Battle of the Machines: Robocup 2016 Starts Tomorrow!

The Robocup 2016 will feature 3,500 participants from 400 countries and will feature robot soccer competitions, robot-based elderly care, and autonomous vehicles demonstrations, among others. The event runs June 30 until July 4.
ROBOTICS WORLD CUP

This year marks the 20th Robocup, featuring 3,500 participants: 500 teams from 40 countries. The cup takes place from June 30 until July 4th in Leipzig, Germany.

The event is a big one.  The competition allots 70 playing fields, ranging from six and 170 square meters in size, to ensure adherence to international standards and regulations of precision. In fact, the soccer competitions alone have been allocated 2,200 square meters of playing fields.

Robocup is a truly international event. The Leipziger Messe (Leipzig Trade Fair) has issued more than 800 visa invitation letters specifically for the cup.


THE FIFA CHALLENGE AND MORE

According to the website, “ever since 1997, the RoboCup Federation has been pursuing its objective of developing intelligent humanoid soccer-playing robots which by 2050 will be able to beat the current FIFA champions.” This does sound ambitious, but Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences professor, Gerhard Kraetzschmar, echoes the same message in his welcome note for the Robocup this year: “By 2050, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win a soccer game, played according to official rules of FIFA, against the winner of the most recent FIFA World Cup.”

The competition has been broadening their categories far beyond the field of soccer through the years. The website boasts, “Additional application disciplines addressing diverse societal needs such as intelligent robots as assistants for rescue missions, in households and in industrial production have been added during the last few years.” These additions include robot-based elderly care, autonomous vehicles, and disaster response.

For those who are interested in attending the event, you can buy your tickets here. Additionally, for the aspiring next generation of scientists and engineers, there is also RobocupJunior to help kick-start inventive thinking and discovery in young people.

Meet The Artificial Intelligence that composes Music that enhances your brain functionality

Brain.fm uses an artificial intelligence to compose music that is designed to enhance your brain's performance—decreasing anxiety, improving focus, and alleivaiting insomnia through neural entrainment.
There’s an AI that’s making music. It’s known as brain.fm, and it could help decrease anxiety, relieve insomnia, and improve mental performance.

Founded by Adam Hewett and Junaid Kalmadi, brain.fm aims to alter your mind with sound. Or to be more specific, they hope to alter your mind with music…music that is composed by an AI (but more on that later). Hewett describes the work as “Auditory brain stimulation,” which is a mechanism that relies on something known as “brain entrainment” (also known as “neural entrainment”).

This is a novel—and somewhat unconventional—theory that is centered on how brain waves alter in response to acoustic stimulation (sound).

It’s stimulating brain waves reliably with audio, and being able to to reliably see that on an EEG to use it as a therapy.
The basic idea is that certain sounds evoke very specific responses in the brain. In other words, listening to music can alter, or induce, certain neural oscillations—oscillations that can achieve a host of things, such as altered mood, decreased anxiety, or improved focus. Notably, those who advocate neural entrainment assert that these acoustic-induced alterations can be seen and analyzed via electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements, which is, of course, where the science comes in.

Hewett succinctly sums the process, and what Brain.fm is attempting to do with it: “It’s stimulating brain waves reliably with audio, and being able to to reliably see that on an EEG to use it as a therapy. That’s what we’ve actually been doing for 13 years…now we’re working with universities and institutions to confirm this and innovate on it further.”

THE RESEARCH

Notably, the team works with neuroscientists in order to scientifically verify that the types of responses that they’re aiming for with their music are, in fact, the ones that they are generating.

For example, the team utilized the work of Dr. Benjamin Morillon, who researches dynamic attending theory, which, as Kalmadi explains, “is a new theory in neuroscience that helps explain how oscillations in music can affect oscillations in the brain.”

And they have completed pilot studies with Dr. Giovanni Santostasi, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, to see how the auditory stimulation can impact sleep and focus. Kalmadi notes, “We got some promising results on both of the studies, but that’s the preliminary studies, so we’re now focusing on building on top of that with the next layer of a more rigorous study.”

