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Jul 6, 2019

First Virtual Debate Among U.S. Transhumanist Party Presidential Candidates

Posted by in categories: geopolitics, policy, transhumanism

The public is encouraged to watch today’s first-ever virtual debate among Transhumanist primary candidates for President of the United States. We will have candidates Charles Holsopple, Rachel Haywire, and Johannon Ben Zion discussing the principles of transhumanism and Core Ideals of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, as well as a wide range of policy proposals that enables transhumanist candidates to stand apart from and above the conventional political fray.


The first virtual debate among U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party candidates for President of the United States will take place on Saturday, July 6, 2019, at 3 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time and will last approximately two hours.

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Jul 6, 2019

How Will We Govern Ourselves in Space?

Posted by in categories: geopolitics, law, space travel, treaties

A new golden age of space exploration is upon us, with growing numbers of countries and private enterprises eager to establish themselves in space for the sake of scientific inquiry, national prestige, adventurous tourism, billionaires’ bragging rights, mineral riches, and even as a hedge against any future calamity that might devastate our home planet.

Our motivations for exploration may vary, but the spaceward rush raises questions about how we will govern ourselves beyond the bonds of Earth. Cold War-era space treaties, vague notions of how legal frameworks on Earth might migrate to settlements in space, and cautionary tales from both history and science fiction offer some guidance, but we could benefit from a larger conversation about how we want to govern them.

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Jul 6, 2019

Algorithmic Warfare: DARPA’s ‘AI Next’ Program Bearing Fruit

Posted by in categories: information science, military, robotics/AI

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency made headlines last fall when it announced that it was pledging $2 billion for a multi-year effort to develop new artificial intelligence technology.

Months later, DARPA’s “AI Next” program is already bearing fruit, said Peter Highnam, the agency’s deputy director.

DARPA — which has for decades fostered some of the Pentagon’s most cutting-edge capabilities — breaks down AI technology development into three distinct waves, he said during a meeting with reporters in Washington, D.C.

Jul 6, 2019

China’s Big AI Advantage: Humans

Posted by in categories: economics, education, government, robotics/AI, transportation

Seemingly “intelligent” devices like self-driving trucks aren’t actually all that intelligent. In order to avoid plowing into other cars or making illegal lane changes, they need a lot of help.

In China, that help is increasingly coming from rooms full of college students.

Continue reading “China’s Big AI Advantage: Humans” »

Jul 6, 2019

Billion-Dollar Returns: The Upside of Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency

Posted by in category: cryptocurrencies

Markkk… please take care, regards, we are tired of half deals, i hope your doing the right choice.


If Libra achieves even modest adoption, the payoff for Facebook and its partners could be in the billions.

Jul 6, 2019

Astronomers Have Observed The Atmosphere Of A Planet Like No Other In The Solar System

Posted by in category: space

For the first time, researchers have been able to observe the atmosphere of a planet between the sizes of Earth and Neptune. Gliese 3470 b is a world 96 light-years away, orbiting a star roughly half the size of the Sun. It is 12.6 times the mass of our planet and slightly smaller than Neptune, which weighs 17 times the mass of the Earth.

As reported in Nature Astronomy, this planet delivered quite the surprise to astronomers. Using the combined power of the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Spitzer infrared observatory, they discovered a clear atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, the main components of stars.

“We expected an atmosphere strongly enriched in heavier elements like oxygen and carbon which are forming abundant water vapor and methane gas, similar to what we see on Neptune,” lead author Björn Benneke, of the University of Montreal, said in a statement. “Instead, we found an atmosphere that is so poor in heavy elements that its composition resembles the hydrogen/helium-rich composition of the Sun.”

Jul 6, 2019

This spray-on nanofiber ‘skin’ may revolutionize burn and wound care

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Shaped like a gun, Nanomedic’s SpinCare device emits a web of electrospun polymer nanofabric that stays put for weeks—no dressing changes required.

[Source Photo: Nanomedic Technologies Ltd.]

