A radical new paper says minds may exist in forms far stranger than brains, reshaping how we think about aliens, AI, and consciousness.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 28
Preventing the next pandemic using AI-designed vaccines
For most of human history, infectious diseases were the main causes of morbidity and mortality. Advances in sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines, and public health dramatically shifted that balance, particularly in high-income countries, where life expectancy has increased by nearly 40 years over the past century. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic provided a stark reminder that infectious threats can still reshape societies almost overnight. Between 2019 and 2021 alone, life expectancy in the US fell by more than two years, and recent modelling suggests there is roughly a 50 percent chance of another COVID-scale pandemic occurring within the next 25 years.
Historically, the vaccine development model has been largely reactive and variant-driven, but the industry is now actively shifting toward proactive and universal vaccinology to get ahead of evolving pathogens. Recent results from a first-in-human clinical trial led by the University of Cambridge and its spin-out DIOSynVax, published in the Journal of Infection, provide early clinical evidence of this shift, demonstrating the safety of an AI-designed “super-antigen” intended to provide broad viral coverage.
Teaching AI to Invent Enzymes Nature Never Imagined
Evolution is an extraordinary engine for enzymatic diversity, yet the chemistry it has explored remains a narrow slice of what DNA can encode. Deep generative models can design new proteins that bind ligands, but none have created enzymes without pre-specifying catalytic residues.
In this webinar, Chenghao Liu and Jarrid Brooks from the Arnold Lab at Caltech will introduce DISCO (DIffusion for Sequence-structure CO-design). This multimodal model co-designs protein sequence and 3D structure around arbitrary biomolecules, as well as inference-time scaling methods that optimize objectives across both modalities. Conditioned solely on reactive intermediates, DISCO designs diverse heme enzymes with novel active-site geometries. These enzymes catalyze new-to-nature carbene-transfer reactions, including alkene cyclopropanation, spirocyclopropanation, B-H, and C(sp^3)-H insertions, with high activities exceeding those of engineered enzymes. Random mutagenesis of a selected design further confirmed that enzyme activity can be improved through directed evolution. By providing a scalable route to evolvable enzymes, DISCO broadens the potential scope of genetically encodable transformations.
Raising New Minds: A Developmental Framework for AI Alignment
AI alignment may depend not only on how we control artificial intelligence, but on how we teach, socialize, and learn to live with the minds we create.
Agentic AI bot helps scientists speak to robots, speeding up experiments
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory use a slew of autonomous robots to design and implement experiments. However, setting up an experiment on an autonomous lab robot is surprisingly slow. The effort requires a lengthy back-and-forth between a scientist and an engineer to design the experimental steps—a process that can take weeks.
To help researchers work more efficiently, a PNNL team developed a generative agentic AI that can quickly translate experimental goals into instructions for a laboratory robot. The translation agent, called AutoLabs, is currently designed to operate with Big Kahuna, an automated robot built by Unchained Labs that researchers use to study new and existing battery materials. The system can carry out multistep experimental workflows, including mixing, heating, stirring and filtering samples with minimal human intervention. By automating these processes, researchers can perform five to 10 times more experiments than would be practical by hand.
The team published a paper in Scientific Reports about AutoLabs, and the software is also available for other researchers to download on GitHub.
Inorganic nanoscale device behaves like a single neuron, opening doors for AI and retinal implants
McGill University researchers have developed a light-detecting nanoscale structure that mimics how a neuron processes information. The neuron-like behavior emerges from the materials themselves, reducing the energy demand associated with similar devices that rely on circuits or software.
Instead of capturing data first and processing it elsewhere, the device senses and interprets light in the same place, similar to how the eye processes visual information.
The researchers say the discovery could increase the efficiency of vision-based technologies like artificial retinas and smart optical sensors. It could also transform how artificial neural networks (ANNs), a foundation of machine learning, are built. The research is published in the journal Nanoscale.
Anthropic Co-Founder: “I’m Scared of the Technology I’m Building” | The Rest Is Politics
Jack Clark — co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind Claude — says something almost no AI executive will say out loud: \.
Ben Goertzel Just Revealed When AGI Will ACTUALLY Happen | Ep. 38
Ben Goertzel, the godfather of AGI research and CEO of SingularityNet, just dropped some mind-blowing insights about artificial general intelligence that will change how you think about AI forever. This isn’t your typical AI hype this is raw truth from someone who’s been building AGI for decades.
In this deep dive conversation, Ben reveals the shocking reality behind current AI limitations, why decentralized AI infrastructure is crucial for humanity’s future, and his honest timeline for when we’ll actually achieve AGI. Plus, he shares what it’s like running a global AI empire while living on a remote island accessible only by ferry.
Key Topics Covered:
The real timeline for AGI development.
Why current AI models aren’t actually intelligent.
How SingularityNet is building decentralized AI infrastructure.
The ASI Alliance and the future of artificial superintelligence.
Ben’s daily routine managing hundreds of AI researchers globally.
Why math and music drive breakthrough AI thinking.
⏰ Timestamps:
0:00 — Introduction to Ben Goertzel.
2:30 — Daily life of an AGI pioneer.
8:45 — Managing a global AI empire.
15:20 — The truth about current AI limitations.
25:10 — SingularityNet and decentralized AI
35:40 — When will AGI actually happen?
45:30 — The future of artificial superintelligence.
58:15 — Closing thoughts.
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💬 What do you think about Ben’s AGI timeline? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!
Shield Space and ClearSpace partner to defend satellites from orbital threats
TAMPA, Fla. — British startup Shield Space plans to combine its autonomous satellite operations software with ClearSpace’s in-orbit servicing capabilities to address emerging orbital threats.
The startup signed a memorandum of understanding June 23 with ClearSpace’s British subsidiary to develop sovereign space defense capabilities for the United Kingdom and its allies, which they say are increasingly important as adversaries step up efforts to monitor, disrupt and potentially disable critical satellite infrastructure.
Founded in 2025, Shield Space is developing software designed to keep satellites operating autonomously even when communications with the ground are disrupted.