Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 20, 2019

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Authored by @remlaps

A Start-up wants to automate farming, from seeding to harvest; Proof claimed for a 78 year old conjecture on approximating irrational numbers; The science is mixed on health effects from eating eggs, but the good seems to outweigh the bad; An algorithm that distinguishes between cyberbullies and normal users; and the world's first out of line of site drone delivery of insulin

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  1. This Startup Is Building Giant Robots to Grow Our Food - California startup, FarmWise is looking to automate the entire agriculture experience, including things like seeding, weeding, and harvesting. Their first foray into the field is a robot that's augmented with AI in order to do weeding. This enables the plants to thrive with fewer chemical inputs. The robots are designed "with machine learning models, computer vision, and high precision mechanical tools" so that they can provide highly customized care to every plant that they care for. In addition to working in the fields, they are also collecting massive amounts of data so that they can continue to improve their capabilities. They've raised $14.5 million to get started.

    Here is a video from the article:


  • New Proof Solves 80-Year-Old Irrational Number Problem - In a July paper on arXiv, Dimitris Koukoulopoulos and James Maynard published a proof of the 78 year old Duffin-Schaeffer conjecture. This conjecture gives conditions for how hard it is to find a rational approximation of an irrational number with a particular denominator and an arbitrary error boundary. Intuitively, it makes sense that the smaller the error the harder it is to find an approximation, but this intuition turned out to be challenging to prove. The paper is 45 pages in length.

  • The truth about eating eggs - According to this article, eggs are optimized by nature to sustain a developing life, so they are densely packed with nutrients. For decades, however, government guidelines have warned against eating eggs because they are also high in cholesterol. It turns out, though, that scientists have not found any links between eating cholesterol and developing heart disease, and more specifically, some studies found no link between eating eggs and heart disease. So the FDA has now lifted its warning against eggs, and a new consensus has developed that eggs are safe to eat. Still newer studies, however have challenged that consensus, finding a slight risk of heart disease associated with eating half an egg per day, which has reopened the debate. On the other hand, eggs may also protect against Alzheimer's disease, eye disease, and liver damage. So in the end, the jury is still out on all of the different trade-offs associated with including eggs in the diet, but at the moment the good health effects seem to outweigh the bad. h/t RealClear Science

  • Algorithm Can Distinguish Cyberbullies from Normal Twitter Users - A team of researchers built a Twitter crawler that gathered and analyzed people's Tweets, profiles, followers and people that they followed. They fed this data into algorithms that made use of natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and a variety of network analysis techniques in order to automatically detect two types of undesirable behavior, cyberbullying and cyberaggression. The paper describing their work said they were able to identify those behaviors with 90% accuracy. The team who performed the work consisted of: Jeremy Blackburn from Binghamton University as well as, "Despoina Chatzakou of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas; Ilias Leontiadis of Samsung AI; Emiliano De Cristofaro of University College London; Gianluca Stringhini of Boston University; Athena Vakali of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; and Nicolas Kourtellis of Telefonica Research."

  • STEEM Cheaper & Faster: First Insulin Delivery Via Drone - In this post, @doitvoluntarily tells us about the world's first drone delivery of insulin that took place out of the line of site. Citing articles from Fox16 and CNBC, the article says that the effort was supported by the Irish Aviation Authority, and that a drone delivered diabetes medicine to an area off the west coast of Ireland. The article also notes that the "last mile" market for drones is expected to exceed $90 billion by the year 2030. (A 10% beneficiary has been applied to this post for @doitvoluntarily)

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    A small list for tonight (but this is a good as I have less time over the week-end (and a 450 pages thesis to read by Monday morning).

    That is amazing. This may be a good way to go for most efficient farming (and hopefully eco-friendly, who knows...).

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