H+ Weekly - Issue #251
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This week - DeepMind releases a documentary movie about AlphaGo; how robots are used to fight COVID-19; a musical robot that has a song on Spotify; and more!
SPONSORED
Humble Book Bundle: Software Development By O'Reilly
Expand your software development skills and transform your bad code to good code with this bundle of software engineering books from Humble Bundle! There are some interesting books there, from software patterns to machine learning with Python to programming a quantum computer. Your purchase will support Code for America and this newsletter.
MORE THAN A HUMAN
A Quest for the Genetic Fountain of Youth
By studying naked mole rats, elephants, bats and whales, researchers hope to find a clue in their biology and genome that can help us understand the ageing process and maybe stop it and even reverse it.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
► AlphaGo - The Movie (1:30:28)
I did not expect DeepMind to release a full documentary about AlphaGo but here it is. AlphaGo chronicles a journey from the halls of Oxford, through the backstreets of Bordeaux, past the coding terminals of DeepMind in London, and ultimately, to the seven-day tournament in Seoul. As the drama unfolds, more questions emerge: What can artificial intelligence reveal about a 3000-year-old game? What can it teach us about humanity?
AI Is Changing Work — and Leaders Need to Adapt
This article, published on Harvard Business School, looks at the impact AI has on workplace from the leadership point of view and offers three possible solutions for companies to adapt - reallocation of capital resources, investment in workforce training and continuous education.
AI-powered smart glasses are finding people with coronavirus in China
Security officers in China are wearing AI-powered smart glasses to find people with a fever, one of the main symptoms of the coronavirus. The specs use a thermal imaging camera to measure someone’s temperature from up to 1 metre away. The glasses were developed by AI startup Rokid, which claims each set can check the temperature of several hundred people in just two minutes.
ROBOTICS
Coronavirus: Robots use light beams to zap hospital viruses
The ongoing outbreak of COVID-19 accelerates the deployment of robots in hospitals, like those autonomous robots designed to disinfect hospitals featured in this article.
China Opened An Entire Hospital Staffed By Robots
There is a hospital in China staffed only by robots. Dubbed the Smart Field Hospital, carried out basic screening tasks such as tracking temperature, heart rate and blood oxygen levels, taken care of by robots, courtesy of Beijing-based startup CloudMinds.
Musical Robot Learns to Sing, Has Album Dropping on Spotify
Shimon is a robot from Georgia Tech that can compose, play, and sing completely original songs. Not only that, but its song is also now on Spotify which make Shimon probably the first robot to publish a song there.
This Drone Can Play Dodgeball – And Win
Researchers from the University of Zurich have demonstrated a flying robot that can detect and avoid fast-moving objects. The robot was equipped with a new type of event cameras that allows it to detect balls thrown at it and react in milliseconds. The robot does not throw the ball back for now.
BIOTECHNOLOGY
A Breakthrough in Genetic Medicine for Rare Diseases
Antisense oligonucleotides drugs (ASO), the idea of using genetic information to make a drug that could bind to RNA, have been around since 1978. They use short strings of chemically modified DNA or RNA that are designed to home in on RNA strands to alter the proteins the body ultimately produces. And now, after decades of struggle, ASO is finally being used as a drug to treat spinal muscular atrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
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Conrad Gray (@conradthegray)
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