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Canadian researchers have discovered a new and direct molecular mechanism to stop cancer cells from proliferating. In the prestigious journal Nature Cell Biology, scientists from Université de Montréal show that a disruption of a fine balance in the composition of ribosomes (huge molecules that translate the genetic code into proteins) results in a shutdown of cancer cell proliferation, triggering a process called senescence.

“Ribosomes are complex machines composed of both RNAs and proteins that make all the proteins necessary for to grow,” said UdeM biochemistry professor Gerardo Ferbeyre, the study’s senior author. Cancer cells grow and proliferate relentlessly and thus require a massive amount of ribosomes, he explained. Growing cells must coordinate the production of both ribosomal RNAs and ribosomal proteins in order to assemble them together in strict proportion to each other.

“We were surprised, however, to find that if the production of ribosomal RNA– proportions are driven out of balance in a cancer cell, proliferation can be shut down by in a very simple and direct manner,” said Ferbeyre.

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Thousands of people in Sweden have inserted microchips, which can function as contactless credit cards, key cards, and even rail cards, into their bodies. Once the chip is underneath your skin, there is no longer any need to worry about misplacing a card or carrying a heavy wallet. But for many people, the idea of carrying a microchip in their body feels more dystopian than practical.

Some have suggested that Sweden’s strong welfare state may be the cause of this recent trend. But actually, the factors behind why roughly 3,500 Swedes have had microchips implanted in them are more complex than you might expect. This phenomenon reflects Sweden’s unique biohacking scene. If you look underneath the surface, Sweden’s love affair with all things digital goes much deeper than these microchips.

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I’m not that interested in this on the movie end, because i think most movies already suck, and couldnt really get any worse.


AUDREY HEPBURN DIED in 1993, but in 2013 she nevertheless starred in an advertisement for Galaxy, a type of chocolate bar. She was shown riding a bus along the Amalfi coast before catching the eye of a passing hunk in a convertible. In 2016 Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, reprised his role as the villainous Grand Moff Tarkin in the Star Wars film “Rogue One”. Such resurrections are not new, but they are still uncommon enough to count as news. Yet advances in special effects—and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence (AI)—are making it ever easier to manufacture convincing forgeries of human beings.

In recent months this has led to concern that propagandists will use the technology to generate videos in which political figures appear to say compromising things. A video created by BuzzFeed, a news website, in April shows Barack Obama apparently saying “We’re entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time,” for example. In May a Belgian political party produced a fake video of Donald Trump saying implausible things about Belgium’s climate policy. In both cases the video looks slightly off, and the voice is provided by an impersonator. But the technology is improving fast, prompting a dozen AI researchers to place bets on whether a fake video will disrupt America’s midterm elections later this year. (Tim Hwang, a Harvard academic, is overseeing the wager.)

Whatever happens in the arena of fake news, the same techniques are sure to revolutionise fiction of a different kind, in the form of film and television. In future, actors need not be creatures of flesh and blood, but could, like so many other things in an increasingly digitised world, exist as nothing more than long strings of 1s and 0s. Such digital actors would sit quietly in digital storage systems until their services were needed—there would be no need for luxury trailers, chefs and make-up people.

It’s amusing that these people know where this is headed, but arent interested enough to stop it.


The co-chief investment officer and co-chairman of Bridgewater Associates shared his thoughts in a Facebook post on Thursday.

Dalio says he was responding to a question about whether machine intelligence would put enough people out of work that the government will have to pay people to live with a cash handout, a concept known as universal basic income.

My view is that algorithmic/automated decision making is a two edged sword that is improving total productivity but is also eliminating jobs, leading to big wealth and opportunity gaps and populism, and creating a national emergency.

Dont really care about the competition, but this horse race means AI hitting the 100 IQ level at or before 2029 should probably happen.


The race to become the global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) has officially begun. In the past fifteen months, Canada, Japan, Singapore, China, the UAE, Finland, Denmark, France, the UK, the EU Commission, South Korea, and India have all released strategies to promote the use and development of AI. No two strategies are alike, with each focusing on different aspects of AI policy: scientific research, talent development, skills and education, public and private sector adoption, ethics and inclusion, standards and regulations, and data and digital infrastructure.

This article summarizes the key policies and goals of each national strategy. It also highlights relevant policies and initiatives that the countries have announced since the release of their initial strategies.

I plan to continuously update this article as new strategies and initiatives are announced. If a country or policy is missing (or if something in the summary is incorrect), please leave a comment and I will update the article as soon as possible.

A team of researchers at UC Berkeley has found a way to get a robot to mimic an activity it sees on a video screen just a single time. In a paper they have uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, the team describes the approach they used and how it works.

Robots that learn to do things simply by watching a human carry out an action a single time would be capable of learning many more new actions much more quickly than is now possible. Scientists have been working hard to figure out how to make it happen.

Historically though, robots have been programmed to perform actions like picking up an object by via code that expressly lays out what needs to be done and how. That is how most robots that do things like assemble cars in a factory work. Such robots must still undergo a training process by which they are led through procedures multiple times until they are able to do them without making mistakes. More recently, robots have been programmed to learn purely through observation—much like humans and other animals do. But such imitative learning typically requires thousands of observations. In this new effort, the researchers describe a technique they have developed that allows a to perform a desired action by watching a human being do it just a single time.

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