Transhumanismus

When we talk about pioneers of computer science, names like Turing, von Neumann, and Shannon often dominate the conversation. But Edsger W. Dijkstra — though far less publicly known — was one of the true intellectual giants who laid the foundation for modern computing. His work quietly shapes much of our digital world today. And […]

When most people hear the name Ted Kaczynski, they immediately think of the Unabomber — the domestic terrorist who waged a deadly bombing campaign for nearly two decades. But Kaczynski’s story is more complicated, more disturbing, and, for those of us interested in the future of technology and the singularity, uncomfortably relevant. Was Ted Kaczynski […]

Artificial Intelligence

Meta Is Creating a New AI Lab to Pursue ‘Superintelligence’Cade Metz and Mike Isaac | The New York Times

“Meta is preparing to unveil a new artificial intelligence research lab dedicated to pursuing ‘superintelligence,’ a hypothetical AI system that exceeds the powers of the human brain, as the tech giant jockeys to stay competitive in the technology race, according to four people with knowledge of the company’s plans.”

Artificial Intelligence

Why Superintelligent AI Isn’t Taking Over Anytime SoonChristopher Mims | The Wall Street Journal

“A primary requirement for being a leader in AI these days is to be a herald of the impending arrival of our digital messiah: superintelligent AI. …Before you get nervous about all the times you were rude to Alexa, know this: A growing cohort of researchers who build, study, and use modern AI aren’t buying all that talk.”

Computing

IBM Aims to Build the World’s First Large-Scale, Error-Corrected Quantum Computer by 2028Sophia Chen | MIT Technology Review

“The company says it has cracked the code for error correction and is building a modular machine [called Starling] in New York state. …If Starling achieves this, IBM will have solved arguably the biggest technical hurdle facing the industry today to beat competitors including Google, Amazon Web Services, and smaller startups such as Boston-based QuEra and PsiQuantum of Palo Alto, California.”

Robotics

Boston Dynamics Robots Dance to ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ for ‘America’s Got Talent’ AuditionAmanda Silberling | TechCrunch

“Their performance was impressive enough to earn four ‘yes’ votes from the judges—but one of the five robots experienced some stage fright, perhaps, and shut down in the middle of the routine. But the show must go on, so nevertheless, the four other robots persisted.”

Tech

‘AI Native’ Startups Pass $15 Billion in Annualized RevenueAmir Efrati | The Information

“Annualized revenue at ‘AI native’ companies selling artificial intelligence models or apps has passed $15 billion just two and a half years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, according to The Information’s Generative AI Database. While that’s not the same as $15 billion in actual revenue, it’s still an unprecedented haul for such a short time period and means that, collectively, the companies generated about $1.25 billion of revenue in May alone.”

Robotics

Waymo Rides Cost More Than Uber, Lyft—and People Are Paying AnywaySean O’Kane | TechCrunch

“At peak hours, Obi found Waymo’s average price to be about $11 more expensive than a Lyft and nearly $9.50 pricier than an Uber. ‘I didn’t expect consumers being willing to pay up to $10 more,’ Anburajan said. ‘I think [that] speaks to a real sense of excitement for technology, novelty, and a real preference to sometimes be in the car without a driver.'”

Artificial Intelligence

They Asked an AI Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.Kashmir Hill | The New York Times

“People who say they were drawn into ChatGPT conversations about conspiracies, cabals, and claims of AI sentience include a sleepless mother with an 8-week-old baby, a federal employee whose job was on the DOGE chopping block, and an AI-curious entrepreneur.”

Future

Lab-Grown Salmon Gets FDA ApprovalDominic Preston | The Verge

“The FDA has issued its first ever approval on a safety consultation for lab-grown fish. That makes Wildtype only the fourth company to get approval from the regulator to sell cell-cultivated animal products, and its cultivated salmon is now available to order from one Portland restaurant.”

Artificial Intelligence

Meta’s New World Model Lets Robots Manipulate Objects in Environments They’ve Never Encountered BeforeBen Dickson | VentureBeat

“Humans develop physical intuition early in life by observing their surroundings. If you see a ball thrown, you instinctively know its trajectory and can predict where it will land. V-JEPA 2 learns a similar ‘world model,’ which is an AI system’s internal simulation of how the physical world operates.”

Artificial Intelligence

ChatGPT Just Got Absolutely Wrecked at Chess, Losing to a 1970s-Era Atari 2600Omar Gallaga | CNET

“OpenAI’s ChatGPT has some major AI chatbot competitors in the market: Gemini, Copilot, Claude. Now add to that list the Atari 2600. The OG video game console, which was first released in 1977, was used in an engineer’s experiment to see how it would fare playing chess against the AI chatbot.”

