While the traditional crypto wisdom is to sell in May and go away, Ethereum had other plans. On 23 May 2024, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) surprisingly greenlit spot Ethereum (ETH) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in principle. This has sent its price skyrocketing and turned its future very bright. Most crypto investors thought this would never come, due to the United States’ onslaught on cryptocurrency technology, or would require a multi-year political struggle. Read here

Engineers at Washington State University have developed two miniature bug-like robots that could be used in the future for work in areas such as artificial pollination, search and rescue, insect control, environmental monitoring, micro-fabrication and robotic-assisted surgery. (Also great for creepy-crawler pranks?)

The two mini-bugs weigh in at just 8 milligrams and 55 milligrams, and can move at about six millimeters a second—way slower than ants, who can run at a meter/sec.

Read more here.

With the technology evolving at a breakneck pace, understanding data availability and its implications is key to understanding the future of cryptocurrency applications. New innovations, like data sharding and sampling, are making it cheaper and more effective to ensure reliable DA and data storage than ever before. And the DA space is only going to get more competitive from here on, with ‘modular’ chains like Celestia, which are divided into specific layers dedicated to specific tasks.

READHERE

Fake news that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump (a story that was shared more widely than any legitimate news story that year). A fake picture of former US VP Michael Pence in his youth seemingly as a gay porn star. Fake audio of UK political leader Keir Starmer apparently viciously berating a young volunteer assistant. Another fake audio of London mayor Sadiq Khan apparently giving priority to a pro-Palestinian march over the annual Remembrance Day walk-past by military veterans. Fake videos of apparent war atrocities. Fake pornographic videos of megastar pop celebrities. READ HERE

The field of AI has witnessed a rapid expansion in the size and power of LLMs, but this growth has come at a significant computational cost. Post-training quantization techniques have aimed to reduce the precision of weights and activations, but a more optimal solution was needed. Recent work on 1-bit model architectures, such as BitNet, has paved the way for a promising new direction in reducing the cost of LLMs while maintaining their performance. READ HERE

This is the story of America’s zaniest presidential candidate - who wants to turn the whole population into cyborgs.

It's a true story… stranger than fiction.

“Don’t stand there!”

Zoltan almost stepped on a landmine. He was in Vietnam, reporting for National Geographic.

If his guide hadn’t warned him--he’d be dead.

Zoltan didn’t want to die. Who does?

But Zoltan realized something else just then. He didn’t want to die ever… In fact, he didn’t want anyone to die ever again.

It’s an idea he’s been pushing now for years. He’s a leader in the “transhumanism” movement, which wants to merge humans with machines.

Zoltan drove a bus shaped like a coffin across the US, to teach people about the new frontiers of science that mean death is not inevitable. 

His presidential campaigns have attracted global attention...

Imagine there were no diseases, because science had cured them all. Imagine storing your mind in a computer…  Living longer than you ever expected--for hundreds of years.

This is the extraordinary story of Zoltan’s war on death.

AS SEEN ON FORBES: https://www.forbes.com/sites/traceyfollows/2024/03/29/can-transhumanism-rescue-the-west-from-the-threat-of-ai/?sh=1b61bf002e49

PREORDER TODAY: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/changemakers-books/our-books/transhuman-citizen-zoltan-istvans-immortality

Text generated by language models, like ChatGPT, is getting better and better at mimicking human language. But doubts have been raised about the authenticity and trustworthiness of writing produced by AI. In response, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have created Ghostbuster, a sophisticated technique for identifying text written by artificial intelligence. Read here

The field of AI has witnessed a rapid expansion in the size and power of LLMs, but this growth has come at a significant computational cost. Post-training quantization techniques have aimed to reduce the precision of weights and activations, but a more optimal solution was needed. Recent work on 1-bit model architectures, such as BitNet, has paved the way for a promising new direction in reducing the cost of LLMs while maintaining their performance. READ HERE

One of the mysteries in neuroscience is how tools that capture relatively few components of brain activity have allowed scientists to predict behavior in mice, while much of the complexity of a mouse brain is “irrelevant background noise,” says Rockefeller University physicist Alipasha Vaziri.

