Baylor College of Medicine
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After 355 days aboard the ISS, astronaut Mark Vande Hei returns to Earth a changed man
As humanity's spaceward expansion accelerates in the coming decades, somebody's going to have to keep all those commercial astronauts alive.
Trump taps anti-vaxxer to lead vaccine safety committee (updated)
It's become a common occurrence in the Trump transition team. The incoming administration has nominated a candidate so uniquely unqualified for their intended position that the nod can only be interpreted as a troll against the American people. We've already seen it in Ben Carson's selection as head of Housing and Urban Development, Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, Rex Tillerson's role as Secretary of State and Rick Perry's heading of the Energy Department. Now, Trump wants vaccine denier Robert Kennedy Jr. to chair a presidential commission on vaccine safety.
IBM lets scientists pay to play with its thinking supercomputer
IBM's Watson promises to usher in a new era of "cognitive computing," but, so far, all the system has demonstrated is a knack for game shows. Now, however, IBM has announced Watson Discovery Advisor, a cloud-based service that'll enable researchers to harness those smarts to do more than put Ken Jennings out of a job. Using the platform, scientists can ask Watson natural-language questions, sending the system to scour every publicly available research paper ever written in every available field. Digesting this information, Watson is then able to identify connections that it would have taken a lifetime for a person to find, which promises to accelerate the speed of scientific discovery. In one instance, the Baylor College of Medicine used Watson to crunch six years worth of cancer protein research into "a matter of weeks." Now all we need to do is scrape together the cash to ask the supercomputer the ultimate question...
