Posts tagged with "Futurism"

Startup claims it’s achieved communication between two people who were both dreaming

October 28, 2024

A San Francisco-based startup supposedly has broken through the dream barrier. REMSpace claimed that it’s achieved “new dimensions of communication” between two humans who were sleeping, by sending messages while both were in a lucid dream state, reports Futurism.

These messages weren’t sent over the ether, but through a special device designed by the company and attached to each participants’ heads—thus facilitating “the first ever ‘chat’ exchanged in dreams.”

But since it hasn’t published its latest research yet, you’ll have to take the company’s word for it: “Yesterday, communicating in dreams seemed like science fiction. Tomorrow, it will be so common we won’t be able to imagine our lives without this technology,” CEO Michael Raduga said in a statement, adding that pursuing REM sleep technology “will become the next big industry after AI.”

REM-shackle

Here’s how REMSpace describes the experiment in a press release, in lieu of scientific documentation. You can also “watch” the experiment in a video that the company shared, which is just a visualization without real footage.

In a nutshell, it involved having two participants sleep at their homes while their devices, connected to a server over WiFi, collected polysomnographic data, which included monitoring their brain waves and heart rate.

Then, through earbuds, a secret word was transmitted to the first person to enter a lucid dream, a state in which the dreamer becomes aware that they’re dreaming. He then repeated the word in their dream— via facial expressions, it sounds like—which was “captured” by the server and stored there. When the other participant entered a lucid dream minutes later, she supposedly “received” the stored message after it was sent to her.

“Our server detected his reply and confirmed that it was right. And when the next person found herself in a lucid dream, we sent his answer to her, and she repeated it as well,” Raduga told ABC 7 News last week.

Language barrier

The word, which remains undisclosed, came from no ordinary lexicon. Instead, it was derived from “Remmyo,” a dream language that the company claims can be detected with a device that looks for distinct EMG patterns made by performing certain facial movements.

“When you talk in this language in your dreams, we can hear you and we can connect two dreamers together,” Raduga told ABC 7.

If all of this sounds a little dubious, don’t worry: REMSleep says it’s got a peer-reviewed study coming down the pipe.

“The paper on communication within lucid dreams has already been written and submitted for review to a scientific journal,” the company announced on Facebook. “We anticipate its publication within the next two [months] to six months.”

Research contact: @futurism

Super-expensive startup is ‘screening’ IVF embryos for IQ

October 23, 2024

A U.S.-based startup called Heliospect Genomics that says it is “at the forefront of genomic prediction” is charging parents tens of thousands of dollars to “screen” embryos they conceive for their IQs, according to startling new reporting from Futurism.

Details of the secretive startup were largely revealed by undercover video footage collected by a UK-based advocacy group called Hope Not Hate, with further research first futconducted by The Guardian. The covertly collected videos reveal company officials openly bragging that their controversial genetic screening tactics can boost a future child’s IQ by upwards of six points.

To be clear, whether Heliospect’s technology works as claimed remains to be seen. Although IQ is determined in part by genetics, there’s not simply a gene for “smart” that can be turned off and on; rather, a person’s IQ is influenced by an overlapping, intersecting array of dozens of different genes—not to mention that intelligence itself is a slippery and notoriously hard-to-measure concept.

And beyond the question of whether something like this could feasibly work as promised, there are obvious biomedical ethical concerns. It’s not like these folks are reviewing embryos for serious, life-threatening conditions—this is genetic selection based on preference alone. Or what’s generally known as eugenics, for the parents who can financially and morally afford it.

Regardless of any scientific or ethical murkiness, however, The Guardian reports that Heliospect is offering its services to wealthy parents undergoing IVF for upwards of $50,000 for the screening of 100 embryos. And as company leaders tell it, people are buying.

“There are babies on the way,” Heliospect CEO Michael Christensen said during a conference call dating back to November 2023, while claiming that five couples it worked with already had embryos screened for intelligence and successfully implanted.

