But if there is some kind of unifying computational principle governing our grey matter, what is it? Dr. Tsien has studied this for over a decade, and he believes he’s found the answer in something called the Theory of Connectivity.
“Many people have long speculated that there has to be a basic design principle from which intelligence originates and the brain evolves, like how the double helix of DNA and genetic codes are universal for every organism,” Tsien said. “We present evidence that the brain may operate on an amazingly simple mathematical logic.”
The Theory of Connectivity holds that a simple algorithm, called a power-of-two-based permutation taking the form of n=2i–1 can be used to explain the circuitry of the brain. To unpack the formula, let’s define a few key concepts from the theory of connectivity, specifically the idea of a neuronal clique. A neuronal clique is a group of neurons which “fire together” and cluster into functional connectivity motifs, or FCMs, which the brain uses to recognize specific patterns or ideas. One can liken it to branches on a tree, with the neuronal clique being the smallest unit of connectivity, a mere twig, which when combined with other cliques, link up to form an FCM. The more complex the idea being represented in the brain, the more convoluted the FCM. The n in n=2i–1 specifies the number of neuronal cliques that will fire in response to a given input, i.
Ein Mensch sei er nicht mehr, sagt Neil Harbisson. Seit eine Antenne mit seinem Kopf verbunden ist, bezeichnet er sich als Cyborg. Gehört der Verbindung von Mensch und Maschine die Zukunft?
A research team led by Dr. Cai at the Albert Einstein college of medicine have shown that stem cells in the hypothalamus influence how fast we age. The new research, shown in mice, may lead to approaches that delay or even prevent age-related diseases[1].
Unfortunately like 70% of scientific research, this publication is behind a paywall, so those wishing to read will have to use the usual channels to obtain the publication. We discuss why paywalls are an unacceptable barrier to progress here in our interview with Sci-Hub.
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Healthy food isn’t always tasty. But with regards to bananas, this isn’t the case. Which is why it’s doubly pleasing to learn that they not only bring satisfaction to your taste buds but also a great many benefits to your health.
We at Bright Side have gathered together all the evidence showing why eating just two bananas a day can seriously improve your health.
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Imagine a world in which you’re 90 years old and nowhere near middle-aged. An app on your phone has hacked your DNA code, so you know exactly when to go to the doctor to receive gene therapy to prevent all the diseases you don’t yet have. A microchip in your skin sends out a signal if you’re at risk of developing a wrinkle — so you step out of the sun and hotfoot it to your dermatologist. Every evening you sync your brain-mapping device with The Cloud, so even if you were caught up in a fatal accident you’d still be able to cheat death — every detail of your life would simply be downloaded to one of the perfect silicon versions you’d had made of yourself, ensuring you last until at least your 1,000th birthday.
This may sound like science fiction but it could be your fate — provided you can afford it. If current research develops into medicine, in the London of the future the super-rich won’t simply be able to buy the best things in life, they’ll be able to buy life itself by transforming themselves into a bio-engineered super-race, capable of living, if not forever, then for vastly longer than the current UK life expectancy of 81 years.
The science of turning back the clock has never been more advanced. In Boston, a drug capable of reversing half a lifetime of ageing in mice is about to be tested on humans in a medical trial monitored by NASA. NMN is a compound found naturally in broccoli which boosts levels of NAD, a protein involved in energy production that depletes as we get older. Professor David Sinclair, who headed up the initial research at Australia’s University of New South Wales, doses himself with 500mg daily, and claims that he has already become more youthful. According to blood tests analysing the state of the 48-year-old’s cells, prior to taking the pills Sinclair was in the same physical shape as a 57-year-old, but now he’s ‘31.4’.
CENTENNIAL, Colo., July 26, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Cochlear Limited (ASX: COH), the global leader in implantable hearing solutions, introduces today its latest innovation, the Cochlear ™ Nucleus® 7 Sound Processor. Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in June, the Nucleus 7 Sound Processor is the world’s first Made for iPhone cochlear implant sound processor and the smallest and lightest behind-the-ear cochlear implant sound processor available on the market.1–3
Formerly known as the “Air Mule,” this is a flying taxi, or maybe a future unmanned ambulance.
