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Feb 19, 2017

Open Bionics Photo

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, cyborgs, robotics/AI, transhumanism

Team OB just won the Robotics for Good Award in Dubai. Over 1,600 technologies for good applied and after competing against the top 10 best assistive technologies the judges chose our bionic hands! Now we have the funding to push our hands through the final stages of medical testing and finally get them to everyone who needs one.

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Feb 19, 2017

Smartphones are revolutionizing medicine

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, mobile phones

Smartphones are revolutionizing the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses, thanks to add-ons and apps that make their ubiquitous small screens into medical devices, researchers say.

“If you look at the camera, the flash, the microphone… they all are getting better and better,” said Shwetak Patel, engineering professor at the University of Washington.

“In fact the capabilities on those phones are as great as some of the specialized devices,” he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting this week.

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Feb 19, 2017

This new helicopter has completely replaced pilots!

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

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Feb 18, 2017

Graphene-based processors could make your computer fast AF

Posted by in categories: computing, materials

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Feb 18, 2017

Robots that steal human jobs should pay taxes, Gates says

Posted by in categories: employment, law, robotics/AI

Taxation and redistribution.


Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and world’s richest man, said in an interview Friday that robots that steal human jobs should pay their fair share of taxes.

“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social Security tax, all those things,” he said. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

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Feb 18, 2017

George Church indicates reversal of aging will be a reality within ten years

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Church mentioned human trials in 2 years a few months ago. this is the first I have seen him say that in 10 years the reversal of aging will be a reality. That’ll make me 55. Hurry.


While discussing creating a hybrid elephant — wooly mammoth using CRISPR genome editing, Harvard’s George Church predicted that reversal of aging will be a reality within ten years.

Nextbigfuture suspects that this could mean clearly reversing aging in mice cells as a proof in principle in ten years. But evidence suggests Church does mean full and significant aging reversal in humans within ten years. In March of 2016 Church said, aging should be thought of as a program that might be reversed, noting, “If we could take one of my skin cells and turn it into an embryo-like cell and turn it back into a skin cell it has reset almost all of the developmental indications of age. We have 65 gene therapies that are being test in mice and larger animals. If they go well we will go straight into human trials. That could be as little as two years…

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Feb 18, 2017

EmDrive: Chinese space agency to put controversial tech onto satellites ‘as soon as possible’

Posted by in categories: government, quantum physics, satellites

Chinese government confirms it has been funding EmDrive research since 2010 and believes in its benefits.

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Feb 18, 2017

Ask Ethan: How Can I Travel Through Space Without Getting Into Trouble?

Posted by in category: space

We’ve all dreamed about going to space. Here’s how to stay out of trouble when you get back.

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Feb 18, 2017

Artificial Vision, Artificial Retina, Optogenetics, José Alain Sahel MD, CMU RI Seminar

Posted by in categories: aging, bioengineering, bionic, biotech/medical, computing, life extension, neuroscience, robotics/AI

For those interested in life extension and bionic / cyborg type enhancements, this CMU Robotics Institute Seminar gives an overview of the background and current developments in artificial vision. José Alain Sahel MD is a world leading ophthalmologist with a lengthy bio and numerous honors and appointments.

In the future, if you’re going blind, these sight restoration technologies may be used to remediate your vision loss.

Three major ideas are covered. 1) Implanting arrays of tiny 3-color LEDs under a failed retina to stimulate still-okay cells, and 2) using gene therapy to express a novel photoreceptor, borrowed from algae, to restore a form of sight to failed cells. These can be done together. Lots of studies in mice, primates, and humans. Some coverage is also given to 3) directly implanting electronics in the brain to send complete images to vision centers, but this is still at an early stage.

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Feb 18, 2017

DeepMind just published a mind blowing paper: PathNet

Posted by in categories: genetics, robotics/AI

Potentially describing how general artificial intelligence will look like.

Since scientists started building and training neural networks, Transfer Learning has been the main bottleneck. Transfer Learning is the ability of an AI to learn from different tasks and apply its pre-learned knowledge to a completely new task. It is implicit that with this precedent knowledge, the AI will perform better and train faster than de novo neural networks on the new task.

DeepMind is on the path of solving this with PathNet. PathNet is a network of neural networks, trained using both stochastic gradient descent and a genetic selection method.

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