Heart Disease in Women: Age of First Period Can Impact Heart Attack Risk
November 14th, 2019Via: Today:
The age when a woman first starts having her period may be much more significant than she or her doctor realize: it can impact her risk of heart attack, stroke and heart failure.
But most women aren’t aware of this risk factor, said Dr. Carl Pepine, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
“Not only are the women not aware of it, but their physicians aren’t aware of it. This is not recorded in most medical records — 90%,” Pepine told TODAY. “I just don’t think they were informed about it.”
…
Pepine is the co-author of a study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association that found women who started menstruating even a year earlier or later than 12 — which is the average age of menarche, or the first period, for U.S. women — had a higher risk of “major adverse cardiac events.”
Girls who had their first period at 10 or younger had a four-fold higher risk of heart attack, stroke, heart failure and premature death down the road compared to girls who started menstruating at 12, researchers found.
Those who had their first period at 11, 13, 14 and 15 or older had at least a two-fold increased risk of such major cardiac events.
Two-Legged Robot Mimics Human Balance While Running and Jumping
November 13th, 2019It’s always for first responders, fire rescue, etc.
“High-impact tasks in challenging environments.”
I’m sure the Pentagon wouldn’t have any use for this…
*wink*
Via: MIT News:
Rescuing victims from a burning building, a chemical spill, or any disaster that is inaccessible to human responders could one day be a mission for resilient, adaptable robots. Imagine, for instance, rescue-bots that can bound through rubble on all fours, then rise up on two legs to push aside a heavy obstacle or break through a locked door.
Engineers are making strides on the design of four-legged robots and their ability to run, jump and even do backflips. But getting two-legged, humanoid robots to exert force or push against something without falling has been a significant stumbling block.
Now engineers at MIT and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a method to control balance in a two-legged, teleoperated robot — an essential step toward enabling a humanoid to carry out high-impact tasks in challenging environments.
The team’s robot, physically resembling a machined torso and two legs, is controlled remotely by a human operator wearing a vest that transmits information about the human’s motion and ground reaction forces to the robot.
Through the vest, the human operator can both direct the robot’s locomotion and feel the robot’s motions. If the robot is starting to tip over, the human feels a corresponding pull on the vest and can adjust in a way to rebalance both herself and, synchronously, the robot.
In experiments with the robot to test this new “balance feedback” approach, the researchers were able to remotely maintain the robot’s balance as it jumped and walked in place in sync with its human operator.
Nimitz UFO Encounters: Enlisted Sailors Insist Data Was Confiscated by “Two Unknown Individuals”
November 13th, 2019Erase everything, including the blank media. Nice.
In other words, make sure all the tapes were wiped in case anything interesting was left behind after the “unknown individuals” walked off with the bulk of the evidence.
Then they hung out in the Admiral’s quarters with a guard posted outside.
Swamp gas, obviously.
Again, I think it’s black world:
Even assuming that there is no prosaic explanation for what we’re seeing, I think there’s at least better than even odds that an American is at the controls (possibly by remote) of the craft shown in the videos.
Additionally, my guess is that it was a test to determine how the crew and the radar systems would perform.
Via: Popular Mechanics:
Miles away from Voorhis, Day, Turner, and Weigelt, on the deck of the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, Petty Officer Patrick “PJ” Hughes was unaware of the unidentified objects the Carrier group had been dealing with for the past several days. Instead, as an aviation technician, one of Hughes’ jobs was to secure the hard drive data recorders from the airborne early-warning aircraft, the E-2 Hawkeye.
“We call them bricks, but they contain the software to run the airplane and they also record or can record a lot of the data that the air crew sees during the flight,” said Hughes in a YouTube interview.
On November 14, as Hughes performed this routine task, he was unaware that the E-2 hard drives he was securing away in a classified safe had just come from the Hawkeye that Day first tried to use to intercept the mysterious UFOs.
Shortly after securing the data bricks, Hughes said he was visited by his commanding officer and two unknown individuals. “They were not on the ship earlier, and I didn’t see them come on. I’m not sure how they got there,” said Hughes of the two men.
According to Hughes, his commanding officer told him to turn over the recently secured harddrives. “We put them in the bags, he took them, then he and the two anonymous officers left,” Hughes said.
Inside the Princeton, Voorhis had a similar encounter. “These two guys show up on a helicopter, which wasn’t uncommon, but shortly after they arrived, maybe 20 minutes, I was told by my chain of command to turn over all the data recordings for the AEGIS system,” says Voorhis.
In addition to turning over his data tapes, Voorhis says he was told by this chain of command he needed to reload the recorders for the ship’s advanced Combat Engagement Center (CEC) because it had also been wiped clean, along with the optical drives with all the radio communications. “They even told me to erase everything that’s in the shop—even the blank tapes.” Voorhis says the only other time he can recall having to turn over his tapes like this was after an aircraft crash during one of his combat deployments.
