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(FoxNews.com) — Food producer Del Monte has received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to start selling a genetically engineered pineapple with pink flesh.

The new species Ananas comosus has been given the more consumer-friendly name of the “Rosé” and, according to The Packer, Del Monte has quietly been working on the fruit’s development since 2005.

So what makes the usually golden-colored fruit pink? The patened pineapple DNA is injected with a healthy dose of lycopene, the bright red pigment found in tomatoes and watermelons.

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We all become accustomed to the tone and pattern of human speech at an early age, and any deviations from what we have come to accept as “normal” are immediately recognizable. That’s why it has been so difficult to develop text-to-speech (TTS) that sounds authentically human. Google’s DeepMind AI research arm has turned its machine learning model on the problem, and the resulting “WaveNet” platform has produced some amazing (and slightly creepy) results.

Google and other companies have made huge advances in making human speech understandable by machines, but making the reply sound realistic has proven more challenging. Most TTS systems are based on so-called concatenative technologies. This relies upon a database of speech fragments that are combined to form words. This tends to sound rather uneven and has odd inflections. There is also some work being done on parametric TTS, which uses a data model to generate words, but this sounds even less natural.

DeepMind is changing the way speech synthesis is handled by directly modeling the raw waveform of human speech. The very high-level approach of WaveNet means that it can conceivably generate any kind of speech or even music. Listen above for an example of WaveNet’s voice synthesis. There’s an almost uncanny valley quality to it.

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At Quora, I occasionally play, “Ask the expert”. Today, I was asked if the difference between quotes at various Bitcoin exchanges presents a profit opportunity.

In addition to my answer, one other cryptocurrency enthusiast offered pithy, one-line response: He said “Buy local, sell internationally and pocket the difference!” I tend to believe the opposite is more likely to generate profit: Buy internationally and sell locally. But, I am getting ahead of myself. Here is my answer [co-published at Quora]…

Question:
A Bitcoin exchange in my country quotes a different rate than
international markets. Can I profit from the price difference?

Answer:
Buying and selling a commodity with the intention of profiting from the difference in price in various markets, regions or exchanges is called arbitrage. Typically, the item must be widely traded and fungible. Although it can be a tangible item (one that must be delivered or stored, like gold, oil, frozen orange juice or soy beans), arbitrage is more practical when applied to an ‘item of account’, such as foreign currency, equity shares, stock futures, or Bitcoin.

arbitrage-01tWith this in mind, Bitcoin qualifies as a fungible item of account. If you see a different price at vaious exchanges (or if you believe that you can source personal sales at a higher price than the market spot price), then you have found an opportunity for arbitrage. But hold on! It is not so easy…

  1. The arbitrage opportunity is often illusory. For example, the cost difference that you observe in market quotes may be overshadowed by the bid/ask spread or by fees, which can be both fixed and a percentage.
  2. The arbitrage opportunity is transient. It is there for a few seconds and then it vanishes in the next quote. For this reason, successful arbitrage players must be very adept at day-trade techniques. To avoid massive risks, you need up-to-the-second quotes, fast trading tools, and the ability to simultaneously freeze your purchase and sale price.
  3. Trust is never golden! Even with these tools and promises, when a commodity begins to move in either direction, you will find that a buyer or seller often finds a way to renege on the agreed price. These are not random events…When a trading partner abandons a transaction, it always work against you.
  4. Some exchanges (and even some national regulatory agencies) prohibit rapid and repeated trading. This may be to discourage speculation or it may be designed as a circuit-breaker (a mechanism to avert the cascade effect that sometimes results from pre-programmed trades). These halts on quick trades can wipe out your gains, or worse. They can turn your investment into a horrible mess.
  5. Some big exchanges have built-in arbitrage mechanisms that quickly adjust prices and even buy and sell on their own account to keep their limit order books in sync. They are on the front lines and you aren’t! This fact, alone, should suggest give you pause. The opportunities for an outsider are severely limited by these ‘inside’, self-adjusting trades.
  6. Other legal risks: If the transaction is later deemed to be illegal in the jurisdiction of any party, your exchange accounts may be frozen or your privileges revoked. Unlike p2p Bitcoin transactions, exchange transactions can be reversed. Again, these legal snafus will always work against you. In fact, sometimes, they were pre-planned scams from the start!
  7. Finally , there are sometimes good reasons for different prices in different markets. For example, national and local regulations may burden to the consumer cost for an item, or the seller may be required to pay a fee or tax to some authority or regulatory agency. If you dodge these costs, you may be violating laws and subject to penalties or punishment. You may even put your customer at risk.

