It’s nothing to get too excited or alarmed about, but a robot has passed a modified version of the classic King’s Wise Men Test. It’s another classic case of simulation rather than emulation, but the experiment shows how artificial self-awareness can be programmed into our technology.
There is a whole lot more to innovation than thinking up a great new idea. A new study from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management suggests that when budding entrepreneurs get time off their normal activities to work on other things — dubbed ‘slack’ time — they use it to complete the less exciting jobs needed to bring a novel project to life.
Every 15 seconds, a computer, network, or mobile device is hacked by cyber-terrorists. To combat this problem, Syntek Industries has manufactured data couriers designed from advanced machine robotics. These couriers are known as SYNCS. Syncs are programmed to securely deliver data packages without interruption.
“‘The solution is to have people become better people and use technology for good,’ she said. ‘Texting is dangerous. People text while driving, which leads to accidents, but no one says, ‘Let’s remove texting from cell phones.’” Read more
An interesting paper about Urchins and how some species effectively do not age (like some lobsters) by expressing telomerase.
Note the researcher makes the classic mistake about telomere biology not understanding the correlation between a short lived species which has longer telomeres and one that has negligible senescence and considerably shorter telomeres. The same applies to mice and men, mice have much longer telomeres than us but live about 3 years max.
The frequently made misconception about telomeres is that telomere length defines or causes aging, it does not. An organism’s telomere length has little to do with how long it lives or how fast it ages. People often point out, some animals, such as mice, have long telomeres and a short lifespan, while other animals, such as humans, have much shorter telomeres but longer lifespan.
To clarify, Telomere theory doesn’t suggest that telomere length controls aging, in fact telomere length is irrelevant to aging. It is the change in telomere length that controls cell aging. The key isn’t how long your telomeres are at birth, but how much your telomeres have shortened relative to that starting length. It’s this shortening that changes gene expression.
Changes in telomere lengths from birth to old age in mice and other animals show clearly that telomere shortening – or rather, the way in which shortening telomeres cause changes in gene expression – is a primary driver of aging of the cell and therefore the organism.
Irina Conboy is making some amazing advances in aging and rejuvenation research at Berkley. The Conboy lab has been steadily making progress in regenerative medicine and is potentially a few years from having something viable in terms of regenerative medicine. It would be amazing if the community could get behind a single breakthrough project like Irina is working on and making sure this technology arrives soon.
By using nanopores to read and write DNA, we’re beginning to unlock the mysteries of our own biology! — B.J. Murphy for Serious Wonder.
We’re getting even crisper images of Pluto’s largest moon Charon. NASA just released the first high-resolution photograph of a section of Charon’s surface, zeroing in on a feature that looks like a…
