Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biological

Advancing synthetic cells: A more flexible system to replicate cellular functions

Creating artificial systems that mimic the functioning of cells is one of the goals of what is known as synthetic biology. These models, known as synthetic or biomimetic cells, allow some of the basic processes of life to be reproduced in the laboratory to better understand how natural cells work and develop new technologies. In this context, a study involving a team of researchers from the Center for Research in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Materials (CiQUS) of the University of Santiago (USC) proposes a more flexible chemical strategy to create this type of system.

The objective, explain the researchers, is to design structures that mimic certain cellular functions and that can be used as small chemical reactors. The study is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

“The idea is to try to replicate cellular functions at the level of encapsulation of communication enzymes,” explains researcher Lucas García, referring to artificial systems capable of recreating processes that in real cells allow, for example, different reactions to take place within the same compartment.

Alignment during conversations is highly situation-dependent, study finds

When people are talking, they can start to unconsciously mirror each other, for instance, in the words they use, their sentence structures and even hand gestures. This tendency to mirror others can lead to smoother conversations, while also fostering empathy and collaboration.

Past studies found that alignment can vary from person to person and that some individuals are more prone to mirroring others while they are interacting with them. However, earlier research did not conclusively establish whether alignment is a stable trait or if it varies based on situation-related factors.

Researchers at Aarhus University recently set out to address this unanswered question by analyzing large collections of recorded conversations used in linguistics research. The findings of their study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, suggest that alignment is not a fixed trait, as the extent to which people mirror others varies greatly across different situations.

The Race to Harness Quantum Computing’s Mind-Bending Power | The Future With Hannah Fry

Get “The AI Career Survival Guide” here: https://technomics.gumroad.com/l/ai-survival-guide.
What happens when human labor becomes mathematically obsolete? For thousands of years, the global economy has run on the biological engine of human workers. But a new era has arrived: The Physical Singularity.
In this video, we break down the brutal thermodynamics of the labor inversion, revealing how major AI companies are mass-producing humanoid robots that operate for just 57 cents an hour. We expose the massive industry shift from digital generation to “World Models,” and how China’s manufacturing miracle is driving hardware costs to zero. With 10 billion robots projected by the 2040s, experts like Geoffrey Hinton are warning of a hive-mind “alien intelligence.” The digital era is over. The physical agent era has begun.
Welcome to Technomics. If you want to stay ahead of the curve and understand the real impact of the AI revolution, hit that subscribe button.
Sources & Research Links:
The 57¢ / Hour Labor Inversion Math: https://www.ark-invest.com/articles/valuation-models/ark-pub…oid-robots.
Unitree G1 Official $16,000 Pricing: https://www.unitree.com/g1/
China’s 2024 Robotics Dominance (IFR Report): https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/china-dominates-industrial-robot-market.
Elon Musk’s 10 Billion Robot Prediction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODsjGOGX_oM
Geoffrey Hinton on AI Hive Mind (“Immortality, but it’s not for us”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpoRO378qRY
Geordie Rose on Alien Intelligence (“The same way you don’t care about an ant”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pd4i2YlGmc.
DeepSeek AI Cost Efficiency Breakthroughs: https://www.deepseek.com/
Timestamps:
00;00 — The 57¢ Workforce & The Great Deception.
02;48 — The Math of the Labor Inversion.
05;01 — Why OpenAI Killed Sora (World Models)
09;16 — The Manufacturing Miracle: China’s Hardware Collapse.
12;53 — 10 Billion Robots & Alien Intelligence.
15;58 — How to Survive the Singularity.
Disclaimer:
The content in this video is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. The views and opinions expressed in this video are based on current research and industry trends, which are subject to rapid change. We do not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the projections discussed. Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research.
#PhysicalSingularity #HumanoidRobots #ArtificialIntelligence #OpenAI #FutureOfWork #TechTrends

Read more

Studies on animal minds suggest consciousness is not computation

We’re often seduced by the idea that the mind is a computer, and that consciousness is just a matter of running the right code. But philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith, renowned for his work on octopus minds, disagrees. Fresh research into animal minds—from bees to jellyfish—suggests that consciousness arises not from software but from electrical oscillations moving rhythmically across cell membranes in living brains. And those oscillations, Godfrey-Smith argues, are unlikely to be reproducible in artificial hardware. Perhaps, then, only living brains can truly be conscious.