“Everyone can have all the children they want and they can have children that are basically disease-free, smart, healthy,” Christensen said on the same call. “It’s going to be great.”

In another clip, according to The Guardian, a Heliospect employee promised buyers they could rank embryos by “IQ and the other naughty traits that everybody wants.” Those “naughty” traits allegedly included obesity risk and risk of mental illness.

On that note, the company unsurprisingly has strong ties to some noteworthy figures in the pronatalist and pro-eugenics communities. To wit: one of its senior staffers, a philosopher named Jonathan Anomaly who has held professorships at prestigious universities including Duke and Oxford, is a noted eugenics defender.

That’s not an exaggeration; in 2018, he published a paper literally titled “Defending Eugenics.” He’s also described his ideology as “Liberal Eugenics.”

As one might expect, experts are sounding the alarm bells. One researcher, Oxford professor of reproductive genetics Dagan Wells, emphasized the lack of say that the public has had in the onset of these technologies. “Is this a test too far, do we really want it?” Wells asked. “It feels to me that this is a debate that the public has not really had an opportunity to fully engage in at this point.”

Again, it’s unclear whether Heliospect’s product even works. That folks with enough cash are biting on the offer, though, feels like yet another ominous signal that gene-selection ventures are only gaining steam—with little, if any, say from the public.

Research contact: @futurism

Scientists take swabs of toothbrushes—and are shocked by the hundreds of viruses they find

October 16, 2024

Scientists have found more than 600 distinct viruses after swabbing peoples’ toothbrushes and shower heads—but, thankfully, the vast majority of them are more helpful than harmful, reports Futurism.

Northwestern University microbiologist Erica Hartmann, lead author of a new study published this week in Frontiers in Microbiomes, tells Futurism that she was equal parts shocked and fascinated when discovering that these everyday objects were teeming with bacteria-eating viruses known as bacteriophages.

“There is so much about the world around us that we don’t understand—including the things that may seem familiar,” explained, she says. “We started out looking at things like toothbrushes and showerheads because they are important sources of microbes that we’re exposed to, but we don’t know which microbes they carry or what factors influence them.”

The latest study was an update to the Northwestern team’s 2021 project, “Operation Pottymouth.”

Although there was incredible diversity among the more than 600 phage samples, a type that kills illness-causing mycobacteria was slightly more common than any other, Harmann says. Given that mycobacteria can cause serious infections like leprosy and tuberculosis, it’s a good thing that viruses killing them were present as well.

“Toothbrushes and showerheads harbor phage that are unlike anything we’ve seen before,” the microbiologist said. “Not only did we find different phage on toothbrushes and showerheads, we found different phage on each toothbrush and each showerhead.”

Phages have in recent years been studied and used as treatments for bacterial infections—especially those that have mutated to resist antibiotics. While Hartmann insists these findings are captivating on their own merit, knowing that they may be used in medical treatments makes them that much more useful.

“It could be,” she said, “that the next great antibiotic will be based on something that grew on your toothbrush.”

While that’s not exactly pleasant to think about, it certainly sounds a hell of a lot better than leaving a mycobacterial infection like TB or chronic ulcers untreated.

Research contact: @futurism

Tesla’s much-hyped robotaxi event was a massive ‘disappointment,’ investors say

October 14, 2024

For ten years now, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised a fully self-driving car. But despite his many reassurances that an autonomous car would be a reality “next year,” the company still doesn’t have a lot to show, reports Futurism.

On Thursday, October 10, the EV maker held its long-awaited “robotaxi” event, showing off a prototype of its “Cybercab,” which supposedly will go into production in 2026 and cost under $30,000. Musk also showed off a separate “robovan” that can carry up to 20 passengers.

A prototype Cybercab—a flashy two-seater with no steering wheel or pedals—was seen navigating some mocked-up streets at the event, which ironically took place inside a Hollywood movie studio.

