Astronomers routinely study galaxies much farther away, visible because they glow with the brightness of billions of stars. They also managed to study supernova, often brighter than the galaxy in which it sits.

However, for a distance of about 100 million light years, the stars in these galaxies are impossible to make out individually.

But a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, the bending of light by massive galaxy clusters in the line of sight, can magnify the distant universe and make dim, far away objects visible.

The single star was discovered in NASA Hubble Space Telescope images taken in late April of 2016 and as recently as April 2017.

“You can see individual galaxies out there, but this star is at least 100 times farther away than the next individual star we can study, except for supernova explosions,” said Patrick Kelly at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, the paper’s first author.

These observations can provide a rare look at how stars evolve, especially the most luminous ones.

“For the first time ever we’re seeing an individual normal star – not a supernova, not a gamma ray burst, but a single stable star – at a distance of nine billion light years,” said Alex Filippenko, a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley and one of many co-authors of the report.

The B-type star Icarus is much larger, more massive, hotter and possibly hundreds of thousands of times intrinsically brighter than our Sun.

According to the researchers, an extended lens, like a galaxy cluster, can only magnify a background object up to 50 times, but smaller objects can magnify much more.

A single star in a foreground lens, if precisely aligned with a background star, can magnify the background star thousands of times.

In this case, a star about the size of our sun briefly passed directly through the line of sight between the distant star Icarus and Hubble, boosting its brightness significantly.

Also, if the alignment was perfect, that single star within the cluster turned the light from the distant star into an “Einstein ring”: a halo of light created when light from the distant star bends around all sides of the lensing star.

The ring is too small to discern from this distance, but the effect made the star easily visible by magnifying its apparent brightness.

The astronomers predict that Icarus will be magnified many times over the next decade as cluster stars move around, perhaps increasing its brightness as much as 10,000 times.

IANS

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“Recent promising examples in the field of medicine include neural networks showing cardiologist-level performance in detection of arrhythmia in ECG data, deriving biomarkers of age from clinical blood biochemistry, and predicting mortality based on electronic medical records,” said co-author Peter Fedichev, Science Director at GERO.

“Inspired by these examples, we explored AI potential for ‘Health Risks Assessment’ based on human physical activity,” Fedichev added.

For the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers analysed physical activity records and clinical data from a large 2003-2006 US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

They trained neural network to predict biological age and mortality risk of the participants from one week long stream of activity measurements.

A state-of-the-art ‘Convolution Neural Network’ was used to unravel the most biologically relevant motion patterns and establish their relation to general health and recorded lifespan.

“We report that AI can be used to further refine the risks models,” Fedichev said.

“Combination of aging theory with the most powerful modern machine learning tools will produce even better health risks models to mitigate longevity risks in insurance, help in pension planning, and contribute to upcoming clinical trials and future deployment of anti-aging therapies,” Fedichev noted.

IANS

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This is officially a test that the Facebook-owned company is doing as it states “private messaging can never be a best-in-class experience when it lives inside an app meant for broadcasting publicly”.

“We want Instagram to be a place for all of your moments, and private sharing with close friends is an important part of that,” Hemal Shah, Instagram Product Manager, was quoted as saying.

“‘Direct’ has grown within Instagram over the past four years, but we can make it even better if it stands on its own. We can push the boundaries to create the fastest and most creative space for private sharing when Direct is a camera-first, stand-alone app,” Shah added.

This is similar to what Facebook did in 2014. The social media giant shut off messaging inside the main app and asked users to download Messenger.

IANS

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“There are now five different lines of observational evidence pointing to the existence of Planet Nine,” said Batygin, who is a planetary astrophysicist at Caltech, in a NASA statement.

“If you were to remove this explanation and imagine Planet Nine does not exist, then you generate more problems than you solve.

“All of a sudden, you have five different puzzles, and you must come up with five different theories to explain them,” the astrophysicist explained.

If a planet is there, it’s extremely distant and will stay that way—with no chance of ever colliding with Earth, or bringing “days of darkness”, as suggested by doomsayers.

According to NASA, it is now harder to imagine our solar system without a Planet Nine than with one.

“The signs so far are indirect, mainly its gravitational footprints, but that adds up to a compelling case nonetheless,” Batygin noted.

Batygin and his co-author, Caltech astronomer Mike Brown, described the first three breadcrumbs on Planet Nine’s trail in a January 2016 paper, published in the Astronomical Journal.

Six known objects in the distant Kuiper Belt, a region of icy bodies stretching from Neptune outward toward interstellar space, have elliptical orbits.