Kalmadi notes the significance of their current results, saying that the music patterns clearly lineup with the EEG readouts, “The spikes we see on the EEG mimic the audio stimulus. The music frequency follows the EEG…literally, follows. It’s become that accurate.”

And they’re also getting help from artificial intelligence.

MUSIC MEETS AI

Of course, it would take a long time to compose a diverse array of songs, ones that individuals could listen to for hours without experiencing monotony. Trying to create songs that effectively incorporate the various auditory components that generate a specific response in the brain and are also unique (and pleasing to listen to) is even more difficult.

So the team gave the work to artificial intelligence.

Kalmadi outlines the difficult and time consuming nature of the process, and why the team needed the AI: “Every single 30-minute session used to take a day all the way up to a week to make. In order to make the first 20 sessions, when we were just getting brain.fm off the ground, it took us 4 months to put together. So it’s [the AI is] a necessity. How do we create like a massive amount of content that is fresh in terms of its diversity, in terms of its genre of music, and actually takes a ton of rules of what we understand between neuroscience and music to quite accurately entrain the brain?”

And it seems that the answer to this question rests in AI.

Kalmadi continues, “So the AI, we like to describe it on a very high level, has the brain of a neuroscientist and the heart of a musician. It actually composes all the music from the ground up by taking a bunch of rules within neuroscience music, and it makes these sessions, but it sounds like it’s made by humans.”

Hewett explains how the AI works: “we’re using what could most easily be described as an emergent AI, or emergence…. emergent AI is basically taking a set of kind of small instructions, or small little pieces, and then it expands and emerges into something beautiful.”

To break this down a bit, in relation to artificial intelligence, emergence is a process in which larger patterns (like a fluid song) emerge through interactions among smaller or simpler parts.

Hewett continues:

We start out with what we might call a SongBot, this kind of overarching overlord—the composer of this kind of song. That bot, the SongBot, gets all kinds of instructions like “what kind of genre do I want?”, “what brain waves am I stimulating?”, “what’s the BPM?”. I can leave it open; I can have it do a minor key or a major key.

You can give it instructions, and from there, it spawns off tens of thousands of other little individual bots, you could say.

They’re really just little kind of pieces of code, little brains. And each of these will be a note or a drum beat, and they will have kind of a mind of their own, and they’ll have instructions. For example, a drum beat will want to be in the first part of the measure, or the middle of the measure.

But that doesn’t always happen, and you have to understand that these bots are competing against each other. They form patterns, and subsequent bots that are propagated learn from the previous ones, and they try to emulate those patterns. So as a pattern emerges, the pattern becomes greater for subsequent iterations.
Kalmadi concludes by noting that a lot of work is currently being done in this field, and that the system will only improve and become more effective (better at generating the desired response in the brain) as new research comes out.

Perhaps most notably is the impact that this could have on human health and medicine: “It’s an emerging field, not a lot of people are aware of the powerful effects music can have on the brain. But we’re getting the scientific community very interested in this.”

You can give it a try here.

WATCH – Sunspring, A Film Written Entirely By An AI (Artificial Intelligence

Sunspring, a short science fiction film written by an AI made its online debut--and it looks, surprisingly, pretty good.
There’s a short science fiction film that just made its debut online;it’s about three people living in a dystopian future on a space station. Thomas Middleditch of Silicon Valley fame stars in it, opposite Elisabeth Gray and Humphrey Ker, who could all possibly be in a love triangle. Stuff Hollywood B-movies are made of.

It’s called Sunspring—and it was written entirely by artificial intelligence (AI).

Having been written by a neural network called long short-term memory dubbed Benjamin, the very fact that it’s a film penned by an AI makes it compelling to watch.

At the helm of the film is director Oscar Sharp, who collaborated with NYU AI researcher Ross Goodwin.

