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Can artificial intelligence, or AI, make it possible for us to live forever? Or at least, be preserved for posterity? What are the current developments in the fields of artificial intelligence and biotechnology?

Will humanity exist without biological bodies, in the near future? Could humans and AI merge into one being? This documentary explores these questions, and more.

The film also explores current advances in AI, robotics and biotechnology. What is the essence of human existence? Can that essence be replicated? Technological development in these fields is rapid. It is also increasingly urgent, as people’s lives play out more and more online. Visionaries, authors, and theorists such as Nick Bostrom, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Douglas Rushkoff and Deepak Chopra are questioning how a humanity without a biological body might evolve.

The scientific community is fascinated by the idea of merging human and machine. However, leading minds are also pondering the question of whether AI might just be the last thing humans ever create.

In 2022, a team of researchers at Baylor College of Medicine discovered that a little-known enzyme called MAPK4 is involved in the growth of triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) and its resistance to certain therapies. Looking into the details of this novel role of MAPK4, the researchers have now identified a strategy that can potentially control MAPK4-promoted growth in TNBC and other cancers. The study, published in PLOS Biology, opens new options for treating this devastating disease.

“Some cancers depend on MAPK4 for their growth, and our team studies cellular processes or pathways that participate in MAPK4-induced cancer growth,” said corresponding author Dr. Feng Yang, associate professor of pathology and immunology and of molecular and cellular biology. He also is a member of the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor.

Yang and his team knew that in some TNBC cases, MAPK4 activates an enzyme called AKT, which promotes cancer growth. They also knew that in the same cells, another enzyme called PDK1 can also promote cancer growth by activating both AKT and a series of other enzymes of the AGC group. This PDK1-mediated activation of AGC enzymes mostly depends on the amount of PDK1 in the cell.

A University of Portsmouth physicist has explored whether a new law of physics could support the much-debated theory that we are simply characters in an advanced virtual world.

The simulated hypothesis proposes that what humans experience is actually an artificial reality, much like a computer simulation, in which they themselves are constructs.

The theory is popular among a number of well-known figures including Elon Musk, and within a branch of science known as information , which suggests is fundamentally made up of bits of information.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained a lot of attention for their human-imitating properties. These models are capable of answering questions, generating content, summarizing long textual paragraphs, and whatnot. Prompts are essential for improving the performance of LLMs like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. The way that prompts are created can have a big impact on an LLM’s abilities in a variety of areas, including reasoning, multimodal processing, tool use, and more. These techniques, which researchers designed, have shown promise in tasks like model distillation and agent behavior simulation.

The manual engineering of prompt approaches raises the question of whether this procedure can be automated. By producing a set of prompts based on input-output instances from a dataset, Automatic Prompt Engineer (APE) made an attempt to address this, but APE had diminishing returns in terms of prompt quality. Researchers have suggested a method based on a diversity-maintaining evolutionary algorithm for self-referential self-improvement of prompts for LLMs to overcome decreasing returns in prompt creation.

LLMs can alter their prompts to improve their capabilities, just as a neural network can change its weight matrix to improve performance. According to this comparison, LLMs may be created to enhance both their own capabilities and the processes by which they enhance them, thereby enabling Artificial Intelligence to continue improving indefinitely. In response to these ideas, a team of researchers from Google DeepMind has introduced PromptBreeder (PB) in recent research, which is a technique for LLMs to better themselves in a self-referential manner.

The number of kids being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has risen sharply in recent decades, and a new study points to the common plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA) as a potential reason why.

BPA is used in a lot of plastics and plastic production processes, and can also be found inside food and drink cans. However, previous research has also linked it to health issues involving hormone disruption, including breast cancer and infertility.

In this new study, researchers from Rowan University and Rutgers University in the US looked at three groups of children: 66 with autism, 46 with ADHD, and 37 neurotypical kids. In particular, they analyzed the process of glucuronidation, a chemical process the body uses to clear out toxins within the blood through urine.