Podme logo
HemUpptäckKategorierSökStudent
Covid mutation; On the facial expression of emotions; A mystery object

Covid mutation; On the facial expression of emotions; A mystery object

33:152020-12-17

Om avsnittet

Dr Alex Lathbridge with your peek at the week in science. This week in the House of Commons Matt Hancock announced a new variant in the Covid virus, discovered to be spreading through the south east of the UK. As Professor Jonathan Ball of the University of Nottingham describes, there have been many slight mutations and changes to the DNA in the virus since it first emerged, and most are of no added danger. But it is important that new ones - and new combinations of them - are tracked through collaborations and networks such as COG-UK, who provide an almost real-time track of the spread of new mutations. The new one this week is of some interest as it involves a slight change to the protein of the binding area on the virus, but much lab work remains to be done, Is an angry face always an angry face? A paper in the Journal Nature this week uses Machine Learning to scan millions of videos of faces on YouTube to shed light on an old problem - the universality of facial expressions in people. The authors - working with Google - suggest that broadly speaking, in a number of contexts such as weddings and sporting events, people in much of the world tend to pull the same faces. But as Lisa Feldman Barrett - who wrote an accompanying commentary in the same journal - suggests, the way Machine Learning approaches in this area require very human perceptions to train the algorithm in the first place, means care must be taken before inferring too much. This year BBC Inside Science has been showcasing some of the mystery objects the Science Museum has uncovered in the course of moving its collections to a new home in Wroughton, Wiltshire. Jessica Bradford talks to Alex about our next one. If you have any ideas what it might be for, you can let them know by dropping a note or memory to mysteryobject@sciencemuseum.ac.uk Presented by Alex Lathbridge Produced by Alex Mansfield Made in Association with The Open University

Senaste avsnitten

BBC Inside Science
BBC Inside Science

Is gene therapy the future?

2024-06-1328min
BBC Inside Science
BBC Inside Science

Is treated sewage worse for the environment than raw?

2024-06-0627min
BBC Inside Science
BBC Inside Science

Ugly animals and asteroid Apophis

2024-05-3028min
BBC Inside Science
BBC Inside Science

Can we get plastic waste under control?

2024-05-2327min
BBC Inside Science
BBC Inside Science

Do we need a new model of cosmology?

2024-05-1631min
BBC Inside Science
BBC Inside Science

Bird flu outbreak in cows

2024-05-0931min
BBC Inside Science
BBC Inside Science

200 years of dinosaur science

2024-05-0227min
BBC Inside Science
BBC Inside Science

Inside Your Microbiome

2024-04-2528min
BBC Inside Science
BBC Inside Science

Our Accidental Universe

2024-04-1836min
BBC Inside Science
BBC Inside Science

World’s oldest forest fossils

2024-04-1128min
logo

PODME

INFORMATION

  • Om kakor
  • Allmänna villkor
  • Integritetspolicy
  • Press

LADDA NED APPEN

app storegoogle play store

REGION

flag
  • sweden_flag
  • norway_flag
  • finland_flag

© Podme AB 2024