Artificial intelligence: Google's AlphaGo beats Go master Lee Se-dol

Google's AlphaGo program was playing against Lee Se-dol in Seoul, in South Korea.Mr Lee had been confident he would win before the competition started.The Chinese board game is considered to be a much more complex challenge for a computer than chess."AlphaGo played consistently from beginning to the end while Lee, as he is only human, showed some mental vulnerability," one of Lee's former coaches, Kwon Kap-Yong, told the AFP news agency.
Mr Lee is considered a champion Go player, having won numerous professional tournaments in a long, successful career.
Go is a game of two players who take turns putting black or white stones on a 19-by-19 grid. Players win by surrounding their opponents pieces with their own.
In the first game of the series, AlphaGo triumphed by a very narrow margin - Mr Lee had led for most of the match, but AlphaGo managed to build up a strong lead in its closing stages.
After losing the second match to Deep Mind, Lee Se-dol said he was "speechless" adding that the AlphaGo machine played a "nearly perfect game".
The two experts who provided commentary for the YouTube stream of for the third game said that it had been a complicated match to follow.
They said that Lee Se-dol had brought his "top game" but that AlphaGo had won "in great style".
The AlphaGo system was developed by British computer company DeepMind which was bought by Google in 2014.
It has built up its expertise by studying older games and teasing out patterns of play. And, according to DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis, it has also spent a lot of time just playing the game.
"It played itself, different versions of itself, millions and millions of times and each time got incrementally slightly better - it learns from its mistakes," he told the BBC before the matches started.
This virtuous circle of constant improvement meant the super computer went into the five-match series stronger than when it beat the European champion late last year.

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What does this mean for artificial intelligence? Dr Noel Sharkey, AI expert

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has flirted with games since its beginnings, because only smart humans excel. Unlike the real world, a closed system of fixed rules suits computing.
Despite critical voices, Arthur Samuel's draughts playing program was an incredible achievement in 1959. Like AlpahGo it learned by playing itself repeatedly only many orders of magnitude slower.
Then the goal posts moved. The critics said chess was beyond computing's capability because it needed human intuition and creativity. But then when good amateur challengers had to eat their words in the 1970s, the goal post shifted again.
Critics claimed a horizon where computers might beat some professionals but certainly not grand masters. So when IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, the world was astonished. But Deep Blue was not the human-like intelligence that the founding fathers of AI had hoped for. It won by brute force by searching through millions of moves in seconds. Humans have limited memory and need brilliant pattern perception and creative strategies to win.
So the critics turned to Go as the impossible. Even with today's vast computer memories and incredibly fast processors (which have doubled more than eight times since Deep Blue), the ancient game will not yield to brute force. The size of the search required for Go is larger than chess by more than the number of atoms in the universe. It is the holy grail of AI gaming.
When Facebook announced earlier this year that their program had beaten a strong Go amateur, jaws dropped in the AI community - and fell to the floor that same day when Google's Deep Mind genius team announced their AlphaGo beat the European champion 5-0.
To beat one of the world's top players, Deep Mind used a mixture of clever strategies to make the search much smaller. They trained their machine on 30 million expert moves to start with, and then the learning machine played against itself millions of times. It worked - the holy grail is in the bag and the goal posts can shift no further.
Does this mean AI is now smarter than us and will kill us mere humans? Certainly not. AlphaGo doesn't care if it wins or loses. It doesn't even care if it plays and it certainly couldn't make you a cup of tea after the game. Does it mean that AI will soon take your job? Possibly you should be more worried about that.
Go is thought to date back to several thousand years ago in China.
Using black-and-white stones on a grid, players gain the upper hand by surrounding their opponents pieces with their own.
The rules are simpler than those of chess, but a player typically has a choice of 200 moves, compared with about 20 in chess - there are more possible positions in Go than atoms in the universe, according to DeepMind's team.
It can be very difficult to determine who is winning, and many of the top human players rely on instinct.
Source : BBC Tech news

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Emulsion

Emulsions are colloid system in which both disperse phase and dispersion medium are liquid. These are 2 types

1. oil in water type emulsion (o/w)
In this emulsion, oil acts as disperse and phase and water acts as dispersion medium for eg. milk

2. Water in oil type emulsion (W/o)
In this emulsion water acts as disperse phase and oil acts as dispersion medium eg. Curd

Preparation of Emulsion :-
Emulsion can be prepared by shaking two liquid mixture or by passing the liquid mixture through homogenize.
     emulsion prepared by mixing two liquids are generally unstable due to the presence of interfacial tension. so to increase the stability certain stabilizing agents are added In emulsion the stabilizing agents are called emulsitying agent.
Demulsification :-
The phenomenon of breaking of emulsion into its constituent particle is called demulsification.

