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The University of Southern California (USC) has a new plan to make college tuition-free.

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For three years, anthropologist Alan Rogers has attempted to solve an evolutionary puzzle. His research untangles millions of years of human evolution by analyzing DNA strands from ancient human species known as hominins. Like many evolutionary geneticists, Rogers compares hominin genomes looking for genetic patterns such as mutations and shared genes. He develops statistical methods that infer the history of ancient human populations.

In 2017, Rogers led a study which found that two lineages of ancient humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, separated much earlier than previously thought and proposed a bottleneck population size. It caused some controversy—anthropologists Mafessoni and Prüfer argued that their method for analyzing the DNA produced different results. Rogers agreed, but realized that neither method explained the genetic data very well.

“Both of our methods under discussion were missing something, but what?” asked Rogers, professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.

Sobyanin said last month that the city had begun using facial recognition as part of its city security surveillance programme.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he had not seen details of the actions being taken in Moscow but that measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus should not be discriminatory.

The clamp down on quarantine rules comes after a woman in St. Petersburg staged an elaborate escape from a hospital where she said she was being kept against her will.

Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles is using biometric facial recognition technology from Alcatraz AI to replace or augment badges for physical security and access control, the company has revealed to Biometric Update.

The Alcatraz AI 3D Rock Facial Authentication Platform was integrated with MLKCH’s access control system to strengthen identity verification procedures for its 70 security department employees. The hospital, which employs more than 2,000 people, considered biometric card reader options, and selected Alcatraz Rock to secure access to its security center.

“The security department was a natural place to start with coverage from the Alcatraz Rock and facial recognition access control,” says MLKCH Director of Support Services Mark Reed in a case study by Alcatraz 3D. “Our security department obviously has a huge role in maintaining a safe and secure hospital environment for patients, staff, and guests and therefore houses important employees and information. Controlling access to this security area is key and we wanted to ensure that only those individuals that are supposed to be coming and going are the ones that are actually coming and going. What better way is there to verify identity than with facial recognition?”

This is a guest post by Mohammed Murad, vice president, global sales and business development, Iris ID.

The world is in the grip of a coronavirus epidemic the impact of which extends well beyond people’s health, including more than 1,300 reported deaths. The fear of this recently identified disease has closed businesses and grounded thousands of flights. The impacts have led to estimates of reduced economic growth in many countries.

While the virus that was first discovered in a Chinese province has killed far fewer people than influenza this year, the fatality rate has people worried. Influenza reportedly kills between 10 to 20 people per 100,000 infections each year. The death rate from the coronavirus tops 2,300 deaths per 100,000 cases. Those latter statistics change virtually daily as more cases of the virus are reported.

A small amount of electricity delivered at a specific frequency to a particular point in the brain will snap a monkey out of even deep anesthesia, pointing to a circuit of brain activity key to consciousness and suggesting potential treatments for debilitating brain disorders.

Macaques put under with general anesthetic drugs commonly administered to human surgical patients, propofol and isoflurane, could be revived and alert within two or three seconds of applying low current, according to a study published today in the journal Neuron by a team led by University of Wisconsin–Madison brain researchers.

“For as long as you’re stimulating their brain, their behavior — full eye opening, reaching for objects in their vicinity, vital sign changes, bodily movements and facial movements — and their brain activity is that of a waking state,” says Yuri Saalmann, UW–Madison psychology and neuroscience professor. “Then, within a few seconds of switching off the stimulation, their eyes closed again. The animal is right back into an unconscious state.”

The De Grey searching for researchers with work involving longevity… r.p.berry & AEWR.

Thank you for your interest in submitting a proposal for grant funding to SENS Research Foundation (SRF). Primarily, we fund projects by identifying research priorities through our Chief Science Officer’s (CSO) team and then either approaching parties with relevant expertise directly, or if appropriate generating requests for proposals (RFPs).

We do, however, also accept letters of intent for new grant proposals from interested parties for projects that fall specifically within our research mission. All such letters should clearly delineate the specific SENS target to which the proposal relates, and how the proposal would further progress toward developing therapies that remove, repair, replace, or render harmless that target.

All research projects are selected and periodically reviewed by our Research Development Committee (RDC), and its decisions are ratified by our Board of Directors. The RDC convenes twice yearly, at the end of the first and third calendar quarters.

Christian Schafmeister, Ph.D., Professor at Temple University in Philadelphia says: “We are developing “therapeutic catalysts” — small, robust, non-immunogentic catalysts that will permeate the tight spaces within tissues and fix things. Our specific targets include reversing the unwanted cross-links that develop in the extracellular matrix with aging.”

Enzymes, while possessing exquisite substrate-specificity, are limited by their molecular size in their ability to gain access to their substrate when it is embedded within dense material. We have always known that this may be a problem for our approach to restoring the elasticity of aged tissues. Christian’s fascinating work offers the potential to solve this issue with molecules that have the same catalytic function as enzymes but are much smaller and can therefore reach these embedded substrates.

Popular Science discusses the Harold space warping project at NASA and Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster

Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster

White shows me into the facility and ushers me past its central feature, something he calls a quantum vacuum plasma thruster (QVPT). The device looks like a large red velvet doughnut with wires tightly wound around a core, and it’s one of two initiatives Eagleworks is pursuing, along with warp drive. It’s also secret. When I ask about it, White tells me he can’t disclose anything other than that the technology is further along than warp drive … Yet when I ask how it would create the negative energy necessary to warp space-time he becomes evasive.