High blood pressure happens when your blood pressure, which naturally naturally fluctuates throughout the day and night, is consistently too high. It means that your heart has to work harder to pump blood around your body - a mechanism that can lead to cardiovascular complications if steps are taken to lower your reading. Fortunately, making healthy lifestyle decisions can lower high blood pressure and ward off the threat of developing serious health conditions.

Exercising regularly is one key lifestyle measure proven to lower high blood pressure, as the Mayo Clinic explained: Regular physical activity makes your heart stronger. A stronger heart can pump more blood with less effort. If your heart can work less to pump, the force on your arteries decreases, lowering your blood pressure.

Crucially, as the health body points out, becoming more active can lower your systolic blood pressure the top number in a blood pressure reading by an average of four to nine millimetres of mercury (mm Hg).

That's as good as some blood pressure medications. For some people, getting some exercise is enough to reduce the need for blood pressure medication, noted the health site.

Blood pressure is measured using two numbers - the first number, called systolic blood pressure, measures the pressure in your blood vessels when your heart beats.

READ MORE:High blood pressure: Avoid eating these five foods to reduce risk of serious complications

The second number, called diastolic blood pressure, measures the pressure in your blood vessels when your heart rests between beats.

According to Blood Pressure UK, systolic blood pressure is more important than diastolic blood pressure because it gives the best idea of your risk of having a stroke or heart attack.

Knowing where to begin with exercise can sometimes seem overwhelming but recent research suggests that doing a simple exercise every morning may provide blood pressure-lowering benefits.

The study, published in the journal Hypertension, found that just 30 minutes of exercise every morning may be as effective as medication at lowering blood pressure for the rest of the day.

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The study found that a short burst of treadmill walking each morning reduced high blood pressure, and that the effect was more pronounced in people that took additional short walks later in the day.

To gather the findings, 35 women and 32 men aged between 55 and 80 followed three different daily plans, in a random order, with at least six days between each one.

The first plan consisted of uninterrupted sitting for eight hours, while the second consisted of one hour of sitting before 30 minutes of walking on a treadmill at moderate intensity, followed by 6.5 hours of sitting down.

The final plan was one hour of sitting before 30 minutes of treadmill walking, followed by 6.5 hours of sitting, which was interrupted every 30 minutes with three minutes of walking at a light intensity.

Commenting on the findings, study author Michael Wheeler of the University of Western Australia in Perth, said: For both men and women, the magnitude of reduction in average systolic blood pressure following exercise and breaks in sitting approached what might be expected from anti-hypertensive medication in this population to reduce the risk of death from heart disease and stroke.

The study echoes extensive evidence that shows regular physical activity can help lower your blood pressure and help reduce your risk of heart attacks and strokes, said Chris Allen at the British Heart Foundation.

It can also give both your body and mind a boost, which is why 30 minutes of activity in the morning is a great way to set yourself up for the day, he said.

In addition to exercise, overhauling your diet is also essential to lowering high blood pressure and warding off the threat of developing deadly complications.

Eating too much salt, for example, can send your reading soaring so to keep the risks at bay, you should cut your salt intake to less than 6g (0.2oz) a day, which is about a teaspoonful, advises the NHS.

According to Mayo Clinic, upping your potassium intake can counter the negative effects of eating too much salt.

The best source of potassium is food, such as fruits and vegetables, rather than supplements, noted the health site.

It added: Eating a diet that is rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables and low-fat dairy products and skimps on saturated fat and cholesterol can lower your blood pressure by up to 11 mm Hg if you have high blood pressure.

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High blood pressure: Do this for 30 minutes in the morning to lower your reading - Express

Constipation is the medical term for infrequent or hard-to-pass bowel movements. A person may have constipation if they have not had a bowel movement in 3 or more days, or if they need to strain very hard when they do have one.

Sometimes, a person may experience a headache in addition to constipation. In some cases, these two symptoms could share the same underlying cause.

Common underlying causes of both symptoms include not drinking enough water or eating enough of certain nutrients. In these instances, drinking more water and eating more fiber may help resolve the symptoms.

If constipation and headaches frequently occur together, it may be due to a long-term condition that requires medical treatment or lifestyle changes.

This article outlines some health conditions that could cause headaches and constipation, along with their associated treatment options.

Many people who experience headaches also complain of constipation. A 2015 study sought to investigate this link.

The researchers assessed the medical records of 96 children who went to the hospital complaining of headache. Of these, 24 had constipation and received appropriate treatment. At a follow-up consultation, all 24 of those children showed improvements in both constipation and headache.

The study authors therefore conclude that successful treatment of constipation can improve headache particularly tension-type headache. However, they could not determine whether constipation triggers headache or constipation and headache are both symptoms of the same underlying cause.

Often, both headaches and constipation develop as a result of not consuming enough fluids or having a balanced diet.

Dehydration, which occurs when someone loses more fluid than they take in, can result in both constipation and headaches.

Constipation can also occur due to eating foods that contain little or no fiber. Many of these foods, such as fast foods and processed foods, are high in sugar. This may cause headaches.

In these instances, taking in more fluid and eating more nutritious high fiber foods could help resolve both symptoms.

There are also several underlying conditions that may cause both constipation and headaches. A person with one of these conditions may experience the two symptoms at the same time. These conditions include:

Celiac disease is a type of autoimmune condition. People who have celiac disease experience intestinal inflammation and damage as a result of eating gluten. Gluten is a protein present in wheat and wheat products.

There are three types of celiac disease: classical, nonclassical, and silent.

Classical celiac disease is characterized by intestinal malabsorption. This refers to when the intestines become so damaged that they are unable to absorb enough nutrients from the diet. Some signs of intestinal malabsorption include:

A person with nonclassical celiac disease may experience mild gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms such as abdominal pain and bloating. They may also experience:

Silent celiac disease is so-called because those who have it are unlikely to experience any symptoms. They may, however, experience improved health after adopting a gluten-free diet.

Treatment

The only treatment for celiac disease is to follow a strict gluten-free diet. This will allow the small intestine to heal, which should lead to a reduction in GI symptoms.

Mood disorders such as depression and anxiety can trigger tension headaches and GI issues.

Some additional symptoms of depression include:

There are also several types of anxiety disorder. Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is one of the most common. People with GAD experience persistent and excessive worry that interferes with their daily life.

They may also experience symptoms such as:

Treatment

A doctor may prescribe medications for people with depression or anxiety. However, these medications can take some time to work. People may also need to try several medications before finding a drug that works well for them.

People with either mood disorder may also benefit from talking therapies, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

Fibromyalgia is a condition characterized by chronic widespread musculoskeletal pain. Common symptoms of fibromyalgia include:

Some people with fibromyalgia may experience migraine or tension headaches. They may also experience digestive issues, such as irritable bowel syndrome or gastroesophageal reflux disease.

Treatment

The most effective treatment for fibromyalgia is physical exercise. Aerobic exercise may be particularly effective.

People with fibromyalgia may also benefit from taking certain medications. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have approved the following three drugs for the treatment of fibromyalgia:

People with fibromyalgia may also benefit from the following treatments:

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a condition that causes a person to feel overwhelmingly tired or fatigued. As a result, a person may have great difficulty carrying out normal daily activities.