Up on the Princeton’s flight deck, Weigel says the two men initially arrived on the Princeton via helicopter, wearing generic flight suits. According to Weigelt, the men boarded one of his detachment’s SH-60B helicopters and flew off for a time before returning with “a bunch of bags.” Weigelt says the two men retired to the “Admiral’s Quarters”on the Princeton and a guard was staged outside of the door.
AI Clones Your Voice After Listening for 5 Seconds
November 13th, 2019Must listen examples at the link.
Via: Google:
We describe a neural network-based system for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis that is able to generate speech audio in the voice of many different speakers, including those unseen during training. Our system consists of three independently trained components: (1) a speaker encoder network, trained on a speaker verification task using an independent dataset of noisy speech from thousands of speakers without transcripts, to generate a fixed-dimensional embedding vector from seconds of reference speech from a target speaker; (2) a sequence-to-sequence synthesis network based on Tacotron 2, which generates a mel spectrogram from text, conditioned on the speaker embedding; (3) an auto-regressive WaveNet-based vocoder that converts the mel spectrogram into a sequence of time domain waveform samples. We demonstrate that the proposed model is able to transfer the knowledge of speaker variability learned by the discriminatively-trained speaker encoder to the new task, and is able to synthesize natural speech from speakers that were not seen during training. We quantify the importance of training the speaker encoder on a large and diverse speaker set in order to obtain the best generalization performance. Finally, we show that randomly sampled speaker embeddings can be used to synthesize speech in the voice of novel speakers dissimilar from those used in training, indicating that the model has learned a high quality speaker representation.
Google Reportedly Plans To Offer Checking Accounts Next Year
November 13th, 2019Via: Forbes:
While previous attempts from big tech companies like Facebook and Apple to get into financial services have met with obstacles and regulatory scrutiny, Google will become the latest Silicon Valley leader to push into the banking space, as it plans to offer checking accounts starting next year, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
Supreme Court Allows Sandy Hook Families’ Case Against Remington Arms To Proceed
November 13th, 2019Via: NPR:
The Supreme Court has denied Remington Arms Co.’s bid to block a lawsuit filed by families of victims of the Sandy Hook school massacre. The families say Remington should be held liable, as the maker and promoter of the AR-15-style rifle used in the 2012 killings.
The court opted not to hear the gun-maker’s appeal, in a decision that was announced Tuesday morning. The justices did not include any comment about the case, Remington Arms Co. v. Soto, as they turned it away.
YouTube: Accounts Can Be Deleted if ‘No Longer Commercially Viable’
November 13th, 2019Via: PC Magazine:
YouTube’s attempt to explain when it can terminate your account has led to confusion among its most prolific users. The Google-owned video platform chose a curious way to explain it, implying that YouTube can delete your account if your videos alienate advertisers.
“YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable,” reads the change to YouTube’s Terms of Service, which will go into effect Dec. 10.
The “no longer commercially viable” wording has the vlogging crowd worried that YouTube is empowering itself to shut down niche video channels that mainstream advertisers don’t like.
Federal Judge Rules Suspicionless Device Searches at the Border Are Illegal
November 13th, 2019Via: Engadget:
Civil liberties advocates just scored an important victory in a bid to prevent arbitrary device searches at the US border. A federal court handling a 2017 lawsuit has ruled that US policies allowing device searches without valid suspicion or warrants violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Judge Denise Casper noted that an exemption for searches at the border was “not limitless,” and still needed to strike a balance between privacy and government interests. That usually means focusing on contraband, she said.
The Newest Fake Meat Is Made from Thin Air
November 12th, 2019pHood!
Via: FastCompany:
Most plant-based meat, such as the Impossible Burger or the Beyond Burger, uses protein made from soy or peas. The newest meat alternative uses protein made from air instead, in a process that transforms CO2 into an ingredient with the same nutritional profile as the protein you find in animals.
Air Protein, a Bay Area-based startup, unveiled the first prototypes of “air-based” meat today. The technology behind it comes from an idea first explored by NASA in the 1960s, when scientists trying to figure out how to feed astronauts in space discovered that it was possible to use microorganisms to convert CO2—breathed out by astronauts—into food. Using a similar process on Earth, inside fermentation tanks, could help radically improve the environmental footprint of food.
Tesla Will Build Gigafactory 4 in Berlin Area
November 12th, 2019Via: TechCrunch:
Elon Musk said Tuesday during an awards ceremony in Germany that Tesla’s European gigafactory will be built in the Berlin area.
Musk was on stage to receive a Golden Steering Wheel Award given by BILD.
“There’s not enough time tonight to tell all the details,” Musk said during an on stage interview with Volkswagen Group CEO Herbert Diess. “But it’s in the Berlin area, and it’s near the new airport.”
