Join us at D60, DARPA’s 60th anniversary symposi…um, to learn from Ron Brachman about how #AI rose to prominence.

Artificial Intelligence has experienced waves of excitement before, but we have never seen the kind of worldwide enthusiasm that we see now, especially in the commercial sector, where AI has become the central mission of some of the world’s most powerful tech companies. DARPA is known for being the first supporter of AI research and panelists will highlight the impetus DARPA provided to the field’s most central technological areas, and give insights about where the field is going next.

The high-flying experiment could shed new light on some of the biggest mysteries in physics.

NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory will create the coldest spot in the universe to study the weird quantum behavior of atoms at ultra-cold temperatures.

You can now explore the ocean while sipping a pina colada on the beach!

Courtesy: PowerVision Europe

I dont see it as a threat. Honestly, some of the US scientific community was getting really cocky, and really lazy, which is never a good combination. The US scientific community wanted to lock Crispr in a closet for 50 years. 30 years ago they could of gotten away with it. With China as it is now, they are forced to do research they would of rather hidden away.

China’s “Thousand Talents” program to tap into its citizens educated or employed in the U.S. is a key part of multi-pronged efforts to transfer, replicate and eventually overtake U.S. military and commercial technology, according to American intelligence officials.

The program, begun in 2008, is far from secret. But its unadvertised goal is “to facilitate the legal and illicit transfer of U.S. technology, intellectual property and know-how” to China, according to an unclassified analysis by the National Intelligence Council, the branch of U.S. intelligence that assesses long-term trends.

More from Bloomberg.com: U.S. Quits UN Human Rights Council, Saying It’s Anti-Israel.

The best AI in the world is some where in the IQ range of the high 50’s to low 60’s, and is doing this kind of stuff. Should be pretty interesting to see what the average human level AI of 2029 can do.

IBM’s Project Debater has shown off its talents in public for the first time.

Super-Kamiokande (or “Super-K” as it’s sometimes referred to) is a neutrino detector. Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles which travel through space and pass through solid matter as though it were air.

Studying these particles is helping scientists detect dying stars and learn more about the universe. Business Insider spoke to three scientists about how the giant gold chamber works — and the dangers of conducting experiments inside it.

These plain brown moths can complete long distance migrations by moonlight, using the magnetic field like a compass.

You didn’t think scientists would let IBM’s “world’s smallest computer” boast go unchallenged, did you? Sure enough, University of Michigan has produced a temperature sensing ‘computer’ measuring 0.04 cubic millimeters, or about a tenth the size of IBM’s former record-setter. It’s so small that one grain of rice seems gigantic in comparison — and it’s so sensitive that its transmission LED could instigate currents in its circuits.

The size limitations forced researchers to get creative to reduce the effect of light. They switched from diodes to switched capacitors, and had to fight the relative increase in electrical noise that comes from running on a device that uses so little power.

The result is a sensor that can measure changes in extremely small regions, like a group of cells in your body. Scientists have suspected that tumors are slightly hotter than healthy tissue, but it’s been difficult to verify this until now. The minuscule device could both check this claim and, if it proves true, gauge the effectiveness of cancer treatments. The team also envisions this helping to diagnose glaucoma from inside the eye, monitor biochemical processes and even study tiny snails.

A look at the AI robots that want your job.

Join journalist and best-selling author Ashlee Vance on a quest to find the freshest, weirdest tech creations and the beautiful freaks behind them.

https://bloom.bg/2Ggfedp

Engineer and adventurer Richard Jenkins has made oceangoing robots that could revolutionize fishing, drilling, and environmental science. His aim: a thousand of them.

The Archinaut, a system made of 3D printers and robotic arms, could be the flying factory humans need to colonize space.

Collection of many amazing and stunning facts which you have never ever heard before!! A better place for Space, NASA,& astronomy facts.

Insilico and its researchers are the first in the world to use GANs to generate molecules.

“The GAN technique is essentially an adversarial game between two deep neural networks,” as Alex explains.

While one generates meaningful noise in response to input, the other evaluates the generator’s output. Both networks thereby learn to generate increasingly perfect output.

American companies like Amazon and Netflix are already using artificial intelligence, says data scientist Michael Li, and ones that will not adapt will be left behind. What we need is to expand the discussion and possible regulation of this new technology that is transforming our lives.