Space

Isaacman’s Bold Plan for NASA: Nuclear Ships, Seven-Crew Dragons, Accelerated ArtemisEric Berger | Ars Technica

“When I spoke with Isaacman this week, I didn’t want to rehash the political melee. I preferred to talk about his plan. After all, he had six months to look under the hood of NASA, identify the problems that were holding the space agency back, and release its potential in this new era of spaceflight.”

Tech

Google and US Experts Join on AI Hurricane ForecastsWilliam J. Broad | The New York Times

“DeepMind, a Google company based in London, announced on Thursday that it was supplying the government forecasters with a newly enhanced variety of its weather forecasting models. Specialized to focus on hurricanes, the model tracks a storm’s development for up to 15 days, predicting not only its path but also its strength, an ability that earlier AI models lacked.”

Artificial Intelligence

With the Launch of o3-Pro, Let’s Talk About What AI ‘Reasoning’ Actually DoesBenj Edwards | Ars Technica

“As we consider the industry’s stated trajectory toward artificial general intelligence and even superintelligence, the evidence so far suggests that simply scaling up current approaches or adding more ‘thinking’ tokens may not bridge the gap between statistical pattern recognition and what might be called generalist algorithmic reasoning.”

Future

The Newspaper That Hired ChatGPTMatteo Wong | The Atlantic

“Several major publications, including The Atlantic have entered into corporate partnerships with OpenAI and other AI firms. Any number of experiments have ensued—publishers have used the software to help translate work into different languages, draft headlines, and write summaries or even articles. But perhaps no publication has gone further than the Italian newspaper Il Foglio.”

Future

News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI ToolsIsabella Simonetti and Katherine Blunt | The Wall Street Journal

“The AI armageddon is here for online news publishers. Chatbots are replacing Google searches, eliminating the need to click on blue links and tanking referrals to news sites. As a result, traffic that publishers relied on for years is plummeting.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 14) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Using the new system, Casey Harrell can emphasize words and intonations in real time—and sing tunes.

At the age of 45, Casey Harrell lost his voice to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Also called Lou Gehrig’s disease, the disorder eats away at muscle-controlling nerves in the brain and spinal cord. Symptoms begin with weakening muscles, uncontrollable twitching, and difficulty swallowing. Eventually patients lose control of muscles in the tongue, throat, and lips, robbing them of their ability to speak.

Unlike paralyzed patients, Harrell could still produce sounds seasoned caretakers could understand, but they weren’t intelligible in a simple conversation. Now, thanks to an AI-guided brain implant, he can once again “speak” using a computer-generated voice that sounds like his.

The system, developed by researchers at the University of California, Davis, has almost no detectable delay when translating his brain activity into coherent speech. Rather than producing a monotone synthesized voice, the system can detect intonations—for example, a question versus a statement—and emphasize a word. It also translates brain activity encoding nonsense words such as “hmm” or “eww,” making the generated voice sound natural.

“With instantaneous voice synthesis, neuroprosthesis users will be able to be more included in a conversation. For example, they can interrupt, and people are less likely to interrupt them accidentally,” said study author Sergey Stavisky in a press release.

The study comes hot on the heels of another AI method that decodes a paralyzed woman’s thoughts into speech within a second. Previous systems took nearly half a minute—more than long enough to disrupt normal conversation. Together, the two studies showcase the power of AI to decipher the brain’s electrical chatter and convert it into speech in real time.

In Harrell’s case, the training was completed in the comfort of his home. Although the system required some monitoring and tinkering, it paves the way for a commercially available product for those who have lost the ability to speak.

“This is the holy grail in speech BCIs [brain-computer interfaces],” Christian Herff at Maastricht University to Nature, who was not involved in the study, told Nature.

Listening In

Scientists have long sought to restore the ability to speak for those who have lost it, whether due to injury or disease.

One strategy is to tap into the brain’s electrical activity. When we prepare to say something, the brain directs muscles in the throat, tongue, and lips to form sounds and words. By listening in on its electrical chatter, it’s possible to decode intended speech. Algorithms stitch together neural data and generate words and sentences as either text or synthesized speech.

The process may sound straightforward. But it took scientists years to identify the most reliable brain regions from which to collect speech-related activity. Even then, the lag time from thought to output—whether text or synthesized speech—has been long enough to make conversation awkward.

