How SETI sifts through cosmic noise to hunt for alien signals.
Follow Focal Point for more stories on groundbreaking science!
Read more
Google and Amazon are on the forefront of AI innovation. But have they already gone too far?
By John Brandon Contributing editor, Inc.com
Read more
WASHINGTON — The U.S. military got is first big taste of artificial intelligence with Project Maven. An Air Force initiative, it began more than a year ago as an experiment using machine learning algorithms developed by Google to analyze full-motion video surveillance.
The project has received high praise within military circles for giving operators in the field instant access to the type of intelligence that typically would have taken a long time for geospatial data analysts to produce.
Project Maven has whetted the military’s appetite for artificial intelligence tools. And this is creating pressure on the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to jump on the AI bandwagon and start delivering Maven-like products and services.
Read more
Sun Emits a Solstice Flare and CME
Posted in materials
While you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, you may be able to make your pup young again.
A Harvard startup has begun preliminary experiments on beagles and claims it can make animals ‘younger’ by adding new DNA instructions to their bodies.
And, the firm says it could one day work for humans, too.
Read more
And inflammation is one of the three primary ageing processes.
Scientists have discovered a new metabolic process in the body that can switch off inflammation. They have discovered that ‘itaconate’—a molecule derived from glucose—acts as a powerful off-switch for macrophages, which are the cells in the immune system that lie at the heart of many inflammatory diseases including arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and heart disease.
The scientists, working in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute at Trinity College Dublin, hope their discovery will have relevance for inflammatory and infectious diseases—and that their findings may also help to develop much-needed new drugs to treat people living with these conditions.
Professor of Biochemistry at Trinity, Luke O’Neill, was, along with Dr. Mike Murphy of the University of Cambridge, the joint leader of the work just published in leading international journal Nature. The discoveries were made using both human cells and mice as a model organism.
Read more
We’ve all dreamed of owning, or at the very least being a passenger of, a flying car. It’s the sci-fi dream that never transpired — until recently, that is. With a growing emphasis of developing flying taxis among several different companies, one wonders if the revolutionary Tesla Motors has plans to join in on this new venture.
Could Elon Musk’s random tweet from late last year be an indicator of Tesla’s interest in flying cars and their joining of this brand new “space race?”
Read more
