Have you had trouble shaking that fear of snakes or dogs or spiders? Researchers from Northwestern University have developed a new technique to rechannel memories while subjects sleep—by blasting them with various odors. It’s like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in Smell-o-Vision.
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A team of British scientists just took a major stride forward in the quest to develop a universal flu vaccine. Using data gathered after the 2009 swine flu outbreak, the team from the Imperial College London have a game plan to develop a vaccine that stands to save as many as half a million lives every year.
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Designing a robot that can mix and pour the perfect martini isn’t terribly difficult—once you get the portions and motions nailed down, it’s good to go. But designing a robot bartender that’s also able to discern who at a noisy crowded bar is looking for a drink—based on subtle gestures or posture—is a whole other level of complexity that researchers at Bielefeld University in Germany are trying to crack.
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Facebook’s current News Feed ranking isn’t all that clever — it’s good at surfacing popular updates, but it can miss lower-profile updates that are personally relevant. The company may soon raise the News Feed’s IQ, however, as it recently launched an artificial intelligence research group. The new team hopes to use deep learning AI, which simulates a neural network, to determine which posts are genuinely important. The technology could also sort a user’s photos, and it might even select the best shots. While the AI work has only just begun, the company tells MIT Technology Review that it should release some findings to the public; those breakthroughs in social networking could help society as a whole.
Filed under: Internet, Facebook
Source: MIT Technology Review
I’ve always found it very amazing that despite the number of people on Earth, we still discover new species of animals hidden deep in the jungles and other locations around the world. It’s even more amazing to me that we can discover a new species of animal right the middle of one of the most […]
Imagine a smartphone you can roll up and slip into your shirt pocket. Or a tablet that can be folded like a newspaper and slipped in your back pocket. It’s an idea that’s been tossed around in science fiction for a years, but now it’s a small step closer to reality because researchers at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China have developed the world’s first flexible silicon.
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You know that scene in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when they’re scanning through Jim Carrey’s playdoh-faced head, looking for bad memories to erase? A bunch of eggheads from MIT just figured out how to do that for real! Sort of. In all seriousness, though, the discovery is poised to do a lot of good for sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder.
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Google has launched Calico, a new “moonshot” company aiming to extend human life and putting Apple chairman Art Levinson at the helm as CEO and founding investor. “With some longer term, moonshot thinking around healthcare and biotechnology, I believe we can improve millions of lives” Google CEO Larry Page said of the new company, while […]
When you spot someone on the side of the road with a camera your normal instinct is to slow down to avoid a speeding ticket. But this fancy new camera developed by researchers at Spain’s Universidad Carlos III de Madrid doesn’t care how fast you’re driving. It’s instead designed to spot how much pollution is spewing forth from your vehicle, letting authorities pinpoint vehicles that are the worst offenders.
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In 2003 when a Cretaceous-era dinosaur adorned with long feathers was discovered in China, it sparked a debate as to if and how such a creature could fly. And to help resolve that debate, researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK put a scale model of the dino in a wind tunnel to see just how bird-like the microraptor really was.
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