Lifeboat Foundation

Hmmmm;

Today a group of 25 scientists officially announced their plan to build a human genome from scratch within the next 10 years. The proposal — called the Human Genome Project-Write — would be, as BuzzFeed News put it, to lay “DNA letters like bricks”.

The group also includes experts from Harvard Medical School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the USA government’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Yale University, the University of Edinburgh, Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Washington, Autodesk Bio/Nano Research Group, Bioeconomy Capital and other institutions, and is led by geneticist Jef Boeke of the New York University Langone Medical Center.

Continue reading “Scientists to launch 10-year project for creating human genomes” »

If a robot can be designed with a great big red kill switch built into it, then a robot can be designed that will not ever resist human attempts at pushing that kill switch.

Breathe easy.

The debate over them highlights one of the more controversial aspects of the increasingly social nature of our interactions with robots as they move from factories into our homes and someday, our bedrooms.”

“‘How we treat robots — it’s a mirror of our own psychology in a way,’ said Kate Darling, an expert in robot ethics at MIT’s Media Lab.

Advancements in machines that can mimic human beings are raising a host of new ethical, legal and moral questions.

Continue reading “Sex robots to become a reality” »

Researchers from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), and the University of Milan have experimentally confirmed a model to detect electron delocalization in molecules and crystals.

Quantum physicists have long thought it possible to send a perfectly secure message using a key that is shorter than the message itself. Now they’ve done it.

In the new, free-for-all era of dark matter research, the controversial idea that dark matter is concentrated in thin disks is being rescued from scientific oblivion.

Yes, it’s true that a group of leading geneticists is calling for the construction of a synthetic human genome. That means they want to take 3 billion chemical building blocks and assemble them into one complete package of DNA, encoding all the body parts and life processes that make up a functional human being.”

“But the organizers want to make one thing very clear: ‘We’re not planning to make synthetic people,’ says a somewhat exasperated Jef Boeke, one of the champions of this proposal. ‘We never were.’

The Human Genome Project-Write could bring down the cost of DNA manufacturing.

Continue reading “The Next Genetics Moonshot: Building a Human Genome from Scratch” »

“Supporters point to the fact that 21st-Century work is increasingly automated, with more and more traditional jobs, in factories, retail and even in finance and accounting, being done by machines. And they do not need salaries.”

(I highly recommend this article, with all kinds of pros and cons, spare a couple of minutes and read it)

Switzerland is holding a landmark vote on whether to give each citizen a guaranteed basic income, the BBC’s Imogen Foulkes reports.

The WSJ comes out in favor of UBI.

Replacing the welfare state with an annual grant is the best way to cope with a radically changing U.S. jobs market—and to revitalize America’s civic culture.