Big Data
Society
Archeology
King Solomon-era Palace Found in Biblical Gezer haaretz
The monumental building dates to the 10th century BCE, the era associated with King Solomon, who is famed for bringing wealth and stability to the newly-united kingdom of Israel and Judah. The American archaeological team also found a layer featuring Philistine pottery, lending credence to the biblical account of them living in the city until being vanquished by King David.
Space
SpaceX Signs First Customer for Launch of Refurbished Rocket wsj
Scheduled to occur before the end of the year, the mission announced on Tuesday will be the first one to use the lower stage and nine main engines of a Falcon 9 rocket that experienced the rigors of a blastoff and acceleration through the atmosphere on a previous launch. No other commercial space company or military contractor has achieved such a landmark by recovering and reusing the entire lower stage intact, after an initial orbital flight.
Egypt
Egypt blames EU-Turkey deal for refugee spike euobserver
"You see what has happened as a result of the deal with Turkey. The closing of the Balkan route and the deal in north Africa, the pressure has increased on Egypt," [foreign minister ambassador Hisham Badr] told MEPs in the European parliament's foreign affairs committee.
Robots
AI
DNA
How DNA could store all the world’s data nature
“We sat down in the bar with napkins and biros,” says Goldman, and started scribbling ideas: “What would you have to do to make that work?” The researchers' biggest worry was that DNA synthesis and sequencing made mistakes as often as 1 in every 100 nucleotides. This would render large-scale data storage hopelessly unreliable — unless they could find a workable error-correction scheme. Could they encode bits into base pairs in a way that would allow them to detect and undo the mistakes? “Within the course of an evening,” says Goldman, “we knew that you could.”
Variation in 'junk' DNA leads to trouble medicalxpress
Although variants are scattered throughout the genome, scientists have largely ignored the stretches of repetitive genetic code once dismissively known as "junk" DNA in their search for differences that influence human health and disease.
A new study shows that variation in these overlooked repetitive regions may also affect human health. These regions can affect the stability of the genome and the proper function of the chromosomes that package genetic material, leading to an increased risk of cancer, birth defects and infertility. The results appear online in the journal Genome Research. genome.cshlp.org
Medical
Reconstructing the 6th century plague from a victim scienmag
Before the infamous Black Death, the first great plague epidemic was the Justinian plague, which, over the course of two centuries, wiped out up to an estimated 50 million (15 percent) of the world's population throughout the Byzantine Empire—-and may have helped speed the decline of the eastern Roman Empire.
No one knows why it disappeared.
Other...
