An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Scientists have grown an entity that closely resembles an early human embryo, without using sperm, eggs or a womb. The Weizmann Institute team say their "embryo model", made using stem cells, looks like a textbook example of a real 14-day-old embryo. It even released hormones that turned a pregnancy test positive in the lab. The ambition for embryo models is to provide an ethical way of understanding the earliest moments of our lives. This research, published in the journal Nature, is described by the Israeli team as the first "complete" embryo model for mimicking all the key structures that emerge in the early embryo.

Instead of a sperm and egg, the starting material was naive stem cells which were reprogrammed to gain the potential to become any type of tissue in the body. Chemicals were then used to coax these stem cells into becoming four types of cell found in the earliest stages of the human embryo: epiblast cells, which become the embryo proper (or foetus); trophoblast cells, which become the placenta; hypoblast cells, which become the supportive yolk sac; and extraembryonic mesoderm cells. A total of 120 of these cells were mixed in a precise ratio -- and then, the scientists step back and watch.

About 1% of the mixture began the journey of spontaneously assembling themselves into a structure that resembles, but is not identical to, a human embryo. The embryo models were allowed to grow and develop until they were comparable to an embryo 14 days after fertilization. In many countries, this is the legal cut-off for normal embryo research. The hope is embryo models can help scientists explain how different types of cell emerge, witness the earliest steps in building the body's organs or understand inherited or genetic diseases. Already, this study shows other parts of the embryo will not form unless the early placenta cells can surround it. There is even talk of improving in vitro fertilization (IVF) success rates by helping to understand why some embryos fail or using the models to test whether medicines are safe during pregnancy.

Telecom operators in India, the second largest wireless market, would like internet companies to compensate for using their networks, a recommendation they've made to the local regulatory body, echoing a viewpoint that is gaining some momentum in other parts of the world but also stoking fears about violation of net neutrality. From a report: Jio, India's largest telecom operator with more than 450 million subscribers, recommended to the local regulator that internet companies should be made to "contribute" towards telecom network costs based on the traffic they consume, their turnover and number of users.

"We suggest that TRAI [India's telecom regulator] should recommend for OTT providers contributing in the network development and building a backbone for the country. In this effort, the Other OTT service providers should also be required to pay their fair share," said the unit of Reliance, which is run by Asia's richest man Mukesh Ambani. Reliance, which carries 55% share of India's total data traffic, contends that requiring internet companies to compensate for network usage will ensure a level playing field. Jio said there is a "near consensus" among telecom operators across the globe on this subject.

Kitty Oppenheimer: Can you explain quantum mechanics to me?

J. Robert Oppenheimer: Well, this glass, this drink, this counter top, uhh.. our bodies, all of it. It's mostly empty space. Groupings of tiny energy waves bound together.

Kitty Oppenheimer: By what?

J. Robert Oppenheimer: Forces of attraction strong enough to convince us [that] matter is solid, to stop my body passing through yours.

— IMDB quote from Oppenheimer


Flash forward to 2023, where Mario Barbatti is a theoretical chemist and physicist researching light and molecule interactions. He's also a professor of chemistry at Aix Marseille University in France. Writing this week for Aeon, Barbatti argues that "there are no empty spaces within the atom.

"The empty atom picture is likely the most repeated mistake in popular science." It is unclear who created this myth, but it is sure that Carl Sagan, in his classic TV series Cosmos (1980), was crucial in popularising it. After wondering how small the nuclei are compared with the atom, Sagan concluded that "[M]ost of the mass of an atom is in its nucleus; the electrons are by comparison just clouds of moving fluff. Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing." I still remember how deeply these words spoke to me when I heard them as a kid in the early 1980s. Today, as a professional theoretical chemist, I know that Sagan's statements failed to recognise some fundamental features of atoms and molecules...

Misconceptions feeding the idea of the empty atom can be dismantled by carefully interpreting quantum theory, which describes the physics of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. According to quantum theory, the building blocks of matter — like electrons, nuclei and the molecules they form — can be portrayed either as waves or particles. Leave them to evolve by themselves without human interference, and they act like delocalised waves in the shape of continuous clouds. On the other hand, when we attempt to observe these systems, they appear to be localised particles, something like bullets in the classical realm. But accepting the quantum predictions that nuclei and electrons fill space as continuous clouds has a daring conceptual price: it implies that these particles do not vibrate, spin or orbit. They inhabit a motionless microcosmos where time only occasionally plays a role...

