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Oct 23, 2018

Apple files patent for autonomous vehicle caravan features like sharing battery systems while driving

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

Wow that’s futuristic lvl streamlining…


Apple has today filed a patent for a set of intriguing new autonomous vehicle features called “Peloton.” The filing describes the ability for multiple self-driving cars to share battery capacity via a “connector arm,” dynamically adjust positions, increase efficiency, and more.

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Oct 23, 2018

Fishing and emergency kit apps developed by Filipino innovators during the NASA Space Apps Challenge in the Philippines

Posted by in categories: astronomy, computing, cosmology, environmental

MANILA, Philippines — A mobile and SMS application developed by IT professionals Revbrain G. Martin, Marie Jeddah Legaspi, and Julius Czar Torreda to help fishermen receive real-time weather, sunrise and sunset, wind speed, and cloud coverage to plan their fishing activity, and an emergency checklist kit app was developed by students Jeorge Loui P. Delfin, Bluen Ginez, Samuel Jose, Rainier Garcia Narboneta, and Eugenio Emmanuel A. Araullo for disaster preparedness won the NASA Space Apps Challenge on October 19–21 at De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines, in partnership with the Embassy of the United States of America and PLDT.

Other projects and solutions developed are games using images from the Hubble Space Telescope, augmented reality mobile app to tell a story of the changes in the Arctic and Antarctic ice, artificial intelligence app helping scientists confirm the habitability of exoplanets, and story-based game using NASA Earth imagery.

They joined together with teams of coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, technologists, thinkers, designers, entrepreneurs, and everyone around the globe working together in a 48-hour sprint to develop solutions to some of the most pressing challenges on Earth and in space, using NASA resources and data.

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Oct 23, 2018

Protein Produced by Astrocytes Involved in Brain Plasticity

Posted by in categories: genetics, neuroscience

Protein Chrdl1 appears to regulate brain plasticity.


Researchers from the Salk Institute have discovered that a protein called Chrdl1, secreted by astrocytes, is responsible for driving synapse maturation and limiting brain plasticity later in life [1].

Abstract

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Oct 23, 2018

NASA brings a Hubble gyro back to life after a seven-year hibernation

Posted by in category: space

When you’ve been in operation since 1990, you need to hibernate things for seven years every once and awhile.


“Following the October 18 maneuvers, the team noticed a significant reduction in the high rates, allowing rates to be measured in low mode for brief periods of time,” NASA reports. “On October 19, the operations team commanded Hubble to perform additional maneuvers and gyro mode switches, which appear to have cleared the issue. Gyro rates now look normal in both high and low mode.”

Now, the space agency plans to test the gyro under conditions like those during routine science activities. Once these tests are done, the telescope should resume normal science observations.

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Oct 23, 2018

David Sinclair Supports NAD+ Mouse Project with a 5k Fund Match

Posted by in category: life extension

Today we are delighted to announce there is to be a third fund match for the NAD+ Mouse Project!


Today, we are delighted to announce that there is to be a third funding match for the NAD+ Mouse Project!

Dr. David Sinclair will be personally matching the next $5000 in donations for the last 10 days of the campaign to help reach the final $60,000 goal. Now, that is what we call a devoted scientist!

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Oct 23, 2018

Disaster readiness, fisherfolk apps are PH entries to Space Apps challenge

Posted by in category: space

A shoutout to our country’s young visionaries!


One app allows users to contact each other when telecoms break down during disasters; the other gives fishermen information on weather conditions before fishing and where they should fish.

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Oct 23, 2018

People Are Living Inside Landfills As The World Drowns In Its Own Trash

Posted by in category: materials

If it floats, is it a ‘lifeboat’?


While the oceans fill up with plastic waste, a horrifying crisis unfolds on land.

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Oct 23, 2018

Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life — study

Posted by in categories: innovation, space

Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported Monday. Current latest trending Philippine headlines on science, technology breakthroughs, hardware devices, geeks, gaming, web/desktop applications, mobile apps, social media buzz and gadget reviews.

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Oct 23, 2018

Biohackers Are Implanting Everything From Magnets to Sex Toys

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, bitcoin, business, cybercrime/malcode, cyborgs, ethics, health, internet, robotics/AI, sex, transhumanism

Biohacking raises a host of ethical issues, particularly about data protection and cybersecurity as virtually every tech gadget risks being hacked or manipulated. And implants can even become cyberweapons, with the potential to send malicious links to others. “You can switch off and put away an infected smartphone, but you can’t do that with an implant,” says Friedemann Ebelt, an activist with Digitalcourage, a German data privacy and internet rights group.


Patrick Kramer sticks a needle into a customer’s hand and injects a microchip the size of a grain of rice under the skin. “You’re now a cyborg,” he says after plastering a Band-Aid on the small wound between Guilherme Geronimo’s thumb and index finger. The 34-year-old Brazilian plans to use the chip, similar to those implanted in millions of cats, dogs, and livestock, to unlock doors and store a digital business card.

Kramer is chief executive officer of Digiwell, a Hamburg startup in what aficionados call body hacking—digital technology inserted into people. Kramer says he’s implanted about 2,000 such chips in the past 18 months, and he has three in his own hands: to open his office door, store medical data, and share his contact information. Digiwell is one of a handful of companies offering similar services, and biohacking advocates estimate there are about 100,000 cyborgs worldwide. “The question isn’t ‘Do you have a microchip?’ ” Kramer says. “It’s more like, ‘How many?’ We’ve entered the mainstream.”

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Oct 22, 2018

BinaryGAN: a generative adversarial network with binary neurons

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

Researchers at the Research Center for IT Innovation of Academia Sinica, in Taiwan, have recently developed a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) that has binary neurons at the output layer of the generator. This model, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, can directly generate binary-valued predictions at test time.

So far, GAN approaches have achieved remarkable results in modeling continuous distributions. Nonetheless, applying GANs to discrete data has been somewhat challenging so far, particularly due to difficulties in optimizing the distribution toward the target data distribution in a high-dimensional discrete space.

Hao-Wen Dong, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore, “I am currently working on music generation in the Music and AI Lab at Academia Sinica. In my opinion, composing can be interpreted as a series of decisions—for instance, regarding the instrumentation, chords and even the exact notes to use. To move toward achieving the grand vision of a solid AI composer, I am particularly interested in whether deep generative models such as GANs are able to make decisions. Therefore, this work examined whether we can train a GAN that uses binary neurons to make binary decisions using backpropagation, the standard training algorithm.”

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