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Sunday, March 30, 2014

ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

ScienceDaily: Strange Science News


Stigmas, once evolutionarily sound, are now bad health strategies

Posted: 28 Mar 2014 02:52 PM PDT

Stigmatization may have once served to protect early humans from infectious diseases, but that strategy may do more harm than good for modern humans, according to researchers. Stigmatizing and ostracizing members stricken with infectious diseases may have helped groups of early humans survive. But "the things that made stigmas a more functional strategy thousands of years ago rarely exist now," explained one author

Information processing demonstrated using a light-based chip inspired by our brain

Posted: 28 Mar 2014 02:51 PM PDT

Researchers report on a novel paradigm to do optical information processing on a chip, using techniques inspired by the way our brain works. Neural networks have been employed in the past to solve pattern recognition problems like speech recognition or image recognition, but so far, these bio-inspired techniques have been implemented mostly in software on a traditional computer. What researchers have now done is implement a small (16 nodes) neural network directly in hardware, using a silicon photonics chip.

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