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This Comic Series Is Gorgeous. You’d Never Know AI Drew the Whole Thing

You might expect a comic book series featuring art generated entirely by artificial intelligence to be full of surreal images that have you tilting your head trying to grasp what kind of sense-shifting madness you’re looking at.

Not so with the images in The Bestiary Chronicles, a free, three-part comics series from Campfire Entertainment, a New York-based production house focused on creative storytelling.

The visuals in the trilogy — believed to be the first comics series made with AI-assisted art — are stunning. They’re also stunningly precise, as if they’ve come straight from the hand of a seasoned digital artist with a very specific story and style in mind.

Transforming bacterial cells into living artificial neural circuits

Bringing together concepts from electrical engineering and bioengineering tools, Technion and MIT scientists collaborated to produce cells engineered to compute sophisticated functions— biocomputers of sorts.

Graduate students and researchers from Technion—Israel Institute of Technology Professor Ramez Daniel’s Laboratory for Synthetic Biology & Bioelectronics worked together with Professor Ron Weiss from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create genetic “devices” designed to perform computations like artificial neural circuits. Their results were recently published in Nature Communications.

The was inserted into the bacterial cell in the form of a plasmid: a relatively short DNA molecule that remains separate from the bacteria’s “natural” genome. Plasmids also exist in nature, and serve various functions. The research group designed the plasmid’s genetic sequence to function as a simple computer, or more specifically, a simple artificial neural network. This was done by means of several genes on the plasmid regulating each other’s activation and deactivation according to outside stimuli.

The Tragedy of Droids in Star Wars

It’s not really a Star Wars story unless there’s a lovable or memorable droid stealing the spotlight. But, when you really stop and think about it, there’s also something profoundly tragic about the role artificial lifeforms play in the Star Wars universe.

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REFERENCES
• Race in American Science Fiction by Isiah Lavender III
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10364882-race-in-american-science-fiction.
• Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Pop Culture by Gregory Jerome Hampton.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26371201-imagining-slave…ar-culture.
• The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature (Chapter 15) Beyond the Borders of the Neo-Slave Narrative by Jeffrey Allen Tucker.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39293853-the-cambridge-c…literature.
• Asimov on Science Fiction in Science Fiction Digest, October-November 1981
https://archive.org/details/sfdigest19811011
• Janelle Monae’s “Many Moons” music video.

NOVELS REFERENCED

AI predicts that a dinosaur thought to be predatory may have been an herbivore

It’s commonly believed that many of these prehistoric animals were vicious carnivores.

Researchers used artificial intelligence (AI) to discover information on dinosaurs, specifically to find out if a certain dinosaur was a predator or not. AI has shown that the dinosaur typically thought to be a carnivore may actually have been an herbivore.

The new analysis was done by using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) — computing systems based on neural networks of the brain — to track the fossils of these prehistoric reptiles.


Dr anthony romilio/ the university of queensland.

The study was published recently in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface.

Cerebras Systems debuts AI supercomputer with 13.5M+ processor cores

Chip startup Cerebras Systems Inc. today debuted Andromeda, a supercomputer optimized to run artificial intelligence applications that features more than 13.5 million processor cores.

Sunnyvale, California-based Cerebras Systems is backed by more than $720 million in venture funding. The startup sells a chip called the WSE-2 that is specifically designed to run AI software. The new Andromeda supercomputer that Cerebras Systems debuted today is based on the WSE-2 chip.

According to Cerebras Systems, Andromeda can provide performance in excess of one exaflop when running AI applications. One exaflop equals 1 million trillion calculations per second. The startup says that Andromeda’s performance makes it suitable for, among other use cases, training large language models, which are complex neural networks that can perform tasks such as translating text and generating software code.

Alex Zhavoronkov: Live Long and Prosper

The maniacally focused founder of Insilico Medicine is going all in on AI to discover new medicines and extend lifespan.

But researchers are now using artificial intelligence to accelerate parts of that process by orders of magnitude. The same kind of technology that recognizes your face or autocompletes your emails can potentially add years to your life, experts say.

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Technologists, researchers, students, teachers, and creators of digital learning platforms or cutting-edge AI techniques are invited to participate. By doing so, you will gain access to a network of experts and receive feedback and technical support.