Biohacking is set to get a lot faster and easier.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

New DNA Synthesis Method Could Soon Build a Genome in a Day https://suhub.co/2NGdLSH

If you want to take your solarpunk in a more biotech direction.

Originally shared by Greg Batmarx

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have developed a new kind of solar cell that can convert sunlight into electricity, but instead of using electronics like most solar cells, this particular invention relies on bacteria.

Many bacteria are already capable of turning sunlight into energy using photosynthesis. This is thanks to a chemical that the bacteria produce, although the specific chemical varies based on the species of bacteria. Some groups of researchers in the past have attempted to isolate these chemicals and use them inside solar cells, but the process of isolating them is difficult and tends to destroy the photosynthetic chemicals.

The University of British Columbia researchers instead left the chemicals inside the bacteria, and used those bacteria themselves to generate electricity. The researchers bred E. coli bacteria to grow large amounts of the photosynthetic chemicals and then covered those bacteria with semiconducting materials to produce electricity.

This new method allowed the researchers to gain a big advantage over other bacteria-based solar cells, nearly doubling the amount of electricity collected. That’s still not quite enough to compete with traditional solar panels, but this new bacteria-powered solar cell does have other advantages as well.

In particular, the photosynthetic chemicals used by the E. coli in the solar cell work just as well in low light as in bright, direct sunlight, meaning they can still generate plenty of electricity on cloudy days. In addition, these solar cells are made without the expensive materials and complicated manufacturing required for conventional solar panels, which mean these should be cleaner and cheaper to produce.

Bacteria-powered solar panels are still a long way from the market, and the researchers are hoping to improve their design to keep the bacteria alive longer.

But perhaps someday, we’ll use bacteria-generated electricity to run all our homes and cities.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a22075233/solar-cell-bacteria-cloudy/

I thought from the headline that they were selling virtual real estate, but no. It’s their offices that are virtual.

My wife’s cousin experienced something similar with a course he’s taking where everyone attends lectures in a virtual space. It took him a while to figure out how to get his avatar to sit down.

Snow Crash might finally be upon us.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Inside a $1 Billion Real Estate Company Operating Entirely in VR https://suhub.co/2ueHf17

What I’m coming to understand more and more is that a lot more people will do the right thing if it’s also the easy thing that clearly benefits them.

Originally shared by Steve S

Until Elon Musk’s Tesla automobiles, electric vehicles were for people who cared more about the environment than having a performant car. What Musk did completely right is that he turned electrics into something those with money to spare would want to drive, even if they didn’t care about the environment. He made them a luxury item and used those big bucks to produce cheaper cars that regular people could afford, like the Tesla 3’s now rolling out of his production lines.

I say all this in the context of “clean meat”, which is muscle grown in vats instead of cut out of the corpses of farm animals. If the new meat tastes better than the old, early adopters will pay extra for it, and that will finance competition and economies of scale to drive prices down. The end goal would be for faceless meat to become much cheaper than the whole-animal kind, driving the latter effectively out of business.

This is plausible because growing meat is inherently more efficient than farming it. As Churchill predicted back in 1932, “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium”. The article explains that “clean meat production could also result in 78% to 96% lower greenhouse gas emissions, use 7% to 45% less energy, 99% less land, and 82% to 96% less water than traditional methods”.

Essentially, you’re just growing the part you want to eat, not the bones or other supporting organs. You don’t have a GI tract, so you don’t have methane production, either. And, fundamentally, it avoids all of the cruelty inherent in raising animals for meat.

It’s economically, ecologically, and morally right.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/01/health/clean-in-vitro-meat-food/index.html

Story fodder. What happens when it’s increasingly hard to talk directly to a human being? What happens when bot-to-bot communication is the predominant traffic?

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Bot vs. Bot: Will the Internet Soon Be a Place Without Humans? https://suhub.co/2KCmzec

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

Deepfakes and the entertainment industry. “AUDREY HEPBURN DIED in 1993, but in 2013 she nevertheless starred in an advertisement for Galaxy, a type of chocolate bar. She was shown riding a bus along the Amalfi coast before catching the eye of a passing hunk in a convertible. In 2016 Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, reprised his role as the villainous Grand Moff Tarkin in the Star Wars film “Rogue One”. Such resurrections are not new, but they are still uncommon enough to count as news. Yet advances in special effects—and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence (AI)—are making it ever easier to manufacture convincing forgeries of human beings.

[…]

The question of who owns the rights to an actor’s digital likeness has already arisen in reality. Framestore had to negotiate with Hepburn’s family in order to make its advert. But a star’s fans often feel a sense of ownership, too. In 2013 a computer-generated version of Bruce Lee was used in an advert in China for Johnnie Walker, a brand of whisky. Johnnie Walker says it consulted with Shannon Lee, Bruce’s daughter, who approved the idea. But many fans were cross, pointing out that Lee had been teetotal for much of his adult life, and asserting that, had he still been alive, he would never have appeared in such an advertisement.

[…]

This may all be decades away, and it may never happen. Auteurs will no doubt refuse to use digital actors in their films on principle (though some might prefer them, since they will uncomplainingly follow even the most tyrannical director’s every command). But the rise of immortal digital actors is the logical outcome as today’s effects-heavy film-making techniques embrace the versatility of artificial intelligence. A trick that is currently resorted to only rarely could easily become a standard cinematic tool, like matte shots, green screens and CGI before it. Digital actors open up new possibilities in storytelling. But they also raise many new questions—and they will be able to answer them using any face, or voice, you like.”

https://www.economist.com/news/2018/07/05/what-if-ai-made-actors-immortal

The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine.

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

The fascinating tricks spiders use to get up, up and away. “Every day, around 40,000 thunderstorms crackle around the world, collectively turning Earth’s atmosphere into a giant electrical circuit. The upper reaches of the atmosphere have a positive charge, and the planet’s surface has a negative one. Even on sunny days with cloudless skies, the air carries a voltage of around 100 volts for every meter above the ground. In foggy or stormy conditions, that gradient might increase to tens of thousands of volts per meter.

Ballooning spiders operate within this planetary electric field. When their silk leaves their bodies, it typically picks up a negative charge. This repels the similar negative charges on the surfaces on which the spiders sit, creating enough force to lift them into the air. And spiders can increase those forces by climbing onto twigs, leaves, or blades of grass. Plants, being earthed, have the same negative charge as the ground that they grow upon, but they protrude into the positively charged air. This creates substantial electric fields between the air around them and the tips of their leaves and branches—and the spiders ballooning from those tips.

This idea—flight by electrostatic repulsion—was first proposed in the early 1800s, around the time of Darwin’s voyage. Peter Gorham, a physicist, resurrected the idea in 2013, and showed that it was mathematically plausible. And now, Morley and Robert have tested it with actual spiders.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/the-electric-flight-of-spiders/564437/

Within a couple of hyperbolic and relentlessly upbeat paragraphs, I knew I was reading a Peter Diamandis article. But if you dial down the hype by 80-90%, this is an interesting glimpse into medical possibilities that are on the horizon, if nowhere near ready yet.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Three Huge Ways Tech Is Overhauling Healthcare https://suhub.co/2tXwnFm