Digital textbooks adapt to your level as you learn

While students are learning from these digital textbooks, the textbooks are learning from the students. They can adapt their content to suit the unique learning behaviour of every student. This is what the future of education looks like:

TIRED of learning from a dusty old textbook? Try a book that learns from you. Students in Houston, Texas, are about to get their hands on the first digital schoolbooks that use artificial intelligence to personalise lessons. The aim, says the books' creator, is to "explode the book" and rethink how students learn from texts.

"We want to be able to create the perfect book for every person," says Richard Baraniuk, director of the OpenStax project at Houston's Rice University, which is behind the books. "Ultimately, we want a system that turns reading the book into an exploration of knowledge."

OpenStax already offers an array of online and printed textbooks on subjects including economics, biology and history. For the past three years, researchers have tracked how students in 12 US schools use the books in their studies, including information on how they scored on questions.

That work is now being used to train machine-learning algorithms that give OpenStax's biology and physics textbooks the ability to adapt to individuals. If a reader seems to be struggling with a particular topic – acceleration, say – the book will slot in additional explanations and practice questions, and increase emphasis on related subjects, such as centripetal force, that could otherwise trip that person up.

The adaptive textbooks also incorporate a learning method called retrieval practice, in which material that students have already learned pops up again in occasional quizzes. This method has been shown to enhance students' ability to retain material, and the algorithmic textbooks will be able to decide when to ask questions based on past exercises.

Digital textbooks are not new – but despite their potential, they have yet to be widely adopted.

"Universities are just not suited for developing and serving such large-scale products. We need start-ups for that," says Peter Brusilovsky of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, one of the designers of the interactive learning system ELM-ART (Episodic Learner Model – The Adaptive Remote Tutor). "If done right, adaptive textbooks could help us to learn faster and better."

Such personalised learning is designed to give students who are struggling time to understand subjects, while faster learners can surge ahead without getting bored. Software is a great way to do this – at Summit Preparatory Charter High School in Redwood City, California, students spend a portion of each week working independently with a computer program that suggests assignments and tracks progress, but students choose how to spend their time and set their own pace. This approach has helped Summit to become one of the top 20 schools in California, according to US News and World Report.

The initial roll-out of OpenStax in Houston high schools will be relatively small, but large institutions have also expressed interest.

Salt Lake Community College, which has more than 60,000 students and is the largest higher-education institution in Utah, wants to pilot OpenStax's algorithm-enhanced textbooks next year in political science, business and mathematics classes. Jason Pickavance, director of educational initiatives at the college, says he is curious to see whether the books improve student performance.

"We have such a varied student body in terms of college readiness," Pickavance says. "What they need is more individualised attention, more tutoring. The courseware has the potential for us to get that mix right."

Whether the books are successful will depend on teachers, says Ben du Boulay, who works on artificial intelligence at the University of Sussex, UK. They are the ones who will ensure that students make the most of their books – for instance, by working out what to do when the books identify a common problem area among their students.

"If all we needed was books, why have teachers?" de Boulay says. "It's the educational interactions around private study that make the difference."

Scientists Propose Using Lasers to Fight Global Warming From Space

At the world's first major geoengineering conference, two separate scientists put forward proposals to use lasers to modify the Earth's climate and fight global warming, from space.

One suggested that a satellite equipped with a high-powered laser could grow clouds in the atmosphere below; the other proposed lasers that would blast greenhouse gases from orbit to effectively erase the agents of climate change. 

The highly theoretical proposals are still in their early stages, and easily count as the more radically ambitious of the already radically ambitious climate engineering schemes discussed by scientists. These plans don't concern gadgets that absorb carbon pollution or spreading particles in the sky, after all—we're talking about space lasers powerful enough to alter the climate.

And European Space Agency fellow Isabelle Dicaire studies them full time. She traveled to Berlin this week to discuss how a satellite equipped with high-powered LIDAR lasers may prove useful for researching—and maybe eventually actually orchestrating—climate engineering.

LIDAR is remote sensing technology that blasts a laser at a target, then analyzes its reflection to accurately measure distances. It's already widely used here on Earth (on things such as Google's driverless car), and by NASA's CALIPSO satellite. Dicaire is interested in what we could do with a much more powerful LIDAR positioned in space; theoretically, it should be able to better detect the movement of particles in clouds, and maybe even make new ones.

