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Aug 15, 2023

Australian Researchers Create Technique for Engineering Blood Vessels Using Natural Tissue

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, engineering, neuroscience

Blood vessels form the transportation network within our bodies. They are streets where red and white blood cells drive. They are the delivery system to oxygenate our brain and other vital organs and muscles. There are other highways in our bodies such as our nervous and lymphatic systems, but blood vessels are the ones that are central to healthy heart function and keeping our brain supplied with oxygen. When blood vessels are compromised we can suffer a stroke, heart attack, aneurysm or die.

When usual causes of heart attacks are blocked coronary arteries. The coronary arteries supply blood and oxygen to the heart. When partially blocked people experience symptoms like angina. When blocked they can suffer a myocardial infarction, the fancy name for a heart attack.

Today, harvested blood vessel grafts from human donors or the patient are used for bypassing coronary blood vessel blockages. But researchers at the University of Melbourne believe that fabricated blood vessel tissue that can be shaped to any need would be an effective substitute for existing grafts. The team in its search for a graft alternative has combined a variety of materials and living tissue with a fabrication technique to create complex blood vessels that can serve multiple purposes.

Aug 15, 2023

Our Milky Way galaxy was not always a spiral. Here’s how it changed shape

Posted by in category: space

A century-old mystery of how galaxies change shapes has been solved by considering “survival of the fittest” collisions between cosmic titans.

Aug 15, 2023

Cyborg Armies

Posted by in categories: cyborgs, futurism

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In the future we may deploy armies of cybernetic superhumans to fight our battles, people so augmented they could tear through walls or dodge bullets. But would these invincible warriors be willing to fight for mundane humans, or merely fight each other to rule us?

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Aug 15, 2023

Physicists Trace the Rise in Entropy to Quantum Information

Posted by in categories: particle physics, quantum physics

Classical thermodynamics has only a handful of laws, of which the most fundamental are the first and second. The first says that energy is always conserved; the second law says that heat always flows from hot to cold. More commonly this is expressed in terms of entropy, which must increase overall in any process of change. Entropy is loosely equated with disorder, but the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann formulated it more rigorously as a quantity related to the total number of microstates a system has: how many equivalent ways its particles can be arranged.

The second law appears to show why change happens in the first place. At the level of individual particles, the classical laws of motion can be reversed in time. But the second law implies that change must happen in a way that increases entropy. This directionality is widely considered to impose an arrow of time. In this view, time seems to flow from past to future because the universe began — for reasons not fully understood or agreed on — in a low-entropy state and is heading toward one of ever higher entropy. The implication is that eventually heat will be spread completely uniformly and there will be no driving force for further change — a depressing prospect that scientists of the mid-19th century called the heat death of the universe.

Boltzmann’s microscopic description of entropy seems to explain this directionality. Many-particle systems that are more disordered and have higher entropy vastly outnumber ordered, lower-entropy states, so molecular interactions are much more likely to end up producing them. The second law seems then to be just about statistics: It’s a law of large numbers. In this view, there’s no fundamental reason why entropy can’t decrease — why, for example, all the air molecules in your room can’t congregate by chance in one corner. It’s just extremely unlikely.

Aug 15, 2023

🔴 The Fermi Paradox, Cyborgs, And Artificial Intelligence — My Interview With Isaac Arthur

Posted by in categories: cyborgs, existential risks, robotics/AI

In this week’s live stream, I’m going to share clips of my interview with Isaac Arthur, which you can find the full version on the Answers With Joe Podcast: h…

Aug 15, 2023

Revolutionary hardware unveils new quantum computing model

Posted by in categories: computing, information science, particle physics, quantum physics

A potentially game-changing theoretical approach to quantum computing hardware avoids much of the problematic complexity found in current quantum computers. The strategy implements an algorithm in natural quantum interactions to process a variety of real-world problems faster than classical computers or conventional gate-based quantum computers can.

“Our finding eliminates many challenging requirements for quantum hardware,” said Nikolai Sinitsyn, a at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is co-author of a paper on the approach in the journal Physical Review A. “Natural systems, such as the electronic spins of defects in diamond, have precisely the type of interactions needed for our process.”

Sinitsyn said the team hopes to collaborate with experimental physicists also at Los Alamos to demonstrate their approach using ultracold atoms. Modern technologies in are sufficiently advanced to demonstrate such computations with about 40 to 60 qubits, he said, which is enough to solve many problems not currently accessible by classical, or binary, computation. A is the basic unit of quantum information, analogous to a bit in familiar classical computing.

Aug 15, 2023

Scientific Proof We Can Reverse Aging | Raj Agni Podcast

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Scientist, longevity expert and biotechnology patent holder Raj Agni (aka Steven Schorr) beams in to discuss age deceleration, telomere extension and revolutionary plant-based anti-aging supplements on episode 114 of the Far Out with Faust podcast.

Raj Agni, also known as Steven M. Schorr, is a metaphysician, author, inventor, healer, alchemist, artist, musician, entrepreneur, and creator of Extended Longevity products designed to rebuild your telomeres. His clinics have operated for 14 years on Maui, Hawaii and he has treated over twenty thousand people.

Continue reading “Scientific Proof We Can Reverse Aging | Raj Agni Podcast” »

Aug 15, 2023

Unbelievably excited

Posted by in categories: energy, transportation

A new airplane seat concept that allows wheelchair users to stay in their own chair throughout a flight was revealed this week by a subsidiary of US airline Delta, a move welcomed as a “huge step” by potential customers.

“Unbelievably excited,” is how power wheelchair user and avid traveler Cory Lee described his reaction after a working prototype of the design was demonstrated by Delta Flight Products (DFP) at the Aircraft Interiors Expo (AIX) in Hamburg, Germany, a symposium spotlighting airplane cabin innovations.

DFP’s concept seamlessly converts to and from a traditional airplane seat. The built-in seat folds up to allow a wheelchair to be docked into place. The seat would be installed into pre-existing aircraft seat track systems, so would not involve any structural change to the airplane.

Aug 15, 2023

Intelsat meets conditions for $3.7 billion C-band clearing payout

Posted by in categories: internet, space

TAMPA, Fla. — Intelsat said Aug. 14 it is due for a $3.7 billion windfall late this year after becoming the latest satellite operator to clear C-band spectrum ahead of schedule for terrestrial 5G telcos in the United States.

Weeks after launching its seventh and final C-band clearing satellite, the company said it had achieved certification for work to move broadcast customers into a narrower swath of the spectrum.

The Federal Communications Commission set a deadline for satellite operators to clear the spectrum by December 2025, but offered them nearly $10 billion in incentive payments if they could make the frequencies available for telcos before Dec. 5, 2023.

Aug 15, 2023

Giving AI a Sense of Empathy Could Protect Us From Its Worst Impulses

Posted by in categories: neuroscience, robotics/AI

M3GAN wasn’t malicious. It followed its programming, but without any care or respect for other beings—ultimately including Cady. In a sense, as it engaged with the physical world, M3GAN became an AI sociopath.

Sociopathic AI isn’t just a topic explored in Hollywood. To Dr. Leonardo Christov-Moore at the University of Southern California and colleagues, it’s high time we build artificial empathy into AI—and nip any antisocial behaviors in the bud.

In an essay published last week in Science Robotics, the team argued for a neuroscience perspective to embed empathy into lines of code. The key is to add “gut instincts” for survival—for example, the need to avoid physical pain. With a sense of how it may be “hurt,” an AI agent could then map that knowledge onto others. It’s similar to the way humans gauge each others’ feelings: I understand and feel your pain because I’ve been there before.