Lifeboat Foundation

In the future, a woman with a spinal cord injury could make a full recovery; a baby with a weak heart could pump his own blood. How close are we today to the bold promise of bionics—and could this technology be used to improve normal human functions, as well as to repair us? Join Bill Blakemore, John Donoghue, Jennifer French, Joseph J. Fins, and P. Hunter Peckham at “Better, Stronger, Faster,” part of the Big Ideas Series, as they explore the unfolding future of embedded technology.

This program is part of the Big Ideas Series, made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation.

Continue reading “Better, Stronger, Faster: The Future of the Bionic Body” »

For decades, biologists have read and edited DNA, the code of life. Revolutionary developments are giving scientists the power to write it. Instead of tinkering with existing life forms, synthetic biologists may be on the verge of writing the DNA of a living organism from scratch. In the next decade, according to some, we may even see the first synthetic human genome. Join a distinguished group of synthetic biologists, geneticists and bioengineers who are edging closer to breathing life into matter.

This program is part of the Big Ideas Series, made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation.

Continue reading “It’s Alive, But Is It Life: Synthetic Biology and the Future of Creation” »

Consciousness is a terrible curse. Or so says a character in screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich. Part theater of the absurd and part neuroscience fiction, the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s work captures the splintering between what we perceive and what we feel as our brains grapple with multiple layers of reality. Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, one of the world’s leading sleep researchers, casts new light on the science of the mind, probing where and how consciousness is generated in the brain. Watch this spellbinding conversation between Kaufman, Tononi, and moderator Alan Alda as they explore and explain the art, science, and mystery of consciousness.

The World Science Festival gathers great minds in science and the arts to produce live and digital content that allows a broad general audience to engage with scientific discoveries. Our mission is to cultivate a general public informed by science, inspired by its wonder, convinced of its value, and prepared to engage with its implications for the future.

Continue reading “Consciousness: Explored and Explained” »

A giant asteroid’s impact is considered the likely cause of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs almost 66 million years ago.

While there is no potential harm from an asteroid on the Earth at present, it is still important to keep our defense system ready in order to prevent catastrophic consequences such as impacts by deflecting trajectories of asteroids if one is ever discovered.

With this aim, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, the world’s first planetary defense test mission, last November. DART is the first-ever mission dedicated to investigating and demonstrating one method of asteroid deflection by changing an asteroid’s motion in space through kinetic impact. In summary, it is to collide with an asteroid and deflect it from its orbit in order to provide valuable information for the development of such a planetary defense system.

This episode focuses on many of the problems with travel between stars at relativistic velocities, like collision avoidance, radiation, ship geometry, armor, and point-defense.

We will also look at some of the possible engine types and discuss realistic maximum speeds they offer.

Continue reading “Interstellar Travel Challenges” »

Cortical Labs takes neurons from mice and put them on chips, then teaches them how to play ping pong.

Can you make smarter AI systems by combining biological neurons with silicon chips? In this episode of The AI Show with John Koetsier, we’re going to chat with Hon Weng Chong, CEO and co-founder of Cortical Labs and Andy Kitchen, the company’s CTO, about biological AI: mixing real brain cells with silicon computer chips.

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It looks like algorithms can write academic papers about themselves now. We gotta wonder: how long until human academics are obsolete?

In an editorial published by Scientific American, Swedish researcher Almira Osmanovic Thunström describes what began as a simple experiment in how well OpenAI’s GPT-3 text generating algorithm could write about itself and ended with a paper that’s currently being peer reviewed.

Continue reading “Researcher Tells AI to Write a Paper About Itself, Then Submits It to Academic Journal” »

Summary: A new robotic system can identify volatile organic compounds associated with diseases by analyzing bodily emissions.

Source: Tsinghua University Press.

Scientists are working on diagnostic techniques that could sniff out chemical compounds from breath, sweat, tears and other bodily emissions and that act as fingerprints of thousands of diseases.

Mars may be more like some areas of Earth than we think.

For the first time ever, NASA rover Curiosity has taken a crucial measure of an ingredient necessary for life in Mars’ rocks: Organic carbon.