To develop Benjamin, the team gave the AI sci-fi screenplays available online from the 80s and 90s, where it was dissected and studied closely by the AI who then learned how to essentially stitch the entire screenplay together by stringing letters, words and phrases the typically occur. The resulting script was thus entered in the Sci-Fi London contest where it ranked on the top 10.

You can watch the film here: http://video.arstechnica.com/watch/sunspring-sci-fi-short-film

China’s Planning A Massive Sea Lab 10,000 Feet Underwater

China is planning to build an enormous underwater lab for research purposes; however, the country notes that "it will carry some military functions."
China plans to build a huge sea lab 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) below the surface of the South China Sea. This project is part is China’s thirteenth five-year economic plan, and it is ranked two in the country’s top 100 science and technology priorities. The purpose of this project is to help China find minerals in the waters…but it may also have military purposes.

Only a little information is available for the public as of the moment.

The platform will be movable, as noted in the recent presentation by the Ministry of Science and Technology. The deep-sea station is spearheaded by China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation. It will have a dozen crew on board and could stay underwater for about a month.

So. Just how feasible is this? Well, general location faces both geological and technical challenges, such as frequent occurrence of typhoons. The area is estimated to have around 125 billion barrels of oil and around 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. China already spent 1.42 trillion yuan ($216 billion) on research and development in 2015. So they are investing big in the project.

Notably, China previously proved that they can live up to their deepsea ambitions by setting a world record when they sent their submersible Jiaolong to descend 7 kilometers (23,000 feet) into the Indian Ocean.

Interestingly, the “Underwater Great Wall Project,” a network of sensors to help detect US and Russian submarines, has also been proposed.

Scientists Are Closer To The First ‘Universal Cancer Vaccine” With Successful Human Trials

Scientists at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, have successfully conducted three human trials of a "universal cancer vaccine," which they developed as a safety test before going onto larger clinical trials.
FIGHTING CANCER THROUGH THE BODY

Treating cancer is obviously not easy. One of the most well known methods is chemotherapy, and while this has proven to be successful over the years (to a certain degree),it has life-threatening side effects.

But science is developing fast these days, and recent marvels in medicine have given us new ways to fight back—including using one’s own immune system, known as immunotherapy, to combat cancer. With that same principle, researchers at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany have developed what may be the first “universal cancer vaccine,” with preliminary human trials shown to be successful.

It must be noted that a full treatment is still years away. For average treatments, FDA approval can take as long as 8 years, and more clinical trials are needed. However, early work is inspiring.

RECOGNIZING THE PROBLEM

To break down the work, the immune system does not always recognize cancer cells as a threat because they possess similarities with normal cells in the body, which the immune system won’t attack. They key to this vaccine is an antigen, a molecule that serves as an identifier that complicates the way that the immune system recognizes cancer cells and normal cells.

To address this issue, the researchers  basically shot ‘darts’ that contain pieces of RNA from the patient’s cancer cells at their own immune system, causing the body to recognize the threat and deal with it accordingly.

The researchers assert that this method is essentially universal, in the sense that they can simply change the RNA within the darts, and they can use it to treat various cancers.

The team from Germany did their research initially on mice. And according to the study, upon injecting the vaccine, the subject’s immune systems began fighting malignant tumors.

Moreover, the researchers have already done tests of the vaccine on three patients to prove its safety. The patients, diagnosed with melanoma, had only undergone side-effects of flu-like symptoms, and nothing like those in chemotherapy. As reported, in one patient, a suspected tumor on a lymph node got smaller after the vaccine injection.r

Universal Basic Income Hits the U.S—Citizens Will Get Paid Just For Being Born

Universal Basic Income Hits the U.S—Citizens Will Get Paid Just For Being Born


Y Combinator, a seed accelerator and startup incubator, plans to inaugurate a short-term “universal basic income” experiment in Oakland, California; it’s a first step toward a larger, projected five-year study of the guaranteed cost-of-living salary.
THE OAKLAND EXPERIMENT

There’s been a lot of talk lately about “basic income”—the notion of a guaranteed financial disbursement to every human being simply for being alive.

