Society
Meet CoverGirl’s first-ever CoverBoy, James Charles usatoday v
CoverGirl ambassador Katy Perry took to Instagram to break the news that the beauty behemoth had signed the 17-year-old New York-based makeup artist. "Just wrapped another great CoverGirl shoot. Honored to have the pleasure to announce the very first CoverBoy, James Charles!" the pop artist captioned a photo of herself posing alongside Charles in all his contoured glory.
Persecution
Sudan Detains Six Christians, Threatens Church Demolition www1.cbn
Six Sudanese Christians were arrested after reportedly refusing to hand over a Christian school to government authorities.
"They were released on bail later the same day," a source told Open Doors, a Christian group that monitors religious freedom around the world. "It is not clear if further legal action is planned."
Unity
Pope urges Lutherans to set aside doctrine to work together therepublic
Francis greeted about 1,000 Lutherans who were visiting the Vatican on an ecumenical pilgrimage. They had arrived in Rome from Germany, where Martin Luther famously sparked the Protestant Reformation by nailing his 95 theses luther.de to a church door to challenge the abuses of the Catholic Church.
End of the World
The man behind the 'doomsday' vault that stores every known crop on the planet explains how it came to be businessinsider p
Cary Fowler, the man considered the "father" of the seed vault and a former executive director of the international nonprofit organization Crop Trust croptrust.org, compares it to a safety deposit box: the point of the vault is not for apocalyptic scenarios, but serves more as a sort of back-up drive.
CRISPR
Sickle Cell Cure - Genetic Enineering Shows the Way medindia.net
The team of scientists performed CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to correct the defective mutated gene in the stem cells of patients suffering from sickle cell anemia. For the first time, they have managed to correct the mutation in enough number of stem cells, that would lead to the production of healthy hemoglobin, not possible earlier, and alleviate the symptoms of the disease.
Medical
To Make Vaccines Anywhere, Just Add Water theatlantic
Manufacturing medicine isn’t the only use for this technology. By freeze-drying the innards of cells onto small paper discs, Pardee also created a cheap way of detecting important diseases, like Zika and Ebola, without relying on laboratories or sequencing machines. Add a drop of saliva or blood to the paper discs, and they’ll change color if the viruses are present.
Research
Graphene-fed silkworms can spin super threads engadget
A team of scientists from Tsinghua University tsinghua.edu in Beijing successfully created silk that's twice as tough simply by feeding the material to silkworms. In order to do so, they coated leaves with a solution that contains either carbon nanotubes or graphene. Carbon nanotubes are essentially rolled up graphene, which is a single layer of tightly packed carbon atoms. The researchers opted for the feeding method, because it's much simpler and more environmentally friendly than treating the final product in chemicals.
AI
Google's Deep Mind Gives AI a Memory Boost That Lets It Navigate London's Underground spectrum.ieee.org
...neural networks face huge challenges when they try to rely solely on pattern recognition without having the external memory to store and retrieve information. To improve deep learning’s capabilities, Google DeepMind created a “differentiable neural computer” (DNC) that gives neural networks an external memory for storing information for later use.
An unaided neural network could not even finish the first level of training, based on traveling between two subway stations without trying to find the shortest route. It achieved an average accuracy of just 37 percent after going through almost two million training examples. By comparison, the neural network with access to external memory in the DNC system successfully completed the entire training curriculum and reached an average of 98.8 percent accuracy on the final lesson.
How Artificial Intelligence Will Kill Some Jobs But Create Others fortune
Prepared for the White House by the National Science and Technology Council’s Subcommittee on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, the report reiterates the conventional wisdom that AI-fueled automation will take over more jobs that could not be automated in the past. On the plus side, that may mean better productivity and potential wealth creation. On the other hand, it could also replace workers and reduce demand for the their skills.
Also see A White House report says AI will take jobs but also help solve global problems recode
Alibaba Cloud to use artificial intelligence to smooth Hangzhou traffic flow scmp
AliCloud is supporting the government’s “Hangzhou City Brain” plan with its AI and big data analytics capabilities which can carry out real-time traffic forecast, the company announced at a cloud computing conference in Hangzhou on Thursday.
Traffic light adjustment is one of the features of the smart traffic management system. For instance, a green light will automatically be extended when the system detects a vehicle, helping to shorten the waiting time.
China has now eclipsed us in AI research washingtonpost
The chart [in the article] was published Wednesday by the Obama administration as part of a new strategic plan aimed at spurring U.S. development of artificial intelligence. What's striking about it is that although the United States was an early leader on deep-learning research, China has effectively eclipsed it in terms of the number of papers published annually on the subject. The rate of increase is remarkably steep, reflecting how quickly China's research priorities have shifted.
Robots
Meet Kobi, Your New All-Season Robot Landscaper roboticstrends
Waelbers says no tedious boundary wires are needed to keep Kobi from veering out of your yard or driveway. All you need to do is use the companion app to drive Kobi around the yard or driveway so it can learn the perimeter of those spaces and where any fixed obstacles are located. Kobi uses GPS and a suite of sensors to achieve inch-level positioning accuracy. Kobi also features WiFi, Bluetooth and mobile data connectivity.
Yemen
US enters Yemen war, bombing Houthis who launched missiles at navy ship theguardian
The Pentagon announced late on Wednesday that it struck and destroyed three radar sites controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi movement in Yemen. The sites were described as being involved in two missile attacks over the past four days on the destroyer USS Mason navy.mil, operating out of the Bab al-Mandeb waterway between Yemen and east Africa.
Also see U.S. Carries Out Strikes Against Yemen's Rebels npr
Russia
Trickery wins every time': Russia is using an old kind of military deception businessinsider
The Russian government has a growing supply of inflatable military gear, including tanks, jets, and missile batteries, provided by hot-air balloon company RusBal, as detailed by a report by The New York Times.
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