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Why do women live longer than man?

All across the world, women enjoy longer lifespans. David Robson investigates the reasons why, and whether men can do anything about it. 

As soon as I was born, I was already destined to die earlier than half the babies in my maternity ward – a curse that I can do little to avoid. The reason? My sex. Simply due to the fact that I am male, I can be expected to die around three years earlier than a woman born on the same day.
What is it about being a man that means I am likely to die younger than the women around me? And is it possible for me to break the curse of my gender? Although this puzzling divide has been known for decades, it is only recently that we have started coming close to some answers. One early idea was that men work themselves into an early grave. Whether working in a mine or ploughing the land, they put extra stress on their bodies and amassed injuries that caught up with them later in life. Yet if that were the case, you might expect the gap to be closing, as both men and women converge on the same, sedentary jobs.

In fact, the difference in lifespan has remained stable even throughout monumental shifts in society. Consider Sweden, which offers the most reliable historic records. In 1800, life expectancy at birth was 33 years for women and 31 years for men; today it is 83.5 years and 79.5 years, respectively. In both cases, women live about 5% longer than men. As one recent article put it: “This remarkably consistent survival advantage of women compared with men in early life, in late life, and in total life is seen in every country in every year for which reliable birth and death records exist. There may be no more robust pattern in human biology.”Nor has it been easy to prove that men are more abusive of their bodies. Factors such as smoking, drinking, and overeating may partly explain why size of the gender gap varies so widely between countries. Russian men are likely to die 13 years earlier Russian women, for instance, partly because they drink and smoke more heavily. But the fact is that female chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons also consistently outlive the males of the group, and you do not see apes – male or female – with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths and beer glasses in their hands. Instead, it would seem like the answer lies in our evolution. “Of course, social and lifestyle factors do have a bearing, but there does appear to be something deeper engrained in our biology,” says Tom Kirkwood, who studies the biological basis for ageing at Newcastle University in the UK.

There are many potential mechanisms – starting with the bundles of DNA known as chromosomes within each cell. Chromosomes come in pairs, and whereas women have two X chromosomes, men have an X and a Y chromosome. That difference may subtly alter the way that cells age. Having two X chromosomes, women keep double copies of every gene, meaning they have a spare if one is faulty. Men don’t have that back-up. The result is that more cells may begin to malfunction with time, putting men at greater risk of disease. Among the other alternatives is the “jogging female heart” hypothesis – the idea that a woman’s heart rate increases during the second half of the menstrual cycle, offering the same benefits as moderate exercise. The result is delayed risk of cardiovascular disease later in life. Or it could also be a simple matter of size. Taller people have more cells in their bodies, meaning they are more likely to develop harmful mutations; bigger bodies also burn more energy, which could add to wear and tear within the tissues themselves. Since men tend to be taller than women, they should therefore face more long-term damage

