Mother’s Day 2017 tech gift guide: You’re welcome

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Listening to starlight: Our ongoing search for alien intelligence

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National Radio Astronomy Observatory – Image: Education Images/UIG via Getty Images Between April and July of 1960, Drake recorded some 150 hours of tape speckled with radio noise. While no meaningful encoded signals or patterns emerged from those readings, Drake still earned himself a place in history for performing what would become the first scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the modern era. Since then, research organizations around the world have performed nearly 100 SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) experiments. Even NASA got in on the hunt, working with the SETI Institute between 1988 and 1993, when Sen. Richard Bryan (D – Nevada) introduced an amendment that cut the program’s government funding. “Senators kind of looked at this line item and said, ‘Hey wait a minute. Are we are we paying to search for little green men?'” explained Steve Croft, an assistant project astronomer at the UC Berkeley SETI Research Center and researcher with the...
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AAA launches its own app-based car sharing service

Gig is also promising to be particularly helpful if you’re fond of mass transit. There will be at least two parking spots near every BART train station, as well as a drop-off point inside Oakland International Airport. This isn’t exactly a large-scale debut (Gig is still aiming for an expansion to San Francisco), but it illustrates just how eager car-related companies are to get into transportation services. AAA, like other firms, no doubt sees personal car ownership on the decline in the long run. Gig lets it diversify beyond roadside assistance and other products built on the assumption that you own what you’re driving. AAA may still have to grapple with self-driving cars (why rent when cars can always show up on demand?), but this is at least a step in the right direction.
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Lab-grown stem cells may carry an increased risk of cancer

This doesn’t mean that the medical community is about to hit the brakes on stem cell research. There’s still some review necessary to decide what happens next. And there are ways to make sure cells are healthy before they’re used. However, this raises the possibility that there are other, less common mutations that haven’t been caught. And these stem cell lines have been in use for nearly 20 years — that’s a lot of time for risks to go unchecked. If the discovery holds up, researchers may have little choice but to look for mutations through DNA sequencing, which is expensive at about $1,000 for every genome. That screening could soon be government-mandated, in fact. Still, it might be necessary to make sure that stem cell treatments aren’t just substituting one disease for another.
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