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May 8, 2019

Amsterdam Announces Plan to Ban All Polluting Cars by 2030

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

On Thursday, the city of Amsterdam announced its plan to replace all gasoline and diesel-powered cars and motorcycles with electric vehicles by 2030. The plan is an attempt to address unhealthy and alarming rates of air pollution in the city due to high traffic.

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May 8, 2019

Research boosts the yield of insulin-producing cells for diabetes therapy

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

A team of researchers led by Harvard University scientists has improved the laboratory process of converting stem cells into insulin-producing beta cells, using biological and physical separation methods to enrich the proportion of beta cells in a sample. Their findings, published in the journal Nature, may be used to improve beta cell transplants for patients with type 1 diabetes.

In 2014, Douglas Melton’s lab showed for the first time that stem cells could be converted to functional beta cells, taking a step toward giving patients their own source of insulin. In that initial process, beta cells made up 30 percent of the final cell mixture.

“To improve from 30 percent, we needed to really understand the other 70 percent of the resulting cells,” said Adrian Veres, a in the Melton lab and lead author of the current study. “Until recently, we couldn’t take a sample of our cells and ask what cell types were in there. Now, with the revolution in single-cell sequencing, we can go from nothing to the full list.”

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May 8, 2019

To Save a Girl’s Life, Researchers Injected Her With Genetically Engineered Viruses

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, genetics

So-called phage therapy isn’t yet mainstream, but in some cases it might be the only option for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.

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May 8, 2019

Genetic therapy heals damage caused by heart attack

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, health

Researchers from King’s College London have found that therapy that can induce heart cells to regenerate after a heart attack.

Myocardial infarction, more commonly known as a heart attack, caused by the sudden blocking of one of the cardiac coronary arteries, is the main cause of , a condition that now affects over 23 million population in the world, according to the World Health Organisation.

At present, when a patient survives a , they are left with permanent structural damage to their heart through the formation of a scar, which can lead to heart failure in the future. In contrast to fish and salamander, which can regenerate the heart throughout life.

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May 8, 2019

A multi-scale body-part mask guided attention network for person re-identification

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, security

Person re-identification entails the automated identification of the same person in multiple images from different cameras and with different backgrounds, angles or positions. Despite recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), person re-identification remains a highly challenging task, particularly due to the many variations in a person’s pose, as well as other differences associated with lighting, occlusion, misalignment and background clutter.

Researchers at the Suning R&D Center in the U.S. have recently developed a new technique for person re-identification based on a multi-scale body-part mask guided attention network (MMGA). Their paper, pre-published on arXiv, will be presented during the 2019 CVPR Workshop spotlight presentation in June.

“Person re-identification is becoming a more and more important task due to its wide range of potential applications, such as , and image retrieval,” Honglong Cai, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “However, it remains a challenging task, due to occlusion, misalignment, variation of poses and background clutter. In our recent study, our team tried to develop a method to overcome these challenges.”

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May 8, 2019

China Stole NSA Cyberweapons and Used Them Against US Allies

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, privacy

An NSA attack on China has blown up in America’s face.

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May 8, 2019

Wasps are smarter than we thought, new study shows

Posted by in category: futurism

Summer is approaching in the northern hemisphere, heralding the return of that great scourge of al fresco diners everywhere: the wasp.

Now, a new study out of the University of Michigan reveals that the striped critters aren’t just pesky — they’re smart.

The research found that wasps can use a form of logical reasoning to infer unknown relationships from known relationships, according to a press release.

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May 8, 2019

Wireless movement-tracking system could collect health and behavioral data

Posted by in categories: health, information science

We live in a world of wireless signals flowing around us and bouncing off our bodies. MIT researchers are now leveraging those signal reflections to provide scientists and caregivers with valuable insights into people’s behavior and health.

The system, called Marko, transmits a low-power radio-frequency (RF) signal into an environment. The signal will return to the system with certain changes if it has bounced off a moving human. Novel algorithms then analyze those changed reflections and associate them with specific individuals.

The system then traces each individual’s movement around a digital floor plan. Matching these movement patterns with other data can provide insights about how people interact with each other and the environment.

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May 8, 2019

Broccoli sprout compound may restore brain chemistry imbalance linked to schizophrenia

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, neuroscience

In a series of recently published studies using animals and people, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they have further characterized a set of chemical imbalances in the brains of people with schizophrenia related to the chemical glutamate. And they figured out how to tweak the level using a compound derived from broccoli sprouts.

They say the results advance the hope that supplementing with broccoli sprout extract, which contains high levels of the chemical sulforaphane, may someday provide a way to lower the doses of traditional antipsychotic medicines needed to manage symptoms, thus reducing unwanted side effects of the medicines.

“It’s possible that future studies could show sulforaphane to be a safe supplement to give people at risk of developing schizophrenia as a way to prevent, delay or blunt the onset of symptoms,” adds Akira Sawa, M.D., Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Johns Hopkins Schizophrenia Center.

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May 8, 2019

There’s a Global Crackdown on the Dark Web Happening Right Now

Posted by in category: futurism

The FBI has seized a dark web site just days after Europol police took down another.

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