A molecule is a static object without any internal motion. The quantum clouds of all nuclei and electrons remain absolutely still for a molecule with a well-defined energy. Time is irrelevant... Time, however, comes into play when a molecule collides with another one, triggering a chemical reaction. Then, a storm strikes. The quantum steadiness bursts when the sections of the electronic cloud pour from one molecule upon another. The clouds mix, reshape, merge, and split. The nuclear clouds rearrange to accommodate themselves within the new electronic configuration, sometimes even migrating between molecules. For a fraction of a picosecond (10-12 seconds or a billionth of a millisecond), the tempest rages and reshapes the molecular landscape until stillness is restored in the newly formed compounds.

A bomb threat against Caesars Forum, the main venue for this week's DEF CON hacking convention, led to the halls being cleared on Saturday evening and the building searched by fire crews and police officers. The Register reports: The timing was very bad, coming in the evening of the main party night for the event. The conference Goons, the red-shirted volunteers who serve as guides and organizers, were praised by attendees for managing the evacuation with aplomb, but when it became clear that the search for the suspect device was going to be hard to find, the DEC CON team cancelled the evening's festivities at Caesars, to the disappointment of thousands.

"Last night we were asked to evacuate the building due to a report of a suspicious package. Local police and fire departments conducted a thorough investigation and ultimately determined that the package was safe," the organizers said. "They also conducted additional sweeps of the building as a precaution before allowing our team to return and prepare for today's con. We are working quickly to keep the original schedule on track, but please check here for additional updates before arriving at DEF CON." The event kicked off on August 10 and wrapped up by August 13.

Presumably the hoax caller thought of themselves as a merry prankster, rather than the selfish idiot who ruined everyone's night - particularly the timing for those in the Track Four hall who were enjoying 2001: A Space Odyssey and who were forced to miss the crucial last 10 minutes of the movie. While tricks and pranks are something of a tradition, they only get respect if they are clever and intricate, not some fool showing they could use a telephone. It's not like security at the show wasn't heavy enough. The event was patrolled regularly by security guards in body armor with handguns, tasers, the occasional police dog, and a host of other equipment that was a bit of an overkill for a bunch of peaceable hackers. Dubbed by some as "Gravy SEALs," by the end of the show they were visibly warming up, and this hack saw several of them accepting stickers from attendees.

Financial institutions often did not understand the models they were using to predict the economic cost of climate change and were underestimating the risks of temperature rises, research led by a professional body of actuaries shows. From a report: Many of the results emerging from the models were "implausible," with a serious "disconnect" between climate scientists, economists, the people building the models and the financial institutions using them, a report by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter finds. Companies are increasingly required to report on the climate-related risks they face, using mathematical models to estimate how resilient their assets and businesses might be at different levels of warming.

The International Sustainability Standards Board last week launched long-awaited guidance for companies to inform investors about sustainability-related risks, including the climate scenarios chosen in their calculations. Countries including the UK and Japan have said they plan to integrate these standards into their reporting rules. Companies will also have to report the full scope of their emissions, including those from their supply chains, from the second year they begin to report under the guidelines due to come into effect in 2024. That was a particular "challenge," since companies would need to collect the data from all their suppliers, said George Richards, head of ESG reporting and assurance at KPMG. [...] Some models were likely to have "limited use as they do not adequately communicate the level of risk we are likely to face if we fail to decarbonise quickly enough," the paper released on Tuesday said.

Body-based measurements may have persisted because they are convenient and offer ergonomic advantages over standardized units. From a report: Although standardized units are often upheld as superior to informal corporeal measures, people in many societies have continued to use their bodies this way well after standardization has taken root, notes Roope Kaaronen, a cognitive scientist who studies cultural evolution at the University of Helsinki. To explore how widespread such practices have been in human history, Kaaronen and colleagues pored over ethnographic data from 186 past and present cultures across the world, looking for descriptions of body-based units of measurement in a database called the Human Relations Area Files. This database is the product of an international nonprofit organization that has been collecting and administering ethnographies and anthropological literature since the 1950s.

