Nothing to see here, except a genius scientist in a gorilla suit, chasing another genius scientist around in a billion dollar orbital lab.
This robot + AI is meant to give users the bad news in a gentle way. It’s sense of timing may be off though. 😃
User Testing
In a test with 12 students, Irony Man was deemed more likable than conventional robots. But Irony Man’s inability to know when to use irony could backfire.
“The robot is not yet able to determine whether and when there is a good moment to employ irony,” André said. “It may happen that the robot generates a funny utterance, but the user is irritated.”
😃 Well, at least fossil-fuel emissions went down.
Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuel and industry are expected to drop by 7% in 2020, new analysis shows, as economies around the world feel the effects of Covid-19 lockdowns.
The latest estimates from the Global Carbon Project (GCP) suggest that these emissions will clock in at 34bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) this year – a fall of 2.4GtCO2 compared to 2019.
This annual decline is the largest absolute drop in emissions ever recorded, the researchers say, and the largest relative fall since the second world war.
The article describes how a college student was able to use GPT-3 to write articles for him. And it seems very few thought that these articles were AI generated. 😃
He notes that the barrier to entry is very easy. And you can make a lot of clickbait articles form them. Some people also note that it can be weaponized for misinformation.
“It was super easy actually,” he says, “which was the scary part.”
A former independent presidential hopeful is vexed at the COVID-19 vaccine at the moment, and for multiple reasons. That would be Zoltan Istvan, a self-described transhumanist candidate who was billed as the “cyborg who is running against President Trump” in press reports throughout 2020. The California hopeful — who ran in the Republican primary — based his campaign on a futuristic message of fusing radical technology with daily life under the motto “Upgrade America.”
Mr. Istvan recently looked into how long it would be before he got a COVID-19 vaccine.
“I took the New York Times’ ‘Find your Place’ in the vaccine line report, and I was near the bottom 15% of the timeline for getting the vaccine — meaning I’ll be nearly last,” Mr. Istvan wrote in an email to Inside the Beltway.
The shroud over P2P firms has fallen, with China’s banking regulator announcing last month that it had shut down all such platforms. However, the financial time bomb is far from being defused for millions of families who invested billions of yuan, and a very real concern exists that mishandling the situation could lead to social unrest.
The shroud over peer-to-peer lending firms has fallen, and China’s banking regulator says all such platforms across the country have ceased operations – but countless billions are already feared lost.
Eco-friendly even in outer space. 🛰️
A Japanese forestry firm has partnered with Kyoto University in what would be a world first.
Studies financed
Posted in biotech/medical, life extension
Hello rejuvenation friends! Did you know that Heales, the Belgian entity led by Didier Coeurnelle, is financing two very interesting experiments with the great rejuvenation scientists Harold Katcher and Rodolfo Goya in order to test if Elixir (in the case of Katcher) and plasma of young rats (in the case of Goya) are capable to considerably extend the lifespan of rats? Today I found out on Google that six days ago, Didier published this article in Heales website: https://heales.org/wp-content/plugins/multisite-language-switcher/flags/. In the article, Didier explains in depth both experiments, and put the links to the detailed protocol of the experiments, in two Word files. It’s incredible the power of the collaboration of people who are enthusiastic of rejuvenation science, such as Didier, Harold and Rodolfo. I don’t know if the experiment will extend considerably the rats lives, but it seems that these two experiments deserve a close look from the rejuvenation field.
Today, in spite of the gigantic progress in medicine and research, we still do not know how to be healthy beyond about 85 years of age.
New methods enable scientists at IST Austria to take a look at the innermost of cells: High-resolution images of deep-frozen cells show structures that previously could only be guessed at.
The cells in our body are in motion. Some migrate from A to B to heal wounds or fight pathogens. They do so with the help of small “feet” at the leading edge of migrating cells, so-called lamellipodia. These thin extensions are pushed forward and bind to the surface while the rest of the cell is pulled along. Inside these feet is a dense network of interwoven protein threads, called actin filaments, which form the cell’s cytoskeleton. So far, it was unclear how the Arp2/3 complex, an assembly of seven proteins central for cell motility, sprouts off new actin filaments from pre-existing ones and thus generates dense, branched networks providing the required protrusive forces to the cell.
Until now, scientists had to decide when they wanted to analyze the structure of the Arp2/3 complex: One option was to study it in isolation, where the protein complex is in an inactive conformation and hence does not allow understanding of how the network is formed. In order to become fully activated, however, the Arp2/3 complex needs to be bound to actin filaments. This requires using a method called electron tomography, which comes at the cost of considerably lower resolution. “Previous electron tomography data of Arp2/3 complexes bound to actin filaments in a test-tube environment was too imprecise, making it impossible to unambiguously tell where the individual elements of the complex must be located,” explains Florian Fäßler, a postdoc in the group of IST Austria professor Florian Schur.
Scientists have just set a new world record for high-temperature sustained plasma with the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device, reaching an ion temperature of above 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) for a period of 20 seconds.
Known as Korea’s “artificial sun”, the KSTAR uses magnetic fields to generate and stabilise ultra-hot plasma, with the ultimate aim of making nuclear fusion power a reality – a potentially unlimited source of clean energy that could transform the way we power our lives, if we can get it to work as intended.
Before this point, 100 million degrees hadn’t been breached for more than 10 seconds, so it’s a substantial improvement on previous efforts – even if there’s still a long way to go before we can completely ditch other sources of energy. At this point, nuclear fusion power remains a possibility, not a certainty.