2017 September 02

2

Sep

Alphabet finalizes restructuring with a new company called XXVI

Back in 2015, Google announced that it was restructuring its company into multiple parts, with a new giant company called Alphabet to oversee all of Google’s various businesses. The reasoning behind the move was to essentially separate out some of Google’s “Other Bets” projects into their own entities, so that they would be valued separately from the core Google business. Today, Alphabet is finally wrapping up the reorg with the invention of a new company, called XXVI Holdings Inc.

XXVI Holdings will be the umbrella encompassing those aforementioned “Other Bets” projects, which include Waymo, which comes up with self-driving tech, and Verily, which specializes in digital health and medical devices. Google, on the other hand, is changing from a corporation to an LLC, because it’s now part of a holding company instead of a listed public company. As a reminder, Google is still home to the business’s bread-and-butter units like Gmail, search and YouTube.

Despite the changes though, it’s really just a formality. “We’re updating our corporate structure to implement the changes we announced with the creation of Alphabet in 2015,” said Gina Weakley Johnson, an Alphabet spokesperson. It won’t affect shareholder control, operations, or management.

As for why it’s called XXVI? Well, it’s 26 — the number of letters in the alphabet — in Roman numerals.

Source: Bloomberg

2

Sep

Instagram Stories will soon be available outside the app

Why it matters to you

Instagram is bringing more features to users who don’t have a quick enough connection to use the app.

Instagram Stories are going beyond the app — on Thursday, August 31, Instagram announced that the popular Stories feature will soon be on the mobile website.

Stories allows users to post several short video clips of their day, providing friends with a brief visual breakdown of the day’s happenings. The feature, which launched a year ago, was only available inside Instagram’s app. Now, the social platform is bringing the feature to the mobile web.

Instagram Stories still aren’t accessible on a desktop computer, but users can login to their account on a mobile browser and will soon see those familiar Stories circles at the top of the screen. Instagram says the feature is rolling out globally in the next few weeks. That update will be followed by the ability to actually add to a Story without the app, an update the company says is coming in the next few months.

Instagram Stories now has over 250 million people using the feature every day. While the concept was originally a Snapchat option, Instagram’s version quickly gained more users than the original.

Instagram has been steadily improving its mobile site this year, adding the ability to post a photo and use the Explore tab in May. The platform has long stuck to a mobile-first, instant sharing philosophy, so while the features are available from a web browser, features like the photo upload, and now, Stories, are only available from browsers on a mobile device.

“Stories has quickly become an important part of the Instagram experience — over 250 million people use it every day to see what their friends are doing in the moment,” the official blog post reads. “Now we’re excited to bring stories to people who use Instagram on the web.”

Instagram’s expanded mobile website allows users with slower networks to access the platform’s biggest features, particularly in high-population but low-tech countries such as India and parts of Africa. While viewing posts and Stories and sharing a photo are accessible with the mobile website, features like messaging and adding videos still require the app.

Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, however, doesn’t have the same mobile-first idea — Facebook began testing Stories on desktop browsers last month. While Facebook hasn’t shared recent numbers, the feature is thought to lack Instagram Stories’ popularity.

2

Sep

Bioengineering could make more donor lungs suitable for transplant

Why it matters to you

New bioengineering research from Columbia University could enable the repair of donor lungs that would otherwise be rejected for transplant.

The major shortage of donor organs is a problem that scientists are frantically trying to solve. Whether it’s finding innovative ways to use animal organs without them being rejected or developing “nano-warming” technology that allows organs to be transported more easily, eliminating transplant waiting lists is among the medical world’s greatest challenges.

With this mission in mind, researchers at Columbia University have developed a new method for bioengineering healthy lungs, which could have a major impact on the quantity of donor lungs that are suitable for transplants. Since currently only 20 percent of potential donor lungs are considered suitable for transplants, the results may be highly significant for sufferers of lung disease — which kills around 400,000 people per year in the United States alone.

“We [have] developed a radically new approach to bioengineering of the lung,” Professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, leader of the project, told Digital Trends. “Over the last decade, several groups have fully decellularized lungs to obtain a scaffold with the proper architecture and stiffness that can be repopulated by fresh cells. To rebuild a functional lung starting from this cell-free scaffold, both the epithelial surfaces in the airway and the vasculature need to be regenerated. Intact vascular network — lacking in these scaffolds — is critical not only for maintaining the blood-gas barrier and allowing for proper graft function but also for supporting the regenerative cells. We reasoned that an ‘ideal’ lung scaffold would need to have perfusable and healthy vasculature, and developed an approach allowing removal of the pulmonary epithelium, while maintaining the viability and function of the vascular network and the lung matrix.”

The team has demonstrated its new technique in an ex vivo rodent lung, meaning a rodent lung outside the animal. The researchers are also experimenting with larger lungs from humans and pigs, and have established methods for local targeted interventions in diseased sections of the lung. While plenty of work still remains to be done, this is extremely promising research.

“This approach could benefit patients with lung disease where the epithelium is primarily involved, which is the majority of lung disease and injury,” Vunjak-Novakovic continued. “By preserving the vasculature and blood supply, we enable removal of damaged epithelium and its replacement with fresh regenerative cells. This way, the lungs that would be rejected for transplant can be repaired and used.”

A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal Science Advances.

2

Sep

Machine learning can predict simulated earthquakes by listening to fault lines

Why it matters to you

We’re not there yet, but new research suggests that it may one day be possible to use AI to help predict earthquakes.

In lab tests involving simulated tabletop earthquakes, researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico demonstrated that machine-learning technology can play a role in predicting major tremors by analyzing acoustic signals to find failing fault lines.

For the experiment, earthquakes were modeled by the researchers using two large blocks of steel, which were put under stress. This resulted in them rubbing against one another like tectonic plates on the Earth’s surface. The movement released energy in the form of seismic waves — which was then analyzed by the team’s artificial intelligence.

“We discovered that an artificial intelligence can learn to discern a very specific pattern in the sound emitted by the fault before it ruptures,” Bertrand Rouet-LeDuc, one of the researchers on the project, told Digital Trends. “This pattern tells us how much stress the fault is undergoing. Once this AI has been trained on an experiment, it can be used to make very accurate predictions of the time remaining before the next laboratory earthquake, for the same experiment but later on, or even for a different experiment. Concretely, even right after a laboratory earthquake, the AI can listen to the experiment for a very short duration, and make an accurate prediction of the time remaining before the next quake.”

There is plenty of discussion in the geoscience community regarding whether the prediction of earthquakes is actually possible, or whether quakes are random and therefore cannot be predicted. Rouet-LeDuc observes that the fact that the work of the team in lab conditions provides hope that real world earthquake prediction may, in fact, be possible. It won’t be easy, though.

“We started working on real Earth data, and there are many additional challenges,” Rouet-LeDuc said. “In particular, the ambient noise picked by the seismometers that comes from human activity, oceans, or the weather is an issue. Another challenge is that we’re also picking up signals from many faults close to the fault that we study, and these signals are mixed with the ones we are interested in.”

Despite this, the researchers describe the preliminary results as promising. “In any case, we are certain we will learn far more about the friction within real faults, and that will only help us understand and characterize [them],” Paul Johnson, another researcher on the project, told us.

A paper describing the research was recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.