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Dec 8, 2021

A COVID vaccine grown in plants measures up

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

A Canadian biotech firm is reporting positive results from a large study of its COVID-19 vaccine. What makes it unusual is that the key ingredient of the vaccine is grown in plants. Medicago has already developed an experimental flu vaccine in Nicotiana benthamian, a plant related to tobacco. When the pandemic struck, the company decided to try to make a COVID-19 vaccine.

Now it appears those efforts have succeeded. “This is an incredible moment for Medicago and for novel vaccine platforms,” Medicago CEO and President Takashi Nagao said in a statement.


A COVID-19 vaccine from a Canadian biotech firm has been found effective at preventing moderate to severe disease. It could soon become the first plant-based vaccine authorized for human use.

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Dec 8, 2021

Atomically thin lasers shine for the first time at room temperature

Posted by in category: futurism

Coherent light generation from ultrathin semiconductor crystals paves the way for creating novel nanolasers and valleytronic devices.

Dec 8, 2021

Unusual ‘Quadruple Helix’ Structure in DNA May Be Behind Rare Aging Syndrome

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, life extension

The double-helix structure has practically become synonymous with DNA, but it isn’t the only way long strands of genetic information squeeze themselves into a tight space.

When a double-strand of DNA doubles back on itself or attaches to another double-strand, it can actually create a quadruple-stranded knot, known as a G-quadruplex.

Scientists first discovered these ‘double-double-helixes’ in living human cells in 2013, and in the years since, these knots have been found in high concentrations in cancerous cells.

Dec 8, 2021

DARPA Funded Researchers Accidentally Create The World’s First Warp Bubble

Posted by in categories: physics, space travel

Warp drive pioneer Dr. Harold G “Sonny” White has reported the successful manifestation of an actual, real-world “Warp Bubble.”


Warp drive pioneer and former NASA warp drive specialist Dr. Harold G “Sonny” White has reported the successful manifestation of an actual, real-world “Warp Bubble.” And, according to White, this first of its kind breakthrough by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI) team sets a new starting point for those trying to manufacture a full-sized, warp-capable spacecraft.

“To be clear, our finding is not a warp bubble analog, it is a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble,” White told The Debrief, quickly dispensing with the notion that this is anything other than the creation of an actual, real-world warp bubble. “Hence the significance.”

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Dec 8, 2021

Technique enables real-time rendering of scenes in 3D

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, robotics/AI

Humans are pretty good at looking at a single two-dimensional image and understanding the full three-dimensional scene that it captures. Artificial intelligence agents are not.

Yet a machine that needs to interact with objects in the world—like a robot designed to harvest crops or assist with surgery—must be able to infer properties about a 3D from observations of the 2D images it’s trained on.

While scientists have had success using neural networks to infer representations of 3D scenes from images, these machine learning methods aren’t fast enough to make them feasible for many real-world applications.

Dec 8, 2021

Player of Games

Posted by in categories: entertainment, information science, robotics/AI

Games have a long history of serving as a benchmark for progress in artificial intelligence. Recently, approaches using search and learning have shown strong performance across a set of perfect information games, and approaches using game-theoretic reasoning and learning have shown strong performance for specific imperfect information poker variants. We introduce, a general-purpose algorithm that unifies previous approaches, combining guided search, self-play… See more.


Games have a long history of serving as a benchmark for progress in.

Artificial intelligence. Recently, approaches using search and learning have.

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Dec 8, 2021

UC Berkeley’s Sergey Levine Says Combining Self-Supervised and Offline RL Could Enable Algorithms That Understand the World Through Actions

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI

The idiom “actions speak louder than words” first appeared in print almost 300 years ago. A new study echoes this view, arguing that combining self-supervised and offline reinforcement learning (RL) could lead to a new class of algorithms that understand the world through actions and enable scalable representation learning.

Machine learning (ML) systems have achieved outstanding performance in domains ranging from computer vision to speech recognition and natural language processing, yet still struggle to match the flexibility and generality of human reasoning. This has led ML researchers to search for the “missing ingredient” that might boost these systems’ ability to understand, reason and generalize.

In the paper Understanding the World Through Action, UC Berkeley assistant professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer sciences Sergey Levine suggests that a general, principled, and powerful framework for utilizing unlabelled data could be derived from RL to enable ML systems leveraging large datasets to better understand the real world.

Dec 8, 2021

A Stadium Sized Asteroid Is Approaching Us This Weekend | Everything You Need To Know | Nereus

Posted by in categories: asteroid/comet impacts, existential risks

A huge asteroid the size of the Eiffel Tower is approaching our planet. The asteroid is named 4,660 Nereus and has been flagged ‘Potentially Hazardous’ by NASA. Nereus is 330 meters long and will break into Earth’s orbit on Saturday, December 11. The colossal asteroid is traveling at 23,700 km/h towards our planet.

On December 11, the asteroid will make its closest approach to Earth. It will come within 3.86 million km, about ten times the distance between Earth and the Moon. Although it sounds like an enormous gap on cosmic scales, it is actually a stone’s throw away.

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Dec 8, 2021

Robots Evolve Bodies and Brains Like Animals in MIT’s New AI Training Simulator

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI

To set some benchmarks for their simulator, the researchers tried out three different design algorithms working in conjunction with a deep reinforcement learning algorithm that learned to control the robots through many rounds of trial and error.

The co-designed bots performed well on the simpler tasks, like walking or carrying things, but struggled with tougher challenges, like catching and lifting, suggesting there’s plenty of scope for advances in co-design algorithms. Nonetheless, the AI-designed bots outperformed ones design by humans on almost every task.

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Dec 8, 2021

Scientists Say They Caught China Successfully Changing the Weather

Posted by in category: geoengineering

China has succeeded in literally changing the weather, a new study claims.

As the South China Morning Post reports, researchers say that during the Chinese Communist Party’s centennial celebration over the summer, weather authorities successfully modified the weather above Beijing to clear the sky and reduce pollution for the tens of thousands gathered for a commemorative ceremony in Tiananmen Square.

They did so using cloud seeding technology, a long-studied but controversial process that involves shooting silver iodide particles into the clouds, with the idea of attracting water droplets to modify the weather.