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6 Charts Showing the Renewables Threat to Natural Gas

Rory McCarthy, senior storage analyst for Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables, illustrated for attendees how the business case for using renewables in place of natural gas is becoming more compelling following declines in solar and wind costs.

That business case is also improving as a result of massive increases in battery storage, where the U.S. leads the world in terms of operational and planned capacity.

Today, storage capacity amounts to around 6 gigawatt-hours worldwide, but Wood Mackenzie predicts a more than tenfold increase, to at least 65 gigawatt-hours, by 2022. The U.S. will continue to lead this build-out, thanks to its more mature market.

This New Space Tech Could Someday Replace A/C

The United States uses more energy for HVAC than Africa uses for all of their energy needs.


The starry night sky seems remarkably distant from the topic of air conditioning, but it’s revolutionizing the field in quite an unexpected way. In this episode of “The Spark,” watch how scientists from across the globe are harnessing natural phenomena to drastically redesign this century-old technology.

Featured in this episode:

Dr. Ernest (Kian Jon) Chua.
National University of Singapore
http://me.nus.edu.sg/staff.php?id=2164

SkyCool Systems

Treating Aging with SENSOlytics

Today, we would like to share a talk given by Stephen Hilbert, President of Oisin Biotechnologies, in which he discusses treating aging and cancer by removing harmful senescent cells.

On July 12th, we hosted our first conference, Ending Age-Related Diseases: Investment Prospects & Advances in Research, at the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, which is part of the Cooper Union campus in New York City. The packed event saw a range of people from research, investment, and the wider community coming together for a day of science and biotech business presentations and panels.

One of the companies at the event was Oisin Biotechnologies, a company working on therapies that remove harmful senescent cells, which accumulate as we age and drive aging processes through the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP), which leads to chronic inflammation.

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship Documentary in English and Russian

Today, we want to let you know that the documentary Paywall: The Business of Scholarship is now available in both English and Russian. This is a documentary exploring the crisis in scientific journal publication and the excessive fees that some publishers charge to access knowledge.

Holding scientific knowledge to ransom

Around 70% of scientific publications are hidden behind paywalls, restricting access to knowledge and holding back progress. We believe that this is unfair and that putting profit before the health of others is unacceptable, and this is one reason why we support the concept of open science here at LEAF.

European science funders ban grantees from publishing in paywalled journals

The move means grantees from these 11 funders—which include the national funding agencies in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France as well as Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics—will have to forgo publishing in thousands of journals, including high-profile ones such as Nature, Science, Cell, and The Lancet, unless those journals change their business model. “We think this could create a tipping point,” says Marc Schiltz, president of Science Europe, the Brussels-based association of science organizations that helped coordinate the plan. “Really the idea was to make a big, decisive step—not to come up with another statement or an expression of intent.”


Bold move is intended to trigger open-access tipping point.

How AI can save our humanity | Kai-Fu Lee

AI is massively transforming our world, but there’s one thing it cannot do: love. In a visionary talk, computer scientist Kai-Fu Lee details how the US and China are driving a deep learning revolution — and shares a blueprint for how humans can thrive in the age of AI by harnessing compassion and creativity. “AI is serendipity,” Lee says. “It is here to liberate us from routine jobs, and it is here to remind us what it is that makes us human.”

Check out more TED Talks: http://www.ted.com

The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more.

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ANA and JAXA Partner to Create a New Space Industry Centered Around Real-World Avatars

TOKYO, Sept. 6, 2018 (ANA HD/JAXA PR) — ANA HOLDINGS INC. (hereinafter ANA HD) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency ( JAXA ) are proud to announce the launch of “AVATAR X,” a multi-phased program to revolutionize space exploration and development using real-world Avatars (*1).

AVATAR X aims to capitalize on the growing space-based economy by accelerating development of real-world Avatars that will enable humans to remotely build camps on the Moon, support long-term space missions and further explore space from afar.

AVATAR X is part of “ANA’s AVATAR Vision (*2),” a breakthrough endeavor to advance and pioneer real-world Avatar technologies, and JAXA ‘s new research and development program “J-SPARC” ( JAXA Space Innovation through Partnership and Co-creation). Together with a growing list of public and private partners, AVATAR X hopes to catalyze new space-based businesses that will provide key services and an unprecedented level of access to space.

Baidu has created a ‘no code’ platform to make building AI models easier

Hoping to make up ground in the hotly contested artificial intelligence battleground, Chinese Internet giant Baidu Inc. is releasing a tool that allows businesses to create and deploy AI models without coding skills.

Announced Saturday, EZDL is a “no-code platform to build custom machine learning models,” designed with ease of use and security in mind, the company said.

“EZDL is a service platform that allows users to build custom machine learning models with a drag-and-drop interface,” Yongkang Xie, tech lead of Baidu EZDL, said in a statement. “It takes only four steps to train a deep learning model, built specifically for your unique business needs.”

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