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Time-Efficient and Low-Cost Neural Network to detect plant disease on leaves and reduce food loss and waste

Singh et al. | Apr 24, 2023

Time-Efficient and Low-Cost Neural Network to detect plant disease on leaves and reduce food loss and waste

About 25% of the food grown never reaches consumers due to spoilage, and 11.5 billion pounds of produce from gardens are wasted every year. Current solutions involve farmers manually looking for and treating diseased crops. These methods of tending crops are neither time-efficient nor feasible. I used a convolutional neural network to identify signs of plant disease on leaves for garden owners and farmers.

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Analyzing resilience in a sample population as a novel qualifier for triage in psychological first aid

Ramesh et al. | Apr 18, 2023

Analyzing resilience in a sample population as a novel qualifier for triage in psychological first aid
Image credit: Mat Napo

While serving as an immediate address for psychological safety and stability, psychological first aid (PFA) currently lacks the incorporation of triage. Without triage, patients cannot be prioritized in correspondence to condition severity that is often called for within emergency conditions. To disentangle the relevance of a potential triage system to PFA, the authors of this paper have developed a method to quantify resilience - a prominent predictor of the capability to recover from a disaster. With this resilience index, they have quantified resilience of differing age, race, and sex demographics to better inform the practice of PFA and potential demographic prioritization via a triage system.

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Optimizing airfoil shape for small, low speed, unmanned gliders: A homemade investigation

Lara et al. | Mar 30, 2023

Optimizing airfoil shape for small, low speed, unmanned gliders: A homemade investigation
Image credit: Konrad Wojciechowski

Here, the authors sought to identify a method to optimize the lift generated by an airfoil based solely on its shape. By beginning with a Bernoullian model to predict an optimized wing shape, the authors then tested their model against other possible shapes by constructing them from Styrofoam and testing them in a small wind tunnel. Contrary to their hypothesis, they found their expected optimal airfoil shape did not result in the greatest lift generation. They attributed this to a variety of confounding variables and concluded that their results pointed to a correlation between airfoil shape and lift generation.

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Increased carmine red exposure periods yields a higher number of vacuoles formed in Tetrahymena pyriformis

Shah et al. | Nov 18, 2022

Increased carmine red exposure periods yields a higher number of vacuoles formed in <em>Tetrahymena pyriformis</em>

T. pyriformis can use phagocytosis to create vacuoles of carmine red, a dye which is made using crushed insects and is full of nutrients. Establishing a relationship between vacuole formation and duration of exposure to food can demonstrate how phagocytosis occurs in T. pyriformis. We hypothesized that if T. pyriformis was incubated in a carmine red solution, then more vacuoles would form over time in each cell.

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Buttermilk and baking soda increase pancake fluffiness by liberating carbon dioxide

Rojas et al. | Sep 18, 2022

Buttermilk and baking soda increase pancake fluffiness by liberating carbon dioxide

Here, seeking a better understanding of what determines the fluffiness of a pancake, the authors began by considering a chemical reaction that results in the production of carbon dioxide gas from recipe ingredients, specifically sodium bicarbonate or baking soda. The substitution of homemade buttermilk for milk and adding more baking soda was found to result in significantly fluffier pancakes.

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Identifying Neural Networks that Implement a Simple Spatial Concept

Zirvi et al. | Sep 13, 2022

Identifying Neural Networks that Implement a Simple Spatial Concept

Modern artificial neural networks have been remarkably successful in various applications, from speech recognition to computer vision. However, it remains less clear whether they can implement abstract concepts, which are essential to generalization and understanding. To address this problem, the authors investigated the above vs. below task, a simple concept-based task that honeybees can solve, using a conventional neural network. They found that networks achieved 100% test accuracy when a visual target was presented below a black bar, however only 50% test accuracy when a visual target was presented below a reference shape.

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The feeling of beauty in music: Relaxing and not confusing

Jain et al. | Sep 07, 2022

The feeling of beauty in music: Relaxing and not confusing

Here, the authors sought to better understand how and why people experience beauty in music. They explored this fundamental aesthetic response by considering numerous emotional responses of participants to diverse musical excerpts using a 42-item Aesthetic Emotions Scale assessment. They found that the highly nuanced emotional experience of beauty in music includes positive, negative, and knowledge-related feelings.

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