A race is on to mine billions of dollars in resources from the solar system’s asteroids, fuelling our future among the stars.

Zoë Corbyn

Imagine meetings that document themselves using AI tools to add real-time translation and accessibility support. How much of that is the future and how much can you do today?

Tim Berners-Lee should know what he is talking about, when he says ‘Celebrity damages private life’. The person who is considered to be the inventor of the World Wide Web was on June 8, 1955.

These products could save your life.

https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

When Stapledon wrote that book he was thinking of Martians, but in our time one might think he was studying the strangeness of what our posthuman progeny may evolve into. In Last and First Men Stapledon presents a version of the future history of our species, reviewed by one of our descendants as stellar catastrophe is bringing our solar system to an end. Humanity rises and falls through a succession of mental and physical transformations, regenerating after natural and artificial disasters and emerging in the end into a polymorphous group intelligence, a telepathically linked community of ten million minds spanning the orbits of the outer planets and breaking the bounds of individual consciousness, yet still incapable of more than “a fledgling’s knowledge” of the whole.

Abstract: Can machines design? Can they come up with creative solutions to problems and build tools and artifacts across a wide range of domains? Recent advances in the field of computational creativity and formal Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) provide frameworks for machines with the general ability to design. In this paper we propose to integrate a formal computational creativity framework into the G” odel machine framework. We call this machine a design G” odel machine. Such a machine could solve a variety of design problems by generating novel concepts. In addition, it could change the way these concepts are generated by modifying itself. The design G” odel machine is able to improve its initial design program, once it has proven that a modification would increase its return on the utility function. Finally, we sketch out a specific version of the design G” odel machine which specifically aims at the design of complex software and hardware systems. Future work could be the development of a more formal version of the Design G” odel machine and a potential implementation.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found new evidence preserved in rocks on Mars that suggests the planet could have supported ancient life, as well as new evidence in the Martian atmosphere that relates to the search for current life on the Red Planet. While not necessarily evidence of life itself, these findings are a good sign for future missions exploring the planet’s surface and subsurface.

The new findings — “tough” organic molecules in 3-billion-year-old sedimentary rocks near the surface, as well as seasonal variations in the levels of methane in the atmosphere — appear in the June 8 edition of the journal Science.

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The Neurogenesis Debate

Written by Nicholi Avery

On March 7 2018, a study was published in the highly esteemed journal Nature by an international team of scientists claiming that #neurogenesis starts to rapidly decline in the #human brain as early as 13 years old and becomes undetectable in adults. This rocked the scientific community as there has been a long-established theory that neurogenesis takes place throughout the course of life in the mammalian #brain. Until the 1990s, neurologists were practicing their profession under the doctrine established in the late 19th to early 20th century by the prominent histologist Ramon y Cajal, often referred to as a god of neuroscience;

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