ECOFE (European Consortium for Open Field Experimentation), a network of agricultural resources at various locations around Europe, has been proposed by a group of scientists in order to do for agricultural science what CERN has done for nuclear research. The organization would be a community of research stations across Europe — from an outpost in Sicily to a … Read more
Chimpanzees played the trust game to find out the basis of individual preference for other chimps Trust is the foundation of close relationships in the world of chimpanzees, according to anthropologists at Max Planck Institute. “Humans largely trust only their friends with crucial resources or important secrets,” said Dr. Jan Engelmann of the Max Planck Institute … Read more
Facebook’s AI hardware is now, like its software, open source, joining a broad movement towards outsourcing the world’s artificial intelligence intelligence. Facebook also stated it hoped independent AI technicians would develop deep learning tech superior to what the company currently uses, and that it would buy this technology. The tech giant has developed deep learning technology, which … Read more
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department announced a new policing initiative this week to combat illegal drone operation in metropolitan areas. The police drones will monitor no-fly zones, enforcing Japan’s drone legislation. Upon finding illegal activity, the drone squad will seek for the drone operator and order the drones to be grounded. If the squad is … Read more
On Monday, the XPrize Foundation announced its latest competition: the $7 Million Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize, which aims to map the ocean floor in high resolution, and find sources of pollution autonomously. Teams will test their technologies in two rounds at two separate undisclosed locations, mapping a 500 square kilometer area of ocean floor in … Read more
The Geminids — “the King of Meteor Showers” — will rain down around 100 to 150 multi-colored slow-moving streaks per hour this weekend, visible from anywhere, but the best views will be for those in the Northern Hemisphere. The show will peak over the night of Sunday, December 13 — between midnight and morning with the highest activity … Read more
“Virgin soil” hypothesis of African tuberculosis burden now challenged by new “European wave” hypothesis Ethiopia is a hotspot for tuberculosis infection, ranking third among African countries and eighth in the world for TB burden according to the World Health Organization. But, say researchers who have analyzed the genomes of 66 TB strains and reported their … Read more
Many of the body’s processes follow a natural daily rhythm or so-called circadian clock, so there are certain times of the day when a person is most alert, when the heart is most efficient, and when the body prefers sleep. Even bacteria have a circadian clock, and in a December 10 Cell Reports study, researchers … Read more
Pretty much everything happening in the brain would fail without astrocytes. These star-shaped glial cells are known to have a critical role in synapse creation, nervous tissue repair, and the formation of the blood-brain barrier. But while we have decades of data in mice about these nervous system support cells, how relevant those experiments are … Read more
The red planet’s future rings Mars will most likely develop rings similar to Saturn’s, when its largest moon, Phobos, gets close enough to break apart, according to a recently published study in Nature Geoscience. Mars would be the only inner planet with rings if this took place. Scientists predict it will happen in about 20 – 40 million … Read more
Late in 2013, a novel variant of the Ebola virus emerged in Western Africa to start what would become the largest human epidemic on record. In a study published December 9th in Cell Host & Microbe, researchers used genome sequencing to trace the introduction and spread of the virus in Liberia–the second worst-affected country. The … Read more
Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt is considering using technology to filter out internet content it checks for “hate and harassment” Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet Inc (formerly called Google), published an opinion piece for the New York Times in which he expressed his thoughts on “the raw reality of the internet,” writing that Google … Read more