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Jul 6, 2019

China’s Big AI Advantage: Humans

Posted by in categories: economics, education, government, robotics/AI, transportation

Seemingly “intelligent” devices like self-driving trucks aren’t actually all that intelligent. In order to avoid plowing into other cars or making illegal lane changes, they need a lot of help.

In China, that help is increasingly coming from rooms full of college students.

Continue reading “China’s Big AI Advantage: Humans” »

Jul 6, 2019

Billion-Dollar Returns: The Upside of Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency

Posted by in category: cryptocurrencies

Markkk… please take care, regards, we are tired of half deals, i hope your doing the right choice.


If Libra achieves even modest adoption, the payoff for Facebook and its partners could be in the billions.

Jul 6, 2019

Astronomers Have Observed The Atmosphere Of A Planet Like No Other In The Solar System

Posted by in category: space

For the first time, researchers have been able to observe the atmosphere of a planet between the sizes of Earth and Neptune. Gliese 3470 b is a world 96 light-years away, orbiting a star roughly half the size of the Sun. It is 12.6 times the mass of our planet and slightly smaller than Neptune, which weighs 17 times the mass of the Earth.

As reported in Nature Astronomy, this planet delivered quite the surprise to astronomers. Using the combined power of the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Spitzer infrared observatory, they discovered a clear atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, the main components of stars.

“We expected an atmosphere strongly enriched in heavier elements like oxygen and carbon which are forming abundant water vapor and methane gas, similar to what we see on Neptune,” lead author Björn Benneke, of the University of Montreal, said in a statement. “Instead, we found an atmosphere that is so poor in heavy elements that its composition resembles the hydrogen/helium-rich composition of the Sun.”

Jul 6, 2019

This spray-on nanofiber ‘skin’ may revolutionize burn and wound care

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Shaped like a gun, Nanomedic’s SpinCare device emits a web of electrospun polymer nanofabric that stays put for weeks—no dressing changes required.

[Source Photo: Nanomedic Technologies Ltd.]

Jul 6, 2019

Star Trails Swirl Over Israel’s Negev Desert (Photo)

Posted by in category: futurism

Miguel Claro is a professional photographer, author and science communicator based in Lisbon, Portugal, who creates spectacular images of the night sky. As a European Southern Observatory photo ambassador, a member of The World At Night and the official astrophotographer of the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve, he specializes in astronomical “skyscapes” that connect Earth and the night sky. Join him here as he takes us through his photograph “Light Trails in Israel Desert.”

Star trails circle over Ramon Crater in this long-exposure photo of the night sky over Israel’s Negev Desert.

I captured this photo from inside Ramon Crater (also known as Makhtesh Ramon), the world’s largest erosion cirque. The Ramon Crater geological formation has nothing to do with a meteor strike, despite its name. Rather, this “crater” formed about 220 million years ago when the ocean that once covered the area dried up. The eroding ocean floor then gave way to the crater-like valley we see there today.

Jul 6, 2019

AI can simulate quantum systems without massive computing power

Posted by in categories: quantum physics, robotics/AI, supercomputing

It’s difficult to simulate quantum physics, as the computing demand grows exponentially the more complex the quantum system gets — even a supercomputer might not be enough. AI might come to the rescue, though. Researchers have developed a computational method that uses neural networks to simulate quantum systems of “considerable” size, no matter what the geometry. To put it relatively simply, the team combines familiar methods of studying quantum systems (such as Monte Carlo random sampling) with a neural network that can simultaneously represent many quantum states.

Jul 6, 2019

Aging is associated with a systemic length-driven transcriptome imbalance

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, robotics/AI

Aging manifests itself through a decline in organismal homeostasis and a multitude of cellular and physiological functions. Efforts to identify a common basis for vertebrate aging face many challenges; for example, while there have been documented changes in the expression of many hundreds of mRNAs, the results across tissues and species have been inconsistent. We therefore analyzed age-resolved transcriptomic data from 17 mouse organs and 51 human organs using unsupervised machine learning3 5 to identify the architectural and regulatory characteristics most informative on the differential expression of genes with age. We report a hitherto unknown phenomenon, a systemic age-dependent length-driven transcriptome imbalance that for older organisms disrupts the homeostatic balance between short and long transcript molecules for mice, rats, killifishes, and humans. We also demonstrate that in a mouse model of healthy aging, length-driven transcriptome imbalance correlates with changes in expression of splicing factor proline and glutamine rich (Sfpq), which regulates transcriptional elongation according to gene length. Furthermore, we demonstrate that length-driven transcriptome imbalance can be triggered by environmental hazards and pathogens. Our findings reinforce the picture of aging as a systemic homeostasis breakdown and suggest a promising explanation for why diverse insults affect multiple age-dependent phenotypes in a similar manner.

The transcriptome responds rapidly, selectively, strongly, and reproducibly to a wide variety of molecular and physiological insults experienced by an organism. While the transcripts of thousands of genes have been reported to change with age, the magnitude by which most transcripts change is small in comparison with classical examples of gene regulation2,8 and there is little consensus among different studies. We hence hypothesize that aging is associated with a hitherto uncharacterized process that affects the transcriptome in a systemic manner. We predict that such a process could integrate heterogenous, and molecularly distinctive, environmental insults to promote phenotypic manifestations of aging.

We use an unsupervised machine learning approach3 5 to identify the sources of age-dependent changes in the transcriptome. To this end, we measure and survey the transcriptome of 17 mouse organs from 6 biological replicates at 5 different ages from 4 to 24 months raised under standardized conditions (Fig. 1A). We consider information on the structural architecture of individual genes and transcripts, and knowledge on the binding of regulatory molecules such as transcription factors and microRNAs (miRNAs) (Fig. 1B). We define age-dependent fold-changes as the log2-transformed ratio of transcripts of one gene at a given age relative to the transcripts of that gene in the organs of 4-month-old mice. As expected for models capturing most measurable changes in transcript abundance, the predicted fold-changes (Fig. S1) match changes empirically observed between distinct replicate cohorts of mice (Figs. S2 and S3).

Jul 6, 2019

Another earthquake felt in Vegas! Did you feel it?

Posted by in category: transportation

A 7. 1 earthquake has taken place in Ridgecrest, Californa, according to the USGS. The quake happened at 8:19 p. m. According to McCarran Airport, fortunately, there were no operational interruptions and all runways were checked and cleared. According to Las Vegas Fire & Rescue, no calls in the city were related to the earthquake. RELATED | The Latest: Southern California reels from 7. 1 quake. On July 4th, a 6.

Jul 6, 2019

Indigenous students win berth at Japan robotics competition

Posted by in categories: education, robotics/AI

A team of two indigenous Nahua students from Guerrero came in first place at a national robotics contest held in Quintana Roo, winning them a berth to represent Mexico in an international competition in Japan next year.

The contest was organized by Conalep, a system of public high schools that offer technical education.

Victor Manuel Bautista Nieves and Próspero Romero Gerardo, both 18-year-old students at the Conalep school in Chilapa, Guerrero, won the contest by designing a robot able to locate and extinguish three randomly-placed candles on a determined field within three minutes.

Jul 6, 2019

Unexpected Evidence of a Brain Microbiome

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Researchers have recently found bacteria residing in the brain, once believed to be a completely sterile environment. The discovery raises profound questions.