The Oxford University professor posits the emergence of ‘a new species’ stemming from algorithms.
This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
Participant:
Stephen Wolfram.
Moderator:
Brian Greene.
Multidisciplinary residential programmes and workshops help advance all the fields involved.
A living artificial intelligence hardware approach that uses the adaptive reservoir computation of biological neural networks in a brain organoid can perform tasks such as speech recognition and nonlinear equation prediction.
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A new analysis of the distribution of matter in the Universe continues to find a discrepancy in the clumpiness of dark matter in the late and early Universe, suggesting a fundamental error in the standard cosmological model.
Cosmologists study the Universe by making a vast range of observations using a variety of modern techniques. Each observation can reveal different details about the Universe’s composition over a certain period of its history. An astronomical survey—a map of a region of the sky—is a powerful way to scan a large swath of the Universe and the objects it contains. For example, a weak-lensing survey does that by obtaining sharp images of galaxies, which can then be used to map the distribution of the Universe’s matter throughout history. The Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP) is one such weak-lensing survey, and it has the highest resolution and the deepest depth of all current weak-lensing surveys. Over the past six years, the HSC-SSP survey team has spent 330 nights scanning 3% of the entire spherical sky, capturing the light emitted by galaxies up to 10 billion years ago.
Producing fake sound reflections that simulate the presence or absence of an object could allow the military to hide assets underwater.
A hologram plate simulates the presence of a three-dimensional object by reflecting the appropriate light waves. Now researchers have demonstrated an equivalent behavior with sound by precisely mimicking the acoustic pattern scattered from an object [1]. The technique could be useful in military efforts to hide or disguise underwater objects, or it may be useful in modifying the reflected sounds of objects so that they are easier to identify by people with impaired vision.
The sound waves reflected from an object can be used to reconstruct its position and shape, an idea routinely exploited in sonar and ultrasound imaging. In principle, using similar concepts, a cleverly produced pattern of scattered waves streaming out of a small region could signify that an object is present when it is not. Several recent attempts to realize such “acoustic cloning” have been unsuccessful because of limitations in recording the precise pattern of waves an object reflects, a necessary preliminary step.
An experimental vaccine against human papillomavirus—HPV—appears to be safe, and most importantly, benefits patients who develop a rare airway cancer that manifests as recurrent obstructive growths requiring dozens, sometimes, hundreds of surgeries over a lifetime to keep the tumors at bay.
The tiny phase 1 clinical study of only 15 patients has served as a proof of concept, demonstrating that recurrent respiratory papillomatosis, a cancerous disorder of the upper airways, can respond to therapeutic vaccination. The tumors are caused by either type 6 or type 11 human papillomavirus.
Writing in Science Translational Medicine, scientists at the Center for Immune-Oncology, a division of the U.S. National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, tackled the problem of recurrent respiratory papillomatosis by testing a vaccine strategy designed to prevent tumor development. Dr. Scott M. Norberg, lead author of the research, writes that the evolving approach is aimed at providing a pathway for the prevention of a condition for which there is no cure.
The mystery of aging has fascinated people for millennia, with many willing to do anything to halt or reverse this process, because aging is typically associated with gradual deterioration of most body functions. While senescence is a natural part of life, biologists understand surprisingly little about the emergence of this process during evolution.
It is not clear whether aging is inevitable because there are organisms that seemingly do not age at all; moreover, the phenomenon known as negative aging, or rejuvenation, does exist: for example, some turtles’ vital functions improve with age.
Researchers of the Institute of Evolution led by Academician Eörs Szathmáry have endeavored to prove the validity of a previously proposed but still unproven theory of aging. The theory suggests that under the right circumstances, evolution can favor the proliferation of genes controlling senescence.