But perhaps the true reason lies in the testosterone that drives most other male characteristics, from deeper voices and hairier chests to balding crowns. Evidence comes from an unexpected place: the Imperial Court of the Chosun Dynasty in Korea. Korean scientist Han-Nam Park recently analysed the detailed records of court life. from the 19th Century, including information about 81 eunuchs whose testicles had been removed before puberty. His analyses revealed that the eunuchs lived for around 70 years – compared to an average of just 50 years among the other men in the court. Overall, they were 130 times more likely to celebrate their hundredth birthday than the average man living in Korea at the time. Even the kings – who were the most pampered people in the palace – did not come close. Although not all studies of other types of eunuch have shown such pronounced differences, overall it seems that people (and animals) without testicles do live longer.
The exact reasons are elusive, but David Gem at University College London speculates that the damage may be done by the end of puberty. For speculative evidence, he points to the sad cases of mental health patients, institutionalised in the USA in the early 20th Century. A few were forcibly castrated as part of their “treatment”. Like the Korean eunuchs, they too lived for longer than the average inmate – but only if they had been sterilised before the age of 15. Testosterone might make our bodies stronger in the short-term, but the same changes also leave us open to heart disease, infections, and cancer later in life. “For example, testosterone might increase seminal fluid production but promote prostate cancer; or it might alter cardiovascular function in a way that improves performance early in life but leads to hypertension and atherosclerosis later,” says Gem.
Not only do women escape the risks of testosterone – they may also benefit from their own “elixir of youth” that helps heal some of the ravages of time. The female sex home oestrogen is an “antioxidant”, meaning that it mops up poisonous chemicals that cause cells stress. In animal experiments, females lacking oestrogen tend not to live so long as those who have not been operated on – the exact opposite of the male eunuch’s fate. “If you remove a rodents’ ovaries, then the cells don’t repair against molecular damage quite as well,” says Kirkwood. Kirkwood and Gem both think of this as a kind of evolutionary pay-off that gave both men and women the best chances of passing on their genes. During mating, women would be more likely to go for alpha males, pumped up on testosterone. But once the children are born, the men are more disposable, says Kirkwood. “The welfare of offspring is intimately connected with welfare of the maternal body. The bottom line is that it matters more for the children that the mother’s body should be in good shape, rather than the father’s.” That’s cold comfort for men today. As it is, the scientists admit that we need to keep on looking for a definitive answer. “We really have to retain an open mind as to how much the difference can be explained by hormonal differences and other factors,” says Kirkwood. But the hope is that eventually, the knowledge may provide some hints to help us all live a little longer.

News source:BBC news: David Robson is BBC Future’s feature writer.

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Facebook introduces profile videos in mobile update

Facebook has announced a profile video feature as part of a set of new, mobile-friendly updates.
It means you'll be able to film a short, looping video - essentially a GIF - that will play for anyone who goes on your profile.
The feature is only being tested in the UK at the moment, so it could be a while before your feed looks like a wall at Hogwarts.
Updates have also been announced for how you change your profile picture.

Kenneth Williams looks like he'll probably be checking his Facebook despite being in "vacation mode"

Following the popularity of Facebook's Celebrate

Pride filter (which covered profile picture with a rainbow affect), users will soon be able to set a profile picture that reverts back to a previous one at a specified time.
It basically means you'll be able to set a profile picture which backs a particular cause or an out of office-style picture on your birthday or while you're on holiday.

The featured photos section is optional so you won't find pictures of you looking worse for wear on your 18th popping up for a future employer to see

A third, potentially less exciting, update sees the introduction of easier control over what people see on your page with a customisable space at the top of your profile.
You'll be able to write a Twitter-style bio, choose certain details describing your work and education to appear at the top of your profile and pick up to five featured photos to go at the top of your profile.
The area will be visible to anyone who visits your profile, but you can control what, if any, information appears there.
The announcement follows Facebook explaining that a message some users were seeing that suggests the site was about introduce a subscription fee was a hoax.
A post on the official Facebook account said: "While there may be water on Mars, don't believe everything you read on the internet today.
"Facebook is free and it always will be. And the thing about copying and pasting a legal notice is just a hoax. Stay safe out there Earthlings!"
#News from bbc news

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LG V10 smartphone has two selfie cameras and two screens

LG has revealed a phone that takes wide-angle selfies and an updated 4G smartwatch, now running on Android.

The high-end LG V10 phone has not one but two front-facing cameras allowing the device to take 120-degree shots.
It also has two screens, one as an inset display above the main one, which can show information such as the date, weather or battery life at all times.
An Android smartwatch, the first to feature 4G connectivity, has also been also announced.
The LG V10's dual cameras on its front each has a five megapixel sensor.
They are capable of capturing 80-degree selfies or wide-angle ones, of 120 degrees, with one shot. For this, the phone actually takes two pictures at once which are then stitched together by an algorithm.
"The ability to take group selfies without a selfie-stick has never been easier," LG said in a statement.
The smaller of the two screens on the V10 has a 2.1 inch (5.3 cm) display designed to show useful information such as battery life or the current time even when the main screen is turned off.
The LG V10's rear camera boasts 16 megapixels and users will also be able to make use of the video app's manual controls for tweaking shutter speed, frame rate and white balance among other settings.

Connected watch

In a first for Android Wear smartwatches, the new Urbane 2nd Edition watch will be able to connect to 4G, 3G, WiFi and Bluetooth.