CFS can cause headaches and, in some instances, constipation. Other symptoms may include:

Treatment

There is currently no cure for CFS. However, there are things a person can do to alleviate their symptoms. This may include spreading out activities that they know will drain them of energy. Certain supplements and relaxation therapies may also help.

The symptoms of CFS differ from one person to another. For this reason, a person should talk to their doctor about their specific symptoms and the possible treatment options.

Headaches and constipation can both be side effects of certain medications. Two medications that may cause these symptoms are opioids and statins.

A person should talk to their doctor if they develop constipation or headaches after starting a new medication.

Treatment

If medication is the cause of both constipation and headaches, a doctor may lower the dosage. When possible, they may even prescribe an alternative medication.

If these options are not feasible, a doctor may prescribe medications to help alleviate the side effects.

Constipation and headaches can sometimes occur together. In some cases, these symptoms may share the same underlying cause. This may be a lack of fluid or fiber.

However, there are also several health conditions that can cause both constipation and headaches. Treating the underlying condition can help alleviate these symptoms.

In some cases, constipation and headaches may occur as side effects of a medication. If this is the case, a doctor may lower the dosage of the medication or prescribe an alternative drug.

A person should see a healthcare provider if they experience persistent or recurrent constipation, headaches, or both.

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Can constipation cause a headache? What to know - Medical News Today

Women who can exercise vigorously are at significantly lower risk of dying from heart disease, cancer and other potentially fatal health problems, according to research presented last Saturday at EuroEcho 2019, a scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology. Exercise as much as you can. Fitness protects against death from any cause, said study author Jess Peteiro, a cardiologist at University Hospital A Corua in Spain.

The study included 4,714 adult women who were recommended to take treadmill exercise echocardiography a test that uses sound waves to create live images of your hearts activity because they had either known or suspected coronary artery disease. Participants walked or ran on a treadmill, gradually increasing the intensity, and continuing until exhaustion, the researchers reported.

Fitness was categorized as 10 metabolic equivalents (METs), the equivalent of walking fast up four flights of stairs or very fast up three flights of stairs, all without stopping. During a median follow-up of 4.6 years there were 345 cardiovascular deaths, 164 cancer deaths, and 203 deaths from other causes. After adjusting for factors that could influence the relationship, METs were significantly associated with lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other causes, the researchers said.

The annual rate of death from cardiovascular disease was nearly four times higher in women with poor versus good exercise capacity (2.2% versus 0.6%). Annual cancer deaths were doubled in patients with poor versus good exercise capacity (0.9% versus 0.4%). The annual rate of death from other causes was more than four times higher in those with poor versus good, exercise capacity (1.4% versus 0.3%).

The average age was 64 and 80% were between 50 and 75. The results were the same for women over 60 and less than 60 although the group under 50 was small, Peteiro said. Good exercise capacity predicted lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other causes. Patients with poor heart function during their exercises had a higher probability of death from cardiovascular disease during follow-up, but heart function during exercise did not predict the likelihood of death from cancer or other causes.

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However, another study suggested that even those who have had heart surgery should move around every 20 minutes during an eight-hour period of sitting to help prolong their life. Taking breaks and burning more than 770 calories per day can reduce your likliehood of dying sooner, said Ailar Ramadi, postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine at University of Alberta, Edmonton. People who have had heart surgery spend most of their waking hours sitting, lying down, but remaining sedentary for long periods could shorten their life, he suggested.

He suggested simple activities such as standing up and walking at a casual pace. There is a lot of evidence now that sitting for long periods is bad for health, Ramadi said. In that study, he enrolled 132 patients with coronary artery disease and an average age of 63 years; 77% were men. Participants wore an arm band activity monitor for an average of 22 hours a day for five days.

This is not the first doctor to effectively recommend walking your way to a longer life. Walking at an average pace was linked to a 20% reduction in the risk of mortality compared with walking at a slow pace, according to a study published last year in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. A similar result was found for risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

That study was a collaboration between the Universities of Sydney, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Limerick and Ulster. It linked mortality records with the results of 11 population-based surveys in the U.K. between 1994 and 2008 in which participants reported their walking pace. Average pace walkers aged 60 years or over experienced a 46% reduction in risk of death from cardiovascular causes.

A separate Harvard University study concluded that you could add 10 years to your life by eating a healthy diet, exercising 30 minutes or more a day, maintaining a healthy weight a body mass index between 18.5 and 24.9 never smoking and drinking only a moderate amount of alcohol. It analyzed 34 years of data from 78,000 women and 27 years of data from 44,000 men.

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The old-fashioned approach to reducing your risk of cancer and heart disease is still one of the best, according to new research - MarketWatch

Back pain is a painful condition that affects everyone at some point in their lives. The pain felt in the back usually gets better on its own and can be managed by keeping mobile or taking over-the-counter-painkillers. There are a variety of ways one could try to help ease the pain they feel in their back.

Spinal manipulation

This method involves using the hands to adjust, massage or stimulate the spine.

The National Centre for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) state that spinal manipulation or chiropractic manipulation helps more with lower back pain.

Acupuncture

A traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture can be used to help treat a variety of ailments from chronic diseases to chronic pain.

An overview of systematic reviews found that acupuncture may help restore function and relive pain is some people who have chronic lower back pain.

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Anti-inflammatory diet

Studies have shown that having higher levels of inflammation has a close connection to certain types of chronic pain.

Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs including ibuprofen, work well for some types of pain.

Research suggests that certain foods can help lower inflammation in the body and these include vegetables, fruits, nuts, fish and whole grains.

Weight loss

Being overweight can cause back pain due to increased pressure on the spine and strain of the back muscles.

One study found that obesity has links to high levels of low back pain and disability in men.

Correcting posture

Incorrect posture could be the cause of back pain for some people, so taking the right steps to correct it may bring some relief.

Studies have shown that incorrect posture contributed to low back pain in adolescents.

There are wearable devices that can gently pull the shoulders back, reminding a person to correct their posture.

Exercise

Studies have long supported the fact that exercise releases endorphins.

These natural brain chemicals help stop pain by binding to opiod receptors in the brain.

This has a mild effect similar to pain medications. Exercise strengthens the back and neck muscles and can help reduce the pain.

Stress management techniques

Stress causes a person to tense their muscles which makes the back pain even worse.

A study explains that stress can cause changes in the bodys perception of pain and those who experienced high levels of stress are highly recommended to find ways to help alleviate that stress so it doesnt negatively impact the body.

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Back pain: 10 proven ways to help alleviate back pain without surgery - Express

Obesity is increasing worldwide, especially among children and teenagers. More than 150 million children in the world are obese in 2019. These children have increased risk of heart disease, cancers and Type 2 diabetes.

Teenagers with obesity are likely to remain obese as adults. If these trends continue, 70 per cent of adults aged 40 years could be either overweight or obese by 2040.

I am a neuroscientist and my research investigates how diet changes the brain. I want to understand how unhealthy diets impact the developing brain, and also why young people today are so prone to developing obesity.

Adolescents are the greatest consumers of calorie-rich junk foods. During puberty, many children have an insatiable appetite as rapid growth requires lots of energy. Heightened metabolism and growth spurts can protect against obesity, to an extent. But excessively eating high-calorie junk foods and increasingly sedentary lifestyles can outweigh any metabolic protection.

