All About Transhumanism

This is a congregation of information, news, events, websites, and popular culture involving or related to transhumanism. Not everything I post here are things that I agree with, but I post them anyway because they're relevant. I've been posting articles for a few years. Take a look at my archives for a lot more.

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This tiny glass ‘Superman memory crystal’ stores 360TB for eternity

New data storage technique can pack 360 TB of info onto a tiny glass disk, and store it for eternity. The nanostructured glass stores info in 5D.

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3D Printed Teeth Kill Mouth Bacteria on Contact | All3DP

Dental researchers have created 3D printed teeth, specially designed to eliminate nasty germs and bacteria from your mouth.

[sizvideos]

Carbon Nanotube Muscle is so light it floats - Video

[toppermostpoppermost-deactivate]

My science boner hurts right now.

[thespectacularspider-girl]

I’m imagining synthetic muscle bundles made out of this, used in cybernetic prosthesis.  Not only are carbon nanotubes insanely durable and strong but they’re incredibly light.

This would cut down on the weight of synthetic body parts immensely, offsetting the weight of materials  used for synthetic skin, bone and organs.

[mousathe14]

HOLY CRAP THAT IS SO COOL

[testspottedprickle]

Science

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Pressure-sensitive artificial skin signals brain cells when touched - Factor

Artificial skin that sends pressure sensations directly to brain cells has been developed for the first time, bringing the eventual goal of flexible, healing and feeling artificial skin a step closer. Developed by Zhenan Bao, professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, the skin is able to detect the level of pressure applied to it, be …

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Singularity University Launches Accelerator To Seize Academia’s Innovation Monopoly

Singularity University, the technology think tank and incubator, on Wednesday announced a new accelerator program that aims to push technologies out of..

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Not Just Another Discussion About Whether AI Is Going To Destroy Us

An AI roundtable discussion is a staple of the tech journalism circus -- usually framed with a preamble about dystopic threats to human existence from the..

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Augmented Reality Has An Image Problem

To date, Augmented Reality has been referred to as “the biggest technological advancement of our lifetime,” a mere “gimmick” or, worst yet, the next..

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Atheist Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan is running for US President in the 2016 election. Visit his official campaign site.

Apparently there’s a Transhumanist Party and they’re running a candidate in this year’s presidential election.  I’m not necessarily endorsing this party here, just putting it up because it’s relevant. 

And yes, you read that correctly.  His name is Zoltan.

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Reconstituting epithelial (skin) microtissues with programmed size, shape, composition, spatial heterogeneity, and embedding extracellular matrix. Scheme and

A new technique developed by UCSF scientists for building organoids (tiny models of human tissues) more precisely turns human cells into the biological equivalent of LEGO bricks. Called DNA Programmed Assembly of Cells (DPAC), it allows researchers in hours to create arrays of thousands of custom-designed organoids, such as models of human mammary glands containing several hundred cells each.

These mini-tissues in a dish can be used to study how particular structural features of tissue affect normal growth or go awry in cancer. They could be used for therapeutic drug screening and to help teach researchers how to grow whole human organs.

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Intelligent Machines: What does Facebook want with AI? - BBC News

The BBC talks to Facebook's director of AI about what the social network is doing with the technology.

“It is a project called M - it is indeed an assistant to which you can ask just about any question or to solve any problem.

Some of the questions may require human expertise - so whenever the machine can't answer a question it is sent to human trainers and then the machine can learn to do a better job next time. As we get more experienced with the service, we will be able to build machines that do more automatically and scale the service to more people.

What we are hoping to do is take this digital assistant idea to the next level. If you think about Siri, Cortana, Google Now - most of the answers they provide are scripted. Someone has imagined the possible answers and figured out a tree of possibilities. If you go outside of the script, the machines responds with a joke or tries to get out of it.

All of its behaviour is programmed by humans but what we are trying to do with M is test the ability of a machine to learn.” -  Prof Yann LeCun

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Intelligent Machines: Chatting with the bots - BBC News

Chatbots exist to help humans and converse with them in natural language but how good are they?

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First brain-to-brain ‘telepathy’ communication via the Internet

The first brain-to-brain telepathy-like communication between two participants via the Internet has been performed by University of Washington researchers.

The experiment used a question-and-answer game. The goal is for the “inquirer” to determine which object the “respondent” is looking at from a list of possible objects. The inquirer sends a question (e.g., “Does it fly?) to the respondent, who answers “yes” or “no” by mentally focusing on one of two flashing LED lights attached to the monitor. The respondent is wearing an electroencephalography (EEG) helmet.

By focusing on the “yes” light, the EEG device generates send a signal to the inquirer via the Internet to activate a magnetic coil positioned behind the inquirer’s head, which stimulates the visual cortex and causes the inquirer to see a flash of light (known as a “phosphene”). A “no” signal works the same way, but is not strong enough to activate the coil.

Read the full article about it here.

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Examples of questions (left column) and interpretations (right column) derived by GEOS (credit: Minjoon Seo et al./Proceedings of EMNLP) An AI system that

This system, called GeoS, uses a combination of computer vision to interpret diagrams, natural language processing to read and understand text, and a geometric solver, achieving 49 percent accuracy on official SAT test questions.

If these results were extrapolated to the entire Math SAT test, the computer roughly achieved an SAT score of 500 (out of 800), the average test score for 2015.

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Illustration of all-optical data memory: ultra-short light pulses (left) make a bit in the Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) material change from crystalline to amorphous (or

The first all-optical chip memory has been developed by an international team of scientists. It is capable of writing data to memory at a speed of up to a gigahertz or more and may allow computers to work more rapidly and more efficiently.

[singularitarian]

Robot ethicists have launched the Campaign Against Sex Robots, seeking a ban on the development of robotic sexytimes.

Robot ethicists have launched the Campaign Against Sex Robots, seeking a ban on the development of robotic sexytimes.