Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 1007

WITH THE IDEA OF CONSCIOUS DIGITAL MINDS on the horizon, it could be that humans are the proverbial frog in a boiling pot of water, and it’s only been a few years since things have started to feel a bit steamy. But as Bostrom argues in his book, this might be a boiling pot we don’t want to jump out of.

“We need to rethink what it means to be human in such a world where AI has taken care of all the practical tasks and we have a kind of a solved world,” Bostrom says. “You might have a much more radical form of automation … where maybe working for money at all becomes completely unnecessary because AI and robots can do everything better than we can do.”

But Bostrom says this is really only one layer of the philosophical onion.

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Neutrinos have a quantum mechanical property called “flavor.” This flavor can transform as neutrinos move through space. A major challenge is to keep track of both the physical movement of the neutrinos and their change of flavor in astrophysical systems such as core-collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers. The complicated arrangement and large number of neutrinos in these systems make it nearly impossible to follow all or even a subset of the neutrinos.

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You can think of our atmosphere as a big chemistry set, a global churn of gaseous molecules and particles that constantly bounce off and change each other in complicated ways. While the particles are very small, often less than 1% of the thickness of human hair, they have outsized impacts. For example, particles are the seeds of cloud droplets, and the abundance of the particles changes the reflectivity and the amount of clouds, rainfall and climate.

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A Chinese research team has achieved a significant milestone in quantum computing by successfully building a device that can simulate the movement of electrons within a solid-state material.

This research, published in the journal Nature, showcases the potential of quantum computers to surpass even the most powerful supercomputers.

Understanding electron behavior is crucial for scientific advancements, particularly in the fields of magnetism and high-temperature superconducting materials. These materials could revolutionize electricity transmission and transportation, leading to significant energy savings and technological progress.

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The genetically modified lymphocytes were then multiplied into the hundreds of millions in the laboratory and infused back into the patients, where they expressed the tumor-specific T-cell receptors and continued to multiply.

“By taking the natural T-cell receptors that are present in a very small number of cells and putting them into normal lymphocytes for which we have enormous numbers—a million in every thimbleful of blood—we can generate as many cancer-fighting cells as we want,” Dr. Rosenberg explained.

As part of a larger phase 2 trial, seven patients with metastatic colon cancer were treated with the experimental personalized cellular immunotherapy. All seven received several doses of the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab (Keytruda) before the cell therapy and another immunotherapy drug called IL-2 afterward. Three patients had substantial shrinkage of metastatic tumors in the liver, lung, and lymph nodes that lasted for four to seven months. The median time to disease progression was 4.6 months.

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