It’s an idea that has garnered a great deal of support in certain circles, for obvious reasons (free money); however, many see it as the natural progression of society…as the only viable way of dealing with issues like increased automation, poverty, etc. Indeed, many see in a universal basic income (UBI) an instrument of liberty, and an effective tool for combating the threats of social unrest, economic dislocation, and various other forms of civil strife that are often the corollaries of unemployment.

There’s even a major national referendum on basic income to be held June 5 in Switzerland. And now the startup accelerator, Y Combinator, whose guiding ethos is seeding and incubating avant-garde businesses and ideas, has stepped into the fray. It plans to launch a short-term pilot program in Oakland, California, a preparatory first step to a longer, five-year experiment.

“Our goal will be to prepare for the longer-term study by working on our methods—how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc.,” the company explained in a blog post.


THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH

Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, believes that a UBI is a necessary—even an inevitable—evolution in our society, considering the widespread unemployment expected to result from the increased mechanization of jobs.

“In our pilot, the income will be unconditional; we’re going to give it to participants for the duration of the study, no matter what,” Altman explains.

“People will be able to volunteer, work, not work, move to another country—anything. We hope basic income promotes freedom, and we want to see how people experience that freedom.”

Of course, not all are onboard. Some in the Swiss government have urged citizens to reject the referendum, explaining that the exorbitant costs would become prohibitive and might bankrupt the country. Which is, of course, is very likely if not managed properly; however, Y Combinator thinks a government model might not be the best choice and that smaller scale operations may prove to be more viable.

There’s no firm date yet for the launch of the Oakland experiment; all we know is that the company is working with city officials and groups to work out the details, and that the program will be headed by Elizabeth Rhodes, a PhD graduate from the University of Michigan.

Without doubt, UBI advocates will be watching the results of the Oakland experiment with great interest.r

What I've Learned in My First Days as Delta's New CEO - ED BASTEN

For more than 15 years, Delta Air Lines has been my second home, and its people have been my extended family. So when I was named incoming CEO in February, I knew how I wanted to spend the first few months on the job: Connecting with my Delta family across the globe and hearing firsthand their advice, their questions, their worries and their hopes for the future.

 Now that I’ve been officially in the role for about a month, here's what I'd tell anyone starting a new job or getting promoted.

The experience will be both exhilarating and humbling. I've gotten great advice from experienced Delta veterans on how to maintain our profitability as we continue to grow as a global company. Younger employees have shown me their infectious enthusiasm and they have taught me a lot about how to reach out to the next generation of travelers and earn their loyalty. And the countless suggestions and examples I have heard on how we can do things better have shown me firsthand that the spirit of innovation is alive and well at Delta.

Get out of the office. Visiting old friends and making new ones among our flight attendants, pilots, engineers, maintenance technicians, customer service agents and others reminded me of why I’ve always been enthralled by Delta. It’s because the deep culture here that puts employees at the center of the enterprise. Our culture is what makes us unique, and it’s the most powerful advantage we have over our competitors.

Respect the culture. CEOs always talk about their company's culture. But it is especially critical at a global airline like Delta, where the performance of our people is the chief factor ensuring a smooth operation and making sure our customers receive the experience they deserve.

Just consider that on every flight, a small team of Delta pilots and flight attendants operates a $100 million asset. They ensure the safety and comfort of more than 100 people. And at 35,000 feet, they do it with virtually no oversight from management. The performance of that flight crew and those on the ground supporting them can impact multiple other flights, because every delay slows other flights later in the day in a "ripple effect" than can snarl operations nationwide, leaving customers frustrated and unhappy.

The level of trust that we must have with our people to make everything work on nearly 5,000 flights every day is unprecedented.

Recognize — and reward — your team. When I'm asked how Delta achieved the status of the most reliable of the major airlines, and one routinely recognized for great customer service, I always point to the performance of our people and the culture that underlies it. During the difficult years after 9-11, it was the employee-focused culture that kept Delta alive, even after many had written us off. Our employees literally saved the airline, and they are similarly responsible for Delta's success today.