THIS WOULD BE THE FIRST STEP IF YOU'D LIKE TO DO LASER CLOUD SEEDING

Among the most widely discussed geoengineering ideas of recent years is so-called cloud-brightening. A cloud is just a mass of water vapor that's condensed into droplets around particles floating in the air—and the more droplets in a cloud, the more sunlight gets bounced off of them. 

So, geoengineers figure that if you can increase the surface area of clouds, or seed more of them altogether, you could begin to reflect back enough sunlight to cool the globe. Research into the subject has been limited, and Dicaire says a powerful LIDAR would help scientists better understand the science. Beyond that, it could be used to carry out the cloud-seeding itself.

"Another application is to use the effects that are happening inside the plasma filaments to do some exotic stuff. For instance, laser-based cloud seeding," she said. Researchers at the University of Geneva, Dicaire says, have demonstrated that lasers can produce droplets.

"They are generating nano-sized water droplets from the laser," she said. They're doing it in a lab, though. "I'm monitoring the field to see what we could do from space."

So, theoretically: "You can use the Earth Observation System to target or find where you have your clouds, what kind of clouds you would like to seed, and then from that, aim the beam towards these clouds." Bear in mind that the idea ESA is examining here is entirely theoretical, and no laser even exists in orbit capable of performing such a feat. But it's not unthinkable, technologically speaking—the political and economic hurdles are probably larger.

"So far you can only find these laser sources on the ground. Eventually, if someone would like to put them in a satellite, they would have to space qualify them. So this is something that some industries are looking into. And this would be the first step if you'd like to do laser cloud seeding."

This would likely be a pretty expensive way to make clouds brighter—older proposals suggest using boats to spray seawater skyward—and you'd need an awful lot of cloud-growing laser satellites. But Dicaire, for now, is more interested in the underlying research LIDAR could help scientists perform.

"It's a very basic concept. The only one looking at it at the moment is ESA, and it's very preliminary. We just want to see if it's possible to send your beam from the satellite to the ground. If it's possible then, yeah, we'll look more closely into this," she said.

Alternatively, we could use another type of laser-toting satellite to blast away the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. That's what Aidan Cowley, a professor at Dublin City University, proposes, anyhow. He believes that a solar-powered satellite equipped with a plasma laser could hone in on heat-trapping gases in order to get them to break apart into less harmful ones.

"We've already observed here on earth that plasma ionization approaches, for example, air plasmas, can essentially dissociate long-lived pollutants: SF6, carbon dioxide. This is something we've observed, and it's been well reported in literature," Cowley told me. "Plasma essentially will excite whatever gas it's traveling through, and just by giving energy to these gases, these molecular species, they'll break up—in the case of SF6, they'll become S, and become more benign greenhouse gases."

It's an alluring idea, of course; SF6 is a potent and long-lasting greenhouse gas. And our immense CO2 output is driving climate change toward a cliff; it'd be convenient if we could just zap them away with a laser. So why haven't we done it already, if plasma ionization has proven to scatter the building blocks of our climate crisis?

"The problem about using [lasers] as a means of actually addressing climate, greenhouse gases per se, is that the energy used to strike those plasmas has to be generated here on Earth. So essentially you're burning fuel to destroy the emissions that you're producing anyway, and it ends up being a net positive to the emissions profile anyway. So you have to come up with a low cost, energy-free scenario that frees you from that paradigm. And that's where the idea of using space solar power to do so comes into it."

A satellite outfitted with high-efficiency solar panels should do the trick.

THERE'S NOTHING CRAZY ABOUT IT, SOLAR POWER IN SPACE

"Essentially by using abundant power that's available in orbit, to drive ionization phenomenon in the atmosphere, you can neatly size up the problem of doing the same thing here on the ground, and you have a nearly unlimited supply of energy to do so. You just need to develop the technology and tap it for that," he said.

Now, there are other pitfalls here; those greenhouse gases are already pretty diffuse in the atmosphere, so it'd be hard to target them effectively with a laser. Cowley says you'd probably need multiple units to do it effectively. Then there's the vast expense of building, testing, and deploying the machines, of course.

