spencer.wilmot posted a photo:
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Ready to push at Terminal 4.
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spencer.wilmot posted a photo:
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China Southern 787 at Terminal 4.
The Narratographer posted a photo:
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Well, I decided to process a lot of the images from my trips across Europe over the last few years. Recently, I haven't done many landscapes and cityscapes, so Ive decided to get back into them.
The main reason for this, is the fact that my best friend, Anthony, has decided to move across the pond to Canada. Best friends since we were 11, he was my travel companion, my ally and my source of inspiration. We spent most of our adult life travelling across the UK, and across Europe, having fun and taking photos. For all those years, we were inseparable, the closest two friends can ever be.
Like I say, a year ago, he decided to move to Canada, to be with a girl he met on Facebook. Now, they have a child and are married...and I haven't seen him since. So all of these images are dedicated to my distant friend. He was with me when I took all of them, and without him, Id have never have taken them. So I just thought that I would post these images, as lately Ive been feeling very nostalgic and sad that we don't get the chance to do these sorts of things anymore. so thanks Ant, for being the best friend anyone could ever wish for. I miss you.
Anyway, I hope you like the images.
Microsoft's recent Artificial Intelligence robot Tay didn't exactly make headlines for the right reasons, after Twitter users somehow managed to trick it into becoming a Nazi. But the computer giant is probably hoping their latest venture will steer clear of any controversy.
Project Murphy is described as a “robot with imagination” - you can talk to it through your Facebook Messenger app and ask it to dream up funny pictures for you.
For example, you could ask Murphy “What if Donald Trump was a fish?” and it would automatically edit the presidential candidate's head onto a sea creature.
Naturally, people are devoting a lot of time to finding the funniest possible combinations.
My best masterpiece so far with #ProjectMurphy. pic.twitter.com/G53KFmaWbE
— Jeremy Nielsen (@Jnn575) July 12, 2016
Идеально #projectmurphy pic.twitter.com/BoB753SQ5z
— Maxim Vakulich (@vma392) July 8, 2016
Having way too much fun with #projectmurphy @ThePoke pic.twitter.com/hpgAjF2fC9
— Tom Nightingale (@Tomn_1986) August 5, 2016
What if Davey Cameron is a pie? #ProjectMurphy pic.twitter.com/ySfvvewwLK
— Ryan Barrell (@RyanBarrell) August 5, 2016
Oh dear. #ProjectMurphy pic.twitter.com/O1pNGzwpTc
— Jason Wilson (@WhizzoUK) August 5, 2016
#ProjectMurphy is easily the best thing Microsoft has done in recent memory. pic.twitter.com/qVR9uBEeMd
— Matt Kremske (@Kremdog28) July 10, 2016
Rather happy with my first question to #ProjectMurphy pic.twitter.com/5s1iHbaOQu
— Jason Wilson (@WhizzoUK) August 5, 2016
#projectmurphy pic.twitter.com/vsNhYGbqEy
— Chris Dyson (@ChrisLDyson) August 5, 2016
"Do you ever sit back and ask yourself what you're doing with your life?" - Saru, 2k16 #ProjectMurphy pic.twitter.com/jGj1mGnmRX
— Animus (@cinderskull) July 25, 2016
#projectmurphy what if Donald Trump was Miley Cyrus? pic.twitter.com/OEPoQULMeb
— Jack (@JackMeeOff) July 22, 2016
#ProjectMurphy is amazing pic.twitter.com/OyTsMcPKHt
— Jeremy Nielsen (@Jnn575) July 12, 2016
#projectmurphy What if Sunderland had an airport - I'm genuinely not sure how to respond to this pic.twitter.com/rt3jGO3EWn
— Chris Swinton (@Keawyeds) August 5, 2016
What does it mean to be you? And how can science unpick the age-old debates around conscious experience? Join us for a journey into the unknown
Ever since Descartes famously split the world into “mind” and “‘matter”, the debate amongst philosophers and thinkers about conscious experience has raged. And with recent advances in brain imaging technologies, scientists now offer a new and exciting viewpoint on this quintessential human phenomenon. But are we any closer to revealing the mechanisms behind it? And can science offer anything other than objective measures? Under the watchful gaze of the cognitive neuroscientist Professor Anil Seth, Ian and Nicola delve into the murky world of consciousness in an attempt to unravel its mysteries. Along the way we meet UCL's Dr Steve Fleming and Professor Christof Koch from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, to hear how experimental practice and theory are tackling this problem head on.
Continue reading...!["Urval]("http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/03205551/book-longer-lives-study-1024x681.jpg")
Image by Johannes Jansson, via Wikimedia Commons
What are the keys to longevity? If you ask Dan Buettner, the author of The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest, he'd list nine key factors. They range from slow down and don't stress out, to have a clear purpose in life, to eat mainly plant based foods and put family first. Nowhere on his list, however, does he suggest sitting down and reading good books.
