The Havana mystery

There was a story that appeared in the news some time ago about a mysterious sound that was supposedly affecting US embassy personnel in Havana and creating such debilitating effects that it resulted in some of them deciding to come back to the US. There were allegations that Cuba was waging some kind of high-tech warfare against the US but the case for that was pretty thin, even allowing for the fact that there would be no motive for them to do so, since they are interested in improving ties with the US.
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The impact of Deep Learning on our lives

The last meeting of Science Café Cleveland had as its presenter Wyatt Newman, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, who gave a fascinating presentation on the state of Deep Learning, the term given by the Artificial Intelligence community to the next stage of AI development, where machines learn to identify things and make decisions for novel situations that they have not been previously programed to deal with. It is this feature, for example, that enables self-driving vehicles to identify the various things it encounters on roads and take appropriate actions.
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The alcohol problem

I do not drink alcohol, except for the occasional champagne or wine at weddings and other social events when such beverages are used to toast people. But I grew up in a family where most of the men drank a lot and Sri Lanka has a lot of heavy drinkers so I am familiar with the problems that alcohol can cause. Given that environment, why I did not start drinking myself I do not know. Perhaps seeing the adverse ways it caused people to behave was one factor. Another may be that my group of friends in college, the age when most people pick up the habit, were not drinkers either and so it was not part of our group activities and there was no peer pressure. Alcohol was not cheap and we preferred to spend our money on films and food. It was only much later that I learned of the genetic element that predisposes some people to become alcoholics and so it is perhaps a good thing that I did not start, just in case I had the gene and it may have been triggered.
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What is the highest point on Earth?

This seems like an easy question. It is at the top of Mount Everest, of course. But is it that simple? It depends on how you define highest. If you mean the height above sea level, then yes, that is the correct answer. But the Earth is not a perfect sphere. It bulges at the equator, making it what we call an oblate spheroid. So if we define tallest by the distance from the center of the Earth, then we have to also take into account the fact that sea level near the equator is ‘higher’ than at points away from the equator.
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New species found under the Antarctic

That evolution shapes the nature of organisms depending on their environment is well known. But we may think that we have explored pretty much all the Earth and thus encountered all the variety that exists. So it is interesting when previously unknown regions of the Earth that have vastly different environments from those we are familiar with reveal new kinds of organisms.
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“Where is my flying car?” may soon no longer be a joke

Some of you may remember the animated TV show The Jetsons about a family that lived in the future that had all manner of anticipated technological advances. One of them was the flying personal car and that particular item has become a punch line whenever people want to express disappointment that we do not have many of the amazing things that we thought had been promised to us in the dreams of science fiction writers.
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The problems with self-driving vehicles

Now that self-driving vehicles (SDVs) are becoming a reality, people are paying close attention to accident reports involving them. In almost all the cases, it appears that it was an error by the human in the other car that caused the accident. Here is a compilation of dash-cam videos taken from SDVs as they avoid accidents, some of which required quick reactions.


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Puzzling things about the Invisible Man

Some of you may have read H. G. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man. There have been several films based on it that I have not seen but as a young boy, I was fascinated by a TV show that was based on the same idea but is set in modern times and is otherwise nothing like the book. In this show, as in the book, a scientific experiment gone wrong makes a man completely invisible, so he goes around wearing clothes, gloves, sunglasses, hat and with his face fully bandaged in order to keep his invisibility secret and make his presence visible and not freak people out.
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