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A controversial climate change catastrophe study has now made its way through peer review.

I like it already…

Autonomous vehicles will bring about an age of safe and effortless travel. But anything that comes with a trunk also comes with baggage.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=a_mYvSVG3QY

For those unfamiliar, SXSW is a week-long, trendy, if not seriously geeky festival of film and culture, panels and discussions. This year, one of the strangest – and either most disturbing or most compelling, depending on where you stand – talks was delivered by Hiroshi Ishiguro, a Japanese inventor and roboticist. The Osaka University professor was speaking about human-like androids and what roles they might fill within society in the near future. Ishiguro discussed his greatest and most marvellous creation to date: a “Geminoid” (robot in his own likeness) whose human appearance has been deftly created through with a plastic skull, a metal skeleton and silicon skin – and is controlled by an external computer. It would be hard, at a glance, to tell the two apart. In fact, the Geminoid held an autonomous conversation in Japanese, on stage, in front of an audience of hundreds.

Geminoid is not Ishiguro’s first uncannily human robot. In 2005, he developed a female android named Repliee Q1Expo, telling the BBC, “I have developed many robots before, but I soon realised the importance of its appearance. A human-like appearance gives a robot a strong feeling of presence. Repliee Q1Expo can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It’s very satisfying.”

Continue reading “What Do These Robots Mean For The Future Of Sex?” »

It lasted only 20 minutes and took place 1.2 billion light years away, but NASA managed to catch it on camera: a star exploding.

The brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave — or “shock breakout” — has been captured for the first time in visible light by the Kepler space telescope.

The black holes that kicked off the first detection of gravitational waves seem to be the right size and frequency to be long-sought primordial black holes.

Stem cells hold great potential!

Aims: Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) have recently attracted interest as a potential basis for a cell based therapy of AD. We investigated the putative immune-modulatory effects in…

This could have some truly profound implications for the treatment of all viruses, including HIV!

Researchers from Temple University have used the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tool to clear out the entire HIV-1 genome from a patient’s infected immune cells. It’s a remarkable achievement that could have profound implications for the treatment of AIDS and other retroviruses.

When we think about CRISPR/Cas9 we tend to think of it as a tool to eliminate heritable genetic diseases, or as a way to introduce new genes altogether. But as this new research shows, it also holds great promise as a means to eliminate viruses that have planted their nefarious genetic codes within host cells. This latest achievement now appears in Nature Scientific Reports.

Continue reading “HIV Genes Successfully Edited Out of Immune Cells” »

Consciousness is one of the most mysterious phenomena we know of. But evidence is emerging that it might just be a very special kind of information processing.