Lifeboat Foundation

Discovering a system’s causal relationships and structure is a crucial yet challenging problem in scientific disciplines ranging from medicine and biology to economics. While researchers typically adopt the graphical formalism of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs) to induce a graph structure that best describes these relationships, such unsupervised score-based approaches can quickly lead to prohibitively heavy computation burdens.

A research team from DeepMind, Mila – University of Montreal and Google Brain challenges the conventional causal induction approach in their new paper Learning to Induce Causal Structure, proposing a neural network architecture that learns the graph structure of observational and/or interventional data via supervised training on synthetic graphs. The team’s proposed Causal Structure Induction via Attention (CSIvA) method effectively makes causal induction a black-box problem and generalizes favourably to new synthetic and naturalistic graphs.

The team summarizes their main contributions as:

Making positive impacts on human longevity — sonia arrison, author, analyst, investor, entrepreneur.

Sonia Arrison (https://soniaarrison.com/) is a best-selling author, analyst, entrepreneur, and investor.

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Circa 2021 Synthetic silicon dna storage.

In research, the demand for DNA strands often outpaces supply. To help supply keep up, researchers may set aside traditional molecular cloning techniques and embrace polymerase chain reaction select PCR)-based techniques. Alternatively, researchers may perform gene synthesis, or the de novo chemical synthesis of DNA. Besides accelerating the creation of genetic sequences, gene synthesis avoids the need for template strands and simplifies procedures such as codon optimization and the fabrication of mutant sequences.

Although gene synthesis can be performed in house, many laboratories prefer to focus on their core competencies and outsource their gene synthesis projects to service providers, especially if sequences of over 1,000 base pairs are desired. Outsourcing also allows laboratories to take advantage of service providers’ economies of scale and quick turnaround times. Finally, service providers offer ease of use. Clients can go online, upload the desired sequences, choose the vector, get the price, and place the order. The entire process takes only a few minutes, and the genes can be delivered a few days later.

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Large swaths of our cities were built to reflect a post-World War Two boom that was an economic anomaly. But that party is long over…and, in many ways, wasn’t that great to begin with. So why do we keep romanticizing the past rather than thinking about the cities we need now?

Have you ever heard of the Scandinavian-Mediterranean Corridor? As the fifth of the Trans-European Transport Network’s nine priority axes, it is a critical path for the European economy.

It spans from Finland and Sweden in the north to the island of Malta in the south, passing through Denmark, Northern, Central, and Southern Germany, Northern Italy’s industrial areas, and southern Italian ports.

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Solar energy has barely scratched the surface of its potential to decarbonize the global economy in time to avert catastrophic warming.

For all the activity in the solar energy marketplace, PV technology has barely even begun to hit the global economy in full force. Huge solar arrays filled with rows of super-efficient silicon solar panels are just one piece of an expanding universe. With that in mind, here are 4 new developments that could kick the slow pace of change into high gear.

1. Distributed Solar Energy

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2022 is set to be a major year for the space economy. According to the Space Foundation, 15 new launch vehicles are set to debut this year, more than any other year in space history. Last year, US spaceports had more launches than any year since 1967, and the number is climbing. Meanwhile, employment in the core US space industry employment is at a 10-year high.

The momentum is there for a flourishing space economy that, according to NASA leaders, could in 20 years take public and private missions beyond low Earth orbit (LEO), with services and infrastructure on the lunar surface and in cislunar space. It’s a fast-growing economy, NASA leaders said at the 37th Space Symposium, that offers promising opportunities for young people who want to get their foot in the door.

The space economy is already a $400 billion industry “and on the way to $1 trillion, and I suspect it’ll get there faster than we think,” James Reuter, associate administrator for the Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) at NASA, said during a panel this week at the 37th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

Public spaces, squares, and parks in New York City are administered by the city’s Department of Parks & Recreation (NYC Parks).

In recent years, the agency has been responsible for creating new programs to help children, youth and adults be aware of the importance of caring for their urban landscape.

One of these programs is a TreesCount! which in 2015 gathered 2,300 volunteers to learn about the trees in their environment, what state they are in, what care they need, what their measurements are, and how they benefit the surrounding community, etc.

CSIS will host a public event on responsible AI in a global context, featuring a moderated discussion with Julie Sweet, Chair and CEO of Accenture, and Brad Smith, President and Vice Chair of the Microsoft Corporation, on the business perspective, followed by a conversation among a panel of experts on the best way forward for AI regulation. Dr. John J. Hamre, President and CEO of CSIS, will provide welcoming remarks.

Keynote Speakers:
Brad Smith, President and Vice Chair, Microsoft Corporation.
Julie Sweet, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Accenture.

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