Lifeboat Foundation

DeepMind’s Professor David Silver describes AlphaGo Zero, the latest evolution of AlphaGo, the first computer program to defeat a world champion at the ancient Chinese game of Go. Zero is even more powerful and is arguably the strongest Go player in history.

Previous versions of AlphaGo initially trained on thousands of human amateur and professional games to learn how to play Go. AlphaGo Zero skips this step and learns to play simply by playing games against itself, starting from completely random play. In doing so, it quickly surpassed human level of play and defeated the previously published champion-defeating version of AlphaGo by 100 games to 0.

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DARPA asked robot-developers for a way to let small infantry units deploy swarms of 250 or more robots in urban areas.

CHICAGO — Small RNA molecules originally developed as a tool to study gene function trigger a mechanism hidden in every cell that forces the cell to commit suicide, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study, the first to identify molecules to trigger a fail-safe mechanism that may protect us from cancer.

The mechanism — RNA suicide molecules — can potentially be developed into a novel form of cancer therapy, the study authors said.

Cancer cells treated with the RNA molecules never become resistant to them because they simultaneously eliminate multiple genes that cancer cells need for survival.

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One note, on the stationary of the Imperial Hotel Tokyo, says that “a quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest.” The other, on a blank piece of paper, simply reads: “where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Two notes were given by Einstein to a courier in Tokyo that contain inspirational messages about life.

Should definitely be worked on. Eventually the same stuff could be used to reverse engineer/terraform Venus.

When politicians talk about the Paris Climate Agreement, it’s usually framed in terms of restrictions on emissions for states and businesses. But the Paris Agreement wasn’t just an agreement to regulate — it was also an agreement to innovate. That’s because most experts agree that the world won’t be able to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius, unless there’s a way to physically remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.

A Swiss startup called Climeworks has made that their goal, developing the most advanced carbon-capture technology to date. VICE News went to Switzerland to see how the technology works and hear how the business plans to tackle climate change. Problem is, what Climeworks is doing isn’t cheap.

Continue reading “Sucking CO2 from the atmosphere could save the planet — but it isn’t cheap” »

A research team at MIT has used synthetic biology to create a gene circuit that triggers the immune system to attack cancer when it first detects the signs of the disease.

The circuit works by only activating the immune response when two specific cancer biomarkers are detected. The new study was published in the journal Cell this week and represents an exciting step forward for synthetic biology and cancer research.

This announcement comes just a few days after the UAE announced their UAE 2031 AI strategy, which aims to make the government more efficient and streamlined by relying on AI technologies.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) appears to be leading new trends in government reshuffles, now having introduced its first Minister for Artificial Intelligence.

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D-Wave system shows quantum computers can learn to detect particle signatures in mountains of data, but doesn’t outpace conventional methods — yet.

• By Davide Castelvecchi, Nature on October 22, 2017

How many individuals own at least 1 BTC?

I was asked this question today at Quora, a popular Q&A blog covering a variety of technical and economic disciplines. Under my alias “Ellery”, I am the most viewed author on Bitcoin and the blockchain.

While this question may sound like a good factoid for a trivia game, it is directly related to something with with far reaching impact on your pocketbook and your future. It goes to the heart of a debate between warring factions: In the 2nd half of this answer, I address the eternal question:

Is Bitcoin a pyramid scheme? Or are we still early on the adoption curve?

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