The Conversation

The drive to improve performance means elite sport is inundated with data from wearable technologies such as GPS, computer vision and match statistics.So professional clubs are constantly on the lookout for tools that can help turn these data into usable and meaningful information.One such tool gaining popularity is machine learning. Put simply, machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence, whereby computers are able to learn without being explicitly programmed by a human operator.

The diagnosis of the first case of Ebola in Lagos, Nigeria in July last year set off alarm bells around the world. The fear was that it would trigger an apocalyptic epidemic that would make the outbreaks in Liberia, Sierra-Leone and Guinea, where 1322 cases were reported and 728 people had died within five months, pale in comparison.

Around a quarter of people experience depression at some point in their lives, two-thirds of whom are women. Each year more than 11 million working days are lost in the UK to stress, depression or anxiety and there are more than 6,000 suicides. The impact of depression on individuals, families, society and the economy is enormous.

There are those who believed that B.B. King wasn’t the world’s greatest guitar player, including the man himself. In a recent interview he said:I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that’s because there’s been so many can do it better'n I can, play the blues better'n me.And his musical vocabulary was limited. King once told Bono: “I’m no good with chords, so what we do is, uh, get somebody else to play chords… I’m horrible with chords”. He even claimed that he couldn’t play and sing at the same time.

A number of recent studies have reported on the use of biomarkers, particularly blood-based ones, that offer the potential for screening diseases such as cancer and HIV.A biomarker can be a gene, a gene mutation, protein, other molecule or clinical measurement that indicates a given disease state. Biomarkers can be diagnostics (telling us of the presence of a given disease), prognostic (telling us of the outcome for a patient with a particular disease) and predictive (telling us of the response of an individual to a given therapy). The latter has led to the rise of so-called personalised or precision medicine.

“Birds of a feather flock together” is a saying that exists in a number of different languages. “Gambá cheira gambá” (opossums smell other opossums) in Brazilian Portuguese is a particularly colorful example. The reason is that like-minded people like to hang out together across many cultures. And it seems the same is true of baboons.

Imagine you are negotiating with a documentary maker to film your expensive and precious home. You are unsure about it, but are reassured that there are fixed procedures to follow; documents to sign and insurance policies to review. The producer seems genuinely concerned that you are happy with the filming process.

It’s bee season and now’s the time to go outside and observe these popular insects. Bees hold a relatively special place in people’s affections – we have them to thank for honey, of course, and they’re also essential pollinators of many food crops and wild plants.But most bees aren’t the snazzy hive-dwelling orange and black characters we know so well. In fact, there are around 20,000 species of bee globally and just seven of these are honeybees, and the vast majority of honeybee colonies belong to only one species: Apis mellifera.

As scientists, my colleagues and I are often told we need to engage the general public and decision makers, to use our expertise to inform public discourse and debates and to reach a far wider audience than just our professional colleagues.I very much believe in the importance of doing this. This is, for instance, my 25th article for The Conversation. I’ve also written scores of articles for other popular venues such as New Scientist, Natural History, Yale Environment 360, Australian Geographic, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times, among others.

A growing body of advice suggests doing small amounts of moderate exercise can make a significant difference to your health.

As a tenured professor and mother of four young sons, I am constantly asked, “How do you do it?” What people mean is: “How can you have a full-time job and still manage child care and housework?”I usually respond, “High-quality husband and high-quality child care, in that order.” From the outset, my husband, a full-time, clinical pharmacist, has been a committed partner in caring for our house and raising our children.But I’ve learned that, with our equal division of housework and child care, he’s an outlier. There may be some like him, but our research group at The Ohio State University recently discovered that such husbands in dual-earner households are, indeed, rare.

Virtual reality (VR) equipment has tended to be cumbersome and expensive, all heavy headsets and awkward gloves. Until recently it’s been beyond the reach of the home consumer, but with the appearance of Oculus Rift (since bought by Facebook), Microsoft’s HoloLens, and even DIY options such as Google Cardboard, it seems VR is coming to a living room near you soon.