These orbits are tilted the same way, about 30 degrees “downward” compared to the pancake-like plane within which the planets orbit the Sun.

Computer simulations of the solar system with Planet Nine included show there should be more objects tilted with respect to the solar plane.

In fact, the tilt would be on the order of 90 degrees, as if the plane of the solar system and these objects formed an “X” when viewed edge-on.

Sure enough, Brown realised that five such objects already known to astronomers fit the bill.

A second article from the team, led by Batygin’s graduate student Elizabeth Bailey, showed that Planet Nine could have tilted the planets of our solar system during the last 4.5 billion years.

This could explain a longstanding mystery: Why is the plane in which the planets orbit tilted about six degrees compared to the sun’s equator?

”Over long periods of time, Planet Nine will make the entire solar-system plane precess or wobble, just like a top on a table,” Batygin said.

The remaining step is to find Planet Nine itself. Batygin and Brown are using the Subaru Telescope at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii to try to do just that.

If Planet Nine is found, it will be a homecoming of sorts, or at least a family reunion.

Over the past 20 years, surveys of planets around other stars in our galaxy have found the most common types to be “super Earths” and their somewhat larger cousins—bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

“Yet these common, garden-variety planets are conspicuously absent from our solar system. Weighing in at roughly 10 times Earth’s mass, the proposed Planet Nine would make a good fit,” NASA said.

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“Our research further shows that the links they share tend to include low-quality content such as clickbait, sensationalism, and misinformation,” said Adam Mosseri, Vice President, News Feed, in a blog post late on Friday.

“We are making an update to help reduce low-quality links in News Feed. We are always working to improve people’s experience in News Feed by showing more stories that we think people will find informative and entertaining,” Mosseri added.

Facebook has been working to improve people’s experience in News Feed by showing more stories that it thinks they will find informative and entertaining.

“As a result, we want to reduce the influence of these spammers and deprioritise the links they share more frequently than regular sharers,” the post added.

The new update is part of Facebook’s efforts to tackle fake news in News Feed.

“This update will only apply to links, such as an individual article, not to domains, Pages, videos, photos, check-ins or status updates,” the post said.

Most publishers won’t see any significant changes to their distribution in News Feed after this update.

“Publishers that get meaningful distribution from people who routinely share vast amounts of public posts per day may see a reduction in the distribution of those specific links,” Mosseri said.

“Publishers should keep in mind basic guideposts to reach their audience on Facebook and continue to post stories that are relevant to their audiences and that their readers find informative,” he added.

IANS

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The researchers believe that their model would enable public health agencies to plan ahead in allocating medical resources and launching campaigns that encourage individuals to take preventative measures such as vaccination and increased hand washing.

“In the past, we had no knowledge of initial conditions for the flu,” said lead researcher Alessandro Vespignani of the Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, US.

The initial conditions—which show where and when an epidemic began as well as the extent of infection—function as a launching pad for forecasting the spread of any disease.

To ascertain those conditions, the researchers incorporated Twitter into their parameter-driven model.

“We were not looking for the number of people who were sick because Twitter will not tell you that. What we wanted to know was: Do we have more flu at this point in time in Texas or in New Jersey, in Seattle or in San Francisco? Twitter, which includes GPS locations, is a proxy for that,” Vespignani said in a statement released by the university.

”By looking at how many people were tweeting about their symptoms or how miserable they were because of the flu, we were able to get a relative weight in each of those areas of the US,” Vespignani added.

The paper on the novel model detailed their projections for the 2014-15 and 2015-16 flu seasons in the US, Italy, and Spain.

Over those time periods, they applied forecasting and other algorithms week by week to the key parameters informed by the Twitter data.

They could identify the week when the epidemic would reach its peak and the magnitude of that peak with an accuracy of 70 to 90 per cent six weeks in advance of the event.

“By capturing the key parameters, we could track how serious the flu was each year compared with every other year and see what was driving the spread,” first author Qian Zhang of Northeastern University said.

While the paper reports results using Twitter data, the researchers said that the model could work with data from many other digital sources, too.

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Honda, Toyota and Hyundai have leased a few hundred fuel cell vehicles over the past three years, and expect to lease well over 1,000 this year. But for now, those leases are limited to California, which is home to most of the 34 public hydrogen fueling stations in the U.S.

Undaunted, automakers are investing heavily in the technology. General Motors recently supplied the U.S. Army with a fuel cell pickup, and GM and Honda are collaborating on a fuel cell system due out by 2020. Hyundai will introduce a longer-range fuel cell SUV next year.

