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Watch the world’s first drone skydive!

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The subconscious communicates truths better than intellect.

Actor Ethan Hawke on ambiguity.

How old, black and white photos get colorized — and why artists do it despite criticism.

A ban on human-animal hybrids was just lifted.

ICYMI: A ban on human/animal hybrids has been lifted.

It will be the longest sea crossing in the world.

This foldable bike helmet can fit into a water bottle.

Rice University computer scientists have adapted a widely used technique for rapid data lookup to slash the amount of computation — and thus energy and time — required for deep learning, a computationally intense form of machine learning.

“This applies to any deep-learning architecture, and the technique scales sublinearly, which means that the larger the deep neural network to which this is applied, the more the savings in computations there will be,” said lead researcher Anshumali Shrivastava, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice.

The research will be presented in August at the KDD 2017 conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It addresses one of the biggest issues facing tech giants like Google, Facebook and Microsoft as they race to build, train and deploy massive deep-learning networks for a growing body of products as diverse as self-driving cars, language translators and intelligent replies to emails.

A study by neuroscientists at Toronto-based Baycrest Rotman Research Institute and Stanford University involving playing a musical instrument suggests ways to improve brain rehabilitation methods.

In the study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience on May 24, 2017, the researchers asked young adults to listen to sounds from an unfamiliar musical instrument (a Tibetan singing bowl). Half of the subjects (the experimental group) were then asked to recreate the same sounds and rhythm by striking the bowl; the other half (the control group) were instead asked to recreate the sound by simply pressing a key on a computer keypad.

Continue reading “Playing a musical instrument could help restore brain health, research suggests” »

A story on why we might one day become an extragalactic solar system. From the archives.

Why Earth and the rest of our solar system may eventually become an intergalactic solar system.