Health Care Chatbots
Chatbots are computer programs designed to carry on a dialogue with people, assisting them via text messages, applications, or instant messaging. Essentially, instead of having a conversation with a person, the user talks with a bot that’s powered by basic rules or artificial intelligence. Chatbots are already widely used to support, expedite, and improve processes in other industries and now the technology is gaining traction in health care, where it is helping patients and providers perform myriad tasks.
Read the whole story at IEEE Pulse: Health Care Chatbots Are Here to Help.
Narrowing Gender Gap in Youth Suicides
Recent data from Nationwide Children's Hospital show a disproportionate increase in the suicide rate among female relative to male youth, highlighting a significant reduction in the historically large gap in suicide rates between sexes.
Read more on the study here: A Narrowing Gender Gap in Youth Suicides.
Artificial Lights and Bat Drinking Behavior
Darkness is a diminishing natural resource. Over the last hundredyears, human development and urbanization have changed the nocturnallandscape, making the nighttime sky 20 percent brighter.
This is bad news for nocturnal animals like bats, which depend on the protection offered by darkness. In my latest Animal Minds blog post, I take a look at how artificial lighting affects bat drinking behavior.
Read the story here: Do Artificial Lights Cause Drinking Problems in Bats?
Promiscuous Lionesses Keep Cubs Safe
African lions seem to exemplify the conflict between genders. Acoalition of males will defend their right to exclusively breed with agroup of females against intruding males, who won’t think twice aboutkilling all the cubs in order to hasten the siring of their own with thefemales.
But in a subspecies of lion, infanticide and sexual coercion are much rarer – and much of it appears to be due to the savvy mating strategy of the females.
Read the whole story at my Animal Minds blog: Who's the Daddy? For Lion Cubs, It's Safer Not to Know.
Brain Imaging Bipolar Disorder in High-Risk Children
Researchers report a potential neural marker of individual risk in those with a family history of bipolar disorder. The study, published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, points to particular patterns of brain connectivity as future potential targets for early intervention. Patterns in connectivity in a portion of the frontal lobe called the inferior frontal gyrus appears to be an early biomarker in children of parents with bipolar disorder.
Read more about the study here: Can Brain Imaging Help Predict Bipolar Disorder in High Risk Children?