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Jan 9, 2019

Diabetes: Can we teach the body to heal itself?

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

In a new study in an animal model, researchers investigate the body’s potential to replace insulin-producing cells and thus heal itself of diabetes.

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Jan 9, 2019

Hyundai’s walking car concept unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show

Posted by in categories: electronics, transportation

The electric vehicle is designed to shift to “reptilian” or “mammalian” walking mode when terrain turns tough.

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Jan 9, 2019

Supermoon Lunar Eclipse To Become The First Pan-American Total Eclipse In 19 Years

Posted by in category: futurism

On January 20/21, half of Earth will experience a total lunar eclipse. For the first time in 19 years, this includes all of North and South America.

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Jan 9, 2019

Mysterious radio signals have reached Earth from a galaxy 1.5 billion light years away

Posted by in category: space

Signals of this type have only been found once before.

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Jan 9, 2019

NMN Enters Cells via Newly Discovered Pathway

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

A new study published in Nature Metabolism finally reveals the answer to how NMN enters the cell in order to become NAD+ and that it does not need to convert into NR to do so.


In the last few years, there has been considerable interest in restoring levels of the nicotinamide adenine dinclueotide (NAD+) coenzyme to combat age-related diseases. Evidence suggests that NAD+ systemically declines with age in a variety of organisms, including rodents and humans, which contributes to the development of many age-related diseases and metabolic conditions.

What is NAD+?

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Jan 9, 2019

Futurist Forecasts 2019 Politics & Tech

Posted by in categories: futurism, innovation

Futurist and political talk with a British twist.


What does 2019 hold for POLITICS and TECHNOLOGY?

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Jan 9, 2019

Uranus is a real oddball in our solar system

Posted by in category: space

Its spin axis is tilted by a whopping 98 degrees.
Venus takes 243 Earth days to rotate once on its axis – the slowest rotation of any planet – and its rotation is retrograde to its orbital path. Combined with its orbital period, this means that a single solar day on Venus (the time between one sunup to the next) is 117 Earth days.

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Jan 9, 2019

Finding an elusive mutation that turns altruism into selfish behavior among honeybees

Posted by in category: futurism

Some days you wonder…


For the first time, researchers have finally found the root cause responsible for thelytoky syndrome — which dramatically turns bees from altruistic helpers to selfish mercenaries.

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Jan 9, 2019

A system to generate new song lyrics that match the style of specific artists

Posted by in categories: media & arts, robotics/AI

Researchers at the University of Waterloo, Canada, have recently developed a system for generating song lyrics that match the style of particular music artists. Their approach, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, uses a variational autoencoder (VAE) with artist embeddings and a CNN classifier trained to predict artists from MEL spectrograms of their song clips.

“The motivation for this project came from my personal interest,” Olga Vechtomova, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Music is a passion of mine, and I was curious about whether a machine can generate lines that sound like the lyrics of my favourite music artists. While working on text generative models, my research group found that can generate some impressive lines of text. The natural next step for us was to explore whether a machine could learn the ‘essence’ of a specific music artist’s lyrical style, including choice of words, themes and sentence structure, to generate novel lyrics lines that sound like the artist in question.”

The system developed by Vechtomova and her colleagues is based on a neural network model called variational autoencoder (VAE), which can learn by reconstructing original lines of text. In their study, the researchers trained their model to generate any number of new, diverse and coherent lyric lines.

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Jan 9, 2019

Researchers create a wireless, battery-free, biodegradable blood flow sensor

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, electronics

A new device developed by Stanford University researchers could make it easier for doctors to monitor the success of blood vessel surgery. The sensor, detailed in a paper published Jan. 8 in Nature Biomedical Engineering, monitors the flow of blood through an artery. It is biodegradable, battery-free and wireless, so it is compact and doesn’t need to be removed and it can warn a patient’s doctor if there is a blockage.

“Measurement of blood flow is critical in many medical specialties, so a wireless biodegradable sensor could impact multiple fields including vascular, transplant, reconstructive and cardiac surgery,” said Paige Fox, assistant professor of surgery and co-senior author of the paper. “As we attempt to care for patients throughout the Bay Area, Central Valley, California and beyond, this is a technology that will allow us to extend our care without requiring face-to-face visits or tests.”

Monitoring the success of surgery on blood vessels is challenging as the first sign of trouble often comes too late. By that time, the patient often needs additional surgery that carries risks similar to the original procedure. This new sensor could let doctors keep tabs on a healing vessel from afar, creating opportunities for earlier interventions.

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