NewConcepts News

The US Supreme Court has ruled that race can no longer be considered as a factor in university admissions.

отныне католики не должны пытаться обратить евреев в христианство и заниматься миссионерством в еврейской среде. Вместо этого им предписано признать евреев носителями слова Божьего, прочувствовать их боль в связи с Катастрофой европейского еврейства и бок о бок сражаться с антисемитизмом.

Президент Обама подписал один из самых революционных биллей в новейшей мировой истории – Соединённые Штаты сняли 40-летний запрет на экспорт нефти.

Пару дней назад появилось интересное сообщение об обнаружении нового вида грибов, которые питаются исключительно бананами. Так что же, прощайте бананы? И кто в мире растений следующая жертва грибов?

Исследователи нашли огромный резервуар воды под мантией Земли, на глубине около 600 км. Его размеры настолько огромны, что этой водой можно заполнить три раза все океаны на Земле которые мы знаем.

замаранные сотрудничеством с нацистами, швейцарские банки начали активно сотрудничать с банками союзников, дав им возможность наживаться на награбленном. Это позволило «гномам» оставить себе две трети попавшего к ним нацистского золота.

Они знают точные полные имена, и у них даже есть все фотографии всего боевого расчета этого “Бука”, который сбил Боинг.

Автопроизводитель показал футуристичный электрокар Chevrolet-FNR Компания General Motors показала концептуальный автономный автомобиль будущего – Chevrolet Find New Roads (FNR) с автопилотом и электроприводом.

An experimental Ebola vaccine seems to confer total protection against infection in people who are at high risk of contracting the virus, according to the preliminary results of a trial in Guinea that were announced today and published1 in The Lancet. They are the first evidence that a vaccine protects humans from Ebola infection.

A technique for editing genes while they reside in intact chromosomes has been a real breakthrough. Literally. In 2013, Science magazine named it the runner-up for breakthrough-of-the-year, and its developers won the 2015 Breakthrough Prize. The system being honored is called CRISPR/Cas9, and it evolved as a way for bacteria to destroy viruses using RNA that matched the virus' DNA sequence. But it's turned out to be remarkably flexible, and the technique can be retargeted to any gene simply by modifying the RNA. Researchers are still figuring out new uses for the system, which means there are papers coming out nearly every week, many of them difficult to distinguish.

IF NASA PLANS to send robots to other planets, it’s going to need some new designs: ones that are easy to land, easy to move around, and easy to fix. That means they probably won’t look like a bipedal T-1000 chasing the one hope for mankind. They probably won’t even look like the four-legged galloping critters Boston Dynamics is building. Nope. Those robots will look like a hexahedral tent stripped of its fabric.

The values of two inherent properties of one photon – its spin and its orbital angular momentum – have been transferred via quantum teleportation onto another photon for the first time by physicists in China. Previous experiments have managed to teleport a single property, but scaling that up to two properties proved to be a difficult task, which has only now been achieved. The team's work is a crucial step forward in improving our understanding of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and the result could also play an important role in the development of quantum communications and quantum computers.

Ask "the invisible". They appeared in a hit list of Islamic terrorism alongside the director of Charlie Hebdo, Stephane Charbonnier, killed in his Paris'office. They are cartoonists, journalists and intellectuals involved in the publication of the cartoons. Today, most of them have become ghosts, untraceable, living in hiding, hidden in some country house, or have retired to private life to defuse the fatwa that branded them, victims of an understandable self- censorship. Yesterday, the director of the Independent, Amol Rajan, had the courage to confess that he decided not to republish the cartoons. "Too risky," wrote the journalist who heads one of the glories of the Anglo-Saxon liberal chattering classes

Macmillan have released an interesting press release, announcing that all research papers published in their 49 Nature Publishing Group (NPG) journals, including Nature, will be made free to read online, via one of Digital Science’s pet projects, ReadCube (note that Digital Science is also owned by Macmillan). These articles can be annotated in ReadCube, but not copied, printed, or downloaded. This is not open access*, and NPG have been very careful and explicit about stating this. What is the reason for this move, then, when we have a globally shifting environment towards open access? Well, academics love to break rules. We share papers freely, and often illegally, with our colleagues all the time. It’s a sort of passive rebellion against paywall-based publishers. A great example of this is #icanhazpdf on Twitter, whereby articles are requested, and then hopefully shared privately by someone else. This kind of activity is what NPG are calling ‘dark social’, like some terrible name for an evil media organisation. By this, they simply mean sharing, but out of their control. This new initiative seems to be a way of controlling, and legitimising this sort of ‘peer-to-peer’ practice.

Participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. In a study that will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reported the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s gray matter. “Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.” Previous studies from Lazar’s group and others found structural differences between the brains of experienced meditation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation, observing thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. But those investigations could not document that those differences were actually produced by meditation.

The digital health revolution is still stuck. Tech giants are jumping into the fray with fitness offerings like Apple Health and Google Fit, but there’s still not much in the way of, well, actual medicine. The Fitbits and Jawbones of the world measure users’ steps and heart rate, but they don’t get into the deep diagnostics of, say, biomarkers, the internal indicators that can serve as an early warning sign of a serious ailment. For now, those who want to screen for a disease or measure a medical condition with clinical accuracy still need to go to the doctor. Dr. Eugene Chan and his colleagues at the DNA Medical Institute (DMI) aim to change that. Chan’s team has created a portable handheld device that can diagnose hundreds of diseases using a single drop of blood with what Chan claims is gold-standard accuracy. Known as rHEALTH, the technology was developed over the course of seven years with grants from NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. On Monday, the team received yet another nod (and more funding) as the winners of this year’s Nokia Sensing XChallenge, one of several competitions run by the moonshot-seeking XPrize Foundation.

Walk through the archives of any academic library and you will find dusty shelves of scientific journals dating back to the early 20th century and sometimes beyond. It’s hard to know the last time many of these volumes were opened or whether the information they contain has long been forgotten. That’s in stark contrast to the way most scientists access scientific papers today; in a matter of seconds after a straightforward web search. Never has it been so easy to look up a circuit diagram, learn about gene therapy or read the latest papers about black holes. That’s why many scientific publishers have digitised their archives to make the entire history of their publications available online and as easy to search as modern papers. That raises an interesting question—if old papers are now as easy to find as modern ones, are they having as great an impact? Today we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Alex Verstak and pals at Google. These guys have studied how often older articles are cited in modern papers and how this has changed since the advent of electronic publishing in the 1990s. Their conclusion is that older papers are having an increasingly important impact on modern science—that the distinction between old and new, between the historical and the modern, no longer creates a division in science.

Как заявил министр иностранных дел Канады Джон Бэрд: "Канада не будет стоять за Израилем в Организации Объединенных Наций. Мы будем стоять прямо рядом с ним. Всегда можно начать совершать правильные поступки".

Maybe its because we don't understand time, that we keep trying to measure it more accurately. But that desire to pin down the elusive ticking of the clock may soon be the undoing of time as we know it: The next generation of clocks will not tell time in a way that most people understand.