KrioRus charges $36,000 to cryonize a corpse, or half that for just the head. The process is fairly straightforward: First, cryonicists drain the blood of the “patient,” and pump in a solution resembling antifreeze. The body goes into a cooling chamber beneath KrioRus’s 2,000-square-foot hangar in Sergiyev Posad, a suburb north of Moscow, for roughly a week. Then it’s immersed, head first, in a double-walled dewar of liquid nitrogen, where it hangs indefinitely until scientists figure out how to revive it. In this way, KrioRus has cryopreserved 61 people and 31 pets, including a cat, a goldfinch, and a chinchilla. At least 487 others have signed up.

“Maybe in five, 30, or 300 years, there will be a way to wake her again,” Riabinina says.

Riabinina’s story is among several that Italian photographer Giuseppe Nucci documents in –196: The Pioneers of Resurrection. His ethereal, atmospheric images respectfully capture the quest for immortality in Russia, home to a visionary gaggle of cosmists, cryonicists, and transhumanists who believe in a deathless future. They preach resurrection, wear high-tech cyber-suits, and deep-freeze the corpses of loved ones they hope to meet again.

“We are all scared of death,” Nucci says. “The idea that humans will one day defeat it is fascinating.”

Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.

The smallest Imperial Walker to ever attack the rebel alliance.

When it comes to matching simplicity with staggering creative potential, DNA may hold the prize. Built from an alphabet of just four nucleic acids, DNA provides the floorplan from which all earthly life is constructed.

But DNA’s remarkable versatility doesn’t end there. Researchers have managed to coax segments of DNA into performing a host of useful tricks. DNA sequences can form logical circuits for nanoelectronic applications. They have been used to perform sophisticated mathematical computations, like finding the optimal path between multiple cities. And DNA is the basis for a new breed of tiny robots and nanomachines. Measuring thousands of times smaller than a bacterium, such devices can carry out a multitude of tasks.

In new research, Hao Yan of Arizona State University and his colleagues describe an innovative DNA walker, capable of rapidly traversing a prepared track. Rather than slow, tentative steps across a surface, the DNA acrobat cartwheels head over heels, covering ground 10- to 100-fold faster than previous devices.

MINNEAPOLIS/ST.PAUL (03/01/17) — A research team, led by the University of Minnesota, has discovered a groundbreaking process to successfully rewarm large-scale animal heart valves and blood vessels preserved at very low temperatures. The discovery is a major step forward in saving millions of human lives by increasing the availability of organs and tissues for transplantation through the establishment of tissue and organ banks.

The research was published today in Science Translational Medicine, a peer-reviewed research journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS). The University of Minnesota holds two patents related to this discovery.

“This is the first time that anyone has been able to scale up to a larger biological system and demonstrate successful, fast, and uniform warming hundreds of degrees Celsius per minute of preserved tissue without damaging the tissue,” said University of Minnesota mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering professor John Bischof, the senior author of the study.

Let’s imagine it’s mid flu season, and a stranger at the grocery store sneezes on you.

Wouldn’t it be great to know if you’re destined for weeks of sweats and chills; or if, by the grace of your immune system, you might just make it out unscathed?

Purvesh Khatri, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Stanford, has discovered a biomarker in the blood may be able to do just that. It’s a gene that codes for a protein that lives on the surface of a type of immune cell known as a “natural killer” cell. The findings of the study, published in Genome Medicine, have been in the works for about four years, and it’s the first time (to Khatri’s knowledge) that a biomarker for flu susceptibility has been identified.

Experiments in mice have shown for the first time that bacteria found in the gut of babies and children seem to play a role in brain development.

Scientists used stem cells to grow a miniature model of a Neanderthal’s brain for the first time. The tiny blob of neurons reveals what makes us different.

Renewable resources are great, but they bring a new element of uncertainty to a power grid. This element can lead to failure in surprising ways, according to a new paper.

A team of researchers built a model of power grids that transport electricity from solar and wind power. That means that there are places where the grid receives fluctuating inputs of power, since levels of sunlight and wind and vary.

An expanding arcade of video games takes aim at easing autism traits, from poor visual attention to problems with motor skills, but the evidence of the games’ effectiveness remains limited.

