Recommendation algorithms can make a customer’s online shopping experience quicker and more efficient by suggesting complementary products whenever the shopper adds a product to their basket. Did the customer buy peanut butter? The algorithm recommends several brands of jelly to add next. These algorithms typically work by associating purchased items with items other shoppers have […]

Astronomers have identified two different cases of “mini-Neptune” planets that are losing their puffy atmospheres and likely transforming into super-Earths. Radiation from the planets’ stars is stripping away their atmospheres, driving hot gas to escape like steam from a pot of boiling water. “Most astronomers suspected that young, small mini-Neptunes must have evaporating atmospheres,” says […]

Temp workers see a 21% increase in average wages when employed by a company with a unionized workforce, according to new ILR School research. “What is surprising is that wage premium only holds for unions that go head-to-head, battling with employers,” said Adam Seth Litwin, associate professor of labor relations, law and history in the ILR […]

Services like Instacart, Grubhub, DoorDash, and Amazon certainly existed before the COVID-19 pandemic. However, demand for groceries, food, and other products purchased online and delivered directly to your door substantially increased when the coronavirus forced many Americans to stay at home. But just how much has the demand for deliveries increased, who uses the services, […]

An international study involving CNRS and CEA researchers and the company Kayrros has uncovered hundreds of major methane releases linked to global oil and gas extraction activities. The team of scientists has shown that limiting volumes released would mitigate climate effects and save money—billions of dollars for the main fossil-fuel-producing countries. Their study is published […]

NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, created using blockchain technology, first made a splash in the art world as a platform to buy and sell digital art backed by a digital contract. But could NFT digital contracts be useful in other marketplaces? A global, multidisciplinary team of scholars in ethics, law and informatics led by bioethicists at […]

CRISPR genome editing has served as a powerful tool for deleting or altering DNA sequences and studying the resulting effect. Now, researchers at Gladstone Institutes and UC San Francisco (UCSF) have co-opted the CRISPR-Cas9 system to forcibly activate genes—rather than edit them—in human immune cells. The method, known as CRISPRa, let them discover genes that […]

When the human brain learns something new, it adapts. But when artificial intelligence learns something new, it tends to forget information it already learned. As companies use more and more data to improve how AI recognizes images, learns languages and carries out other complex tasks, a paper publishing in Science this week shows a way that computer chips […]

A region crossing the folded surface of the top of the brain, called the dorsal precentral gyrus, plays an essential role in how people use the sound of their voices to control how they want the words to sound, a new study shows. The ability to take cues from one’s own voice while talking, researchers […]

As the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated, new mutations in viral genetic sequences can have significant impacts on the virus’s transmissibility and the damage it causes. For many years, there have been concerns that this could arise in the HIV-1 virus, which already affects 38 million people worldwide, and has caused 33 million deaths to […]