I am neither an arbitrage player nor a day trader. These are just a few warning bells that come to mind when I think about such activity. You can be sure that this list of risks only scratches the surface. Bitcoin is remarkably fluid and many people flaunt regulations. For this reason, I am confident that opportunities for profitable arbitrage are rare and very tiny (small gain for a big risk).

Have I scared you away from Bitcoin arbitrage? If not, proceed with extreme caution and don’t bet the family ranch! Once you have some experience, come back and post feedback below. I have dabbled in options arbitrage, but never with Bitcoin or any currency. Since I don’t have first-hand experience, your feedback will be appreciated.

Philip Raymond is co-chair of Cryptocurrency Standards Association,
host of The Bitcoin Event (New York), and editor at A Wild Duck.

A 14-year-old girl who said before dying of cancer that she wanted a chance to live longer has been allowed by the high court to have her body cryogenically frozen in the hope that she can be brought back to life at a later time.

The court ruled that the teenager’s mother, who supported the girl’s wish to be cryogenically preserved, should be the only person allowed to make decisions about the disposal of her body. Her estranged father had initially opposed her wishes.

During the last months of her life, the teenager, who had a rare form of cancer, used the internet to investigate cryonics. Known only as JS, she sent a letter to the court: “I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done. I’m only 14 years old and I don’t want to die, but I know I am going to. I think being cryo‐preserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years’ time.

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In Brief As technology improves, the possibility that our world may be a simulated one is becoming more and more probable, argues Universe Today founder Fraser Cain. But can we ever prove that we live in a simulation of a reality?

All the world’s a stage. Or is it a simulation?

The idea that what we consider reality is actually a simulation was first proposed by scientist Nick Bostrom, and it is frequently addressed in fiction (e.g., “The Matrix” trilogy) and by innovators and educators such as Elon Musk, who brought up the topic at the 2016 Code Conference.

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So much for “Junk” DNA being a load of old rubbish!

UC San Francisco researchers have taken a major step toward understanding the function of the tens of thousands of human genes that do not code for proteins, a phenomenon considered one of the key remaining mysteries of the human genome. New findings, which focused on the roles of these genes in human cancer cells, suggest a possible new strategy for targeting the disease.

In recent years, researchers have recognized that non-coding regions of the genome—long dismissed as “junk DNA”—are actually key players in cell biology, development, and disease. However, the vast majority of these regions have not yet been extensively studied.

Now UCSF scientists have developed an approach to studying the function of genes that produce RNA transcripts but no protein – called long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs)—at an unprecedented scale. In a proof of principle experiment, the researchers set out to look for common lncRNAs required for the growth of many different types of cancer cells. To their surprise, they found that each cancer cell line they tested relied upon a different set of IncRNAs for growth and survival, suggesting that these molecules might be promising targets for precision cancer therapies.

Continue reading “CRISPR study reveals unexpected roles of non-coding RNAs” | >

Stem cell bandages are in development in the UK.

A ‘living bandage’ made from stem cells, which could revolutionise the treatment and prognosis of a common sporting knee injury, has been trialled in humans for the first time by scientists at the Universities of Liverpool and Bristol.

Meniscal tears are suffered by over one million people a year in the US and Europe alone and are particularly common in contact sports like football and rugby. 90 per cent or more of tears occur in the white zone of meniscus which lacks a blood supply, making them difficult to repair. Many professional sports players opt to have the torn tissue removed altogether, risking osteoarthritis in later life.

The cell bandage has been developed by Bristol University spin-out company Azellon, and is designed to enable the meniscal tear to repair itself by encouraging cell growth in the affected tissue.

Continue reading “Stem cell ‘living bandage’ for knee injuries trialled in humans” | >

Further progress with cancer this time using genome sequencing.

In their search for new ways to treat cancer, many scientists are using a high-tech process called genome sequencing to hunt for genetic mutations that encourage tumor cells to thrive. To aid in this search, some researchers have developed new bioinformatics methods that each claim to help pinpoint the cancer-friendly mutants.

But a stubborn question remains: Among the numerous new tactics that aim to spotlight the so-called cancer driver genes, which produce the most accurate results?

To help solve this puzzle, a team of Johns Hopkins computational scientists and cancer experts have devised their own bioinformatics software to evaluate how well the current strategies identify cancer-promoting mutations and distinguish them from benign mutations in cancer cells.

Continue reading “New bioinformatics tool tests methods for finding mutant genes that ‘drive’ cancer” | >