The team found these systems used in every culture they looked at, particularly in the construction of clothes and technologies. For example, in the early 1900s, the Karelian people, a group indigenous to Northern Europe, traditionally designed skis to be a fathom plus six hand spans long. In the late 1800s the Yup'ik people from the Alaskan coast recorded building kayaks that were 2.5 fathoms long plus a cockpit, which was the length of an arm with a closed fist. Next, the team looked at a subsample of 99 cultures that, according to a widely used benchmark in anthropology, developed relatively independently of one another. Fathoms, hand spans, and cubits were the most common body-based measurements, each popping up in about 40% of these cultures. Different societies likely developed and incorporated such units because they were especially convenient for tackling important everyday tasks, the authors argue, such as measuring clothes, designing tools and weapons, and building boats and structures.

In India, children under 16 returning to school this month at the start of the school year will no longer be taught about evolution, the periodic table of elements, or sources of energy. Nature: The news that evolution would be cut from the curriculum for students aged 15-16 was widely reported last month, when thousands of people signed a petition in protest. But official guidance has revealed that a chapter on the periodic table will be cut, too, along with other foundational topics such as sources of energy and environmental sustainability.

Younger learners will no longer be taught certain pollution- and climate-related topics, and there are cuts to biology, chemistry, geography, mathematics and physics subjects for older school students. Overall, the changes affect some 134 million 11-18-year-olds in India's schools. The extent of what has changed became clearer last month when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) -- the public body that develops the Indian school curriculum and textbooks -- released textbooks for the new academic year that started in May.

Researchers, including those who study science education, are shocked. "Anybody who's trying to teach biology without dealing with evolution is not teaching biology as we currently understand it," says Jonathan Osborne, a science-education researcher at Stanford University in California. "It's that fundamental to biology." The periodic table explains how life's building blocks combine to generate substances with vastly different properties, he adds, and "is one of the great intellectual achievements of chemists."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A research team has turned the bodies of dead mice into vivid 3D maps of anatomy, with tissues, nerves, and vessels highlighted in color. The technique, which renders the corpses transparent and then exposes them to fluorescent antibodies that label distinct cell types, could help everything from drug development to understanding the spread of cancer, its creators and other scientists say. The developers, at the Helmholtz Munich research institute, call their technique wildDISCO -- wild because it can work on any "wild type," or normal, mice, and DISCO for 3D imaging of solvent-cleared organs. Building on their previous success at making mouse bodies transparent, the new technique removes cholesterol from the bodies so that a vast array of existing antibodies can penetrate deep into the animals.

"wildDISCO is a game changer -- it allows us to see the hidden highways and byways in the body," says Muzlifah Haniffa, a dermatologist and immunologist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Newcastle University's Biosciences Institute who was not involved in the research. The method should let scientists map a mouse at the cellular level and explore previously hidden links between tissues, like neural connections between organs, says neuroscientist Ali Erturk, director of Helmholtz Munich, who led the work, posted recently as a preprint. His group in Germany has already posted eye-catching videos of "flying" through the 3D anatomy of a mouse with different tissues labeled.

Last week there was some good news for startups working on commercial nuclear fusion in the U.S. And it came from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC), the top governing body for America's nuclear power plants nuclear materials, reports CNBC: The top regulatory agency for nuclear materials safety in the U.S. voted unanimously to regulate the burgeoning fusion industry differently than the nuclear fission industry, and fusion startups are celebrating that as a major win. As a result, some provisions specific to fission reactors, like requiring funding to cover claims from nuclear meltdowns, won't apply to fusion plants. (Fusion reactors cannot melt down....)

Other differences include looser requirements around foreign ownership of nuclear fusion plants, and the dispensing of mandatory hearings at the federal level during the licensing process, said Andrew Holland, CEO of the industry group, the Fusion Industry Association... The approach to regulating fusion is akin to the regulatory regime that is currently used to regulate particle accelerators, which are machines that are capable of making elementary nuclear particles, like electrons or protons, move really fast, the Fusion Industry Association says...

Technically speaking, fusion will be regulated under Part 30 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Jeff Merrifield, a former NRC commissioner, told CNBC. The regulatory structure for nuclear fission is under Part 50 of that code. "The regulatory structure needed to regulate particle accelerators under Part 30, is far simpler, less costly and more efficient than the more complicated rules imposed on fission reactors under Part 50," Merrifield told CNBC. "By making this decision to use the Part 30, the commission recognized the decreased risk of fusion technologies when compared with traditional nuclear reactors and has imposed a framework that more appropriately aligns the risks and the regulations," he said.
"Private fusion companies have raised about $5 billion to commercialize and scale fusion technology," the article points out, "and so the decision from the NRC on how the industry would be regulated is a big deal for companies building in the space." And they shared three reactions from the commercial fusion industry:

• The CEO of the industry group, the Fusion Industry Association told CNBC the decision was "extremely important."

