HUMANS PRODUCE NEW BRAIN CELLS THROUGHOUT THEIR LIVES, SAY RESEARCHERS
Humans continue to produce new neurons in a part of their brain involved in learning, memory and emotion throughout adulthood, scientists have revealed, countering previous theories that production stopped after adolescence. The findings could help in developing treatments for neurological conditions such as dementia. Source: theguardian.com
BERKELEY OFFERS ITS FASTEST-GROWING COURSE – DATA SCIENCE – ONLINE FOR FREE
The fastest-growing course in UC Berkeley’s history — Foundations of Data Science — is being offered free online this spring for the first time through the campus’s online education hub, edX. Data science is becoming important to more and more people because the world is increasingly data-driven — and not just science and tech but the humanities, business and government.
Read moreREDESIGNING THE SCIENTIFIC PAPER
The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.
Read moreURBAN DARWINISM: HOW SPECIES ARE EVOLVING TO SURVIVE IN CITIES
In urban areas, the forces of rapid natural selection are leading to striking genetic changes in animals. Dutch biologist Menno Schilthuizentalks to Yale e360 about the transformations seen in creatures ranging from mice in Central Park to anole lizards in Puerto Rico. Source: yale.edu
COMPUTER SYSTEM TRANSCRIBES WORDS USERS “SPEAK SILENTLY”
MIT researchers have developed a computer interface that can transcribe words that the user verbalizes internally but does not actually speak aloud. Source: mit.edu
WHAT IS GOOD SCIENCE?
Demanding that a theory is falsifiable or observable, without any subtlety, will hold science back. We need madcap ideas. Source: aeon.co
AI EXPERTS THREATEN TO BOYCOTT A UNIVERSITY OVER REPORTS OF KILLER ROBOT RESEARCH
Dozens of the world’s leading experts on artificial intelligence and robotics have announced a boycott of a major South Korean research university, which has been working with an arms company on integrating artificial intelligence with weaponry. Source: fortune.com
NOW, YOU CAN DEPLOY TO KUBERNETES ENGINE FROM GITLAB WITH A FEW CLICKS
In cloud developer circles, GitLab is a popular DevOps lifecycle tool. It lets you do everything from project planning and version control to CI/CD pipelines and monitoring, all in a single interface so different functional teams can collaborate. In particular, its Auto DevOps feature detects the language your app is written in and automatically builds your CI/CD pipelines for you.
Read moreSCALING UBER’S HADOOP DISTRIBUTED FILE SYSTEM FOR GROWTH
Uber’s Data Infrastructure team overhauled our approach to scaling our storage infrastructure by incorporating several new features and functionalities, including ViewFs, NameNode garbage collection tuning, and an HDFS load management service. Source: uber.com
RETRO CONTEST
We’re launching a transfer learning contest that measures a reinforcement learning algorithm’s ability to generalize from previous experience. In typical RL research, algorithms are tested in the same environment where they were trained, which favors algorithms which are good at memorization and have many hyperparameters. Instead, our contest tests an Source: openai.com