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What is the Drake Equation? We are talking about The Odds of ALIEN LIFE.
Is there life out there in the Universe?
How are the chances to find Extraterrestrial life?
Continue reading “What Are The Odds Of Alien Life? The Drake Equation” »
The so-called “Father of the Atomic Bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer was once described as “a genius of the nuclear age and also the walking, talking conscience of science and civilization”. Born at the outset of the 20th century, his early interests in chemistry and physics would in the 1920s bring him to Göttingen University, where he worked alongside his doctoral supervisor Max Born (1882−1970), close lifelong friend Paul Dirac (1902−84) and eventual adversary Werner Heisenberg (1901−76). This despite the fact that even as early as in his youth, Oppenheimer was singled out as both gifted and odd, at times even unstable. As a child he collected rocks, wrote poetry and studied French literature. Never weighing more than 130 pounds, throughout his life he was a “tall and thin chainsmoker” who once stated that he “needed physics more than friends” who at Cambridge University was nearly charged with attempted murder after leaving a poisoned apple on the desk of one of his tutors. Notoriously abrupt and impatient, at Göttingen his classmates once gave their professor Born an ultimatum: “either the ‘child prodigy’ is reigned in, or his fellow students will boycott the class”. Following the successful defense of his doctoral dissertation, the professor administering the examination, Nobel Laureate James Franck (1882−1964) reportedly left the room stating.
“I’m glad that’s over. He was at the point of questioning me”
From his time as student at Harvard, to becoming a postgraduate researcher in Cambridge and Göttingen, a professor at UC Berkeley, the scientific head of the Manhattan project and after the war, the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, wherever Oppenheimer went he could hold his own with the greatest minds of his age. Max Born, Paul Dirac, John von Neumann, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Richard Feynman, they all admired “Oppie”. When he died in 1967, his published articles in physics totaled 73, ranging from topics in quantum field theory, particle physics, the theory of cosmic radiations to nuclear physics and cosmology. His funeral was attended by over 600 people, and included numerous associates from academia and research as well as government officials, heads of military, even the director of the New York City Ballet.
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Irina Rish is a world-renowned professor of computer science and operations research at the Université de Montréal and a core member of the prestigious Mila organisation. She is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and the Canadian Excellence Research Chair in Autonomous AI. Irina holds an MSc and PhD in AI from the University of California, Irvine as well as an MSc in Applied Mathematics from the Moscow Gubkin Institute. Her research focuses on machine learning, neural data analysis, and neuroscience-inspired AI. In particular, she is exploring continual lifelong learning, optimization algorithms for deep neural networks, sparse modelling and probabilistic inference, dialog generation, biologically plausible reinforcement learning, and dynamical systems approaches to brain imaging analysis. Prof. Rish holds 64 patents, has published over 80 research papers, several book chapters, three edited books, and a monograph on Sparse Modelling. She has served as a Senior Area Chair for NeurIPS and ICML. Irina’s research is focussed on taking us closer to the holy grail of Artificial General Intelligence. She continues to push the boundaries of machine learning, continually striving to make advancements in neuroscience-inspired AI.
Continue reading “Prof. IRINA RISH — AGI, Complex Systems, Transhumanism #NeurIPS” »
𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐨𝐤𝐲𝐨 𝐢𝐧 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐃𝐍𝐀 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐰𝐚𝐲.
The method was effective in lab tests against human cervical cancer-and breast cancer-derived cells, and against malignant melanoma cells from mice. The team created a pair of chemically synthesized, hairpin-shaped, cancer-killing DNA. When the DNA pairs were injected into cancer cells, they connected to microRNA (miRNA) molecules that are overproduced in certain cancers.
Once connected to the miRNA, they unraveled and joined together, forming longer chains of DNA which triggered an immune response. This response not only killed the cancer cells but prevented further growth of cancerous tissue. This method is different from conventional anticancer drug treatments and is hoped to bring about a new era of drug development.
New research in the journal Nature Aging takes a page from the field of renewable energy and shows that genetically engineered mitochondria can convert light energy into chemical energy that cells can use, ultimately extending the life of the roundworm C. elegans. While the prospect of sunlight-charged cells in humans is more science fiction than science, the findings shed light on important mechanisms in the aging process.
