Toggle light / dark theme

On January 2023, 60 minutes interviewed Paul Ehrlich, the author of the 1968 Population Bomb.

Although I agree with some of the points, like the destruction of habitat, and climate change, and those points indeed need addressing. the overpopulation arguments in the book and the interview have already been proven wrong, repeatedly.

The 18th century Malthusian catastrophe predictions never materialized. Thanks to modern technology, new clean energy sources, and modern agriculture, our planet doesn’t have an overpopulation problem despite having more people today than at ant time in history.

It’s okay to have more kids. Kids will not “destroy the planet”. They may actually help.

Princeton Engineering researchers have developed a cost-effective way to use breakfast foods to create a material that can remove salt and microplastics from seawater.

The researchers used egg whites to create an aerogel, a versatile material known for its light weight and porosity. It has a range of uses, including water filtration, energy storage, and sound and thermal insulation. Craig Arnold, the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and vice dean of innovation at Princeton, leads a lab that focuses on creating new materials, including aerogels, for engineering purposes.

One day, sitting in a faculty meeting, he had an idea.

My first computer had a CPU with 3,510 transistors. We now live in a world where you can get chips with over a trillion transistors.

“This a data centre accelerator that contains 146 billion transistors.”

I checked and the article didn’t include the transistors that made up the L4 cache memory on the chip. The actual total is 1.25 trillion transistors plus another 1.1 trillion capacitors.

This chip is coming out later this year and I expect to see it used in large quantities in supercomputers and in the server market in general.

Quite impressive!

Sixty-six million years ago, the age of the dinosaurs came to a dramatic close as a huge asteroid impact accelerated them on a path towards extinction. Not all of them died out, however; those that survived went on to become today’s birds.

Scientists are still trying to carefully map out the anatomical changes that occurred between dinosaurs and birds during this time, and there’s arguably no better way to do this than to engage in a little “reverse evolution.” With this in mind, a team of researchers has grown “dinosaur legs” in chicken embryos, as revealed in their study in the journal Evolution.

Remarkably, previous research manipulating chickens into “becoming” dinosaurs has already taken place. Back in 2015, a study showcased that chickens that had been tweaked during embryonic development could grow a dinosaur-like snout. A year earlier, a more low-tech study demonstrated how a few strategically-placed weights could make a chicken walk along like a Tyrannosaurus rex.

Since the discovery of genetics, people have dreamed of being able to correct diseases, select traits in children before birth, and build better human beings. Naturally, many serious technical and ethical questions surround this endeavor. Luckily, tonights’ guest is as good a guide as we could hope to have.

Dr. Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. He has done extensive research in the field of computational genomics, and is the founder of several startups.

#geneticengineering #intelligence

“Brainomix specialise in the creation of AI-powered imaging biomarkers that enable precision medicine for better treatment decisions in stroke imaging”

https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/brainomix-stroke-imaging-solutions/122141/


The use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has helped to triple the number of patients who recover from a stroke in England.

Early-stage analysis of the Brainomix e-Stroke system technology, which has been rolled out in a number of stroke networks in the country, found it can greatly cut the time between diagnosis and treatment.

It’s based on microsensations that together create an immersive experience.

What if you could actually feel all the sensations of a video game? That’s what the OWO haptic shirt displayed at this year’s Electronics Consumer Show (CES) 2023 allows you to do.

“The result; a deep level of immersion you won’t find anywhere else.”