With the second season of The Last of Us returning to our screens, it might be comforting to think that the show is purely fictional. But believe it or not, the show's haunting zombies aren't that far from reality. Real-life'zombie-making' fungi burrow into their host's flesh and manipulate their minds to turn them into hyperactive super spreaders. As it stands, these mind-warping parasites only affect certain insects. However, the stages of infection are eerily similar to those seen in the hit HBO show.

The climate is changing, and our crops have to keep up with it. A team of scientists and companies are joining forces to learn how to make crops more resilient to heat, drought, pests and diseases; also because we want to use less pesticides in the future. In their ten year plan called Plant-XR, the team aims to enable the development of new climate resilient crops with the help of artificial intelligence and computer models. The consortium behind Plant-XR consists of researchers from Utrecht University, the University of Amsterdam, Wageningen University & Research, Delft University of Technology and worldwide leading breeding companies in the Netherlands. With the provisional grant from NWO in its pocket, the team can further develop its plans in the coming months.

In their working paper ‘Identifying Politically Connected Firms: a Machine Learning Approach’, external linkDeni Mazrekaj, Vitezslav Titl and Fritz Schiltz …

When scientists carry out research on a given topic, they often start by reviewing previous study findings. Conducting systematic literature reviews or meta-analyses can be very challenging and time consuming, as there are often huge amounts of research focusing on different topics, which may not always be relevant to a researcher's work. Researchers at Utrecht University have recently developed a machine learning framework that could significantly speed up this process, by automatically browsing through numerous past studies and compiling high quality literature reviews. This framework, called ASReview, could prove particularly useful for conducting research during the COVID-19 pandemic. "Researchers and experts face a major challenge to stay up-to-date with the latest developments in their field nowadays," Jonathan de Bruin, lead engineer involved in the study, told TechXplore.

Multi-agent models are a suitable starting point to model complex social interactions. However, as the complexity of the systems increase, we argue that novel modeling approaches are needed that can deal with inter-dependencies at different levels of society, where many heterogeneous parties (software agents, robots, humans) are interacting and reacting to each other. In this paper, we present a formalization of a social framework for agents based in the concept of Social Practices as high level specifications of normal (expected) behavior in a given social context. We argue that social practices facilitate the practical reasoning of agents in standard social interactions.

Lamenesses are frequently characterized by asymmetric limb motion, Bragança said. Strapped to different sections of a horse's body, inertial measurement units (IMUs) are becoming useful tools for evaluating asymmetry and body lean angles. Dutch and Belgian scientists are now looking at ways to gather reliable movement data from IMUs placed on horses' limbs, head, body, and pelvis. And this, they say, can lead to even greater accuracy in both veterinary diagnoses and performance evaluations. "It is important that we have methods to objectively quantify and record limb motion since we are now, more and more, aware of the limitations of the human eye as an instrument to detect motion asymmetries, especially at high speeds," said Filipe Serra Bragança, DVM, a PhD candidate in equine musculoskeletal biology at Utrecht University's Faculty of Veterinary Medicine Department of Equine Sciences, in The Netherlands.