The world’s first commercial fully re-programmable satellite lifted off from French Guiana on Friday on board an Ariane 5 rocket, ushering in a new era of more flexible communications.
Unlike conventional models that are designed and “hard-wired” on Earth and cannot be repurposed once in orbit, the Eutelsat Quantum allows users to tailor the communications to their needs—almost in real-time.
The satellite will be placed in orbit some 36 minutes after the launch.
DeepMind CEO and co-founder. “We believe this work represents the most significant contribution AI has made to advancing the state of scientific knowledge to date. And I think it’s a great illustration and example of the kind of benefits AI can bring to society. We’re just so excited to see what the community is going to do with this.” https://www.futuretimeline.net/images/socialmedia/
AlphaFold is an artificial intelligence (AI) program that uses deep learning to predict the 3D structure of proteins. Developed by DeepMind, a London-based subsidiary of Google, it made headlines in November 2020 when competing in the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP). This worldwide challenge is held every two years by the scientific community and is the most well-known protein modelling benchmark. Participants must “blindly” predict the 3D structures of different proteins, and their computational methods are subsequently compared with real-world laboratory results.
The CASP challenge has been held since 1994 and uses a metric known as the Global Distance Test (GDT), ranging from 0 to 100. Winners in previous years had tended to hover around the 30 to 40 mark, with a score of 90 considered to be equivalent to an experimentally determined result. In 2018, however, the team at DeepMind achieved a median of 58.9 for the GDT and an overall score of 68.5 across all targets, by far the highest of any algorithm.
The longest-lived leaves in the plant kingdom can be found only in the harsh, hyperarid desert that crosses the boundary between southern Angola and northern Namibia. A desert is not, of course, the most hospitable place for living things to grow, let alone leafy greens, but the Namib Desert — the world’s oldest, with parts receiving less than 2 inches of precipitation a year — is where Welwitschia calls home. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times In Afrikaans, the plant is.
“Balancing that, I clearly state that my goal is not longevity, not even modest longevity. It’s just reversal of diseases of aging, which really is classic medicine. Q: Which takes me to the next question: do we even know how to aim at life extension? I don’t think we do. I think if we get serious aging reversal, it’s something that we can continue to improve on, just like we improved on transportation from the first wheel to rocket ships,” I’ll be honest, I disagree as we have some improvement in humans indicated from TRIM and TAME and plasma filtering. Church’s work is very important though.
Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and one of the most prominent geroscientists, George Church works on gene therapies that can potentially reverse age-related diseases. We had the opportunity to interview this prolific researcher and entrepreneur, who is involved in dozens of startups on topics ranging from the current state of gene therapy to his recent attempt to auction off his genome, one of the first sequenced human genomes in the world, as an NFT.
What have been the successes and the failures of gene therapy in recent years? What do you expect to happen in the next few years?
So, most of the big failures of gene therapy happened at the very beginning, around the year 2000, almost two decades ago, when a couple of people died from an LMO2 oncogene, and one person died from an immune reaction to an adenovirus vector. So, that was 20 years ago. Fast forward to now, and gene therapies are mostly succeeding, hundreds of them are in clinical trials, you have dozens that have been approved by the FDA.
“Our study raises the possibility of using therapeutic drugs, gene editing, or other strategies to make epigenetic modifications that tap into the latent regenerative capacity of inner ear cells as a way to restore hearing,” said Segil. “Similar epigenetic modifications may also prove useful in other non-regenerating tissues, such as the retina, kidney, lung, and heart.”
Scientists from the USC Stem Cell laboratory of Neil Segil have identified a natural barrier to the regeneration of the inner ear’s sensory cells, which are lost in hearing and balance disorders. Overcoming this barrier may be a first step in returning inner ear cells to a newborn-like state that’s primed for regeneration, as described in a new study published in Developmental Cell.
“Permanent hearing loss affects more than 60 percent of the population that reaches retirement age,” said Segil, who is a Professor in the Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, and the USC Tina and Rick Caruso Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery. “Our study suggests new gene engineering approaches that could be used to channel some of the same regenerative capability present in embryonic inner ear cells.”
In the inner ear, the hearing organ, which is the cochlea, contains two major types of sensory cells: “hair cells” that have hair-like cellular projections that receive sound vibrations; and so-called “supporting cells” that play important structural and functional roles.
The applications claimed Dabus, which is made up of artificial neural networks, invented an emergency warning light and a type of food container, among other inventions.
Several countries, including Australia, had rejected the applications, stating a human must be named the inventor. The decision by the Australian deputy commissioner of patents in February this year found that although “inventor” was not defined in the Patents Act when it was written in 1991 it would have been understood to mean natural persons – with machines being tools that could be used by inventors.
But in a federal court judgment on Friday, justice Jonathan Beach overturned the decision, and sent the matter back to the commission for reconsideration.
Posted in robotics/AI
We’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.
Posted in futurism
Posted in computing
This post delves into the implementation of my procedural earth simulation, written entirely in GLSL fragment shaders. It simulates the complete history of an earth-like planet in a few minutes, with the simulation updating at 60 frames per second.
