A redesigned Cas9 is thousands of times less likely to target the wrong stretch of DNA while remaining just as efficient as the original version.
I’ve been trying to review and summarize Eliezer Yudkowksy’s recent dialogues on AI safety. Previously in sequence: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents. Now we’re up to Yudkowsky contra Cotra on biological anchors, but before we get there we need to figure out what Cotra’s talking about and what’s going on.
The Open Philanthropy Project (“Open Phil”) is a big effective altruist foundation interested in funding AI safety. It’s got $20 billion, probably the majority of money in the field, so its decisions matter a lot and it’s very invested in getting things right. In 2020, it asked senior researcher Ajeya Cotra to produce a report on when human-level AI would arrive. It says the resulting document is “informal” — but it’s 169 pages long and likely to affect millions of dollars in funding, which some might describe as making it kind of formal. The report finds a 10% chance of “transformative AI” by 2031, a 50% chance by 2052, and an almost 80% chance by 2100.
Eliezer rejects their methodology and expects AI earlier (he doesn’t offer many numbers, but here he gives Bryan Caplan 50–50 odds on 2030, albeit not totally seriously). He made the case in his own very long essay, Biology-Inspired AGI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works, sparking a bunch of arguments and counterarguments and even more long essays.
Google has patented technology that will let users control its smartwatches and earbuds by simply touching their skin.
The patent titled “Skin interface for Wearables: Sensor fusion to improve signal quality” was spotted by folks over at LetsGoDigital. It details tech that users can use to operate wearable devices using skin gestures.
Patent documents show that users can swipe or tap the skin near the wearables in order to control them. The gesture creates a mechanical wave that is picked up by the sensors in the wearables. The “Sensor Fusion” tech then combines this movement data collected from various sensors into an input command for the wearable.
Researchers at NTNU have managed to restore muscle function in older mice with muscle loss using advanced gene therapy. The hope is that this method might eventually be used on humans to prevent severe loss of muscle mass.
“Gene therapy is the most effective method to be able to give these people the same health benefits you normally get with physical exercise,” says Moreira, who has been involved in the new research. He is part of the Cardiac Exercise Research Group (CERG).
With age comes experience. And with experience come sore backs, tired bones, and increased risks from a large number of diseases.
Scientists have long been trying figure out how to stop these aches and pains in our twilight years, and to make us live longer and healthier lives at the same time.
While it’s likely a long way off from being ready for humans, a new study investigating the long-term ‘partial reprogramming’ of cells in mice appears to have produced some very intriguing results.
Circa 2014
New research on nanoparticles shows that they could be used to encode information when suspended in a liquid. This could one day allow us to store vast amounts of data in a very small volume of “digital colloid.”
Circa 2015
Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash and his students have developed a synchronous computer that operates using the unique physics of moving water droplets.
Continue reading “Stanford engineers develop computer that operates on water droplets” »
Adult cells in our body can only give rise to the same cell type. For example, a skin cell cannot give rise to a muscle cell but to skin cells only. This limits the potential use of adult cells for therapy. During early development, however, the cells in the embryo have the capacity to generate all cell types of our body, including stem cells. This capacity, which is called totipotency, has served as an inspiration for researchers to find new ways to recapitulate totipotency through cellular reprogramming in the lab.
Totipotent cells have their own speed
Totipotent cells have many properties, but we do not know all of them yet. Researchers at Helmholtz Munich have now made a new discovery: “We found out that in totipotent cells, the mother cells of stem cells, DNA replication occurs at a different pace compared to other more differentiated cells. It is much slower than in any other cell type we studied,” says Tsunetoshi Nakatani, first-author of the new study.
Researchers have restored muscle function in research animals with gene therapy. The approach could someday lead to new treatment methods in the elderly.
A team of researchers from Monash University’s Faculty of Engineering have redesigned the heart of a lithium-sulfur battery, creating a new interlayer that allows for exceptionally fast lithium transfer, as well as an improvement in the performance and lifetime of the batteries.
Continue reading “Australian researchers announce lithium-sulfur battery breakthrough” »
