Monday, February 11, 2019

Chinese Sci-Fi


Wandering Earth

Shanghai Fortress

Pathfinder







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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/11/china-first-blockbuster-sci-fi-film-wandering-earth

China challenges Hollywood with own sci-fi blockbuster

Wandering Earth on track to be one of highest-grossing films in country’s history
 in Beijing
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The Wandering Earth, Liu Lang Di Qiu (2019)
 The Wandering Earth been described as a cross between Armageddon and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Photograph: China Film Group Corporation/IMDB
China has entered the cinematic space race. Wandering Earth, the country’s first blockbuster sci-fi film, is on track to be one of the highest-grossing films in China’s history.
The film has brought in more than 2bn yuan (£232m) in the six days since its release on 5 February, lunar new year. So far, it is the highest-grossing film released over the holiday season, a peak time for the Chinese box office.
Set in the distant future, the governments of Earth, confronted with annihilation from an unstable sun, have strapped thrusters on to the planet, ejecting it out into the universe in search of a new home. But as the Earth approaches Jupiter, a malfunction in the system puts it on course to crash into the planet.
The Wandering Earth / Liu Lang Di Qiu (2019)
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 The Wandering Earth is seen by some as the dawn of Chinese sci-fi. Photograph: China Film Group Corporation/IMDB
Described as a cross between Armageddon and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film is seen by some as the dawn of Chinese sci-fi – a genre that has long been dominated by Hollywood. Several other Chinese-made sci-fi films are due to debut this year, including Shanghai Fortress, about an alien invasion, and Pathfinder, which follows a spaceship that has crashed on a deserted planet.
Frant Gwo, the director of Wandering Earth, told the government web portal China.org.cn: “2019 could be remembered as year zero of Chinese science-fiction blockbusters. It is not just about one successful movie but about the emergence of multiple films.”
China is already home to a thriving science and speculative fiction literary scene. Wandering Earth is based on the work of Liu Cixin, the author of the Three-Body Problem series and the first Chinese author to win a Hugo award,
Actor Ng Man-tat and actor Wu Jing attend a press conference of film ‘The Wandering Earth’ in Beijing.
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 Actors Ng Man-tat and Wu Jing attend a press conference of The Wandering Earth in Beijing. Photograph: VCG/via Getty Images
“The Wandering Earth fills the gap in Chinese science fiction movies. It means that China’s science fiction movies have officially set sail,” one fan of the film wrote on the review site Douban.
China’s film market is expected to overtake the US as the world’s largest by 2022. In the first quarter of last year, the Chinese market surpassed that of the US, with films such as Ready Player One and Pacific Rim enjoying bigger box office debuts in China than the US.
Yet, Chinese studios have not invested in sci-fi films. According to Liu, the author of the novel Wandering Earth, the main difference between Chinese and US audiences is trust.
“Building trust between producers, investors and the audience is the biggest challenge here,” he told the state broadcaster CCTV. “Not so many people have faith in a Chinese sci-fi movie,” he said.
Indeed, Wandering Earth was slow to get off the ground in the first few days of its release, with many sceptical of a Chinese-made sci-fi film. As Wandering Earth received positive reviews for its special effects, pacing and arresting views of the Earth as seen from space, it quickly gained momentum.
For Chinese moviegoers, accustomed to sci-fi films made by US studios, Chinese elements such as references to spring festival, or Chinese new year, mahjong and road signs common in China (anquan diyitiao, “safety number one”) were a welcome change.
Some noted that unlike many Chinese blockbusters, Wandering Earth dials back on the patriotism. Rescue teams from around the world scramble to get the thrusters back up and running. A Russian soldier sacrifices his life to help a Chinese colleague.
“This is not a patriotic film but a film about humans saving themselves,” one reviewer said.
Critics of the film have pointed out plot holes, cloying sentimentality and one-dimensional female characters – traits Wandering Earth shares with its Hollywood peers.
In response to plot criticisms about the necessity of ejecting Earth from the solar system, Liu said: “Of course we don’t need to escape soon … That’s why it’s a movie instead of a [real-life] crisis.”
Additional reporting by Wang Xueying
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Thursday, February 7, 2019

gene editing 1st

https://apnews.com/d728f86d70d94ce68dd4fedffe58d03f
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study finds new music sucks

https://metro.co.uk/2019/02/07/millennials-prefer-music-20th-century-golden-age-pop-today-research-reveals-8462993/

Millennials prefer music from 20th century ‘golden age’ to the pop of today, research suggests 

By Jasper Hamill

Research has suggested that modern music really isn’t as good as the old classics. A study has found that golden oldies stick in millennials’ minds far more than the relatively bland, homogenous pop of today. A golden age of popular music lasted from the 1960s to the 1990s, academics claimed. Songs from this era proved to be much more memorable than tunes released in the 21st century.