“We know that mitochondrial dysfunction is a consequence of aging,” said Andrew Wojtovich, Ph.D., associate professor of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine and Pharmacology & Physiology at the University of Rochester Medical Center and senior author of the study.
“This study found that simply boosting metabolism using light-powered mitochondria gave laboratory worms longer, healthier lives. These findings and new research tools will enable us to further study mitochondria and identify new ways to treat age-related diseases and age healthier.”
The efficacy of implanted biomaterials is largely dependent on the response of the host’s immune and stromal cells. Severe foreign body response (FBR) can impede the integration of the implant into the host tissue and compromise the intended mechanical and biochemical function. Many features of FBR, including late-stage fibrotic encapsulation of implants, parallel the formation of fibrotic scar tissue after tissue injury. Regenerative organisms like zebrafish and salamanders can avoid fibrosis after injury entirely, but FBR in these research organisms is rarely investigated because their immune competence is much lower than humans. The recent characterization of a regenerative mammal, the spiny mouse (Acomys), has inspired us to take a closer look at cellular regulation in regenerative organisms across the animal kingdom for insights into avoiding FBR in humans.
Tardigrades have competition in the realm of microscopic and incredibly sturdy beasties. Like tardigrades, Bdelloid rotifers can also survive drying, freezing, starving, and even low-oxygen conditions. Now, scientists report that they revived some of these rotifers after having been frozen in Siberian permafrost for at least 24,000 years.
The incredible observations are reported in the journal Current Biology. The researchers took samples of permafrost about 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) deep and slowly warmed the sample, which led to the resurrection of several microscopic organisms including these tiny little animals.
“Our report is the hardest proof as of today that multicellular animals could withstand tens of thousands of years in cryptobiosis, the state of almost completely arrested metabolism,” co-author Stas Malavin of the Soil Cryology Laboratory at the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science in Pushchino, Russia, said in a statement.
Finding a material that could replace silicon is a critical task in nanoelectronics. For many years, graphene has appeared promising. However, its potential was compromised along the way because of destructive processing techniques and the absence of a new electronics paradigm to adopt it. The need for the next major nanoelectronics platform is greater than ever, as silicon is almost at its limit in supporting faster computation.
The strength of graphene, according to Walter de Heer, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Physics, rests in its flat, two-dimensional structure, which is kept together by the strongest chemical bonds known.
Alpha Centauri, here we come.
However, while technology has indeed advanced a long way since the 1940s, it still seems like we are still a long way from having a fully functional von Neumann machine. That is unless you turn to biology. Even simple biological systems can perform absolutely mind-blowing feats of chemical synthesis. And there are few people in the world today who know that better than George Church. The geneticist from Harvard has been at the forefront of a revolution in the biological sciences over the last 30 years. Now, he’s published a new paper in Astrobiology musing about how biology could aid in creating a pico-scale system that could potentially explore other star systems at next to no cost.
Continue reading “Trillions of tiny, self-replicating satellites could unlock interstellar travel” »
3D printers to create rapid on-demand objects have only been around for a short time. It’s a popular technique for making quick mock-ups or temporary solutions, but 3D-printing can also be used for more long-term applications. For example, some museums used it to create tactile models for interactive displays or even to create structural parts to support restoration projects. Either way, these are not temporary whimsical creations, but structures that they would likely still want to be in perfect shape several years down the line.
There are also other reasons to want to preserve 3D-printed materials for more than just a few years, but we haven’t had the technology for long enough to really know what will happen to these objects over time.
To find out, art conservation researchers at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain subjected two types of 3D printing materials to an artificial accelerated aging process. When plastics age, any damage such as loss of color or chemical changes in the materials are often caused either by UV radiation from exposure to light or by extreme temperature fluctuations. To simulate these extreme environments in a much faster scale than natural aging, the researchers put the 3D printed samples and the original filaments in two different chambers: One exposing the samples to UV light and the other subjecting them to a range of high temperatures.