Urban Aeronautics
Nine years ago, the Air Mule was an almost-believable concept: a flying robot taxi that could get people out of dangerous battlefields without endangering a pilot or crew. It was the exact sort of gizmo one expects from Popular Science: an amazing machine of the future, almost like a flying car, that seemed plausible but just out of reach.
Google’s DeepMind AI is using elastic weight consolidation to get around the problem of catastrophic forgetting. These advances in artificial neural networks are helping us better understand our own brains.
The latest research from DeepMind is proving how inspired the idea to model neural networks of the human mind truly was. The strength of the association between the human brains and and their computational models is revealing weaknesses in our own minds and teaching us how to overcome them.
An artificial intelligence system being developed at Facebook has created its own language. It developed a system of code words to make communication more efficient. The researchers shut the system down as it prompted concerns we could lose control of AI.
It is a command that led the leading atheist Richard Dawkins to claim that the God of the Old Testament was “a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser … a genocidal … megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”.
For God had ordered the Israelites to slaughter the apparently sinful Canaanites, saying: “You shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them.” And, according to the Bible, they did just that.
However, a new genetic study has found that the Canaanites actually managed to survive this purge of their traditional homeland, passing on their DNA over the centuries to their numerous descendants in modern-day Lebanon.
In the hopes of rising above the laws and regulations of terrestrial nations, a group of Silicon Valley millionaires has bold plans to build a floating city in Tahiti, French Polynesia. It sounds like the start of a sci-fi dystopia (in fact, this is the basic premise behind the video game Bioshock), but the brains behind the project say their techno-libertarian community could become a paradise for technological entrepreneurship and scientific innovation.
The Seasteading Institute was set up in 2008 by billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel and software engineer, poker player, and political economic theorist Patri Friedman. Both ardent libertarians, their wide-eyed mission is to “establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems.”
“Seasteading will create unique opportunities for aquaculture, vertical farming, and scientific and engineering research into ecology, wave energy, medicine, nanotechnology, computer science, marine structures, biofuels, etc,” their website reads.
Reports suggest researchers have altered DNA and made few errors.
- By Sharon Begley, STAT on July 27, 2017
Since nanobots are no longer fiction, is it time to start answering body augmentation questions raised by sci-fi genres like Cyberpunk?
A big space rock slipped right by us last week and was only spotted as it left our cosmic neighborhood.
At the 2017 Naval Future Force Science and Technology Expo in Washington DC, an ONR spokesman revealed that the weapon is ready for field demonstrations at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division’s new railgun Rep-Rate Test Site at Terminal Range, according to New Atlas.
Initial rep-rate fires (repetition rate of fires) of multi-shot salvos already have been successfully conducted at low muzzle energy, officials say.
The next test sequence calls for safely increasing launch energy, firing rates and salvo size.
Breakthrough Initiatives achieved a major milestone with the recent deployment of their Sprite satellites, the smallest satellites in history.
Click on photo to start video.
http://reut.rs/2va7JDI via @ReutersTV
The Eureka science show recently featured one of the leaders of the Transhumanist movement which believes humans will transcend disease and delay mortality indefinitely.
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appear to be at odds over the future of the artificial intelligence. CNN’s Richard Quest discussed the feud with physics professor Michio Kaku…
We will need to tap into our brains and enter the era of neuroreality if we want to reach the next level of truly immersive worlds.
Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have found that stem cells in the brain’s hypothalamus govern how fast aging occurs in the body. The finding, made in mice, could lead to new strategies for warding off age-related diseases and extending lifespan. The paper was published online today in Nature.
The hypothalamus was known to regulate important processes including growth, development, reproduction and metabolism. In a 2013 Nature paper, Einstein researchers made the surprising finding that the hypothalamus also regulates aging throughout the body. Now, the scientists have pinpointed the cells in the hypothalamus that control aging: a tiny population of adult neural stem cells, which were known to be responsible for forming new brain neurons.
“Our research shows that the number of hypothalamic neural stem cells naturally declines over the life of the animal, and this decline accelerates aging,” says senior author Dongsheng Cai, M.D., Ph.D., (professor of molecular pharmacology at Einstein. “But we also found that the effects of this loss are not irreversible. By replenishing these stem cells or the molecules they produce, it’s possible to slow and even reverse various aspects of aging throughout the body.”
