Low muscle mass has been linked to cognitive decline with scientists suggesting that measuring muscle mass can help to identify people more at risk of dementia.
Australia’s leading universities say redesign of how students are assessed is ‘critical’ in the face of a revolution in computer-generated text.
Does anyone believe extraterrestrials have visited Earth? I am super curious to see what the members of this group believe!
A habitable zone is an area just the right distance from a star so water can exist on a planet’s surface and the conditions are neither too hot nor too cold for life.
Can we predict evolution?
Posted in evolution
Evolution is characterized as unpredictable, yet orderly. New research into a group of plants suggests it might follow a predictable pattern.
One of the most dreaded effects of the bite of the brown recluse spider (Loxosceles spp) is the appearance of a necrotic skin lesion, but a clinical study by Brazilian researchers recently reported in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases shows that the problem can be solved by administering antivenom, especially if this is done within 48 hours of the incident.
An antivenom produced by Butantan Institute, an arm of the São Paulo State Department of Health, was used in the study. As the authors of the paper explain, there is no consensus regarding the best treatment to avoid necrosis and ulceration in cases of brown recluse spider bites.
A 2009 study involving rabbits showed that necrotic lesions were approximately 30% smaller even when the antivenom was administered 48 hours after the animals were bitten.
An electric molecular motor
Posted in nanotechnology
An electrically driven motor on the molecular scale based on [3]catenane is described, in which two cyclobis(paraquat-p-phenylene) rings operate by means of redox reactions, demonstrating highly unidirectional movement around a circular loop.
Reasons Your Hips Hurt
Posted in futurism
You use them to sit, stand, dance, kick, and run. Find out from WebMD’s slide show what makes your hips hurt, and what you can do about it.
If you watched the debate live, you know that, at the very end, I wanted to reply to a point made by Susan but couldn’t, since we ran out of time. The goal of this essay is to put my reply on the record in writing, so to take it out of my system. Before I do that, however, I need to give some context to those who didn’t watch the debate live and don’t have a subscription to the IAI to watch it before reading this essay. If you did watch the debate, you can skip ahead to the section ‘My missing reply.
Context
In a nutshell, my position is that we have no reason to believe that silicon computers will ever become conscious. I cannot refute the hypothesis categorically, but then again, I cannot categorically refute the hypothesis of the Flying Spaghetti Monster either, as the latter is logically coherent. Appeals to logical coherence mean as little in the conscious AI debate as they do in the Flying Spaghetti Monster context. The important point is not what is logically coherent or what can be categorically refuted, but what hypothesis we have good reasons to entertain.
The pursuit of artificial awareness may be humankind’s next moonshot. But it comes with a host of difficult questions.