FIRST CLEAR EVIDENCE CELL PHONE RADIATION CAN CAUSE CANCER IN RATS
This substantially changes the debate on whether cell phone use is a cancer risk. Up until this point, the federal government and cell phone manufacturers operated on the assumption that cell phones cannot by their very nature cause cancer, because they emit non-ionizing radiation. Whereas ionizing radiation—the kind associated with x-rays, CT scans, and nuclear power plants, among others—definitely causes cancer at high enough doses, non-ionizing radiation was believed to not emit enough energy to break chemical bonds.
Read moreVOYAGER 1 FIRES UP THRUSTERS AFTER 37 YEARS
Thethrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft just did what we thought was impossible. After 37 years of inactivity,NASA just received response from spacecraft 13 billion miles away, NASA said in a statement on its website. Voyager 1 is NASA’s farthest and fastest spacecraft. It waslaunched on September 5, 1977. Having operated for 40 years, 6 months and 14 days as of March 19, 2018, the spacecraft relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or “puffs,” lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet.
Read moreTESLA IN FATAL CALIFORNIA CRASH WAS ON AUTOPILOT
Electric carmaker Tesla says a vehicle involved in a fatal crash in California was in Autopilot mode, raising further questions about the safety of self-driving technology. Source: bbc.com
STARTUPS NOT STATUS: JAPAN’S TOP GRADS RETHINK SUCCESS
The trend is such that Tokyo’s Hongo district, where the university’s campus is located, has earned the nickname ‘Hongo Valley.’ Japan’s version of Silicon Valley is buzzing with startups that specialize in fields such as wealth management, health care, home sharing and space debris collection. Source: nikkei.com
AUTOMATICALLY “BLOCK” PEOPLE IN IMAGES USING A PRETRAINED NEURAL NETWORK
A script to automatically ‘block’ people in images (like the Black Mirror episode White Christmas) using Mask R-CNN pretrained on the MS COCO dataset. No GPU required! Source: github.com
SCIENTISTS SAY WE’RE ON THE CUSP OF A CARBON DIOXIDE–RECYCLING REVOLUTION
Within a few years, we could be capturing the carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and recycling it into fuel. Source: sciencemag.org
SWIFT FOR TENSORFLOW
Swift for TensorFlow is a result of first-principles thinking applied to machine learning frameworks, and works quite differently than existing TensorFlow language bindings. Whereas prior solutions are designed within the constraints of what can be achieved by a (typically Python or Lua) library, Swift for TensorFlow is based on the belief that machine learning is important enough to deserve first-class language and compiler support. Source: tensorflow.org
AMAZON TAKES FRESH STAB AT $16B HOUSEKEEPING INDUSTRY
Now Amazon is quietly hiring house cleaners in Seattle as direct employees. The online retailer is swapping the low cost of contract workers for the greater control of employing its own people. Doing so puts it on the hook for things like minimum wage, workers compensation and overtime pay. But it also lets Amazon determine how the workers are trained, which cleaning products they use and how they organize their schedules.
Read moreBRAINS CLING TO OLD HABITS WHEN LEARNING NEW TRICKS
The hallmark of intelligence is the ability to learn. As decades of research have shown, our brains exhibit a high degree of “plasticity,” meaning that neurons can rewire their connections in response to new stimuli. But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have recently discovered surprising constraints on our learning abilities. The brain may be highly flexible and adaptive overall, but at least over short time frames, it learns by inefficiently recycling tricks from its neural repertoire rather than rewiring from scratch.
Read moreIN TO ASIA
Modern humans arose only once, in Africa, about 200,000 years ago. They then spread across Eurasia some time after 60,000 years ago, replacing whatever indigenous populations they met with no interbreeding. This is the ‘Out of Africa’ model, as it’s commonly known. In the 1990s, the hypothesis found widespread acceptance by palaeoanthropologists, especially when the first analyses of Neanderthal DNA seemed to indicate that Neanderthals and modern humans did not interbreed. But this popular idea is in need of revision, particularly given the number of important findings across Asia over the past few decades.
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