Lifeboat Foundation

As artificial intelligence advances at an unprecedented pace, we tend to see its arrival in emotional terms — usually, either excitement or fear. But Noumena, a collective of designers, engineers and architects, is looking at AI and robots more practically. What form will they take, how will they survive and develop, and where will they live? It aims to explore those idea with an exhibition entitled “Robotic Habitats.”

Noumena’s project assumes that deep learning systems will grow out of their narrow Go-playing abilities and soon match humans at many, if not most, tasks. While that would put them on par with us, it doesn’t mean they would live the same way, though. “Society will need to develop a framework for both to thrive,” explains Neumena on its website. “A new form of artificial life will emerge, finding space at the peripheries of humanity in order to not compete for human-dominated resources.”

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A new species of dinosaur has been uncovered in the Egyptian desert, a rare discovery in a part of the world not known for dino fossils.

The huge animal, which was roughly the size of a school bus, is an “incredible discovery,” scientists said in a new study that was published Monday.

“This was the Holy Grail — a well-preserved dinosaur from the end of the age of dinosaurs in Africa — that we paleontologists had been searching for for a long, long time,” said Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, one of the authors of the study.

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Reading human DNA used to take laboratories, a pile of cash and a long time.

Conventional electronics rely on controlling electric charge. Recently, researchers have been exploring the potential for a new technology, called spintronics, that relies on detecting and controlling a particle’s spin. This technology could lead to new types of more efficient and powerful devices.

In a paper published in Applied Physics Letters, researchers measured how strongly a charge carrier’s spin interacts with a magnetic field in diamond. This crucial property shows diamond as a promising material for spintronic devices.

Diamond is attractive because it would be easier to process and fabricate into spintronic devices than typical semiconductor materials, said Golrokh Akhgar, a physicist at La Trobe University in Australia. Conventional quantum devices are based on multiple thin layers of semiconductors, which require an elaborate fabrication process in an ultrahigh vacuum.

“Yesterday (Jan. 28), 23 African countries launched the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) initiative by the African Union (AU). ”

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This revolutionary gene modified T cell therapy is bearing fruit in treating a type of lymphoma, a resistant form of cancer.

Summary: After years of effort, this revolutionary gene-modified T cell therapy is bearing fruit in treating a type of lymphoma, a resistant form of cancer. [This article first appeared on the website LongevityFacts.com. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Thirty-seven-year-old Nick Asoian of Denver unsuccessfully fought Hodgkin’s Lymphoma using conventional cancer treatments for two years. In 2008, while in New Zealand for a ski race, Nick was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Two bone marrow transplants and two years of chemotherapy combined with radiation therapy didn’t bring his cancer to heel.

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Between 04–09 December 2017, thousands of researchers and experts gathered for at the largest and most influential AI and Thirty-first Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) in Long Beach, California. This is the conference’s 40th year, and its most-attended, at 7,229 registrations.

Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of DeepMind and an expert chess player himself, presented further details of the system, called Alpha Zero, at an Artificial Intelligence Conference in California. The program often made moves that would seem unthinkable to a human chess player.

Continue reading “Learning From First Principles — Demis Hassabis” »

Researchers have developed a superconducting switch that can make future computers think like the human brain.

As an added bonus, these tiny building blocks could even be used to split water, creating a clean-burning and near infinite source of energy.