• The scientific director for fusion startup Focused Energy told CNBC the decision "removes a major area of uncertainty for the industry."

• The general counsel for nuclear fusion startup Helion told CNBC. "It is now incumbent on us to demonstrate our safety case as we bring fusion to the grid, and we look forward to working with the public and regulatory community closely on our first deployments."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Writing a report on the state of AI must feel a lot like building on shifting sands: by the time you hit publish, the whole industry has changed under your feet. But there are still important trends and takeaways in Stanford's 386-page bid to summarize this complex and fast-moving domain. The AI Index, from the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, worked with experts from academia and private industry to collect information and predictions on the matter. As a yearly effort (and by the size of it, you can bet they're already hard at work laying out the next one), this may not be the freshest take on AI, but these periodic broad surveys are important to keep one's finger on the pulse of industry.

This year's report includes "new analysis on foundation models, including their geopolitics and training costs, the environmental impact of AI systems, K-12 AI education, and public opinion trends in AI," plus a look at policy in a hundred new countries. But the report goes into detail on many topics and sub-topics, and is quite readable and non-technical. Only the dedicated will read all 300-odd pages of analysis, but really, just about any motivated body could.

For the highest-level takeaways, let us just bullet them here:

- AI development has flipped over the last decade from academia-led to industry-led, by a large margin, and this shows no sign of changing.
- It's becoming difficult to test models on traditional benchmarks and a new paradigm may be needed here.
- The energy footprint of AI training and use is becoming considerable, but we have yet to see how it may add efficiencies elsewhere.
- The number of "AI incidents and controversies" has increased by a factor of 26 since 2012, which actually seems a bit low.
- AI-related skills and job postings are increasing, but not as fast as you'd think.
- Policymakers, however, are falling over themselves trying to write a definitive AI bill, a fool's errand if there ever as one.
- Investment has temporarily stalled, but that's after an astronomic increase over the last decade.
- More than 70% of Chinese, Saudi, and Indian respondents felt AI had more benefits than drawbacks. Americans? 35%. The full report can be found here.

Researchers have analyzed samples of the asteroid Ryugu collected by the Japanese Space Agency's Hayabusa2 spacecraft and found uracil, one of the informational units that make up RNA, the molecules that contain the instructions for how to build and operate living organisms. Nicotinic acid, also known as Vitamin B3 or niacin, which is an important cofactor for metabolism in living organisms, was also detected in the same samples. Phys.Org reports: This discovery by an international team, led by Associate Professor Yasuhiro Oba at Hokkaido University, adds to the evidence that important building blocks for life are created in space and could have been delivered to Earth by meteorites. The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications. The researchers extracted these molecules by soaking the Ryugu particles in hot water, followed by analyses using liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry. This revealed the presence of uracil and nicotinic acid, as well as other nitrogen-containing organic compounds. "We found uracil in the samples in small amounts, in the range of 6-32 parts per billion (ppb), while vitamin B3 was more abundant, in the range of 49-99 ppb," Oba elaborated. "Other biological molecules were found in the sample as well, including a selection of amino acids, amines and carboxylic acids, which are found in proteins and metabolism, respectively." The compounds detected are similar but not identical to those previously discovered in carbon-rich meteorites.

The team hypothesizes that the difference in concentrations in the two samples, collected from different locations on Ryugu, is likely due to the exposure to the extreme environments of space. They also hypothesized that the nitrogen-containing compounds were, at least in part, formed from the simpler molecules such as ammonia, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide. While these were not detected in the Ryugu samples, they are known to be present in cometary ice -- and Ryugu could have originated as a comet or another parent body that had been present in low temperature environments.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: China's annual, week-long parliamentary meeting just ended on Monday. Apart from confirming President Xi Jinping for a historic third term and appointing a new batch of other top leaders, the government also approved a restructuring plan for national ministries, as it typically does every five years. Among all the changes, there's one that the tech world is avidly watching: the creation of a new regulatory body named the National Data Administration. According to official documents, the NDA will be in charge of "advancing the development of data-related fundamental institutions, coordinating the integration, sharing, development and application of data resources, and pushing forward the planning and building of a Digital China, the digital economy and a digital society, among others." In plain words, the NDA will help build smart cities in China, digitize government services, improve internet infrastructure, and make government agencies share data with each other.