“We’ve clearly left the science project stage and the technology is viable,” said Charles Freese, who heads GM’s fuel cell business.

Like pure electric cars, fuel cell cars run quietly and emission-free. But they have some big advantages. Fuel cell cars can be refueled as quickly as gasoline-powered cars. By contrast, it takes nine hours to fully recharge an all-electric Chevrolet Bolt using a 240-volt home charger. Fuel cells cars can also travel further between fill-ups.

But getting those fill-ups presents the biggest obstacle. Fueling stations cost up to $2 million to build, so companies have been reluctant to build them unless more fuel cell cars are on the road. But automakers don’t want to build cars that consumers can’t fuel.

The U.S. Department of Energy lists just 34 public hydrogen fueling stations in the country; all but three are in California. By comparison, the U.S. has 15,703 public electric charging stations, which can be installed for a fraction of the cost of hydrogen stations. There are also millions of garages where owners can plug their cars in overnight.

As a result, U.S. consumers bought nearly 80,000 electric cars last year, but just 1,082 fuel cell vehicles, according to WardsAuto.

That’s why automakers will keep hedging their bets and offer electric vehicles alongside hydrogen ones.

Honda began leasing the 2017 Clarity fuel cell sedan earlier this year; about 100 are already on the road. At this week’s New York Auto Show, the company also introduced electric and plug-in hybrid versions of the Clarity.

The plug-in hybrid can go 42 miles in electric mode before a small gas engine kicks in, Honda says. The all-electric Clarity can go 111 miles on a charge. Both will go on sale later this year.

“We think going forward the powertrain market is going to be very diverse,” said Steve Center, vice president of the environmental business development office at American Honda.

Hyundai’s Genesis luxury brand also blended technology with its GV80 SUV prototype, which was revealed in New York. The GV80 is a plug-in fuel cell vehicle, which means it would get power from stored electricity as well as hydrogen. It’s not clear when — or if — the GV80 will go on sale.

Fuel cell cars create electricity to power the battery and motor by mixing hydrogen and oxygen in the specially treated plates that combine to form the fuel cell stack.

The technology isn’t new. GM introduced the first fuel cell vehicle, the Electrovan, in 1966. It only seated two; the back of the van housed large steel tanks of hydrogen and oxygen. It went about 150 miles between refuelings, and its hydrogen tank exploded on at least one occasion.

Advances in hydrogen storage, fuel cell stacks and batteries have allowed engineers to significantly shrink those components to fit neatly inside a sedan. Oxygen is now collected from the air through the grille, and hydrogen is stored in aluminum-lined, fuel tanks that automatically seal in an accident to prevent leaks. Reducing the amount of platinum used in the stack has made fuel cell cars less expensive.

Honda’s new Clarity can go 366 miles between fuelings, the longest range in the industry.

The Clarity leases for $369 per month for 36 months. That’s more than the $354 monthly lease payment for the Chevrolet Bolt electric. But Honda, Toyota and Hyundai are all throwing in free hydrogen refueling. It costs between $13 and $16 per kilogram for hydrogen, or up to $80 to fill the Clarity’s 5-kilogram capacity, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

Even with that perk, analysts think sales of fuel cell vehicles will be limited until more fueling stations are built. But carmakers will still invest in fuel cells. GM’s Freese says there are many applications beyond cars, including unmanned, deep-sea vehicles or backup home power systems.

“One of the reasons global car companies do something like this is they want to have a finger in the pie. Should we suddenly have to shift over, they want to be able to do it,” said Jack Nerad, an executive market analyst with Kelley Blue Book.

The number of fueling stations could also grow quickly if automakers partner with governments and energy companies, as they have done in California. Earlier this year, 13 companies — including Shell and BMW — formed a council to accelerate the adoption of hydrogen as a transportation fuel.

Heather McLaughlin of San Ramon, California, was one of the first customers to lease a 2017 Clarity. She says she prefers a fuel cell car over an electric because she can refuel it in minutes. And one fill-up a week more than covers her 50-mile daily commute to Benicia, where she serves as the city attorney.

She recently drove the Clarity to Southern California and found plenty of stations along her route.

“I like the innovation,” said McLaughlin. “It helps if we can have more of these on the road.”—AP

Image: AP

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California and other states are weighing the opportunities of becoming a hub of testing a technology that is seen as the future of transportation and the risks from giving up active control of a large, potentially dangerous vehicle.

In most tests of self-driving cars there is still a person seated at the steering wheel, ready to take over, although Alphabet Inc’s Waymo tested a car with no steering wheel or pedals in Austin, Texas, as early as 2015.

