News

Prefrontal cortex as a meta-reinforcement learning system

Recently, AI systems have mastered a range of video-games such as Atari classics Breakout and Pong. But as impressive as this performance is, AI still relies on the equivalent of thousands of hours of gameplay to reach and surpass the performance of human video game players. In contrast, we can usually grasp the basics of a video game we have never played before in a matter of minutes.

Think organic food is better for you, animals, and the planet? Think again

How long can a neutron survive outside an atom?

Neutrons are probably best known for being a chargeless component of the nucleus of all atoms other than hydrogen. In that context, they can be extremely stable—you probably noted the fact that your body wasn’t decaying around you. But pull neutrons out of that context, and they become very unhappy.

The spectacular power of Big Lens

If you have been wearing glasses for years, like me, it can be surprising to discover that you perceive the world thanks to a few giant companies that you have never heard of. Worrying about the fraying edge of motorway lights at night, or words that slide on the page, and occasionally spending a fortune at the opticians is, for many of us, enough to think about. And spectacles are unusual things.

The Microbiome is the Fundamental Future of Personalized Medicine

If anything makes us human it’s our minds, thoughts and emotions. And yet a controversial new concept is emerging that claims gut bacteria are an invisible hand altering our brains. Science is piecing together how the trillions of microbes that live on and in all of us—our microbiome—affect our physical health.

Using CRISPR to edit coral

The work was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Phillip Cleves, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and coral enthusiast, is first author on the study. Cleves and his collaborators were able to use CRISPR to successfully introduce mutations to three genes (red fluorescent protein, green fluorescent protein and fibroblast growth factor 1a, a gene that is thought to help regulate new coral colonization) in a specific type of coral, Acropora millepora, definitively showing for the first time that the gene-editing technology could be successful in coral species.

Transfer Learning

Transfer Learning is the reuse of a pre-trained model on a new problem. It is currently very popular in the field of Deep Learning because it enables you to train Deep Neural Networks with comparatively little data. This is very useful since most real-world problems typically do not have millions of labeled data points to train such complex models.

A videogame that powers quantum entanglement experiments

The random number generator Abellan wanted to use? Randos online. His group would design a game that used the 1 and 0 keys on a phone or computer keyboard as controller buttons.

An Introduction to Hashing in the Era of Machine Learning

What’s New in Deep Learning Research: Inside Google’s Semantic Experiences