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Scientists grow kidney in the laboratory

Laboratory grown rat kidney.

Scientists in the the U.S. say the have “grown” a kidney in the laboratory and it has been transplanted into animals where it started to produce urine.  Similar techniques to make simple body parts have already been used in patients, but the kidney is one of the most complicated organs made so far.

 

 

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Eric Schmidt urges action to regulate mini-drones

Warning of mini-drones’ potential as a terrorist weapon.

Eric Schmidt, the influential head of Google, has called for civilian drone technology to be regulated, warning about privacy and security concerns.  He told the UK’s Guardian newspaper that cheap miniature versions of the unmanned aircraft used by the military could fall into the wrong hands.

 

 

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SolarCopter – world’s first solar powered helicopter

SolarCopter

A team of masters students from the U.K. have built what they call the world’s first “solar copter.”  It is a quadrotor that flies solely on solar power.  It is only capable of short flights at the moment. But once the team adds a storage system they say it should fly longer. (Video)

 

 

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California universities are aggressively expanding online courses

The online education movement is transforming physical colleges at a fast pace.

The California State University system is the largest university system in America and they are aggressively expanding its experimental foray into Massive Online Open Learning (MOOCs), based on an unusually promising pilot course.  They will offer a special “flipped” version of an electrical engineering course at 11 more universities, where students watch online lectures from Harvard and MIT at home, while class time is devoted to hands-on problem solving. A San Jose State University pilot found that the flipped class increased pass rates a whopping 46%, which university President Mohammad Qayoumi believes is enough to move full-steam ahead.

 

 

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eBooks account for nearly 23% of all U.S. publishing revenue

Americans enjoy diving into a good book, but more and more of them prefer the digital version.

Ebook sales made up 22.5 percent of the publishing industry’s net revenue last year, according to a new survey from the Association of American Publishers. That’s up from just 0.05 percent 10 years prior, when the AAP first began keeping track of ebook sales, and up from 16.98 percent in 2011. The categories that saw the biggest increase in ebook revenues included adult fiction, adult nonfiction, and religious books. Even more encouraging, the overall net revenue for the US publishing industry was $7.1 billion, up 6.2 percent from 2011.

 

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Which company will win the race to dominate the emerging driverless car industry?

The arguments in favor of self-driving cars are many: computer-sorted traffic could yield higher maximum speeds and optimized drive times (sayonara “stop and go,” hello increased fuel efficiency!), the option to drive whether you’ve had too much to drink or not and driverless valet park anywhere you go (as well as make better use of parking space — no more sloppy two-for-one parking jobs). Imagine your vehicle driving itself off to a maintenance facility without your assistance, returning home on its own, or the option to be as distracted as you like while your vehicle’s escorting you around, from texting to watching a video to catching up on your notes for a morning work meeting. (Infographic)

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News is bad for your health

Giving up reading the news will make you happier.

Some of us have learned to recognize the hazards of living with an overabundance of food and have started to change our diets. But, did you know that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body? The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike things that require thinking like reading books and long magazine articles, we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-colored candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognize how toxic news can be.

 

 

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