The Importance of Breeding Bats for Immunology Research

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A team in Singapore has been breeding bats to help understand them a bit better. Unlike the typical lab mouse, bats are pregnant for longer and have fewer pups. They've established the first bat colony in Asia so I went to visit that colony. The bats are really important because they help them study bat biology in more detail.

00:46 A new test to get autonomous vehicles on the road

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.

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08:23 Research Highlights

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

10:43 Why bat research is taking off

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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