The big question mark is how much regulatory authority it will exert. At the moment, many different governmental groups in China have a hand in data regulation (last year, one political representative counted 15), and there is no government body that has an explicit mission to protect data privacy. The closest the country has is the Cyberspace Administration of China, which was originally created to police online content and promote party propaganda. "It makes sense to set something [like NDA] up, given how important data is," says Jamie Horsley, a senior fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, who studies regulatory reforms in China. "But the problem anytime you try to streamline government is that you realize every issue impacts other issues. It's very hard to just carve out something that's only going to be regulated by this one entity." For now, it seems this new department is part of an ongoing effort by the Chinese government to drum up a "digital economy" around collecting, sharing, and trading data.

In fact, the new national administration greatly resembles the Big Data Bureaus that Chinese provinces have been setting up since 2014. These local bureaus have built data centers across China and set up data exchanges that can trade data sets like stocks. The content of the data is as varied as cell phone locations and results from remote sensing of the ocean floor. The bureaus have even embraced and invested in the questionable concept of the metaverse. Those bureaus tend to view data as a promising economic resource rather than a Pandora's box full of privacy concerns. Now, these local experiments are being integrated and elevated to a national-level agency. And that explains why the new NDA is set up under China's National Development and Reform Commission, an office mostly responsible for drawing broad economic blueprints for the country. We may not get clarity on NDA's full scope of authority until the summer, when its organizational structure, personnel, and regulatory responsibilities are expected to be put down in writing. But analysts think that it's not likely to replace the Cyberspace Administration of China, which has risen up in recent years to become the "super regulator" of the tech industry.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The UK government is to invest 900 million pounds in a cutting-edge supercomputer as part of an artificial intelligence strategy that includes ensuring the country can build its own "BritGPT". The treasury outlined plans to spend around 900 million pounds on building an exascale computer, which would be several times more powerful than the UK's biggest computers, and establishing a new AI research body. An exascale computer can be used for training complex AI models, but also have other uses across science, industry and defense, including modeling weather forecasts and climate projections. The Treasury said the investment will "allow researchers to better understand climate change, power the discovery of new drugs and maximize our potential in AI.".

An exascale computer is one that can carry out more than one billion billion simple calculations a second, a metric known as an "exaflops". Only one such machine is known to exist, Frontier, which is housed at America's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and used for scientific research -- although supercomputers have such important military applications that it may be the case that others already exist but are not acknowledged by their owners. Frontier, which cost about 500 million pounds to produce and came online in 2022, is more than twice as powerful as the next fastest machine.

The Treasury said it would award a 1 million-pound prize every year for the next 10 years to the most groundbreaking AI research. The award will be called the Manchester Prize, in memory of the so-called Manchester Baby, a forerunner of the modern computer built at the University of Manchester in 1948. The government will also invest 2.5 billion pounds over the next decade in quantum technologies. Quantum computing is based on quantum physics -- which looks at how the subatomic particles that make up the universe work -- and quantum computers are capable of computing their way through vast numbers of different outcomes.

The European Union is weighing a proposal to make technology companies that use the most bandwidth, like Netflix and Alphabet, to help pay for the next generation of internet infrastructure, according to a draft document seen by Bloomberg. From the report: The suggestions are part of a "fair-share" vision from the EU's executive arm that could require large tech businesses, which provide streaming videos and other data-heavy services, to help pay for the traffic they generate.

The draft document, which is part of a consultation with the industry, suggested firms might contribute to a fund to offset the cost of building 5G mobile networks and fiber infrastructure, as well as the creation of a mandatory system of direct payments from tech giants to telecom operators. The commission also asked companies whether there should be a threshold that would qualify a company to be a "large traffic generator," the document showed. That could be similar to the European governing body's rules designating some tech companies "gatekeepers" and "very large online platforms" in its recent competition and online content rules.

Elon Musk's SpaceX is expanding its Starlink satellite technology into military applications with a new business line called Starshield. CNBC reports: "While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use," the company wrote on its website. Few details are available about the intended scope and capabilities of Starshield. The company hasn't previously announced tests or work on Starshield technology.

On its website, SpaceX said the system will have "an initial focus" on three areas: Imagery, communications and "hosted payloads" -- the third of which effectively offers government customers the company's satellite bus (the body of the spacecraft) as a flexible platform. The company also markets Starshield as the center of an "end-to-end" offering for national security: SpaceX would build everything from the ground antennas to the satellites, launch the latter with its rockets, and operate the network in space.

