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Introducing the 15 finalist teams who are developing physical avatar systems to make human telepresence and interaction possible across the globe. From performing life changing operations, caretaking, disaster relief, or simply bridging the distance for social connection, these robotic avatars will allow us to expand our physical reach and evolve the way we communicate and interact remotely. Learn more about next phase of the $10M ANA Avatar XPRIZE https://www.xprize.org/prizes/avatar/articles/ana-avatar-xpr…-finalists.

ABOUT XPRIZE

XPRIZE is a global future-positive movement of over 1M people and rising, delivering truly radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. XPRIZE inspires and empowers a global community of problem-solvers to positively impact our world by crowdsourcing solutions through large-scale competitions, tackling the world’s grandest challenges in exploration, environment and human equity. Active competitions include the $100 Million XPRIZE Carbon Removal with Elon Musk, $20 Million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, $15 Million XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion, $10 Million XPRIZE Rainforest, $10 Million ANA Avatar XPRIZE, $5 Million IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, $5 Million XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling and $1 Million Digital Learning Challenge. Donate, sign up or join a team at xprize.org.

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Summary: Researchers identify the role the Pig-Q gene plays in sleep regulation. Mutations of the Pig-Q gene increase sleep.

Source: Texas A&M

A research effort involving researchers from Texas A&M University, the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) has used human genomics to identify a new genetic pathway involved in regulating sleep from fruit flies to humans—a novel insight that could pave the way for new treatments for insomnia and other sleep-related disorders.

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https://youtu.be/I5Xarr7pBuk

Simon Waslander is the Director of Collaboration, at the CureDAO Alliance for the Acceleration of Clinical Research (https://www.curedao.org/), a community-owned platform for the precision health of the future.

CureDAO is creating an open-source platform to discover how millions of factors, like foods, drugs, and supplements affect human health, within a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), making suffering optional through the creation of a “WordPress of health data”.

Simon is a native of the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba, having been born on the island and initially chose to study medicine at the University of Groningen, but then transitioned over to healthcare innovation studies at the University of Maastricht where he wrote his master thesis on the topic of Predictive Healthcare Algorithms.

(For information on the discussion segment on AGI, please contact — www.Norn.AI)

Continue reading “Open-Sourcing And Accelerating Precision Health Of The Future: Progress, Potential and Possibilities Podcast episode” | >

A little over two years after its public debut, Mineral is becoming its own Alphabet company. The team, which was formerly known as the “Computational Agriculture Project” (no prizes for guessing why they adopted the new name), just graduated from the X “moonshot” labs.

“After five years incubating our technology at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, Mineral is now an Alphabet company,” CEO Elliott Grant said in a blog post. “Our mission is to help scale sustainable agriculture. We’re doing this by developing a platform and tools that help gather, organize, and understand never-before known or understood information about the plant world — and make it useful and actionable.”

Years after attempting to build a robotics division largely through acquisition, Alphabet appears to be growing one more organically in-house. Mineral follows Everyday Robots and Intrinsic in growing from X to a fully released Alphabet subsidiary.

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An international team has succeeded in propagating a commercial hybrid rice strain as a clone through seeds with 95 percent efficiency. This could lower the cost of hybrid rice seed, making high-yielding, disease resistant rice strains available to low-income farmers worldwide. The work was published Dec. 27 in Nature Communications.

First-generation hybrids of crop plants often show higher performance than their parent strains, a phenomenon called hybrid vigor. But this does not persist if the hybrids are bred together for a second generation. So when farmers want to use high-performing hybrid plant varieties, they need to purchase new seed each season.

Rice, the staple crop for half the world’s population, is relatively costly to breed as a hybrid for a yield improvement of about 10 percent. This means that the benefits of hybrids have yet to reach many of the world’s farmers, said Gurdev Khush, adjunct professor emeritus in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Working at the International Rice Research Institute from 1967 until retiring to UC Davis in 2002, Khush led efforts to create new rice high-yield rice varieties, work for which he received the World Food Prize in 1996.

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The US space agency selected 14 projects that are focused on “making the impossible possible”.

Part of the value of space exploration comes from the fact it will open new frontiers to science that we don’t yet know exist.

NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program has selected a total of 14 projects that it deems worthy of further investigation. Some may not make it past the concept stage, while others could change space exploration for good.

Continue reading “NASA considers Titan hybrid aircraft mission and other visionary space concepts” | >

The study is being funded by the U.S. Army and Air Force.

Researchers at the Case Western Reserve University in the U.S. are currently working toward an experiment that will record something that has never been captured at such a resolution before; the moment of impact when a projectile traveling at 9,000 miles (14,484 km) an hour hits a wall of water, a press release said.

Research of this nature has been done earlier, but that was nearly eight decades ago. Back in the 1940s, the U.S. military conducted such studies to gauge the impact of shockwaves from underwater explosions on boats and submarines.

The Daily.

Continue reading “Researchers will shoot a projectile at 9,000 miles an hour for science” | >

A mix of computer simulations and gamma-ray burst observations shed new light on merging neutron stars.

Astronomers trawled through archival observations of short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and detected the rapid evolution of two merging neutron stars into a superheavy neutron star, which then collapsed into a black hole.

Two neutron stars merge to create a black hole.

Continue reading “Scientists detect superheavy neutron star that existed for only a fraction of a second” | >