The international team behind the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project is gearing up for a huge announcement next week — and according to ScienceAlert’s analysis, it’s likely to be the first-ever photo of a black hole’s event horizon.
If that prediction is correct, the April 10 event will be a monumental moment for science — providing a glimpse of one of the most epic objects in the known universe.
Posted in futurism
Children born through IVF have a greater risk of developing childhood cancer, the largest study of its kind has found.
Researchers in the US found that the risk of childhood cancer increases from 1.9 cases in 10,000 youngsters to 2.5 in those born through fertility treatment, an increase of around 31 per cent.
Although the study is only observational, previous research has suggested that drugs used to stimulate the ovaries to produce eggs during fertility treatment, or the nutritious chemical soup in which embryos are grown may cause disease.
Posted in biotech/medical, business, computing, education
Outcome-based education. This is about a man who is involved in a system designed to train and assess the skills of computer programmers, but I wonder if the ideas could be applied to other types of learning.
For that matter, it strikes me that merit badges in the Boy Scouts may work along similar lines.
Nathan chose all-in, investing his entire life savings in a single stock-market exchange, and made enough money to keep the business alive. The past several years have been full of similar tests of commitment but Nathan and his business partner have weathered them all, building a groundbreaking company called Qualified.
Qualified has developed a new format for training and assessing coding skills, one that achieves greater effectiveness through an immersive, real-world experience. This allows companies to identify the best potential employees and educators to improve student evaluation.
“In the workforce, this assessment approach ensures that performance gets rewarded instead of pedigree. In education, this new format enables interactive, self-directed learning, while also allowing educational institutions to be responsive to rapid changes in relevant skills.”
A personal report from the recent Undoing Aging conference in Berlin by Nicola Bagalà. The event saw many of the leading figures in aging research and rejuvenation biotechnology attend a packed conference which celebrates its second successful year.
Last Wednesday, I landed in Berlin, Germany at around 12:30. About an hour later, I was briefly in Cafè Alex, right next to the tapering TV Tower, where I met some of my colleagues from LEAF—some of whom I had never seen in person before—as well as other volunteers and members of HEALES, our friend organization. We were all there to attend the Undoing Aging 2019 conference, which would take place over the course of the next three days, bringing together experts and researchers from all over the world to discuss the latest advances, network, and share views on the biology of aging.
Thanks to video calls, meeting people face-to-face whom you’d only known through the Internet isn’t all that strange, but meeting people whom you had only read about or seen on YouTube still feels a little unreal, especially if these people are celebrities in their own field. Shortly after leaving Cafè Alex, we headed to our hotel to check in; Steve Hill and his wife Fatima—whose help over the course of my stay has been invaluable—were talking to the receptionist while Elena Milova and I were waiting right behind them. Elena and I were chatting about various things when a man who looked somewhat familiar walked through the doors; I wasn’t sure he was whom I thought he was, and as I glanced to Elena to ask for confirmation, I understood that he was indeed stem cell pioneer and AgeX CEO Mike West, who has been in the gerontology scene for quite a while now.