The teenage years are a key window of brain development. Adolescence coincides with a new-found social autonomy and the independence to make personal food choices.

Read more: Your brain on sugar: What the science actually says

During adolescence, connections between different brain regions and individual neurons are also being refined and strengthened. The adolescent brain is malleable because of increased levels of neuroplasticity.

This means the brain is highly receptive to being shaped and rewired by the environment including diet. In turn, these changes can become hardwired when development is complete. So the adolescent brain is vulnerable to diet-induced changes, but these changes may endure through life.

Neuroscientists use functional brain imaging to examine how the brain responds to specific events. Brain scans show that the prefrontal cortex a key brain area for behavioural control and decision-making doesnt fully mature until the early 20s.

The prefrontal cortex controls and overrides urges triggered by events in the environment. Resisting eating a whole bag of candy or buying cheap junk foods can be particularly difficult for teenagers.

In contrast to the immature prefrontal cortex, the brains reward system the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system is fully developed at a much earlier age.

Teenagers are particularly drawn to rewards, including sweet and calorie-dense foods. This is due to increased numbers of dopamine receptors in the adolescent brain, so the feeling of reward can be exaggerated. Frequent stimulation of the reward system results in enduring brain adaptations.

During adolescence, these changes may cause long-lasting shifts to the balance of brain chemicals.

Taken together, the teenage brain has a voracious drive for reward, diminished behavioural control and a susceptibility to be shaped by experience.

This manifests as a reduced ability to resist rewarding behaviours. So its not surprising that teenagers prefer to eat foods that are easy to obtain and immediately gratifying, even in the face of health advice to the contrary. But what are the enduring brain consequences?

Functional imaging studies show brain activity during tasks or viewing images of foods. Brain circuits that process food rewards are more active in adolescents with obesity compared to those considered normal weight.

Interestingly, lower activity is seen in regions of the prefrontal cortex. This shows that obesity can both heighten activation of the reward system and reduce brain activity in centres that can override the desire to eat.

Importantly, successful weight loss in adolescents restores levels of activity in the prefrontal cortex. This provides critical knowledge that the prefrontal cortex is a key area of the brain for controlling food intake, and that diet interventions increase activity in brain regions that exert self control.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a way scientists can modify brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, can change inhibitory control of eating behaviour. Repeated TMS treatment could be a new therapy to restore cognitive control over eating, helping with long-term weight loss.

Excessively eating junk foods during adolescence could alter brain development, leading to lasting poor diet habits. But, like a muscle, the brain can be exercised to improve willpower.

Increased brain plasticity during adolescence means the young mind may be more receptive to lifestyle changes. Physical exercise boosts brain plasticity, helping to set in place new healthy habits. Identifying how the brain is changed by obesity provides opportunities to identify and intervene.

Functional brain imaging adds a new layer of information where clinicians can identify at-risk individuals and track brain changes during nutritional and lifestyle interventions.

Even more, TMS could be a new treatment approach to improve re-calibration of the young brain to prevent enduring changes into adulthood.

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How junk food shapes the developing teenage brain - The Conversation CA

AlphaGo is a computer program that plays the board game Go.[1] It was developed by DeepMind Technologies [2] which was later acquired by Google. AlphaGo had three far more powerful successors, called AlphaGo Master, AlphaGo Zero[3] and AlphaZero.

In October 2015, the original AlphaGo became the first computer Go program to beat a human professional Go player without handicap on a full-sized 1919 board.[4][5] In March 2016, it beat Lee Sedol in a five-game match, the first time a computer Go program has beaten a 9-dan professional without handicap.[6] Although it lost to Lee Sedol in the fourth game, Lee resigned in the final game, giving a final score of 4 games to 1 in favour of AlphaGo. In recognition of the victory, AlphaGo was awarded an honorary 9-dan by the Korea Baduk Association.[7] The lead up and the challenge match with Lee Sedol were documented in a documentary film also titled AlphaGo,[8] directed by Greg Kohs. It was chosen by Science as one of the Breakthrough of the Year runners-up on 22 December 2016.[9]

At the 2017 Future of Go Summit, its successor AlphaGo Master beat Ke Jie, the world No.1 ranked player at the time, in a three-game match (the even more powerful AlphaGo Zero already existed but was not yet announced). After this, AlphaGo was awarded professional 9-dan by the Chinese Weiqi Association.[10]

AlphaGo and its successors use a Monte Carlo tree search algorithm to find its moves based on knowledge previously "learned" by machine learning, specifically by an artificial neural network (a deep learning method) by extensive training, both from human and computer play.[11] A neural network is trained to predict AlphaGo's own move selections and also the winner's games. This neural net improves the strength of tree search, resulting in higher quality of move selection and stronger self-play in the next iteration.

After the match between AlphaGo and Ke Jie, DeepMind retired AlphaGo, while continuing AI research in other areas.[12] Starting from a 'blank page', with only a short training period, AlphaGo Zero achieved a 100-0 victory against the champion-defeating AlphaGo, while its successor, the self-taught AlphaZero, is currently perceived as the world's top player in Go as well as possibly in chess.

Go is considered much more difficult for computers to win than other games such as chess, because its much larger branching factor makes it prohibitively difficult to use traditional AI methods such as alphabeta pruning, tree traversal and heuristic search.[4][13]

Almost two decades after IBM's computer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in the 1997 match, the strongest Go programs using artificial intelligence techniques only reached about amateur 5-dan level,[11] and still could not beat a professional Go player without a handicap.[4][5][14] In 2012, the software program Zen, running on a four PC cluster, beat Masaki Takemiya (9p) twice at five- and four-stone handicaps.[15] In 2013, Crazy Stone beat Yoshio Ishida (9p) at a four-stone handicap.[16]

According to DeepMind's David Silver, the AlphaGo research project was formed around 2014 to test how well a neural network using deep learning can compete at Go.[17] AlphaGo represents a significant improvement over previous Go programs. In 500 games against other available Go programs, including Crazy Stone and Zen,[18] AlphaGo running on a single computer won all but one.[19] In a similar matchup, AlphaGo running on multiple computers won all 500 games played against other Go programs, and 77% of games played against AlphaGo running on a single computer. The distributed version in October 2015 was using 1,202 CPUs and 176 GPUs.[11]

In October 2015, the distributed version of AlphaGo defeated the European Go champion Fan Hui,[20] a 2-dan (out of 9 dan possible) professional, five to zero.[5][21] This was the first time a computer Go program had beaten a professional human player on a full-sized board without handicap.[22] The announcement of the news was delayed until 27 January 2016 to coincide with the publication of a paper in the journal Nature[11] describing the algorithms used.[5]

AlphaGo played South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol, ranked 9-dan, one of the best players at Go,[14][needs update] with five games taking place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, South Korea on 9, 10, 12, 13, and 15 March 2016,[23][24] which were video-streamed live.[25] Out of five games, AlphaGo won four games and Lee won the fourth game which made him recorded as the only human player who beat AlphaGo in all of its 74 official games.[26] AlphaGo ran on Google's cloud computing with its servers located in the United States.[27] The match used Chinese rules with a 7.5-point komi, and each side had two hours of thinking time plus three 60-second byoyomi periods.[28] The version of AlphaGo playing against Lee used a similar amount of computing power as was used in the Fan Hui match.[29]The Economist reported that it used 1,920 CPUs and 280 GPUs.[30] At the time of play, Lee Sedol had the second-highest number of Go international championship victories in the world after South Korean player Lee Changho who kept the world championship title for 16 years.[31] Since there is no single official method of ranking in international Go, the rankings may vary among the sources. While he was ranked top sometimes, some sources ranked Lee Sedol as the fourth-best player in the world at the time.[32][33] AlphaGo was not specifically trained to face Lee nor was designed to compete with any specific human players.

