31 Jul

Posted at 14:57h in Scoop.it

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, has discovered three new worlds that are among the smallest, nearest exoplanets known to date. The planets orbit a star just 73 light years away and include a small, rocky super-Earth and two sub-Neptunes — planets about half the size of our own icy giant.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.sciencedaily.com

21 Jul

Posted at 18:20h in Scoop.it

Researchers from China’s Peking University have developed a new gene-editing technology —  and they think it shows promise as a CRISPR alternative for fighting human diseases.

 

According to a paper published on Monday in the journal Nature Biotechnology, this new technology, LEAPER, which stands for “leveraging endogenous ADAR for programmable editing of RNA,” works similarly to CRISPR-Cas13, targeting RNA molecules as opposed to DNA like the well-known CRISPR-Cas9.

 

But while CRISPR-Cas13 relies on both a guide RNA and the Cas13 enzyme to make its edits to RNA, the LEAPER system needs just one component known as an arRNA. This makes the system “more easily deliverable and less likely to result in unwanted cellular immune responses,” the researchers told China-based media outlet Caixin.

 

As for the potential uses of their CRISPR alternative, Peking researcher Zhou Zhuo told Caixin that “there are clear prospects for using this technology in disease treatment.” In fact, in tests of cells taken from people with the debilitating genetic disorder Hurler syndrome, LEAPER was able to correct “sufficient amounts” of the cells’ mutated RNA, University of Queensland geneticist Ernst Wolvetang, who wasn’t involved in the research, told Caixin.

 

However, the research is still in the early stages and is only now moving into tests on animals — meaning we won’t know for some time if LEAPER will dethrone CRISPR as the preeminent gene-editing technology.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: futurism.com

21 Jul

Posted at 18:17h in Scoop.it

Beneath the spread of all “fake news,” misinformation, disinformation, digital falsehoods and foreign influence lies society’s failure to teach its citizenry information literacy: how to think critically about the deluge of information that confronts them in our modern digital age. Instead, society has prioritized speed over accuracy, sharing over reading, commenting over understanding. Children are taught to regurgitate what others tell them and to rely on digital assistants to curate the world rather than learn to navigate the informational landscape on their own. Schools no longer teach source triangulation, conflict arbitration, separating fact from opinion, citation chaining, conducting research or even the basic concept of verification and validation. In short, we’ve stopped teaching society how to think about information, leaving our citizenry adrift in the digital wilderness increasingly saturated with falsehoods without so much as a compass or map to help them find their way to safety. The solution is to teach the world’s citizenry the basics of information literacy.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.forbes.com

21 Jul

Posted at 18:16h in Scoop.it

The principle behind the GAN was first proposed in 2014, and at its most basic level, it describes a system that pits two AI systems (neural networks) against each other to improve the quality of their results.

 

To understand how they work, imagine a blind forger trying to create copies of paintings by great masters. To start with, he has no idea what a painting should look like – but he happens to have a friend who has a photographic memory of every masterpiece that’s ever been painted.

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: bernardmarr.com

16 Jul

Posted at 19:23h in Scoop.it

The moon’s light influences lion prey behavior, dung beetle navigation, fish growth, mass migrations and birdsong.

 

Crowds of people gather to watch an evening spectacle on beaches in Southern California: Twice a month, typically from March through August, the sand becomes carpeted with hundreds or thousands of California grunion. Writhing, flopping, silvery sardine look-alikes lunge as far onto shore as possible. As the female fish dig their tails into the sand and release eggs, males wrap around females and release sperm to fertilize those eggs. About 10 days later, the eggs hatch and the little grunion get washed out to sea.

 

This mating ritual is set to the tides, with hatching timed to the arrival of the peak high tide every two weeks. But the ultimate force choreographing this dance is the moon.

 

Many people know that the moon’s gravitational tug on the Earth drives the tides, and with them, the life cycles of coastal creatures. Yet the moon also influences life with its light.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.sciencenews.org