FDA TO START NAMING NAMES OF PHARMA COMPANIES BLOCKING CHEAPER GENERICS
The Food and Drug Administration plans this week to effectively begin publicly shaming brand-name drug companies that stand in the way of competitors trying to develop cheaper generic drugs. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told reporters on Monday and Tuesday that the agency will unveil a website on Thursday, May 17 that names names of such companies. More specifically, the website will publicly reveal the identity of 50 branded drugs and their makers that have blocked generic development.
Read moreFINLAND OFFERS FREE ONLINE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE COURSE TO ANYONE, ANYWHERE
The University of Helsinki has offered a course in AI for the past few years. Due to increased interest in the subject, the institution collaborated with Reaktor to create an online course to meet the growing demand. The course, which went live this week, has no prerequisites, is free of charge and open to anyone around the world. The coursework takes about 30 hours to complete and students in Finland can even earn two ECTS academic credits through the Open University. Thouse outside Finland who’ve successfully completed the course are able to receive a certificate to post on their LinkedIn page.
Read moreTHE NENGO NEURAL SIMULATOR
Nengo is a graphical and scripting based Python package for simulating large-scale neural networks. Nengo can create sophisticated spiking or non-spiking neural simulations with sensible defaults in a few lines of code. Yet, Nengo is highly extensible and flexible. You can define your own neuron types and learning rules, get input directly from hardware, build and run deep neural networks, drive robots, and even implement your model on a completely different neural simulator or neuromorphic hardware.
Read moreMICE WITH 3D-PRINTED OVARIES SUCCESSFULLY GIVE BIRTH
AsKatherine Kornei at Science reports,the researchers used a 3D printer to build the scaffolding of the organs, weaving layers of gelatin to createtiny (15 x 15 millimeter) ovaries on glass slides. They then tested the scaffolds by embedding a follicle—the tiny sacs composed of hormone-secreting cells that containthe maturing eggs. This test suggested that the tightest weave supported the highest survival rates, reports Kornei.
Read moreHOW MUCH OF THE INTERNET IS USING QUIC?
It’s been five years since Google launched QUIC — a new transport protocol that is deployed on the shoulders of UDP in user space. QUIC offers similar properties as TCP + TLS 1.3 but promises to incorporate new features more easily and without them being dropped by legacy systems that don’t support them, for example, middleboxes that block new TCP features — a problem that TCP has faced since its initial deployment. QUIC tackles the problem by offering a fully encrypted transport protocol, thereby removing the possibility for middleboxes to alter its content.
Read moreFAST FASHION: FOR AN E-COMMERCE MODEL IN CHINA, 150 OUTFITS IN 13 HOURS IS A DAY’S WORK
Cui Yue, known professionally as Pin’er, models clothes for online retailers selling their goods on the Chinese e-commerce behemoth Taobao. Because Taobao models are valued for their ability to drive sales, with the website tracking each product, the approach to modelling favours volume and efficiency. Donning between 100 and 200 outfits a day (and more than 200,000 in her career, she estimates), Yue tries to capture the spirit of each outfit in a matter of seconds, shifting her poses in rapid-fire sequences before slipping into the next look.
Read moreCHINESE SCIENTISTS DEVELOP A PHOTONIC QUANTUM CHIP FOR BOOSTING ANALOG QUANTUM COMPUTING
Chinese scientists demonstrated the first two-dimensional quantum walks of single photons in real spatial space, which may provide a powerful platform to boost analog quantum computing. They reported in a paper published on Friday in the journal Science Advances a three-dimensional photonic chip with a scale up to 49-multiply-49 nodes, by using a technique called femtosecond direct writing. Jin Xianmin, a quantum communication researcher with Shanghai Jiaotong University, who led the study, told Xinhua, it is the largest-scaled chip reported so far that allows for the realization of this two-dimensional quantum walk in real spatial space, and potential exploration for many new quantum computing tasks.
Read moreINTRODUCING STATE OF THE ART TEXT CLASSIFICATION WITH UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE MODELS
This post is a lay-person’s introduction to our new paper, which shows how to classify documents automatically with both higher accuracy and less data requirements than previous approaches. We’ll explain in simple terms: natural language processing; text classification; transfer learning; language modeling; and how our approach brings these ideas together. If you’re already familar with NLP and deep learning, you’ll probably want to jump over to our NLP classification page for technical links.
Read moreFORGET CARBON FIBER—WE CAN NOW MAKE CARBON NANOTUBE FIBERS
A carbon nanotube is tough—by some measures, more than 30 times more robust than Kevlar. As they’re only a few atoms thick, however, that toughness isn’t especially useful. Attempts have been made to bundle them together, but nothing has worked out especially well; the individual nanotubes are typically short, and it’s difficult to get them to all line up in the same direction.
Read moreSHORT CIRCUIT: THE HIGH COST OF ELECTRIC VEHICLE SUBSIDIES
Many claim that “zero-emissions vehicles” (ZEVs), especially battery-powered electric vehicles, should replace most, if not all, cars and trucks powered by gasoline-burning internal combustion engines. The primary rationale is to reduce air pollution and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. To effect this change, governments are spending billions of dollars to subsidize electric vehicles. These subsidies include state and federal tax credits for purchasing ZEVs and programs to subsidize the installation of vehicle-charging infrastructure in businesses, households, and along highways. Several states also have mandated the sale of ZEVs. For example, an executive order signed by California governor Jerry Brown in January requires 5 million ZEVs to be on the state’s roads and highways by 2030.
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