- AskScience AMA Series: I'm Michael Abramoff, a physician/scientist, and Principal Investigator of the study that led the FDA to approve the first ever autonomous diagnostic AI, which makes a clinical decision without a human expert. AMA.
- I read that we look for exoplanets by examining how much they reduce their stars' brightness when they transit. If aliens were observing us, how much would Earth and other planets reduce the sun's brightness?
- How far can we possibly see using a telescope (in terms of time and space)?
- Are there any other viable power sources available to us other than electromagnetic induction and photovoltaic technology?
- Why aren’t underwater windmills more of a thing?
- How much more advanced and safer is a nuclear power plant built today compared to one built in 1986?
- When a sufficiently sized star dies and collapses into a black hole, does the gravitational attraction that it yields change?
- Why do we differentiate between Brønsted–Lowry and Lewis acids/bases?
- How do researchers have so many mice with cancer ?
- Why Don't Lagrange Points Accumulate Matter?
- Why is everything trying to reach its lowest energy state?
- Does anyone know if the number of blades on a fan has any correlation with airflow or noise?
- If the type of element is directly correlated with its number or protons/neutrons/electrons, why aren't there infinite elements and why is 'discovering' a new one a big deal?
- Do falling objects radiate gravitons?
- What semiconductor fabrication method enabled the development of FinFET and other multi-gate transistors?
- Hypothetically, would an object in an infinitly large vacuum with a constant force pushing it in one direction accelerate forever?
- What properties do the stellar leftovers of very small, low intensity stars (e.g. M and L sequence stars) have after all of their fuel has been consumed?
- Is geostationary orbit possible on Venus?
- If ash from erupting volcanos cause rain, why is it that massive forest fires do not?
- If the universe is flat, how can that be consistent with a big bang origin?
| Posted: 05 Sep 2018 04:17 AM PDT Nature Digital Medicine published our study last week, and it is open access. This publication had some delay after the FDA approved the AI-system, called IDx-DR, on April 11 of this year. After the approval, many physicians, scientists, and patients had questions about the safety of the AI system, its design, the design of the clinical trial, the trial results, as well as what the results mean for people with diabetes, for the healthcare system, and the future of AI in healthcare. Now, we are finally able to discuss these questions, and I thought a reddit AMA is the most appropriate place to do so. While this is a true AMA, I want to focus on the paper and the study. Questions about cost, pricing, market strategy, investing, and the like I consider to not be about the science, and are also under the highest regulatory scrutiny, so those will have to wait until a later AMA. I am a retinal specialist - a physician who specialized in ophthalmology and then did a fellowship in vitreoretinal surgery - who treats patients with retinal diseases and teaches medical students, residents, and fellows. I am also a machine learning and image analysis expert, with a MS in Computer Science focused on Artificial Intelligence, and a PhD in image analysis - Jan Koenderink was one of my advisors. 1989-1990 I was postdoc in Tokyo, Japan, at the RIKEN neural networks research lab. I was one of the original contributors of ImageJ, a widely used open source image analysis app. I have published over 250 peer reviewed journal papers (h-index 53) on AI, image analysis, and retina, am past Editor of the journals IEEE TMI and IOVS, and editor of Nature Scientific Reports, and have 17 patents and 5 patent applications in this area. I am the Watzke Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Iowa, and I am proud to say that my former graduate students are successful in AI all over the world. More info on me on my faculty page. I also am Founder and President of IDx, the company that sponsored the study we will be discussing and that markets the AI system, and thus have a conflict of interest. FDA and other regulatory agencies - depending on where you are located - regulate what I can and cannot say about the AI system performance, and I will indicate when that is the case. More info on the AI system, called labelling, here. I'll be in and out for a good part of the day, AMA! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 05 Sep 2018 05:31 AM PDT |
| How far can we possibly see using a telescope (in terms of time and space)? Posted: 04 Sep 2018 11:34 PM PDT Question is basically the title plus a little extra. So I've learned in school that if we use a telescope to observe something that's 1 lightyear away, then what we observe is not the thing as it is today but rather how it was 1 year ago. So the farther away the object of observation is, the older the image we observe of it.
If this is true, and please correct me if I'm wrong, then given that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and infinitely wide (because it's constantly expanding right?) then what happens if we theoretically try to observe something that's 13.9 billion lightyears away or farther?
