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The Vonyich manuscript (Image: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University) Since its discovery over a hundred years ago, the 240-page Voynich manuscript, filled with seemingly coded language and inscrutable illustrations, of has confounded linguists and cryptographers. Using artificial intelligence, Canadian researchers have taken a huge step forward in unraveling the document’s hidden meaning. Named after Wilfrid Voynich, the Polish book dealer who procured the manuscript in 1912, the document is written in an unknown script that encodes an unknown language—a double-whammy of…

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As artificial intelligence advances at an unprecedented pace, we tend to see its arrival in emotional terms — usually, either excitement or fear. But Noumena, a collective of designers, engineers and architects, is looking at AI and robots more practically. What form will they take, how will they survive and develop, and where will they live? It aims to explore those idea with an exhibition entitled “Robotic Habitats.”

Noumena’s project assumes that deep learning systems will grow out of their narrow Go-playing abilities and soon match humans at many, if not most, tasks. While that would put them on par with us, it doesn’t mean they would live the same way, though. “Society will need to develop a framework for both to thrive,” explains Neumena on its website. “A new form of artificial life will emerge, finding space at the peripheries of humanity in order to not compete for human-dominated resources.”

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A new species of dinosaur has been uncovered in the Egyptian desert, a rare discovery in a part of the world not known for dino fossils.

The huge animal, which was roughly the size of a school bus, is an “incredible discovery,” scientists said in a new study that was published Monday.

“This was the Holy Grail — a well-preserved dinosaur from the end of the age of dinosaurs in Africa — that we paleontologists had been searching for for a long, long time,” said Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, one of the authors of the study.

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Conventional electronics rely on controlling electric charge. Recently, researchers have been exploring the potential for a new technology, called spintronics, that relies on detecting and controlling a particle’s spin. This technology could lead to new types of more efficient and powerful devices.

In a paper published in Applied Physics Letters, researchers measured how strongly a charge carrier’s spin interacts with a in diamond. This crucial property shows diamond as a promising material for spintronic devices.

Diamond is attractive because it would be easier to process and fabricate into spintronic devices than typical semiconductor materials, said Golrokh Akhgar, a physicist at La Trobe University in Australia. Conventional quantum devices are based on multiple thin layers of semiconductors, which require an elaborate fabrication process in an ultrahigh vacuum.

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This revolutionary gene modified T cell therapy is bearing fruit in treating a type of lymphoma, a resistant form of cancer.


Summary: After years of effort, this revolutionary gene-modified T cell therapy is bearing fruit in treating a type of lymphoma, a resistant form of cancer. [This article first appeared on the website LongevityFacts.com. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Thirty-seven-year-old Nick Asoian of Denver unsuccessfully fought Hodgkin’s Lymphoma using conventional cancer treatments for two years. In 2008, while in New Zealand for a ski race, Nick was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Two bone marrow transplants and two years of chemotherapy combined with radiation therapy didn’t bring his cancer to heel.

Then, a few years ago the avid skier got wind of clinical trial using T cell therapy at the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. After speaking with Dr. Bollard and Vicky Torrano, the physicians conducting the trial, Asoian decided to give it a shot.

Between 04–09 December 2017, thousands of researchers and experts gathered for at the largest and most influential AI and Thirty-first Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) in Long Beach, California. This is the conference’s 40th year, and its most-attended, at 7,229 registrations.

Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of DeepMind and an expert chess player himself, presented further details of the system, called Alpha Zero, at an Artificial Intelligence Conference in California. The program often made moves that would seem unthinkable to a human chess player.

“It doesn’t play like a human, and it doesn’t play like a program,” Hassabis said at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Long Beach. “It plays in a third, almost alien, way.”

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