But the flashy presentation left plenty of glaring questions unanswered. For one, the company didn’t show off the long-awaitedModel 2“—a rumored $25,000 passenger vehicle that shareholders have said could help the company boost sales.

Investors in particular were left wanting more, with Tesla shares dropping six percent in premarket trading on Friday.

As many analysts predicted, the company didn’t get into the details.

There was no discussion, for instance, about when said robotaxi could go on sale or how long it would take for Tesla to establish a service that can compete with the likes of the autonomous taxi company Waymo, which maintains a significant lead over the Musk-led carmaker.

Musk took the opportunity to ham it up at the event, appearing in a leather jacket while addressing the crowd in front of a flashy, neon-lit stage. “The autonomous future is here,” he proclaimed. “With autonomy, you get your time back.”

The billionaire has previously described a Tesla-based robotaxi service as “some combination of Airbnb and Uber,” enabling owners to have their vehicles make money on their behalf. But such a service is likely still many years out—if it ever becomes a reality—despite a decade of development.

“I’m a shareholder and pretty disappointed,” Triple D Trading equity trader Dennis Dick told Reuters. “I think the market wanted more definitive time lines.”

“I don’t think he said much about anything,” he added.

Instead of relying on industry-standard tech like light detection and ranging (liDAR), Tesla’s robotaxis are designed to only make use of cameras and AI-powered hardware—a controversial approach that has prompted plenty of skepticism.

At the event, Musk promised that the EV maker would kick off trials of “unsupervised FSD,” referring to the company’s controversial “Full Self-Driving” driver assistance software—which still requires drivers to pay attention at all times —sometime next year in Texas and California with its Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.

Whether the company will be able to actually improve on its software, which still leads to plenty of close calls on public streets, remains to be seen.

“For all the hype that Elon Musk puts behind Tesla Full Self-Driving, it does not work,” noted Tesla critic Dan O’Dowd wrote in a statement following the event.

“The latest version of Full Self-Driving travels 71 miles between critical disengagements, in contrast to Waymo’s 17,311 miles. Elon Musk is trying to compete in the Tour de France on a tricycle.”

Research contact: @futurism

You are not prepared for how Mark Zuckerberg is dressing now

September 30, 2024

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and longtime CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook), is wearing chains. He’s growing his hair out. He’s wearing oversized tee-shirts emblazoned with his favorite classical expressions—the latest of which, donned this week by the CEO to deliver the keynote speech at Meta’s annual Connect conference, featured the phrase “aut Zuck aut nihil,” reports Futurism.

For those less familiar with niche Roman sayings, that’s a take on the infamous expression “aut Caeser aut nihil,” which translates to “either emperor or nothing.” If that sounds at all foreboding to you, your intuition would be correct: The phrase historically has been invoked by ambitious political actors seeking supreme rulership—that, or nothing.

Meta Connect is the company’s annual developer conference, where the tech giant shows off its latest and greatest innovations. This year’s event has unsurprisingly centered on Meta’s efforts to dominate the artificial intelligence (AI space), as well as a buzzy new prototype for holographic augmented reality glasses, dubbed “Orion.”

The glasses are still pretty clunky—although not nearly as ungainly as Apple’s Vision Pro goggles. But, according to Zuck, they’re a “time machine” into the future.

“These glasses exist, they are awesome,” Zuck told the crowd, “and they are a glimpse of a future that I think is going to be pretty exciting.” (The ultra-chunky frames also added a special level of eccentricity to the billionaire’s outfit during the appearance.)

On the one hand, the thick-rimmed AR glasses, designed to add a virtual layer of reality over the real world in real time, are a bet against smartphones and existing devices. In the billionaire’s imagined future, we don’t call our friends or loved ones over FaceTime, or work via multiple physical monitors. Instead, with his glasses, it’s all projected in front of us.