Scientists tested a group of millennials on their ability to recognise hit records from different decades. The 643 participants, typically aged 18 to 25, maintained a steady memory of top tunes that came out between 1960 and 1999. In contrast, their memory of 21st-century songs from 2000 to 2015 – while higher overall – diminished rapidly over time. Lead researcher Dr Pascal Wallisch, from New York University in the US, said: ‘The 1960s to 1990s was a special time in music, reflected by a steady recognition of pieces of that era-even by today’s millennials.’ During this period songs reaching the top of the US Billboard charts were significantly more varied than they were between 2000 to 2015, or the 1940s and 1950s, said the scientists. Even so, certain songs were far more memorable than others, the study found.

Well known examples included ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ by Percy Sledge (1966), ‘Baby Come Back’ by Player (1977) and ‘The Tide is High’ by Blondie (1980). Others, including ‘Knock Three Times’ by Dawn (1970), ‘I’m Sorry’ by John Denver (1975) and ‘Truly’ by Lionel Richie (1982) were all but forgotten. Songs selected for the study included those that reached number one on the Billboard Top 100 between 1940 and 1957, and the top slot on the Billboard ‘Hot 100’ from 1958 to 2015. Each participant was presented with short excerpts from a random selection of seven out of 152 songs and asked to say if they recognised them.


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Wednesday, January 30, 2019

brain to speech

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190129081919.htm


Engineers translate brain signals directly into speech

Advance marks critical step toward brain-computer interfaces that hold immense promise for those with limited or no ability to speak

Date:
January 29, 2019
Source:
The Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University
Summary:
In a scientific first, neuroengineers have created a system that translates thought into intelligible, recognizable speech. This breakthrough, which harnesses the power of speech synthesizers and artificial intelligence, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain.
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Concept illustration (stock image).
Credit: © adragan / Fotolia
In a scientific first, Columbia neuroengineers have created a system that translates thought into intelligible, recognizable speech. By monitoring someone's brain activity, the technology can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity. This breakthrough, which harnesses the power of speech synthesizers and artificial intelligence, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain. It also lays the groundwork for helping people who cannot speak, such as those living with as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or recovering from stroke, regain their ability to communicate with the outside world.
These findings were published today in Scientific Reports.
"Our voices help connect us to our friends, family and the world around us, which is why losing the power of one's voice due to injury or disease is so devastating," said Nima Mesgarani, PhD, the paper's senior author and a principal investigator at Columbia University's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. "With today's study, we have a potential way to restore that power. We've shown that, with the right technology, these people's thoughts could be decoded and understood by any listener."
Decades of research has shown that when people speak -- or even imagine speaking -- telltale patterns of activity appear in their brain. Distinct (but recognizable) pattern of signals also emerge when we listen to someone speak, or imagine listening. Experts, trying to record and decode these patterns, see a future in which thoughts need not remain hidden inside the brain -- but instead could be translated into verbal speech at will.
But accomplishing this feat has proven challenging. Early efforts to decode brain signals by Dr. Mesgarani and others focused on simple computer models that analyzed spectrograms, which are visual representations of sound frequencies.
But because this approach has failed to produce anything resembling intelligible speech, Dr. Mesgarani's team turned instead to a vocoder, a computer algorithm that can synthesize speech after being trained on recordings of people talking.
"This is the same technology used by Amazon Echo and Apple Siri to give verbal responses to our questions," said Dr. Mesgarani, who is also an associate professor of electrical engineering at Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.
To teach the vocoder to interpret to brain activity, Dr. Mesgarani teamed up with Ashesh Dinesh Mehta, MD, PhD, a neurosurgeon at Northwell Health Physician Partners Neuroscience Institute and co-author of today's paper. Dr. Mehta treats epilepsy patients, some of whom must undergo regular surgeries.
"Working with Dr. Mehta, we asked epilepsy patients already undergoing brain surgery to listen to sentences spoken by different people, while we measured patterns of brain activity," said Dr. Mesgarani. "These neural patterns trained the vocoder."
Next, the researchers asked those same patients to listen to speakers reciting digits between 0 to 9, while recording brain signals that could then be run through the vocoder. The sound produced by the vocoder in response to those signals was analyzed and cleaned up by neural networks, a type of artificial intelligence that mimics the structure of neurons in the biological brain.
The end result was a robotic-sounding voice reciting a sequence of numbers. To test the accuracy of the recording, Dr. Mesgarani and his team tasked individuals to listen to the recording and report what they heard.
"We found that people could understand and repeat the sounds about 75% of the time, which is well above and beyond any previous attempts," said Dr. Mesgarani. The improvement in intelligibility was especially evident when comparing the new recordings to the earlier, spectrogram-based attempts. "The sensitive vocoder and powerful neural networks represented the sounds the patients had originally listened to with surprising accuracy."
Dr. Mesgarani and his team plan to test more complicated words and sentences next, and they want to run the same tests on brain signals emitted when a person speaks or imagines speaking. Ultimately, they hope their system could be part of an implant, similar to those worn by some epilepsy patients, that translates the wearer's thoughts directly into words.
"In this scenario, if the wearer thinks 'I need a glass of water,' our system could take the brain signals generated by that thought, and turn them into synthesized, verbal speech," said Dr. Mesgarani. "This would be a game changer. It would give anyone who has lost their ability to speak, whether through injury or disease, the renewed chance to connect to the world around them."
Story Source:
Materials provided by The Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
  1. Hassan Akbari, Bahar Khalighinejad, Jose L. Herrero, Ashesh D. Mehta, Nima Mesgarani. Towards reconstructing intelligible speech from the human auditory cortex. Scientific Reports, 2019; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-37359-z
Cite This Page:
The Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University. "Engineers translate brain signals directly into speech: Advance marks critical step toward brain-computer interfaces that hold immense promise for those with limited or no ability to speak." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 29 January 2019. .
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Tuesday, January 29, 2019

