SpaceX asks FCC for license expansion after 700,000 people register interest.
Too bad.
Nearly 500 pages of evidence were made public during the House Judiciary’s marathon hearing this week on potential anti-competitive actions by Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple. We’ve collected them here with added context and an omnibus, searchable version for anyone who’d rather not juggle four dozen documents.
The emails, chat logs and other communications listed here trickled out online as the hearings went on. Many are internal documents that were never meant to be exposed publicly — for instance, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg telling a colleague that “we can likely always just buy any competitive startups” shortly before acquiring Instagram in 2012.
Do you agree Eric Klien?
In just a few short years, the new technology is entering new realms and helping cement Shanghai’s ambition to become a global leader in the sector.
The Hackett Group at EMBL Rome explores epigenetics, genome regulation and cell identity. Recently, the scientists developed a novel CRISPR molecular tool for editing the epigenome, enabling transient modifications that can switch certain genes “on” and “off” temporarily.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus that has caused the COVID-19 global pandemic makes its way into a host cell via a protein known as ACE2, which is involved in a range of physiological functions in the body.
What happens when you transiently turn “off” the gene that encodes this protein? Can SARS-CoV-2 still enter the cell and cause infection? This is what Hackett and colleagues are currently exploring in animal models, to determine whether epigenetic silencing could be a treatment approach for COVID-19 in humans.
DeepMind this week released Acme, a framework intended to simplify the development of reinforcement learning algorithms by enabling AI-driven agents to run at various scales of execution. According to the engineers and researchers behind Acme, who coauthored a technical paper on the work, it can be used to create agents with greater parallelization than in previous approaches.
Reinforcement learning involves agents that interact with an environment to generate their own training data, and it’s led to breakthroughs in fields from video games and robotics to self-driving robo-taxis. Recent advances are partly attributable to increases in the amount of training data used, which has motivated the design of systems where agents interact with instances of an environment to quickly accumulate experience. This scaling from single-process prototypes of algorithms to distributed systems often requires a reimplementation of the agents in question, DeepMind asserts, which is where the Acme framework comes in.
If you think you control your own thoughts and decisions, think again. Recent research reveals that unconscious thoughts give birth to our mental imagery and personal choices.
Summary: Repetitive transcranial memory stimulation applied to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex modifies the negative effects of fear memories. The findings could have implications for the treatment of PTSD.
Source: University of Bologna
A research group from the University of Bologna has succeeded in modifying the negative effect of a returning memory that triggers fear, and developed a new non-invasive experimental protocol. The result of this study, published in the journal Current Biology, is an innovative protocol that combines fear conditioning—a stimulus associated with something unpleasant that induces a negative memory—and the neurostimulation of a specific site of the prefrontal cortex.
Space tourism venture Virgin Galactic announced it signed an agreement with Rolls-Royce to develop an aircraft for supersonic travel, giving a first look on Monday of the coming vehicle’s design.
Supersonic travel is a long-term bet for Virgin Galactic, which has been developing reusable spacecraft capable of sending people on short trips to the edge of space for more than a decade.
Virgin Galactic said it completed a mission concept review alongside NASA of its supersonic vehicle design and now will work with the Federal Aviation Administration to create a framework for certifying the aircraft for flight. Previously Boeing’s venture arm invested $20 million in Virgin Galactic, specifically toward helping the company build a supersonic aircraft.
Life-saving Ai
If you had to guess how long it takes for a drug to go from an idea to your pharmacy, what would you guess? Three years? Five years? How about the cost? $30 million? $100 million?
Well, here’s the sobering truth: 90 percent of all drug possibilities fail. The few that do succeed take an average of 10 years to reach the market and cost anywhere from $2.5 billion to $12 billion to get there.
But what if we could generate novel molecules to target any disease, overnight, ready for clinical trials? Imagine leveraging machine learning to accomplish with 50 people what the pharmaceutical industry can barely do with an army of 5,000.
One of the world’s most prolific hacking groups recently infected several Massively Multiplayer Online game makers, a feat that made it possible for the attackers to push malware-tainted apps to one target’s users and to steal in-game currencies of a second victim’s players.