T he first light which ever shone in the universe has been detected by astronomers scouring the skies for the earliest stars.
Using a simple radio antenna positioned in the quietest place on Earth — the western Australian desert — scientists picked up a signal of the long-sought ‘cosmic dawn.’
The breakthrough was described as ‘revolutionary’, ‘trailblazing’ and the most important discovery in astronomy since the detection of gravitational waves in 2015.
Posted in space
A s was the case in January, there are two full Moons in March, one on the 2nd and one on the 31st.
The second full Moon in a month has popularly become known as a Blue Moon even though this is not the original definition. That stated a Blue Moon was the third full Moon in a season which contained four full Moons.
The occurrence of two full Moons in January followed by two in March takes place approximately four times every century.
Researchers at MIT have developed an imaging technique that will help study exactly how electrical signals propagate through the brain, in an advance that could help us better understand Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, and other brain disorders, as well as how thoughts and feelings are formed.
Brain MRIs offer important insight into how our brains work, but they can only produce crude approximations of the areas that are activated by a given stimulus. In order to unravel the minutiae of how neurons communicate and collaborate to form thoughts and feelings, we would need imaging tools with vastly improved resolutions.
Today, far from being able to tackle the 86 billion neurons in the human brain, neuroscientists must settle for studying simple organisms like worms and fish larvae (with neuron counts in the hundreds), relying on slow and cumbersome methods like implanting electrodes into brain tissue to detect electrical signals.
Now that everyone is getting comfortable with blockchain platforms, what’s next? Companies should look to standardize the technology, talent, and platforms that will drive future initiatives—and, after that, look to coordinate and integrate multiple blockchains working together across a value chain.
Pony.ai, the first public autonomous car service in China, has launched in Guangzhou with partners including Velodyne and GAC Group.
Good intentions + evolving tech + developing science + inadequate data = bad outcomes
Predictive policing technology has proven highly controversial wherever it is implemented, but in New Orleans, the program escaped public notice, partly because Palantir established it as a philanthropic relationship with the city through Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s signature NOLA For Life program. Thanks to its philanthropic status, as well as New Orleans’ “strong mayor” model of government, the agreement never passed through a public procurement process.
Posted in business, law, robotics/AI
Another milestone in the race to artificial superintelligence:
A study conducted by legal AI platform LawGeex in consultation with law professors from Stanford University, Duke University School of Law, and University of Southern California, pitted twenty experienced lawyers against an AI trained to evaluate legal contracts. Their 40 page report details how AI has overtaken top lawyers for the first time in accurately spotting risks in everyday business contracts.
Competitors were given four hours to review five non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and identify 30 legal issues, including arbitration, confidentiality of relationship, and indemnification. They were scored by how accurately they identified each issue.
Summary: Researchers who just finished a precision cancer treatment trial at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles just reported that three out of four adult and child cancer patients responded favorably to a new precision therapy which targets a gene mutation. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) reports that three-fourths of adults and children with a variety of advanced cancers in different sites of the body responded to a novel therapy called larotrectinib that targets a specific genetic mutation.
The researchers published the results of this phase 1/2 trial on February 22, 2018, in the New England Journal of Medicine.