cancer cure in one year

https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for-cancer-Israeli-scientists-say-they-think-they-found-one-578939

A CURE FOR CANCER? ISRAELI SCIENTISTS SAY THEY THINK THEY FOUND ONE

“We believe we will offer in a year's time a complete cure for cancer."

BY 
 
 JANUARY 28, 2019 23:14
 


    A cure for cancer? Israeli scientists say they think they found one
    Dr. Ilan Moran. (photo credit: Courtesy)
    A small team of Israeli scientists think they might have found the first complete cure for cancer.

    “We believe we will offer in a year’s time a complete cure for cancer,” said Dan Aridor, of a new treatment being developed by his company, Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd. (AEBi), which was founded in 2000 in the ITEK incubator in the Weizmann Science Park. AEBi developed the SoAP platform, which provides functional leads to very difficult targets.
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    “Our cancer cure will be effective from day one, will last a duration of a few weeks and will have no or minimal side-effects at a much lower cost than most other treatments on the market,” Aridor said. “Our solution will be both generic and personal.”

    It sounds fantastical, especially considering that an estimated 18.1 million new cancer cases are diagnosed worldwide each year, according to reports by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Further, every sixth death in the world is due to cancer, making it the second leading cause of death (second only to cardiovascular disease).

    Aridor, chairman of the board of AEBi and CEO Dr. Ilan Morad, say their treatment, which they call MuTaTo (multi-target toxin) is essentially on the scale of a cancer antibiotic – a disruption technology of the highest order.

    The potentially game-changing anti-cancer drug is based on SoAP technology, which belongs to the phage display group of technologies. It involves the introduction of DNA coding for a protein, such as an antibody, into a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria. That protein is then displayed on the surface of the phage. Researchers can use these protein-displaying phages to screen for interactions with other proteins, DNA sequences and small molecules.

    In 2018, a team of scientists won the Nobel Prize for their work on phage display in the directed evolution of new proteins – in particular, for the production of antibody therapeutics.

    AEBi is doing something similar but with peptides, compounds of two or more amino acids linked in a chain. According to Morad, peptides have several advantages over antibodies, including that they are smaller, cheaper, and easier to produce and regulate.

    When the company first started, Morad said, “We were doing what everyone else was doing, trying to discover individual novel peptides for specific cancers.” But shortly thereafter, Morad and his colleague, Dr. Hanan Itzhaki, decided they wanted to do something bigger.

    To get started, Morad said they had to identify why other cancer-killing drugs and treatments don’t work or eventually fail. Then, they found a way to counter that effect.

