News

New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

For decades, descriptions of viruses have straddled life and nonlife, a divide that usually isn’t difficult to navigate. Their hallmark characteristics, namely their small size, tiny genomes and parasitic dependence on cellular hosts for replication, set them apart from all other living things despite their animation. But that story has gotten far more puzzling — particularly since the discovery of the first giant virus in 2003, which was so large that researchers initially thought it was a bacterium.

Insulator or superconductor? Physicists find graphene is both

Physicists at MIT and Harvard University have found that graphene, a lacy, honeycomb-like sheet of carbon atoms, can behave at two electrical extremes: as an insulator, in which electrons are completely blocked from flowing; and as a superconductor, in which electrical current can stream through without resistance.

Founding Stories Are Myths

Why You Should Ignore Every Founder’s Story About How They Started Their Company.

The Human Driving Manifesto

Do you like driving? I do. It’s not about speed.

Australia could become first country to eradicate cervical cancer

HPV (human papillomavirus) is a sexually transmitted infection that causes 99.9% of cervical cancers. In 2007, the federal government began providing the vaccine for free to girls aged 12-13 years, and in 2013, it extended the program to boys.

Scientists observe a new quantum particle with properties of ball lightning

The virus hunter: In a bygone era, C.J. Peters learned how to bend the rules

“Cracking” Morse code with RNNs

Spoiler alert: Morse code doesn’t really need cracking. Its useful because messages can be sent using this code with minimal equipment, and I say it doesn’t need cracking because the code is well known and what the combinations of dots and dashes stand for is no secret. But, in theory, it is a substitution cipher — where each letter of the alphabet (and each digit) has some representation using dots and dashes, as illustrated below.

Building a Next Word Predictor in Tensorflow

Next Word Prediction or what is also called Language Modeling is the task of predicting what word comes next. It is one of the fundamental tasks of NLP and has many applications. You might be using it daily when you write texts or emails without realizing it.

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.