Reddit user htGoSEVe posted a map of the potential rail voyage, later updating his post to reflect the fact that sections of the journey — from Lisbon to Hendaye in France, and the Paris-Moscow Express, for example — have been paused during the pandemic.
Rail enthusiasts estimate that it would cost a little over £1,000 in tickets.
But fellow Reddit user Shevek99 commented to suggest that the journey could be made even longer and more ambitious by starting further east.
HONG KONG, Dec 17 (Reuters Breakingviews) — After conquering semiconductors, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s biggest chipmaker has a new challenge: kickstarting Taiwan’s stalled green transition. Bureaucracy and red tape have marred the island’s renewable-energy goals. The company’s (2330.TW) voracious appetite for cleaner power will offer a much-needed spark.
Referendums on whether to restart a nuclear power plant and whether to change the location of a planned $2 billion liquid fossil gas terminal highlight how politically contentious the island’s energy issues are. President Tsai Ing-wen has pledged to phase out nuclear power and is hoping gas-fired plants will supply half of the $600 billion economy’s electricity needs by 2025. At the same time, she has promised to increase the share of renewable sources to 20%, from 5.4% in 2020.
On paper that’s doable, but in practice it looks increasingly out of reach. Covid-19 disruptions held up wind and solar projects, but lengthy and complex approval processes are also to blame. Offshore wind developers, for instance, must obtain consent letters from at least eight different authorities as well as approval from the environmental watchdog even to be eligible to bid for projects. Those that make it to the second round must also detail how they can meet local procurement requirements, often onerous criteria given how new the industry is in Taiwan. According to one 2021 estimate, unfinished wind and solar projects totalled $83 billion, among the highest in Asia.
For all that neural networks can accomplish, we still don’t really understand how they operate. Sure, we can program them to learn, but making sense of a machine’s decision-making process remains much like a fancy puzzle with a dizzying, complex pattern where plenty of integral pieces have yet to be fitted.
If a model was trying to classify an image of said puzzle, for example, it could encounter well-known, but annoying adversarial attacks, or even more run-of-the-mill data or processing issues. But a new, more subtle type of failure recently identified by MIT scientists is another cause for concern: “overinterpretation,” where algorithms make confident predictions based on details that don’t make sense to humans, like random patterns or image borders.
This could be particularly worrisome for high-stakes environments, like split-second decisions for self-driving cars, and medical diagnostics for diseases that need more immediate attention. Autonomous vehicles in particular rely heavily on systems that can accurately understand surroundings and then make quick, safe decisions. The network used specific backgrounds, edges, or particular patterns of the sky to classify traffic lights and street signs—irrespective of what else was in the image.
Yale researchers have developed an mRNA vaccine that targets the antigens found in tick saliva in order to alert individuals to tick bites as well as prevent the tick from feeding correctly, thereby reducing its ability to transmit pathogens.
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A highly dexterous, human-like robotic hand with fingertip touch sensors can delicately hold eggs, use tweezers to pick up computer chips and crush drink cans. The hand could eventually be used as a prosthetic or in robots that use artificial intelligence to manipulate objects.
Weighing 1.1 kilograms, the hand is 22 centimetres long and made of steel and aluminium. Each finger is driven by three small motors that fit within the palm and move metal parts that act like tendons around a total of 20 joints. This enables the digits to tilt sideways, to flex back and forth and to fold, giving the hand a range of movements comparable to that of a human hand.
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JERUSALEM, Dec 11 (Reuters) — Israeli researchers said on Saturday they found that a three-shot course of the Pfizer/BioNTech (PFE.N), (22UAy. DE) COVID-19 vaccine provided significant protection against the new Omicron variant.
The findings were similar to those presented by BioNTech and Pfizer earlier in the week, which were an early signal that booster shots could be key to protect against infection from the newly identified variant.
The study, carried out by Sheba Medical Center and the Health Ministry’s Central Virology Laboratory, compared the blood of 20 people who had received two vaccine doses 5–6 months earlier to the same number of individuals who had received a booster a month before.
Rejuveron increases to near-majority stake in Endogena to progress treatments for degenerative diseases of the eye.
Boston-based biotech Vincere Biosciences is on a mission to combat neurodegenerative disease by improving the quality of the mitochondria in our cells. The company was spun out from AI drug discovery company NeuroInitiative in 2018 after its platform identified that modulation of certain enzymes to repair mitochondrial health “may slow or stop the progression of Parkinson’s disease and other age-related disorders.”
In addition to seed funding, Vincere has received grants from the National Institutes of Health and Michael J Fox Foundation, and the company is now gearing up for a Series A funding round in early 2022.
Longevity. Technology: Mitochondria’s role in longevity is a hot topic. Often referred to as the “powerhouse of the cell”, these miniature organs within our cells play a key role in providing the energy needed for growth, repair and rejuvenation. As we age, our mitochondria begin to decline in function, and this decline is linked to a range of age-related diseases. We caught up with Vincere’s co-founder and CEO Dr Spring Behrouz to find out how her company aims to tap into the potential of these small but mighty biological players.
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The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has generated a renaissance in vaccinology, with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines delivering a “digital code” of the viral antigen with no need to purify proteins or inactivate pathogens.