Late in the previous century, there seemed to be good reasons to think that the physical make-up of a system could not matter much to whether that system had a mind. The organization of the system is what matters, people thought, and physically different systems can be organized the same way. As a result, artificial minds making use of ordinary computer hardware should be possible. This whole discussion was hypothetical, because there weren’t any convincing possible cases of artificial minds to worry about.

Since then, two things have happened. From around 2022, we’ve been confronted with candidates for artificial minds that are disturbingly impressive. These are the LLM systems, such as ChatGPT. But reasons have emerged to doubt that the physical make-up of a system is irrelevant and minds are “substrate independent.” A view sometimes called biological naturalism holds that the biological details of nervous systems might make a difference to whether a physical system has a mind. (The term was coined, with this sense at least, by John Searle.) But if nervous systems and brains are special, what is it that makes them special?

New memristor design uses built-in oxygen gradient to bring stability to reinforcement learning

In a recent study published in Nature Communications, researchers created a memristor that uses a built-in oxygen gradient to produce slow, stable conductance changes, enabling a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to learn faster and more stably than conventional approaches.

Reinforcement learning stands as one of the most promising ways to achieve continual learning in AI. The idea is to replicate how biological systems acquire and adapt knowledge slowly over time. The brain achieves this via ion gradients that regulate slow, directional signaling across cell membranes. Replicating this in hardware is a key goal of neuromorphic computing.

With their ability to mimic synaptic behavior, memristors have long been considered strong candidates for this. However, most existing devices suffer from unpredictable, abrupt conductance changes, making sustained and stable learning difficult.

Earth’s 40,000-year tilt cycle links Antarctic ice growth to subtropical productivity

Cycles in the growth and decay of Antarctica’s ice sheets once shaped marine biological productivity thousands of miles away in the subtropical ocean, according to new research led by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the obliquity cycle—a 40,000-year astronomical cycle tied to changes in Earth’s axial tilt—influenced ocean productivity in subtropical latitudes about 34 million years ago, when the Antarctic ice sheet was first expanding.

The finding surprised researchers because the 40,000-year cycle, while an important factor in the conditions at Earth’s poles, typically has a more limited influence on climate and ocean conditions near the equator.

“We generally expect other astronomical cycles to have a greater influence,” says Stephen Meyers, a professor of geoscience at UW-Madison and one of the study’s lead authors.

Hidden features in X-rays could radically change how we measure and understand them

Hidden features uncovered in X-ray signals are set to overturn a key scientific theory and fundamentally change how X-rays are interpreted across fields of physics, chemistry, biology and materials science, new research reveals. Researchers say the discovery can help scientists measure X-rays more precisely and reliably, and improve our understanding of common materials, from battery materials to biological proteins.

X-ray science focuses on the unique energy signatures of atoms. These include the specific X-rays emitted when electrons transition into inner shells—the strongest of which are known as K-alpha lines—as well as distinct energy thresholds at which atoms begin to strongly absorb X-rays.

For more than 50 years, the entire field has relied on the assumption that a core parameter in the equation used to model X-ray absorption spectra, known as the standard XAFS equation, is fixed and does not change.

Free software lets laptops simulate how aging evolves under selection

Why do some species live for only weeks while others survive for centuries? Researchers at the Leibniz Institute on Aging—Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI) in Jena have developed AEGIS, a freely available software tool that enables scientists to simulate evolution on a standard computer and investigate how lifespan and aging evolve under different ecological pressures and genetic constraints.

Described in a new study published in PLoS Computational Biology, the platform represents years of development and marks an important milestone in the evolutionary biology of aging.

Aging is not a fixed property of life. Across the tree of life, species differ dramatically when they start to age, how fast they age, and how long they live. Understanding what evolutionary forces produced this diversity is one of the deepest open questions in biology.

The neuroscience of hypocrisy points to a communication breakdown in the brain

Half of the participants received actual stimulation aimed at the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The other half received a fake version of the treatment, known as a sham stimulation. After the procedure, all participants completed the same card game and judgment exercises.

The people who received the real brain stimulation showed a wider gap between their behavior and their judgments. By disrupting the normal function of the brain region, the researchers successfully made people more hypocritical. This proved that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex directly controls moral consistency.

These results suggest that moral consistency is not an automatic trait. It is a biological process that relies on the brain’s ability to sync up different types of information. “Our findings suggest that we should treat moral consistency like a skill that can be strengthened through deliberate decision making,” says senior author Hongwen Song of the University of Science and Technology of China.

/* */