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I t has now been decades since stem cell technology emerged as the next great breakthrough in modern medicine, with the bold potential for one day curing everything from heart disease to cancer. Today, that optimism doesn’t appear to have diminished.

It’s easy to recall the excitement. In the late 1990s, when stem cell research was still relatively unexplored but gathering pace, the hope surrounding future uses for such treatments appeared near limitless. Once greater advances had been made, it was often argued, doctors could one day inject patients with cells that have the ability to transform into any other type of cell, making it possible to grow whole new organs. In theory, any damaged area…

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3D map of all known stellar systems in the solar neighbourhood within a radius of 12.5 light-years. The Sun is at the centre and the Epsilon Indi binary system with the brown dwarf Epsilon Indi B lies near the bottom. The colour is indicative of the temperature and the spectral class — white stars are (main-sequence) A and F dwarfs; yellow stars like the Sun are G dwarfs; orange stars are K dwarfs; and red stars are M dwarfs, by far the most common type of star in the solar neighbourhood. The blue axes are oriented along the galactic coordinate system, and the radii of the rings are 5, 10, and 15 light-years, respectively.

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An early symptom is blurry vision in which straight lines appear distorted. That can progress to darkness, whiteouts, or blurry areas in the center of the visual field. The disease does not, by itself, lead to total blindness because peripheral vision remains unaffected. Although some therapies delay loss of central vision, no current treatments restore it completely.

“Macular degeneration therapies seem to be treating disease symptoms, rather than its cause,” Lin says. “We focused on the role of macrophages in regulating inflammation and the growth of abnormal blood vessels to see whether it may be possible one day to help people who don’t get much benefit from existing treatments and design therapies that may prevent progression to advanced forms of the disease.”

Virus delivers genes to fight vision loss.

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Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence developments are happening at a break neck speed! At such pace, you need to understand the developments at multiple levels – you obviously need to understand the underlying tools and techniques, but you also need to develop an intuitive understanding of what is happening.

By end of this article, you will develop an intuitive understanding of RNNs, specially LSTM & GRU.

Ready?

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You heard about the Anthropocene, a new geological era when what happens to the planet is determined by the activities of the human species. The Anthropocene started with agriculture 12,000 years ago or with the industrial revolution in the 1800s according to different opinions.

I propose that the Anthropocene will be over by the end of this century as what will happen to Earth is determined not by humans but by artificial intelligence (AI).

Amazon’s Alexa is a popular name for the personification of artificial intelligence, so I propose Alexacene as the name of this new era. Jeff Bezos picked a good name for their AI(exa) (he will prevail over you know who too). And Alexa is evolving fast; HackerEarth to Launch Virtual Artificial Intelligence Hackathon for Alexa.

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