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The UK government is continuing its electric vehicle push by giving Jaguar Land Rover a £500 million ($620 million) loan guarantee to help advance its position as a global EV maker. This means that should Jaguar Land Rover default, the governme...

Scientific American presents the winner and runners-up of the ninth annual Art of Neuroscience contest, along with other notable entries

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Hey, good morning! You look fabulous. Morning, there! Did you join the not-so-secret society of Instant Pot owners following those Amazon Prime Day sales? We're here to make sure it doesn't gather dust, with a bunch of tips (and crucially) recipes f...

Meredith Whittaker previously said she faced retaliation from the search giant.

Jiaming Luo and Regina Barzilay from MIT and Yuan Cao from Google's AI lab in Mountain View, California, have developed a machine-learning system capable of deciphering lost languages, and they've demonstrated it on a script from the Mediterranean island of Crete. The script, Linear B, appeared after 1400 BCE, when the island was conquered by Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland. MIT Technology Review reports: Luo and co put the technique to the test with two lost languages, Linear B and Ugaritic. Linguists know that Linear B encodes an early version of ancient Greek and that Ugaritic, which was discovered in 1929, is an early form of Hebrew. Given that information and the constraints imposed by linguistic evolution, Luo and co's machine is able to translate both languages with remarkable accuracy. "We were able to correctly translate 67.3% of Linear B cognates into their Greek equivalents in the decipherment scenario," they say. "To the best of our knowledge, our experiment is the first attempt of deciphering Linear B automatically." That's impressive work that takes machine translation to a new level. But it also raises the interesting question of other lost languages -- particularly those that have never been deciphered, such as Linear A. In this paper, Linear A is conspicuous by its absence. Luo and co do not even mention it, but it must loom large in their thinking, as it does for all linguists. Yet significant breakthroughs are still needed before this script becomes amenable to machine translation. For example, nobody knows what language Linear A encodes. Attempts to decipher it into ancient Greek have all failed. And without the progenitor language, the new technique does not work.

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There's a problem in cell biology research: to study what happens inside a cell, it has to be destroyed. When scientists use a traditional microscope to observe a cell, they use stains -- chemicals that color parts of the cell to make them visible. H...

It'll likely take a while before a Hyperloop network can take passengers to their destinations, but a team competing at the 2019 SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition is giving people a glimpse of what that could look like. A team from the Netherland's De...

The grand prize includes a complete Captain Marvel collection set and the Star Wars Retro Collection featuring the 1977 designs. This giveaway ends July 25, 2019.

Scientists believe aerogel sheets could transform the cold, arid surface of Mars into land fit for farming. The Guardian reports: The "aerogel" sheets work by mimicking Earth's greenhouse effect, where energy from the sun is trapped on the planet by carbon dioxide and other gases. Spread out in the right places on Mars, the sheets would warm the ground and melt enough subsurface ice to keep plants alive. Should humans ever decide to spread beyond Earth, as the late Stephen Hawking declared we must, then growing food on alien worlds will be a skill that has to be mastered. But on Mars the conditions are hardly conducive. The planet is frigid and dry and bombarded by radiation, the soil contains potentially toxic chemicals and the wispy atmosphere is low on nitrogen. The aerogel sheets do not solve all of the problems but they could help future spacefarers create fertile oases on desolate planets where plants and other photosynthesizing organisms can take root. Because life would only grow beneath the sheets, the risk of contaminating the rest of Mars with foreign lifeforms would be minimal. The aerogel used to make the sheets is composed 97% of air, with the rest made up of a light silica network. The researchers, including scientists at Nasa and the University of Edinburgh, showed that 2cm- to 3cm-thick sheets of silica aerogel blocked harmful UV rays, allowed visible light through for photosynthesis and trapped enough heat to melt frozen water locked in Martian soil. The sheets could be laid directly on the ground to grow algae and aquatic plants, or suspended to provide room for land plants to grow beneath them. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy.

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Niantic finally launched trainer battles on Pokémon Go late last year, giving you a way to take on friends or any other random players you come across. Now, the game developer has started rolling out an upgrade for the feature that'll have you...

Prime day is the perfect excuse to dust off your wallet and treat yourself, your car and your garage to a little special something.

