With the goal to lower the price of solid-state EV batteries by employing cheaper raw materials and processes without sacrificing safety, a joint venture with China’s biggest car maker is now moving to the production stage.
As humanity’s gaze turns towards the stars, one name stands at the forefront of the space exploration revolution: Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Among its many ambitious projects, the SpaceX Starship promises to reshape our understanding of interplanetary travel. This colossal 9-meter diameter rocket has captured our imagination with the grand vision of shuttling thousands of people on a six-month journey to Mars. But what lies within this futuristic vessel? What can we expect from the spaceship interior that aims to make long-duration space travel a reality?
Historically, our mental image of a spacecraft has often been based on cramped capsules, such as the iconic Apollo 11, Soyuz, or Dragon. These designs, while functional, have offered little in the way of comfort. Even modern incarnations like the Orion spacecraft still lack the headroom to stand upright inside the Command Module. With its larger size, the space shuttle hinted at more livable conditions, but it still fell short of providing ample space for extended journeys.
Enter the SpaceX Starship—a towering, 9-meter diameter rocket that evokes images of Flash Gordon’s futuristic transport. Elon Musk’s vision of a vessel capable of shuttling thousands to Mars within six months is a compelling proposition. However, spending half a year in the confined space of a metal box hurtling through an interplanetary void is daunting, even if the box is quite spacious. As we anticipate the Starship interior, our expectations are high, and speculation runs rampant about what life onboard might entail.
Artificial Intelligence has transformed how we live, work, and interact with technology. From voice assistants and chatbots to recommendation algorithms and self-driving cars, AI has suddenly become an integral part of our daily lives, just a few months after the release of ChatGPT, which kickstarted this revolution.
However, with the increasing prevalence of AI, a new phenomenon called “AI fatigue” has emerged. This fatigue stems from the overwhelming presence of AI in various aspects of our lives, raising concerns about privacy, autonomy, and even the displacement of human workers.
AI fatigue refers to the weariness, frustration, or anxiety experienced by individuals due to the overreliance on AI technologies. While AI offers numerous benefits, such as increased efficiency, improved decision-making, and enhanced user experiences, it also presents certain drawbacks. Excessive dependence on AI can lead to a loss of human agency, diminishing trust in technology, and a feeling of disconnection from the decision-making process.
Michael Levin is a Distinguished Professor in the Biology department at Tufts University. He holds the Vannevar Bush endowed Chair and serves as director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. To explore the algorithms by which the biological world implemented complex adaptive behavior, he got dual B.S. degrees, in CS and in Biology and then received a PhD from Harvard University. He did post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School, where he began to uncover a new bioelectric language by which cells coordinate their activity during embryogenesis. The Levin Lab works at the intersection of developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science.
✅EPISODE LINKS:
👉Round 1: https://youtu.be/v6gp-ORTBlU
👉Mike’s Website: https://drmichaellevin.org/
👉New Website: https://thoughtforms.life.
👉Mike’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin.
👉Mike’s YouTube: https://youtube.com/@drmichaellevin.
👉Mike’s Publications: https://tinyurl.com/yc388vvk.
👉The Well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a3xg4M9Oa8 & https://youtu.be/XHMyKOpiYjk.
👉Aeon Essays: https://aeon.co/users/michael-levin.
Plenary Talk by Michael Levin on “Non-neural, developmental bioelectricity as a precursor for cognition: Evolution, synthetic organisms, and biomedicine” at the Virtual Miniature Brain Machinery Retreat, September 16, 2021. Introduction by William Baker.
Michael Levin.
Director of the Allen Discovery Center.
Tufts University.
Welcome to another exciting episode of our podcast series, where we dive deep into the world of science and innovation! In today’s episode, we have the privilege of interviewing Prof. Michael Levin, a renowned researcher in the fields of bioelectricity, regenerative biology, and biophysics.
Prof. Levin is the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and has been making groundbreaking discoveries that are revolutionizing the field of regenerative medicine. His research focuses on understanding the electrical communication within and between cells, and how this communication can be harnessed for tissue repair and regeneration.
For millions of Chinese people, the first software they download on a new laptop or smartphone is always the same: a keyboard app. Yet few of them are aware that it may make everything they type vulnerable to spying eyes.
Since dozens of Chinese characters can share the same latinized phonetic spelling, the ordinary QWERTY keyboard alone is incredibly inefficient. A smart, localized keyboard app can save a lot of time and frustration by predicting the characters and words a user wants to type. Today, over 800 million Chinese people use third-party keyboard apps on their PCs, laptops, and mobile phones.
Their development Scalene, an open-source tool for dramatically speeding up the programming language Python, circumvents hardware issues limiting computer processing speeds.
A team of computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, led by Emery Berger, recently unveiled a prize-winning Python profiler called Scalene. Programs written with Python are notoriously slow—up to 60,000 times slower than code written in other programming languages—and Scalene works to efficiently identify exactly where Python is lagging, allowing programmers to troubleshoot and streamline their code for higher performance.
There are many different programming languages—C++, Fortran, and Java are some of the more well-known ones—but, in recent years, one language has become nearly ubiquitous: Python.
Sticking out your tongue while doing delicate work with your hands reveals a history of evolutionary relationships.
