A SILICON Valley billionaire is paying the ultimate price for the chance of immortality: death.
Well that, and a spare ten grand.
Entrepreneur Sam Altman is one of 25 people who have splashed the cash to join a waiting list at Nectome – a startup that promises to upload your brain into a computer to grant eternal life to your consciousness.
The move is being heralded as a ‘significant milestone’ in the broader effort to build a world-beating quantum computer.
Building a quantum computer has been called the ‘space race of the 21st century’ – a difficult and ambitious challenge, with the potential to deliver revolutionary tools.
The team of researchers, which is led by Australian of the year Michelle Simmons, is the only group in the world that can see the exact position of their qubits, according to a release from the University of New South Wales.
Last year, scientists took a big step towards creating the next generation of computers.
For the first time ever, they stored light-based information as sound waves on a computer chip — something the researchers compared to capturing lightning as thunder.
While that might sound a little strange, this conversion is critical if we ever want to shift from our current, inefficient electronic computers, to light-based computers that move data at the speed of light.
Israel-based BrainQ is a new neurotech startup hoping to take on brain-computer interface (BCI) companies like Braintree founder Bryan Johnson’s Kernel and Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk’s Neuralink.
It’s not clear yet what Musk’s startup intends to do with the computer chips it plans to put in our heads, but Johnson’s startup says it is focused on developing “technologies to understand and treat neurological diseases in new and exciting ways.”
Whatever sector each company goes for, both plan to insert chips in our brains to connect us to computers — the consequences of which could have dramatic effects on human memory, intelligence, communication and many other areas that could rocket humanity forward, should they work out.
However, the pattern seems clear, and is worth heeding by other nations: despite China’s reputation for authoritarian and hierarchical rule, in science the approach seems to be to ensure that top researchers are well supported with funding and resources, and then to leave them to get on with it.
Chinese investment is paying off with serious advances in biotech, computing and space. Are they edging ahead of the west?
By Philip Ball
Rumors swirled earlier this week suggesting Nvidia was preparing to showcase its next generation of GeForce graphics cards during its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) at the end of the month (or perhaps even during the annual Game Developers Conference a week earlier).
Unfortunately, neither venue will host the big reveal according to a recent report from Tom’s Hardware. Multiple independent sources tell the site that apart from a possible announcement and a vague appetizer, nothing concrete regarding Nvidia’s next-gen gaming hardware is likely to be shared at the shows.
“Rumors that these venues would be the big reveal for Nvidia’s 2018 cards to succeed its current Pascal lineup should be put to rest,” the site advises.
Summary: Treatability of cancer was raised to over 80% by a new intelligent system that sifts through massive genetic datasets to pinpoint targets for cancer treatment, say these scientists. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
Scientists in Singapore have discovered a significantly improved way to treat cancer by listening to many different computer programs rather than just one.
Their new computer program reaches a consensus on how to treat a specific tumor, and it is significantly more accurate than existing predictive methods. The system isolates the Achilles heel of each individual tumor, helping doctors to choose the best treatment.
