Lifeboat Foundation

They aren’t clones. They’re xenobots, synthetic lifeforms made from clusters of cells.

Robots such as these, capable of making offshoots of themselves, could be a future tool for science and medicine.

For at least half a century, it has been popular to compare brains and minds to computers and programs. Despite the continuing appeal of the computational model of the mind, however, it can be difficult to articulate precisely what the view commits one to. Indeed, critics such as John Searle and Hilary Putnam have argued that anything, even a rock, can be viewed as instantiating any computation we please, and this means that the claim that the mind is a computer is not merely false, but it is also deeply confused.

Kidney cancer patients who received an oral probiotic in addition to immunotherapy treatments saw improved outcomes, according to research published in Nature Medicine.

A SEVENTH person has been “cured” of HIV after revolutionary stem cell treatment, it is hoped.

The man, 60, who also had acute myeloid leukaemia when he had the procedure to replace his bone marrow in October 2015, is now thought to be free of both diseases.

It all started at a Denny’s in San Jose in 1993. Three engineers—Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem—gathered at the diner in what is now the heart of Silicon Valley to discuss building a computer chip that would make graphics for video games faster and more realistic. That conversation, and the ones that followed, led to the founding of Nvidia, the tech company that soared through the ranks of the stock market to briefly top Microsoft as the most valuable company in the S&P 500 this week.

The company is now worth over $3.2 trillion, with its dominance as a chipmaker cementing Nvidia’s place as the poster child of the artificial intelligence boom—a moment that Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, has dubbed “the next industrial revolution.”

On a conference call with analysts last month, Huang predicted that the companies using Nvidia chips would build a new type of data center called “AI factories.”

Scientists at the University of Sydney have developed a gene-editing tool with greater accuracy and flexibility than the industry standard, CRISPR, which has revolutionized genetic engineering in medicine, agriculture and biotechnology.

SeekRNA uses a programmable ribonucleic acid (RNA) strand that can directly identify sites for insertion in genetic sequences, simplifying the editing process and reducing errors.

The new gene-editing tool is being developed by a team led by Dr. Sandro Ataide in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences. Their findings have been published in Nature Communications.

Listen to this episode from The Futurists on Spotify. Monica Anderson returns to the Futurists to share a radical concept: future AI models based on Darwinism. The “AI epistemologist” shares provocative opinions about where the current crop of generative AI systems went wrong, and why generative AI is computationally expensive and energy intensive, and why scaling AI with hardware will not achieve general intelligence. Instead she offers a radical alternative: a design for machine intelligence that is inspired by biology, and in particular by the Darwinian process of selection. Topics include: why generative AI is not a plagiarism machine; syntax versus semantics and why AI needs both; there is only one algorithm for creativity; and how to construct an AI that consumes a million times less energy.

NASA is very interested in developing a propulsion method to allow spacecraft to go faster. We’ve reported several times on different ideas to support that goal, and most of the more successful have utilized the sun’s gravity well, typically by slingshotting around it, as is commonly done with Jupiter currently.

But, there are still significant hurdles when doing so, not the least of which is the energy radiating from the sun simply vaporizing anything that gets close enough to utilize a gravity assist. That’s the problem a project supported by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) and run by Jason Benkoski, now of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is trying to solve.

The project was awarded a NIAC Phase I grant in 2022, focused on combining two separate systems—a heat shield and a thermal propellant system. According to the project’s final report, combining those two technologies could allow a spacecraft to perform what is known as an Oberth maneuver around the sun.

Scientists have achieved a series of milestones in growing a high-quality thin film conductor, suggesting in a new study that the material is a promising candidate platform for future wearable electronics and other miniature applications.

Researchers at The Ohio State University, the Army Research Laboratory and MIT determined that the material is the best among similarly built films for its electron mobility—an index of how easy it is for an electrical current to pass through it.

Coupled with low defect density to reduce interference with electron movement on the surface, the material is like a tiny empty freeway where all the electrons can easily get where they need to go with no traffic to be seen.