SCIENCE BOND

The genome is the instruction booklet for building a human, comprising three billion paired DNA "letters".  The work shows that early Irish farmers were similar to southern Europeans.  Genetic patterns then changed dramatically in the Bronze Age - as newcomers from the eastern periphery of Europe settled in the Atlantic region.  Details of the work, by geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queen's University Belfast are published in the journal PNAS.Team members sequenced the genomes of a 5,200-year-old female farmer from the Neolithic period and three 4,000-year-old males from the Bronze Age.  Opinion has been divided on whether the great transitions in the British Isles, from a hunting lifestyle to one based on agriculture and later from stone to metal use, were due to local adoption of new ways by indigenous people or attributable to large-scale population movements. The ancient Irish genomes show unequivocal evidence for mass mi...

Mimicking each other's facial expressions is a human habit, which helps people to get along.  Dogs do the same to bond with other dogs, scientists report in the journal, Royal Society Open Science.  They think dogs may be showing a basic built-in form of empathy, enabling them to pick up on emotions.  And the phenomenon may have emerged in our canine companions during the process of domestication, say scientists from the Natural History Museum, University of Pisa.Until now, the idea - involved in social bonding - has only been described in humans and non-human primates such as chimps and orangutans.  It is why humans automatically mirror a smile or a laugh, enabling the sharing of emotions. The team of three researchers - working with the Unit of Cognitive Primatology and Primate Center in Rome - videotaped dogs playing in a park in Palermo, Italy.  They analysed the way the dogs were interacting, including signals used to show when a dog was being ...

The actual pigeons could generalise precisely what they learned, correctly distinguishing tumours within invisible microscope images.  In addition, they performed well with a particular mammogram-classifying task, though an extra mammogram analyze (recognising shady lumps) turned out way too tough.  The actual pigeons' capacity may help increase completely new image-based analysis technological know-how. Probable zero bigger than the tip of this catalog little finger, the actual pigeon's human brain on the other hand provides remarkable functions.  Pigeons can easily recognize identities along with emotive expressions about human looks, letters on the alphabet, misshapen drug products, and also art simply by Monet compared to Picasso, inches stated Prof Edward Wasserman from your School regarding Iowa, the co-author on the review. "Their aesthetic storage volume is every bit as remarkable, which has a established remember in excess of 1, 900 images. inches...

Yamaha motors  Yamaha Motors has revealed it is developing a robot designed to ride any racing motorbike at high speeds.  The Japanese company unveiled a prototype at the Tokyo Motor Show. At present it is reliant on human operators, but in time the firm plans to have the android make its own decisions about the best course and speed to achieve the best race time around a track.

Quadcopter drones have been programmed to build a rope bridge capable of supporting the weight of a human. The project was the result of a joint study by two researchers - one specialising in robotics, the other architecture - at ETH Zurich University's Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control and Gramazio Kohler Research.  They hope the technology could eventually be used to save lives.

UK scientists are seeking permission to genetically modify human embryos for the first time.  Researchers at The Francis Crick Institute in London want to use a controversial genetic technique to carry out research into infertility.  The embryos would be destroyed after the research and not implanted into the womb.  The government's fertility watchdog said it had received the application, which would be looked at in due course.  In the UK, it is illegal to use gene editing of embryos in IVF treatment, but it is permissible for research purposes, under a licence.  "We have recently received an application to use Crispr/Cas9 (gene editing) in one of our licensed research projects, and it will be considered in due course," said a spokesperson for the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority (HFEA). When scientists in China announced they had genetically modified  human embryos in a world first earlier this year, there was an outcry. The e...

By 2050 some experts believe that machines will have reached human level intelligence. Thanks, in part, to a new era of machine learning, computer are already learning from raw data in the same way as the human infant learns from the world around her.  It means we are getting machines that can, for example, teach themselves how to play computer games and get incredibly good at them (work ongoing at Google's DeepMind) and devices that can start to communicate in human-like speech, such as voice assistants on smartphones.  Computers are beginning to understand the world outside of bits and bytes.First as a PhD student and latterly as director of the computer vision lab at Stanford University, she has pursued the painstakingly difficult goal with an aim of ultimately creating the electronic eyes for robots and machines to see and, more importantly, understand their environment.  Half of all human brainpower goes into visual processing even though it is something we all ...