Larry Chen, the former school teacher from a Chinese village who became one of the world’s richest people, is closing in on losing his billionaire status as shares in his online-education business slump, Bloomberg reports. GSX Techedu Inc. shares have plunged 88% since late January, wiping almost $14 billion from Chen’s fortune and leaving him a net worth of about $1.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The Chinese firm has been buffeted...
Donald Trump's blog on his official website has been terminated, CNBC reported today. The blog, which launched in early May, was used to share statements after Trump was banned by social media sites including Facebook and Twitter. The blog "From the Desk of Donald J. Trump" was "just auxiliary" to the ex-president's communications efforts, senior aide Jason Miller said. In his posts, Trump adopted a tone similar to the one he used on his now-defunct Twitter account --...
Moderna is seeking full approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to administer its coronavirus vaccine in people 18 and older, CNET reports. The vaccine is being given to adults in the U.S. under an emergency use authorization, which was granted in December. Last week, the company said its vaccine is effective in 12- to 17-year-olds, and will seek approval to administer its vaccine to teenagers this month.
https://www.cnet.com/health/moderna-seeks-full-fda-approval-of-its-covid-19-vaccine/
A paper published in Applied Energy by researchers from the Smart Systems Group (SSG) at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, has shown that tools from distributed artificial intelligence (specifically multi-agent systems) and co-operative game theory can be used in energy communities to increase use of renewables, protect the lifetime of expensive assets such as batteries, and to devise fair ways to divide joint gains. Their work develops algorithms for smart control of community energy assets to...
A new study by Jennifer Raynor, a natural resource economist at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and her colleagues, suggests that wild wolves in Wisconsin are helping save human lives and billions of dollars in damages by reducing the number of collisions between cars and deer. More than one million car-deer collisions occur in the U.S. every year causing many injuries and deaths, and with an associated cost of about 10 billion U.S. dollars, according to the researchers....
As automobile manufacturers race to cash in on the soaring popularity of electric vehicles, concerns grow about the environmental and social impact of more intense mining operations. In a report in the journal Nature Reviews Materials, British earth scientist Richard Herrington points out that by the year 2035, there could be 245 million battery-powered electric vehicles on the road. In addition, there will be a huge demand for stationary batteries needed for energy storage to compensate for the less...
German researchers have proposed a solution to prevent blood clots caused by two leading COVID-19 vaccines. Other scientists warn it is too early to draw conclusions about the mechanism behind the potentially deadly condition, CBC reports. The researchers behind the new preprint study say they hope their theory could eventually help laboratories adapt the AstraZeneca-Oxford and Johnson & Johnson vaccines to increase safety and boost global vaccination efforts. Though uncommon, vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT) is much more severe than a...
Microsoft president Brad Smith told the BBC that it will be "difficult to catch up” with rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. “If we don’t enact the laws that will protect the public in the future, we are going to find the technology racing ahead ... ” he said. “I’m constantly reminded of George Orwell’s lessons in his book 1984. You know the fundamental story…was about a government who could see everything that everyone did and hear everything...
Scientists from the Santa Fe Institute, MIT, and ETH Zürich have developed a scaling law that governs the number of visitors to any urban location based on how far they are traveling and how often they are visiting. The researchers' findings are a result of analysis of data from millions of anonymized cellphone users in urban regions including Boston, Lisbon, Singapore, and Dakar. The visitation law increases accuracy in predicting flows between locations, which could have...
Researchers have shown that sustainably decarbonizing the U.S. energy system by 2050 will require us to change the way energy transitions are modelled and account for the role of public opinion, reports Tech Xplore. Carnegie Mellon University researchers used nuclear energy as a case study of how conventional energy models – which minimize system costs – fail at accounting for social acceptance, a factor that can inhibit the deployment of certain technologies such as...
