Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers recently made an important discovery in protein science that will advance our understanding of the inner workings of cells. In an article published in Scientific Reports, the team said they found a critical evolutionary link between a protein’s structure and its function.

Like tiny molecular machines, proteins handle a variety of functions from transporting chemicals to breaking food down into nutrients. The vast range of protein function is possible because of their unique gene-encoded sequence of amino acids, which affects the three-dimensional shape that folded protein chains adopt.

To better understand them, researchers have sequenced and resolved a huge number of protein structures. Currently, the Protein Data Bank includes 110,000+ structures—far more than the number with known functions. Powerful bioinformatics tools assist in making correlations between the shape and purpose of a protein, but what’s been missing is a direct structure-function link, tantamount to a Rosetta stone-like key.

Continue reading “Scientists Unearth Key Evolutionary Link in Proteins” »

Why the bot evolution must be human-led.

By Rob LoCascio.

Continue reading “4 Things to Consider Before Turning Over your Business to Bots” »

Luv this article (science meets philosophical theory on the evolution of science); reminds me of an article that one of my Quantum friends shared yesterday on Linkedin Pulse.

Science is the biggest enterprise that man ever created. Of all the living things on this planet, man is the only one that seems to have started thinking about how this world works. To understand that he started this new venture, called Science, which was originally meant just to understand how this world works. Some exceptionally brilliant minds did accidentally stumble upon some understanding of the world’s laws like gravity, buoyancy, and others in the west while Indian sages had realised this much earlier.

Next step was to find out how the world works by doing some experiments. That was the stage when the Churches started obstructing “Science” as this kind of scientific enquiry, the Church felt, might interfere with religious beliefs. That is where the first conflict between religion and science started. The fall out was that scientists subconsciously developed an aversion to the God concept in religion and thus God was kept out of the scientific realm. Let us, therefore, think from now on. Science, then, was more of a hobby for the well to do. The leading lights of that generation were Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. There were a host of others but less illustrious than these two. Newton’s Laws of deterministic predictability and Einstein’s laws of relativity together founded a world view of “space-time” constraints where everything else out with this space time module was rejected.

Continue reading “The quantum world view and vedanta” »

US biochemical engineer Frances Arnold on Tuesday won a million-euro technology prize in Finland for her work on “directed evolution”, a method of rewriting DNA to improve medicines and develop green fuels.

“Frances Arnold receives the 2016 Millennium Technology Prize in recognition of her discoveries that launched the field of ‘directed evolution’, which mimics natural evolution to create new and better proteins in the laboratory,” the Technology Academy Finland, which awards the prize at two-year intervals, said in a statement.

Arnold, 59, who is a professor of chemical engineering at California Institute of Technology, said her work made it possible to “solve human problems”, such as replacing toxic chemicals like fossil fuels.

Biologists have identified the one gene that caused the evolution of single-celled organisms into multicellularity, debunking previous theories that several genes were at play. The gene retinoblastoma is also the same gene that is found to be defective in cancer patients, and suppresses tumors.

George Church is pushing the boundaries of science!

Harvard biologist George Church wants to reverse aging, reanimate a mammoth, and build an entire human genome from scratch. What makes him tick?

The troubling piece of this article is that the article leaves out how the underlying technology will need to change in order for AI to truly intertwine with humans. AI in the existing infrastructure and digital technology with no support of BMI, microbots, etc. will not evolve us to Singularity by itself and without changes to the existing digital landscape.

As artificial intelligence continuously evolves, the future of AI is also becoming more significantly challenging to perceive and comprehend for humans.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Evolution: Future AI Technologies To Make AI Obsolete And Intertwine Physical, Digital Realities?” »

(Source: Jimmy Pike & Christopher Wilder ©Moor Insights & Strategy)

Microsoft and Facebook recently announced how they plan to drive leadership in the digital transformation and cloud market: bots. As more companies—especially application vendors—begin to drive solutions that incorporate machine learning, natural language, artificial intelligence, and structured and unstructured data, bots will increase in relevance and value. Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft see considerable opportunities to enable vendors and developers to build solutions that can see, hear and learn as well as applications that can recognize and learn from a user’s intent, emotions, face, language and voice.

Bots are not new, but they have evolved over time through the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, ubiquitous connectivity and increases in data processing speeds. In the mid-1990s, the first commercial bots were developed. For example, I was on the ground floor for the first commercial chat providers called ichat. As with many disruptive media-based technologies, as was the case with ichat, early adopters tend to be the darker side of the entertainment industry. These companies saw a way to get website visitors to stay online longer by having someone to interact with their guests at 3AM. Out of this necessity, chatbots were developed. Thankfully, the technology has evolved and now bots are mainstream and are being used to helping people perform simple tasks and interact with service providers.

Continue reading “Rise Of The Machines (Part 2): Artificial Intelligence And Bots Promise To Disrupt” »

A study performed at IRB Barcelona offers an explanation as to why the genetic code stopped growing 3,000 million years ago. This is attributed to the structure of transfer RNAs—the key molecules in the translation of genes into proteins. The genetic code is limited to 20 amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—the maximum number that prevents systematic mutations, which are fatal for life. The discovery could have applications in synthetic biology.

Nature is constantly evolving—its limits determined only by variations that threaten the viability of species. Research into the origin and expansion of the genetic code are fundamental to explain the evolution of life. In Science Advances, a team of biologists specialised in this field explain a limitation that put the brakes on the further development of the genetic code, which is the universal set of rules that all organisms on Earth use to translate genetic sequences of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) into the amino acid sequences that comprise the proteins that undertake cell functions.

Headed by ICREA researcher Lluís Ribas de Pouplana at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and in collaboration with Fyodor A. Kondrashov, at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and Modesto Orozco, from IRB Barcelona, the team of scientists has demonstrated that the genetic code evolved to include a maximum of 20 amino acids and that it was unable to grow further because of a functional limitation of transfer RNAs—the molecules that serve as interpreters between the language of genes and that of proteins. This halt in the increase in the complexity of life happened more than 3,000 million years ago, before the separate evolution of bacteria, eukaryotes and archaebacteria, as all organisms use the same code to produce proteins from genetic information.

Continue reading “Discovery of a fundamental limit to the evolution of the genetic code” »