But keeping a values-based culture vibrant and alive isn't easy. It takes a relentless focus and commitment, and it has to be more than just lip service. That's why we have invested heavily in our people, and they know they will share in the company's success.

One of the first things I did after being named incoming CEO was celebrate Profit Sharing Day, when we paid out $1.5 billion to our employees — the equivalent to 21 percent of their annual pay. It was the largest single profit-sharing payout in the history of U.S. business. Just a few months before we had given 14.5 percent raises across the board.

Even more importantly, our people are empowered to take ownership of what they do, to innovate and find solutions to the problems that confront them on a daily basis. They know that if they are trying to take care of our customers, Delta will back them up. That is a powerful tool to get people engaged in what they do and can turn them into passionate ambassadors for the company.

All the time I have spent with Delta people has both energized and humbled me as I step into this leadership role. It makes me confident that we have only begun in our quest to become the No. 1 airline for our customers, employees and investors. I plan to continue keeping the pulse of Delta people in the months and years to come. Because with all the responsibilities that come with being CEO, acting as the steward of our shared culture is by far the most important.

Written by


Ed Bastian
Chief Executive Officer at Delta Air Lines

Study shows that One Person’s Cancer Can Be Fought Using Someone Else’s Immune Cells,

In new research, scientists use a 'borrowed' immune system to help an existing immune system 'see' cancer cells for the first time.
For the first time, scientists have shown that even if a patient’s own immune cells are incapable of recognising and attacking tumours, someone else’s immune cells might be able to.

In a new study, scientists have shown that by inserting certain components of healthy donor immune cells (or T cells) into the malfunctioning immune cells of a cancer patient, they can ‘teach’ these cells how to recognise cancer cells and attack them.

“In a way, our findings show that the immune response in cancer patients can be strengthened; there is more on the cancer cells that makes them foreign that we can exploit,” says one of the team, Ton Schumacher from the Netherlands Cancer Institute.

“One way we consider doing this is finding the right donor T cells to match these neo-antigens,” he says. “The receptor that is used by these donor T-cells can then be used to genetically modify the patient’s own T cells so these will be able to detect the cancer cells.”

It’s now abundantly clear that existing treatments that try to kill off cancer cells by pumping the body full of harmful chemicals (aka chemotherapy) or incredibly hot bursts of laser light (radiation therapy) are woefully inadequate, so scientists around the world have been looking to something called immunotherapy as the next big hope.

Rather than using lasers or chemicals to attack cancer cells (and also healthy cells nearby), immunotherapy is based on the idea that certain treatments could bolster a patient’s own immune system to fight the cancer on its own.

Ideally, when a patient gets sick, their own T cells – or white blood cells – are responsible for detecting foreign or abnormal cells, and once they’ve locked onto their target, they bind with them and signal to the the rest of the immune system that they need to be attacked.

But when it comes to cancer, T cells can fail for two main reasons: either certain ‘barriers’ are in place that interfere with their ability to target and bind cancer cells, or they simply don’t recognise the cancer cells as something they need to take note of and destroy in the first place.

Scientists have recently seen some really promising results in a trial where defective T cells were extracted from the blood of leukaemia patients, reprogrammed to target the specific type of cancer, and inserted back into the body to more effectively fight the disease.

“In one trial, 94 percent of patients with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia saw their symptoms disappear entirely,” Fiona MacDonald reported for us back in February. “For patients with other types of blood cancer, response rates have been above 80 percent, and more than half have experienced complete remission.”

Another way to address a malfunctioning immune system is by using a healthy immune system to kick it back into gear. In this most recent study, a team from the Netherlands Cancer Institute and the University of Oslo extracted T cells from healthy donors, and inserted mutated DNA from a patient’s cancer cells into them.

