Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have known for a century that viruses attack and sometimes kill bacteria, much the way humans come down with the flu. But only recently have they begun to understand the biochemistry that happens as bacteria and virus strive for competitive advantage, with far-reaching implications for medicine and more.

Researchers explain how viruses make a molecular decoy that is used to subvert the CRISPR-Cas bacterial immune system.

Singapore is intent on positioning itself at the vanguard of self-driving technologies. Now it is looking to ramp things up even further, rolling what it claims to be the world’s first full size, autonomous electric bus onto a university campus in partnership with Volvo.

Is your AI intelligent or just looking like it’s intelligent? In many ways, this depends on your idea of AI and what it is supposed to do. Scientists at Singapore University of Technology and Design have worked out a way to check for the issue. Open Access Journal: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08987-4

Current learning machines have successfully solved hard application problems, reaching high accuracy and displaying seemingly intelligent behavior. Here we apply recent techniques for explaining decisions of state-of-the-art learning machines and analyze various tasks from computer vision and arcade games. This showcases a spectrum of problem-solving behaviors ranging from naive and short-sighted, to well-informed and strategic. We observe that standard performance evaluation metrics can be oblivious to distinguishing these diverse problem solving behaviors. Furthermore, we propose our semi-automated Spectral Relevance Analysis that provides a practically effective way of characterizing and validating the behavior of nonlinear learning machines. This helps to assess whether a learned model indeed delivers reliably for the problem that it was conceived for. Furthermore, our work intends to add a voice of caution to the ongoing excitement about machine intelligence and pledges to evaluate and judge some of these recent successes in a more nuanced manner.

Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it.

A new 50p coin will memorialise Stephen Hawking, who died last year, while paying respect to his groundbreaking research on black holes.

3D printing has revolutionized the fields of healthcare, biomedical engineering, manufacturing and art design.

NEW YORK (AP) — Somewhere in the Midwest, a restaurant is frying foods with oil made from gene-edited soybeans. That’s according to the company making the oil, which says it’s the first commercial use of a gene-edited food in the U.S.

Calyxt said it can’t reveal its first customer for competitive reasons, but CEO Jim Blome said the oil is “in use and being eaten.”

The Minnesota-based company is hoping the announcement will encourage the food industry’s interest in the oil, which it says has no trans fats and a longer shelf life than other soybean oils. Whether demand builds remains to be seen, but the oil’s transition into the food supply signals gene editing’s potential to alter foods without the controversy of conventional GMOs, or genetically modified organisms.

Nature India: All about science in India.

Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees on the #Future: Prospects for #Humanity https://www.singularityweblog.com/martin-rees/ #AI #Singularity #Futurism

Martin Rees has been concerned with our ever-heavier ‘footprint’ on the global environment and with the runaway consequences of our powerful technologies.