Lifeboat Foundation

By Amy Woodyatt, CNN—Wed August 7, 2019

Continue reading “Crashed spacecraft may have left creatures on the moon” »

For DeepMind, the emergence of the new headquarters is symbolic of a new chapter for the company as it turns its research heft and compute power to try to understand, among other things, the building blocks of organic life. In so doing, the company hopes to make breakthroughs in medicine and other disciplines that will significantly impact progress in a number of fields. “Our mission should be one of the most fascinating journeys in science,” Hassabis says. “We’re trying to build a cathedral to scientific endeavour.”

DeepMind’s AI has beaten chess grandmasters and Go champions. But founder and CEO Demis Hassabis now has his sights set on bigger, real-world problems that could change lives. First up: protein folding.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/current-state-longevity-scien…colangelo/

A paper posted online this month has settled a nearly 30-year-old conjecture about the structure of the fundamental building blocks of computer circuits. This “sensitivity” conjecture has stumped many of the most prominent computer scientists over the years, yet the new proof is so simple that one researcher summed it up in a single tweet.

“This conjecture has stood as one of the most frustrating and embarrassing open problems in all of combinatorics and theoretical computer science,” wrote Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas, Austin, in a blog post. “The list of people who tried to solve it and failed is like a who’s who of discrete math and theoretical computer science,” he added in an email.

The conjecture concerns Boolean functions, rules for transforming a string of input bits (0s and 1s) into a single output bit. One such rule is to output a 1 provided any of the input bits is 1, and a 0 otherwise; another rule is to output a 0 if the string has an even number of 1s, and a 1 otherwise. Every computer circuit is some combination of Boolean functions, making them “the bricks and mortar of whatever you’re doing in computer science,” said Rocco Servedio of Columbia University.

Two remarkable new studies are suggesting sci-fi stories of memory manipulation may not be so far-fetched. The research describes early proof-of-concept experiments showing how negative emotional associations with traumatic memories can potentially be weakened or even entirely edited out.

New video from our 2019 Undoing Aging conference: Mikhail Shchepinov, Chief Science Officer at Retrotope, Inc., on aging and diseases resulting from the gradual accumulation of oxidative damages.

undoing-aging.org/videos/mikhail-shchepinov-presenting-at-undoing-aging-2019

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The thing that Carl Sagan did better than anybody else was connecting to the science through emotion and stories, says NASA’s Michelle Thaller. Watching him when growing up formed Thaller’s vision of what an astronomer could be and inspired her for the rest of her life.