Japanese life insurance company Fukoku Mutual is replacing 34 employees with AI derived from IBM’s Watson.
Automation is securing its place now even outside of the manufacturing sector. While not all jobs are at risk of machine replacement, that list seems to be growing smaller.
More progress with cancer using a senolytic compound found in Indian Long Peppers.
DALLAS – January 3, 2017 – UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists have uncovered the chemical process behind anti-cancer properties of a spicy Indian pepper plant called the long pepper, whose suspected medicinal properties date back thousands of years.
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has completed the deepest X-ray image ever obtained, made with over 7 million seconds of observing time revealing the best picture ever at the growth of black holes over billions of years beginning soon after the Big Bang. The central region of the image contains the highest concentration of supermassive black holes ever seen, equivalent to about 5,000 objects that would fit into the area of the full Moon and about a billion over the entire sky.
A flexible transistor can stretch to twice its length without losing its conductive properties and could be used in electronic tattoo-style wearable sensors.
Interesting and I remember coming across similar research a few years ago.
Brain stimulation might sound like some Frankensteinian demonstration from a Victorian science fair. But in reality, it is a contemporary technique making a huge impact in neuroscience by addressing a longstanding limitation of traditional methods for investigating human brain function. Such techniques, like EEG and fMRI, can only be used to infer the effects of a stimulus or task on brain activity, and not vice versa. For example, a scientist might use EEG to study the effect of a task like arm movement on brain activity, but how can one study the effect of brain activity on arm movement?
Today, noninvasive brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) are offering alternatives to old paradigms. TMS can excite or suppress underlying brain tissue safely and ethically, allowing researchers to study causal relationships between brain circuits and behavior. What’s more, TMS may have therapeutic value in treating brain disorders such as depression.
Proteins are the workhorse molecules of life. Among their many jobs, they carry oxygen, build tissue, copy DNA for the next generation, and coordinate events within and between cells. Now scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a method to control proteins inside live cells with the flick of a switch, giving researchers an unprecedented tool for pinpointing the causes of disease using the simplest of tools: light.
The work, led by Klaus Hahn and Nikolay Dokholyan and spearheaded by Onur Dagliyan, a graduate student in their labs, builds on the breakthrough technology known as optogenetics. The technique, developed in the early 2000s, allowed scientists, for the first time, to use light to activate and deactivate proteins that could turn brain cells on and off, refining ideas of what individual brain circuits do and how they relate to different aspects of behavior and personality.
Multiplexed optogenetic control, using Photo-inhibitable Vav2 (PA-Vav2) and Photo-inhibitable Rac1 (PI-Rac1) in the same cell.
A few nanoscale adjustments may be all that is required to make graphene-nanotube junctions excel at transferring heat, according to Rice University scientists.
The Rice lab of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson found that putting a cone-like “chimney” between the graphene and nanotube all but eliminates a barrier that blocks heat from escaping.
The research appears in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Physical Chemistry C.