Cowley also says his satellite would be useful for creating ozone, to patch up the holes we've left by overusing aerosols. "You could use it to create ozone, too," he said. "Pretty strong pedigree for producing ozone. It's a very easy trick." Then again, he adds, the technology could be used to the reverse effect, too.

"Conversely, from a military perspective, you could also use it to destroy the ozone as well, if you do it the right way," he said. "It could potentially open the holes in the atmosphere of your not too friendly neighbors."

So does Dr. Cowley think his greenhouse gas-blasting satellite is feasible?

"I still think it will take a long time. It's got an underground movement to a certain degree, so I think it will continue to be developed, going forward. Space solar power has got a fairly good future for certain applications, and, I think, eventually, like most technology, it will be the niche that drives the mainstream adaptation," he said. "Find one good niche and make it work, and people will go, 'oh that's not so crazy after all.' And there's nothing crazy about it, solar power in space. It's not science fiction."

NASA's Next Rocket Is So Big, the Sound of It Launching Could Damage Buildings

Earlier this summer, NASA took a "sound ride" on a small-scale SLS rocket, which gave engineers an idea of how the acoustics of NASA's massive new launch platform will work. While we might not think about it, those sound waves and vibrations are things engineers need to think aboutbefore launching a new rocket.

Acoustic considerations of a rocket launch go beyond the noise we hear when the engines start to fire. The sound power of a launching rocket is the result of the mechanical energy of the rocket's exhaust plume, which is defined by the thrust of the rocket times its exit velocity independent of the fuel and oxidizer being used. The end result is a lot of noise.

That noise is spread across a range of frequencies, but not evenly. Engineers at NASA's Stennis Space Centre, the agency’s rocket engine test site in Mississippi, have determined that the acoustic energy of a launch is concentrated in the low to mid frequency range, exactly the range that can knock down buildings or hurt people standing nearby.

That's because sound waves are physical waves, the result of back and forth vibration of the particles that make up the medium through which the sound wave is moving. In the case of a rocket launch, the danger comes from the sound waves creating air pressure as the molecules are pushed aside so the sound wave can pass, or creating harmonics that can vibrate the rocket or nearby objects to failing points.

It's something engineers had to address when building NASA's iconic Vehicle Assembly Building. Just three miles from the launch pads where Saturn V rockets would leave the Earth, the agency had to consider what the acoustic pressure would do to the nearby structure. The solution was to use insulated aluminum panels fastened to steel girders to cushion the VAB and anything inside from the sound pressures of a Saturn V launch.

Unsurprisingly, the highest sound power levels ever recorded at Stennis was during testing for the Saturn I-C stage, the first stage of the Saturn V that used five F-1 engines to generate 7.5 million pounds of thrust. One test registered about 204 decibels, while more recent rockets, which generate between 100,000 and 650,000 pounds of thrust, typically generate around 195 decibels at launch.

But the SLS, which is still on track to launch in 2017, will be bigger than the Saturn V, generating more power at launch and having a correspondingly high sound power profile. 

But it's not just buildings engineers have to think about with the next big rocket. "The noise the engines and boosters generate is so great that it can impact the rocket, and the crew, during liftoff," said Jeremy Kenny, an acoustics engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. "We have to ensure we have the proper suppression system to basically turn that noise down to a safe level."

Scale tests of the SLS are helping engineers understand what the sound power of this rocket will be so they can take the appropriate safety measures. This includes sound suppression systems, which typically use large volumes of water to dampen sound waves; the water increases resistance on a moving sound wave, slowing it down.

It might not look like much, but this kind of small scale testing is exactly what's going to help NASA regain a heavy lift launch capability that won't destroy buildings, spacecraft, or injure our nation's astronauts. 

A Synthetic Bio Startup Is Making Cat Poop Coffee Without the Poop (or the Cat)

This is great news. If this new coffee product catches on, it could save countless civets from battery cage systems in Indonesia.

Among coffee enthusiasts, kopi luwak, which is made from beans that have been partially digested and defecated by an Indonesian wild cat, is often held up as the best brew in the world. A pound of good kopi luwak beans can fetch $500, if you can even manage to find it. So, that's why a synthetic biology startup is trying to make something resembling the beans without using the animal at all.

