A former Amazon employee with Asperger's syndrome claimed he was bullied and abused by co-workers at a warehouse in San Bernardino, and the company did nothing when he spoke up. Co-workers called him "retard," "a waste of life," and one person asked why he was working there "if you can't do the job?" according to a lawsuit filed in court. A jury awarded the worker, Michael Kopp, $1.2 million earlier this month after finding that Amazon intentionally inflicted emotional distress on the former employee when its human resources department failed to stop the harassment. "Sadly what ended up happening is HR did nothing for months," said Raymond Babaian, an attorney who represented Kopp. "As a result, [Kopp's] fear and anxiety increased."

Imagine that before you could make dinner, you first had to rebuild the kitchen, specifically designed for each recipe. You'd spend way more time on preparation, than actually cooking. For computational biologists, it's been a similar time-consuming process for analyzing genomics data. Before they can even begin their analysis, they spend a lot of valuable time formatting and preparing huge data sets to feed into deep learning models. To streamline this process, researchers from the Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) developed a universal programming tool that converts a wide variety of genomics data into the required format for analysis by deep learning models.

The health ministry, which is at the heart of the nation's ongoing battle with the coronavirus outbreak, is struggling to keep non-Japanese updated on the rapidly escalating situation in a timely manner, hampered by a dearth of staff proficient in foreign languages. As of Tuesday afternoon, the English version of the ministry's website made no mention of the COVID-19 infection anywhere prominent on its top page, relegating any coronavirus-related links to midpage or lower, with those all directing viewers to original press releases written exclusively in Japanese. "Since our main job has been to update our Japanese website, it has inevitably led to difficulties in providing English-language information in a timely way, so one option is to use machine translation for now," ministry official Takuma Kato said. The official said a future redesign of the English website to better highlight updates pertaining to the new virus is not guaranteed, citing the need to overcome technical difficulties. "Our ministry doesn't have a dedicated team of staff specializing in English-language communication in the first place, so the situation at the moment is that our Japanese staff has been utilizing what little resources they can find to deal with any English update," Kato said.