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Experience high-res #science in first #8K ultra high definition (UHD) video from the International Space Station. Get closer to the in-space experience and see how human spaceflight is improving lives on Earth, while enabling humanity to explore the universe. Watch and download: 🚀🔬🌟🎥.

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A thought experiment to see whether life extension might contribute to your happiness.


Today, we’re going to engage in a thought experiment. We’re going to imagine a world with some sort of antechamber to life in which you hang around as some sort of disembodied entity before you are born. (Some people actually believe in something like that, but we won’t go there; it’s just a thought experiment.)

The Choice to Be Born

Let’s suppose that, as a disembodied soul, you have a somewhat human outlook on things: you want to enjoy new experiences, avoid unpleasant circumstances, and so forth. Let us further suppose that you have a choice over being born or not and that someone comes along and tries to get you sold on the idea of being born. Neither of you can predict the future and know exactly how good or bad a life you would have, but you do know the gist of it—what stages you need to go through, what issues may manifest, etc.

Now in a new paper, published in Psychological Science, Martin Maier and Rasha Abdel Rahman at the Humboldt University of Berlin report that by affecting visual processing at an early stage, such linguistic differences can even determine whether someone will see a coloured shape – or they won’t. “Our native language is thus one of the forces that determine what we consciously perceive,” they write.


The wavelengths of light that we perceive as colours form a smooth continuum, but crucially, the colour categories that people use to divide up this spectrum vary between languages. Maier and Abdel-Rahman studied native Greek-, Russian- and German-speakers for whom these categories differ.

In both Greek and Russian, there is a dedicated category-word for “light blue” and another for “dark blue” but no specific word for “blue” as a broader category. In German (as in English), people can use qualifiers to refer to “light blue”, “navy blue” or “sky blue”, and so on, but there are no dedicated category words for these shades. On the other hand, in German (also as in English) there is a dedicated word “blue” (blau in German) to cover all the shades of blue. However, Russian, Greek and German alike have a dedicated category word for referring to all shades of “green”, just as we do in English.

Earlier work already showed that having a category term for something – whether it’s an object or a colour – speeds up a person’s ability to identify that item among a host of others. Russian-speakers are faster at discriminating between light and dark blue colour patches than English-speakers, for example. Maier and Abdel-Rahman wanted to go further and see whether linguistic colour categories would influence the likelihood of speakers of different languages becoming conscious of something at all.

…but Our Timelines Are Too Rosy I would actually welcome a correction in public opinion about what AI can and cannot do. This has happened to me multiple times, where I would listen to a CEO on stage make an announcement about what their company is doing with AI, and then 20 minutes later I’d talk to one of their engineers, and they’d say, “No, we’re not doing that, and we have no idea how to do it.” I think it still takes judgment to know what is and what isn’t possible with AI, and when the C-suite does not yet have that judgment it’s possible for companies to make promises very publicly that are just not feasible. Frankly, we see some of this in the self-driving space. Multiple auto [original equipment manufacturer] CEOs have promised self-driving car roadmaps that their own engineers think are unrealistic. I feel [CEOs are] being sincere but just not really understanding what can be done in a certain timeframe.


The co-founder of Google’s deep-learning research team on the promise of a conditional basic income, the need for a skills-based education system and what CEOs don’t understand about artificial intelligence.

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Stem cell research firm Celprogen Inc. has been working on something quite exciting for some time now, which has remained largely under the radar until very recently. The California-based company announced it has successfully 3D printed a human brain organelle using brain stem cells. The bioprinted brain could have applications in studying neurological diseases.

More than just announcing the bioprinted brain organelle, Celprogen has also used the brain to study the “role of Microglia activation and deactivation in neurological diseases.” Through this research and experimentation, the company says it has identified and characterized 11 lead compounds that could be potential drug candidates for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Glioblastoma.

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