Many human beings spend the majority of their time indoors, interacting with and coming into contact with other humans, and objects that other humans have touched. At the same time, we're surrounded (inside and out) by a teeming mass of millions of species of microbes that they spread to the people and things surrounding us. Recently, scientists have become interested in these tiny organisms—collectively known as the microbiome—and how they influence our health. And they've come along way. We have a much better understanding of how some of these organisms influence our weight, and our susceptibility to certain diseases.
This past Monday, a snake-inspired robot wriggled down the throat of a live human being. Make that two human beings, operated on during the same day at University Hospital Dinant Godinne in Yvoir, Belgium. The pair of procedures were an important milestone for the Flex system, marking the first time the flexible robot was used on living patients (it had been tested on cadavers last year).
Human beings! Clothes-wearers! Folks who maybe drank some milk right out of the jug one time and spilled it all over themselves but okay it was Saturday night and no one was around and whatever it's not like people have any right to judge others for what they do in their own homes! Rejoice! Your salvation is nigh.
Facebook users upload 350 million photos onto the social network every day, far beyond the ability of human beings to comprehensively look at, much less analyze. And so that’s one big reason the company just hired New York University (NYU) machine learning expert Yann LeCun, an eminent practitioner of an artificial intelligence (AI) technique known as “deep learning.” As director of Facebook’s new AI laboratory, LeCun will stay on at NYU part time, while working from a new Facebook facility on Astor Place in New York City.
