In February 2021, seven Russian poultry-farm workers were reported to have been infected with H5N8 avian influenza. This subtype of bird flu had never been known to infect people before, and the virus's genetic sequence was quickly uploaded to the genetic data repository GISAID. For Colin Carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University in Washington DC, it presented an opportunity. "I immediately thought, 'I want to run this through FluLeap'," he says. FluLeap is a machine-learning algorithm that uses sequence data to classify influenza viruses as either avian or human.

A data scientist has designed an algorithm that predicts which Game of Thrones characters are most likely to die in season 8. The final season of Game of Thrones may be a year away, but a lot of fans are left wondering what to expect and more specifically, which characters are going to die. Leave it up to a numbers and science guy to figure that one out. Taylor Larkin, a data scientist at Boston-based DataRoot, went through an extensive Thrones wiki database to analyze the traits of nearly 2,000 characters. Using automated machine learning, Larkin didn't cut any corners and factored in everything from gender, age, house, family lineage and more.