Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers and entrepreneurs are starting to ponder how AI could create versions of people after their deaths—not only as static replicas but as evolving digital entities that may steer companies or influence world events.

Experts are exploring ways artificial intelligence might confer a kind of digital immortality, preserving the personalities of the departed in virtual form and then allowing them to evolve.

Astronomers have discovered the smallest yet most massive white dwarf star ever seen.

According to a new study published Thursday in the journal Nature, the “very special” star has a mass greater than that of our sun, all packed into a relatively small body, similar in size to our moon. It formed when two less massive white dwarf stars, which spent their lives as a pair orbiting around each other, collided and merged together.

At the end of their lives, the vast majority of stars become white dwarfs, which are essentially smoldering corpses, in addition to being one of the densest objects in the universe alongside black holes and neutron stars. In about 5 billion years, our sun will become a red giant before ultimately suffering the same fate.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have been feuding publicly for years, but the Tesla chief recently came out in praise of the Amazon boss.

ISIS-Khorasan, the Islamic State branch in Afghanistan, could soon “reconstitute capability,” said the US State Department’s John T. Godfrey.

Nothing now obstructing development of revolutionary computers, key figure says.

A year after University at Buffalo scientists demonstrated that it was possible to produce millions of mature human cells in a mouse embryo, they have published a detailed description of the method so that other laboratories can do it, too.

The ability to produce millions of mature human cells in a living organism, called a chimera, which contains the cells of two species, is critical if the ultimate promise of stem cells to treat or cure human disease is to be realized. But to produce those mature cells, human primed stem cells must be converted back into an earlier, less developed naive state so that the human stem cells can co-develop with the inner cell mass in a mouse blastocyst.

The protocol outlining how to do that has now been published in Nature Protocols by the UB scientists. They were invited to publish it because of the significant interest generated by the team’s initial publication describing their breakthrough last May.

The remains of 182 people in unmarked Indigenous graves were found on the eve of Canada Day.

How does the human brain keep track of the order of events in a sequence?

New research suggests that ‘time cells’ – neurons in the hippocampus thought to represent temporal information – could be the glue that sticks our memories together in the right sequence so that we can properly recall the correct order in which things happened.

Evidence for these kinds of sequence-tracking time cells was previously found in rats, where specific neuron assemblies are thought to support the recollection of events and the planning of action sequences – but less is known about how episodic memory is encoded in the human brain.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in observing a crystal that consists only of electrons. Such Wigner crystals were already predicted almost ninety years ago but could only now be observed directly in a semiconductor material.

Crystals have fascinated people through the ages. Who hasn’t admired the complex patterns of a snowflake at some point, or the perfectly symmetrical surfaces of a rock crystal? The magic doesn’t stop even if one knows that all this results from a simple interplay of attraction and repulsion between atoms and electrons. A team of researchers led by Ataç Imamoğlu, professor at the Institute for Quantum Electronics at ETH Zurich, have now produced a very special crystal. Unlike normal crystals, it consists exclusively of electrons. In doing so, they have confirmed a theoretical prediction that was made almost ninety years ago and which has since been regarded as a kind of holy grail of condensed matter physics. Their results were recently published in the scientific journal Nature.

A decades-old prediction

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