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Sep 5, 2017

Shenzhen: City of the Future. The high-tech life of China’s Silicon Valley

Posted by in categories: government, habitats, robotics/AI, solar power, sustainability

More films about China: https://rtd.rt.com/tags/china/
- Technology and innovation hub, Shenzhen is known as China’s “silicon valley” and “the city of the future”.
- Once a fishing village, in just 50 years it grew into a megacity packed with skyscrapers.
- It hosts international technology exhibitions and forums and attracts creators and investors from around the world, contributing to its population boom.
- Inventors and engineers working here, create helpful robots, hybrid cars and smart car parks.

China has a saying; to see the past, visit Beijing, to see the present, go to Shanghai but for the future, it’s Shenzhen. Shenzhen has transformed itself from a tiny fishing village to a megacity in just 50 years, its population tripling since the 1990s. The city is a magnet for tech-savvy and inventive dreamers from all across China and the world, because of them Shenzhen has become the “silicon valley” of China, a true technology and innovation hub.

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Sep 4, 2017

VIDEO: San Francisco official pushes robot tax to battle automation

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, security

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Security guard Eric Leon watches the Knightscope K5 security robot as it glides through the mall, charming shoppers with its blinking blue and white lights. The brawny automaton records video and sounds alerts. According to its maker, it deters mischief just by making the rounds.

Leon, the all-too-human guard, feels pretty sure that the robot will someday take his job.

“He doesn’t complain,” Leon says. “He’s quiet. No lunch break. He’s starting exactly at 10.”

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Sep 4, 2017

Military Research Targets Regrowing Limbs Like Salamanders

Posted by in category: military

Researchers for the U.S. military are studying salamanders and other animals to discover how they can regrow lost body parts.

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Sep 4, 2017

3 of Nature’s Greatest Mysteries May Be Solved Thanks to Quantum Biology

Posted by in categories: biological, quantum physics

Turns out, organisms may be using quantum mechanics to gain evolutionary advantages.

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Sep 4, 2017

Breakthrough Molecular 3D Printer Can Print Billions of Possible Compounds

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, biotech/medical, solar power, sustainability

What will 3D printers ultimately evolve into? No one has a functioning crystal ball in front of them I assume, but a good guess would be a machine which can practically build anything its user desire, all on the molecular, and eventually atomic levels. Sure we are likely multiple decades away from widespread molecular manufacturing, but a group of chemists led by medical doctor Martin D. Burke at the University of Illinois may have already taken a major step in that direction.

Burke, who joined the Department of Chemistry at the university in 2005, heads up Burke Laboratories where he studies and synthesizes small molecules with protein-like structures. For those of you who are not chemists, small molecules are organic compounds with very low molecular weight of less than 900 daltons. They usually help regulate biological processes and make up most of the drugs we put into our bodies, along with pesticides used by farmers and electronic components like LEDs and solar cells.

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Sep 4, 2017

Christian transhumanism? Yes, says pastor

Posted by in categories: ethics, transhumanism

Facts of life, even for passionate seperation of church and state advocates like me: Religious #transhumanism is growing.


WASHINGTON – A Christian pastor from Florida is promoting acceptance of some forms of transhumanism, saying believers should be open to finding an “ethical alternative” to the complete rejection of the scientific, technical and philosophical transhumanist movement that has already begun.

Rev. Christopher Benek, associate pastor of family ministries and mission at First Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, writes in the Christian Post that it’s time for the development of “Christian transhumanism.”

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Sep 4, 2017

Decoding the patterns that make our brains human

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Each of our human brains is special, carrying distinctive memories and giving rise to our unique thoughts and actions. Most research on the brain focuses on what makes one brain different from another. But recently, Allen Institute researchers turned the question around.

“So much research focuses on the variations between individuals, but we turned that question on its head to ask, what makes us similar?” says Ed Lein, Ph.D., Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “What is the conserved element among all of us that must give rise to our unique cognitive abilities and human traits?”

Their work, published this month in Nature Neuroscience, looked at gene expression across the entire human brain and identified a surprisingly small set of molecular patterns that dominate gene expression in the human brain and appear to be common to all individuals.

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Sep 4, 2017

Live long and stay young

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Support the MouseAGE project with this exclusive T-shirt and help speed up scientific progress and save animal lives: https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/mouseage-photographic-agin…/#reward_5

Just one of the cool rewards for supporting the project!

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Sep 4, 2017

BRICS countries considering own cryptocurrency as settlement mechanism

Posted by in categories: cryptocurrencies, economics, finance

The BRICS Finance Committee is discussing a joint virtual currency for the five nation bloc of developing economies, according to the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) chief Kirill Dmitriev.

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Sep 4, 2017

Two-thirds of Americans approve of editing human DNA to treat disease

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical

About two-thirds of Americans support the use of gene editing to treat diseases, according to a new survey. But opinions vary a lot based on people’s religious beliefs and how much they know about gene editing in general.

The research, published earlier this month in Science, shows that across the board, people want to be involved in a public discussion about editing the human genome. And that conversation with scientists and public officials needs to happen now, as the technology is still developing, says study co-author Dietram Scheufele, a science communication scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The results are based on a survey of 1,600 US adults conducted in December 2016 and January 2017.

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