Neuralink, Elon Musk's fourth and least visible company, will become a bit less secretive Tuesday with a livestreamed presentation about its technology to connect computers directly to human brains. From a report: Neuralink accepted applications from some folks to attend the San Francisco event to hear "a bit about what we've been working on the last two years," but the rest of us can tune in online at 8 p.m. PT Tuesday. "Livestream details will be available on our website shortly before event start," Neuralink tweeted Sunday. Neuralink, founded in 2016, is working on a way to let human brains communicate directly with computers. Goals include fast transfer rates and quick responses, but just establishing a connection and figuring out how to exchange useful information presents immense challenges. One possible approach involves an array of flexible probes inserted into the brain with a system resembling a sewing machine, an idea described by researchers reportedly associated with Neuralink. That's a lot cruder than the organically grown nanotechnological neural laces you'll find inside the brains of sci-fi characters, but it's remarkable that the technology is even under discussion.

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Respawn may have a particularly poetic way to exact justice on Apex Legends cheaters: give them a taste of their own medicine. The studio has revealed that its anti-cheating efforts will include matchmaking between detected cheaters and spam account...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: Screen time -- and social media in particular -- is linked to an increase in depressive symptoms in teenagers, according to a new study by researchers at Montreal's Sainte-Justine Hospital. The researchers studied the behavior of over 3,800 young people from 2012 until 2018. They recruited adolescents from 31 Montreal schools and followed their behavior from Grade 7 until Grade 11. The teenagers self-reported the number of hours per week that they consumed social media (such as Facebook and Instagram), video games and television. Conrod and her team found an increase in depressive symptoms when the adolescents were consuming social media and television. The study was published on Monday in JAMA Pedatrics, a journal published by the American Medical Association. The researchers "found that the increased symptoms of depression are linked to being active on platforms such as Instagram, where teens are more likely to compare their lives to glitzy images in their feeds," the report says. "They also tested to see if the additional screen time was taking away from other activities that might decrease depressive symptoms, such as exercise, but found that was not the case." Surprisingly, time spent playing video games was found to not be contributing to depressive symptoms. "The study suggests the average gamer is not socially isolated, with more than 70 percent of gamers playing with other people either online or in person," CBC.ca reports.

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This week more than one non-MCU superhero film that's worth watching is available, as Shazam! is released in 4K (and 3D, if you prefer), on disc and digital, and Fast Color makes its debut. On cable, Fear the Walking Dead is coming to a midseason bre...

New submitter HansiMeier33 shares a report from The Guardian: France's annual Bastille Day parade showcased European military cooperation and innovation on Sunday, complete with a French inventor hovering above Paris on a jet-powered flyboard. The former jetskiing champion and military reservist Franky Zapata clutched a rifle as he soared above the Champs-Elysees on his futuristic machine, which the French military helped to develop. The board, which was first created to fly above water, can reach speeds of up to 190km/h and can run for 10 minutes. The French armed forces minister, Florence Parly, said before the parade that the flyboard could "allow tests for different kinds of uses, for example as a flying logistical platform or, indeed, as an assault platform."

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More than 30% of adult Republican Twitter users follow Trump on the platform, a Pew Research Center study finds.

phalse phace writes: Earlier this month, there was a report that Broadcom was in advance talks with Symantec about a possible buyout. It's being reported that those talks have now ended. "Symantec and Broadcom have ceased deal negotiations, sources tell CNBC's David Faber," reports CNBC. "The people familiar with the matter added that Symantec would not accept less than $28 a share. People familiar with the matter added that Broadcom indicated in early conversations that it would be willing to pay $28.25 per share for Symantec, but that following due diligence knocked that figure down below $28."

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Amazon is reportedly working on a series based on Jack Reacher, the character from Lee Child's bestselling crime-thriller novels. According to Deadline, Amazon Studios landed the rights to develop a script-to-series drama. Scorpion creator Nick Santo...

dcblogs writes: The Master of Science in Analytics was created in North Carolina State University in 2006. Today, there are about 280 colleges and universities that offer a similar graduate degree and in total, they will produce about 10,000 analytics master graduates in 2019. "The demand is there, but the supply [of data scientists] is catching up quickly," said Michael Rappa, who founded the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University. Graduates of these programs are typically called data scientists, a relatively new term that's often cited as one of the most in-demand occupations in the U.S. These programs aren't completely unique. Graduates with degrees in statistics, for instance, were forerunners of the shift to analytics. Despite the increase in graduates, the entry level salaries remain strong, typically beginning at $80K plus. Amazon recently cited data scientists as a second fastest internal growing occupations.

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