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UF researches develop tool that targets chemical spray directly to plants

#artificialintelligence

Keeping your food clean, while saving money. Researchers came up with a prototype to target the plants they spray, rather than spewing chemicals over crops that don't need it. "Reduce the amount of chemicals we apply, and that will help us help growers to increase profit, so reduce costs, input costs," said Dr. Yiannis Ampatzidis, assistant professor, UF's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Southwest Florida Research and Education Center. The prototype uses cameras and artificial intelligence to target specific weeds or crops. It can even fit underneath something as small as a golf cart and as big as a blueberry harvester. Gene McAvoy, the associate director for stakeholder relations at UF/IFAS SWFREC, works directly with farmers and growers.


James McAvoy gets a dazzling actor's showcase in M. Night Shyamalan's return-to-form thriller 'Split'

Los Angeles Times

Unlikely as it might seem at this point in his up-and-down career, M. Night Shyamalan proves he can still pull off a genuine surprise at the end of his unnervingly clever new thriller, "Split." The precise nature of that twist will not be revealed here, though given its mind-tickling narrative implications -- to say nothing of the wildfire-like speed of social media these days -- you can probably expect the statute of limitations on spoilers to run out faster than it did on "Bruce Willis is dead" or "Rosebud is a sled." Nevertheless, the more significant and spoiler-proof astonishment here is that Shyamalan -- after nearly a decade-long creative (and sometimes commercial) drought -- has reclaimed much of the formal precision and conceptual daring that made his earlier pictures, "The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" chief among them, so memorably creepy. There is life after "After Earth." To be fair, there were already promising signs of career resurgence in the writer-director's more recent output, including his 2013 found-footage thriller, "The Visit," and the first season of the science-fiction series "Wayward Pines."