Throughout 2019, tech companies have ramped up their efforts to secure the best AI talent and technology. Here, we take a look back at some of this activity, with a focus on the “big 5”: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and (Alphabet’s) Google (FAAMG).
All the big tech firms secured AI talent and technology through acquisitions this year, including Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
Paul Westerman was just 44 when he developed the blood clot that almost killed him after suffering a knee injury while playing tennis.
Eight days after he fell, part of the clot — which had formed in a vein in his calf — travelled to his heart and lungs, with catastrophic results.
‘I woke up that morning feeling more tired than usual and went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror and did a double take,’ says Paul, a former management consultant from Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire.
Consuming a diet high in sugar and fat is a known risk factor for a number of health problems, including obesity and type-2 diabetes. A new study from the University of Illinois has found that consuming caffeine from coffee, tea, and other sources may help protect against some of the health consequences often resulting from poor dietary habits. Similar benefits were also associated with consuming synthetic caffeine.
Methylation clocks are far and away the most accurate markers of a person’s age, and so are a promising tool for evaluating anti-aging interventions, but they are a bit of a black box. We know from statistics that certain places on chromosomes become steadily methylated ( or demethylated ) with age, but we often don’t know what effect that has on expression of particular genes.
For the first time, a clock has been devised based on proteins in the blood that is comparable in accuracy to the best methylation clocks. This has the advantage of being downstream of epigenetics, so it is less of a black box. What can we learn from the proteins that are increased ( and decreased ) with age?
I’ve written often and enthusiastically about the utility of methylation clocks for evaluation of anti-aging interventions [ blog, blog, blog, journal article ]. This technology offers a way to promptly identify small age-reversal successes (perhaps not in individuals, but averaged over a cohort of ~50 to 100 subjects). Before these tests were available, we had no choice but to wait — usually 10 years or more — for enough experimental subjects to die that we could be sure the intervention we were evaluating affected life expectancy. (This is the plan of the worthy but ridiculously expensive TAME trial promoted by Nir Barzilai.)
Promising news- very primitive proof of concept for cryonics.
Scientists (and sci-fi fans) have been talking about suspended animation for years. The idea that the functions of the human body can somehow be put on “pause” while life-saving medical procedures are performed (or a person is sent into space, a la Alien) has long seemed untenable — until now. According to New Scientist, doctors have successfully placed humans in suspended animation for the first time, in a trial that could have an enormous influence on the future of emergency room surgery.
Read our full story on Engadget: https://www.engadget.com/2019/11/20/human-patient-put-in-sus…irst-time/
Some scientists think so.
They argue that all the information in the universe may be stored on some sort of two-dimensional object. In this video, NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller delves into frontier science — an unchartered territory that may require a new level of physics to better understand.
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2019 was nuts for neuroscience. I said this last year too, but that’s the nature of accelerating technologies: the advances just keep coming.
There’re the theoretical showdowns: a mano a mano battle of where consciousness arises in the brain, wildly creative theories of why our brains are so powerful, and the first complete brain wiring diagram of any species. This year also saw the birth of “hybrid” brain atlases that seek to interrogate brain function from multiple levels—genetic, molecular, and wiring, synthesizing individual maps into multiple comprehensive layers.
Brain organoids also had a wild year. These lab-grown nuggets of brain tissue, not much larger than a lentil, sparked with activity similar to preterm babies, made isolated muscles twitch, and can now be cloned into armies of near-identical “siblings” for experimentation—prompting a new round of debate on whether they’ll ever gain consciousness.
A Chinese hacking group believed to operate on behalf of the Beijing government has learned how to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) in attacks on government and industry targets, ZDNet reported on Monday.
The group, known as APT20, has reportedly sought to compromise VPN credentials that would grant them heightened levels of access across their victims’ networks, according to ZDNet, citing a new report from Dutch cyber-security firm Fox-IT.
This new “digital highway” centered on 5G will give rise to new industries and services previously unimagined. The United States must redouble its efforts to build such a digital infrastructure and make the commercialization of the Internet of Things a reality.
We’re on the verge of another industrial revolution. We can’t let the U.S. miss out.