Then there are the nuances. Speech isn’t just about producing audible sentences. How you say something also matters. Intonation tells us if the speaker is asking a question, stating their needs, joking, or being sarcastic. Emphasis on individual words highlights the speaker’s mindset and intent. These aspects are especially important for tonal languages—such as Chinese—where a change in tone or pitch for the same “word” can have wildly different meanings. (“Ma,” for example, can mean mom, numb, horse, or cursing, depending on the intonation.)

Talk to Me

Harrell is part of the BrainGate2 clinical trial, a long-standing project seeking to restore lost abilities using brain implants. He enrolled in the trial as his ALS symptoms progressed. Although he could still vocalize, his speech was hard to understand and required expert listeners from his care team to translate. This was his primary mode of communication. He also had to learn to speak slower to make his residual speech more intelligible.

Five years ago, Harrell had four 64-microelectrode implants inserted into the left precentral gyrus of his brain—a region controlling multiple brain functions, including coordinating speech.

“We are recording from the part of the brain that’s trying to send these commands to the muscles. And we are basically listening into that, and we’re translating those patterns of brain activity into a phoneme—like a syllable or the unit of speech—and then the words they’re trying to say,” said Stavisky at the time.

In just two training sessions, Harrell had the potential to say 125,000 words—a vocabulary large enough for everyday use. The system translated his neural activity into a voice synthesizer that mimicked his voice. After more training, the implant achieved 97.5 percent accuracy as he went about his daily life.

“The first time we tried the system, he cried with joy as the words he was trying to say correctly appeared on-screen. We all did,” said Stavisky.

In the new study, the team sought to make generated speech even more natural with less delay and more personality. One of the hardest parts of real-time voice synthesis is not knowing when and how the person is trying to speak—or their intended intonation. “I am fine” has vastly different meanings depending on tone.

The team captured Harrell’s brain activity as he attempted to speak a sentence shown on a screen. The electrical spikes were filtered to remove noise in one millisecond segments and fed into a decoder. Like the Rosetta Stone, the algorithm mapped specific neural features to words and pitch, which were played back to Harrell through a voice synthesizer with just a 25-millisecond lag—roughly the time it takes for a person to hear their own voice, wrote the team.

Rather than decoding phonemes or words, the AI captured Harrell’s intent to make sounds every 10 milliseconds, allowing him to eventually say words not in a dictionary, like “hmm” or “eww.” He could spell out words and respond to open-ended questions, telling the researchers that the synthetic voice made him “happy” and that it felt like “his real voice.”

The team also recorded brain activity as Harrell attempted to speak the same set of sentences as either statements or questions, the latter having an increased pitch. All four electrode arrays recorded a neural fingerprint of activity patterns when the sentence was spoken as a question.

The system, once trained, could also detect emphasis. Harrell was asked to stress each word individually in the sentence, “I never said she stole my money,” which can have multiple meanings. His brain activity ramped up before saying the emphasized word, which the algorithm captured and used to guide the synthesized voice. In another test, the system picked up multiple pitches as he tried to sing different melodies.

Raise Your Voice

The AI isn’t perfect. Volunteers could understand the output roughly 60 percent of the time—a far cry from the near perfect brain-to-text system Harrell is currently using. But the new AI brings individual personality to synthesized speech, which usually produces a monotone voice. Deciphering speech in real-time also lets the person interrupt or object during a conversation, making the experience feel more natural.

“We don’t always use words to communicate what we want. We have interjections. We have other expressive vocalizations that are not in the vocabulary,” study author Maitreyee   Wairagkar told Nature.

Because the AI is trained on sounds, not English vocabulary, it could be adapted to other languages, especially tonal ones like Chinese. The team is also looking to increase the system’s accuracy by placing more electrodes in people who have lost their speech due to stroke or neurodegenerative diseases.

“The results of this research provide hope for people who want to talk but can’t…This kind of technology could be transformative for people living with paralysis,” said study author David Brandman.

The post A Man With ALS Can Speak and Sing Again Thanks to a Brain Implant and AI-Synthesized Voice appeared first on SingularityHub.

Fervo is using technology from the oil and gas industry to unlock vast stores of geothermal power under our feet.

Between power-hungry AI data centers, domestic manufacturing growth, and electric vehicles, US electricity demand is set to soar in coming years, and utilities aren’t yet sure where the supply to meet this growth will come from. Geothermal power is increasingly looking like a viable option thanks to companies deploying next-generation technologies.

One of these is Fervo Energy, which announced $206 million in funding this week, adding to the $255 million they secured earlier this year. The new funding round was led by Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, part of Bill Gates’ climate investment firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

Fervo’s approach, which uses technologies developed for the oil and gas industry, could help push geothermal’s share of total US electricity supply from its current 0.4 percent to 10 percent or greater.