A team of researchers from ETH Zurich and the University of Basel in Switzerland and Institut Universitaire de Technologie in France has that found that embryonic kidney cells engineered to produce insulin when exposed to caffeine were able to reduce glucose levels in mouse models. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes their efforts and how well it worked in the mouse models.

People with diabetes suffer from higher than normal levels of glucose in the blood, which can lead to a host of health problems. Current treatments include drugs that make cells more sensitive to insulin, or injection of insulin to make more of it available to cells that need it. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a new way to get more insulin into the body when it is needed most.

Instead of adding insulin externally, the researchers engineered embryonic kidney cells to produce it—but only when they were exposed to caffeine. The team chose caffeine because it has been so extensively studied and because the majority of people consume caffeinated beverages, such as coffee and soft drinks. They point out that caffeine is also a substance that appears very rarely in other foods, making its ingestion easy to regulate. The engineered cells were covered with a material that protected them from the immune system and were then put into a device that was implanted into the abdomens of mice that had been engineered to have diabetes. The researchers note that glucose levels tend to spike after people (and mice) eat sugar or food material that the body converts to sucrose. Thus, the optimal time for giving the mice caffeine would be after eating.

A revolutionary new DNA tool could help take humanity a step closer to eternal life. The device (pictured) pioneers a new technique that makes it cheaper and easier to synthesise genes ‘overnight’, say scientists — a process that normally takes several days.

Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley said it could lead to ‘DNA printers’ in research labs that work like the 3D printers in many modern workshops.

‘If you’re a mechanical engineer, it’s really nice to have a 3D printer in your shop that can print out a part overnight so you can test it the next morning,’ said UC Berkeley graduate student Dan Arlow.

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Humanity is made of individuals; preserving the life of individuals preserves humanity. Thus, life extension and the preservation of our species aren’t incompatible.

What is it that really matters: preserving individual lives or preserving humanity? Is it more important to grant individuals the option to live as long as they’d like in good health, or is it more important to ensure the preservation of our species? This sort of question isn’t unheard of in the context of discussions of pros and cons of rejuvenation biotechnology; at times, when presented with the possibility of indefinite lifespans, some people reply that focusing on the preservation of our species is more important. This observation is reminiscent of the “other priorities” objection, and one could respond to it in the same way. However, this issue is also worth examining from other angles.

Quick comeback: the two goals aren’t incompatible

A practical remark to make here is that preserving individual lives automatically preserves the human species because the species only exists as long as there are humans. Not everyone agrees that having a population of individuals that live indefinitely is “good for the species”—be it for fear of overpopulation or of cultural stagnation—but this concept is rather vaguely defined and not objectively measurable. However, here we are stepping into a different territory, one that has been explored in other articles, so we won’t go there in this one.

Companies like Eli Lilly & Co. and GlaxoSmithKline PLC are investing in automation with the hope of transforming drug discovery from an enterprise where humans do manual experiments to one where robots handle thousands of samples around the clock. This automation will be key to developing better therapies more efficiently, drug companies say, as research and development becomes more labor intensive amid the push toward more-tailored… To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In The Future of Everything A Burger Joint Where Robots Make Your Food Creator, a San Francisco restaurant set to open this month, will offer a $6 gourmet burger, cooked and assembled with no human help.

Empieza un nuevo capítulo de #Avances, donde junto a Daniel Silva conocemos más sobre tecnología e innovación.

For the June edition of Journal Club, we will be taking a look at the recent paper entitled “Changes at the nuclear lamina alter binding of pioneer factor Foxa2 in aged liver”.

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Robert E. Litan introduces four solutions to concerns about automation’s impact on wages.

Eating foods high in salt is known to contribute to high blood pressure, but does that linear relationship extend to increased risk of cardiovascular disease and death? Recent cohort studies have contested that relationship, but a new study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and their colleagues using multiple measurements confirms it. The study suggests that an inaccurate way of estimating sodium intake may help account for the paradoxical findings of others.

“Sodium is notoriously hard to measure,” said Nancy Cook, ScD, a biostatistician in the Department of Medicine at BWH. “Sodium is hidden—you often don’t know how much of it you’re eating, which makes it hard to estimate how much a person has consumed from a dietary questionnaire. Sodium excretions are the best measure, but there are many ways of collecting those. In our work, we used multiple measures to get a more accurate picture.”