SpaceX notes that Starshield uses "additional high-assurance cryptographic capability to host classified payloads and process data securely," building upon the data encryption it uses with its Starlink system. Another key feature: the "inter-satellite laser communications" links, which the company currently has connecting its Starlink spacecraft. It notes that the terminals can be added to "partner satellites," so as to connect other companies' government systems "into the Starshield network."

AmiMoJo writes: The operator of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, which suffered core meltdowns in 2011, is considering a new submersion method for removing radioactive fuel debris that would wholly encase a reactor building in a water-filled, tank-like structure, a source close to the company said earlier this month. Conceptual breakthroughs with the method, whose advantages include using water's ability to interrupt radiation and thereby provide a safer working environment, have made it a promising candidate for the cleanup of the defunct nuclear plant, according to the source close to Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco). But with no proven track record in the nuclear field, investigations are ongoing into future technological issues and costs, among other contingencies. The source said it could "require advanced technology to stop water leaking out and become a huge construction project."

Were it to go ahead, the process from building to actual debris removal would be lengthy and would likely affect total decommissioning costs, currently pegged at about $57.45 billion. In the aftermath of the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, nuclear fuel cooling processes failed at the Fukushima plant's reactors 1 through 3, causing the fuel to melt and re-solidify into radioactive debris mixed with concrete, metal and other materials present in the reactors. Debris removal is the operator's most challenging issue in the Fukushima plant cleanup. Some 880 tons of the radioactive waste material is estimated to have been created by the nuclear meltdown across the three reactors. The new submersion method, which is currently expected to be applied to the No. 3 reactor, would involve building a strong, pressure-resistant structure, much like a ship's hull or a plane's body, completely encapsulating the reactor, including underground. The structure could then be filled with water, and removal work would take place from the top.

New submitter mrex writes: More than 60 major American companies that employ tens of thousands of U.S. workers are asking the Supreme Court to uphold the use of race as a factor in college admissions, calling affirmative action critical to building diverse workforces and, in turn, growing profits. The businesses -- some of the most high-profile and successful in the U.S. economy -- outlined their position in legal briefs filed Monday ahead of oral arguments this fall in a pair of cases expected to determine the future of the race-based policy. The companies told the court they rely on universities to cultivate racially diverse student bodies which in turn yield pools of diverse, highly educated job candidates that can meet their business and customer needs. "The government's interest in promoting student-body diversity on university campuses remains compelling from a business perspective," the companies wrote in an amicus, or friend-of-the-court, brief. "The interest in promoting student-body diversity at America's universities has, if anything, grown in importance." Among the signatories are American Express, United and American Airlines, Apple, Intel, Bayer, General Electric, Kraft Heinz, Microsoft, Verizon, Procter & Gamble and Starbucks. Citing data and research on a rapidly diversifying America, the companies said race-based diversity initiatives are about more than what many call a moral imperative and critical to their bottom lines. "Prohibiting universities nationwide from considering race among other factors in composing student bodies would undermine businesses' efforts to build diverse workforces," they said.

Researchers at Stanford University, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and the Autodesk AI Lab have collaborated to develop a novel learning-based framework that can interpret 2D instructions to build 3D objects. The Register reports: The Manual-to-Executable-Plan Network, or MEPNet, was tested on computer-generated Lego sets, real Lego set instructions and Minecraft-style voxel building plans, and the researchers said it outperformed existing methods across the board. Interpreting 2D instructions isn't easy for artificial intelligence. The researchers said there are a couple key problems going from visual instructions that, like Lego sets, consist entirely of images: Identifying correspondence between 2D and 3D objects, and dealing with a lot of basic pieces, like Lego.

Basic Lego bricks, the researchers said, are often assembled into complex forms before being added to the main body of the model. This "increases the difficulty for machines to interpret Lego manuals: it requires inferring 3D poses of unseen objects composed of seen primitives," the researchers said. Existing methods of parsing manual steps into machine-executable plans mainly consist of two forms, the researchers said: Search-based methods that are simple and accurate but computationally expensive; and learning-based models that are fast but aren't very good at handling unseen 3D shapes. MEPNet, the researchers said, combines both.

