Documentary filmmaker Hans Busstra shares with us, with the aid of amazing and scientifically accurate animations of the molecular world, the background story of his journey from imaging the hardcore science of molecular biology to the fundamental insights of metaphysics.
DeepMind’s Vice President of Drastic Research and Gemini co-tech lead Oriol Vinyals describes how artificial intelligence is moving from narrowly focused systems toward autonomous agents, and what challenges remain ahead.
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According to Vinyals, AI is going through a fundamental transformation away from highly specialized systems and toward autonomous agents. Speaking on a company podcast, he explained that early AI systems like AlphaStar, which focused on playing StarCraft, were just the beginning of this development.
Infectious diseases can have very different effects on different people; some individuals may have virtually no symptoms from COVID-19, for example, while others are killed by the viral disease. Scientists have now learned more about one genetic mechanism that can lead to variations in immune responses in different people. The findings, which have been reported in Cell, describe a kind of tuner that can dial the immune response up or down, and has been encoded in human DNA for millions of years.
The human genome contains bits of ancient viruses known as retrotransposons, which were once able to move around the genome, like so-called jumping genes, but have since been brought under control. They are thought to compose a major part of the genome. Researchers have identified instances where retrotransposons can become active again, however, such as in some types of cancer. Now even more consequences of these trasnposons are being identified.
Dr. Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston hopes to pick up the movement where Jones left off, albeit with the significant twist that his version does not require freezing. A research fellow at Melbourne’s Monash University, Zeleznikow-Johnston wrote the new book, “The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death,” which makes the case that cryopreservation is possible and should be more widely available. Rejecting the popular notion that death endows life with meaning as “palliative philosophy,” Zeleznikow-Johnston’s book instead argues a human’s connectome — a high-resolution map of all their brain connections — could be theoretically recorded perfectly before they die.
Once that happens, that same internal brain activity could be recreated through high-powered computers, while a new brain is grown in a vat via stem cells or some combination of the two. As such, Zeleznikow-Johnston is proposing a spiritual descendant to the cryonics movement (which he dismisses as “unscientific” and “unsubstantiated”), one where the focus is not on preserving tissues but on the “data,” so to speak, of our distinct connectomes.
“We have very strong evidence that the static structure of the neurons is enough to hold onto someone’s memories and personality.”
Learn about the benefits of robotic surgery, how surgeons perform it and what surgeries you can get done with a da Vinci robot.
Google’s latest quantum computer chip, which the team dubbed Willow, has ignited a heated debate in the scientific community over the existence of parallel universes.
Following an eye-opening achievement in computational problem-solving, claims have surfaced that the chip’s success aligns with the theory of a multiverse, a concept that suggests our universe is one of many coexisting in parallel dimensions. In this piece, we’ll examine both sides of this argument that seems to have opened up a parallel universe of its own — with one universe of scientists suggesting the Willow experiments offer evidence of a multiverse and the other suggesting it has nothing to do with the theory at all.
According to Google, Willow solved a computational problem in under five minutes — a task that would have taken the world’s fastest supercomputers approximately 10 septillion years. This staggering feat, announced in a blog post and accompanied by a study in the journal Nature, demonstrates the extraordinary potential of quantum computing to tackle problems once thought unsolvable within a human timeframe.
SpinMagIC, a spin-off from the University of Stuttgart that is developing a palm-sized quantum sensor, secured two years of funding.
For years, researchers and clinicians have been trying to find a way to rapidly deliver oxygen to patients when traditional means of oxygenation are difficult or ineffective during critical moments of cardiac or respiratory arrest.
Sometimes, hypoxemia caused by airway obstruction or lung disease can be so severe that methods to boost low-oxygen levels (including the placement of a breathing tube) are ineffective. A patient can have cardiac arrest, potentially leading to severe organ damage. Research has shown that as many as 40% of in-hospital cardiac arrests are triggered by low-oxygen levels.
After 15 years of research, Boston Children’s cardiologist John Kheir, MD, and researcher Yifeng Peng, Ph.D., believe they have developed a safe and effective oxygen delivery method for those emergencies: injectable oxygen carried into the bloodstream by a rapidly dissolving gas microbubble.
Futurism, transhumanism, bioethics, ethics, science, philosophy, artificial intelligence, personhood.
Research on so-called mirror cells, which defy fundamental properties of living organisms, should be prohibited as too dangerous, biologists said.