Sodium intake can be measured using a spot test to determine how much salt has been excreted in a person’s urine sample. However, sodium levels in urine can fluctuate throughout the day so an accurate measure of a person’s sodium intake on a given day requires a full 24-hour sample. In addition, sodium consumption may change from day to day, meaning that the best way to get a full picture of sodium intake is to take samples on multiple days.

Only 35 per cent of five- to 17-year-olds and 62 per cent of children ages 3 and 4 are getting the recommended physical-activity levels for their age group (Editor’s note: around 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily, including vigorous-intensity activity on at least 3 days per week) and that this may be having an impact on the health of their brains.

___ Getting kids outside and active could help with brain health: Participaction report (The Globe and Mail): The physical benefits of kids leading an active lifestyle, including better heart heal…

The danger, some experts warn, is that A.I. will run into a technical wall and eventually face a popular backlash — a familiar pattern in artificial intelligence since that term was coined in the 1950s. With deep learning in particular, researchers said, the concerns are being fueled by the technology’s limits.

A branch of A.I. called deep learning has transformed computer performance in tasks like vision and speech. But meaning, reasoning and common sense remain elusive.

A bunch of modern cars already let you unlock your vehicle using your phone, but there isn’t a standard to ensure that the feature will work across devices for years to come. Thankfully, a number of tech firms and automakers are coming together to sort that out.

More than 70 companies, including the likes of Apple, LG, Samsung, Panasonic, Audi, GM, BMW, Hyundai, NXP, Qualcomm, and Volkswagen, have joined hands under the Car Connectivity Consortium to create the Digital Key standard, which is a specification that aims to let you securely unlock and start your vehicle across car and mobile device brands.

The publication of this standard should not only help more companies adopt these features, but also allow owners to share access to their vehicles with others, through their phones.

I want to thank the Air Force for certifying Falcon Heavy.

A group of researchers from Yale University and Agilent Technologies have developed a #syntheticbiology technique that turns bacterium E. Coli into a phosphorylated protein factory capable of churning out every known instance of this modification in human proteins.

Proteins, the end product of genes, carry out life functions. Most human proteins are modified by a process called serine phosphorylation — a chemical switch that can alter their structure and function. Malfunctions in this process have been implicated in diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s yet are difficult to detect and study. A group of researchers from Yale University and Agilent Technologies have developed a synthetic biology technique that turns bacterium E. Coli into a phosphorylated protein factory capable of churning out every known instance of this modification in human proteins.

“We synthesized over 110,000 phosphoproteins from scratch and we can now study how they all function together,” said Jesse Rinehart, associate professor of cellular and molecular physiology at the Systems Biology Institute and senior author of the research. “This is the future of scientific research — we can build everything we study.”

Previously, researchers were only able to create a single phosphoprotein at a time. The new platform will help scientists create designer proteins by studying the impact of phosphorylation on all potential protein interactions, the authors say. “Biologists want to know which proteins interact with each other because diseases can arise when these interactions go wrong,” said Karl Barber, a Yale graduate student who is the first author on the study and a recently named Schmidt Science Fellow.

The first known human case of the virus was identified in a Florida teen after a year of tests. Known symptoms include fever and a severe rash, but it’s unclear if it causes brain inflammation.

An international team of astronomers have made the most precise test of gravity outside our own solar system.

By combining data taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, their results show that gravity in this galaxy behaves as predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, confirming the theory’s validity on galactic scales.

In 1915 Albert Einstein proposed his general theory of relativity (GR) to explain how gravity works. Since then GR has passed a series of high precision tests within the solar system, but there have been no precise tests of GR on large astronomical scales.

The Himalayan Range includes some of the youngest and most spectacular mountains on Earth, but the rugged landscape that lends it the striking beauty for which it is known can also keep scientists from fully understanding how these mountains formed. “We know more about the rocks on parts of Mars than we do about some of the areas in the Himalaya,” said Dr. Alka Tripathy-Lang.