The bus project in San Ramon, at the Bishop Ranch office park complex, involves two 12-passenger shuttle buses from French private company EasyMile.

The project is backed by a combination of private companies and public transit and air quality authorities, with the intention of turning it into a permanent, expanded operation, said Habib Shamskhou, a program manager who strolled in front of a moving bus to show that the vehicle would notice him and react. It stopped.

In a test for reporters, one bus cruised a block-long circuit so consistently that it created a dirt track on the tarmac.

California legislators late last year passed a law to allow slow-speed testing of fully autonomous vehicles without steering wheels or pedals on public roads, with the Bishop Ranch test in mind.

The shuttle buses will test for a few months in the parking lots before operators apply for Department of Motor Vehicles approval under the new law. The vehicles are expected to swing onto the local street late this year or early in 2018.

Reuters

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Christian Mwijage decided he could tackle those problems in one go – by turning discarded plastic bottles into building materials that can be used instead of wood.

His year-old company, EcoAct Tanzania, has transformed nearly one million kilogrammes (3.27 million pounds) of waste into “plastic lumber” that can be used for fences, house beams, signposts and more.

The company says it is reducing waste in the East African nation’s cluttered commercial capital, while creating jobs for young people and saving trees.

EcoAct Tanzania won the $10,000 Africa Finance and Investment Forum Entrepreneurship Award in Nairobi last week, which will help it grow, said founder and director Mwijage.

“It’s a pressing issue in our country – I feel like we have a big problem with plastic waste,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, explaining why he started the company in late 2015. Mwijage’s home of Dar es Salaam is the biggest city in Tanzania and one of the fastest-growing on the continent, with a population of over four million.

As in many African cities, that has led to large informal settlements and an accumulation of waste. Meanwhile, logging driven by the construction boom is ravaging Tanzania’s forests.

“I thought about the increasing activity in construction and tried to combine the two problems,” Mwijage said, meaning logging and waste.

He realised he could also create much-needed jobs by paying people to collect, clean and sort through neighbourhood trash.

EcoAct sought out parts of the city where there were piles of waste and offered to pay a small price for the usable plastic. In some cases, it pays children’s health insurance in exchange for collecting their families’ recyclables each week.

The company produces 70 to 80 plastic logs a day, but hopes to scale up to at least 400 once it can afford a bigger machine.

“Demand is high. The challenge is production capacity,” said Mwijage. The logs are cheaper than wood, he says, and more convenient because they don’t attract insects and cannot rot.

His hope for this year is to stop some of the deforestation happening around Mount Kilimanjaro by offering developers alternative supplies to wood. Later he hopes to expand to neighbouring Rwanda.

“As long as the number of people [in cities] is increasing, opportunities are increasing,” Mwijage said.

Reuters

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The New York-based firm said on Tuesday that it would launch two new plans called Betterment Plus and Betterment Premium. Clients on the Plus account will receive one annual financial planning call with a team of advisers, while Premium clients will get unlimited access to human advice, the company said.

The company, which will continue to offer its signature all-digital service, has expanded its team of in-house advisers to implement the new plans

The move marks an significant strategy shift for Betterment, a poster-child for an emerging sector that has sought to upend the traditional financial advice market by using automation to capture clients who were previously seen as too expensive to service.

Robo-advisers typically use computer algorithms to create and manage portfolios made up of low-cost exchange-traded-funds for clients with as little as a few hundred dollars to invest.

Alex Benke, vice president of financial advice and investing at Betterment, said the new plans aimed to give more options to clients who preferred contact with human advisers.

“We have seen a growing need for this extra helping hand,” Benke said.

While the robo-advice model has prompted incumbents, such as Charles Schwab Corp. (SCHW.N), to launch similar services, some established firms have argued that a hybrid model combining digital and human advice will be more successful in the future.

Speaking on an earnings call earlier this month, Morgan Stanley (MS.N) > chairman and chief executive James Gorman said the “biggest opportunity” for the company around digital advice is “providing online capability to existing clients, who want a multi-channel relationship with us.”

Betterment’s new services also come as increased competition from established players raises questions about whether independent robo-advisers can grow at a sufficient scale to become profitable.

“We do think that it should help us grow faster because it opens up additional parts of the market,” Benke said.

Founded in 2008, Betterment has more than $7 billion in assets under management.

It will charge a 0.25 percent fee on assets under management for its purely digital plan, 0.40 percent for the Plus offering, and 0.50 percent for the Premium offering. While its traditional digital plan has no minimum investment size, the plus and premium plans will require $100,000 and $250,000 minimums respectively.

Reuters

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