On January 20th Google’s DeepMind division, the division behind a myriad of artificial intelligence (AI) firsts, quietly submitted a paper on Arxiv entitled “PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks” that mostly went unnoticed.
The cryonics debate explained, plus new issues in waking the dead. Would cryonics customers even be welcomed in the future?
The Life Extension Advocacy Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting healthy longevity and aging research through crowdfunding and advocacy initiatives, is hosting its second annual scientific conference, Ending Age-Related Diseases: Investment Prospects and Advances in Research, at the Cooper Union in New York City on July 11th-12th.
The goal of this conference is to promote collaboration between academia, biotech companies, investors, regulators, public health advocates, and doctors in order to foster the creation of interventions to relieve our aging society from the burden of age-related diseases. It is supported by Genome Protection Inc., which is developing therapies to counteract harmful viral elements in our genome that provoke chronic inflammation, and Icaria Life Sciences Inc., which provides contract research in the field of geroscience.
The morbidity from chronic age-related diseases is increasing proportionally to the aging of the global population, representing a challenge to social protection and healthcare systems around the world. The development of next-generation drugs and therapies that could directly target the processes of aging to more effectively prevent and cure age-related diseases has now become a priority, yet the industry is clearly facing unique financial, development, and regulatory bottlenecks.
The rabbit-sized heart was made from a patient’s own cells and tissues, using techniques that could help to increase the rate of successful heart transplants in future.
How it worked: A biopsy of tissue was taken from patients, and then its materials were separated. Some molecules, including collagen and glycoproteins, were processed into a hydrogel, which became the printing “ink.” Once the hydrogel was mixed with stem cells from the tissue, the researchers from Tel Aviv University were able to create a patient-specific heart that included blood vessels. The idea is that such a heart would be less likely to be rejected when transplanted. The study was published in the journal Advanced Science.
Let it flow: Until now, researchers have only been able to print simple tissues lacking blood vessels, according to the Jerusalem Post.
The discovery that apparently dead cells can sometimes resurrect themselves has researchers exploring how far they can push the point of no return.
Summary: Gene therapy can restore the structure of the retina and regain normal light responses. Source: SfNFollowing gene therapy, the retina can restructure itself and regain normal light res.
Despite their names, artificial intelligence technologies and their component systems, such as artificial neural networks, don’t have much to do with real brain science. I’m a professor of bioengineering and neurosciences interested in understanding how the brain works as a system – and how we can use that knowledge to design and engineer new machine learning models.
In recent decades, brain researchers have learned a huge amount about the physical connections in the brain and about how the nervous system routes information and processes it. But there is still a vast amount yet to be discovered.
At the same time, computer algorithms, software and hardware advances have brought machine learning to previously unimagined levels of achievement. I and other researchers in the field, including a number of its leaders, have a growing sense that finding out more about how the brain processes information could help programmers translate the concepts of thinking from the wet and squishy world of biology into all-new forms of machine learning in the digital world.
LOWELL, Mass. – Eggshells can enhance the growth of new, strong bones needed in medical procedures, a team of UMass Lowell researchers has discovered.
Artificial neural networks were created to imitate processes in our brains, and in many respects – such as performing the quick, complex calculations necessary to win strategic games such as chess and Go – they’ve already surpassed us. But if you’ve ever clicked through a CAPTCHA test online to prove you’re human, you know that our visual cortex still reigns supreme over its artificial imitators (for now, at least). So if schooling world chess champions has become a breeze, what’s so hard about, say, positively identifying a handwritten ‘9’? This explainer from the US YouTuber Grant Sanderson, who creates maths videos under the moniker 3Blue1Brown, works from a program designed to identify handwritten variations of each of the 10 Arabic numerals (0−9) to detail the basics of how artificial neural networks operate. It’s a handy crash-course – and one that will almost certainly make you appreciate the extraordinary amount of work your brain does to accomplish what might seem like simple tasks.
Video by 3Blue1Brown
The work of a sleepwalking artist offers a glimpse into the fertile slumbering brain.
