An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: The people who happen to be in a city center at any given moment may seem like a random collection of individuals. But new research featuring a simple mathematical law shows that urban travel patterns worldwide are, in fact, remarkably predictable regardless of location — an insight that could enhance models of disease spread and help to optimize city planning. Studying anonymized cell-phone data, researchers discovered what is known as an inverse square relation between the number of people in a given urban location and the distance they traveled to get there, as well as how frequently they made the trip. It may seem intuitive that people visit nearby locations frequently and distant ones less so, but the newly discovered relation puts the concept into specific numerical terms. It accurately predicts, for instance, that the number of people coming from two kilometers away five times per week will be the same as the number coming from five kilometers twice a week. The researchers’ new visitation law, and a versatile model of individuals’ movements within cities based on it, was reported in Nature.

The researchers analyzed data from about eight million people between 2006 and 2013 in six urban locations: Boston, Singapore, Lisbon and Porto in Portugal, Dakar in Senegal, and Abidjan in Ivory Coast. Previous analyses have used cell-phone data to study individuals’ travel paths; this study focused instead on locations and examined how many people were visiting, from how far and how frequently. The researchers found that all the unique choices people makeâ”from dropping kids at school to shopping or commuting — obey this inverse square law when considered in aggregate. One explanation for this strong statistical pattern is that traveling requires time and energy, and people have limited resources for it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Simple Mathematical Law Predicts Movement In Cities Around the World

Researchers have developed a technique for reconstructing whole genomes, including the human genome, on a personal computer. “This technique is about a hundred times faster than current state-of-the-art approaches and uses one-fifth the resources,” reports Phys.Org. From the report: The study, published September 14 in the journal Cell Systems, allows for a more compact representation of genome data inspired by the way in which words, rather than letters, offer condensed building blocks for language models. […] To approach genome assembly more efficiently than current techniques, which involve making pairwise comparisons between all possible pairs of reads, [researchers] turned to language models. Building from the concept of a de Bruijn graph, a simple, efficient data structure used for genome assembly, the researchers developed a minimizer-space de Bruin graph (mdBG), which uses short sequences of nucleotides called minimizers instead of single nucleotides. “Our minimizer-space de Bruijn graphs store only a small fraction of the total nucleotides, while preserving the overall genome structure, enabling them to be orders of magnitude more efficient than classical de Bruijn graphs,” says [one of the researchers].

The researchers applied their method to assemble real HiFi data (which has almost perfect single-molecule read accuracy) for Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies, as well as human genome data provided by Pacific Biosciences (PacBio). When they evaluated the resulting genomes, [researchers] found that their mdBG-based software required about 33 times less time and 8 times less random-access memory (RAM) computing hardware than other genome assemblers. Their software performed genome assembly for the HiFi human data 81 times faster with 18 times less memory usage than the Peregrine assembler and 338 times faster with 19 times less memory usage than the hifiasm assembler. Next, [researchers] used their method to construct an index for a collection of 661,406 bacterial genomes, the largest collection of its kind to date. They found that the novel technique could search the entire collection for antimicrobial resistance genes in 13 minutes — a process that took 7 hours using standard sequence alignment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Scientists Can Now Assemble Entire Genomes On Their Personal Computers In Minutes

Comcast is gearing up to launch its own smart TVs: The company has struck a partnership with Chinese TV manufacturer Hisense to sell two smart TV models under the XClass TV brand, Protocol reported Tuesday. From the report: A number of clues left online suggests that a launch is imminent. XClass TVs run a version of Comcast’s X1 operating system, which also powers the company’s set-top boxes as well as its Xfinity Flex streaming box. However, unlike those devices, XClass TVs will be available to anyone, regardless of whether they subscribe to the company’s cable services. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this summer that Comcast had struck a partnership with Walmart to sell its smart TVs; Protocol was first to report about Comcast’s plans to enter the smart TV platform business a year ago. While under development for some time, Comcast’s smart TV efforts have picked up steam in recent months: The company registered a trademark for “X Class TV” in February. The official XClasstv.com website remains inaccessible, but the company inadvertently left a temporary staging site accessible to the public that reveals many details about the initiative.

“XClass TV is a smart TV that brings all your favorite apps, live channels, and On Demand movies and shows together in one place,” that site explains in a FAQ. ” XClass TV … gives you thousands of free movies, shows, music, and more. And to find what you love faster, XClass TV comes with a voice remote that lets you control your TV and search across apps with just your voice.” Among the tidbits leaked through this staging site: Hisense is making two 4K TV models, with screen sizes of 43 and 50 inches, respectively, for Comcast.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Comcast Will Soon Launch Smart TVs Under Its New XClass TV Brand