The watch includes a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, four gigabytes of RAM, a 570mAh battery and a 480 x 480 P-OLED screen.

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Why is Ti(bpy) (CH3)4 Much more thermally stable than Ti(CH3)4?

In Ti(CH3)4 the metal is coordinatively unstaurated and the coordination sites required for decomposition reaction are avaliable (vacant) . There is easy pathway for thermodynamically possible decomposition reaction to occour. Hence Ti(CH3)4 is thermaly unstable, But in Ti(bpy)(CH3)4 has high thermal stablity due to the reasons that the coordination sites required for decomposition reaction to proceed are blocked.

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Why is the metallic atom in low oxidation state in metallic carbonyls?

The metal atom in metal  carbonyls is in low oxidation state. This is because if the fact that there is a higher electronic density (electronic charge) on the metal atom in its lower oxidation state than in its higher oxidaton state. Thus, since the metal is electroposative in nature, it would feel more comfortable if some of the excess electronic charge present on the metal atom gets transferred to the vacant pi-orbitals of CO (ligand) by forming M-CO pi-Bond.

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How Plastics-to-Fuel Can Become the Next Green Machine (Op-Ed)

Doug Woodring is director and co-founder of the Ocean Recovery Alliance, a nonprofit that brings together innovative solutions, technology, collaborations and policy to benefit ocean health. Steve Russell is vice president of the American Chemistry Council's Plastics Division, which leads efforts to "reduce, reuse, recycle and recover" more plastics through outreach, education and access to advances in technology. The authors contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
We all know plastics deliver many benefits that make modern life possible. They help keep our foods fresher longer, reduce the weight of our cars so we use less fuel, insulate our homes so we use less energy, and keep countless medical supplies safe and sterile. While some plastics are recycled, far too many are not — and end up buried in landfills or littered where they can enter delicate marine ecosystems.
But new technologies that can harness the fuel content in non-recycled plastics could help remedy this. These technologies work as part of an integrated approach to managing waste geared toward creating value from trash — an approach dubbed sustainable materials management.
Cash from trash
One of the biggest benefits to this approach is that it helps everyone — from businesses to consumers to government — start to value materials that used to be "waste." And when people realize materials have value, everyone starts to think about how this value can be captured and put to work for communities. Not discarded. Not buried. And certainly not littered.
So why do plastics have an intrinsic value as a fuel source? Plastics are created primarily from energy feedstocks, typically natural gas or oil (mostly natural gas in the United States). The hydrocarbons that make up plastics are embodied in the material itself, essentially making plastics a form of stored energy, which can be turned into a liquid fuel source.
It makes sense that people are asking how to keep more of this valuable fuel in play, even after plastics are used, and how to keep it out of landfills.
One way, of course, is to recycle plastics whenever one can. Today, recycling technologies reprocess many common types of plastics: bottles, containers, cups, caps, lids and so on. Even many flexible plastics, such as bags and wraps, can be recycled at major grocery stores across the United States.
But what about the plastics that can't be economically recycled? They still contain embodied energy and largely untapped value as a new potential fuel source.
Getting fuel from used plastics
A new set of emerging technologies is helping to convert non-recycled plastics into an array of fuels, crude oil and industrial feedstocks. Processes vary, but these technologies, known as "plastics-to-fuel," involve similar steps.
Plastics are collected and sorted for recycling. Then the non-recycled plastics (or residuals) are shipped to a plastics-to-fuel facility, where they are heated in an oxygen-free environment, melted and vaporized into gases. The gases are then cooled and condensed into a variety of useful products. Plastics-to-fuel technologies do not involve combustion.
Depending on the specific technology, products can include synthetic crude or refined fuels for home heating; ingredients for diesel, gasoline or kerosene; or fuel for industrial combined heat and power.
Companies sell the petroleum products to manufacturers and industrial users, while fuels can help power cars, buses, ships and planes.
Economics will likely drive adoption of this technology. For example, by tapping the potential of non-recycled plastics, the U.S. could support up to 600 plastics-to-fuel facilities and generate nearly 39,000 jobs, resulting in nearly $9 billion in economic output from plastics-to-fuel operations. And that doesn't even include the $18 billion of economic output during the build-out phase.
Plastics-to-fuel technologies are increasingly scalable and can be customized to meet the needs of various economies and geographies, so they do not require huge machines. [Plant Plastics Seed New Tech, from Miatas to Tea Bags]
The promise of plastics-to-fuel is particularly exciting as an option to recover materials that today may be buried, or in some regions, illegally dumped or burned in open pits due to inadequate waste management infrastructure. The new facilities could create local revenue for communities in parts of the world where trash has become a hazard and a large source of marine litter.
A cleaner fuel
Another potential environmental benefit of plastics-derived fuels is that they can deliver a cleaner-burning fuel, due to the low sulfur content of plastics. Many developing economies currently use diesel with relatively high sulfur content.
The main product of fuel from plastic, when refined properly, is a diesel with greatly reduced sulfur content. Using