In 2021, Vaziri’s lab developed light-beads microscopy (LBM), which enabled a 100-fold increase in the number of neurons that could be simultaneously recorded.

Read more here.

With the technology evolving at a breakneck pace, understanding data availability and its implications is key to understanding the future of cryptocurrency applications. New innovations, like data sharding and sampling, are making it cheaper and more effective to ensure reliable DA and data storage than ever before. And the DA space is only going to get more competitive from here on, with ‘modular’ chains like Celestia, which are divided into specific layers dedicated to specific tasks. READ HERE

Fake news that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump (a story that was shared more widely than any legitimate news story that year). A fake picture of former US VP Michael Pence in his youth seemingly as a gay porn star. Fake audio of UK political leader Keir Starmer apparently viciously berating a young volunteer assistant. Another fake audio of London mayor Sadiq Khan apparently giving priority to a pro-Palestinian march over the annual Remembrance Day walk-past by military veterans. Fake videos of apparent war atrocities. Fake pornographic videos of megastar pop celebrities. Read here

“We have fabricated a new nanofluidic device for memory applications that is significantly more scalable and much more performant than previous attempts,” says LBEN postdoctoral researcher Théo Emmerich. “This has enabled us, for the very first time, to connect two such ‘artificial synapses,’ paving the way for the design of brain-inspired liquid hardware.”

Read more here:

In an excellent conversation right here on Mindplex, Cory Doctorow went on a bit of a rant about how there were more changes over the 20th century leading up to the digital revolution than in this virtualized century. It’s worth sharing most of it: “mid century America, from post-war to 1980, is probably the most dynamic era in industrial history. In terms of total ground covered, we’re talking about a period that went from literal horse drawn carriages as a standard mode of transportation for a significant fraction of Americans to rocket ships… the number of changes you had to absorb from cradle to grave over that period are far more significant than the ones we’ve had now… someone born, like me, in 1971, has had to deal with computers getting faster and more ubiquitous, but not the invention of computers per se…. not the invention of telecommunications per se…” here

These multicellular bots move around and help heal “wounds” created in cultured neurons (and other possible uses)

Researchers at Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute have created tiny biological robots that they call Anthrobots from human tracheal cells. They can move across a surface and encourage the growth of neurons across a region of damage in a lab dish.

The self-assembling, multicellular robots, which range in size from the width of a human hair to the point of a sharpened pencil, are shown to have a remarkable healing effect on other cells. The discovery is a starting point for the researchers’ vision to use patient-derived biobots as new therapeutic tools for regeneration, healing, and treatment of disease.

Read more here: https://magazine.mindplex.ai/mp_news/scientists-build-tiny-healing-biological-robots-from-human-cells/

Implantable medical devices rely on batteries (such as pacemakers, which keep the heart on beat). But batteries eventually run low and require invasive surgeries to replace.

So researchers at Tianjin University of Technology, China devised an implantable battery that runs on oxygen in the body. Their study with rats, published in the journal Chem, shows that the proof-of-concept design can deliver stable power and is compatible with the body’s biological system.

Read more here

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, led by Bin He, are using deep-learning decoders to improve BCI performance. They're aiming to enable continuous movement of virtual objects, like controlling a computer cursor with your mind.

In their study, participants imagined moving their hands to control the cursor's direction. The deep-learning decoders showed significant improvement over traditional methods, allowing participants to control the cursor with high accuracy without any physical movement.

This advancement could greatly benefit individuals with movement or speech disorders, as well as open up possibilities for prosthetic limb control and gaming. While the technology is still evolving, it's an exciting step towards neuro-assistive robotics.

If you're interested in learning more about this research, check out the full article here. Let's stay informed about the incredible progress in BCI technology!