Vertical Drilling for Water

Conventional geothermal works by drilling vertical wells into underground reservoirs of hot water or steam. Wells are up to 10,000 feet (or about 3 kilometers/1.9 miles) deep—and those are the easy ones. The hot water accessed through vertical wells is brought to the surface, where it’s turned into steam that’s used to spin turbines.

A major advantage of geothermal over solar and wind is that it’s not limited by intermittency; the rocks in the Earth’s crust are hot 24/7. This means geothermal is a reliable source of baseload power, and tech companies including Meta and Google have jumped on the geothermal bandwagon.

However, easily accessible underground reservoirs only exist in a handful of geologically active spots around the globe, like Iceland, Kenya, and New Zealand. These countries are positioned over sections of the Earth’s crust that have high heat flow and permeable rock relatively close to the surface, as they’re close to fault lines and areas where there’s volcanic activity.

Such areas exist in the western US as well, namely in California, Nevada, Utah, and Hawaii. In fact, the US leads the world in installed geothermal generating capacity—yet we’ve tapped less than 0.7 percent of our geothermal resources. The majority of those resources can only be accessed via enhanced geothermal technology—and that’s where Fervo comes in.

Horizontal Drilling for Heat

Rather than only drilling vertically to access naturally occurring reservoirs of hot water, Fervo and other enhanced geothermal companies also drill horizontally to create artificial reservoirs in hot, dry rock. After drilling vertically to depths of about 8,000 feet, they bore horizontal tunnels then pump water through them, essentially creating artificial reservoirs. Heat from the rock transfers to the water, which is brought to the surface and used to generate electricity. The water is typically recycled and pumped back into the ground again.

Besides putting more surface area in contact with geothermal fluid and maximizing heat transfer, horizontal drilling allows multiple wells to be drilled from a single surface location. This means there’s a smaller surface footprint and less impact on the environment surrounding the wells.

Horizontal drilling was developed for oil and gas production to find new fossil fuel deposits. Fervo’s cofounder, Tim Latimer, started his career in the oil and gas industry, but after a 2015 flood in his home city of Houston, he realized the urgency of the climate crisis and decided to find a way to apply fossil fuel technologies to renewable energy.

Horizontal drilling isn’t the only technology Latimer repurposed for geothermal. Fervo installs fiber-optic cables in its wells to monitor real-time data on flow, temperature, and performance. They also use an advanced drill bit technology called polycrystalline diamond compact (PDC). PDC contains lab-grown diamond, one of the hardest and most resilient materials in existence. The drill bits can cut through harder types of rock, do so faster, and go longer without wearing down. In addition, Latimer said in an interview with Time Magazine, “One of the things that we drove forward was a way of pumping fluid down while we’re drilling that cools your drilling system more efficiently than in an oil and gas operation.”

Fervo set multiple drilling performance records with its recent completion of an appraisal well in southwest Utah (part of the larger project the company will use its new funding on): The 15,765-foot-deep Sugarloaf well will reach a temperature of 520 degrees Fahrenheit and was completed in 16 drilling days. The company says that’s a 79 percent reduction in drilling time compared to the US Department of Energy baseline for ultradeep geothermal wells.

Beyond the Low-Hanging Fruit

Fervo’s technology is making it feasible to develop geothermal power plants in areas where they wouldn’t have been possible before, mainly because the economics wouldn’t have made sense. The company plans to use the $206 million in new funding to keep building out its Cape Station plant in Beaver County, Utah. Phase I of the project plans to deliver 100 megawatts of power to the grid starting in 2026, and Phase II will add another 400 megawatts by 2028. The site has received permitting approval to expand up to two gigawatts.

Fervo ultimately has ambitions to go far beyond those two gigawatts—and the resources to do so definitely exist. A US Geological Survey assessment published last month says geothermal energy in the Great Basin alone, which spans Nevada and neighboring states, could produce electricity equal to one-tenth of the current US power supply.

“Principally, there’s virtually an unlimited amount of geothermal energy,” Latimer said. “The world is really big, and the world is really hot. We’ve got billions of years of energy under our feet. It’s all a question about how much you can access economically.”

The post Geothermal Unicorn Fervo Energy Is Building a Massive Next-Gen Plant in Utah appeared first on SingularityHub.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke wasn’t just a science fiction writer; he was a futurist whose predictions often read like prophecy. Best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey and for envisioning geostationary satellites before they existed, Clarke’s legacy continues to shape how we think about the future. Alongside Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, he was one […]

Our universe may have been born in a gravitational crunch that formed a very massive black hole—followed by a bounce inside it.