They identified the correct DNA sequences by mapping certain protein fragments called neo-antigens on the surface of cancer cells from three patients at the Oslo University Hospital.

In all three patients, the cancer cells seemed to display a large number of different neo-antigens, but none were picked up by their own T-cells. Fortunately, they did stimulate an immune response in the healthy donor immune cells.

The team inserted active components from these donor immune cells into the immune cells of the three cancer patients, and found that this prompted their own immune cells to effectively recognise the neo-antigens on the surface of the cancer cells, and kickstart an immune response.

So basically, they’re using a ‘borrowed’ immune system to help the existing immune system ‘see’ the cancer cells for the first time.

While this is just a proof-of-concept study with only three participants, the results are promising enough that the treatment will hopefully be tested in a much wider clinical study in the future.

What we’re beginning to see more and more is the idea that cancer treatments need to be more personalised, and quite simply smarter than what’s been offered for several decades now, and addressing the things that are holding back an individual’s own immune system from doing its job just might be the answer.

If you’re not convinced, this billionaire just invested US$250 million into getting immunotherapy to the forefront of cancer research.

“Our study shows that the principle of outsourcing cancer immunity to a donor is sound. However, more work needs to be done before patients can benefit from this discovery,” said one of the team, Johanna Olweus.

“We are currently exploring high-throughput methods to identify the neo-antigens that the T cells can ‘see’ on the cancer and isolate the responding cells. But the results showing that we can obtain cancer-specific immunity from the blood of healthy individuals are already very promising.”

IBM Is Working on a Molecule That Could Eradicate Viruses

IBM has created a macromolecule that prevents specific viral infections, like zika and ebola, and stops them from spreading. The team asserts that, one day, they hope this work can up used as a baseline for defeating disease wholesale.
Part of the difficulty in tackling viruses like Ebola and Zika is that they’re all so different, and each one can regularly mutate to create different strains within the same virus.

To address this, scientists have been busy looking at common characteristics of viruses that could be used to develop an all-powerful vaccine capable of fighting off any infection, and researchers over at IBM say they’re getting close.

It’s exciting stuff: A macromolecule – a giant molecule made up of smaller units – has now been developed that could have the potential to block multiple types of viruses, despite the many variations involved. It’s still early days yet, but the results could lead to drugs that aren’t tricked by mutating virus strains.

The scientists, from tech giant IBM and the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore, ignored the RNA and DNA of the viruses they used for testing – these would traditionally be the areas to target, as they give the viruses their characteristics, but they also tend to vary from virus to virus and mutation to mutation.

Instead the team looked at glycoproteins–large molecules attached to the outside of all viruses and capable of latching onto cells in the body, which is the process that actually makes us sick. The macromolecule that’s now been developed attracts viruses and then hitches a ride on these glycoproteins, neutralising their acidity levels and making them less able to replicate in the process.

The macromolecule has another method of attack too – a sugar called mannose, which attaches itself to healthy immune cells and draws them closer to the virus, speeding up the fight against the infection.

Based on the tests already carried out by the team on viruses such as Ebola and dengue, the macromolecule works as intended. It binds itself to the glycoproteins, disabling viral ability to infect healthy cells, while the mannose was also found to be effective in stopping viruses from infecting immune cells.

In the short term, the researchers think the macromolecules could be used in antiviral wipes or detergents, Gizmag’s Chris Wood reports. With further study, we could see vaccinations that are capable of protecting us against a whole range of viruses.

“It’s almost a daunting task to design any kind of therapeutic for a virus,” lead researcher James Hedrick of IBM Research explained to Samantha Olson at Medical Daily. “[The glycoprotein is] kind of like honey. It’s kind of sticky. We can now competitively go after this cell faster than the virus can go after your immune cell. And once we block those receptors, we prevent infection.”

The group’s findings have been published in the journal Macromolecules.

