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Jan 29, 2018

African countries have taken the first major step towards cheaper continental flights — By Yomi Kazeem | Quartz

Posted by in categories: drones, governance, innovation, transportation

“Yesterday (Jan. 28), 23 African countries launched the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) initiative by the African Union (AU). ”

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Jan 29, 2018

Revolutionary gene edited T cell therapy to treat lymphoma shows promise and little toxicity

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

This revolutionary gene modified T cell therapy is bearing fruit in treating a type of lymphoma, a resistant form of cancer.


Summary: After years of effort, this revolutionary gene-modified T cell therapy is bearing fruit in treating a type of lymphoma, a resistant form of cancer. [This article first appeared on the website LongevityFacts.com. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Thirty-seven-year-old Nick Asoian of Denver unsuccessfully fought Hodgkin’s Lymphoma using conventional cancer treatments for two years. In 2008, while in New Zealand for a ski race, Nick was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Two bone marrow transplants and two years of chemotherapy combined with radiation therapy didn’t bring his cancer to heel.

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Jan 29, 2018

Learning From First Principles — Demis Hassabis

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Between 04–09 December 2017, thousands of researchers and experts gathered for at the largest and most influential AI and Thirty-first Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) in Long Beach, California. This is the conference’s 40th year, and its most-attended, at 7,229 registrations.

Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of DeepMind and an expert chess player himself, presented further details of the system, called Alpha Zero, at an Artificial Intelligence Conference in California. The program often made moves that would seem unthinkable to a human chess player.

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Jan 29, 2018

Artificial brains could soon be reality: Superconducting switch, which can ‘learn’ like human brain, developed

Posted by in categories: computing, neuroscience

Researchers have developed a superconducting switch that can make future computers think like the human brain.

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Jan 29, 2018

All living organisms on Earth owe a debt to these protein-based ‘Legos of life’

Posted by in category: energy

As an added bonus, these tiny building blocks could even be used to split water, creating a clean-burning and near infinite source of energy.

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Jan 29, 2018

Fully Electric “Tesla of the Canals” Set to Make Maiden Voyage This Summer

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

The battery-powered autonomous ships will move goods across Belgium and the Netherlands, helping pull up to 23,000 polluting trucks off the road.

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Jan 29, 2018

NASA tests light, foldable plane wings for supersonic flights

Posted by in categories: energy, transportation

Planes that can fold their wings to different angles while in the air have the potential to fly faster than their peers, and NASA has recently made headway into their development. The space agency has conducted a series of test flights proving that it can control the wings it designed to move into any position and that they have aerodynamic benefits. While the technology has existed for a long time, it typically requires the use of heavy hydraulic systems. NASA’s version doesn’t need that kind of machinery: it relies on the properties of a temperature-activated material called shape memory alloy instead. Upon being heated, the alloy activates a twisting motion in the tubes serving as the wings’ actuator, moving the wings’ outer portion up to 70 degrees upwards or downwards.

The foldable wings will give typical planes like commercial airliners a way to adapt to different flight conditions. They can give pilots more control over their aircraft and could even lead to more fuel efficient flights. Planes designed to fly at supersonic speeds (faster than the speed of sound), however, will get more out of this technology.

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Jan 29, 2018

Chinese scientists just cloned two monkeys, moving one step closer to cloning humans

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

By Ben Hirschler

LONDON (Reuters) — Chinese scientists have cloned monkeys using the same technique that produced Dolly the sheep two decades ago, breaking a technical barrier that could open the door to copying humans.

Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, two identical long-tailed macaques, were born eight and six weeks ago, making them the first primates — the order of mammals that includes monkeys, apes and humans — to be cloned from a non-embryonic cell.

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Jan 29, 2018

Scientists Just Created Rain and Snow on Demand in Idaho With Cloud Seeding

Posted by in category: geoengineering

The ability to modify the weather has long belonged in the realm of science fiction, but now a team of scientists in Idaho think they’ve figured out how to make it happen outside a lab.

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Jan 29, 2018

Never-Before-Seen Viruses With Weird DNA Were Just Discovered in The Ocean

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

The ocean is crowded. As many as 10 million viruses can be found squirming in a single millilitre of its water, and it turns out they have friends we never even knew about.

Scientists have discovered a previously unknown family of viruses that dominate the ocean and can’t be detected by standard lab tests. Researchers suspect this viral multitude may already exist outside the water — maybe even inside us.

“We don’t think it’s ocean-specific at all,” says environmental microbiologist Martin Polz from MIT.

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