But when Zuck makes grandiose claims about Meta’s innovations powering the future, he isn’t just talking about the future of hardware or wearables—at least, not in a vacuum. Speaking not only to Orion but also to Meta’s various VR projects and fast-moving AI efforts, the swashzuckling, jiu jitsuing CEO declared that he and Meta are constructing humanity’s social future.

“All of this comes together to build what I think is going to be the future of human connection, and the next generation of computing platforms,” Zuckerberg told the Connect crowd. “In every generation of technology, there is competition of ideas for what the future should look like—and at Meta, we are trying to build a future that is more open, more accessible, more natural, and more about human connection.”

In other words, by his own admission, Zuck is explicitly in competition with Silicon Valley foes to establish dominance in a new technological landscape that would continue to define how humans engage with each other and with the world at large.

Indeed, technological advancement and the tools that define a moment in human history have always played a role in our interpersonal relationships, social norms, and politics—a role that Meta’s social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram didn’t originate, but have undeniably filled.

Now, the wealth that Zuckerberg and his company have amassed in the process is being funneled into the billionaire’s new vision for the next version of the web and the technology that powers it. And should Meta win out over competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft—well, leading tech centibillionaires are probably the closest thing we have to emperors, so aut Zuck aut nihil, indeed.

Research contact: @futurism

Godfather of AI says Elon Musk is lying about self-driving Teslas

September 24, 2024

One of the pioneers of artificial intelligence (AI) is throwing major shade on Elon Musk‘s years of broken promises about self-driving Teslas, reports Futurism.

Yann LeCun, the so-called “Godfather of AI,” who currently serves as Meta‘s AI czar, has accused the billionaire of lying “again and again” about when fully-automated Teslas would arrive.

“Elon: ‘I’ve kept lying to you again and again about Tesla’s ‘Full Self Driving’ capabilities for the last 8 years,” the AI aficionado wrote, “‘but you should believe everything I say about politics and everything else.'”

While this criticism is always trenchant, given that Musk has in fact been claiming for nearly a decade that self-driving cars would arrive “next year,” LeCun’s comments came in response to a separate and more extensive critique.

In the long-form post, software CEO and notorious Tesla hater Dan O’Dowd accused Musk of being a “snake oil salesman” for continuing to hype autonomous driving tech that’s nowh

The meticulously detailed post—which we should note was penned by a guy who owns five Teslas and is now really mad about it—tracks Musk’s more recent claims RE: Full Self-Driving (FSD), breaking them down bit-by-bit in the process.

“Elon claimed in June that [FSD] v12 would finally see the introduction of ‘Actually Smart Summon (ASS)’, enabling consumers to summon their car with computer vision with [no one] in the driver’s seat in ‘a month or two,'” O’Dowd noted, “before stating in July that the feature would be available ‘next month.'”

“ASS is not even legally allowed to operate on public roads,” he continued, oblivious or uncaring about how hilarious that sentence sounds. “Elon had yet again made a promise which Tesla is still to this day unable to deliver.”

LeCun ended up responding to a Tesla fan who informed him that he’d let down a new follower with his Musk “hating.”

“I don’t hate Elon. I hate his lies,” the AI scientist wrote. “I like his cars, rockets, and satellite network.”

That’s honestly a far kinder statement than many would make—and it makes a lot of sense coming from someone who’s urging responsible thinking and usage of AI.

Research contact: @futurism

NYU professor of medicine says death appears to be reversible

September 4, 2024

A near-death experience expert insists that one’s heart stopping doesn’t have to be the end, with current medical interventions that can help patients cheat death, reports Futurism.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Associate Professor of Medicine Sam Parnia at New York University’s Langone Medical Center insisted that by and large, the medical industry is still very behind on the concepts of death and dying.

According to Parnia, studies from the last five years— including some undertaken by his own eponymous lab at NYUhave suggested that our brains remain “salvageable for not only hours, but possibly days” after death.

