
Tracking COVID-19 across Europe
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According to the World Health Organization, a third wave of COVID infections is now all but inevitable in Europe. A COVID tracker developed by IIASA researcher Asjad Naqvi, aims to identify, collect, and collate various official regional datasets for European countries, while also combining and homogenizing the data to help researchers and policymakers explore how the virus spreads.
How a pandemic progresses in a country is largely determined by social, political and psychological processes. Predicting these socio-dynamics seems hardly possible until today; thus making it impossible to foresee the course the pandemic takes. This is where a new simulation study carried out by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon comes into play, which is now published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Melkior Ornik, professor in the Dept. of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, analyzed the same datasets from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that were used in a research paper that refutes the number of Holocaust victims from a concentration camp in Croatia. Ornik's rebuttal paper, debunking the researchers' findings, is published in the same journal, IEEE Access.
Scientists from China present the fastest real-time quantum random number generators to date to make the devices quicker and more portable. The device combines a state-of-the-art photonic integrated chip with optimized real-time postprocessing for extracting randomness from quantum entropy source of vacuum states.
Do we have free choice or are our decisions predetermined? Is physical reality local, or does what we do here and now have an immediate influence on events elsewhere? The answers to these questions are sought by physicists in the Bell inequalities. It turns out that free choice and local realism can be skilfully measured and compared. The results obtained reveal surprising relationships of a fundamental and universal nature, going far beyond quantum mechanics itself.
Network scientists from Beijing Normal University and Bar-Ilan University address the effect of team freshness on the originality and multidisciplinary impact of produced work, by systematically investigating prior collaboration relations between team members. Among other things their study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, reveals that papers of fresher teams are significantly more effective than those of older teams in creating studies of higher originality and greater multidisciplinary impact.
St. Petersburg, like other cities in the Russian Federation, is actively participating in the establishment of the "Smart City" program, which will provide new services for residents of the megalopolis, increasing the safety of citizens. Digital services are essential for such a system. Due to the Internet of Things (IoT) systems, the environment can adapt to the needs of humanity on its own accord. Cybersecurity threats are especially dangerous for such infrastructure.
Who made more accurate predictions about the course of the COVID-19 pandemic - experts or the public? A study from the University of Cambridge has found that experts such as epidemiologists and statisticians made far more accurate predictions than the public, but both groups substantially underestimated the true extent of the pandemic.
The evolving periodicity of the brightness of certain types of stars can now be described mathematically.
Large-scale analysis of pedestrian data from three European cities examines how building density and street design influence pedestrian behavior.