To understand where climate change is heading, we have to look at the planet’s distant past and appreciate the disturbing uniqueness of our situation, says Bill McGuire
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Kevin Warwick: Be/Come the Cy/Borg
In February 2011, IBM’s Watson had just beaten two human champions at Jeopardy, and most people filed it under party trick.
A few days later, I sat down with Prof. Kevin Warwick for the second time. He had already run a wire into the median nerve of his own left arm and sent a signal from his nervous system straight into his wife’s. The press called him an eccentric. A few of his colleagues used a less generous word.
So I asked him where the line between genius and madness actually sits. We also got into the magnetic implants and sensory substitution devices his students were building, the trouble his rat-brain-cell robot kept running into, and why Alan Turing was owed far more than Britain ever gave him.
Fifteen years on, #BCI implants have moved from stunt to clinical trial, #AI writes the code that writes the code, and the open question is no longer whether we merge with our machines. It is on whose terms, and who gets a vote.
Kevin’s answer back in 2011 was three words: be/come the #cyborg.
Prophecy or warning? Watch it and tell me which one you hear.
AI-powered system offers unprecedented insight into the forces shaping Earth’s climate
The world’s oceans may appear calm from space, but beneath the surface, an intricate web of fast-moving currents drives Earth’s climate. Now, a new study led by Tel Aviv University has unveiled a breakthrough that allows scientists to observe these hidden motions with unprecedented clarity.
The researchers developed GOFLOW, an artificial intelligence-powered system that can reconstruct high-resolution ocean current patterns directly from satellite images. The technology provides scientists with an entirely new way to study the small-scale ocean dynamics that influence weather, climate change and the exchange of heat and gases between the ocean and atmosphere.
The study was led by Roy Barkan, a professor, physical oceanographer and fluid dynamics expert in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Geophysics at the Faculty of Exact Sciences. The research was conducted in collaboration with scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCLA and the University of Rhode Island, and published in Nature Geoscience.
Chemotherapy leaves detectable DNA fingerprints in childhood tumors within 18 months
Nearly half of childhood tumors treated with common types of chemotherapy showed detectable DNA changes linked to treatment within 18 months, according to a new international study led by The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids). Researchers say these changes could eventually help clinicians spot treatment resistance earlier, before cancer returns or spreads, opening the door to more precise use of chemotherapy.
For their study published in Nature, researchers analyzed more than 600 tumors from 544 patients in Canada, Australia and the United States. By combining whole-genome sequencing with detailed medical records and advanced computational methods developed at SickKids, the team found distinct genomic signatures of DNA changes left behind by different chemotherapies. Some of these patterns appeared as early as 91 days after treatment began.
“There’s a long-standing belief that pediatric cancers are genetically quiet because they haven’t had much time to mutate,” says lead author Dr. Adam Shlien, senior scientist, Genetics & Genome Biology, and a lab director in Genome Diagnostics at SickKids. “Instead, it was mind-blowing to see how many mutations found in tumors that had relapsed or spread were linked to the chemotherapy used to treat the cancer in the first place.”
