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Aug 24, 2022

George Church, PhD: Rewriting Genomes to Eradicate Disease and Aging

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, existential risks, genetics, life extension, robotics/AI

All around smart guy Dr Goerge Church talking about genetic engineering technologies.


George Church, Ph.D. is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and of health sciences and technology at both Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Church played an instrumental role in the Human Genome Project and is widely recognized as one of the premier scientists in the fields of gene editing technology and synthetic biology.

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Aug 24, 2022

Electrical control of glass-like dynamics in vanadium dioxide for data storage and processing

Posted by in category: computing

Electronically accessible states in vanadium dioxide can be arbitrarily manipulated on short timescales and tracked beyond 10,000 s after excitation.

Aug 24, 2022

Scientists create material capable of ‘thinking’

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, engineering, neuroscience

The technology is based on integrated circuits, which typically rely on silicon semiconductors in order to process information in a way that is similar to the role played by the brain in the human body.

The research team discovered that integrated circuits capable of performing computational tasks could be achieved using “nearly any material” around us.

“We have created the first example of an engineering material that can simultaneously sense, think and act upon mechanical stress, without requiring additional circuits to process such signals,” said Ryan Harne, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State.

Aug 24, 2022

Our approach to alignment research

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Our approach to aligning AGI is empirical and iterative. We are improving our AI systems’ ability to learn from human feedback and to assist humans at evaluating AI. Our goal is to build a sufficiently aligned AI system that can help us solve all other alignment problems.

Our alignment research aims to make artificial general intelligence (AGI) aligned with human values and follow human intent. We take an iterative, empirical approach: by attempting to align highly capable AI systems, we can learn what works and what doesn’t, thus refining our ability to make AI systems safer and more aligned. Using scientific experiments, we study how alignment techniques scale and where they will break.

We tackle alignment problems both in our most capable AI systems as well as alignment problems that we expect to encounter on our path to AGI. Our main goal is to push current alignment ideas as far as possible, and to understand and document precisely how they can succeed or why they will fail. We believe that even without fundamentally new alignment ideas, we can likely build sufficiently aligned AI systems to substantially advance alignment research itself.

Aug 24, 2022

Scientists have traced Earth’s path through the galaxy via tiny crystals found in its crust

Posted by in category: space

“To see a world in a grain of sand,” the opening sentence of the poem by William Blake, is an oft-used phrase that also captures some…

Aug 24, 2022

Webcast: Robotics Accelerates Retail Digitization

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

In this Robotics 24/7 Roundtable, viewers can learn how robots and software can enable retailers to improve productivity, manage their supply chains, and better serve consumers.

Aug 24, 2022

Earth has just started emitting Giant Magnetic Waves from its Core

Posted by in category: evolution

Earth’s interior is a far from quiet place. Deep below our surface activities, the planet rumbles with activity, from plate tectonics to convection currents that circulate through the hot magmatic fluids far underneath the crust.

Now scientists studying satellite data of Earth have identified something inside Earth we’ve never seen before: a new type of magnetic wave that sweeps around the surface of our planet’s core, every seven years.

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Aug 24, 2022

Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo, M.D., Ph.D. — Modulating Autophagy To Promote Healthspan — Albert Einstein COM

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, education, life extension, neuroscience

Modulating Autophagy To Promote Healthspan — Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo, M.D., Ph.D., Albert Einstein College of Medicine.


Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo, M.D., Ph.D. (https://www.einsteinmed.edu/faculty/8784/ana-maria-cuervo/) is Co-Director of the Einstein Institute for Aging Research, and a member of the Einstein Liver Research Center and Cancer Center. She serves as a Professor in the Department of Developmental & Molecular Biology, and the Department of Medicine (Hepatology), and has the Robert and Renée Belfer Chair for the Study of Neurodegenerative Diseases.

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Aug 24, 2022

Reversal of aging

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, life extension

Aging is a complex and inevitable process that affects all organisms – and it is associated with tissue dysfunction, susceptibility to various diseases, and death [1]. The development of strategies like cellular reprogramming for increasing the duration of healthy life and promoting healthy aging is difficult since the mechanism of aging is not understood clearly. Aging is known to be associated with several hallmarks of aging – such as epigenetic alterations, genomic instability, cellular senescence, telomere shortening, mitochondrial dysfunction and altered intercellular communication.

Aging can be divided into two major phases: healthy aging and pathological aging. Healthy aging is the phase where the accumulation of minor alterations takes place, but pathological aging is the phase where clinical diseases and disabilities predominate along with the impairment of physiological functions [2].

Longevity. Technology: Notions regarding cells undergoing a unidirectional differentiation process during development existed previously [3]. However, in recent years cellular reprogramming using transcription factors has emerged as an important strategy for the rejuvenation of aging cells, erasing markers of cell damage and restoring epigenetic markers. These transcription factors also known as Yamanaka factors include Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc (OSKM). They can convert terminally differentiated somatic cells into pluripotent stem cells which are capable of dividing into any cell type of the body and thus can improve the health and longevity of individuals.

Aug 24, 2022

Artificial Intelligence “Megatron” Scared Scientists With Its Predictions

Posted by in categories: futurism, robotics/AI

A recent debate at Oxford University has convinced scientists that artificial intelligence is worth considering. The computer was asked about its views on the future, and whether AI’s emergence is ethical.

The AI that answered the questions is called Megatron and was created by a team at Nvidia. Megatron’s head contains all of Wikipedia, 63 million English news articles, and 38 gigabytes of Reddit chat.

This information helped him form his opinion. Participants also participated in the discussion. Megatron responded to their statements that they don’t believe that AI will have an ethical future, in a way that terrified those present.