The Big Bang is often described as the explosive birth of the universe—a singular moment when space, time, and matter sprang into existence. But what if this was not the beginning at all? What if our universe emerged from something else—something more familiar and radical at the same time?

In a new paper, published in Physical Review D (full preprint here), my colleagues and I propose a striking alternative. Our calculations suggest the Big Bang was not the start of everything, but rather the outcome of a gravitational crunch or collapse that formed a very massive black hole—followed by a bounce inside it.

This idea, which we call the black hole universe, offers a radically different view of cosmic origins, yet it is grounded entirely in known physics and observations.

Today’s standard cosmological model, based on the Big Bang and cosmic inflation (the idea that the early universe rapidly blew up in size), has been remarkably successful in explaining the structure and evolution of the universe. But it comes at a price: It leaves some of the most fundamental questions unanswered.

For one, the Big Bang model begins with a singularity—a point of infinite density where the laws of physics break down. This is not just a technical glitch; it’s a deep theoretical problem that suggests we don’t really understand the beginning at all.

To explain the universe’s large-scale structure, physicists introduced a brief phase of rapid expansion into the early universe called cosmic inflation, powered by an unknown field with strange properties. Later, to explain the accelerating expansion observed today, they added another “mysterious” component: dark energy.

In short, the standard model of cosmology works well—but only by introducing new ingredients we have never observed directly. Meanwhile, the most basic questions remain open: Where did everything come from? Why did it begin this way? And why is the universe so flat, smooth, and large?

New Model

Our new model tackles these questions from a different angle—by looking inward instead of outward. Instead of starting with an expanding universe and trying to trace back how it began, we consider what happens when an overly dense collection of matter collapses under gravity.

This is a familiar process: Stars collapse into black holes, which are among the most well-understood objects in physics. But what happens inside a black hole, beyond the event horizon from which nothing can escape, remains a mystery.

In 1965, the British physicist Roger Penrose proved that under very general conditions, gravitational collapse must lead to a singularity. This result, extended by the late British physicist Stephen Hawking and others, underpins the idea that singularities—like the one at the Big Bang—are unavoidable.

The idea helped win Penrose a share of the 2020 Nobel prize in physics and inspired Hawking’s global bestseller A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. But there’s a caveat. These “singularity theorems” rely on “classical physics” which describes ordinary macroscopic objects. If we include the effects of quantum mechanics, which rules the tiny microcosmos of atoms and particles, as we must at extreme densities, the story may change.

In our new paper, we show that gravitational collapse does not have to end in a singularity. We find an exact analytical solution—a mathematical result with no approximations. Our math shows that as we approach the potential singularity, the size of the universe changes as a (hyperbolic) function of cosmic time.

This simple mathematical solution describes how a collapsing cloud of matter can reach a high-density state and then bounce, rebounding outward into a new expanding phase.

But why do Penrose’s theorems forbid such outcomes? It’s all down to a rule called the quantum exclusion principle, which states that no two identical particles known as fermions can occupy the same quantum state (such as angular momentum, or “spin”).

And we show that this rule prevents the particles in the collapsing matter from being squeezed indefinitely. As a result, the collapse halts and reverses. The bounce is not only possible—it’s inevitable under the right conditions.

Crucially, this bounce occurs entirely within the framework of general relativity, which applies on large scales such as stars and galaxies, combined with the basic principles of quantum mechanics—no exotic fields, extra dimensions, or speculative physics required.

What emerges on the other side of the bounce is a universe remarkably like our own. Even more surprisingly, the rebound naturally produces the two separate phases of accelerated expansion—inflation and dark energy—driven not by hypothetical fields but by the physics of the bounce itself.

Testable Predictions

One of the strengths of this model is that it makes testable predictions. It predicts a small but non-zero amount of positive spatial curvature—meaning the universe is not exactly flat, but slightly curved, like the surface of the Earth.

This is simply a relic of the initial small over-density that triggered the collapse. If future observations, such as the ongoing Euclid mission, confirm a small positive curvature, it would be a strong hint that our universe did indeed emerge from such a bounce. It also makes predictions about the current universe’s rate of expansion, something that has already been verified.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying ESA’s Euclid mission on the launch pad in 2023. Image Credit: ESA, CC BY-SA

This model does more than fix technical problems with standard cosmology. It could also shed new light on other deep mysteries in our understanding of the early universe—such as the origin of supermassive black holes, the nature of dark matter, or the hierarchical formation and evolution of galaxies.

