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Researchers are now calling for a set of guidelines, similar to those used in animal research, to guide the humane use of brain organoids and other experiments that could achieve consciousness. In June, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine began a study with the aim of outlining the potential legal and ethical issues associated with brain organoids and human-animal chimaeras.


A handful of experiments are raising questions about whether clumps of cells and disembodied brains could be sentient, and how scientists would know if they were.

Microsoft has released a public preview of a free app lets helps people train machine learning models without writing any code.

The Lobe desktop app for Windows and Mac currently only supports image classification, but Microsoft plans to expand it to other models and data types in the future.

“Just show it examples of what you want it to learn, and it automatically trains a custom machine learning model that can be shipped in your app,” the Lobe website explains.

SpaceX is ready to offer Starlink internet in northern United States and southern Canada. The company currently operates approximately 888 internet-beaming satellites in low Earth orbit. SpaceX plans to deploy thousands of satellites to provide broadband coverage globally by 2021. To track the satellites in orbit SpaceX signed a deal with LeoLabs, the company announced the partnership today October 27. —“LeoLabs is pleased to announce a commercial agreement with SpaceX to support tracking of Starlink satellites during the initial on-orbit phase of missions,” LeoLabs representatives wrote in a press release. “Under this partnership, SpaceX utilizes LeoLabs Launch and Early Orbit service to track all Starlink satellites beginning immediately after deployment, providing SpaceX with rapid orbital location and identification support during the first few days of new missions.”

SpaceX and LeoLabs have been working together since March this year. Through LeoLabs’ advanced tracking system, SpaceX obtains detailed data rapidly about where each Starlink satellite is located in space. LeoLabs states it delivers data within 1-hour after a Starlink satellite passes over one of its radar stations on Earth.

“LeoLabs is excited to work with SpaceX as they launch the world’s largest constellation of satellites to provide global broadband internet access,” the Chief Executive Officer at LeoLabs Dan Ceperley wrote in a statement released by the company. “Our global radar network and software platform allow LeoLabs to acquire an entire batch of Starlink satellites faster than any other organization in the world and provides SpaceX with a level of certainty that was previously not available,” he added.

Forget water on the moon, NASA has now struck gold.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a rare, heavy and immensely valuable asteroid called “16 Psyche” in the Solar System’s main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Asteroid Psyche is located at roughly 230 million miles (370 million kilometers) from Earth and measures 14 miles (226 kilometers) across, about the size of West Virginia. What makes it special is that, unlike most asteroids that are either rocky or icy, Psyche is made almost entirely of metals, just like the core of Earth, according to a study published in the Planetary Science Journal on Monday.

‚The innocuous microwave on a shelf in a laboratory at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Wash., is anything but ordinary.

“Weird,” is how Penny McKenzie, a cybersecurity engineer at the laboratory, describes the device.

The microwave arrived at PNNL with the capability to be controlled through a connected to the internet, a connection McKenzie and her colleagues declined when they plugged it into the wall.

An international team of researchers has developed a multifunctional skin-mounted microfluidic device that is able to measure stress in people in multiple ways. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their device and how it could be useful.

Prior research has shown that can damage a person’s health. It can lead to diabetes, depression, obesity and a host of other problems. Some have suggested that one of the ways to combat stress is to create a means for alerting a person to their heightened stress so that they might take action to reduce it. To that end, prior teams have developed skin-adhesive devices that that collect sweat samples. The tiny samples contain small amounts of cortisol, a hormone that can be used as a marker of stress levels. In this new effort, the researchers have improved on these devices by developing one that measures more than just cortisol levels and is much more comfortable.

The researchers began with the notion that in order to convince people to wear a full time, it had to be both useful and comfortable. The solved the latter issue by making their device out of soft materials that adhere gently to the skin. They also used a skeletal design for their microfluidic sweat-collection apparatus—a flexible mesh. They also added more functionality. In addition to cortisol, their device is able to measure glucose and vitamin C levels. They also added electrodes underneath that are able to measure sweat rate and electrical conductivity of the skin, both of which change in response to stress. They also added a wireless transmitter that sends all of the data to a nearby smartphone running the device’s associated app.

With video editing software becoming increasingly sophisticated, it’s sometimes difficult to believe our own eyes. Did that actor really appear in that movie? Did that politician really say that offensive thing?

Some so-called ‘deepfakes’ are harmless fun, but others are made with a more sinister purpose. But how do we know when a video has been manipulated?

Researchers from Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science have teamed up with Intel Corp. to develop a tool called FakeCatcher, which boasts an accuracy rate above 90%.