In one such Parnia Lab study from last year, for instance, researchers found that some cardiac arrest patients had memories of their death experiences up to an hour after their hearts had stopped, and brain activity from those same patients suggests a similar phenomenon. For 40% of those subjects, brain activity also returned to normal or near-normal an hour into cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

Combined with other studies—including a particularly gruesome one out of Yale that involved decapitated pig brains being revived up to 14 hours after their beheadings—the seemingly death-defying doctor said that the idea that death is a definitive state is “simply a social convention that does not conform with scientific realities.”

“If we remove that social label that makes us think everything stops, and look at it objectively, [death is] basically an injury process,” Parnia told The Telegraph.

By his reasoning, that process can be reversed not only by using extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machines, which act as a body’s heart and lungs when those functions have failed, but also specific cocktails of drugs that have been demonstrated to aid in the process of resurrection in animal studies.

Parnia told the British newspaper that he believes his team is the only one in the world giving patients these so-called “CPR cocktails“—which can include epinephrine, the diabetes drug metformin, vitamin C, the antidiuretic drug vasopressin, and the fatigue supplement Sulbutiamine—to cardiac arrest patients in efforts to revive them.

The 52-year-old doctor is so confident in his approach that he’s taken to telling people that, given his age and gender, he’s likely “going to have a cardiac arrest soon,” and that he shouldn’t have to die then when interventions like ECMO and CPR cocktails are at his disposal.

“If I have a heart attack and die tomorrow, why should I stay dead?” the death defier asked the newspaper. “That’s not necessary anymore.”

Obviously, Parnia’s idea of post-death revival is extremely dependent upon timing—but if he has his way, we might start seeing beyond death less as a final frontier, and more as something reversible in its immediate aftermath or even beyond.

Research contact: @futurism

Ahead of October launch, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket explodes during testing

August 26, 2024

Jeff Bezos’ rocket venture Blue Origin is tripping over its own feet as it races to meet an October deadline, reports Futurism.

The company is still hoping to have its New Glenn orbital rocket ready for NASA’s EscaPADE mission, which is scheduled to launch later this year—taking advantage of a rare alignment of the Earth and Mars to launch two spacecraft toward the Red Planet.

The next time the two planets will be this close won’t occur for another two years.

But as  Bloomberg reports, Blue Origin is facing major setbacks in the development of the 321-foot rocket. According to the report, an upper rocket portion failed during stress testing and exploded during testing, and a separate portion imploded like a soda can after engineers failed to install the necessary pressure-release valves before moving it from a humid exterior hangar into an air-conditioned space.

The launch platform, designed to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and launch Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite constellation, is already a whopping four years behind schedule.

And given the latest news, it’s starting to look increasingly unlikely that New Glenn will be ready to boost NASA’s two Mars spacecraft into Earth’s orbit in a matter of just two months.

Failure to launch

That’s despite all the flight hardware being complete, as a Blue Origin spokesperson told Bloomberg. The company is now working on assembling the various parts and engine integrations.

The company already has experienced other major setbacks, including an engine explosion of its much smaller New Shepard rocket in September 2022, which grounded the space tourist shuttle until December 2023.

Blue Origin has also reshuffled much of its upper management in the midst of the drama, including the appointment of a new CEO in December, Dave Limp, who has since installed several new executives in an apparent attempt to kick the company into high gear. The company is still hiring at a breakneck pace.

But even with a slate of new talent, it’s still facing some major technical hurdles—including the much-plagued BE-4 rocket engines that will power its New Glenn rocket. The engines—which also are being used for the United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rockethave faced years of delays and were only recently delivered.

With easily avoidable user errors plaguing its rocket’s development, Blue Origin is facing a major uphill battle to rise to the occasion—and a lucrative NASA contract hangs in the balance.

Rocket Lab, the maker of the two Mars spacecraft, recently revealed that it had entered “hero mode” to get the probes ready for an October launch. But whether those efforts will pay off remains to be seen.

