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Dec 9, 2019

New Zealand volcano erupts

Posted by in category: futurism

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has confirmed that many people remain unaccounted for after a volcano erupted on an island off the coast. Police say they don’t expect any more survivors.

Dec 9, 2019

Blockchain is not a magic bullet for security. Can we trust it?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, bitcoin, security

Up to 10% of global GDP could be stored on blockchains by 2025, according to the World Economic Forum. From product identifiers, medical records to land registries, academic degrees and insurance contracts, blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are already functioning in many sectors.

What blockchain promises is no less than the technological backbone of the 21st century’s renaissance of the social commons, giving back power to the people. In this century more than ever, power comes from data. Blockchain promises to give control of data back to the people. But this requires one element: trust in the technology, trust that it does what it’s supposed to do.

The paradox here is that blockchain removes the need to trust the intermediary – i.e., notaries, insurers and bankers – by requiring us to trust the technology. But how likely are we to trust the technology if it is breached repeatedly?

Dec 8, 2019

A Harvard geneticist’s goal: to protect humans from viruses, genetic diseases, and aging

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

George Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School is working to make humans immune to all viruses, eliminate genetic diseases and reverse the aging process. Scott Pelley reports on how close the geneticist’s team is to a breakthrough.

Dec 8, 2019

‘Siri, I’m getting pulled over’: A shortcut for iPhones can automatically record the police

Posted by in categories: mobile phones, transportation

A road stretching to more than 80% of the world – russia proposes a superhighway that will take you from europe to the united states!

According to a report in The Siberian Times, Russian Railways president has proposed a plan for a massive trans-Siberian highway.

Dec 8, 2019

The US just sent 10 new scientists to Congress, including an ocean expert, a nurse, and a biochemist. Here’s the full list

Posted by in category: government

The faces of Capitol Hill are changing.

When the 116th Congress heads to Washington in January, there will be a record number of women in the ranks — at least 123, according to the news website Axios, including the first Muslim women, the first Somali-American, and the first Native American women.

There will be more scientists too.

Dec 8, 2019

This AI writes a text adventure while you play it

Posted by in categories: entertainment, robotics/AI

It’s easy to imagine advances in AI will have an impact on strategy games and digital versions of board games like Chess and Go, but one of the most interesting implementations of AI technology I’ve seen so far is a text adventure.

AI Dungeon 2 by Nick Walton uses OpenAI to simulate an old-school text adventure of the Zork variety, only instead of having to read the designer’s mind to figure out what to type to use this thing on that thing, you write plain English and get results. It helps to start sentences with verbs but you’ll get a response to basically anything, and that response is likely to be surprising. I played a wizard exploring a ruin and within a handful of turns I’d found out I was responsible for the state of these ruins and confronted a younger version of myself.

Dec 8, 2019

Can We Live Longer

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

The quest to live longer and healthier is not new. But the concept of reversing aging has recently stunned both the scienftific community and the public in general. Scientists have been able to reverse aging by 2.5 years to some participants in a groundbreaking experiment in the field of age reversal.

World leading scientists in the field of aging like David Sinclair think that aging is the ultimate disease that needs a cure. If scientsits were able to shed 2.5 years to the participants genomic age, the question raises itself, are we going to see an age reversal of a decade or more in the coming years?

Continue reading “Can We Live Longer” »

Dec 8, 2019

Stanford scientists link distinct points of aging to three specific years

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Researchers with Stanford University have published a study revealing that physical aging is not a smooth process, but rather something that happens in what they describe as a ‘herky-jerky trajectory.’ Using blood tests to look at specific proteins, the researchers found that human aging involves three distinct turning points, the first starting in one’s mid-thirties.

Dec 8, 2019

The Universe Remembers Gravitational Waves — And We Can Find Them

Posted by in categories: physics, space

Gravitational waves leave behind a memory — a permanent bend in space-time — as they pass through.

Dec 8, 2019

Does a Breached Blood-Brain Barrier Cause Seizures in AD?

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

In back-to-back papers in the December 4 Science Translational Medicine, scientists led by Daniela Kaufer, University of California, Berkeley, and Alon Friedman, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel, report that age-related cracks in the blood-brain barrier allow an influx of serum protein albumin into the brain, where they activate TGFβ receptors, overexcite neuronal networks, and impair cognition. Breaches correlated with localized slowing of cortical activity in epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease patients, and in mouse models of AD. Called paroxysmal slow-wave events, these activity changes correlated with cognitive impairment and interspersed with seizures in epilepsy patients.