“Many researchers have done extraordinary geologic mapping in this rugged region, but the fact is that some places are just completely inaccessible because of topography, elevation, or geopolitical issues. The rocks in those areas are an important piece of the tectonic puzzle and are important for understanding the way the region evolved,” said Dr. Wendy Bohon. “The tools we used, originally developed for mapping rocks on Mars, were a way to safely access information about the rocks in the Himalayas.”

Bohon and colleagues worked with researchers at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University to use data from the Earth orbiting satellite Terra in the same way planetary geologists have been using data from the Mars orbiting satellite Odyssey.

Sawed-off fingers are a thing of the past with this technology. Here’s how SawStop does it. (via @ Seeker)

I felt my hand, as if a hollow shell, got filled with life again.”

Researchers have created e-dermis, an electronic skin that transmits sensations of pain from an amputee’s prosthetic hand to their brain.

Researchers tissue-engineered human pancreatic islets in a laboratory that develop a circulatory system, secrete hormones like insulin and successfully treat sudden-onset type 1 diabetes in transplanted mice.

In a study published by Cell Reports, the scientists use a new bioengineering process they developed called a self-condensation cell culture. The technology helps nudge medical science closer to one day growing human organ tissues from a person’s own cells for regenerative therapy, say study investigators at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in the U.S. and Yokohama City University (YCU) in Japan.

“This method may serve as a principal curative strategy for treating type 1 diabetes, of which there are 79,000 new diagnoses per year,” said Takanori Takebe, MD, a physician-scientist at the Cincinnati Children’s Center for Stem Cell and Organoid Medicine. “This is a life-threatening disease that never goes away, so developing effective and possibly permanent therapeutic approaches would help millions of children and adults around the world.”

Compared with brain organoids grown from ordinary human cells (top), those with a Neanderthal gene variant (bottom) differ in appearance and behavior.

Aside from dark matter and the dark energy that comprised the universe, there remained to be 5 percent of what was called the “ordinary matter.” About two-thirds of this ordinary matter was left unaccounted for until now. ( Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics )

After a 20-year-long experiment, a team of international scientists detects the last of the missing intergalactic material predicted to be created by the Big Bang.

Specifically, the team was finally able to detect the missing parts of the “ordinary matter” that makes up everything in the universe, from the stars to the cores of black holes. This ordinary matter is different from the “dark matter” that comprised the bulk of the universe’s mass. The dark matter remained to be undetected until now.

It seems that Microsoft isn’t done experimenting with blockchain technology.

Microsoft and Ernst & Young (EY) announced the launch of a blockchain solution for content rights and royalties management on Wednesday.

The blockchain solution is first implemented for Microsoft’s game publisher partners. Indeed, gaming giant Ubisoft is already experimenting with the technology.

Infrared cameras are the heat-sensing eyes that help drones find their targets, even in the dead of night or through heavy fog.

Hiding from such detectors could become much easier, thanks to a new cloaking material that renders objects—and people—practically invisible.

“What we have shown is an ultrathin stealth ‘sheet.’ Right now, what people have is much heavier metal armor or thermal blankets,” says Hongrui Jiang, the Lynn H. Matthias Professor and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The exponential potential of longevity technologies.

Jim Mellon became a billionaire by pouncing on a wide variety of opportunities, from the dawn of business privatization in Russia to uranium mining in Africa and real estate in Germany. But all of that might eventually look small, he says, compared to the money to be made in the next decade or so from biotechnologies that will increase human longevity well past 100.

The British investor is so enthusiastic about these technologies that he co-authored a 2017 book about them, Juvenescence: Investing in the Age of Longevity, and launched a company, Juvenescence Ltd., to capitalize on them. “Juvenescence” is a real word — it’s the state of being youthful. Says Mellon, who is 61: “I’m hoping that this stuff works on me as well as on my portfolio.”

Juvenescence Ltd., which has raised $62.5 million from Mellon and some partners, has invested in or is close to confirming investments in nine biotech companies. He won’t discuss most of them. But one of the deals was an 11 percent stake in Insilico Medicine, a company applying machine-learning techniques to drug discovery. Insilico Medicine and Mellon’s company also formed a joint venture called Juvenescence AI to investigate the therapeutic properties of specific compounds. Mellon is particularly optimistic that this venture can develop a “senolytic” drug that helps the body clear out cells that have stopped dividing and can damage other cells.