Ephemerisle, a free California festival described as “Burning Man on water,” is a favorite with the cryptocurrency community.
When you use smartphone AI apps like Siri, you’re dependent on the cloud for a lot of the processing — limited by your connection speed. But what if your smartphone could do more of the processing directly on your device — allowing for smarter, faster apps?
MIT scientists have taken a step in that direction with a new way to enable artificial-intelligence systems called convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to run locally on mobile devices. (CNN’s are used in areas such as autonomous driving, speech recognition, computer vision, and automatic translation.) Neural networks take up a lot of memory and consume a lot of power, so they usually run on servers in the cloud, which receive data from desktop or mobile devices and then send back their analyses.
Forget swiping a credit card or badge to buy food at work. One Wisconsin-based tech firm is offering to install rice-size microchips in its employees’ hands.
Three Square Market will be the fir st firm in the U.S. to use the device, which was approved by the FDA in 2004, CEO Todd Westby told CNBC on Monday.
“We think it’s the right thing to do for advancing innovation just like the driverless car basically did in recent months,” he said in an interview with “Closing Bell.”
Researchers at Facebook realized their bots were chattering in a new language. Then they stopped it.
Pay your fare using a 3D face map
Jump to media player A system designed to replace the need for tickets on trains is being tested in the UK.
The researchers netted a 50 percent reduction in energy loss, taking us one step closer to a future of unlimited clean energy.
Employees at a Wisconsin technology company are volunteering to have microchips implanted in their hands to make unlocking doors and paying for food easier.
What if there was one thing that you could do today to delay or improve the natural aging process in your body and mind?
At Emerge we are constantly seeking collaboration with the best minds in the world for helpful and practical advice on how to stay physically, mentally and financially healthy. Today we explore the concept of what it would be like to totally reimagine aging.
We’ve spent weeks rounding-up the top experts from around the world in various aging (also referred to as senescence) fields and asked them one question for our highly health conscious audience:
What is the best habit for staying physically or mentally young that most people do not know?
Rewriting Life
First Human Embryos Edited in U.S.
Researchers have demonstrated they can efficiently improve the DNA of human embryos.
Following the announcement petrol and diesel engine cars will be banned from sale in 2040, the car of the future is up for grabs.
The interdisciplinary nexus of biology and engineering, known as synthetic biology, is growing at a rapid pace, opening new vistas that could scarcely be imagined a short time ago.
The unique swimming strategies of natural microorganisms have inspired recent development of magnetic micro/nanorobots powered by artificial helical or flexible flagella. However, as artificial nanoswimmers with unique geometries are being developed, it is critical to explore new potential modes for kinetic optimization. For example, the freestyle stroke is the most efficient of the competitive swimming strokes for humans. Here we report a new type of magnetic nanorobot, a symmetric multilinked two-arm nanoswimmer, capable of efficient “freestyle” swimming at low Reynolds numbers. Excellent agreement between the experimental observations and theoretical predictions indicates that the powerful “freestyle” propulsion of the two-arm nanorobot is attributed to synchronized oscillatory deformations of the nanorobot under the combined action of magnetic field and viscous forces. It is demonstrated for the first time that the nonplanar propulsion gait due to the cooperative “freestyle” stroke of the two magnetic arms can be powered by a plane oscillatory magnetic field. These two-arm nanorobots are capable of a powerful propulsion up to 12 body lengths per second, along with on-demand speed regulation and remote navigation. Furthermore, the nonplanar propulsion gait powered by the consecutive swinging of the achiral magnetic arms is more efficient than that of common chiral nanohelical swimmers. This new swimming mechanism and its attractive performance opens new possibilities in designing remotely actuated nanorobots for biomedical operation at the nanoscale.
Each bot is 5 micrometres long and has three main parts, connected together like sausage links by two silver hinges. Its gold body is flanked by two magnetic arms made of nickel, and applying a magnetic field to the tiny robot makes the arms move.
The next generation bloodstream will be made from biodegradable materials before they can be used in the bloodstream. Less complicated areas in the human body like the urinary tract or the eyeballs should see clinical trials begin within the next five to 10 years. Injecting a single swimmer into an eyeball, where it could deliver medication directly to the retina and then be removed, would be much less complicated than letting a swarm of them swim throughout the entire circulatory system.