Since the universe didn't exist before 13.8 billion years ago, there isn't any light that anyone or anything can pick up and observe right? Or is it that we can only possibly see as far as the universe is currently wide, in which case is it really infinite or is it sort of asymptotically infinite? Is it even theoretically possible to build a telescope that could peer across such astronomical distances?
And tangentially related this is something that's been on my mind for a while and I'm hoping someone can answer it. Say you teleported to some observatory 200 lightyears away and were able to use a telescope to look back at Earth. Say you could also zoom in enough to see cities. Would you then see the world as it was in the 1800s? Or is this idea itself, barring the obvious outlandish conditions, science fiction? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 05 Sep 2018 05:06 AM PDT When I make a lost of every source of power generation I can think of, everything comes down to either photovoltaic technology, or spinning a turbine which causes electromagnetic induction. Do we have any other way of powering our homes? [link] [comments]  |
| Why aren’t underwater windmills more of a thing? Posted: 04 Sep 2018 02:06 PM PDT The way I reckon it, the tides go through multiple times a day in a predictable way. If turbines just sat there collecting energy 24/7 we'd get a lot of energy. You could put a nearly infinite amount of them up and down the coast line. [link] [comments]  |
| How much more advanced and safer is a nuclear power plant built today compared to one built in 1986? Posted: 04 Sep 2018 09:10 PM PDT I was recently thinking about how much better computers have gotten in the past few decades, and wondered if nuclear power plants had improved along the same rate of improvement. I chose 1986 because of the Chernobyl incident, but I'm kind of talking about all types of nuclear power not just the Chernobyl type of reactor. (Also I'm surprised there isn't a Nuclear flair) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 Sep 2018 10:28 PM PDT |
| Why do we differentiate between Brønsted–Lowry and Lewis acids/bases? Posted: 04 Sep 2018 05:04 PM PDT Which theory is actually used when studying chemistry today? Why is one more useful than the other in different scenarios? The difference between the two theories seems so miniscule to me; why not just stick to one? [link] [comments]  |
| How do researchers have so many mice with cancer ? Posted: 05 Sep 2018 06:49 AM PDT I mean if X% of mice will have a cancer during their life, do research labs have millions of these waiting for some to get sick or do they have a way to create the cancer in the mouse? (I am not talking about little cigarettes for mice...) [link] [comments]  |
| Why Don't Lagrange Points Accumulate Matter? Posted: 04 Sep 2018 12:08 PM PDT If we can put objects in orbit around them, I would expect natural objects would also find themselves in orbit by chance. What is preventing these points from having natural moons or filling up with debris? [link] [comments]  |
| Why is everything trying to reach its lowest energy state? Posted: 04 Sep 2018 10:19 AM PDT |
| Does anyone know if the number of blades on a fan has any correlation with airflow or noise? Posted: 04 Sep 2018 12:48 PM PDT |
| Posted: 04 Sep 2018 09:13 AM PDT |
| Do falling objects radiate gravitons? Posted: 04 Sep 2018 11:05 AM PDT If I jump off a cliff, am I sending out gravitons or exchanging gravitons with anything? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 Sep 2018 12:04 PM PDT |
| Posted: 04 Sep 2018 02:34 PM PDT I have always heard matter can't reach the speed of light, I also know that this hypothetical is essentially impossible because even in the middle of space there are minute forces working on objects, but if you could somehow set this up, where there is no resistance or opposing force acting upon this object, would it ever stop speeding up? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 Sep 2018 09:52 AM PDT Could the leftovers be considered "black dwarfs" or is there something else that happens? I'd imagine stars like that would be too small to collapse into black holes or form supernovae. [link] [comments]  |
| Is geostationary orbit possible on Venus? Posted: 04 Sep 2018 11:29 AM PDT |
| If ash from erupting volcanos cause rain, why is it that massive forest fires do not? Posted: 04 Sep 2018 10:47 AM PDT The understanding I have on volcanos and the atmospheric effects they cause is minimal. I've been told that when volcanos erupt and release ash into the atmosphere, the ash causes rain. However, when we have major forest fires, it seems the ash released by the fire burning doesn't have as big of an impact on causing rain. Is there a difference in the ash produced by a volcano compared to a fire? Or does it still have an effect but just takes longer? [link] [comments]  |
| If the universe is flat, how can that be consistent with a big bang origin? Posted: 05 Sep 2018 01:11 AM PDT Just ran into an article at RealClearScience.com claiming three problems with the big bang theory. I didn't realize before that the universe is flat as the article claimed. I don't know how a big bang could result in a flat universe. [link] [comments]  |
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