Jul 6, 2019

Star Trails Swirl Over Israel’s Negev Desert (Photo)

Posted by in category: futurism

Miguel Claro is a professional photographer, author and science communicator based in Lisbon, Portugal, who creates spectacular images of the night sky. As a European Southern Observatory photo ambassador, a member of The World At Night and the official astrophotographer of the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve, he specializes in astronomical “skyscapes” that connect Earth and the night sky. Join him here as he takes us through his photograph “Light Trails in Israel Desert.”

Star trails circle over Ramon Crater in this long-exposure photo of the night sky over Israel’s Negev Desert.

I captured this photo from inside Ramon Crater (also known as Makhtesh Ramon), the world’s largest erosion cirque. The Ramon Crater geological formation has nothing to do with a meteor strike, despite its name. Rather, this “crater” formed about 220 million years ago when the ocean that once covered the area dried up. The eroding ocean floor then gave way to the crater-like valley we see there today.

Jul 6, 2019

AI can simulate quantum systems without massive computing power

Posted by in categories: quantum physics, robotics/AI, supercomputing

It’s difficult to simulate quantum physics, as the computing demand grows exponentially the more complex the quantum system gets — even a supercomputer might not be enough. AI might come to the rescue, though. Researchers have developed a computational method that uses neural networks to simulate quantum systems of “considerable” size, no matter what the geometry. To put it relatively simply, the team combines familiar methods of studying quantum systems (such as Monte Carlo random sampling) with a neural network that can simultaneously represent many quantum states.

Jul 6, 2019

Aging is associated with a systemic length-driven transcriptome imbalance

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, robotics/AI

Aging manifests itself through a decline in organismal homeostasis and a multitude of cellular and physiological functions. Efforts to identify a common basis for vertebrate aging face many challenges; for example, while there have been documented changes in the expression of many hundreds of mRNAs, the results across tissues and species have been inconsistent. We therefore analyzed age-resolved transcriptomic data from 17 mouse organs and 51 human organs using unsupervised machine learning3 5 to identify the architectural and regulatory characteristics most informative on the differential expression of genes with age. We report a hitherto unknown phenomenon, a systemic age-dependent length-driven transcriptome imbalance that for older organisms disrupts the homeostatic balance between short and long transcript molecules for mice, rats, killifishes, and humans. We also demonstrate that in a mouse model of healthy aging, length-driven transcriptome imbalance correlates with changes in expression of splicing factor proline and glutamine rich (Sfpq), which regulates transcriptional elongation according to gene length. Furthermore, we demonstrate that length-driven transcriptome imbalance can be triggered by environmental hazards and pathogens. Our findings reinforce the picture of aging as a systemic homeostasis breakdown and suggest a promising explanation for why diverse insults affect multiple age-dependent phenotypes in a similar manner.

The transcriptome responds rapidly, selectively, strongly, and reproducibly to a wide variety of molecular and physiological insults experienced by an organism. While the transcripts of thousands of genes have been reported to change with age, the magnitude by which most transcripts change is small in comparison with classical examples of gene regulation2,8 and there is little consensus among different studies. We hence hypothesize that aging is associated with a hitherto uncharacterized process that affects the transcriptome in a systemic manner. We predict that such a process could integrate heterogenous, and molecularly distinctive, environmental insults to promote phenotypic manifestations of aging.

We use an unsupervised machine learning approach3 5 to identify the sources of age-dependent changes in the transcriptome. To this end, we measure and survey the transcriptome of 17 mouse organs from 6 biological replicates at 5 different ages from 4 to 24 months raised under standardized conditions (Fig. 1A). We consider information on the structural architecture of individual genes and transcripts, and knowledge on the binding of regulatory molecules such as transcription factors and microRNAs (miRNAs) (Fig. 1B). We define age-dependent fold-changes as the log2-transformed ratio of transcripts of one gene at a given age relative to the transcripts of that gene in the organs of 4-month-old mice. As expected for models capturing most measurable changes in transcript abundance, the predicted fold-changes (Fig. S1) match changes empirically observed between distinct replicate cohorts of mice (Figs. S2 and S3).

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