The first three games were won by AlphaGo following resignations by Lee.[34][35] However, Lee beat AlphaGo in the fourth game, winning by resignation at move 180. AlphaGo then continued to achieve a fourth win, winning the fifth game by resignation.[36]

The prize was US$1 million. Since AlphaGo won four out of five and thus the series, the prize will be donated to charities, including UNICEF.[37] Lee Sedol received $150,000 for participating in all five games and an additional $20,000 for his win.[28]

In June 2016, at a presentation held at a university in the Netherlands, Aja Huang, one of the Deep Mind team, revealed that they had patched the logical weakness that occurred during the 4th game of the match between AlphaGo and Lee, and that after move 78 (which was dubbed the "divine move" by many professionals), it would play as intended and maintain Black's advantage. Before move 78, AlphaGo was leading throughout the game, but Lee's move caused the program's computing powers to be diverted and confused.[38] Huang explained that AlphaGo's policy network of finding the most accurate move order and continuation did not precisely guide AlphaGo to make the correct continuation after move 78, since its value network did not determine Lee's 78th move as being the most likely, and therefore when the move was made AlphaGo could not make the right adjustment to the logical continuation.[39]

On 29 December 2016, a new account on the Tygem server named "Magister" (shown as 'Magist' at the server's Chinese version) from South Korea began to play games with professional players. It changed its account name to "Master" on 30 December, then moved to the FoxGo server on 1 January 2017. On 4 January, DeepMind confirmed that the "Magister" and the "Master" were both played by an updated version of AlphaGo, called AlphaGo Master.[40][41] As of 5 January 2017, AlphaGo Master's online record was 60 wins and 0 losses,[42] including three victories over Go's top-ranked player, Ke Jie,[43] who had been quietly briefed in advance that Master was a version of AlphaGo.[42] After losing to Master, Gu Li offered a bounty of 100,000 yuan (US$14,400) to the first human player who could defeat Master.[41] Master played at the pace of 10 games per day. Many quickly suspected it to be an AI player due to little or no resting between games. Its adversaries included many world champions such as Ke Jie, Park Jeong-hwan, Yuta Iyama, Tuo Jiaxi, Mi Yuting, Shi Yue, Chen Yaoye, Li Qincheng, Gu Li, Chang Hao, Tang Weixing, Fan Tingyu, Zhou Ruiyang, Jiang Weijie, Chou Chun-hsun, Kim Ji-seok, Kang Dong-yun, Park Yeong-hun, and Won Seong-jin; national champions or world championship runners-up such as Lian Xiao, Tan Xiao, Meng Tailing, Dang Yifei, Huang Yunsong, Yang Dingxin, Gu Zihao, Shin Jinseo, Cho Han-seung, and An Sungjoon. All 60 games except one were fast-paced games with three 20 or 30 seconds byo-yomi. Master offered to extend the byo-yomi to one minute when playing with Nie Weiping in consideration of his age. After winning its 59th game Master revealed itself in the chatroom to be controlled by Dr. Aja Huang of the DeepMind team,[44] then changed its nationality to the United Kingdom. After these games were completed, the co-founder of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, said in a tweet, "we're looking forward to playing some official, full-length games later [2017] in collaboration with Go organizations and experts".[40][41]

Go experts were impressed by the program's performance and its nonhuman play style; Ke Jie stated that "After humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong... I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go."[42]

In the Future of Go Summit held in Wuzhen in May 2017, AlphaGo Master played three games with Ke Jie, the world No.1 ranked player, as well as two games with several top Chinese professionals, one pair Go game and one against a collaborating team of five human players.[45]

Google DeepMind offered 1.5 million dollar winner prizes for the three-game match between Ke Jie and Master while the losing side took 300,000 dollars.[46][47][48] Master won all three games against Ke Jie,[49][50] after which AlphaGo was awarded professional 9-dan by the Chinese Weiqi Association.[10]

After winning its three-game match against Ke Jie, the top-rated world Go player, AlphaGo retired. DeepMind also disbanded the team that worked on the game to focus on AI research in other areas.[12] After the Summit, Deepmind published 50 full length AlphaGo vs AlphaGo matches, as a gift to the Go community.[51]

AlphaGo's team published an article in the journal Nature on 19 October 2017, introducing AlphaGo Zero, a version without human data and stronger than any previous human-champion-defeating version.[52] By playing games against itself, AlphaGo Zero surpassed the strength of AlphaGo Lee in three days by winning 100 games to 0, reached the level of AlphaGo Master in 21 days, and exceeded all the old versions in 40 days.[53]

In a paper released on arXiv on 5 December 2017, DeepMind claimed that it generalized AlphaGo Zero's approach into a single AlphaZero algorithm, which achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess, shogi, and Go by defeating world-champion programs, Stockfish, Elmo, and 3-day version of AlphaGo Zero in each case.[54]

On 11 December 2017, DeepMind released AlphaGo teaching tool on its website[55] to analyze winning rates of different Go openings as calculated by AlphaGo Master.[56] The teaching tool collects 6,000 Go openings from 230,000 human games each analyzed with 10,000,000 simulations by AlphaGo Master. Many of the openings include human move suggestions.[56]

An early version of AlphaGo was tested on hardware with various numbers of CPUs and GPUs, running in asynchronous or distributed mode. Two seconds of thinking time was given to each move. The resulting Elo ratings are listed below.[11] In the matches with more time per move higher ratings are achieved.

In May 2016, Google unveiled its own proprietary hardware "tensor processing units", which it stated had already been deployed in multiple internal projects at Google, including the AlphaGo match against Lee Sedol.[57][58]

In the Future of Go Summit in May 2017, DeepMind disclosed that the version of AlphaGo used in this Summit was AlphaGo Master,[59][60] and revealed that it had measured the strength of different versions of the software. AlphaGo Lee, the version used against Lee, could give AlphaGo Fan, the version used in AlphaGo vs. Fan Hui, three stones, and AlphaGo Master was even three stones stronger.[61]

As of 2016, AlphaGo's algorithm uses a combination of machine learning and tree search techniques, combined with extensive training, both from human and computer play. It uses Monte Carlo tree search, guided by a "value network" and a "policy network," both implemented using deep neural network technology.[4][11] A limited amount of game-specific feature detection pre-processing (for example, to highlight whether a move matches a nakade pattern) is applied to the input before it is sent to the neural networks.[11]