Unlike other synthetic bio companies, New York City-based Afineur isn't starting with trying to reengineer a bacteria or yeast to do something it wasn't originally designed to do (at least, not yet). 

IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, IT'S BECOME LIKE THE FOIE GRAS OF COFFEE. WE'VE EMULATED IT WITHOUT THE ANIMAL.

Instead, the company is experimenting with ways of creating new flavor profiles in fairly ordinary coffee beans. So far, Afineur says it has created something that smells and tastes like kopi luwak, without requiring the beans to be pooped out of anything.

"What we have is quite comparable to kopi luwak. It's less bitter, less astringent, and more aromatic," Camille Delebecque, one of the company's founders, told me. "In the last few years, it's become like the foie gras of coffee. We've emulated it without the animal, without the price tag, and without the ecological impact."

That's good news on all accounts: The so-called "cat-poop coffee" industry is rife with animal abuse, with the civet cats often being kept in tiny cages and forced to eat the beans. And then, of course, there's the price. Delabecque estimates that, when it's ready to go to market, he'll be able to sell the coffee for no more than other upscale artisanal coffee roasters, perhaps as cheaply as $50 a pound.

Delabecque has a synthetic biology background, and when he ended up trying kopi luwak in Bali, he said he had to try to recreate the smell and taste in the lab.

So, how does it work? Delabecque says the process is still patent pending, but he and his partner have basically found a way that, using specific strains of microorganisms during the fermentation process, they can tease out certain flavors and aromas that exist in standard Arabica coffee beans. 

"We start with the kind of coffee beans that stores around the corner would serve. We do fermentation on those beans, and then at the end of the process they're dried again," Delabecque said. "Right now, it's all natural. There's no synthetic biology involved right now—we don't think the customer base is quite ready for that yet."

Over the last few months, the company has been working at a synthetic biology startup accelerator in Cork, Ireland, where other companies are trying to create yeast that can make THC. The difference with Afineur, however, is that the process was already perfected back in a lab in New York. Now, they're working on doing chemical analysis of both kopi luwak and the new blend to figure out what, exactly, is going on during the fermentation process to make it taste so close to kopi luwak.

"We've had two sensory experts come in and do an analysis, and we're exactly where we wanted to be with this," he said.

Delabecque says the company will be launching a Kickstarter in early fall, and could be ready to sell its beans early next year.

New ‘shape-shifting’ material can reconstruct faces

This new biodegradable, shape-shifting plastic can fill gaps in a damaged face and act as a scaffold to guide the growth of existing bones

Called a shape-memory polymer (SMP) and developed by a team at Texas A&M University in the US, this biodegradable material can be used to fill in gaps in a damaged face and act as a scaffold to guide the growth of existing bones. 

The researchers made their shape-memory polymer by linking molecules of another material - polycaprolactone, or PCL - and whipping it into a foam. According to Jackie Hong at Motherboard, the material is soft and easy to mould when heated to 60°C (140°F), and sets when it’s cooled to body temperature without becoming brittle. It can be used in 3D printing and moulding, which means it can be shaped into extremely precise models and bone scaffolds, and it’s full of tiny holes like a sponge, which allows bone-producing cells called osteoblasts to collect inside and grow.

According to Hong, the researchers enhanced this osteoblast-growing effect by coating their SMP material in polydopamine - a different kind of polymer substance that helps bind existing bones to the SMP scaffold, and has been shown in previous studies to encourage the growth of osteoblasts. Over a three-day trial, their coated SMP scaffold grew five times more osteoblasts than their uncoated scaffold.

The team presented the new material at the 248th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco earlier this month. 

“The work we’ve done in vitro is very encouraging,” study leader Melissa Grunlan said in a press release. She said they’ll now test the polymer on animals suffering from bone defects in their heads and faces, and if that goes well, they’ll progress to clinical trials.

"Instead of invasive surgeries gathering autograft tissues, a surgeon can simply heat up the polymer, shape it so it perfectly fills out the defect (potentially with a 3D printer), pop it in place and let it cool down,” says Hong at Motherboard. "The patient's bone cells would then start growing within the pores of the polymer, and since it's biodegradable, the scaffold would gradually disappear, leaving behind the newly-formed bone."

