damage, the aftermath of a natural disaster can also create a cultural trauma, so we wanted to look beyond the first phase of disaster response and focus on the longer-term repercussions and approaches to rebuilding." They turned their attention to the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake of 2010, which killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and collapsed the government in the process.

* This article was originally published here

New evidence supports the presence of microbes in the placenta

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine previously found evidence that the placenta harbors a sparse but still present community of microorganisms, which they and other researchers speculate may contribute to key functions in pregnancy, including immunity.

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Popcorn as a snack—healthy hit or dietary horror show?

Popcorn, with its ample dietary fiber and typically low calorie count, makes it easy to understand why many people think a giant bucket at the movie theater qualifies as a healthy snack.

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Teaching AI agents navigation subroutines by feeding them videos

Researchers at UC Berkeley and Facebook AI Research have recently proposed a new approach that can enhance the navigation skills of machine learning models. Their method, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, allows models to acquire visuo-motor navigation subroutines by processing a series of videos.

* This article was originally published here

Researchers have success in detecting if images of faces were manipulated

Make some noise for Adobe in its effort to detect fakery. They unleashed the powers of machine learning to automatically detect when images of faces have been manipulated.

* This article was originally published here