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Exploring the Factors that Drive Coffee Ratings

Agarwal et al. | May 19, 2025

Exploring the Factors that Drive Coffee Ratings

This study explores the factors that influence coffee quality ratings using data from the Coffee Quality Institute. Through a regression model based on gradient descent, the authors aimed to predict coffee ratings (total cup points) and hypothesized that sweetness and the coffee producer would be the most influential factors.

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Cleaning up the world’s oceans with underwater laser imaging

Gurbuz et al. | Jul 07, 2023

Cleaning up the world’s oceans with underwater laser imaging
Image credit: Naja Bertolt Jensen

Here recognizing the growing amount of plastic waste in the oceans, the authors sought to develop and test laser imaging for the identification of waste in water. They found that while possible, limitations such as increasing depth and water turbidity result in increasing blurriness in laser images. While their image processing methods were somewhat insufficient they identified recent methods to use deep learning-based techniques as a potential avenue to viability for this method.

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Testing Simarouba amara’s therapeutic effects against weedicide-induced tumor-like morphology in planarians

Thiagarajan et al. | Apr 26, 2024

Testing Simarouba amara’s therapeutic effects against weedicide-induced tumor-like morphology in planarians

According to the World Health Organization, cancer is a leading cause of death globally. The disease’s prevalence is rapidly increasing in association with factors including the increased use of pesticides and herbicides, such as glyphosate, which is one of the most widely used herbicide ingredients. Natural antioxidants and phytochemicals are being tested as anti-cancer agents due to their antiproliferative, antioxidative, and pro-apoptotic properties. Thus, we aimed to investigate the potential role of S. amara extract as a therapeutic agent against glyphosate-induced toxicity and tumor-like morphologies in regenerating and homeostatic planaria (Dugesia dorotocephala).

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How has California’s Shelter-in-Place Order due to COVID-19 and the Resulting Reduction in Human Activity Affected Air and Water Quality?

Everitt et al. | Feb 15, 2021

How has California’s Shelter-in-Place Order due to COVID-19 and the Resulting Reduction in Human Activity Affected Air and Water Quality?

As the world struggled to grapple with the emerging COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, many countries instated policies to help minimize the spread of the virus among residents. This inadvertently led to a decrease in travel, and in some cases, industrial output, two major sources of pollutants in today's world. Here, the authors investigate whether California's shelter-in-place policy was associated with a measurable decrease in water and air pollution in that state between June and July of 2020, compared to the preceeding five years. Their findings suggest that, by some metrics, air quality improved within certain areas while water quality was relatively unchanged. Overall, these findings suggest that changing human behavior can, indeed, help reduce the level of air pollutants that compromise air quality.

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