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I have been seeing this for the recent weeks; I find it interesting and another step in China’s own move to be a global leader of tech. Could be either good or bad in the longer term.

China is taking a more inclusive tack in instituting cybersecurity standards for foreign technology companies, allowing them to join a key government committee in an effort to ease foreign concerns over the controls.

The committee under the government’s powerful cyberspace administration is in charge of defining cybersecurity standards. For the first time, the body earlier this year allowed select foreign companies— Microsoft Corp. MSFT −0.39 %, Intel Corp. INTC 0.43 %, Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO 0.14 % and International Business Machines Corp.—to take an active part in drafting rules, rather than participating simply as observers, said people familiar with the discussions.

How much influence the foreign companies will have over committee deliberations remains to be seen, these people said. Over the past few months, the committee’s seven working groups—which focus on encryption, big data and other cybersecurity issues—have each met at least once.

Continue reading “China Sets New Tone in Drafting Cybersecurity Rules” | >

More insights on human conscientious in relation to its state after we die.

Personally, (this is only my own opinion) I believe much of the human conscientious will remain a mystery even in the living as it relates to the re-creation of the human brain and its thinking and decision making patterns on current technology. Namely because any doctor will tell you that a person’s own decisions (namely emotional decision making/ thinking) can be impacted by a whole multitude of factors beyond logical information such as the brain’s chemical balance, physical illness or even injury, etc. which inherently feeds into conscientious state. In order to try to replicate this model means predominantly development of a machine that is predominantly built with synthetic biology; and even then we will need to evolve this model to finally understand human conscientious more than we do today.

Sir Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, has asked “what right do we have to claim, as some might, that human beings are the only inhabitants of our planet blessed with an actual ability to be “aware”? It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as “observing itself” all the time! Beneath all this technicality is the feeling that it is indeed “obvious” that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer, even though much of what is involved in mental activity might do so.

Continue reading “World’s Scientists: “Human Consciousness Will Remain a Mystery”” | >

Major advancement in Gene Editing.

A team involving Kobe University researchers has succeeded in developing ‘Target-AID’, a genome editing technique that does not cleave the DNA. The technique offers, through high-level editing operation, a method to address the existing issues of genome editing. It is expected that the technique will be applied to gene therapy in the future in addition to providing a powerful tool for breeding useful organisms and conducting disease and drug-discovery research. The findings were published online in Science on August 5.

The team consists of Project Associate Professor NISHIDA Keiji and Professor KONDO Akihiko (Graduate School of Science, Technology and Innovation, Kobe University) as well as Associate Professor YACHIE Nozomu (Synthetic Biology Division, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo) and Professor HARA Kiyotaka (Department of Environmental Sciences, Graduate School of Nutritional and Environmental Sciences, University of Shizuoka).

Genome editing — which can directly manipulate the genome information of various organisms without leaving an artificial strand — has seen rapid progress in recent years and it is gradually becoming a revolutionary tool in fields ranging from life sciences to advanced medical research.

Continue reading “Researchers succeed in developing a genome editing technique that does not cleave DNA” | >

New updated article on the evolution of the processors of tomorrow.

Personally, I find this article runs short in only focusing on carbon, organics aka plastics, and QC as future replacement. With the ongoing emergence of synthetic biology and what this could mean for processors; I would suggest the author explore further the future of synthetic bio.

From stacked CPUs to organic and quantum processing.

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Additional insights on methods in improving efficiencies during the conversion of light energy into chemical energy.

The chromatophore of purple bacteria is an intracellular spherical vesicle that exists in numerous copies in the cell and that efficiently converts sunlight into ATP synthesis, operating typically under low light conditions. Building on an atomic-level structural model of a low-light-adapted chromatophore vesicle from Rhodobacter sphaeroides, we investigate the cooperation between more than a hundred protein complexes in the vesicle. The steady-state ATP production rate as a function of incident light intensity is determined after identifying quinol turnover at the cytochrome bc1 complex (cytb⁢c1) as rate limiting and assuming that the quinone/quinol pool of about 900 molecules acts in a quasi-stationary state.

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Perfecting the macro-molecule.

(Phys.org)—A pair of physicists with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Switzerland has found a way to create very large diatomic molecules, and in so doing, have proved some of the theories about such molecules to be correct. In their paper published in Physical Review Letters, Johannes Deiglmayr and Heiner Saßmannshausen describe their experiments and results and why they believe such molecules may have a future in quantum computing.

Physicists have been interested in the properties of macromolecules for many years because they believe studying them will illuminate the fundamental properties of in general. Prior research has shown that large, two-atom molecules should be possible if they were put into a Rydberg state—in which the outer electron exists in a high quantum state, allowing it to orbit farther than normal from the nucleus—and thus allowing for the creation of molecules thousands of times larger than conventional diatomic molecules such as H2.

In this new effort, the researchers sought to test assumptions made about such molecules by actually building some. They did so by firing a laser at a pair of chilled cesium atoms to excite them and then by firing another laser with a smaller amount of energy to bring them into a Rydberg state. To make sure they had succeeded in making the large molecule, they used a device to detect that the ions that had been created during the process decayed to the lower Rydberg state, releasing the energy that had ionized the other atom. By actually creating the molecules, the pair were able to test many of the theories and assumptions about them made by others in the field.

Continue reading “Research pair create two-atom molecules that are more than a thousand times bigger than typical diatomic molecules” | >

My new Vice Motherboard story on the Fermi Paradox, Jethro’s Window, and why we’ll never discover intelligent aliens:

Here’s the sad solution to Fermi’s Paradox: We’ve never discovered other life forms because language and communication methods in the Singularity evolve so rapidly that even in one minute, an entire civilization can become transformed and totally unintelligible. In an expanding universe that is at least 13.6 billion years old, this transformation might never end. What this means is we will never have more than a few seconds to understand or even notice our millions of neighbors. The nature of the universe—the nature of communication in a universe where intelligence exponentially grows—is to keep us forever unaware and alone.

The only time we may discover other intelligent life forms is that 100 or so years during Jethro’s Window, and then it requires the miracle of another species in a similar evolutionary time table, right then, looking for us too. Given the universe is so gargantuan and many billions of years old, even with millions of alien species out there, we’ll never find them. We’ll never know them. It’s an unfortunate mathematical certainty.

Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, author of The Transhumanist Wager, and a 2016 US Presidential candidateof the Transhumanist Party. He writes an occasional columnfor Motherboard in which he ruminates on the future beyond human ability.

Continue reading “​The Language of Aliens Will Always Be Indecipherable” | >

It echoes the nanite and nanobot technology seen in science fiction TV series like Star Trek and Red Dwarf, where swarms of microscopic robots can be used to repair damaged tissue.

Researchers at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya, built their nanobots using a form to DNA origami to create hollow shell-like structures.

Drugs could then be placed inside these before they were chemically locked shut with particles of iron oxide.

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