Neural networks are everywhere today. They are used to drive vehicles, classify images, translate texts, determine your shopping preferences, or finding your quickest route to the supermarket. Their power at making sense of small or large datasets alike is enabling great progress in a number of areas of human knowledge, too. Yet there is nothing magical about them, and in fact what makes them powerful is something that has been around for century: differential calculus.

Scientists just published a study of what may prove to be China's most ancient human fossil. The researchers employed microCT, geometric morphometry, and classical morphology techniques to investigate the remains of the maxillary and five teeth from the skull unearthed at the Chinese site of Gongwangling, on the vast plains on the northern slopes of the Quinling Mountains (province of Shaanxi, in central China) and was discovered by the scientist Woo Ju-Kang in 1963.

A new paper says Generation X adults in the United States are more likely to have a greater number of chronic health conditions than those that preceded them, which will please environmental groups who claim that everything from pesticides to natural gas to cell phones is killing us, but is not science.

There are two issues to think about. One is that diagnoses don't mean much. If you get a diagnosis of chronic lyme disease, it does not mean that is suddenly a real disease, and life expectancy is basically meaningless.

A new study correlates SARS-CoV-2 specific T cells to lung function and those who suffer from long-term COVID symptoms, which impacts an unclear number of people.

The study found that patients suffering from long COVID symptoms had virus-specific T cell levels more than 100 times higher than those who recovered from the disease.

About 94 percent of the universe is not detectable matter and the universe is expanding. Those two facts alone are how scientists recognize that gravity as we know it does not work at the very large scale.

It also does not work at the very small. Various bits of speculation, hypothesis, and science-fiction have tried to account for macro effects and they get lumped under generic blanket terms like 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' but experimental physics leads the charge in turning science from fantasy into reality. A new paper has made a step closer to understanding the quantum excitation known as the axial Higgs mode, which unlike the Higgs Boson has a magnetic moment. There is no end to theoretical claims about an axial Higgs mode but reality has been more elusive. 

As the twentythree regular readers of this blog know [(c) A.Manzoni], in recent times I have moved the main focus of my research to advanced applications of deep learning to fundamental science. That does not mean that I am not continuing to participate in the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider - that remains the main focus of my research; but it does mean that what remains of my brain functionalities is mostly invested in thinking about future applications of today's and tomorrow's computer science innovations. 

The birth and ultimate fate of the 13.7 billion year old universe is a subject that has intrigued scientists since the dawn of civilization.