Episode description

Truly autonomous vehicles, ones that don't require a driver to be present and are driven by AI, aren't yet safe for public use. Part of the reason for this is it has been difficult to train them to deal with rare dangerous situations. Now researchers are unveiling a new approach to present lots of these infrequent events to the AI very rapidly, speeding up the training and testing process.

Research Article: Feng et al.

News and Views: Hazards help autonomous cars to drive safely

Video: The driving test for driverless cars

How bird-flu is adapting to mammals, and the effect of negative headlines.

Research Highlight: Bird-flu virus makes itself at home in Canada’s foxes and skunks

Research Highlight: It’s bad! Awful! Negative headlines draw more readers

Bats are known to tolerate a lot of viruses that are deadly to humans without much issue. With the ongoing pandemic, this has driven researchers to dive more into the world of bats in the hopes of applying bats' tolerance to humans. Reporter Smriti Mallapaty has been writing about this renewed interest and she joined us to tell us more.

News Feature: Bats live with dozens of nasty viruses — can studying them help stop pandemics?

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