Best of Last Week—Alternate theory of gravity, automated restroom cleaning, Martian meteorite mystery solved
It was a good week for physics research as an international team of astrophysicists made observations of star clusters that were consistent with the predictions of an alternative theory of gravity—called "modified Newtonian dynamics," it challenges Newton's laws. Also, a team at Princeton University discovered an exotic quantum state in a topological insulator at room temperature.
In technology news, a team at Tokyo Metropolitan University may have solved a sanitation problem—they developed an automated system to clean restrooms in convenience stores. And a team at the Computer Vision and Biometrics Lab of IIT Allahabad working with a group from Vignan University, developed a deep learning model that generates compressed images from text—called T2CI GAN, it used a generative adversarial network to teach a system to generate an image from text-based descriptions of objects. Also, a team with members from UC Berkeley's Hybrid Robotics Group, Simon Fraser University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, designed and built a reinforcement-learning-based, four-legged robotic goalkeeper. And a combined team from the National University of Singapore and Tsinghua University developed an optical-fiber-sensor-based mouthguard to operate devices by bite force.
In other news, a combined team from the University of California and the University of Southern California found that an inexpensive, readily available chemical may limit the impact of COVID-19—the amino acid GABA, which is already available over the counter, was found to reduce viral loads. And a team at Queen Mary University of London, working with colleagues from the University of Oulu and the University of Sheffield, found evidence that bumblebees sometimes engage in play—they do things for no other reason than because they are fun. Also, a team with members from Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and UC San Francisco developed a machine-learning system that can provide "almost perfect" diagnosis of an elusive global killer—the infections behind a given instance of sepsis. And finally, a team with members affiliated with institutions in the U.K., the U.S., Australia and Italy solved the century-old mystery of a Martian meteorite discovery near Purdue University.
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