It’s feared super-smart silicon assassins could one day declare war on humanity and wipe us off the face of the Earth.
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We are changing space itself.
In 2017, NASA space probes detected a massive, human-made ‘barrier’ surrounding Earth.
And tests have confirmed that it’s actually having an effect on space weather far beyond our planet’s atmosphere.
That means we’re not just changing Earth so severely, scientists are calling for a whole new geological epoch to be named after us — our activities have been changing space too.
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Mach Effect Gravity Assist (MEGA) drive propulsion is based on peer-reviewed, technically credible physics. Mach effects are transient variations in the rest masses of objects that simultaneously experience accelerations and internal energy changes. They are predicted by standard physics where Mach’s principle applies as discussed in peer-reviewed papers spanning 20 years and a recent book, Making Starships and Stargates: the Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes published in 2013 by Springer-Verlag.
Above – Graphic depiction of Mach Effect for in-space propulsion: Interstellar mission Credits: J. Woodward.
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A longer-term concern is the way AI creates a virtuous circle or “flywheel” effect, allowing companies that embrace it to operate more efficiently, generate more data, improve their services, attract more customers and offer lower prices. That sounds like a good thing, but it could also lead to more corporate concentration and monopoly power—as has already happened in the technology sector.
LIE DETECTORS ARE not widely used in business, but Ping An, a Chinese insurance company, thinks it can spot dishonesty. The company lets customers apply for loans through its app. Prospective borrowers answer questions about their income and plans for repayment by video, which monitors around 50 tiny facial expressions to determine whether they are telling the truth. The program, enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), helps pinpoint customers who require further scrutiny.
AI will change more than borrowers’ bank balances. Johnson & Johnson, a consumer-goods firm, and Accenture, a consultancy, use AI to sort through job applications and pick the best candidates. AI helps Caesars, a casino and hotel group, guess customers’ likely spending and offer personalised promotions to draw them in. Bloomberg, a media and financial-information firm, uses AI to scan companies’ earnings releases and automatically generate news articles. Vodafone, a mobile operator, can predict problems with its network and with users’ devices before they arise. Companies in every industry use AI to monitor cyber-security threats and other risks, such as disgruntled employees.
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Kids these days…
Millennials in America sometimes get a bad reputation, this time for good reason. A recent survey found that just 66 percent of young adults aged 18 to 24 years old have “always believed the world is round.”
YouGov polled 8,215 US adults on February 8th, 2018 to get a representative idea of America’s views on the shape of the Earth. What they found would make any scientist shake their heads, a surprising percentage of responders weren’t convinced the Earth is round.
The question asked individuals to categorize their thoughts surrounding the shape of the Earth into one of the five buckets below:
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Nobody has yet been able to prevent or avoid time’s effects on our bodies and minds, and they are inevitable until science finds the solutions to aging. However, before then, we can do some things to try to slow the processes of aging down.
One potential approach is to follow the Mediterranean diet. This diet plan has already been reported to work for many health issues, and recent research suggests that we can use it to fight the aging process as well.
A new series of six studies appearing in the March issue of the Journals of Gerontology have found new correlations between a Mediterranean diet, aging, and health [1–6]. There are also a mountain of previous studies suggesting that this diet may help to somewhat slow aging.
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Protein synthesis is a critical part of how our cells operate and keep us alive and when it goes wrong it drives the aging process. We take a look at how it works and what happens when things break down.
Suppose that your full-time job is to proofread machine-translated texts. The translation algorithm commits mistakes at a constant rate all day long; from this point of view, the quality of the translation stays the same. However, as a poor human proofreader, your ability to focus on this task will likely decline throughout the day; therefore, the number of missed errors, and therefore the number of translations that go out with mistakes, will likely go up with time, even though the machine doesn’t make any more errors at dusk than it did at dawn.
To an extent, this is pretty much what is going on with protein synthesis in your body.
Protein synthesis in a nutshell
The so-called coding regions of your DNA consist of genes that encode the necessary information to assemble the proteins that your cells use. As your DNA is, for all intents and purposes, the blueprint to build you, it is pretty important information, and as such, you want to keep it safe. That’s why DNA is contained in the double-layered membrane of the cell nucleus, where it is relatively safe from oxidative stress and other factors that might damage it. The protein-assembling machinery of the cell, ribosomes, are located outside the cell nucleus, and when a cell needs to build new proteins, what’s sent out to the assembly lines is not the blueprint itself, but rather a disposable mRNA (messenger RNA) copy of it that is read by the ribosomes, which will then build the corresponding protein. The process of making an mRNA copy of DNA is called “translation”, and as the initial analogy suggests, it is not error-free.
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‘Google should not be in the business of war’: Over 3,000 employees pen letter urging CEO to pull out of the Pentagon’s controversial AI drone research, citing firm’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto…
More than 3,000 Google employees have penned an open letter calling upon the internet giant’s CEO to end its controversial ‘Project Maven’ deal.
Calling the deal ‘business of war’, they said Google boss Sundar Pichai should ‘cancel this project immediately’.
It was revealed last month that Google is allowing the Pentagon to use some of its artificial intelligence technologies to analyze drone footage.
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