May 18, 2016
Martine Rothblatt's Vision for Immortality
Martine Rothblatt explains how our doppelgangers could lead to immortality. Washington Post Live
April 3, 2016
National Geographic's The Story of God
Morgan Freeman Interviews BINA48. The Story of God
January 3, 2016
Watching A Robot Get Interviewed By A Musician Is As Mindblowing As It Sounds
New York singer/songwriter JiHAE and strikingly 'human' robot Bina48 sit down for a quick chat about the world. The Fader
August 18, 2015
Transparent Brains for Large-scale Connectomic Mapping
Japanese researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute have created a new technique for converting brain tissue into transparent tissue to reveal 3D brain anatomy at very high resolution, according to an article in Kurzweil AI News. The new technique, called ScaleS, has been used for large-scale connectomic mapping and 3D neural circuit reconstruction.
August 18, 2015
Miniature Functioning Human-brain Model
Scientists have developed a miniature human brain in a dish with the equivalent brain maturity of a five-week-old fetus, according to an article in Kurzweil AI News. The researchers at Ohio State report that it contains most of the structures found in a developing brain (except for a vascular system) and represents the most complete human brain model yet developed.
August 12, 2015
Origin of Robot Species
University of Cambridge researchers have built a robot that can build other (simpler) robots, test which one does best, and automatically use the results to improve the design for the next generation of robots, according to an article in Kurzweil AI News. This is but one step away from self-improving reproduction in a machine ... basically the beginning of Darwinian evolution in machines. Considering that the pace of such evolution will be a billion times faster than it was with biological organisms, Kurzweil may have his Singularity very soon.
August 10, 2015
Humour in a Machine
Researchers at Microsoft have developed an artificial intelligence system with a sense of humour. According to an article in Bloomberg News, the system is intended to sift through over 5000 black and white cartoons submitted to the New Yorker every week to find the funniest choices among captions that make similar jokes. The lack of humour in an AI has been a mainstay in science fiction, perhaps best represented by Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation
Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have developed software that can recognize hand-drawn sketches better than humans for the first time. According to an
Scientists at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet and Linkoping University have built what they claim is a "fully functional neuron" that mimicks the functions of a human nerve cell, according to an article published in Kurzweil AI News . The "organic electronic biomimetic neuron" senses a chemical change in one dish and translates it into an electrical/ionic signal that travels along an "axon" to a "synapse" and releases chemical signals in another dish that then trigger another neuron, etc.
June 22, 2015
Brain connections last as long as the memories they store
Our memories are as fleeting as the brain structures that store them, or so the theory goes. When the connections - called synapses - between neurons break, the memories they hold are thought to evaporate along with them. Mark Schnitzer, an associate professor of biology and of applied physics at Stanford, has leveraged microscopy tools developed in his lab to monitor the connections (synapses) between hippocampal neurons for the first time and confirm this theory, according to an article published in the Stanford News Service. In the mice that the neuroscientist and his team studied, the connections between neurons lasted about 30 days, roughly the duration over which episodic memories are believed to stay in the mouse hippocampus.