Lifeboat Foundation

In her new book, Sara Walker explains why the key distinction between life and other kinds of ‘things’ is how the living use information.

P. falciparum (malaria) transmission includes the development of male and female parasite forms called gametocytes, which are taken up by the Anopheles mosquito. The authors of this study use single cell transcriptomics to define the transcriptional programs, identify key regulators and predict novel genes, involved in driving the male and female sexual cell fates.

The CDC warned of increasing viral activity on the heels of “unusually high numbers of cases” in Europe earlier this year.

Substances like ayahuasca and psilocybin can induce a sense of unity with the world—and even allow some users to “see God.”

Along with the first private-sector spacewalk, the SpaceX Polaris Dawn crew also will set a new Earth-orbit altitude record.

Picking up a box and placing it in a neat pile is not an impressive action in itself for a robot; understanding an enigmatic human command and correctly deciphering and explaining the decision-making process, are definitely innovations. Digit owes parts of its progress to the generative artificial intelligence revolution that also reached the field of robotics and turned expectations from it on its head. “I’ve been asked what’s the biggest thing in 2024 besides language modeling — it’s robotics. Period,” Nvidia’s senior AI scientist Jim Fan wrote in December. “We’re about three years away from a ChatGPT moment for physical AI agents,” he explained.

Ever since Fan made this statement, it seems that everyone is talking about the “ChatGPT moment of robotics”, or the hope of a technological breakthrough that will push the field forward and finally fill our homes with intelligent humanoid robots to help us with household chores, wash the floor, set the table or do the laundry (but not fold it). “What has been happening in recent months is dramatic,” explains Amir Bousani, CEO of R-Go Robotics, which recently entered into a partnership with Nvidia to equip the robot it is developing with its spatial perception capabilities. “The physical world is more difficult than the internet,” notes Dr. Oren Etzioni, founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, “but the field of robots that have the ability to behave in general is running much faster today.”

The huge interest in humanoid robots, or humanoids, which Fan is talking about, is evident in the constant announcements in the field: in February, the startup Figure raised $675 million from Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and OpenAI for the development of the humanoid. In March, Nvidia’s CEO stood on the stage of the company’s developer conference alongside nine humanoids from different companies and announced that building models for robots is “one of the most exciting problems to solve in artificial intelligence”; in April, Elon Musk promised that he would launch the humanoid robot he is developing — Optimus — next year and predicted that by 2040 there will be a billion humanoids among us. A short time later, the activities of Mentee Robotics, Amnon Shashua’s company that was founded two years ago and also develops the humanoid, went public.

“My main life work, along with basic science, has been building our Wolfram language computational language for the purpose of having a way to express things computationally that’s useful to both humans and computers,” Wolfram told TechCrunch.

As AI developers and others start to think more deeply about how computers and people intersect, Wolfram says it is becoming much more of a philosophical exercise, involving thinking in the pure sense about the implications this kind of technology may have on humanity. That kind of complex thinking is linked to classical philosophy.

Continue reading “Stephen Wolfram thinks we need philosophers working on big questions around AI” »

Thorium may sound like something out of a Marvel comic book, but the radioactive metal could provide a very real, renewable energy source.

Chinese scientists have been working on a molten salt nuclear power plant using thorium for years. They even created a prototype reactor in 2021, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Continue reading “China prepares to change world with introduction of revolutionary nuclear power station: ‘This design significantly reduces the chances of meltdowns’” »

Like a supersonic jet being blasted with high-speed winds, Earth is constantly being bombarded by a stream of charged particles from the sun known as solar wind.

Just like wind around a jet or water around a boat, these solar wind streams curve around Earth’s magnetic field, or magnetosphere, forming on the sunward side of the magnetosphere a front called a bow shock and stretching it into a wind sock shape with a long tail on the nightside.

Dramatic changes to the solar wind alter the structure and dynamics of the magnetosphere. An example of such changes provides a glimpse into the behavior of other bodies in space, such as Jupiter’s moons and extrasolar planets.