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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — An anonymous donor has made it easier for dogs at the Halifax Humane Society to find a forever home thanks to a cryptocurrency investment.

Halifax Humane Society Community Outreach Director Barry Kukes said the woman stopped by the shelter Saturday and paid all the adoption fees for dogs ready to be adopted out.

“Basically, had made a very wise investment in some cryptocurrency and had a windfall and said it changed her life that she wanted to do something nice,” he said.

Scientists have discovered one of the smallest black holes on record—and the closest one to Earth found to date.

Researchers have dubbed it ‘The Unicorn,’ in part because it is, so far, one of a kind, and in part because it was found in the constellation Monoceros—’The Unicorn.’ The findings are publishing today, April 21, in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“When we looked at the data, this black hole—the Unicorn—just popped out,” said lead author Tharindu Jayasinghe, a doctoral student in astronomy at The Ohio State University and an Ohio State presidential fellow.

With NASA’s historic solar-powered helicopter flight over the barren slopes of Mars’ Jezero Crater, Leonardo da Vinci and Igor Sikorsky also deserve credit along with the Wright brothers for enabling this astounding bit of off-world powered, controlled flight. Da Vinci made one of the earliest drawings of a rotor-driven aircraft and Sikorsky built the U.S.’ first commercially viable helicopter.

Even though Orville and Wilbur Wright get credit for making the first powered, controlled aircraft flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903, the vertical flight of helicopters is markedly different. Thus, the first test flight of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter is all the more astounding in no small part because Mars’ atmosphere is only one percent that of Earth.

“While these two iconic moments in aviation history may be separated by time and 173 million miles of space, they now will forever be linked,” NASA Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen said in a statement. “As an homage to the two innovative bicycle makers from Dayton, this first of many airfields on other worlds will now be known as Wright Brothers Field, in recognition of the ingenuity and innovation that continue to propel exploration.”

A company recently developed a novel system capable of printing biological tissue in a blindingly fast 30 seconds — creating a possible means of bringing an end to diabetes, according to a blog post shared on the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne’s (EPFL’s) official website.

A bioprinted pancreas might remove the need for animal testing! Check out how diabetes might end.

The next version of Android remains focussed on developers until the first beta launches next month. With that in mind, we’re diving into today’s release of Android 12 DP3 to find all the new features.

Over the coming hours, we’ll dive into all of Android 12 DP3’s new features and every single change. (The newest updates will be at top of this list. Be sure to check back often and tell us what you find in the comments below.)

Google is planning eight releases over the coming months before the consumer launch later this year to Pixel phones and other devices. If you want to quickly install the Android 12 DP1 on your compatible Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL, Pixel 3a, Pixel 3a XL, Pixel 4, Pixel 4 XL, Pixel 4a, Pixel 4a 5G, and Pixel 5 be sure to check out our step-by-step guide.

No fossils necessary.

Scientists have achieved a breakthrough they’re comparing to the moon landing: sequencing a full ancient genome from soil samples.

How’s that on par with humans touching down on the lunar surface? Well, the research team from the University of Copenhagen found the entire genetic code of an ancient bear species without obtaining it from fossils, marking the very first time scientists have found genes outside the fossil record. And by gathering the DNA from the soil, these researchers gathered a bunch of examples, rather than just one single specimen’s genome.

Continue reading “In ‘Moon Landing of Genomics,’ Scientists Sequence Ancient DNA From Dirt” »

As content moderation continues to be a critical aspect of how social media platforms work — one that they may be pressured to get right, or at least do better in tackling — a startup that has built a set of data and image models to help with that, along with any other tasks that require automatically detecting objects or text, is announcing a big round of funding.

Hive, which has built a training data trove based on crowdsourced contributions from some 2 million people globally, which then powers a set of APIs that can be used to identify automatically images of objects, words and phrases — a process used not just in content moderation platforms, but also in building algorithms for autonomous systems, back-office data processing, and more — has raised $85 million in a Series D round of funding that the startup has confirmed values it at $2 billion.

“At the heart of what we’re doing is building AI models that can help automate work that used to be manual,” said Kevin Guo, Hive’s co-founder and CEO. “We’ve heard about RPA and other workflow automation, and that is important too but what that has also established is that there are certain things that humans should not have to do that is very structural, but those systems can’t actually address a lot of other work that is unstructured.” Hive’s models help bring structure to that other work, and Guo claims they provide “near human level accuracy.”

Summary: Betaine, a dietary supplement extracted from sweet beets, reduces behavioral symptoms of schizophrenia in mice with genetic risk factors for the disorder. The supplement may help protect proteins that build the cellular skeletons of neurons.

Source: University of Tokyo.

A simple dietary supplement reduces behavioral symptoms in mice with a genetic mutation that causes schizophrenia. After additional experiments, including visualizing the fluorescently stained dancing edge of immature brain cells, researchers concluded that the supplement likely protects proteins that build neurons’ cellular skeletons.

Cerebras Systems has unveiled its new Wafer Scale Engine 2 processor with a record-setting 2.6 trillion transistors and 850000 AI-optimized cores. It’s built for supercomputing tasks, and it’s the second time since 2019 that Los Altos, California-based Cerebras has unveiled a chip that is basically an entire wafer.

Chipmakers normally slice a wafer from a 12-inch-diameter ingot of silicon to process in a chip factory. Once processed, the wafer is sliced into hundreds of separate chips that can be used in electronic hardware.

But Cerebras, started by SeaMicro founder Andrew Feldman, takes that wafer and makes a single, massive chip out of it. Each piece of the chip, dubbed a core, is interconnected in a sophisticated way to other cores. The interconnections are designed to keep all the cores functioning at high speeds so the transistors can work together as one.