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It might sound scary, but it has given the first recipient a new lease on life, with more independence and lesser dependence on pain medication.

A collaborative effort of researchers from Italy, Australia, Sweden, and the US has led to the development of a bionic arm that can fuse with the bones and work with the neurons in the body to deliver high functionality, a press release said.

In a farming accident twenty years ago in Sweden, Karin lost her right arm. She was given a conventional prosthesis that she found not only uncomfortable but also unreliable. Karin did not find the prosthesis was helping her carry on with her routine life in a meaningful way.

We are arguably at “the knee” of the curve. More breakthroughs have happened in the first 9 months of 2023 than all previous years from the turn of the century (2001 — 2022).

Will AGI kill us all? Will we join with it? Is it even close? Is it just “cool stuff”? Will we have bootstrapping self-improving AI?

The podcast crew today:
On the panel (left to right): Stefan Van Der Wel, Oliver Engelmann, Brendan Clarke.
Host camera: Roy Sherfan, Simon Carter.
Off camera: Peter Xing.

Lightweight materials with super strength and toughness are highly sought after. Spider silk, a sustainable material, meets these requirements but faces challenges in commercialization due to scientific understanding of its spinning mechanism, technical complexities in the process, and engineering hurdles in low-cost mass production. Here, drawing inspiration from nylon and Kevlar, we propose a theory on the nature of toughness and strength, unveiling the basic structure of silk fibers. Using these theories, we successfully produce the first “localized” full-length spider silk fiber via transgenic silkworms, showcasing high tensile strength (1,299 MPa) and exceptional toughness (319 MJ/m3). This breakthrough overcomes scientific, technical, and engineering obstacles, paving the way for spider silk’s commercialization as a sustainable substitute for synthetic fibers. Moreover, our theories provide essential guidance for developing super materials.


Developing sustainable materials with high strength and ultra-toughness is vital for ecological civilization. Using transgenic silkworms, we have successfully produced the first full-length spider silk, overcoming the scientific challenge of understanding the essence of toughness and strength. The resulting bionic spider silk exhibits high strength (1,299 MPa) and ultra-toughness (319 MJ/m3), offering a potentially sustainable substitute for synthetic commercial fibers. This breakthrough provides valuable insights for the development of super materials, including those for a space elevator, driving the advancement of civilization.

This processor is the first to be built on the Intel 4 (7nm) architecture.

Intel, the PC silicon giant, has recently made a significant announcement that’s set to revolutionize its mobile processor line. On Tuesday, at the Intel Innovation event, the company unveiled its highly anticipated Meteor Lake processors, now known as Core Ultra chips. This is after Intel decided to do away with the Core “i” designation in June 2023. It is slated for release on December 14, and laptops coming out in the first quarter of 2024 should start adopting the new chips. While this news is undoubtedly exciting for tech enthusiasts, it also raises important questions for consumers: Will Intel-powered Windows… More.


Source: Intel Corporation.

Meteor Lake isn’t just another processor in Intel’s lineup; it represents a pivotal moment in the company’s evolution. This processor is the first to be built on the “Intel 4” (7nm) architecture, a significant leap forward in terms of efficiency and power from the 12th and 13th gen Alder Lake and Raptor Lake CPUs. Competitors like Apple already leapfrogged into the world’s first 3nm process with the announcement of Apple’s A17 Bionic Pro on the iPhone 15 Pro lineup. But those are based on ARM architecture, while Intel is on the classic x86-64 ones.

At the 2015 Conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, held 3 Apr 2015 at the Salt Lake City Public Library, speakers addressed the themes of Mormonism, Transhumanism and Transfigurism, with particular attention to topics at the intersection of technology, spirituality, science and religion. Members, friends and critics of the association have many views. This is one of them. It is not necessarily shared by others.

Aiming to be first in the world to have the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence while also maintaining control over more than a billion people, elite Chinese scientists and their government have turned to something new, and very old, for inspiration—the human brain.

Equipped with surveillance and visual processing capabilities modelled on human vision, the new “brain” will be more effective, less energy hungry, and will “improve governance,” its developers say. “We call it bionic retina computing,” Gao Wen, a leading artificial intelligence researcher, wrote in the paper “City Brain: Challenges and Solution.”

What do pacemakers, prosthetic limbs, Iron Man and flu vaccines all have in common? They are examples of an old idea that’s been gaining in significance in the last several decades: transhumanism. The word denotes a set of ideas relating to the increasing integration of humans with their technologies. At the heart of the transhuman conversation, however, lies the oldest question of all: What does it mean to be human?

When talking about transhumanism, it’s easy to get lost because the definition is imprecise. “Transhumanism” can refer to the Transhumanist (with a capital T) movement, which actively pursues a technologically enhanced future, or an amorphous body of ideas and technologies that are closing the bio-techno gap, such as a robotic exoskeleton that enhances the natural strength of the wearer.

At Arizona State University, a diverse set of researchers has been critically examining transhumanism since 2004.