Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: computing – Page 635

L AS VEGAS — At a biohacker conference convened here the other day, panelists took to the stage, settled into their chairs, and launched into their slide decks. Not Anastasia Synn.

With Frank Sinatra crooning “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” over the loudspeakers, Synn pulled out a giant needle and twisted it deeper and deeper into her left forearm as the music played on. It was only after finishing her routine, capped off by loud applause from the crowd of biohackers, that Synn sat down for a fireside chat about her work as a “cyborg magician.”

Synn has 26 microchips and magnets implanted throughout her body. Unlike many biohackers who experiment purely out of personal interest, Synn does it for her magic career. These days, she’s doing less performing on stage and spending more time designing bodily implants for other magicians.

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Drew Endy almost can’t talk fast enough to convey everything he has to say. It’s a wonderfully complex message filled with nuance, a kind of intricate puzzle box being built by a pioneer of synthetic biology who wants to fundamentally rejigger the living world.

Endy heads a research team at Stanford that is, as he puts it, building genetically encoded computers and redesigning genomes. What that means: he’s trying to engineer life forms to do useful things. Just about anything could come out of this toolkit: new foods, new materials, new medicines. So you are unlikely to find anyone who is more optimistic than he is about the potential for synthetic biology to solve big problems.

That’s what makes Endy so compelling when he worries about how the technology is being developed. Perhaps more than anyone else working in synthetic biology, Endy has tried to hold the community to account.

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Some researchers have raised the possibility that, if quantum computers fail to deliver anything of use soon, a quantum winter will descend: enthusiasm will wane and funding will dry up before researchers get anywhere close to building full-scale machines. “Quantum winter is a real concern,” Preskill says. But he remains upbeat, because the slow progress has forced researchers to adjust their focus and see whether the devices they already have might be able to do something interesting in the near future.

Researchers search for ways to put today’s small noisy quantum systems to work. The hunt for useful quantum computers.

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SAN FRANCISCO—( )—Twist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ: TWST), a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of high-quality synthetic DNA using its silicon platform, today announced that it has entered into an agreement with Imagene SA, where Imagene will provide Twist with an encapsulation service to store DNA through its DNAshell® technology to store digital data encoded in DNA for thousands of years.

“We are happy to be partnering with Twist and providing them with our disruptive DNAshell® technology to safely store DNA with digital data encoded.” Tweet this

“This agreement with Imagene provides the next step in the continuum on DNA digital data storage and fits within our strategy to cover all aspects of the process efficiently to enable the development of DNA as a digital storage medium,” commented Emily Leproust, Ph.D., CEO of Twist Bioscience. “We believe the DNAshell ® technology allows us to encapsulate the DNA-stored digital data securely, protecting it for eternity from any elements including radiation, and eliminating the need for continued copying of digital data due to degradation experienced in other forms of storage today.”

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For the first time, physicists in the US have confirmed a decades-old theory regarding the breaking of time-reversal symmetry in gauge fields. Marin Soljacic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an international team of researchers have made this first demonstration of the “non-Abelian Aharonov-Bohm effect” in two optics experiments. With improvements, their techniques could find use in optoelectronics and fault-tolerant quantum computers.

First emerging in Maxwell’s famous equations for classical electrodynamics, a gauge theory is a description of the physics of fields. Gauge theories have since become an important part of physicists’ descriptions of the dynamics of elementary particles – notably the theory of quantum electrodynamics.

A salient feature of a gauge theory is that the physics it describes does not change when certain transformations are made to the underlying equations describing the system. An example is the addition of a constant scalar potential or a “curl-free” vector potential to Maxwell’s equations. Mathematically, this does not change the electric and magnetic fields that act on a charged particle such as an electron – and therefore the behaviour of the electron – so Maxwell’s theory is gauge invariant.

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The World Economic Forum has partnered with the Inter-American Development Bank and the Colombian Inspector General’s Office to explore how distributed ledger technology can improve public transparency and integrity in school meal procurement.

The project, which is taking place this year, is multi-faceted and includes a software implementation with blockchain technology for the selection of school food vendors. It is co-designed with several partners from academia, the IT industry, and the non-profit world, including economists and computer scientists from the blockchain economics and governance consulting firm Prysm Group, the National University of Colombia, U.C. Berkeley, and the blockchain security firm Quantstamp.

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A professor at the University of Chicago believes he is on his way to creating a wearable for market that will manipulate your muscles with electrical impulses to cause you to move involuntarily so you can perform a physical task you otherwise didn’t know how to do, like playing a musical instrument or operating machinery.

Dr. Pedro Lopes, who heads the Human Computer Integration lab at the university, is all about integrating humans and computers, closing the gap between human and machine. His team, which focuses on engineering the next generation of wearable and haptic devices, is exploring the endless possibilities if wearables could intentionally share parts of our body for input and output, allowing computers to be more directly interwoven in our bodily senses and actuators.

Lopes’ vision: a wearable EMS device that would look like a sleeve and be able to send electrical impulses in the right timing and in the right fashion to make a user’s muscles move involuntarily to perform a physical task. EMS stands for electrical muscle stimulation.

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