New drug cures Ebola-related virus in monkeys

An experimental drug has been shown to halt the replication of the Marburg virus - a relative of Ebola - and can cure a patient after several days of infection.

A study led by Thomas Geisbert, a professor of microbiology and immunology from the University of Texas in the US, tested a new intravenous drug on 16 rhesus macaques infected with theMarburg virus. The researchers involved reported that all 16 monkeys lived after the treatment, whereas five infected monkeys that did not receive the treatment died in just over a week.

This is the first time any drug has been able to cure a lab animal from this particular strain of the Marburg virus, and because it belongs to the same family of viruses as Ebola, the team is now working on adjusting it to suit Ebola patients. According to Geisbert, they’re combining their new drug with another experimental drug designed to be like ZMapp, which is an anti-Ebola drug that used to be distributed to infected American missionaries working in Liberia. The global supplies of ZMapp have just about dried up.

So far no drug has been approved for the prevention or treatment of Marburg or Ebola, but according to a paper published by Geisbert and his colleagues in the journal Science Translational Medicine, their drug starts attacking the virus the minute it gains access to the cell.

"The Marburg drug consists of sections of 'small interfering RNA' (siRNA), or silencing RNA, which are created in the lab and packaged in microscopic envelopes called lipid nanoparticles that can be absorbed by cells,” says Monte Morin at the LA Times. "Once inside the cell, the siRNA hampers viral reproduction by degrading messenger RNA and shutting down the production of viral proteins."

"Maybe the best analogy I can give is the messenger RNA is a blueprint for how the virus makes more of itself, and the siRNA kind of interferes or blocks that ability for it to kind of follow its recipe to make proteins," Geisbert said in a recent statement to journalists.

According to Morin at the LA Times, Geisbert and his colleagues have begun Phase 1 trials of their new Ebola drug and hope to work their way up to human trials as soon as possible.

New transparent solar cells can be used on windows, smartphone screens

This new type of transparent solar cell can be used to cover windows, buildings or smartphone screens to produce solar energy.

Named a transparent luminescent solar concentrator and developed by researchers in Michigan State University in the US, this material can be used to cover anything that has a flat, clear surface. Transparent solar cell technology has been attempted before, but the energy the cells produced was poor and the materials they were made out of were highly coloured.

"No one wants to sit behind coloured glass,” said one of the researchers behind the technology, chemical engineer Richard Lunt, in a press release. "It makes for a very colourful environment, like working in a disco. We take an approach where we actually make the luminescent active layer itself transparent.”

The new transparent solar cells are made from tiny organic molecules that absorb invisible wavelengths of sunlight such as ultraviolet and near infrared light. This invisble light is then guided to the edge of the solar panel, where thin strips of photovoltaic solar cells pick it up and convert it into energy. "Because the materials do not absorb or emit light in the visible spectrum, they look exceptionally transparent to the human eye," Lunt said.

Not only are they transparent, these solar cells are also flexible. The researchers are now working on scaling the technology up for commercial applications such as window coverings for residential and office buildings, smartphone and tablet screens, electronic signs, and car windows.

"It opens a lot of area to deploy solar energy in a non-intrusive way,” said Lunt. "It can be used on tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device that demands high aesthetic quality like a phone or e-reader. Ultimately we want to make solar harvesting surfaces that you do not even know are there."

How to photograph the fangs of Australia’s deadliest spider

Photographer Alex Wild got really, really close to the fangs of a Sydney funnel-web spider, and the results are both beautiful and terrifying.

The Sydney funnel-web spider, Atrax robustus, is widely known as Australia’s deadliest spider, with toxic venom capable of attacking the human nervous system and shutting down our organs, resulting in death. The males are particularly dangerous.

So, when someone asks you to get close to the fangs of a male Sydney funnel-web, the standard answer should normally be, “Hell no!”

American entomologist and photographer Alex Wild, also known by his Twitter handle Myrmecos, recently did the opposite, however. He took his camera to the lab of venom researcher David Wilson at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, in order to get some close-ups of those deadly fangs.

