Lifeboat Foundation

We may not be the only beings in the universe who use artificial intelligence. That’s according to some astronomers who say that an intelligent civilization anywhere in the cosmos would develop this tool naturally over the course of their cultural evolution.

After 13.8 billion years of existence, life has likely sprung up countless times throughout the cosmos. According to the Drake Equation, which calculates the probability of an existing, communicating civilization, there are currently an estimated 12,500 such intelligent alien societies in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. And if there are aliens who think in a way that we do, and created cultures that developed technology like us, then they probably invented a form of artificial intelligence, too, scientists say.

Assuming AI has been an integral part of intelligent societies for thousands or even millions of years, experts are increasingly considering the possibility that artificial intelligence may have grown to proportions we can scarcely imagine on Earth. Life in the universe may not only be biological, they say. AI machine-based life may dominate many extraterrestrial civilizations, according to a burgeoning theory among astrobiologists.

The universe just got a whole lot bigger—or at least in the world of computer simulations, that is. In early November, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory used the fastest supercomputer on the planet to run the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe ever conducted.

The achievement was made using the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The calculations set a new benchmark for cosmological hydrodynamics simulations and provide a new foundation for simulating the physics of atomic matter and dark matter simultaneously. The simulation size corresponds to surveys undertaken by large telescope observatories, a feat that until now has not been possible at this scale.

Continue reading “Record-breaking run on Frontier sets new bar for simulating the universe in exascale era” »

Stem cells grown in microgravity aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have unique qualities that could one day help accelerate new biotherapies and heal complex disease, two Mayo Clinic researchers say. The research analysis by Fay Abdul Ghani and Abba Zubair, M.D., Ph.D., published in NPJ Microgravity, finds microgravity can strengthen the regenerative potential of cells. Dr. Zubair is a laboratory medicine expert and medical director for the Center for Regenerative Biotherapeutics at Mayo Clinic in Florida. Abdul Ghani is a Mayo Clinic research technologist. Microgravity is weightlessness or near-zero gravity.

“Studying stem cells in space has uncovered cell mechanisms that would otherwise be undetected or unknown within the presence of normal gravity,” says Dr. Zubair. “That discovery indicates a broader scientific value to this research, including potential clinical applications.”

Dr. Zubair has launched stem cell experiments from his lab on three different missions to the ISS. His review paper provides data on the scientific question, “Is space the ideal environment for growing large numbers of stem cells?” Another key concern is whether cells grown in space could maintain their strength and function after splashdown on Earth.

Viruses known as bacteriophages are difficult to study, but they are beginning to give up their secrets.

“Life is incredible.” Here’s how a brain implant changed the life of Jon Nelson, who long suffered from severe depression. Now a patient advocate for startup Motif, he spoke to Emily Chang about the hope of using neurotech to treat mental illnesses.

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Continue reading “Would You Plant a Chip in Your Brain” »

Advance paves the way for broad applications in medicine and biotech. Researchers from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and the University of Rome Tor Vergata in Italy have developed synthetic genes that function like the genes in living cells.

The artificial genes can build intracellular structures through a cascading sequence that builds self-assembling structures piece by piece. The approach is similar to building furniture with modular units, much like those found at IKEA. Using the same parts, one can build many different things and it’s easy to take the set apart and reconstruct the parts for something else. The discovery offers a path toward using a suite of simple building blocks that can be programmed to make complex biomolecular materials, such as nanoscale tubes from DNA tiles. The same components can also be programmed to break up the design for different materials.

The research study was recently published in Nature Communications and led by Elisa Franco, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and bioengineering at UCLA Samueli. Daniela Sorrentino, a postdoctoral scholar in Franco’s Dynamic Nucleic Acid Systems lab, is the study’s first author.

The secret to cellular youth may depend on keeping the nucleolus—a condensed structure inside the nucleus of a cell—small, according to Weill Cornell Medicine investigators. The findings were elucidated in yeast, a model organism famous for making bread and beer and yet surprisingly similar to humans on the cellular level.

The study, published Nov. 25 in Nature Aging, may lead to new longevity treatments that could extend human lifespan. It also establishes a mortality timer that reveals how long a cell has left before it dies.

As people get older, they are more likely to develop health conditions, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative diseases.

Conventional components perform incredibly inefficiently at these sub-freezing temperatures, the scientists said. They’re also very hard to maintain — as more and more qubits are added to a system, the more heat is emitted, which makes it more difficult and expensive to sustain these ultralow temperatures.

Because the new transistor — dubbed the “cryo-CMOS transistor” — is optimized to operate at temperatures under 1 K and emit near-zero heat, it offers plenty of advantages over traditional electronics, representatives of the Finnish company SemiQon, which developed the transistor, said in a statement.

The genome-editing technology can be supercharged by artificial intelligence—and the results are already being felt.