By David Glance Director of UWA Centre for Software Practice, University of Western Australia
Pharmaceutical companies typically develop new drugs with thousands of staff and budgets that run into the billions of dollars. One estimate puts the cost of bringing a new drug to market at $2.6 billion with others suggesting that it could be double that cost at $5 billion.
For the second time in less than a month, SpaceX has landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a ship at sea.
The booster settled softly onto the deck of SpaceX’s robotic “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship at 1:30 a.m. EDT (0530 GMT) on Friday (May 6), nine minutes after launching from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on a successful mission to carry the Japanese communications satellite JCSAT-14 to orbit.
Chants of “USA! USA! USA!” erupted at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California as the Falcon 9 stuck its landing on the ship, which was stationed about 200 miles (320 kilometers) offshore in the Atlantic Ocean. [Photos: SpaceX Launches Satellite, Lands Rocket at Sea].
Posted in futurism
Japanese scientists have reported the first successful skin-to-eye stem cell transplant in humans, where stem cells derived from a patient’s skin were transplanted into her eye to partially restore lost vision.
The patient, a 70-year-old woman diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) – the leading cause of vision impairment in older people – received the experimental treatment back in 2014 as part of a pilot study. Now, closing in on two years after the transplant took place, the scientists are sharing the results.
The researchers took a small piece of skin from her arm (4 mm in diameter) and modified its cells, effectively reprogramming them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC).
Researchers at the University of Liverpool have developed a set of algorithms that will help teach computers to process and understand human languages.
Whilst mastering natural language is easy for humans, it is something that computers have not yet been able to achieve. Humans understand language through a variety of ways for example this might be through looking up it in a dictionary, or by associating it with words in the same sentence in a meaningful way.
The algorithms will enable a computer to act in much the same way as a human would when encountered with an unknown word. When the computer encounters a word it doesn’t recognise or understand, the algorithms mean it will look up the word in a dictionary (such as the WordNet), and tries to guess what other words should appear with this unknown word in the text.
My dream is to finally have an AI solution that is a mixture of Dragon meets, Amy meets a great editor and pr person to help me co-author a series of novels that I have been waiting for many years to write, publish, market and promote. Right now, you have Dragon or an experimental AI that writes the novel without any human input.
Textio, a service that helps job recruiters by flagging both good and poor phrasing, now aims to be a real-time writing coach.
Something so simple and finally done to help so many.
Beautiful
Researchers at the University of California said the new system dramatically improves the ability of people with limited sight to read books, menus, newspapers and emails.
The camera is not limited to text: its makers said it can also recognise faces and products.
Nice
A study providing new information about neuropathic pain afflicting some 90 percent of cancer patients who have had nerve damage caused by tumors, surgery, chemotherapy or radiation indicates gene therapy as a possible treatment.
The study in rats showed transfer of a gene known as KCC2 into the spinal canal restored chloride levels gone awry after nerve injury. Results from the research at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, were published in the May 5 online issue of Cell Reports.
The results also could have implications for treatment of chronic pain due to diabetic neuropathy and spinal cord injury since neuropathic pain caused by these conditions is associated with reduced KCC2 activity.
