Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Aromatic bonds, particularly strong chemical bonds which form in some ring-shaped molecules, are a crucial building block of the world around us. They appear in everything from proteins to aspirin, and literally millions of natural and synthetic substances in between.

The bonds are very hard to break and to control, and their properties have puzzled chemists for more than a century.

Which is just the motivation chemists needed to break and control them, and now a group of UK researchers has figured out how to twist an aromatic bond until it breaks.

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Despite AI’s impressive track record, its computational power pales in comparison with a human brain. Now, scientists unveil a revolutionary path to drive computing forward: organoid intelligence, where lab-grown brain organoids act as biological hardware.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has long been inspired by the human brain. This approach proved highly successful: AI boasts impressive achievements – from diagnosing medical conditions to composing poetry. Still, the original model continues to outperform machines in many ways. This is why, for example, we can ‘prove our humanity’ with trivial image tests online. What if instead of trying to make AI more brain-like, we went straight to the source?

Scientists across multiple disciplines are working to create revolutionary biocomputers where three-dimensional cultures of brain cells, called brain organoids, serve as biological hardware. They describe their roadmap for realizing this vision in the journal Frontiers in Science.

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Summary: Scientists have developed a way to use artificial intelligence (AI) to find signs of life on other planets. They combined statistical ecology and machine learning to map the patterns and rules of how life survives in harsh environments on Earth, and then trained the AI to recognize those same patterns and rules in data from other planets. This method can help guide rovers and other exploration missions to places with the highest probability of containing life.

Source: SETI Institute.

Wouldn’t finding life on other worlds be easier if we knew exactly where to look? Researchers have limited opportunities to collect samples on Mars or elsewhere or access remote sensing instruments when hunting for life beyond Earth.

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A new study has shown that bumblebees pick up new “trends” in their behavior by watching and learning from other bees, and that one form of a behavior can spread rapidly through a colony even when a different version gets discovered.

The research, led by Queen Mary University of London and published in PLOS Biology, provides strong evidence that drives the spread of bumblebee behavior—in this case, precisely how they forage for food.

A variety of experiments were set up to establish this. The researchers designed a two-option puzzle box that could be opened either by pushing a red tab clockwise or a blue tab counter-clockwise to reveal a 50% sucrose solution reward.

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The system dramatically reduces the environmental footprint and improves compatibility with other sea uses.

In a boost to further wind energy generation, the world’s only floating wind platform currently installed with a tension leg platform (TLP) mooring system has kickstarted its operations with the production of its first kWh. The facility developed by X1 Wind, a floating wind technology developer based in Barcelona, is anchored in the Canary Islands, which is situated near Spain.

Its X30 floating wind prototype’s TLP system dramatically reduces the environmental footprint and improves compatibility with other sea uses.

X1 Wind.

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The development represents “an important advance in extraterrestrial research, in which biology has often lagged behind chemistry and geology.”

A new study has revealed a new way to enhance the search for aliens on Mars by teaching artificial intelligence to detect sites that could contain “biosignatures.”

And so, the researchers trained a deep learning framework to map biosignatures in a three-square-kilometer area of Chile’s Atacama Desert… More.

NASA/JPL-Caltech.

According to NASA, a biosignature is any “characteristic, element, molecule, substance, or feature that can be used as evidence for past or present life.” But before testing such a tool on Mars or other worlds, they need to be tested on Earth first.

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Its based model performs better than state-of-the-art models available today.

Search giant Google has completed the ‘critical first step’ toward building its artificial intelligence (AI) model that will support the world’s one thousand most-spoken languages. In a blog post the company released details about its Universal Speech Model (USM).

Google’s announcement is part of the build-up to its annual I/O event where it plans to unveil a slew of products powered by AI.

400tmax/iStock.

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