“Viral diseases continue to be one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality,” said the study’s lead author Dr. Yi Yan Yang, a group leader at IBN. “We have created an anti-viral macromolecule that can tackle viruses by blocking the virus from infecting the cells, regardless of mutations. It is not toxic to healthy cells and is safe for use. This promising research advance represents years of hard work and collaboration with a global community of researchers.”

Physicists Just Discovered a New Form of Light

A new form of light, one where the angular momentum of each photon takes only half of the value of Planck’s constant, has just been uncovered.
LET THERE BE LIGHT

It’s easy to take light for granted and assume that we know everything there is to know about it—after all, it’s everywhere. But as it turns out, we might have only scratched the surface.

Today, physicists announced that they have discovered a new form of light. It’s completely different from our existing rules regarding light and angular momentum, showing that light can take on new and unexpected forms, and these could fundamentally change our current understanding of electromagnetic radiation.

The TCD press release explains how angular momentum operated in relation to light:

“A beam of light is characterised by its colour or wavelength and a less familiar quantity known as angular momentum. Angular momentum measures how much something is rotating. For a beam of light, although travelling in a straight line, it can also be rotating around its own axis. So when light from the mirror hits your eye in the morning, every photon twists your eye a little, one way or another.”

Until today, it was presumed that light, regardless of form, would have a whole number for angular momentum (a constant quantity that measures how much light is rotating). It was thought that the value would always be a multiple of Planck’s constant (the physical constant that sets the scale of quantum effects).

However, researchers from Trinity College Dublin are claiming to have demonstrated that a new form of light exists—one where the angular momentum is just half of this constant value.

Their research has been published in the journal, Science Advances.

THEORETICAL PHYSICS

But what does this all mean? “The topic of light has always been one of interest to physicists, while also being documented as one of the areas of physics that is best understood,” adds one of the researchers, Stefano Sanvito. “This discovery is a breakthrough for the world of physics and science alike.”

Apart from completely changing our understanding of light, this new information could ultimately help improve speed and security for current technology, such as fiber-optic cables. Quite simply, it means, if this new form of light can further be developed, it will lead to safer and faster internet connections.

That said, it’s important to note that we still have a long way to go before we get the full benefits of this groundbreaking new discovery. A separate team of researchers will be needed to replicate the work originally done and ensure that the results from the TCD team wasn’t just a one-off (like an artefact).

ABA ETHNIC RIOTS 5th MAY 2016

—What would have been a major ethnic clash was averted yesterday in Aba, Abia State following protests over alleged killings of two Igbo butchers at the Waterside abattoir by soldiers.

Vanguard gathered that penultimate week, an unnamed soldier in mufti, reportedly went to the abattoir to smoke Indian hemp after which he refused to pay, claiming he was a soldier.

The situation led to a fracas with some boys in the area, who insisted he must pay, without knowing that the man was a soldier.

The said soldier reportedly came to the abattoir yesterday with four of his colleagues in a Hilux patrol van and started shooting indiscriminately.

There was commotion in the area as butchers and those who came to buy meat scampered to safety and when the shooting died down, a pig rearer, identified as Ojukwu, was found dead.

It was gathered that when some of the butchers, who saw what happened, sought to know from the soldiers what led to their action, that the trigger happy soldiers shot and killed another butcher.

The soldiers reportedly beat four others to pulp and forced them into their van and drove off to an unknown destination.

Their action angered the butchers as they were joined by other people in a protest that spread to all parts of the city.

Attempt by the protesters to dump one the dead bodies they took round the town in a wheel barrow at one of the military posts in the city was aborted by soldiers in full battle gear at the Ogbor Hill waterside bridge.

The protest which began at about 12.00noon later took an ethnic colouration, as the protesters marched towards the Mosque and the Hausa settlement on Hospital Road, but were quickly dispersed by soldiers who kept watch over the places.

As at the time of filing this report, some Hausas in the city had to take refuge at the Aba Police Area command.

When contacted, Commanding Officer, 14 Brigade, Ohafia, Brigadier General Lawrence Fejokwu, said investigations are ongoing to unravel the cause of the incident.

E