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May 15, 2019

Latest Data on Evobrutinib, New MS Therapy Targeting B Cells

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Further data from the phase 2 trial of show a significant reduction in enhancing MRI lesions with one of the doses tested but increases in liver enzymes may be an issue.

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May 15, 2019

Jeff Bezos foresees a trillion people living in millions of space colonies. Here’s what he’s doing to get the ball rolling

Posted by in category: space

The billionaire tycoon’s ideas draw from the vision of physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, who pioneered concepts for space settlements in the 1970s.

Physicist Gerard K. O’Neill proposed a space settlement design based on giant cylinders. Rick Guidice / NASA.

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May 15, 2019

Quantum sunlight experiment could shed light on stellar astrophysics

Posted by in category: quantum physics

Solar photons pair-up with light from a quantum dot in a “highly non-classical” manner.

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May 15, 2019

Scientists Say They’ve Created a Smartphone App That Can Hear Ear Infections

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health, mobile phones

Wondering if your kid is dealing with an ear infection? Soon, according to researchers at the University of Washington, there’ll be an app for that. They claim to have created a simple test that uses a smartphone and folded up paper to detect one of the telltale signs of infection—fluid in the ears—with about the same or greater accuracy as a doctor.

Ear infections are one of the first health problems people tend to experience. By the age of three, most everyone has had at least one ear infection. These infections often cause fluid build-up in the ear, as can another condition called otitis media with effusion (OME). But though most infections or cases of OME go away on their own, too much or chronic fluid can cause pain or even severe complications like hearing loss.

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May 15, 2019

Come to Our Conference at a Special Price!

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

We’re offering a few discounted tickets to our conference, Ending Age-Related Diseases 2019, in order to celebrate the 174th birthday of Élie Metchnikoff, the father of gerontology. We’re selling these tickets at the previous early bird price of $350 instead of the current $400!

This special, lower-price offer is valid from May 15, Noon EDT to May 17, Noon EDT, so this is the ideal time to guarantee your place at this exciting event. Prices will also be rising to $500 from June 10th onwards as we draw closer to the conference.

You can get your discounted ticket by visiting our Eventbrite page and using the discount code Metchnikoff.

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May 15, 2019

The Thesis on Consciousness and Experiential Realism: Digital Philosophy Perspective

Posted by in categories: alien life, computing, information science, quantum physics

A radically new view articulated now by a number of digital philosophers is that consciousness, quantum computational and non-local in nature, is resolutely computational, and yet, has some “non-computable” properties. Consider this: English language has 26 letters and about 1 million words, so how many books could be possibly written in English? If you are to build a hypothetical computer containing all mass and energy of our Universe and ask it this question, the ultimate computer wouldn’t be able to compute the exact number of all possible combinations of words into meaningful story-lines in billions of years! Another example of non-computability of combinatorics: if you are to be born and live your own life again and again in our Quantum Multiverse, you could live googolplex (10100) lives, but they all would be somewhat different — some of them drastically different from the life you’re living right now, some only slightly — never quite the same, and timeline-indeterminate.

Another kind of non-computability is akin to fuzzy logic but based on pattern recognition. Deeper understanding refers to a situation when a conscious agent gets to perceive numerous patterns in complex environments and analyze that complexity from the multitude of perspectives. That is beautifully encapsulated by Isaiah Berlin’s quote: “To understand is to perceive patterns.” The ability to recognize patterns in chaos is not straightforwardly algorithmic but rather meta-algorithmic and yet, I’d argue, deeply computational. The types of non-computability that I just described may somehow relate to the non-computable element of quantum consciousness to which Penrose refers in his work.

Picture

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May 15, 2019

AUDI’s new electric car will have autonomous vehicle capability and a roof that holds real plants

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

Apart from the AI tech implemented to take most of the effort out of driving in general, the AI: ME autonomous vehicle is completely electric and holds plants.

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May 15, 2019

Anatomy of a living, tree-based spaceship

Posted by in category: space travel

I’ve always liked living spaceships, but it seems to me that the animal kingdom would make far inferior spaceships to the plant kingdom. With that in mind, what does this tree-ship have to be made from to:

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May 15, 2019

Ask Anything: Could You Build A Spaceship Out Of Wood?

Posted by in category: space travel

Illustrations by Jason Schneider

“In terms of strength, wood is pretty good,” says Mike Gruntman, professor of astronautics at the University of Southern California. Early airplanes were built with wood, all the way into the early 1930s. (There were also wooden submarines.) Gruntman thinks it may be possible to build a wooden spacecraft that could survive the stress of a rocket launch.

Once your timber ship made it into space, however, you’d have a lot of problems. For starters, the organic matter would contain a fair amount of water. In a vacuum, that water would leak out and evaporate, which could affect the structure—especially in places where screws and brackets were attached. Even if this process unfolded over many weeks or months, the integrity of the spacecraft might be compromised.

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May 15, 2019

A Massive ‘Blob’ of Rock Stretching Under Asia Might Be Triggering Hundreds of Earthquakes

Posted by in category: futurism

Ummmm… o„o.


A massive, underground “blob” of dripping continental crust might be triggering hundreds of mysterious earthquakes in the Hindu Kush mountains.

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