And yet a new study by researchers at Yale University's School of Public Health indicates that people who read books (but not so much magazines and newspapers) live two years longer, on average, than those who don't read at all. Becca R. Levy, a professor of epidemiology at Yale, is quoted in The New York Times as saying, “People who report as little as a half-hour a day of book reading had a significant survival advantage over those who did not read.” “And the survival advantage remained after adjusting for wealth, education, cognitive ability and many other variables.” Precisely how book reading contributes to increased longevity is not spelled out. You can read the abstract for the new study here.
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Book Readers Live Longer Lives, According to New Study from Yale University is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.
Soooo … I heard Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, age 48, is using the blood of twentysomethings to stay young.
Actually, he's not doing that yet. Reportedly, he's considered receiving blood transfusions from younger people, which he hopes might reverse signs of aging, but he hasn't actually said anything publicly beyond hint that he might be game.
Wait, is that even possible? Sucking in young blood to make yourself younger?
Let's back up a few steps. There's been some exciting, preliminary research in mice that suggests there's something about young blood. In these experiments, scientists have stitched together a young mouse and old mouse so that their circulatory systems are pumping the same blood through each other's veins. This makes tissue stronger in the older mice: repairs spinal cord damage, prompts new brain cells to grow, and “even makes their fur shinier,” writes journalist Megan Scudellari for Nature in a great primer on the research's history.
When these experiments were done in the 1950s, mice sometimes reacted by trying to bite each other's heads off. It was not great. But in modern experiments, they are carefully selected for compatibility and hang out beforehand, which seems to help. They seem to behave normally while sewn together and can even be separated afterward. The older mice might be healthier for it but as Scudellari writes, “no one has convincingly shown that young blood lengthens lives, and there is no promise that it will.”
You'd have to be physically stitched to another person and receiving their blood for this to work?
No, no, obviously not, though that is the method that's shown most of the best results in mice. There's some evidence that repeated injections of plasma will work the same way, too: A 2014 study showed that they improved cognitive function in aging mice. But we would not stitch humans together, no.
Well, what are we doing to humans then?
We're basically trying to figure out if any of this translates to humans. This is all very preliminary, but there are actually a couple companies trying out various methods of the idea that young blood can reduce disease in older patients. Stanford researcher Tony Wyss-Coray, who has long been stitching together mice, founded a company called Alkahest and is carrying out a clinical trial on 18 people with Alzheimer's to see if plasma injections can improve their cognitive function—and, if so, which parts of the plasma are doing the work. The general understanding is that the proteins in young blood have some sort of restorative property, though no one quite understands the mechanism that makes young blood useful.
Another company, Ambrosia LLC, founded by a recently minted Stanford MD, is booting up a clinical trial for anyone over 35 who is aging (aka anyone over the age of 35). (It's this company that attracted the attention of Thiel's health adviser, though there's no sign that Thiel himself has enrolled in the trial.)
In the Ambrosia trial, 600 participants will each receive a liter-and-a-half of blood from someone under 25 over the course of a couple days. Before and after the trial, Ambrosia will analyze various measurements of the participants' health to see if they can assess any change from the infusion.
Where do they get the young blood?
They buy it from blood banks, just like any other hospital would.
OK, I guess that's not that weird. So, I'd like to live longer. How do I sign up?
Whoa, slow down. This will probably not actually extend people's lives. It's not even always effective in mice. In a trial that involved injecting rodents with plasma over the course of 16 weeks, the mice didn't live any longer than a control group injected with saline. There isn't enough research done in humans to know if the small benefits to tissue health transfers, and we do know that mice are not perfect foils for the human body.
“There's just no clinical evidence [that the treatment will be beneficial], and you're basically abusing people's trust and the public excitement around this,” Wyss-Coray told Science magazine of the Ambrosia trial. (Yes, his company could be considered a competitor to Ambrosia, though it doesn't seem like he's selling anything yet.)
Ambrosia's founder Jesse Karmazin, on the other hand, tells me that he finds the evidence from mouse studies along with encouraging results from the few small studies that have been conducted in humans, like Wyss-Coray's, enough to justify his trial.
At any rate, transfusions are very safe when properly supervised, so it's not like he's trying some experimental procedure that could do harm. He is, however, charging participants $8,000.
Seems pretty fair for a shot at longer life, no?
Well, normally, in clinical trials, people are paid for their time and participation, not the other way around. This is actually pretty weird. So weird, in fact, that it's unlikely this trial will result in reputable results able to tell us anything meaningful about blood transfusions.
Taking money from participants is referred to as pay-to-play. While a handful of researchers are trying it, it's rife with ethical issues, many of which University of Pennsylvania medical ethicist Ezekiel J. Emanuel (and co-authors) outlined in an editorial for Science Translational Medicine last year. (They also noted that the method has been favored by “unscrupulous companies and health facilities” looking to turn a profit.)