In a new study involving thousands of simulated cases of patients with chest pain, GPT-4 provided inconsistent conclusions, returning different heart-risk assessment levels for the same patient data.

Despite GPT-4’s reported ability to pass medical exams, it also failed to match the traditional methods physicians use to judge a patient’s cardiac risk. here

Until now, these nanobubbles moved no faster than 100 m/s, which is too slow for computing applications. But thanks to the use of an antiferromagnetic material as a medium, the scientists successfully made the skyrmions move 10 times faster.

These results, which were published in the journal Science, offer new prospects for developing higher-performance and less- energy-intensive computing devices.

This study is part of the SPIN national research program launched in January, which supports innovative research in spintronics, with a view to helping develop a more agile and enduring digital world.

Read more here: https://magazine.mindplex.ai/mp_news/skyrmions-move-at-record-speeds-a-step-toward-future-computing/

UCLA engineers have invented a soft, thin, stretchy device measuring just over 1 square inch that can be attached to the skin outside the throat to help people with dysfunctional vocal cords regain their voice function.

The development is described in the open-access journal Nature Communications.

The new bioelectric system, developed by Jun Chen, an assistant professor of bioengineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, and his colleagues, can detect movement in a person’s larynx muscles and translate those signals into audible speech, with the assistance of machine-learning technology and with nearly 95% accuracy.

Read more here.

One of the mysteries in neuroscience is how tools that capture relatively few components of brain activity have allowed scientists to predict behavior in mice, while much of the complexity of a mouse brain is “irrelevant background noise,” says Rockefeller University physicist Alipasha Vaziri.

In 2021, Vaziri’s lab developed light-beads microscopy (LBM), which enabled a 100-fold increase in the number of neurons that could be simultaneously recorded.

LBM will be used in the Rockefeller Brain Observatory, a new initiative spearheaded by Vaziri to make pioneering, commercially unavailable instruments accessible to neuroscientists “that can do things that are otherwise impossible,” Vaziri says. 

Vaziri and his team are also helping researchers at several universities, including at Stanford University and UCL-London, to replicate LBM technology in their own neuroscience labs. The data they’ve amassed from the current study is also available for analysis by other researchers.

Read more here.

I have many ideas but i do not know how possible they would be.

1 - Photosynthesis. Humans would genetically modify themselves to use photosynthesis in order to sustain there lives. Now from my current understanding of this is that photosynthesis is not efficient enough to produce the required energy for a active organism.

But what if we genetically modified or created a extremely efficient life form or plant capable or reaching between 50-100% efficiency while using photosynthesis. I have very little understanding about all of this but with such efficiency and capability for energy generation could a human in theory apply these genetics to themselves thus becoming a plant person and no longer need much or any outside sources for substenance.

2 - Solar cells. Instead of using plant based dna or organic material for photosynthesis. The person could instead have self replicating solar panel nanobots in there bodies. There solar panels would than generate electricity which the body could convert to fuel to sustain life.

I have a few other ideas but they seem even less likely than these ones. So would this be possible?

I am asking because so far i have a fictional world built where humanity has basically already cured all diseases and sicknesses and have genetically modified themselves to dramatically extend there lives. They live around 5000-10000 years in my world. And recently they developed self replicating nanobots that are in every human. These nanobots can repair dna and cell damage and even allow for limited regeneration in a person like regrowing limbs and stuff though it still takes a long time.

Now there are also different branches of humans or cults that follow different ideals. A group of over 1 billion humans have became a hive mind another group cyborgs and another uploaded there consciousness to a computer while leaving there bodies in stasis or integrated as a part of the machine. There are even beings similar to 40k space marines in my universe. Just wanted to add this in as a perspective or to show how far these humans are so not much is impossible for them to accomplish. I really just want to know if alternate ways of sustenance are feasible.

The humans in this world are extremely peaceful and dislike harming anything they sustain themselves solely off of plant based foods. But are seeking a alternative way of life that would allow them to not harm any species.

Lastly i am new here so apologies if this is not the type of post that should be posted here.