Scientists have grown a kidney in a laboratory and shown that it works when implanted into a living animal. The work is an important step towards the longer-term goal of growing personalised replacement organs that could be transplanted into people with kidney failure.
House passes controversial cybersecurity bill CISPA in 288-127 vote
Almost half of Democrats support info-sharing bill despite Obama’s veto threat.
Image courtesy of Kwikset’s insomnia and addiction to the shop.
This also happened on April 15th:
“If you have the munchies, you’ve got to get to a restaurant somehow — even if you are 6.
Cops outside Detroit responded to calls of a car driving erratically on a highway and were shocked to find a 6-year-old boy behind the wheel.
The boy told cops he had been driving to get Chinese food, then hit a street sign and tried to drive to a car dealer to fix the damage.”~NYPost
Supreme Court wrestles with right to patent human genes - The Hill's Healthwatch
The lawsuit deals with patents on two genes that can identify a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer. Do companies have the right to patent your genes?
NASA Wants You to Train Its Space Robot
Astronauts on board the International Space Station don’t have a lot of free time, which means the last thing they want to do is expend energy on mundane chores like vacuuming. Enter Robonaut 2, the first humanoid robot in space that takes on these everyday tasks.
R2, which has been on the ISS since 2011, has a mission: clean handrails, vacuum air filters and take air-flow measurements. The problem is it doesn’t yet have the ability to learn and complete the work. So NASA is looking for someone to teach the bot. The Robonaut Challenge calls on contestants to write algorithms that allow R2 to interact with a training dashboard the space agency built.
“R2 is meant to contribute back to the ISS by freeing the astronauts up to do more scientific research and the more difficult tasks,” Allison Thackston of the Robonaut team tells Mashable via email. “We measure our cost savings in crew hours saved, which translates into more important scientific and engineering research being done.”
Competitors will start by writing code that enables R2 to “see” and recognize the state and location of LED-illuminated buttons and switches on the dashboard. Building on that successful algorithm, contestants will write control software that manipulates the objects that Robonaut can recognize and locate.
The contest started on Monday morning and will run for three weeks. However, the Robonaut team says it won’t take long for solutions to start trickling in.
“While there is no requirement for contestants to submit their solutions early, we usually begin seeing the first solutions within a week of launch,” says Robonaut’s Julia Badger.
NASA may eventually use the Robonaut 2 to prepare or clean up work sites for astronauts outside the ISS. However, as sophisticated as the technology is, R2 won’t likely replace humans in space.
“Robotics technology has a long way to go,” says Badger. “But having a robotic assistant is a great way to push that technology while still having the benefit of human interaction and supervisory control.”
NASA is hosting its Robonaut Challenge with TopCoder, the world’s largest open platform for the computer science community.
Syrian Dictator Bashar Al-Assad assassinated
DAMASCUS — “Brutal Syrian Dictator and Opthamologist Bashar Al-Assad was assassinated by a disgruntled bodyguard Sunday Morning, as western propaganda alleged his involvement in recent chemical attacks rightfully attributed to so-called revolutionary forces which act as proxies for Christendom. Assad was rushed to hospital in critical condition, but did not survive the gunshot wounds.
Fans of Assad mourn his loss and hope the state of emergency instituted in 1963 will continue in perpetuity. Assad has followed through with promises to appease Arab Spring protesters by further violent suppression of political speech and increasing crackdowns on rebels influenced by western powers.
Kim Jong-Un poured a forty-ounce over the grave of his grandfather saying, “I ain’t gonna forget my nigga Assad, he been sendin’ me dat rocketry ‘n shit, and he always hooked a brother up with Hennessy.”
The assassin was reportedly arrested while screaming, in English, “We are Anonymous! Expect Us!”~Kilgoar | Chronicle.su
Supreme Court OKs $222K Verdict for Sharing 24 Songs
“The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a jury’s conclusion that infamous file-sharer Jammie Thomas-Rasset pay the recording industry $222,000 for downloading and sharing two dozen copyrighted songs on the now-defunct file-sharing service Kazaa.
Without comment, the justices declined (.pdf) to review a petition from the Minnesota woman who claimed the damages award was unconstitutionally excessive and was not rationally related to the harm she caused the music labels. Thomas-Rasset was the nation’s first file-sharer to challenge a Recording Industry Association of America lawsuit, one of thousands the industry lodged against individuals who illegally shared music on peer-to-peer networks.” Read More: Wired
Meanwhile in the US President Obama has passed an executive order to push Cybersecurity bill forward
“CISPA Strikes Back? Barack Obama’s Cybersecurity Executive Order”~Via TheDailyBeast
It seems President Obama has some seriously legitimate reasons for pushing this would be Cispa bill forward however imho to those pursuing online activism in the US I would recommend you find a new hobby to avoid becoming cannon fodder. Read entire executive order here: CloudDoc
