
For your biotechnology handwavium needs.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Enzyme Designed Entirely From Scratch Opens a World of Biological Possibility http://suhub.co/2EsR9kb
For your biotechnology handwavium needs.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Enzyme Designed Entirely From Scratch Opens a World of Biological Possibility http://suhub.co/2EsR9kb
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Smart Homes Won’t Just Automate Your Life—They’ll Track Your Health Too http://suhub.co/2DLkZiU
Well, end of January, and I’ve already posted my first two-star review and my first five-star review for the year.
This is the five-star one. A well-constructed, well-written thriller with both moral complexity and a moral stance, showing that it can be done.
“Decision-making, planning, human interaction, or creative work” are the kind of skills your kids will need to thrive in the future world of work.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
These Are the Most Exciting Industries and Jobs of the Future http://suhub.co/2DJN4qP
“It may well be that a far greater fraction of what makes us human can be abstracted away into mathematics and pattern-recognition than we’d like to believe.”
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
The Love Oracle: Can AI Help You Succeed at Dating? http://suhub.co/2EhC59b
This is not a million miles from some of my speculations in Gu, which includes “tumbleweeds” – permanent nomads travelling the world in their self-contained mobile residences.
Via Raja Mitra.
Originally shared by Mark Lewis
I read quite a few articles on driverless cars. This is the first one in a while that I have felt really has creative elements to it. They might be pushing the idea a bit too far, but it is a very interesting idea and goes beyond some of my previous thinking in different areas. What I liked most though was how the author points out that the auto industry could produce enough autonomous cars to replace all human-driven cars in a rather short period of time. That’s significant. The timeline for scaling up autonomous ride sharing is one of the things I’ve worried about the most, but apparently, if current production switched over to fully autonomous, it would produce a complete global supply of such cars in a rather short period of time because so many fewer cars are needed if the cars aren’t left sitting in parking lots all the time.
Small study, so don’t get too excited. Interesting if true, though.
Originally shared by Neuroscience News
Magic Mushrooms May Alter How You Feel About Nature (and Politics)
Long-held beliefs can become entrenched over time, making them hard to change. But psychedelics might provide a way to alter them, a study suggests.
The research is in Journal of Psychopharmacology. (full open access)
Of course, some of these things are still available to the people they’re available to because other people are poor. But it’s also the case that with greater connectivity comes a rise in average prosperity.
Originally shared by Todd William
Why You’re Richer than a King
There exists a trend in the Western World to focus on the negative. The more we have, it seems, the more we have to take for granted. Yet much of this pessimism is grossly unwarranted.
Perhaps no one expresses this better than Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist. With a keen sense of perspective, he provides the following anecdote that will leave even the most cynical of mindsets second guessing themselves.
_____________________
THE KING
“The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services.”
“He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.”
But what about today?
“Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was.”
“Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach.”
And yet consider this.
“The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavored with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary.”
“You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.”
“You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia.”
“You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamoring to bring you clean central heating.”
“You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell.”
“You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.”
“My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference?”
“That is the magic that exchange and specialization have wrought for the human species.”
____________________
(Artwork by: Jacek Yerka)
Originally shared by Jennifer Ouellette
The truth about Easter Island: a sustainable society has been falsely blamed for its own demise http://theconversation.com/the-truth-about-easter-island-a-sustainable-society-has-been-falsely-blamed-for-its-own-demise-85563