These questions will be explored by future space missions such as Arrakihs, which will study diffuse features such as stellar halos (a spherical structure of stars and globular clusters surrounding galaxies) and satellite galaxies (smaller galaxies that orbit larger ones) that are difficult to detect with traditional telescopes from Earth and will help us understand dark matter and galaxy evolution.

These phenomena might also be linked to relic compact objects—such as black holes—that formed during the collapsing phase and survived the bounce.

The black hole universe also offers a new perspective on our place in the cosmos. In this framework, our entire observable universe lies inside the interior of a black hole formed in some larger “parent” universe.

We are not special, no more than Earth was in the geocentric worldview that led Galileo (the astronomer who suggested the Earth revolves around the sun in the 16th and 17th centuries) to be placed under house arrest.

We are not witnessing the birth of everything from nothing, but rather the continuation of a cosmic cycle—one shaped by gravity, quantum mechanics, and the deep interconnections between them.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post What If the Big Bang Wasn’t the Beginning? Research Suggests It May Have Taken Place Inside a Black Hole appeared first on SingularityHub.

Such devices could monitor viruses or biodiversity, but the potential for misuse raises ethical questions.

A majestic bobcat sauntered through the Florida coastal forests. Nearby, diamondback rattlesnakes slithered across muddy terrain, alligator “swamp puppies” patrolled the waters, and venomous spiders waited for prey. Meanwhile, trekkers explored the grand oaks, slapped away mosquitos, and looked for bats and ospreys.

This may sound like an episode of Planet Earth—but there were no cameras. Instead, scientists collected microscopic snippets of airborne DNA with a vacuum. They documented the animals by running this environmental DNA, or eDNA, through a cutting-edge device about the size of a deck of cards. The device can do more. Halfway around the world in the city of Dublin—known for its pubs, music, and cheer—the team used it to detect DNA traces from weed, poppy, and magic mushrooms wafting on the breeze. They assembled genomic profiles with astounding speed, capturing whole genetic landscapes in just two days.

“The level of information that’s available in environmental DNA is such that we’re only starting to consider what the potential applications can be, from humans to wildlife to other species that have implications for human health,” said study author David Duffy at the University of Florida in a press release.

The device is a powerful tool that can be used to monitor biodiversity, emerging viruses, and illicit drugs, but it can also detect the genetic heritage of people traipsing about nearby. Although it wasn’t used to identify individuals in the study, the authors warned that airborne eDNA “could provide seriously powerful potential for individual-level surveillance for…humans.”

Nevertheless, “It is boundary-pushing work,” Ryan Kelly at the  University of Washington, who was not involved in the study, told Science.

A Trove of Data

Living creatures shed genetic material. Fungi, plants, animals, humans, bacteria, viruses—all leave invisible genetic fingerprints as they roam the world.

As technologies to read DNA—known as genetic sequencing—have advanced, scientists have begun capturing DNA in the ambient environment to take a census of the living creatures there.

Some have found thousands of bacterial species in the depths of our oceans. Others are tracking ocean species using DNA “sponges” or land-based creatures by analyzing ingested eDNA from dung beetles. These studies can also monitor emerging viruses from animals—such as those in wildlife markets—by capturing and analyzing genetic molecules.

Duffy believes eDNA could invigorate conservation efforts. In 2022, his team devised a way to monitor endangered sea turtles on the Florida coast. These animals are difficult to track. They roam multiple habitats, including the open sea, coastal ecosystems, and beaches.

Though originally developed to track microbes, Duffy and team showed eDNA can be used to detect small chunks of genetic material from hair, skin, scales, and fluids left behind in sand and water. The team also picked up dangerous sea-turtle pathogens, including a virus that causes tumors in the turtles. Since then, they’ve captured human eDNA from oceans, rivers, and sand—and can identify individual volunteers based on their footprints on the beach.

Although eDNA samples are usually picked up from water and land, they also float in the breeze. This led the team to ask: How much information can we gather from air?

Bring in the Shotgun

Most eDNA studies use a technology called metabarcoding. Here, scientists extract DNA from a sample—say, water from a Florida swamp or a Dublin pub—and sequence the DNA. To detect which species are present, each DNA snippet is matched to a barcode in a data library. The method can be accurate, but it has some shortcomings.

For one, the approach can only identify eDNA sequences already in the database. The barcodes are a little like those on produce at the grocery, only instead of apples or onions, they’re small snippets of DNA unique to a species. You can only detect organisms with existing primers. That is, when the system scans a piece of DNA, it won’t register unless there’s already a barcode present. The method is also costly and takes days, if not weeks, to process a single sample.