    For starters, most anti-cancer drugs attack a specific target on or in the cancer cell, he explained. Inhibiting the target usually affects a physiological pathway that promotes cancer. Mutations in the targets – or downstream in their physiological pathways – could make the targets not relevant to the cancer nature of the cell, and hence the drug attacking it is rendered ineffective.

    In contrast, MuTaTo is using a combination of several cancer-targeting peptides for each cancer cell at the same time, combined with a strong peptide toxin that would kill cancer cells specifically. By using at least three targeting peptides on the same structure with a strong toxin, Morad said, “we made sure that the treatment will not be affected by mutations; cancer cells can mutate in such a way that targeted receptors are dropped by the cancer.”

    “The probability of having multiple mutations that would modify all targeted receptors simultaneously decreases dramatically with the number of targets used,” Morad continued. “Instead of attacking receptors one at a time, we attack receptors three at a time – not even cancer can mutate three receptors at the same time.”

    Furthermore, many cancer cells activate detoxification mechanisms when in stress from drugs. The cells pump out the drugs or modify them to be non-functional. But Morad said detoxification takes time. When the toxin is strong, it has a high probability of killing the cancer cell before detoxification occurs, which is what he is banking on.

    Many cytotoxic anticancer treatments aim at fast-growing cells. But cancer stem cells are not fast growing, and they can escape these treatments. Then, when the treatment is over, they can generate cancer again.

    “If it does not completely annihilate the cancer, the remaining cells can start to get mutations again, and then the cancer comes back, but this time it is drug resistant,” Morad said.

    He explained that because cancer cells are born out of mutations that occur in cancer stem cells, most of the overexpressed proteins which are targeted on the cancer cell exist in the cancer stem cells. MuTaTo’s multiple-target attack ensures that they will be destroyed as well.

    Finally, some cancer tumors erect shields which create access problems to large molecules, such as antibodies. MuTaTo acts like an octopus or a piece of spaghetti and can sneak into places where other large molecules cannot reach. Morad said the peptide parts of MuTaTo are very small (12 amino acids long) and lack a rigid structure.

    “This should make the whole molecule non-immunogenic in most cases and would enable repeated administration of the drug,” he said.

    Morad said their discovery could also reduce the sickening side-effects of most cancer treatments, which stem from drug treatments interacting with the wrong or additional targets, or the correct targets but on non-cancerous cells. He said MuTaTo’s having a combination of several highly specific cancer-targeting peptides on one scaffold for each type of cancer cell would increase the specificity to the cancer cell due to the avidity effect. In addition, in most cases, the non-cancer cells that have a protein in common with the cancer cells do not overexpress it.

    “This makes a great difference between the two kinds of cells and should decrease the side effects dramatically,” Morad said.

    He equated the concept of MuTaTo to the triple drug cocktail that has helped change AIDS from being an automatic death sentence to a chronic – but often manageable – disease.

    Today, AIDS patients take protease inhibitors in combination with two other drugs called reverse transcriptase inhibitors. The drug combination disrupts HIV at different stages in its replication, restrains an enzyme crucial to an early stage of HIV duplication and holds back another enzyme that functions near the end of the HIV replication process.

    “We used to give AIDS patients several drugs, but we would administer them one at a time,” Morad explained. “During the course of treatment, the virus mutated, and the AIDS started attacking again. Only when patients started using a cocktail, were they able to stop the disease.”

    Now, he said, people with AIDS are HIV carriers, but they are not sick anymore.

    The MuTaTo cancer treatment will eventually be personalized. Each patient will provide a piece of his biopsy to the lab, which would then analyze it to know which receptors are overexpressed. The individual would then be administered exactly the molecule cocktail needed to cure his disease.
    However, unlike in the case of AIDS, where patients must take the cocktail throughout their lives, in the case of MuTaTo, the cells would be killed, and the patient could likely stop treatment after only a few weeks.

    The company is now writing patents on specific peptides, which will be a large bank of targeting toxin peptides wholly owned and hard to break, said Aridor.

    Morad said that so far, the company has concluded its first exploratory mice experiment, which inhibited human cancer cell growth and had no effect at all on healthy mice cells, in addition to several in-vitro trials. AEBi is on the cusp of beginning a round of clinical trials which could be completed within a few years and would make the treatment available in specific cases.
    Aridor added: “Our results are consistent and repeatable.”
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