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Inverse doing a recap from my AMA on Reddit’s Futurology. My AMA is going on for about another 15 hours, so if you have a question, please chime in there: https://www.inverse.com/article/23120-zoltan-istvan-formula-1-sports-future and here’s the AMA:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5aq3mw/ama_im_z…manist_us/ #transhumanism #AMA #ScienceCandidate #Election2016


The U.S. presidential candidate has shared some of his future goals ahead of voting day.

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Scientists have been working for decades on engineered viruses that can hunt down and get inside cancer cells, cause them to burst and spur the immune system to mop up whatever malignant cells might be left behind. Only one such treatment has successfully become an FDA-approved cancer treatment.

That one drug, from Amgen, isn’t selling much. But that small victory a year ago has emboldened others to go forward with their own ideas to advance this approach to cancer therapy, known as oncolytic virus therapy.

One of the aspiring players in the oncolytic virus field, Ottawa, Canada-based Turnstone Biologics, is announcing today it has raised $41.4 million in a Series B venture financing. The round was led by OrbiMed Advisors, and included F-Prime Capital Partners and a couple of existing investors, FACIT and Versant Ventures. The new money will add on to the $11.3 million Series A round from a year ago.

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Researchers plan to bring dead to life by freezing their brains and then resurrecting them with artificial intelligence.

Bringing the dead back to life is futuristic and final frontier of science and Humai is working on just that. Humai is a technology company based in Los Angeles and is working on a project known as “Atom & Eve” that would let human consciousness be transferred to an artificial body after their death.

The artificial intelligence company has said it can resurrect human beings within the next 30 years. The “conversational styles, [behavioural]patterns, thought processes and information about how your body functions from the inside-out” would be stored on a silicon chip through AI and nanotechnology.

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Have you ever been in a situation where knowing another language would have come in handy?

I remember standing on the platform at Tokyo Station watching my train to Nagano — the last train of the day — pulling away without me on it. What ensued was a frustrating hour of gestures, confused smiles, and head-shaking as I wandered the station looking for someone who spoke English (my Japanese is unfortunately nonexistent). It would have been really helpful to have a bilingual pal along with me to translate.

Bilingual pals can be hard to find, but Google’s new translation software may be an equally useful alternative. In a paper released last week, the authors noted that Google’s Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT) reduced translation errors by an average of 60% compared to Google’s phrase-based system. GMNT uses deep learning, a technology that aims to ‘think’ in the same way as a human brain.

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