The system's neural networks were initially bootstrapped from human gameplay expertise. AlphaGo was initially trained to mimic human play by attempting to match the moves of expert players from recorded historical games, using a database of around 30 million moves.[20] Once it had reached a certain degree of proficiency, it was trained further by being set to play large numbers of games against other instances of itself, using reinforcement learning to improve its play.[4] To avoid "disrespectfully" wasting its opponent's time, the program is specifically programmed to resign if its assessment of win probability falls beneath a certain threshold; for the match against Lee, the resignation threshold was set to 20%.[63]

Toby Manning, the match referee for AlphaGo vs. Fan Hui, has described the program's style as "conservative".[64] AlphaGo's playing style strongly favours greater probability of winning by fewer points over lesser probability of winning by more points.[17] Its strategy of maximising its probability of winning is distinct from what human players tend to do which is to maximise territorial gains, and explains some of its odd-looking moves.[65] It makes a lot of opening moves that have never or seldom been made by humans, while avoiding many second-line opening moves that human players like to make. It likes to use shoulder hits, especially if the opponent is over concentrated.[citation needed]

AlphaGo's March 2016 victory was a major milestone in artificial intelligence research.[66] Go had previously been regarded as a hard problem in machine learning that was expected to be out of reach for the technology of the time.[66][67][68] Most experts thought a Go program as powerful as AlphaGo was at least five years away;[69] some experts thought that it would take at least another decade before computers would beat Go champions.[11][70][71] Most observers at the beginning of the 2016 matches expected Lee to beat AlphaGo.[66]

With games such as checkers (that has been "solved" by the Chinook draughts player team), chess, and now Go won by computers, victories at popular board games can no longer serve as major milestones for artificial intelligence in the way that they used to. Deep Blue's Murray Campbell called AlphaGo's victory "the end of an era... board games are more or less done and it's time to move on."[66]

When compared with Deep Blue or with Watson, AlphaGo's underlying algorithms are potentially more general-purpose, and may be evidence that the scientific community is making progress towards artificial general intelligence.[17][72] Some commentators believe AlphaGo's victory makes for a good opportunity for society to start discussing preparations for the possible future impact of machines with general purpose intelligence. (As noted by entrepreneur Guy Suter, AlphaGo itself only knows how to play Go, and doesn't possess general-purpose intelligence: "[It] couldn't just wake up one morning and decide it wants to learn how to use firearms"[66]) In March 2016, AI researcher Stuart Russell stated that "AI methods are progressing much faster than expected, (which) makes the question of the long-term outcome more urgent," adding that "in order to ensure that increasingly powerful AI systems remain completely under human control... there is a lot of work to do."[73] Some scholars, such as Stephen Hawking, warned (in May 2015 before the matches) that some future self-improving AI could gain actual general intelligence, leading to an unexpected AI takeover; other scholars disagree: AI expert Jean-Gabriel Ganascia believes that "Things like 'common sense'... may never be reproducible",[74] and says "I don't see why we would speak about fears. On the contrary, this raises hopes in many domains such as health and space exploration."[73] Computer scientist Richard Sutton said "I don't think people should be scared... but I do think people should be paying attention."[75]

In China, AlphaGo was a "Sputnik moment" which helped convince the Chinese government to prioritize and dramatically increase funding for artificial intelligence.[76]

In 2017, the DeepMind AlphaGo team received the inaugural IJCAI Marvin Minsky medal for Outstanding Achievements in AI. AlphaGo is a wonderful achievement, and a perfect example of what the Minsky Medal was initiated to recognise, said Professor Michael Wooldridge, Chair of the IJCAI Awards Committee. What particularly impressed IJCAI was that AlphaGo achieves what it does through a brilliant combination of classic AI techniques as well as the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques that DeepMind is so closely associated with. Its a breathtaking demonstration of contemporary AI, and we are delighted to be able to recognise it with this award.[77]

Go is a popular game in China, Japan and Korea, and the 2016 matches were watched by perhaps a hundred million people worldwide.[66][78] Many top Go players characterized AlphaGo's unorthodox plays as seemingly-questionable moves that initially befuddled onlookers, but made sense in hindsight:[70] "All but the very best Go players craft their style by imitating top players. AlphaGo seems to have totally original moves it creates itself."[66] AlphaGo appeared to have unexpectedly become much stronger, even when compared with its October 2015 match[79] where a computer had beaten a Go professional for the first time ever without the advantage of a handicap.[80] The day after Lee's first defeat, Jeong Ahram, the lead Go correspondent for one of South Korea's biggest daily newspapers, said "Last night was very gloomy... Many people drank alcohol."[81] The Korea Baduk Association, the organization that oversees Go professionals in South Korea, awarded AlphaGo an honorary 9-dan title for exhibiting creative skills and pushing forward the game's progress.[82]

China's Ke Jie, an 18-year-old generally recognized as the world's best Go player at the time,[32][83] initially claimed that he would be able to beat AlphaGo, but declined to play against it for fear that it would "copy my style".[83] As the matches progressed, Ke Jie went back and forth, stating that "it is highly likely that I (could) lose" after analysing the first three matches,[84] but regaining confidence after AlphaGo displayed flaws in the fourth match.[85]

Toby Manning, the referee of AlphaGo's match against Fan Hui, and Hajin Lee, secretary general of the International Go Federation, both reason that in the future, Go players will get help from computers to learn what they have done wrong in games and improve their skills.[80]

After game two, Lee said he felt "speechless": "From the very beginning of the match, I could never manage an upper hand for one single move. It was AlphaGo's total victory."[86] Lee apologized for his losses, stating after game three that "I misjudged the capabilities of AlphaGo and felt powerless."[66] He emphasized that the defeat was "Lee Se-dol's defeat" and "not a defeat of mankind".[26][74] Lee said his eventual loss to a machine was "inevitable" but stated that "robots will never understand the beauty of the game the same way that we humans do."[74] Lee called his game four victory a "priceless win that I (would) not exchange for anything."[26]

Facebook has also been working on its own Go-playing system darkforest, also based on combining machine learning and Monte Carlo tree search.[64][87] Although a strong player against other computer Go programs, as of early 2016, it had not yet defeated a professional human player.[88] Darkforest has lost to CrazyStone and Zen and is estimated to be of similar strength to CrazyStone and Zen.[89]

DeepZenGo, a system developed with support from video-sharing website Dwango and the University of Tokyo, lost 21 in November 2016 to Go master Cho Chikun, who holds the record for the largest number of Go title wins in Japan.[90][91]

A 2018 paper in Nature cited AlphaGo's approach as the basis for a new means of computing potential pharmaceutical drug molecules.[92]

AlphaGo Master (white) v. Tang Weixing (31 December 2016), AlphaGo won by resignation. White 36 was widely praised.

The AlphaGo documentary film[93][94] raised hopes that Lee Sedol and Fan Hui would have benefitted from their experience of playing AlphaGo, but as of May 2018 their ratings were little changed; Lee Sedol was ranked 11th in the world, and Fan Hui 545th.[95] However the overall Go community may have been moved forward in how it plays the game.[citation needed]

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AlphaGo - Wikipedia

The personnel changes at Alphabet continue, this time with Mustafa Suleyman one of the three co-founders of the companys influential AI lab DeepMind moving to Google.

Suleyman announced the news on Twitter, saying that after a wonderful decade at DeepMind, he would be joining Google to work with the companys head of AI Jeff Dean and its chief legal officer Kent Walker. The exact details of Suleymans new role are unclear but a representative for the company told The Verge it would involve work on AI policy.

