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Aug 20, 2019

Juvenescence Secures $100M for Rejuvenative Therapies

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

It seems that billionaire biotech investor Jim Mellon is the flavor of the month as he continues the drive to create a rejuvenation biotech industry. Jim and his colleagues at Juvenescence have announced that they have secured another $100M for the company, and it will be used to invest and support the growth of promising biotech companies working in this field.

Juvenescence has a varied investment portfolio of companies that range in potential usefulness, depending on your point of view, and they mostly favor the more traditional small molecule drug approach. There are a few companies that are of particular interest.

Aug 20, 2019

An Overview of Python’s Datatable package

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI

Modern machine learning applications need to process a humongous amount of data and generate multiple features. Python’s datatable module was created to address this issue. It is a toolkit for performing big data (up to 100GB) operations on a single-node machine, at the maximum possible speed.

Aug 20, 2019

Brain scans could help personalize treatment for people who are depressed or suicidal

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, habitats, neuroscience

By his late 20s, Moe had attained the young adult dream. A technology job paid for his studio apartment just blocks from the beach in Santa Barbara, California. Leisure time was crowded with close friends and hobbies, such as playing the guitar. He had even earned his pilot’s license. “There was nothing I could have complained about,” he says.

Yet Moe soon began a slide he couldn’t control. Insomnia struck, along with panic attacks. As the mild depression he’d experienced since childhood deepened, Moe’s life collapsed. He lost his job, abandoned his interests, and withdrew from his friends. “I lost the emotions that made me feel human,” Moe says. (He asked that this story not use his full name.)

Although many people with depression respond well to treatment, Moe wasn’t one of them. Now 37, he has tried antidepressant drugs and cycled through years of therapy. Moe has never attempted suicide, but he falls into a high-risk group: Though most people with depression don’t die by suicide, about 30% of those who don’t respond to multiple antidepressant drugs or therapy make at least one attempt. Moe was desperate for relief and fearful for his future. So when he heard about a clinical trial testing a new approach to treating depression at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, near his home, he signed up.

Aug 20, 2019

You Can Now Rent Tesla Solar Panels for Crazy Cheap

Posted by in category: sustainability

Now, the company is trying yet another approach, launching a new program that lets homeowners rent Tesla solar panels for as little as $50 per month plus tax.

To rent Tesla’s solar panels, you must own a home in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, or New Mexico and be a customer of one of 20 listed utility companies.

The rental rate varies by state and size of the system — small, medium, or large — but in all instances, the single monthly fee is all-encompassing, covering everything from the hardware and installation to maintenance and support.

Aug 20, 2019

Fraud Detection Using Random Forest, Neural Autoencoder, and Isolation Forest Techniques

Posted by in categories: finance, information science, robotics/AI

  • Fraud detection techniques mostly stem from the anomaly detection branch of data science.
  • If the dataset has sufficient number of fraud examples, supervised machine learning algorithms for classification like random forest, logistic regression can be used for fraud detection.
  • If the dataset has no fraud examples, we can use either the outlier detection approach using isolation forest technique or anomaly detection using the neural autoencoder.
  • After the machine learning model has been trained, it’s evaluated on the test set using metrics such as sensitivity and specificity, or Cohen’s Kappa.

With global credit card fraud loss on the rise, it is important for banks, as well as e-commerce companies, to be able to detect fraudulent transactions (before they are completed).

According to the Nilson Report, a publication covering the card and mobile payment industry, global card fraud losses amounted to $22.8 billion in 2016, an increase of 4.4% over 2015. This confirms the importance of the early detection of fraud in credit card transactions.

Aug 20, 2019

New Hand-Tracking Algorithm Could Be a Big Step in Sign Language Recognition

Posted by in categories: information science, mobile phones, robotics/AI

Several companies, like SignAll and Kintrans, have created hand-tracking software that tries, with little success so far, to allow the millions of people that use sign language and an app to easily communicate with anyone.

Now, a new hand-tracking algorithm from Google’s AI labs might be a big step in making this ambitious software everything it originally promised.

RELATED: THIS SMARTPHONE APP CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE WITH JUST 3 WORDS

Aug 20, 2019

This startup says they can convert your gas car into an electric one for just $9,500

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

With more electric cars on the road and the negative environmental impact of traditional vehicle emissions on the forefront of many minds, some may struggle with their choice to drive a car with a standard combustion engine.

But what if you could just “convert” your car into an electric one?

French startup Transition-One says it can do it for only $9,500 — in fact, in France, you also get a subsidy for a converted car so it actually only works out to around $5,600.

Aug 20, 2019

Drop: This man built a water filter unlike any you have seen before

Posted by in category: futurism

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Aug 20, 2019

APIS: Asteroid Provided In-situ Supplies) is a family of flight systems based on a similar architecture

Posted by in category: space travel

Ranging in size from the experimental Mini Bee , a 250kg technology demonstration spacecraft, through the Honey Bee, capable of capturing a 10m asteroid and extracting its resources, to the Queen Bee, capable of capturing a 40m asteroid for resource extraction. All use an asteroid containment system similar to that proposed for the original Asteroid Redirect Mission, optical mining for resource extraction, and a water based Omnivore™ Thruster system for propulsion. A variant called the Worker Bee, can serve as an orbital transfer vehicle, transporting items to high Earth orbits and beyond, potentially even to Mars.

Aug 20, 2019

Frontier AI: How far are we from artificial “general” intelligence, really?

Posted by in categories: education, Elon Musk, robotics/AI

Some call it “strong” AI, others “real” AI, “true” AI or artificial “general” intelligence (AGI)… whatever the term (and important nuances), there are few questions of greater importance than whether we are collectively in the process of developing generalized AI that can truly think like a human — possibly even at a superhuman intelligence level, with unpredictable, uncontrollable consequences.

This has been a recurring theme of science fiction for many decades, but given the dramatic progress of AI over the last few years, the debate has been flaring anew with particular intensity, with an increasingly vocal stream of media and conversations warning us that AGI (of the nefarious kind) is coming, and much sooner than we’d think. Latest example: the new documentary Do you trust this computer?, which streamed last weekend for free courtesy of Elon Musk, and features a number of respected AI experts from both academia and industry. The documentary paints an alarming picture of artificial intelligence, a “new life form” on planet earth that is about to “wrap its tentacles” around us.