Discover 3 science news from the latest 24 hours in our #PeerusWhatsNew, now on Medium.
1 A computer has managed to be better than dermatologists to spot skin cancer in a series of photos, a team of researchers said Tuesday.
The team created this system of artificial intelligence to distinguish skin lesions and moles according to whether they were benign or alarming, showing him more than 100,000 images.
With a photo of 100 cases considered complicated, doctors correctly identified 87% of the melanomas that were presented to them. The computer was able to identify 95% of the melanomas. But today nothing can replace a thorough clinical examination, recalled two professors in dermatology, Victoria Mar and Peter Soyer.
2 A team of researchers from Kyoto University suggests that cats are aware of some physics laws.
For their experiment, researchers observed 30 domestic cats. They were shaking a box that contained or not an object in front of a cat. Then the box was turned over and the cat watched if an object fell or not. In 50% of cases, the situation went against the laws of physics and the cats were in a disconcerting situation: either there was a noise and no object that came out of the box, or there was no noise but an object still fell out of the box.
For the authors, “this study can be considered as a proof that cats have a rudimentary knowledge of gravity”.
3 Global warming and the presence of more and more CO2 in our atmosphere, could have an impact on the nutrient content of rice.
Researchers tested 18 different strains of rice, planted in open fields and somehow sprayed with CO2 to simulate the atmospheric situation as imagined for the second half of the century.
After the experiment, results revealed that iron, zinc, protein and vitamin B1, B2, B5 and B9 levels were lower in rice grown under high CO2 conditions.
Try Peerus, a smart and exhaustive way to be up-do-date with the latest scientific advances.
