Lifeboat Foundation

By Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub

The blueprint of every living thing on the planet is encoded in DNA. We know the stuff can hold a lot of information. But how much is a lot? We could theoretically encode the world’s data (from emails to albums, movies to novels) on just a few grams of DNA. DNA already preserves life itself—now it might also preserve life as we live it.

According to New Scientist, a gram of DNA could theoretically store 455 exabytes of data. And Quartz drives the point home. If the world has about 1.8 zettabytes of data, according to a 2011 estimate, all the world’s information would fit on a four-gram DNA hard drive the size of a teaspoon.

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Written by Victoria Turk — Motherboard

In 2013, researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the Oxford Martin School dropped the bombshell that 47 percent of U​S jobs were at risk of computerisation. Since then, they’ve made similar predicti​ons for the UK, where they say 35 percent of jobs are at high risk.

So what will our future economy look like?

“My predictions have enormously high variance,” Osborne told me when I asked if he was optimistic. “I can imagine completely plausible, incredibly positive scenarios, but they’re only about as probable as actually quite dystopian futures that I can imagine.”
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By Nichole Dobo — Slate

Most of physical science is nice and non-fraudulent. But cosmologists and particle physicists have lost contact to reality and defend superstition in a criminal fashion.

This was my friend Benoit Mandelbrot’s experience in 2000, because he had explained the Kepler-Olbers paradox (“Why is the night sky dark?”) in a non-expansionist way. Before him, Fritz Zwicky had become ostracized for making such a proposal.

The Zwicky-Mandelbrot result has since been proved and explained with publications starting in 2003. But there is no response to the two independent proofs offered (a statistical mechanics of mutually attractive particles; a demonstration that Einstein’s constant c in the vacuum is a global and not just a local constant of nature everywhere).

So the standard cosmology as defined in any school text is based, not on ignorance but on lies? One could go so far as say so, although of course most of the worshipers of the disproved gospel never heard of its demise since the leading journals and media suppress the dogma-defying results.

Continue reading “Science becomes Misosophy” »

Laura Bliss — CityLab

Judging from some of Facebook’s most viral images in history—textbooks wrapped in paper bags, futuristic beach houses, Barack and Michelle mid-hug—it seems safe to say that, content-wise, a mix of nostalgia and aspiration makes ‘book users click, like, comment, and share. On Flickr, it’s cool nature shots. Instagram loves the Kardashians.

But favorite subjects come and go, while the viral cycle lives on. What if you could predict the kinds of photos most likely to strike a nerve? Given the incredible amount of data available on how online users engage with images, is there a way to measure the objective qualities of an image’s shareability?
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Helen Knight | MIT News correspondent

The sequencing of the human genome laid the foundation for the study of genetic variation and its links to a wide range of diseases. But the genome itself is only part of the story, as genes can be switched on and off by a range of chemical modifications, known as “epigenetic marks.”

Now, a decade after the human genome was sequenced, the National Institutes of Health’s Roadmap Epigenomics Consortium has created a similar map of the human epigenome.
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Lifeboat Foundation — Futurism Update — Feb/26/2015

POINT OF CONTACT:

https://www.AMAZON.com/author/agostini

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andresagostini

https://AGO26.blogspot.com

Continue reading “Lifeboat Foundation — Futurism Update — Feb/26/2015” »

Adele Peters — Fast Company

In another Tokyo suburb, a cartoonesque robot named Pepper, the first robot designed to respond to human emotions, is joking with customers at a store selling mobile phones.

While Japan has been a robot-friendly place for a long time, the number of robots is now booming, even as its human population is not. In the next five years, the country hopes to build 20 times more of them. One industry leader suggests that the country should invest in 30 million robots—nearly the same population as greater Tokyo—as part of a plan to regain a spot as the world leader in manufacturing.

“What you’re seeing in Japan is a much more aggressive approach to purchasing robots,” says Mike Zinser, a partner at Boston Consulting Group, and co-author of a new study about how robotics will transform manufacturing. “They’ve got a real potential to see significant cost savings, and also an improvement in competitiveness relative to other countries over the next decade.“
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