Lifeboat Foundation

An AI-powered deepfake voice was just used in a money heist.

Instant Bestseller on Amazon, this new book is a collection of remarkable essays on our near future with AI, cybernetics, transhumanism, the Simulation Hypothesis, the Technological Singularity, the emergence of the Global Mind, and corresponding philosophical issues. Written by Alex M. Vikoulov; Foreword by Antonin Tuynman, PhD; Publisher: Ecstadelic Media Group; Publication Date: September 1, 2019; Format: Kindle eBook; Print Book Length: 245 pages; ISBN: 9781733426107; Price: $9.99.

Ecstadelic Media Group releases a new non-fiction book The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence. Written by Alex M. Vikoulov; Foreword by Antonin Tuynman PhD; Format: Kindle eBook (Press Release, San Francisco, CA, USA, September 3, 2019 11.00 AM PST)

Tomorrow’s wars will be faster, more high-tech, and less human than ever before. Welcome to a new era of machine-driven warfare.

W allops Island —a remote, marshy spit of land along the eastern shore of Virginia, near a famed national refuge for horses—is mostly known as a launch site for government and private rockets. But it also makes for a perfect, quiet spot to test a revolutionary weapons technology.

If a fishing vessel had steamed past the area last October, the crew might have glimpsed half a dozen or so 35-foot-long inflatable boats darting through the shallows, and thought little of it. But if crew members had looked closer, they would have seen that no one was aboard: The engine throttle levers were shifting up and down as if controlled by ghosts. The boats were using high-tech gear to sense their surroundings, communicate with one another, and automatically position themselves so, in theory, .50-caliber machine guns that can be strapped to their bows could fire a steady stream of bullets to protect troops landing on a beach.

The human body is an incredible machine. It is impossible to determine which is the essential body part for sustaining life — because there is no single indispensable part. If your heart stops beating, you will die. If your lungs stop working, your brain — and thus all of your cells — will eventually die. Without a stomach or intestines you cannot acquire nutrients and you will die. All parts are critical for optimal function, for sustaining life.

Synthetic biology as a field is no different. There are those that supply DNA — arguably the critical building block for every single synthetic biology application. There are those that automate and scale components of the design-build-test cycle to enable innovation to effect change in meaningful timelines. But when all of those parts come together with a single goal, the power of synthetic biology reaches new levels.

Such potential is exactly what Arzeda — through a collaboration with TeselaGen, Twist Bioscience, and Labcyte — has brought to us. Each company, a giant in its own right, provides an essential, needed component to an elegant, efficient workflow that can best be described as a “DNA assembly line” for more rapid, efficient protein design and production. The companies’ products work seamlessly: Twist produces the DNA fragments needed to make protein-expressing plasmids, Labcyte’s acoustic liquid handler (the Echo 525) facilitates rapid DNA assembly, and TeselaGen’s DNA assembly design and laboratory automation software connects the two, designing plasmids and ordering the necessary sequences from Twist while generating worklists for the Echo to execute.

Why the rush? It now costs $2.6 billion, by one estimate, to get a new drug to market, and pipelines are only getting slower and more expensive. There’s hope—and hype—that AI could help chip away at that figure by reducing the time and labor before a drug starts clinical trials. The idea is that the same techniques used to generate realistic deepfakes and deftly play Go might be able to decipher the complex rules of drug design and generate molecules from scratch.

Insilico Medicine is among several startups trying to harness artificial intelligence to speed to development of drugs.

Interactive tool lets users see and control how automated model searches work.

PhD Project — Automating Scientific Discovery in Physics using Hybrid AI Models at University of Manchester, listed on FindAPhD.com.

A team of scientists at MIT and elsewhere has developed a neural network, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), that can read scientific papers and render a plain-English summary in a sentence or two.

Image: Chelsea Turner

A group of DARPA-funded scientists associated with Elon Musk say they’ve invented a new way to “rapidly implant” brain electrodes into rats — and their “sewing machine” implantation system could facilitate the creation of a mind-reading brain-computer interface, as first reported by Bloomberg.

“Although more research is needed to refine the overall interface system and better integrate its components, these developments may ultimately open the possibility of bundling next-generation robotics, AI software, and electronics to create alternatives to present-day neurosurgical techniques,” DARPA biotech director Justin Sanchez told Bloomberg.