Sunday 16 June 2019

Getting to zero: the Japan town trying to recycle all its waste

Plastic, paper, metal? In Japan's Kamikatsu, sorting rubbish isn't that simple. Residents face a mind-boggling 45 separate categories for their garbage as the town aims to be "zero-waste" by 2020.

* This article was originally published here

A new approach for unsupervised paraphrasing without translation

In recent years, researchers have been trying to develop methods for automatic paraphrasing, which essentially entails the automated abstraction of semantic content from text. So far, approaches that rely on machine translation (MT) techniques have proved particularly popular due to the lack of available labeled datasets of paraphrased pairs.

* This article was originally published here

Electron (or 'hole') pairs may survive effort to kill superconductivity

Scientists seeking to understand the mechanism underlying superconductivity in "stripe-ordered" cuprates—copper-oxide materials with alternating areas of electric charge and magnetism—discovered an unusual metallic state when attempting to turn superconductivity off. They found that under the conditions of their experiment, even after the material loses its ability to carry electrical current with no energy loss, it retains some conductivity—and possibly the electron (or hole) pairs required for its superconducting superpower.

* This article was originally published here