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.
Read moreINSULATOR 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. Source: mit.edu
FOUNDING STORIES ARE MYTHS
Why You Should Ignore Every Founder’s Story About How They Started Their Company. Source: medium.com
THE HUMAN DRIVING MANIFESTO
Do you like driving? I do. It’s not about speed. It’s about freedom. It’s about choice. Car in the garage. Keys in hand. Hands on wheel. We choose where we go and when we go, and we choose how we get there. With the rise of self-driving cars, an army of experts would have us believe freedom and choice are a bad thing. From behind the banner of safety, they claim autonomous technology will save us from the tyranny and danger of human control.
Read moreAUSTRALIA 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. Source: theguardian.com
SCIENTISTS OBSERVE A NEW QUANTUM PARTICLE WITH PROPERTIES OF BALL LIGHTNING
In an extremely sparse and cold quantum gas, the physicists have created knots made of the magnetic moments, or spins, of the constituent atoms. The knots exhibit many of the characteristics of ball lightning, which some scientists believe to consist of tangled streams of electric currents. The persistence of such knots could be the reason why ball lightning, a ball of plasma, lives for a surprisingly long time in comparison to a lightning strike.
Read moreTHE VIRUS HUNTER: IN A BYGONE ERA, C.J. PETERS LEARNED HOW TO BEND THE RULES
At 77, Clarence James Peters, known as C.J., is getting on, walking with more deliberate steps than in his earlier years. But he can still recount in sharp detail anecdotes from a career in which he flew through mountain passes to perilous landing strips and trudged to remote villages. By the time he returned home, he had stolen from Mother Nature some of the secrets of diseases including Bolivian hemorrhagic fever and Rift Valley fever.
Read more“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.
Read moreBUILDING 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. Source: towardsdatascience.com
IF YOU’RE SO SMART, WHY AREN’T YOU RICH? TURNS OUT IT’S JUST CHANCE.
The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment. Source: technologyreview.com