Research contact: @futurism

Retired astronaut admits Boeing’s Starliner has trapped crew in space

July 30, 2024

With two NASA astronauts stranded  in space for weeks, officials at the space agency have insisted that the troubled Boeing Starliner, plagued with technical issues, can take the two explorers back to Earth, reports Futurism.

So, why haven’t they already?The At

An unnamed retired astronaut tells The Atlantic the obvious truth that NASA has been dancing around since the beginning of this space boondoggle: It’s just too risky right now.

“Of course they don’t feel comfortable putting them in the vehicle,” the retired astronaut told the magazine, referring to the Starliner, which transported the astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) back in June and is meant to return them back home. “Otherwise they would have put them in it already.”

 Expect delays

No date has been set for a return trip, with the earliest date now pushed back to August. To explain away the delay, NASA officials have said repeatedly that they want to test and troubleshoot the Starliner capsule before committing to a return trip.

The trouble started when helium leaks were discovered on Starliner prior to takeoff. They opted to launch anyway, and on its journey toward the ISS, it started experiencing additional leaks and malfunctioning thrusters.

Boeing has gotten the brunt of the negative press, not least because the company’s airplanes have been in the news for falling doors and other quality control issues—casting a pall over its space efforts as well.

But NASA shouldn’t escape scrutiny, The Atlantic article argues, and the space agency has been less than forthcoming with issues surrounding the Starliner—which has been ill-fated from the start of its development with various technical issues and aborted launches.

Boys club

For its part, NASA is eager to have a second option for ferrying astronauts into space beyond the more battle-tested Dragon capsule manufactured by SpaceX.

But even setting aside the Starliner, NASA ‘s relationship with SpaceX, headed by mercurial tech billionaire Elon Musk, has had its own fair share of headaches. While SpaceX missions into space have been successful, the commercial space outfit has seen death and injuries to personnel, not to mention Musk’s purported drug use and inappropriate relations with women staff.

One of those female staff members, a flight attendant, sued Musk for exposing his penis to her, resulting in a $250,000 payout to quiet down the scandal.

There’s been no answer from NASA on these issues, but with American dollars being used for these missions, there’s no question that the space agency needs to be more transparent.

Research contact: @futurism

Study: Night owls have superior cognitive function

September 23, 2024

Night owls can hoot all they want! New research suggests that people who stay up and do their best work at night have higher cognitive function than early birds, who are—let’s face it—often seen in a far more positive light, reports Futurism.

An international team of scientists led by Imperial College London came to this intriguing conclusion in a new study published in the journal, BMJ Public Health, during which they also found that getting seven to nine hours of sleep is best for optimum brain function.

For the study, the scientists looked at the large-scale UK Biobank, which comprises biomedical data and other information from half a million Brits, analyzing 26,000 participants who had undergone cognitive tests and answered whether they were early birds or night owls.

After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that one group of night owls had significantly higher cognitive function than another group of morning folks—surpassing them with 13.5% higher scores. In another sampling, night owls still came up on top with 7.5% higher scores.

People who are considered intermediate sleepers—they can switch between night and morning habits—also topped pure early birds with higher scores at 10.6% and 6.3%, respectively, in two separate population samples.

Cognitive function was obtained using results from four tests that measured visual and working memory, reaction time, verbal and numerical intelligence, and other cognitive qualities.

Scientists used different groups of people for comparison because some participants only completed two cognitive function tests instead of the four. People who did only two and people who did all four all were included in the study order to “optimize the analysis and enhance the representativeness of our findings,” the researchers wrote.

“It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean all morning people have worse cognitive performance,” Imperial College London medical researcher and study lead author Raha West said. “The findings reflect an overall trend where the majority might lean towards better cognition in the evening types.”

But will this study change the overall impression of night owls, who are seen as being lazy and irresponsible? Maybe not. But if you’re a night owl, at least you can whip out this study and say you got the morning birds beat in one very important aspect.

Research contact: @futurism