The scientists who developed the revolutionary gene-editing system known as CRISPR are improving it with new tools that make it work better.
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David Wood at TransVision
Posted in futurism
Over the last decade, military theorists and authors in the fields of future warfare and strategy have examined in detail the potential impacts of an ongoing revolution in information technology. There has been a particular focus on the impacts of automation and artificial intelligence on military and national security affairs. This attention on silicon-based disruption has nonetheless meant that sufficient attention may not have been paid to other equally profound technological developments. One of those developments is the field of biotechnology.
There have been some breathtaking achievements in the biological realm over the last decade. Human genome sequencing has progressed from a multi-year and multi-billion dollar undertaking to a much cheaper and quicker process, far outstripping Moore’s Law. Just as those concerned with national security affairs must monitor disruptive silicon-based technologies, leaders must also be literate in the key biological issues likely to impact the future security of nations. One of the most significant matters in biotechnology is that of human augmentation and whether nations should augment military personnel to stay at the leading edge of capability.
Military institutions will continue to seek competitive advantage over potential adversaries. While this is most obvious in the procurement of advanced platforms, human biotechnological advancement is gaining more attention. As a 2017 CSIS report on the Third Offset found most new technological advances will provide only a temporary advantage, assessed to be no more than five years. In this environment, some military institutions may view the newer field of human augmentation as a more significant source of a future competitive edge.
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Commentary
The crime scene was straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. One hundred and fifty dead birds lay sprawled on the ground, fallen out of trees in a park in The Hague, The Netherlands.
The second such occurrence last autumn made Dutch citizens look up and wonder. With robust starlings turned upside-down at their feet, the usual suspects of disease, pollution, and foul play were dismissed.
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When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we contemplate new kinds of advertising products.”
And, for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names and other personally identifiable information Google has collected from Gmail and its other login accounts.
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If I were to make a prediction, I’d think there’s a good chance that it is not batteries. But capacitors.”
Today he may be making good on his prediction. The electric vehicle manufacturer confirmed that it has acquired a small San Diego lab that owns ultracapacitor patents and technology.
Maxwell Technologies provides dry electrode manufacturing technology that can be used to make to make batteries that power electric vehicles and renewable energy systems. The company announced that in an all-stock transaction it will merge and become a wholly owned by a subsidiary of Tesla.
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It’s even more fascinating than we thought.
The Milky Way looks nothing like the flat space pancake it is usually depicted as. The newly-created and most accurate 3D map of our galaxy reveals that it’s warped and twisted, and even more fascinating.
A group of astronomers from Australia and China have built their “intuitive and accurate three-dimensional picture” by mapping the so-called “classical Cepheids.”
Burning their fuel quickly, those pulsating stars that live fast and die young are 100,000 times brighter than the Sun. The combination of their pulsation periods and known luminosity allowed the scientists to determine their location with the high accuracy of between 3 to 5 percent.
Now with its cover in place, our NASA InSight lander will collect accurate data despite wind and temperature changes on the Red Planet: https://go.nasa.gov/2St6gUj
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US$190 million in investors’ money has been locked since Cotten died in December. His widow says she doesn’t know his passwords.
About US$190 million in cryptocurrency has been locked away in a online black hole after the founder of a currency exchange died, apparently taking his encrypted access to their money with him.
Investors in QuadrigaCX, Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, have been unable to access their funds since its founder, Gerald Cotten, died last year.
AI may quickly point out a corrupt official, but it is not very good at explaining the process it has gone through to reach such a conclusion.
“We just use the machine’s result as reference,” Zhang Yi, an official in a province that’s still using the software, told the SCMP. “We need to check and verify its validity. The machine cannot pick up the phone and call the person with a problem. The final decision is always made by humans.”
Algorithmic Justice
Though corruption in China is reportedly widespread, officials are probably right to be suspicious of a black box algorithm that can bring down the hammer of justice without explaining its reasoning.