Lifeboat Foundation

Economists, investors and medical insurers can’t figure out how to pay for cutting-edge drugs.

By Erika Check Hayden, Nature magazine on June 15, 2016.

Let’s hope it actually works!

Excellent article on iPS. Imagine many of us in our lives have designed or researched and develop new technologies or solutions to solve a specific set of problems or to address a specific set of opportunities; and ended up to our surprise to take in a different direction. This is one of those stories.

Induced pluripotent stem cells were supposed to herald a medical revolution. But ten years after their discovery, they are transforming biological research instead.

Interesting.

Individual cells can repeatedly re-activate unused connections.

There’s a saying among futurists that a human-equivalent artificial intelligence will be our last invention. After that, AIs will be capable of designing virtually anything on their own — including themselves. Here’s how a recursively self-improving AI could transform itself into a superintelligent machine.

When it comes to understanding the potential for artificial intelligence, it’s critical to understand that an AI might eventually be able to modify itself, and that these modifications could allow it to increase its intelligence extremely fast.

Once sophisticated enough, an AI will be able to engage in what’s called “recursive self-improvement.” As an AI becomes smarter and more capable, it will subsequently become better at the task of developing its internal cognitive functions. In turn, these modifications will kickstart a cascading series of improvements, each one making the AI smarter at the task of improving itself. It’s an advantage that we biological humans simply don’t have.

Continue reading “How Artificial Superintelligence Will Give Birth To Itself” »

List of the who’s who are leading some of key bio programs around nextgen bio/ living cell technologies.

According to GEN’s experts, synthetic biology isn’t yet plug-and-play, but cellular processes are being engineered into biosensing systems as well as biologics production. Soon, for tasks from theranostics to regenerative medicine, “there will be a synbio app for that.”

IARPA is hosting a Proposers’ Day for businesses in a couple weeks.

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have found a new way of generating light and other electromagnetic radiation, using a sheet of graphene, a pure two-dimensional form of carbon.

LIGO detects gravitational waves for the second time, from another pair of merging black holes. This time they were smaller and provided a longer-duration signal of their final moments. Two events within four months suggests that such detections will soon be giving astronomers a wealth of new information about previously invisible events in the Universe.