News

What makes a tree a tree?

Despite numerous studies and 30-plus genomes under their belts, scientists are still struggling to nail down the defining traits of these tall, long-lived, woody plants.

Lessons Learned Reproducing a Deep Reinforcement Learning Paper

There are a lot of neat things going on in deep reinforcement learning. One of the coolest things from last year was OpenAI and DeepMind’s work on training an agent using feedback from a human rather than a classical reward signal. There’s a great blog post about it at Learning from Human Preferences, and the original paper is at Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences.

Spyce Kitchen, a robotic chef built by four recent M.I.T. grads

Leap Motion designed a $100 augmented reality headset with hand tracking

Alzheimer’s gene neutralised in human brain cells for the first time

Bathroom hand-dryers suck in poo-particles and aerosolize them all over you and everything else

Can a Wandering Mind Make You Neurotic?

On the positive side, mind-wandering promotes planning for the future, allowing my daughter to lay the groundwork for financial security and a career with a long endgame. And it may be an essential ingredient in creativity. Several studies have shown that creativity blossoms under the same conditions that encourage mind-wandering—for example, an incubation period in which the mind is only lightly focused on an easy task is especially conducive to flashes of insight and imaginative solutions to problems.

CRISPR’d Food, Coming Soon To A Supermarket Near You

For years now, the US Department of Agriculture has been flirting with the latest and greatest DNA manipulation technologies. Since 2016, it has given free passes to at least a dozen gene-edited crops, ruling that they fall outside its regulatory purview. But on Wednesday, March 28, the agency made its relationship status official; effective immediately, certain gene-edited plants can be designed, cultivated, and sold free from regulation.

The disinformation campaign–and massive radiation increase–behind the 5G rollout

The Internet of Things will require augmenting today’s 4G technology with 5G, thus “massively increasing” the general population’s exposure to radiation, according to a petition signed by 236 scientists worldwide who have published more than 2,000 peer-reviewed studies and represent “a significant portion of the credentialed scientists in the radiation research field,” according to Joel Moskowitz, the director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped circulate the petition. Nevertheless, like cell phones, 5G technology is on the verge of being introduced without pre-market safety testing.

China’s Social Credit: Rewards and Punishments

Like private credit scores, a person’s social score can move up and down depending on their behaviour. The exact methodology is a secret — but examples infractions include bad driving, smoking in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games and posting fake news online.