Lifeboat Foundation

Close to 800,000 records from about a dozen plant collections or “herbaria” are being digitized, allowing researchers broad access to data on plant species collected and preserved in past centuries.

A far better approach, then, is the middle course. Rather than prejudge the products of biotechnology, regulators should screen new plants and single out those that might need special monitoring or restrictions. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration does something similar on a voluntary basis for foods made from plants with engineered proteins. Companies submit data about their new products, and if the FDA decides it has no further questions, they can claim their foods are “generally recognized as safe.”

Europe and the U.S. should avoid an all-or-nothing approach to regulating plants made with Crispr.

The ocean cleanup starts in 5 days.

Develops advanced technologies to rid the world’s oceans of plastic. Full-scale deployment will remove 50% of the North Pacific gyre debris in 5 years.

Countries should quickly agree a treaty banning the use of so-called killer robots “before it is too late”, activists said Monday as talks on the issue resumed at the UN.

They say time is running out before weapons are deployed that use lethal force without a human making the final kill-order and have criticised the UN body hosting the talks—the Convention of Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW)—for moving too slowly.

“Killer robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction,” Rasha Abdul Rahim, Amnesty International’s advisor on artificial intelligence and human rights, said in a statement.

Continue reading “Activists urge killer robot ban ‘before it is too late’” »

Findings from the UCLA study could lead to new treatments for patients.

It’s the state’s biggest step yet in the fight against global warming.

In this Viewpoint, Geoffrey Hinton of Google’s Brain Team discusses the basics of neural networks: their underlying data structures, how they can be trained and combined to process complex health data sets, and future prospects for harnessing their unsupervised learning to clinical challenges.

Sound waves rip droplets from a nozzle, “like picking apples from a tree.”

Humanity is terrible at planning for the distant future. If we build advanced artificial intelligence, it might save us from ourselves.