 this lower sulfur content fuel for boats, machinery, generators and vehicles can help decrease sulfur-related impacts while reducing non-recycled materials along the way.
Plastics-to-fuel technologies are expected to be particularly helpful in island nations where fuel prices are high and landfill options are limited. Communities now have the potential to create some of their own fuel locally, providing economic and environmental benefits, while removing a portion of the waste stream that potentially causes harm to their waterways, reefs, and tourism.
These are just some of the reasons our two organizations — one representing America's plastics makers, the other a nonprofit dedicated to a trash-free ocean — teamed up to create two new tools aimed at helping communities around the globe evaluate their potential to adopt plastics-to-fuel technologies.
The "2015 Plastics-to-Fuel Developers Guide" and the "Cost Estimating Tool for Prospective Project Developers"were designed to help potential investors, developers and community leaders determine whether this rapidly growing family of technologies could be a good fit for meeting local waste management needs and local demand for the relevant commodities.
Available at no cost, these tools provide, for the first time, an exploration of available commercial technologies, operational facilities and things to consider when developing a business plan.We first announced the tools at the fourth annual Plasticity Forum held in Cascais, Portugal, in early June. Each year, the Plasticity Forum draws hundreds of global thought leaders in the areas of policy, design, innovation, waste management, retail/brand management and more. And earlier this month, we introduced the tools at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation's "Building Better Cities" Forum in Cebu, Philippines. Today, banks and investors are reviewing the online tools to evaluate investment opportunities. 

Source News from livescience

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Study finds benefits from lowering blood pressure, but questions remain

A new study proclaims some dramatic benefits of using medication to lower blood pressure, but some scientists are advising caution.
Aggressive treatment of high blood pressure comes with risks, and the study, a large clinical trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, has not yet been peer-reviewed or published.
Until then, changes to blood pressure guidelines and patient treatment plans should wait, says Sripal Bangalore, a cardiologist at New York University Langone Medical Center.
“The results look good, there’s no doubt about it,” he says. “But we need more details. We need to look at the data.”
Some experts caution that the study’s results may not be as impressive as they initially seem, and that NIH didn’t release enough data to put the findings in context. Plus, a low blood pressure treatment plan might not be right for every patient.

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Apple releases iOS 9.0.1 with plenty of bug fixes

A week after iOS 9 launched, Apple has released iOS 9.0.1 with a host of bug fixes.
Among the iOS 9 bug fixes:
-- Fixes an issue where some users could not complete the setup assistant after updating, because the "Slide to Upgrade" function was unresponsive.

-- Fixes an issue where sometimes alarms and timers could fail to play.
-- Fixes an issue in Safari and Photos where pausing video could cause the paused frame to appear distorted.
-- Fixes an issue where some users who manually set up how their phones connect to their wireless networks could lose their data connections.
It's certainly not a big update, but it will allow a small group of people who were unable to upgrade to iOS 9 finally get the latest iPhone operating system. That unresponsive "Slide to Upgrade" bug was annoying to people who were eagerly waiting to get iOS 9, but couldn't.
Apple (AAPL, Tech30) made the new iOS available in a public beta for the first time this summer, allowing people to test out the new software. In theory, that should have helped reduce the number of bugs at launch.
Compared to previous versions of iOS, iOS 9 is (so far) pretty bug-free. The biggest problem so far was Apple's inability to satisfy demand, giving thousands of people headaches when they were unable to contact Apple's servers to download the new operating system.
Eventually, people were able to get the upgrade, however. In fact, Apple said iOS 9 has the fastest adoption rate of any iPhone operating system in history. 

News source : CNN news

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