Lifeboat Foundation

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.

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?

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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.

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

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.

The farther away they get, the smaller distant galaxies look. But only up to a point, and then they get magnified. Here’s how.

Not only does the drug reverse dementia, but researchers also believe that it could help the brain recover from concussion and trauma.

Dmitry Kaminskiy speaks as though he were trying to unload everything he knows about the science and economics of longevity—from senolytics research that seeks to stop aging cells from spewing inflammatory proteins and other molecules to the trillion-dollar life extension industry that he and his colleagues are trying to foster—in one sitting.

At the heart of the discussion with Singularity Hub is the idea that artificial intelligence will be the engine that drives breakthroughs in how we approach healthcare and healthy aging—a concept with little traction even just five years ago.

“At that time, it was considered too futuristic that artificial intelligence and data science … might be more accurate compared to any hypothesis of human doctors,” said Kaminskiy, co-founder and managing partner at Deep Knowledge Ventures, an investment firm that is betting big on AI and longevity.

Nuclear physics usually involves high energies, as illustrated by experiments to master controlled nuclear fusion. One of the problems is how to overcome the strong electrical repulsion between atomic nuclei which requires high energies to make them fuse. But fusion could be initiated at lower energies with electromagnetic fields that are generated, for example, by state-of-the-art free electron lasers emitting X-ray light. Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) describe how this could be done in the journal Physical Review C.

During nuclear fusion two atomic nuclei fuse into one new nucleus. In the lab this can be done by particle accelerators, when researchers use fusion reactions to create fast free neutrons for other experiments. On a much larger scale, the idea is to implement controlled fusion of light nuclei to generate power – with the sun acting as the model: its energy is the product of a series of fusion reactions that take place in its interior.

For many years, scientists have been working on strategies for generating power from fusion energy. “On the one hand we are looking at a practically limitless source of power. On the other hand, there are all the many technological hurdles that we want to help surmount through our work,” says Professor Ralf Schützhold, Director of the Department of Theoretical Physics at HZDR, describing the motivation for his research.