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"Deep Learning is a new area of Machine Learning research, which has been introduced with the objective of moving Machine Learning closer to one of its original goals: Artificial Intelligence."

As if they weren't considered beastly enough, black holes can dive into nearby stars and devour them from the inside out, scientists now suggest. Such invasions by such black holes could help explain the most powerful explosions in the universe, gamma-ray bursts, whose origins remain elusive.

Elisabeth Daynès’ hyper realistic reconstructions, based on fossil hominids, make a unique contribution to paleoanthropology and art, by retracing the path of human evolution and origins

Interesting new paper coming out in Nature this week, presenting early scientific results from LIGO on the amplitude of stochastic gravitational radiation background of cosmological origin.

"Israeli archaeologists have discovered human remains dating from 400,000 years ago, challenging conventional wisdom that Homo sapiens originated in Africa, the leader of excavations in Israel said on Tuesday."

ScienceDaily (Jan. 7, 2011) - Certain molecules do exist in two forms which are symmetrical mirror images of each other: they are known as chiral molecules. On Earth, the chiral molecules of life, especially amino acids and sugars, exist in only one form, either left-handed or right-handed. Why is it that life has initially chosen one form over the other?

Dogs Decoded reveals the science behind the remarkable bond between humans and their dogs and investigates new discoveries in genetics that are illuminating the origin of dogs - with surprising implications for the evolution of human culture. Other research is proving what dog lovers have suspected all along: Dogs have an uncanny ability to read and respond to human emotions. Humans, in turn, respond to dogs with the same hormone responsible for bonding mothers to their babies. How did this incredible relationship between humans and dogs come to be? And how can dogs, so closely related to fearsome wild wolves, behave so differently?

The lushest patches of some jungles are rooted in enigmatic black soil - with unexpected origins

chemiosmosis - alternate and quite well explained possible origin of life

A series of fossils unearthed in southwestern China has revealed the origins of complex life in unprecedented detail, and pushed its beginning back by at least 40 million years. The specimens come from the Doushantuo formation, a layer of sediments deposited about 590 million years ago, just before the Ediacaran period's primordial fauna gave way to the kaleidoscopically complex creatures of the Cambrian explosion.

Further discussion on how life on earth may have originated.

Listen up, Facebook and Twitter groupies: how easily can social pressure affect your memory? Very easily, researchers at the Weizmann Institute and University College London have proved, and they think they even know what part of the brain is responsible. The participants conformed to the group on these "planted" responses, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% of the time. Volunteers watched a documentary film in small groups. Three days later, they returned to the lab individually to take a memory test, answering questions about the film. They were also asked how confident they were in their answers. They were later invited back to the lab to retake the test. This time, the subjects were also given supposed answers of the others in their film-viewing group (along with social-media-style photos) while being scanned in a functional MRI (fMRI) that revealed their brain activity. Is most of what you know false? Planted among these were false answers to questions the volunteers had previously answered correctly and confidently. The participants conformed to the group on these "planted" responses, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% of the time. To determine if their memory of the film had actually undergone a change, the researchers invited the subjects back to the lab later to take the memory test once again, telling them that the answers they had previously been fed were not those of their fellow film watchers, but random computer generations. Some of the responses reverted back to the original, correct ones, but get this: despite finding out the scientists messed with their minds, close to half of their responses remained erroneous, implying that the subjects were relying on false memories implanted in the earlier session. An analysis of the fMRI data showed a strong co-activation and connectivity between two brain areas: the hippocampus and the amygdala. Social reinforcement could act on the amygdala to persuade our brains to replace a strong memory wi

"The Decentralized Library of Alexandria is an open-source standard in active development to allow users to publish and distribute original content themselves, from music to videos to feature films, 3d printable inventions, recipes, books and just about anything else. It is a unified, ever-growing library of art, history and culture which users interact with through a variety of front end apps. A native browser is in continuing development, but the Alexandria standard can also be used by other open source developers and even current industry incumbents like YouTube, Soundcloud, iTunes and Netflix to offer a far superior value proposition to content providers and a better experience for users than currently available."

The contamination and potential ecological risk posed by heavy metals from thirteen (13) sediment samples from different sampling sites along the lower portion of Agusan River were analyzed and assessed using different pollution indices. The results obtained shows that the total digest concentrations of different heavy metals under investigation have the following order: Cd < Pb < Zn < Mn, for both first sampling periods. The speciation and distribution pattern have shown that significant amounts of all metals are present in the residual fraction. Similarly, oxide-bound and organic-bound fractions were found to be highly important for Zn and Mn while Cd and Pb were significantly associated in the residual and exchangeable fractions. The results of different pollution indices moreover, showed that among all the heavy metals being studied, Cd posed the highest environmental risk across all sampling stations in both sampling periods and Mn metal was highly enriched and abundant in all of the sampling stations. Importantly, PCA results suggest that Zn, Mn and Pb may have the same origin while Cd might be coming from different sources, and this is corroborated well with the cluster analysis results. The results obtained from this work provide baseline data on the assessment of heavy metal pollution in the lower portion of Agusan River. Importantly, the acquired environmental indices will certainly help safety managers in assessing and interpreting the potential risk of the sediment associated chemical status that might adversely affect aquatic organisms in the selected sampling sites.

"Mao's support of Chinese medicine was inspired by political necessity. In a 1950 speech (unwittingly echoed by the Senate's concerns about "providing health care to underserved populations"), he said: Our nation's health work teams are large. They have to concern themselves with over 500 million people [including the] young, old, and ill. … At present, doctors of Western medicine are few, and thus the broad masses of the people, and in particular the peasants, rely on Chinese medicine to treat illness. Therefore, we must strive for the complete unification of Chinese medicine"

Scientific and speculative articles about the future of human evolution regarding to artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, transhumanism, nanotechnology, space colonization, time travel, life extension and human enhancement

Scientists have discovered the amino acid glycine, a critical component of all living things, hiding in samples from the comet Wild 2. It's the first