Duffy and team turned to a method called shotgun sequencing, which randomly chops DNA sequences into billions of snippets called “reads.” Though the approach is powerful, it’s languished in the past due to the cost and time to piece together individual genetic snippets and match them to a group of organisms. The hardware was also bulky, roughly the size of a refrigerator, making it difficult to bring into the field. It was mostly used to study microbes—not animals or humans.

Thanks to cloud computing and deep sequencing—a type of DNA sequencing where the same DNA region is read many times—it’s now possible to do shotgun sequencing in the wild.

The team used a handheld device with a vacuum tube to suck DNA from the air. For two years, they collected samples across a range of urban and rural locations and produced 78 shotgun sequencing datasets.

“When we started, it seemed like it would be hard to get intact large fragments of DNA from the air. But that’s not the case. We’re actually finding a lot of informative DNA,” said Duffy.

In one experiment, they tracked bobcats by gathering eDNA near animal tracks for a week. They found it contained bobcat DNA from a wild population and a zoo-based one, suggesting the tech could be used to monitor animal lineages. They also collected airborne DNA near venomous spiders and found their genomes differ from those in the Caribbean or South America. Without having to lay eyes on the animals, the team painted a picture of species thriving in Florida’s coastal forests.

Meanwhile, Dublin had a completely different eDNA profile. The device identified 63 viruses in air samples across the city alongside a slew of allergens, such as those from peanuts and tree pollen. It also found evidence of illicit drugs, including magic mushrooms.

A Genetic Quandary

The technology isn’t an all-seeing eye, and it’s possible to over-interpret results.

It relies on algorithms to stitch DNA back together and some could just be random DNA floating in the air. Also, some applications, like those related to human DNA, could be beneficial but also risk unexpected negative consequences, wrote the authors. In Florida and Dublin, they could identify the genetic ancestry of people walking through a location. The team intentionally refrained from identifying individual people in the study—although it has already been done.

“As with artificial intelligence technologies, the human eDNA genie cannot be returned to the bottle,” wrote the team. The technology can be used for good or nefarious purposes. For now, the team is hoping to bring eDNA back to its roots, to save and conserve wildlife.

“It seems like science fiction, but it’s becoming science fact,” said Duffy.

The post Handheld Device Creates Genetic Profiles From Airborne DNA With Astounding Speed appeared first on SingularityHub.

It was during the relatively low-tech mid-19th century that Samuel Butler wrote his startling essay, Darwin among the Machines. In it, Butler fused two emerging forces of his time: the rapid industrial transformation brought by machines, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The result? A radical, unsettling vision: that machines were not merely […]

SYNESTHETES

Tired: Listening to music.
Wired: Feeling the music.

A mind-bending new suit straps onto your torso, ankles and wrists, then uses actuators to translate audio into vivid vibration. The result: a new way for everyone to experience music, according to its creators. That’s especially exciting for people who have trouble hearing.

THE FEELIES

The Music: Not Impossible suit was created by design firm Not Impossible Labs and electronics manufacturing company Avnet. The suit can create sensations to go with pre-recorded music, or a “Vibrotactile DJ” can adjust the sensations in real time during a live music event.”

Billboard writer Andy Hermann tried the suit out, and it sounds like a trip.

“Sure enough, a pulse timed to a kickdrum throbs into my ankles and up through my legs,” he wrote. “Gradually, [the DJ] brings in other elements: the tap of a woodblock in my wrists, a bass line massaging my lower back, a harp tickling a melody across my chest.”

MORE ACCESSIBLE

To show the suit off, Not Impossible and Avnet organized a performance this past weekend by the band Greta Van Fleet at the Life is Beautiful Festival in Las Vegas. The company allowed attendees to don the suits. Mandy Harvey, a deaf musician who stole the show on America’s Got Talent last year, talked about what the performance meant to her in a video Avnet posted to Facebook.

“It was an unbelievable experience to have an entire audience group who are all experiencing the same thing at the same time,” she said. “For being a deaf person, showing up at a concert, that never happens. You’re always excluded.”

READ MORE: Not Impossible Labs, Zappos Hope to Make Concerts More Accessible for the Deaf — and Cooler for Everyone [Billboard]

More on accessible design: New Tech Allows Deaf People To Sense Sounds

The post Make Music A Full Body Experience With A “Vibro-Tactile” Suit appeared first on Futurism.

IN THE FEELS

Today’s prosthetics can give people with missing limbs the ability to do almost anything — run marathons, climb mountains, you name it. But when it comes to letting those people feel what they could with a natural limb, the devices, however mechanically sophisticated, invariably fall short.

Now researchers have created a “synthetic skin” with a sense of touch that not only matches the sensitivity of natural skin, but in some cases even exceeds it. Now the only challenge is getting that information back into the wearer’s nervous system.

