Lifeboat Foundation

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem.

We’ve come a long way from stone tools. With great complexity, we manufacture things like jet airplanes, interplanetary probes, medical tools, and microprocessors. We build with a top-down approach, starting with a big picture concept which we then design and assemble in pieces.

Duke University professor of computer sciences, Dr. John Reif, notes that nature works from the bottom up to assemble complex structures in three dimensions.

The field, or at least the widely used term, of synthetic biology (synbio) started nearly two decades ago. As the field has matured, two PLoS ONE papers have analyzed the publishing data to look at trends, language, and connections among synbio researchers. This data provides snapshots of who’s publishing, what kind of research is being published, when it’s being published, and where it’s being published. The question of why is certainly open for interpretation but the growth dynamics of synthetic biology publishing can give some sense of why a the term has stuck as a useful unifying term.

In 2012, researchers used Thomson Reuters Web of Science publishing data to map where people are publishing synbio research, how those people are connected, and who’s funding it. More recently, three French researchers also used data from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science to assess how synthetic biology the different areas of synthetic biology have grown and interacted.

Both of these papers draw interesting pictures of how new terms and ideas spread within an new umbrella term for a kind of research. Together these two papers paint give us some answers to the ‘Who, What, When, Where, & Why’ of synthetic biology.

A tiny needle of 5-μm-diameter may help solve the mysteries of the brain and facilitate the development of a brain-machine interface.

To all those who said it couldn’t happen for another 10+ years; this article is definitely for you.

Robert Wolkow, University of Alberta physics professor and the Principal Research Officer at Canada’s National Institute for Nanotechnology, has developed a technique to switch a single-atom channel.

Continue reading “Electrical currents can be now be switched on and off at the atomic scale” »

I hope I get invited to speak. Would love to.

Researchers discuss how to make machines more like the human brain—and faster and more energy-efficient.

By MONICA ROZENFELD 28 October 2016

Continue reading “First IEEE Conference on Rebooting Computing Focuses on Neuromorphic and Quantum Designs” »

If you’ve been on the Internet for a long time, chances are that you’d be inclined to say you’ve seen it all. Well, let’s just say that you haven’t really seen it all until you’ve seen Marianas Web. Don’t get your keyboard and mouse ready just yet, though – that might prove a bit more difficult than you think. This is because it doesn’t even exist.

… Or does it?

Machine learning will drop the cost of making predictions, but raise the value of human judgement.

To really understand the impact of artificial intelligence in the modern world, it’s best to think beyond the mega-research projects like those that helped Google recognize cats in photos.

According to professor Ajay Agrawal of the University of Toronto, humanity should be pondering how the ability of cutting edge A.I. techniques like deep learning —which has boosted the ability for computers to recognize patterns in enormous loads of data—could reshape the global economy.

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Encryption is something we all rely on regularly to keep our information safe online, but many of us have experienced it since childhood, and in fact probably used it in school. If you ever wrote out a message in code that nobody could read without they knew the decipher rules, you messed around with encryption!

That same secret message technique has now been put to a much more worrying use. Google has created multiple AI and they’ve learned how to not only create their own encryption, but are now communicating using messages nobody else can read.

This Google Brain project is an experiment in deep learning techniques and involved the use of three neural networks (Alice, Bob, and Eve) created using artificial neurons. These neural nets work like a much simplified version of our brains, and they are slowly and steadily becoming more intelligent.

Continue reading “Google’s Alice AI Is Sending Secret Messages To Another AI” »