Researchers succeed in an 80-year-old quest to find the elusive “angel particle”.
Helix will sequence your genes for $80 and lure app developers to sell you access to different parts of it.
DARPA’s Safe Genes program plans to invest $65 million in seven teams that will collect data and develop gene editing tools to support bio-innovation and combat bio-threats such as invasive species.
Is this the beginning of Skynet? A robot is being hired to help out shoppers at a St. Louis grocery store chain.
Tally will be working the aisles at Schnucks grocery stores looking for items that are out of stock and checking on prices, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
At Jef Boeke’s lab, you can whiff an odor that seems out of place, as if they were baking bread here.
But he and his colleagues are cooking up something else altogether: yeast that works with chunks of man-made DNA.
Scientists have long been able to make specific changes in the DNA code. Now, they’re taking the more radical step of starting over, and building redesigned life forms from scratch. Boeke, a researcher at New York University, directs an international team of 11 labs on four continents working to “rewrite” the yeast genome, following a detailed plan they published in March.
Google’s DeepMind has revealed a radical new research project designed to give AI’s an imagination.
The breakthrough means that systems will be able to think about their actions, and undertake ‘deliberate reasoning.’
The radical system uses an internal ‘imagination encoder’ that helps the AI decide what are and what aren’t useful predictions about its environment.
Researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing have now developed a new type of electronic skin, with a colour change easily seen at just 0–10 per cent strain.
The material is made from graphene — a form of pure carbon that is 200 times stronger than steel.
Two layers of graphene are included — a highly-resistive strain sensor, alongside a stretchable organic electrochromic device (ECD) that changes colour when a current is applied.
Berkeley scientists to develop safer and better CRISPR tools and apply them to medicine and mosquito gene drives.
By Marc Pollefeys, Director of Science, HoloLens
It is not an exaggeration to say that deep learning has taken the world of computer vision, and many other recognition tasks, by storm. Many of the most difficult recognition problems have seen gains over the past few years that are astonishing.
Although we have seen large improvements in the accuracy of recognition as a result of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), deep learning approaches have two well-known challenges: they require large amounts of labelled data for training, and they require a type of compute that is not amenable to current general purpose processor/memory architectures. Some companies have responded with architectures designed to address the particular type of massively parallel compute required for DNNs, including our own use of FPGAs, for example, but to date these approaches have primarily enhanced existing cloud computing fabrics.
Gene editing aims to make precise changes to the target DNA whilst avoiding altering other parts of the DNA. The objective of this is to remove undesirable genetic traits and introduce desirable changes in both plants and animals. For example, it could be used to make crops more drought resistant, prevent or cure inherited genetic disorders or even treat age-related diseases.
As some of you may recall, back in May a study was published which claimed that the groundbreaking gene editing technique CRISPR caused thousands of off target and potentially dangerous mutations[1]. The authors of the paper called for regulators to investigate the safety of the technique, a move that could potentially set back research years if not decades.
This publication has been widely blasted by the research community due to serious questions about the study design being raised. One of the problems with this original paper was that it involved only three mice, this is an extremely poor number to make the kind of conclusions the paper did. There have been calls for the paper to be withdrawn and critical responses to the study.
Growing your own food may soon be as simple as pressing a button.
Boeing’s Starliner and Virgin Galactic don’t just want you to visit space–they want you to do it in style.
When British billionaire Jim Mellon wants to map out an investment strategy, he likes to write a book first. Out of that process came his most recent work — Juvenescence: Investing in the Age of Longevity. Now he and some close associates with some of the best connections in biotech are using the book as inspiration to launch a new company — also named Juvenescence — with plans to make a big splash in anti-aging research.
Hot on the heels of last month’s nuclear fusion breakthrough comes the first results from a multi-year partnership between Google and Tri Alpha Energy, the world’s largest private fusion company. The two organizations joined forces in 2014 in the hopes that Google’s machine learning algorithms could advance plasma research and bring us closer to the dream of fusion power.
The Android mastermind is on a mission to connect our devices into a single consciousness. Ambitious? Absolutely. Possible? Maybe.
The tech giant and a leading US fusion company have developed a new computer algorithm that has significantly speeded up progress towards the goal of unlimited energy.