Wild writes about how he managed to get the final, surprisingly beautiful, shot (above) over at hisScientific American blog Compound Eye.

Wilson studies the venom of funnel-web spiders in the hope of finding new drugs. To set up the shot for Wild, he coaxed out a male and urged it (through some gentle poking) into a threat display, where it rears up and shows its fangs. So far, so dangerous.

But once in this pose, the spider freezes for a few minutes, as Wild explains: “The spider would then sit motionless for several minutes thereafter, fangs bared and legs raised. As someone used to frenetic ants, a sedentary spider was magic! The animal just posed, still as marble.” 

His first shot was the one below.

There’s sea plankton on the International Space Station

Cosmonauts have found ocean plankton from Earth on the outside of the International Space Station and, fascinatingly, it's surviving in zero gravity, low temperatures and hard cosmic radiation. The only problem is, they're not sure how it got there.

Scientists analysing samples from the outside of the International Space Station’s windows have found something surprising - sea plankton from Earth. Even more impressive, the tiny microorganisms have managed to survive in space.

A Russian news agency, ITAR-TASS, reports that the research confirms “that some organisms can live on the surface of the International Space Station (ISS) for years amid factors of a space flight, such as zero gravity, temperature conditions and hard cosmic radiation. Several surveys proved that these organisms can even develop.”

So how did tiny plankton make it all the way into space? The researchers are still trying to work this out, but they say it’s unlikely they were carried up at take off, as the marine microorganisms are not native to Kazakhstan, where this section of the ISS took off from.

Vladimir Solovyev, the head of the Russian ISS orbital mission, told Stuff that the plankton may have been “uplifted” 420 km to the ISS by air currents on Earth. 

So far there’s no word from NASA on whether there’s been plankton found on the outside of the American segment of the ISS.

Google's Knowledge Vault already contains 1.6 billion facts

The automated, fact-harvesting bot will build up a collection of all human knowledge.

Google has decided to create the largest store of knowledge in human history and it is going to create it without using human brainpower. 

Google's Knowledge Vault is a massive database of facts, built up by an algorithm that autonomously trawls the web and transforms data into useable, bite-sized pieces of information. 

The predecessor of Knowlege Vault, known as Knowledge Graph, used crowdsourcing techniques but Google realised that humans could only take the project so far; computers could drastically speed up the process.

To date the Knowledge Vault contains over 1.6 billion facts. This huge fact reservoir will be the basis of future search engines. Google is currently racing Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and IBM, who are all attempting to build the same kind of database.

The Knowledge Vault will be the foundation for smartphone and robot intelligence. Siri is going to get a lot better at interpreting what you mean when you ask her questions in the future. 

The algorithm is indiscriminate and will build information equally on places, people, history, science and popular culture. This has raised some privacy concerns as the program can access "backstage" information such as data hidden behind websites like Amazon, YouTube and Google+. 

In the future, virtual assistants will be able to use the database to make decisions about what does and does not matter to us. Our computers will get better at finding the information we are looking for and anticipating our needs. 

The Knowledge Vault is also going to be able to find correlations that humans would miss by sifting through enormous amounts of information. This could provide the means for massive medical breakthroughs, discovery of trends in human history and the prediction of the future.

IBM's Watson is already playing a role in cancer research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York.

Once the Knowledge Vault can interpret objects on sight, it will become integral to real-time information generation. One day you might be able to walk around, point your phone at an object, ask a question about it and recieve an intelligent response.

At the Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in New York on 25 August Kevin Murphy and his team will present a paper on the Knowledge Vault.

Far Cry 4 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

The CRew

Pre Order The Crew and be ready to experience the massive open world which has something for every player, be it missions that can be played collectively as a crew of up to 4 players or skill challenges to level up and tune your ride for even better performances. Exploration, RPG and action driving all wrapped up in a huge and connected open world.”
Enjoy the new trailer -->

Have you pre-ordered Mortal Kombat X yet?

Pre Order Now -->for ps3
                                     :For ps4
                                    :For xbox 360
                                      :For xbox one
                                   :For pc............but i would recommend you to wait for torrent and play it free

AH MY GOD!! A New Prince of Persia game On Its Way

The next Prince of Persia's concept art.

Do You Know !