The move is notable, though, as it was reported earlier this year that Suleyman had been placed on leave from DeepMind. (DeepMind disputed these reports, saying it was a mutual decision intended to give Suleyman time out ... after 10 hectic years.) Some speculated that Suleymans move was the fallout of reported tensions between DeepMind and Google, as the former struggled to commercialize its technology.

DeepMind breaks ground in AI research, but spends a lot of money doing it

Although DeepMind has achieved a number of research milestones in the AI world, most notably the success of its AlphaGo program in 2016, the lab has also recorded significant financial losses. In 2018, it doubled its revenues to 102.8 million ($135 million), but its expenditures also rose to 470.2 million ($618 million) and it recorded a total debt of more than 1 billion ($1.3 billion).

Suleyman, who founded DeepMind in 2010 along with Demis Hassabis (now CEO) and Shane Legg (now chief scientist), had spearheaded the companys health team, which offered the lab one avenue to monetize its research. DeepMinds engineers designed a number of health algorithms that broke new ground, and its team built an assistant app for nurses and doctors that promised to save time and money. But the venture was also criticized strongly for its mishandling of UK medical data, and in 2018 was absorbed into Google Health.

In addition to this, Suleyman also led the DeepMind for Google team, which aimed to put the companys research to practical uses in Google products, delivering tangible commercial benefits like improved battery life on Android devices and a more natural voice for Google Assistant.

Its difficult to parse the meaning behind Suleymans move to Google without more details on his new role, but its clear that DeepMind is still working out how to position itself for the future as highlighted by the publication of a blog post by Hassabis timed with the announcement of Suleymans departure.

In the post, Hassabis charts the journey of DeepMind from unlikely start-up to major scientific organization. And although he highlights collaborations the lab has made with other parts of Alphabet, he ultimately focuses on the fundamental breakthroughs and grand challenges that DeepMind hopes to tackle most notably, using artificial intelligence to augment scientific research. It seems clear that long-term research, not short-term profits, are still the priority for DeepMinds scientists.

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DeepMind co-founder moves to Google as the AI lab positions itself for the future - The Verge

In March 2010, anthropologists discovered a tiny, lone finger bone in the Denisova cave in Siberia. They determined it belonged to previously undiscovered species of human ancestor. Replica of a Denisovan finger bone fragment, originally found in Denisova Cave in 2008, at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels, Belgium. Thilo Parg/Wikimedia Commons

Genetic analysis revealed that Denisovans (named after the cave in which they were found) were an enigmatic offshoot of Neanderthals.

Thus far, fossilized Denisovan remains have only been found in Siberia and Tibet. The species disappeared about 50,000 years ago but passed some of their genetic makeup to Homo sapiens.Denisovan DNA can be found in the genes of modern humans across Asia and some Pacific islands;up to 5% of modern Papua New Guinea residents' DNA shows remnants of interbreedingwith Denisovans.

People in Tibet today also possess some Denisovan traits and these traits appear to help Sherpas weather high altitudes.

Scientists discovered that both Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with modern humans extensively.

Curiosity is the largest and most capable rover ever sent to Mars. It joined fellow rover Opportunity in searching the red planet for signs of water and clues about whether Mars was capable of supporting microbial lifeforms.

The Kepler mission was charged with finding and identifying Earth-like planets in our galaxy that existed within a star's "Goldilocks," or habitable, zone. Kepler 22-b is 600 light-years away.

Planets in habitable zones are capable of hosting liquid water, one of the requisites for being considered Earth-like.

NASA launched Voyager 1 in 1977. After flying by Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space. It continues to collect data to this day.

In 2019, Voyager 1's successor, Voyager 2, also entered interstellar space. Both probes have been flying longer than any other spacecraft in history.

Voyager 2 has beamed back unprecedented data about previously unknown boundary layers at the far edge of our solar system an area known as the heliopause. The discovery of these boundary layers suggests there are stages in the transition from our solar bubble to interstellar space that scientists did not previously know about.

SpaceX's groundbreaking spaceship was called Dragon.

Previously, only four governments the United States, Russia, Japan, and the European Space Agency had achieved this challenging technical feat.

Seven years later, SpaceX launched Dragon's successor, Crew Dragon, into orbit for the first time. Crew Dragon is designed to ferry astronauts to the ISS; its 2019 trip marked the first time that a commercial spaceship designed for humans had ever left Earth.

The Higgs Boson is nicknamed the "God particle" because it gives mass to all other fundamental particles in the universe that have mass, like electrons and protons.

Scientists knew a particle akin to the Higgs Boson had to exist otherwise nothing in the universe would have mass, and we wouldn't exist but had failed to find evidence of such a particle until 2012.

Crispr-Cas9 technology enables researchers to edit parts of the genome by removing, adding, or altering sections of DNA. Since 2012, scientists have edited mosquito, mushroom, and lizard DNA, among others. In 2018, a Chinese scientist announced he had edited the genetic information of two human embryos.

This discovery made Europa only the second known oceanic world in our solar system aside from Earth; NASA observed jets of water vapor spewing from Saturn's moon Enceladus in 2005.

The presence of liquid water and ice make these two moons ideal places to search for life in our corner of the galaxy.

Since 2013, water has also been discovered on the dwarf-planet Pluto, a moon of Neptune called Triton, and multiple other moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

In September 2012, NASA announced its Curiosity rover had identified gravel made by an ancient river in Mars' Gale Crater.

Then in March 2013, scientists found chemical ingredients for life sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and carbon in powder that Curiosity had drilled from rock near the ancient streambed.

"A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment," Michael Meyer, who worked as the lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at the time, said in a press release about the finding. "From what we know now, the answer is yes."

In the following years, evidence has mounted that the planet was once home to a vast ocean.

After three years of studying Mars, Italian scientists determined in July 2018 that it's possible the red planet has a 20-kilometer-wide lake of liquid water at its polar ice cap today.

"If these researchers are right, this is the first time we've found evidence of a large water body on Mars," Cassie Stuurman, a geophysicist at the University of Texas,told the Associated Press.

Other parts of Mars are too cold for water to stay liquid unless it's deep underground.

In a March 2019 study, researchers suggested that seasonal flow patterns in Mars's crater walls could come from pressurized groundwater 750 meters below the surface, which travels upward through cracks in the ground.

Researchers found the particles using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an array of sensors embedded in Antarctic ice. Neutrinos are nearly mass-less and unstoppable; they move at the speed of light and get discharged in the aftermath of exploding stars.

Scientists can use neutrinos to understand events happening in distant galaxies. In 2018, they found more of the particles in Antarctica, then traced them back to the source: a rapidly spinning black hole, millions of times the mass of the sun, that's gobbling up gas and dust.

The burger which took two years and $325,000 to make consists of 20,000 thin strips of cow muscle tissue that were grown in a Netherlands laboratory.

Since 2013, the lab-grown meat industry has grown in popularity and dropped in price. In 2015, one of the researchers responsible for the first lab-grown burger, said the per-pound cost had dropped to $37.

It took Rosetta 10 years to reach and orbit the comet, then launch a lander down to the surface.

Rosetta's lander, Philae, took the first-ever surface images of a comet.

