Archive: 2016

The 20 USD bill’s Andrew Jackson is as worried as many computer scientists over the thought of AIs stealing our money Not content with stealing our jobs and beating our top Go players, artificial intelligence (AI) has now turned to cleaning out our…

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Snapshot of a Go game in progress [Image: ‘Go Board Game’ from Sean Welton under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence]Computers have been capable of beating the best human chess players for almost two decades, but a week-long stretch earlier this month…

Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins that are made by the immune system to identify and neutralize pathogens. The generation of good antibodies during an immune response is essential for the body to protect itself against pathogens. Moreover, the vast…

Presented by Vinidhra Mani The skin is our first barrier to entry of pathogens. The tightly regulated immune system in our skin provides us with a robust arsenal to combat potential invaders, yet also has checkpoints to ensure that the battlefields…

Infection with Vaccinia virus (above) was used to test the effect of deleting MER41 ERVs on the cell’s immune response (Photo Credit:Content Providers(s): CDC/Cynthia Goldsmith [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons) Scientists have estimated that…

The Zika virus has lately been a global focus due to its connection to deformities in newborns. A recent report by the CDC has bolstered the suspicion that Zika is sexually transmittable from men to women, which was previously only supported by a handful…

The concept of nuclear fusion merged with a photograph of the nuclear fusion energy display at Weiss Energy Hall, Houston Museum of Natural Science, Houston, TX on the right (Credits: Katherine Fellows, via Flikr) In November 2015, Germany switched on…

Scientists recently estimated the volume and ages of groundwater using a combination of chemical measurements and mathematical models. The authors of the study compiled measurements of levels of tritium, the radioactive form of the element hydrogen, to…

These images show cross sections of the different compartments of the developing gut in a chick embryo: esophagus (top), small intestine (middle), and large intestine (bottom), at days 6, 8, 10, and 14 (left to right). As the chick develops, the shape of…