Leave it to Berlin to breed the coolest of tech-related gatherings. At this interdisciplinary ‘unconference’, industry leaders and tech enthusiasts rubbed shoulders as they sipped chia seed smoothies among the sun-kissed gardens of an abandoned carpet factory.
From CNN—The universe came in with the biggest bang ever. But now, with a drooping fizzle, it is in its swan song. The conclusion of a new astronomical study pulls no punches on this: “The Universe is slowly dying,” it reads.
Astronomers have believed as much for years, but the new findings establish the cosmos’ decline with unprecedented precision. An international team of 100 scientists used data from the world’s most powerful telescopes — based on land and in space — to study energy coming from more than 200,000 galaxies in a large sliver of the observable universe. [Full story below or at CNN.com]…
Based on those observations, they have confirmed the cosmos is radiating only half as much energy as it was 2 billion years ago. The astronomers published their study on Monday on the website of the European Southern Observatory.
The team checked the energy across a broad spectrum of lightwaves and other electromagnetic radiation and says it is fading through all wavelengths, from ultraviolet to far infrared.
Continue reading “Slow death of Universe confirmed with precision” »
Baidu’s AskADoctor initiative is an ambitious project that recently emerged from Baidu’s deep learning division. We’ve gotta say, initial impressions seem very promising.
Although inflammation has rather a bad reputation, it is a vital process which allows us to effectively fight off infection. Like many things however, there appears to be a balancing act, and when inflammation becomes maladaptive and persistent — it does more harm than good.
It seems that in the process of destroying adversaries, immune responses can create collateral damage which can set the stage for later cancerous developments.
G is for Google.
As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make “smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.” From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have.
How about security hacking as a form of Turing’s Test?
“Next year’s Cyber Grand Challenge event will pit humans against machines in a grand hacking war”
Next year’s Cyber Grand Challenge event will pit humans against machines in a grand hacking war. DEF CON’s war gamers like their chances.
My new story for Vice Motherboard exploring the human journey into eventually becoming a machine: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-i-advocate-for-becoming-a-machine And also if you haven’t donated to the Immortality Bus Indiegogo campaign, there are only a few hours left to do so: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/immortality-bus-with-pres…406#/story
Biology is simply not the best system out there for our species’ evolution. It’s frail, terminal, and needs to be upgraded. In fact, even machines may be upgraded in the future too, and rendered as junk as our intelligences figure out ways to become beings of pure organized energy. “Onward” is the classic transhumanist mantra.
No matter what happens, to move forward in the transhumanist age, we need to let go of our egos and our shallow sense of identity; in short, we need to get over ourselves. The permanence of our species lies in our ability to reason, think, and remember who we are and where we’ve been. The rest is just an impermanent shell that changes—and it has already been changing for tens of millions of years in the form of sentient evolution.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) website reports that two of DARPA’s Young Faculty Award (YFA) recipients have developed nanoscale electronic switches with reprogrammable features, similar to those at play in inter-neuron communication in the brain, which could find uses in next-generation reconfigurable electronic devices and brain-inspired computing.
While exploring which biological processes might predict successful in centenarians, a team from Newcastle and Tokyo have identified two prominent factors that facilitate health longevity — low level inflammation and telomere length.
“Centenarians and supercentenarians are different — put simply, they age slower. They can ward off diseases for much longer than the general population.”
After measuring a number of health markers in 1,554 people including: those over 105, between 100 and 105 and a group near their 100th birthday along with their offspring, these two elements emerged as consistent longevity predictors.