The reason why this is suspect is because clinical trials are setup to test a treatment as objectively as possible. In fact, the highest standard of clinical trial is one that is placebo-controlled and conducted double-blind. Participants are recruited based on specific criteria—for example, if they all have a disease and are within a certain age range. These participants are randomly assigned to different groups. One of these groups receives a placebo (a sugar pill instead of a drug), so researchers can understand what changes are attributable to the drug itself and what changes are attributable to the theater of the treatment. Patients are put in these groups randomly: Ideally, neither the patient nor the experimenter knows what kind of treatment they're receiving.
Isn't Ambrosia doing that?
Nope. In Ambrosia's trial, all patients appear to be getting the same treatment—there is no placebo set up, so there is nothing to blind. The thinking is that people shelling out eight grand won't accept the terms of a randomized treatment, and the possibility of receiving a mere placebo—the very backbone of a good clinical trial.
The terms of enrollment for Ambrosia's trial are also laughably general. I mean, 35-year-olds aren't exactly elderly. They aren't going to have any diseases associated with aging. As Harvard researcher Amy Wagers told Scudellari in Nature last year, most effective use of young blood will probably be for treating a specific disease, or helping elderly recover from surgery. It's hard to know what kind of measurable effect it might have on a—by all appearances spry—40-something like Thiel.
It also means that Ambrosia's sample is going to be skewed toward people who are can afford the treatment and who self-select to prioritize youth. There's no telling how this sample size may compare to the average person.
Maybe it's not a perfect clinical trial. But won't the people still get something out of it?
Honestly, who knows! The pay-to-play model is potentially very dishonest: Most clinical trials do not work out. This is how science goes. A clinical trial is an experiment, not a service. When scientists set it up like one, it puts patients in a position to be taken advantage of because the treatment being tested probably will not work.
Hmmm. But this is legal and everything?
Yes, technically it is. Blood transfusions are a common, Food and Drug Administrationapproved treatment, and Karmazin has a medical degree, so he can administer them at his discretion.
I asked Karmazin about some criticisms of the pay-to-play model. He wrote in an email that “patients frequently pay for off-label uses of medications, based on physician judgment.” That's true. But the doctor's judgement in this case is rather optimistic. The price is also pretty steep.
I think I'm going to sit this one out and see what they come up with.
That seems best.
What else I can do to live longer?
There are a number of actions you can take that have been shown to extend lifespan, such as eating more vegetables, exercising regularly, or not smoking.
Yeah, yeah, I know.
Joe.Gibson posted a photo:
!["Sunset]("http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8830/28165502473_77ceaae41a_m.jpg")
Part of a project I have set myself to upload a photo for each day for the two weeks that I am off work.
Went to try and catch some shots of the sunset from Royal Hill in Greenwich.
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crissudi posted a photo:
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crissudi posted a photo:
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www.matthewcattellphotography.com posted a photo:
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A Red Deer Stag in a misty meadow, photographed so that the low morning sun created a halo around its velvet-covered antlers.
Euro airliner firm Airbus is sponsoring a glider capable of soaring to greater altitudes than the famous SR-71 Blackbird spy aircraft.…
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Full Text:
We learn a lot about objects by manipulating them: poking, pushing, prodding, and then seeing how they react. We obviously can't do that with videos — just try touching that cat video on your phone and see what happens. But is it crazy to think that we could take that video and simulate how the cat moves, without ever interacting with the real one? Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have recently done just that, developing an imaging technique called Interactive Dynamic Video (IDV) that lets you reach in and “touch” objects in videos. Using traditional cameras and algorithms, IDV looks at the tiny, almost invisible vibrations of an object to create video simulations that users can virtually interact with.
Image credit: Abe Davis/MIT CSAIL
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The Yellowstone River in Yellowstone National Park after a late spring snowstorm. Earlier annual snowmelt periods may decrease streamflow and reduce forests' ability to regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study. By mid-century, a shift in snowmelt timing could lead to 45 percent reduction of forest CO2 uptake.
Image credit: Theodore Barnhart
When an earnest undergraduate quizzed the aged E M Forster about the good life, the novelist is supposed to have replied: “Don't ask about the good life. Find out what you enjoy.” I'm not sure of the source of the story, which I've heard in more than one version, but the dictum attributed to the novelist encapsulates a popular type of liberal philosophy. Arguments about the good are unending and inconclusive. Despite Aristotle, Buddha, Laozi and all those who followed them, there is no more agreement on the subject than there was two and a half millennia ago. Given the essential elusiveness of goodness, why not focus on something we can judge with reasonable confidence? After all, we all know what we like. If we stick to what we enjoy, we can hardly go wrong.
The trouble is that, in fact, what we like is often unclear to us. As Tom Vanderbilt writes:
Related: The secret of taste: why we like what we like | Tom Vanderbilt
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