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Apple, VW sign driverless car deal for Apple campus shuttles, NY Times sources say

How gut microbes are joining the fight against cancer

Cancer has been a late bloomer in the microbiome revolution that has surged through biomedicine. Over the past few decades, scientists have linked the gut’s composition of microbes to dozens of seemingly unrelated conditions — from depression to obesity. Cancer has some provocative connections as well: inflammation is a contributing factor to some tumours and a few types of cancer have infectious origins.

Why China’s Payment Apps Give U.S. Bankers Nightmares

Wandering the streets of Shanghai to admire the architecture, the head of one of the largest U.S. consumer banks recently found himself surrounded by a gaggle of teenagers. Entranced by their phones, they hardly made way for the banker. The teens were messaging, shopping and sending money back and forth, all without cash.

US Employee in China Suffers Brain Injury in Case Recalling Cuba

Showdown: MySQL 8 vs. PostgreSQL 10

Now that MySQL 8 and PostgreSQL 10 are out, it’s a good time to revisit how the two major open source relational databases compete against each other. Before these versions, the general perception has been that while Postgres is superior in feature sets and its pedigree, MySQL is more battle tested at scale with massive concurrent reads/writes. But with the latest releases, the gap between the two has gotten significantly narrowed.

Ancient Rome’s Collapse Is Written into Arctic Ice

On March 15, some time ago, several dozen famous politicians—sturdy men, duly elected senators who claimed to love their republic—attacked their chief executive while he walked into the Senate. They stabbed Gaius Julius Caesar 23 times, as he fell to the floor, defenseless, and bled to death, setting off a chain of wars that formally ended the Roman Republic and initiated the Roman Empire. Some 2,062 years have passed since that day, but we haven’t stopped arguing about it.

A new experiment hints at surprising hidden mechanics of quantum superpositions

Scanner: Processing Terabytes of Video on Hundreds of Machines

There are now many state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms which are a git clone away. We found that existing systems for distributed data analysis were not well suited to dealing with the computational challenges of applying computer vision algorithms to terabyte or petabyte sized video collections, so we designed and built a system called Scanner to make efficient video analysis easier.

Leading UK scientist reveals likely cause of childhood leukaemia

Professor Mel Greaves from The Institute of Cancer Research, London, assessed the most comprehensive body of evidence ever collected on acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) – the most common type of childhood cancer. His research concludes that the disease is caused through a two-step process of genetic mutation and exposure to infection that means it may be preventable with treatments to stimulate or ‘prime’ the immune system in infancy. The first step involves a genetic mutation that occurs before birth in the foetus and predisposes children to leukaemia – but only 1 per cent of children born with this genetic change go on to develop the disease.