Starting with a 3D model of the components, the current state of the Lego set, and 2D manual images, MEPNet "predicts a set of 2D keypoints and masks for each component," the researchers wrote. Once that's done, the 2D keypoints "are back-projected to 3D by finding possible connections between the base shape and the new components." The combination "maintains the efficiency of learning-based models, and generalizes better to unseen 3D components," the team wrote. In the paper, the researchers said their aim is to create machines that help people assemble complex objects, and they include furniture alongside Lego bricks and voxel worlds in their list of applications. The researchers have made their code available on Github.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN Travel: Breakfast in Paris, lunch in Frankfurt and dinner in Vienna -- all without the hassle and frustration of flying. Imagine a network of modern, super-fast and comfortable trains hurtling between every major city in the European Union, providing a reliable, comfortable and sustainable alternative to air travel. That was the vision outlined by rail industry leaders in Lyon, France, on June 29, amid ambitious European plans to double high-speed rail use by 2030 and triple current levels by 2050. Only a massive -- and accelerated -- expansion of the high-speed network can achieve these hugely ambitious targets, but are they a realistic and affordable proposition?

Unlike many parts of the world, Europe already has thousands of kilometers of dedicated high-speed railway. France's world-famous TGVs, Germany's ICE and Spain's AVE have transformed rail travel over the last 40 years, but they remain largely focused on domestic markets. That's no surprise. When countries are investing billions of euros in new infrastructure, political pressure to squeeze out the maximum benefit for taxpayers is inevitable. Building lines across international borders, even within the European Union, creates tension over who pays for what, how the contracts are allocated, conflicting national standards and regulations and a host of other obstacles. For decades it's been too easy to kick difficult projects down the road until they become someone else's problem.

Now a body of European organizations have committed to a new study highlighting the numerous benefits of an expanded high-speed rail network connecting national capitals and major cities. These include the European Commission, the Community of European Railways, the European Rail Supply Industry and ALLRAIL, which represents non-state-owned railways. Most importantly the group will investigate how to pay for tens of thousands of kilometers of new lines and how a radical transformation of the continent's rail network can help the EU deliver on its "Green Deal' objective of carbon neutrality by 2050. Some of that expansion will come on new routes that are planned or under construction but many more will be needed to facilitate the vision of European leaders. "According to EU statistics, 17 of the 20 busiest air routes in Europe cover distances of less than 434 miles (700 kilometers) -- exactly the kind of distances where city center-to-city center trains can offer faster, cleaner and more sustainable journeys -- if the right infrastructure exists," adds CNN.

"And according to Alberto Mazzola of the Community of European Railways, carbon emissions trading could be a key tool in funding the massive investment required to complete a Europe-wide high-speed rail network." A Paris-Berlin flight generates at least six times the CO2 emissions of a similar train journey, notes the report. Meanwhile, flights of less than 621 miles between and within European countries are estimated to create 28 million metric tons of CO2 every year.

"Excess carbon emissions from airliners, trucks and cars are currently charged at 50 euros per ton in the EU, but this could soon rise to 80 euros per ton," reports CNN. "If just 10% of that revenue is re-invested in transport it could add around 8 billion euros a year to the pot for rail upgrades."

"In molecular biologist David Sinclair's lab at Harvard Medical School, old mice are growing young again," reports CNN: Using proteins that can turn an adult cell into a stem cell, Sinclair and his team have reset aging cells in mice to earlier versions of themselves. In his team's first breakthrough, published in late 2020, old mice with poor eyesight and damaged retinas could suddenly see again, with vision that at times rivaled their offspring's.

"It's a permanent reset, as far as we can tell, and we think it may be a universal process that could be applied across the body to reset our age," said Sinclair, who has spent the last 20 years studying ways to reverse the ravages of time.

"If we reverse aging, these diseases should not happen. We have the technology today to be able to go into your hundreds without worrying about getting cancer in your 70s, heart disease in your 80s and Alzheimer's in your 90s." Sinclair told an audience at Life Itself, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN.

"This is the world that is coming. It's literally a question of when and for most of us, it's going to happen in our lifetimes," Sinclair told the audience.... Sinclair said his lab has reversed aging in the muscles and brains of mice and is now working on rejuvenating a mouse's entire body.
The article points out that he's building on research by Japan's Dr. Shinya Yamanaka (which in 2007 won a Nobel prize).

But one key caveat: "Studies on whether the genetic intervention that revitalized mice will do the same for people are in early stages, Sinclair said. It will be years before human trials are finished, analyzed and, if safe and successful, scaled to the mass needed for a federal stamp of approval."