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Mar 20, 2021

U.S. Transhumanist Party Virtual Enlightenment Salon with Aubrey de Grey

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, geopolitics, life extension, transhumanism

Today at 1 PM PST.


On Sunday, February 212021, at 1 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time, the U.S. Transhumanist Party invites Dr. Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation, for an in-depth conversation about recent developments in the quest to reverse the damage of biological aging. The discussion will cover current in rejuvenation research and advocacy, as well as delve into how the prospects for reaching longevity escape velocity have changed since Dr. de Grey’s remarks at the U.S. Transhumanist Party Discussion Panel on Life Extension nearly 4 years ago in 2017.

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Mar 20, 2021

Humans still similar to first animals without heads, arms, or skeletons

Posted by in category: futurism

555-million-year-old oceanic creatures share genes with today’s humans, finds a new study.


As complex as modern humans can get, they still retain some features of the earliest animals on Earth. According to new research, we are not as different as we might think from strange prehistoric organisms that didn’t have any heads, arms, legs, or skeletons.

A study from UC Riverside identified 555-million-year-old oceanic creatures that share genes with humans and other contemporary animals.

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Mar 20, 2021

An End To Aging — The Mother Of All Disease

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

I will look at the idea that all disease could be almost stopped in its tracks with a universal treatment for aging. A lot of people ask when we will cure aging and the answer is it may well be here sooner than many realise.

It doesn’t matter how good the treatments are that we develop for cancer, heart disease, alzheimers, and any other of a number of the most common ways we finally die, it is really just a game of whack a mole. If you survive one, just wait a few years and another will get you.

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Mar 20, 2021

Thought-detection: AI has infiltrated our last bastion of privacy

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, food, internet, robotics/AI

“Ahsan Noor Khan, a PhD student and first author of the study, said: “We’re now looking to investigate how we could use low-cost existing systems, such as Wi-Fi routers, to detect emotions of a large number of people gathered, for instance in an office or work environment.” Among other things, this could be useful for HR departments to assess how new policies introduced in a meeting are being received, regardless of what the recipients might say. Outside of an office, police could use this technology to look for emotional changes in a crowd that might lead to violence.”


Research from the UK and an update from Elon Musk on human trials at his brain interface company show software is now eating the mind.

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Mar 20, 2021

Strange creatures accidentally discovered beneath Antarctica’s ice shelves

Posted by in category: futurism

Far underneath the ice shelves of the Antarctic, there’s more life than expected, finds a recent study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

Mar 20, 2021

WATCH: Two Moons Appear In Sky Over Dubai, Frightening Confused Residents

Posted by in category: space

Dozens of videos of the bizarre sight were posted to social media by scared citizens unsure of what was going on.

Mar 20, 2021

New Video Shows Beverly Hills Cops Playing Beatles to Trigger Instagram Copyright Filter

Posted by in category: media & arts

In comments to City Council last year about APD’s intellectual property enforcement grant, I warned council that one thing I was concerned about was that APD might try to confiscate/remove activist videos by issuing takedown notices for copyrighted music playing in the background of the videos. Looks like I was right to be worried.


In at least three cases, Beverly Hills Cops have started playing music seemingly to prevent themselves from being filmed by an activist.

Mar 20, 2021

The Case (or Not) for Life in the Venusian Clouds

Posted by in category: alien life

The case (or not) for life in the clouds of Venus, re-evaluated 7 months after the initial claimed detection of phosphine in its atmosphere.


The possible detection of the biomarker of phosphine as reported by Greaves et al. in the Venusian atmosphere stirred much excitement in the astrobiology community. While many in the community are adamant that the environmental conditions in the Venusian atmosphere are too extreme for life to exist, others point to the claimed detection of a convincing biomarker, the conjecture that early Venus was doubtlessly habitable, and any Venusian life might have adapted by natural selection to the harsh conditions in the Venusian clouds after the surface became uninhabitable. Here, I first briefly characterize the environmental conditions in the lower Venusian atmosphere and outline what challenges a biosphere would face to thrive there, and how some of these obstacles for life could possibly have been overcome.

Mar 20, 2021

First collaborative robot to work with vehicles in motion

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

The Ph.D. thesis by Daniel Teso-Fernández de Betoño of the UPV/EHU Faculty of Engineering in Vitoria-Gasteiz has resulted in a mobile, collaborative platform capable of performing tasks in motion at the Mercedes-Benz plant in the capital of Alava. The research opens up a new field for improving the ergonomics of these workstations and for the robot and human to collaborate by performing tasks together.

The idea of collaborative robotics with autonomous navigation to perform screwdriving tasks in motion emerged at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vitoria-Gasteiz. To develop his Ph.D. thesis, Daniel Teso-Fernández de Betoño sought to investigate, develop and implement an adequate, efficient technology within the lines of work, and which would cooperate with the workers.

On the Mercedes-Benz final assembly lines, the vast majority of tasks require manual operations. It is also an area where everything is in motion, which means that not all types of people can opt to work in these spaces.

Mar 19, 2021

Solving ‘barren plateaus’ is the key to quantum machine learning

Posted by in categories: information science, mathematics, quantum physics, robotics/AI

Many machine learning algorithms on quantum computers suffer from the dreaded “barren plateau” of unsolvability, where they run into dead ends on optimization problems. This challenge had been relatively unstudied—until now. Rigorous theoretical work has established theorems that guarantee whether a given machine learning algorithm will work as it scales up on larger computers.

“The work solves a key problem of useability for . We rigorously proved the conditions under which certain architectures of variational quantum algorithms will or will not have barren plateaus as they are scaled up,” said Marco Cerezo, lead author on the paper published in Nature Communications today by a Los Alamos National Laboratory team. Cerezo is a post doc researching at Los Alamos. “With our theorems, you can guarantee that the architecture will be scalable to quantum computers with a large number of qubits.”

“Usually the approach has been to run an optimization and see if it works, and that was leading to fatigue among researchers in the field,” said Patrick Coles, a coauthor of the study. Establishing mathematical theorems and deriving first principles takes the guesswork out of developing algorithms.