Lifeboat Foundation

Elizabeth Gibney — Nature

Physicists have found hints that the asymmetry of life — the fact that most biochemical molecules are ‘left-handed’ or ‘right-handed’ — could have been caused by electrons from nuclear decay in the early days of evolution. In an experiment that took 13 years to perfect¹, the researchers have found that these electrons tend to destroy certain organic molecules slightly more often than they destroy their mirror images.

Many organic molecules, including glucose and most biological amino acids, are ‘chiral’. This means that they are different than their mirror-image molecules, just like a left and a right glove are. Moreover, in such cases life tends to consistently use one of the possible versions — for example, the DNA double helix in its standard form always twists like a right-handed screw. But the reason for this preference has long remained a mystery.

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FUTURISM UPDATE (October 31, 2014)

WIRED: Huge Flock of Minisatellites Aims to Photograph the Entire Earth Every Day http://lnkd.in/dT53SGk

BLOOMBERG: Mercedes, VW to Thwart Google’s Car Inroads in Car Data http://lnkd.in/dRnNVqz

WIRED: How Facebook Could End Up Controlling Everything You Watch and Read Online http://lnkd.in/daY8Uc9

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This archive file was compiled from an interview conducted at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, 2013. In the discussion, Amit Singhal, a key figure in the evolution of Google’s search engine, broadly outlined the significant hurdles that stood in the way of achieving one of his long-held dreams — creating a true ‘conversational’ search engine. He also sketched out a vision of how the initial versions of such a system would, and also importantly, would not attempt to assist the individuals that it interacted with.

Though the vision was by design more limited and focused than a system capable of passing the famous Turing test, it nonetheless raised stimulating questions about the future relationships of humans and their ‘artificial’ assistants.

More about Amit Singhal:

Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Singhal

Google Search:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search

Michael Schulson, Religion Dispatches — Salon

There are places you never expect to be in life. For me, this was certainly one of them: in a conference room in suburban Charlotte on the campus of Southern Evangelical Seminary, with an enormous old Bible on a side table, shelves of Great Books lining the walls, and, on the conference table itself, a 23-inch-tall robot doing yoga.

Meet the Digitally Advanced Viritual Intelligence Device, a NAO (now) robot known as “D.A.V.I.D.”

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FUTURISM UPDATE (October 30, 2014)

WIRED: Hackers Are Using Gmail Drafts to Update Their Malware and Steal Data http://lnkd.in/dsiYwPY

YAHOO: Volkswagen says to launch over 20 electric vehicle models in China http://lnkd.in/dV-ZcpM

“The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.”

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Alexandra Ossola — MotherBoard

Ever since humans first envisioned robots, we’ve thought about how to make the machines more like us. Robots compete against us on game shows, and rendezvous with us in the bedroom (or at least, make virtual sex feel real). But part of being human is sensing the world around us in a particular way, and doing it all at the same time.

This is much more complicated than it seems, as scientists haven’t fully unraveled how we’re able to sense what we do; it’s both our hardware and software that contain codes that are difficult to crack. Still, scientists power through, discovering how their own senses work while crafting artificial versions of them. Here are some of the most valiant attempts to get robots to taste, smell, touch, hear, and see in the most human way possible.

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FUTURISM UPDATE (October 28, 2014)

REUTERS: Wall St. flat after last week’s big gain; energy weighs http://lnkd.in/dZxTeKd

REUTERS: Amazon buys comedy service Rooftop Media to expand digital content http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/27/us-amazon-com-medi…XW20141027

KAI: How ferroelectrics could replace silicon in computers http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-ferroelectrics-could-replace-silicon-in-computers

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Kurweil AI

Researchers at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, and Pennsylvania State University have developed a 3D printing process that transitions from one metal or alloy to another in a single object.

For example, they created a prototype of an improved telescope mirror mount. The part at the top near the glass mirror is made of a metal with low thermal expansion, so that it won’t shrink in space as much as most metals do. That prevents stress in the epoxy adhesive between the mirror and the metal. The bottom part of this mount is stronger stainless steel and could be connected to a stainless steel component of a spacecraft.

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