Two spelunkers had accidentally stumbled across the Homo naledi fossils two years earlier, in a hidden cave 100 feet below the surface.

All told, the chamber contained 1,550 bones belonging to at least 15 individuals who all lived between 330,000 and 250,000 years ago.

The epigenome is made up of chemicals and proteins that can attach to DNA and modify its function turning our genes on and off.

An individual's lifestyle and environment factors like whether they smoke or what their diet looks like can prompt sometimes deadly changes in their epigenome that can cause cancer.

Mapping the epigenome may help scientists understand how tumors develop and cancer spreads.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft found that Enceladus emits plumes of water into space following the probe's arrival in 2004. But in 2015, scientists confirmed that the source of these plumes was a giant saltwater oceanhidden beneath the moon's icy crust.

That wasn't the first time AI beat humans in a complex game.

In 2011, IBM's supercomputer, Watson, defeated two "Jeopardy!" champions including Ken Jennings in a three-day contest.

A year after AlphaGo's success, anAI named Libaratus beat four of the world's top professional players in 120,000 hands of no-limit, two-player poker. Then, in 2019, another DeepMind AI program named AlphaStar bested 99.8% of human players in the popular video game "Starcraft II."

The catastrophic collision created ripples in space-time, also known asgravitational waves. Einstein predicted the existence of these gravitational waves in 1915, but he thought they'd be too weak to ever pick up on Earth. New detection tools have proved otherwise.

This collision was the first event scientists observed using gravitational-wave detectors. Then in 2017, they observed two neutron stars merging. In August 2019, astrophysicists detected the billion-year-old aftermath of a collision between a black hole and a neutron star(the super-dense remnant of a dead star).

The lost land ofZealandiasits on the ocean floor between New Zealand and New Caledonia.

It wasn't always sunken researchers have found fossils that suggested novel kinds of plants and organisms once lived there. Some argue that Zealandia should be countedalongsideour (more visible) seven continents.

In 2019, scientists found that another ancient continent had slid under what is now southern Europe about 120 million years ago. The researchers named this continent Greater Adria. Its uppermost regions formed mountain ranges across Europe, like the Alps.

All living creatures' DNA is made up of two types of amino acid pairs: A-T (adenine thymine) and G-C (guanine cytosine). This four-letter alphabet forms the basis for all genetic information in the natural world.

But scientists invented two new letters, an unnatural pair of X-Y bases, that they seamlessly integrated into the genetic alphabet of E. coli bacteria.

Floyd Romesburg, who led the research, previously told Business Insider that his invention could improve the way we treat diseases. For example, it could change the way proteins degrade inside the body, helping drugs stay in your system longer. Romesburg said his team will be investigating how the finding might help cancer treatments and drugs for autoimmune diseases.

In September 2017, Audi announced it had produced the world's first "Level 3" autonomous car meaning its self-driving mode requires no human feet, hands, or eyes. The A8 sedan can wholly, safely control itself in self-driving mode, only needing a human to take over in the event of bad weather or disappearing lane lines.

Tesla Autopilot drivers, for comparison, have to be ready to take over at any moment, so they're counseled to keep their eyes on the road at all times.

Just two months later, Waymo the autonomous vehicle division of Alphabet, Google's parent company revealed that it was testing self-driving minivans in the streets of Arizona without any humans at all behind the wheel. In 2018, Waymo launched the first fully autonomous taxi service in the US.

The two massive, exploded stars hit each other at one-third the speed of light and created gravitational waves. Scientific instruments on Earth picked up the waves from that crash, an event astronomers say only happens once every 100,000 years.

The crash happened 130 million light years away from Earth, researchers discovered. It caused the formation of $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 worth of gold and produced huge stores of silver and platinum, too.

Scientists only had a few weeks to study the interstellar interloper before it got too far, and too dim, to see with Earth-based telescopes.

Guesses as to what the object is run the gamut from comet to asteroid to alien spaceship. One Harvard University astronomer, Avi Loeb, has speculated that 'Oumuamua was an extraterrestrial scout, but nearly all other experts who have studied 'Oumuamua say that hypothesis is extraordinarily unlikely.

Cassini had been exploring Saturn and its moons for 13 years before the probe plunged to its death on September 15. Scientists planned the crash to ensure that Cassini wouldn't one day run out of fuel and hit one of Saturn's potentially habitable moons (thereby contaminating it with Earthly bacteria).

During its final dive, Cassini beamed back amazing photos of Saturn as we'd never seen the planet before. That last portion of the mission began with a flyby of the planet's moon, Titan. Then Cassini jetted through a 1,200-mile opening between Saturn and its rings of ice an unprecedented feat.

The spacecraft then angled down into the planet's clouds and burned up.

The cure for a form of hereditary blindness called leber congenital amaurosis is the first gene therapy approved by the FDA for an inherited disease.

The treatment, called Luxturna, is a one-time virus dose that gets injected into a patient's retina. The corrected gene in the virus taps out the flawed, blindness-inducing gene in the eye, and produces a key vision-producing protein that patients with the disease normally can't make.

People start noticing a difference in their sight within a month. In clinical trials of the treatment, 13 out of 20 patients saw positive results. The treatment costs $425,000 per eye, or $850,000 total, however.

Jiankui claimed to have edited genes in a pair of twins born in China in November. By using the DNA-editing technique called CRISPR, he said, the babies were born immune to HIV.

This type of genetic manipulation is banned in most parts of the world, since any genetic mutations that the babies may have would get passed on to their offspring, with potentially disastrous consequences.

In 2019, the MIT Technology Review released excerpts from Jiankui's research. The unpublished manuscripts revealed that in the process of trying to manipulate the babies' HIV resistance which some experts say was unsuccessful Jiankui may have introduced unintended mutations.

NASA's InSight lander spent more than six months careening through space before it landed safely on Martian soil.

The robot is charged with exploring Mars' deep interior and helping scientists understand why Mars wound up a cold desert planet while Earth did not.

InSight has given scientists the unprecedented ability to detect and monitor Mars quakes seismic events deep inside the planet.

Fossil fuels like coal contain carbon dioxide, methane, and other compounds that trap heat from the sun. When we extract and burn these fuels for energy, that releases those gases into the atmosphere, where they accumulate and heat up the Earth over time.

That's what made 2016 the hottest year on record. So far, 2019 is the second-hottest year since records began 140 years ago, with July being the hottest month ever recorded.

A landmark report by the Intergovernmental Panel in Climate Change (IPCC) warned that slashing greenhouse-gas emissions in the next decade is crucial in order to avoid the worst consequences of severe climate change.

An April 2019 studyrevealed that the Greenland ice sheet is sloughing off an average of 286 billion tons of ice per year. Two decades ago, the annual average was just 50 billion.

In 2012, Greenland lostmore than 400 billion tons of ice.

Antarctica, meanwhile, lost an average of 252 billion tons of ice per year in the last decade. In the 1980s, by comparison, Antarctica lost 40 billion tons of ice annually.

What's more, parts of Thwaites Glacier in western Antarctica are retreating by up to 2,625 feet per year, contributing to4% of sea-level rise worldwide.A study published in July suggested that Thwaites' melting is likely approachingan irreversible point after which the entire glacier could collapse into the ocean. If that happens, global sea levels could rise by more than 1.5 feet.

The object, called MU69, is nicknamed Arrokoth, which means "sky" in the Powhatan/Algonquian language (it was previously nicknamed Ultima Thule). It's themost distant objecthumanity has ever visited.

The New Horizons probe took hundreds of photographs as it flew by the space rockat 32,200 miles per hour.

Images revealed that Arrokoth isflat like a pancake, rather than spherical in shape. The unprecedented data will likely reveal new clues about the solar system's evolution and how planets like Earth formed, though scientists are still receiving and processing the information from the distant probe.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched itsHayabusa-2probe in December 2014. Hayabusa-2 arrived at Ryugu in June 2018, but didn'tland on the asteroid's surface until this year.

In order to collect samples from deep within the space rock, Hayabusa-2blasted a hole in the asteroid before landing. The mission plan calls for the probe to bring those samples back to Earth. By studying Ryugu's innermost rocks and debris which have been sheltered from the wear and tear of space scientists hope to learn how asteroids like this may have seeded Earth with key ingredients for life billions of years ago.

The unprecedented photo shows the supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, which is about54 million light-years away from Earth. The black hole's mass is equivalent to 6.5 billion suns.

Though theimage is somewhat fuzzy, it showed that, as predicted, black holeslook like dark spheres surrounded by a glowing ring of light.

Scientists struggled for decades to capture a black hole on camera, since black holes distort space-time, ensuring that nothing can break free of their gravitational pull even light. That's why the image shows a unique shadow in the form of a perfect circle at the center.

In September, scientists announced they'ddetected water vapor on a potentially habitable planet for the first time.The planet, K2-18b, is asuper-Earththat orbits a red dwarf star 110 light-years away.

NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope discovered K2-18b in 2015, three years before the telescope was shut down. During its nine-year mission, Kepler discovered more than 2,500 exoplanets.

But K2-18b is the only known planet outside our solar systemwith water, an atmosphere, and a temperature range that could support liquid water on its surface. That makes it our "best candidate for habitability," one researcher said.

In the pilot program, children up to 2 years old in Malawi, Ghana, and Kenya can receive the vaccine. The new vaccine prevented 4 in 10 malaria cases in clinical trials, including 3 in 10 life-threatening cases.

Malaria kills about 435,000 people each year, most of them children.

"We need new solutions to get the malaria response back on track, and this vaccine gives us a promising tool to get there," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said in a release. "The malaria vaccine has the potential to save tens of thousands of children's lives."

The vaccine comes in addition to two experimental treatments proven to dramatically boost Ebola survival rates.

The two new treatments, called REGN-EB3 and mAb-114, are cocktails of antibodies that get injected into people's bloodstreams. These therapies saved about 90% of new infected patients in the Congo after theWHO declared the Ebola outbreak in Africa to be a global health emergency.

Morgan McFall-Johnsen contributed to this story.

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Biggest scientific discoveries of the 2010s decade: photos - Business Insider

Facebook AI Research (FAIR) says its created the latest AI to achieve state-of-the-art performance when playing the card game Hanabi. The AI system achieves a score of 24.61 out of 25, while the previous best got 23.92 out of 25. In February, researchers from Google, DeepMind, Carnegie Mellon University, and Oxford University proposed a Hanabi benchmark and the creation of more AI that can play the game in order to achieve a new frontier for AI research.

Unlike other game challenges that pit AI versus humans, like chess or Go, Hanabi is a cooperative game where participants play together to work towards a common goal.

One of the really exciting things about this is that the improvement were observing is really orthogonal to the improvements that are being observed with deep reinforcement learning: You can add this on top of any strategy, and it will make it much stronger, Facebook AI researcher Noam Brown told VentureBeat in a phone interview. Were seeing that the results are far beyond what we or other researchers expected. In fact, the benefits that we get from search are stronger than the benefits that have been gained through all of the deep reinforcement learning algorithms that have been used in the past.

Facebooks Hanabi AI draws some of its search smarts from Pluribus, a poker-playing AI Facebook introduced earlier this year that bested some human champions.

Facebooks AI team achieved the feat by applying search techniques in conjunction with deep reinforcement learning. The search algorithm converts a problem into a single agent setting by making all but one agent carry out an agreed-upon policy, a reinforcement learning algorithm referred to as the blueprint. The blueprint allows the search agent to treat the known policy of other agents as part of the environment and maintain beliefs about the hidden information based on others actions, according to a paper on the subject titled Improving Policies via Search in Cooperative Partially Observable Games.

Ultimately, Facebook researchers believe AI akin to its Hanabi bot could help robotics systems, self-driving vehicles, or conversational AI agents better respond to human activity by solving theory of mind challenges, Brown said. Theory of mind is the idea of putting yourself in another persons shoes to infer their next action. An example of this in the real world is if youre driving and the car in front of you rolls to a stop, you may infer or deduce that a person is about to enter a crosswalk even if you cant see that person.

This is something that comes very naturally to humans, this idea of being able to put yourself in the shoes of another person and understand why theyre taking the actions theyre taking, what theyre thinking, and even if they dont know certain things. But its something that AI has historically really struggled with, he said. Theres been this long debate about whether primates have theory of mind and at what age do humans babies develop theory of mind, and I think its really fascinating to finally be seeing this sort of behavior in AI. And I think that thats going to be really important if we want to deploy AI in the real world to interact with humans because humans expect this behavior.

In other gameplay and AI news, last week Go master Lee Sedol said he plans to retire from playing the game. Sedol beat DeepMinds AlphaGo once in a best out of five series of games in 2016, but plans to retire due to the rise of superhuman AI that cannot be defeated, according to the BBC.

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Facebooks Hanabi-playing AI achieves state-of-the-art results - VentureBeat

David Bacon, senior software engineer in Googles quantum lab: Quantum computers do computations in parallel universes. This by itself isnt useful. U only get to exist in 1 universe at a time! The trick: quantum computers dont just split universes, they also merge universes. And this merge can add and subtract those other split universes.

David Reilly, principal researcher and director of the Microsoft quantum computing lab in Sydney, Australia: A quantum machine is a kind of analog calculator that computes by encoding information in the ephemeral waves that comprise light and matter at the nanoscale. Quantum entanglement likely the most counterintuitive thing around holds it all together, detecting and fixing errors.

Daniel Lidar, professor of electrical and computer engineering, chemistry, and physics and astronomy at the University of Southern California, with his daughter Nina, in haiku:

Quantum computers solve some problems much faster but are prone to noise

Superpositions: to explore multiple paths to the right answer

Interference helps: cancels paths to wrong answers and boosts the right ones

Entanglement makes classical computers sweat, QCs win the race

Scott Aaronson, professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin: A quantum computer exploits interference among positive and negative square roots of probabilities to solve certain problems much faster than we think possible classically, in a way that wouldnt be nearly so interesting were it possible to explain in the space of a tweet.

Alan Baratz, executive vice president of research and development at D-Wave Systems: If were honest, everything we currently know about quantum mechanics cant fully describe how a quantum computer works. Whats more important, and even more interesting, is what a quantum computer can do: A.I., new molecules, new materials, modeling climate change

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This Week in Tech: What on Earth Is a Quantum Computer? - The New York Times