UNDER PRESSURE

When something presses against your skin, your nerves receive and transmit that pressure to the brain in the form of electrical signals.

To mimic that biological process, the researchers suspended a flexible polymer, dusted with magnetic particles, over a magnetic sensor. The effect is like a drum: Applying even the tiniest amount of pressure to the membrane causes the magnetic particles to move closer to the sensors, and they transmit this movement electronically.

The research, which could open the door to super-sensitive prosthetics, was published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.

SPIDEY SENSE TINGLING

Tests shows that the skin can sense extremely subtle pressure, such as a blowing breeze, dripping water, or crawling ants. In some cases, the synthetic skin responded to pressures so gentle that natural human skin wouldn’t be able to detect them.

While the sensing ability of this synthetic skin is remarkable, the team’s research doesn’t address how to transmit the signals to the human brain. Other scientists are working on that, though, so eventually this synthetic skin could give prosthetic wearers the ability to feel forces even their biological-limbed friends can’t detect.

READ MORE: A Skin-Inspired Tactile Sensor for Smart Prosthetics [Science Robotics]

More on synthetic skin: Electronic Skin Lets Amputees Feel Pain Through Their Prosthetics

The post “Synthetic Skin” Could Give Prosthesis Users a Superhuman Sense of Touch appeared first on Futurism.

BRAIN BOOST

There’s a gadget that some say can help alleviate depression and enhance creativity. All you have to do is place a pair of electrodes on your scalp and the device will deliver electrical current to your brain. It’s readily available on Amazon or you can even make your own.

But in a new paper published this week in the Creativity Research Journal, psychologists at Georgetown University warned that the practice is spreading before we have a good understanding of its health effects, especially since consumers are already buying and building unregulated devices to shock them. They also cautioned that the technique, which scientists call transcranial electrical stimulation (tES), could have adverse effects on the brains of young people.

“There are multiple potential concerns with DIY-ers self-administering electric current to their brains, but this use of tES may be inevitable,” said co-author Adam Green in a press release. “And, certainly, anytime there is risk of harm with a technology, the scariest risks are those associated with kids and the developing brain”

SHOCK JOCK

Yes, there’s evidence that tES can help patients with depression, anxiety, Parkinson’s disease, and other serious conditions, the Georgetown researchers acknowledge.

But that’s only when it’s administered by a trained health care provider. When administering tES at home, people might ignore safety directions, they wrote, or their home-brewed devices could deliver unsafe amounts of current. And because it’s not yet clear what effects of tES might be on the still-developing brains of young people, the psychologists advise teachers and parents to resist the temptation to use the devices to encourage creativity among children.

The takeaway: tES is likely here to stay, and it may provide real benefits. But for everyone’s sake, consumer-oriented tES devices should be regulated to protect users.

READ MORE: Use of electrical brain stimulation to foster creativity has sweeping implications [Eurekalert]

More on transcranial electrical stimulation: DARPA’s New Brain Device Increases Learning Speed by 40%

The post People Are Zapping Their Brains to Boost Creativity. Experts Have Concerns. appeared first on Futurism.

MIND CONTROL

The military is making it easier than ever for soldiers to distance themselves from the consequences of war. When drone warfare emerged, pilots could, for the first time, sit in an office in the U.S. and drop bombs in the Middle East.

Now, one pilot can do it all, just using their mind — no hands required.

Earlier this month, DARPA, the military’s research division, unveiled a project that it had been working on since 2015: technology that grants one person the ability to pilot multiple planes and drones with their mind.

“As of today, signals from the brain can be used to command and control … not just one aircraft but three simultaneous types of aircraft,” Justin Sanchez, director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, said, according to Defense One.

THE SINGULARITY

Sanchez may have unveiled this research effort at a “Trajectory of Neurotechnology” session at DARPA’s 60th anniversary event, but his team has been making steady progress for years. Back in 2016, a volunteer equipped with a brain-computer interface (BCI) was able to pilot an aircraft in a flight simulator while keeping two other planes in formation — all using just his thoughts, a spokesperson from DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office told Futurism.

In 2017, Copeland was able to steer a plane through another simulation, this time receiving haptic feedback — if the plane needed to be steered in a certain direction, Copeland’s neural implant would create a tingling sensation in his hands.

NOT QUITE MAGNETO

There’s a catch. The DARPA spokesperson told Futurism that because this BCI makes use of electrodes implanted in and on the brain’s sensory and motor cortices, experimentation has been limited to volunteers with varying degrees of paralysis. That is: the people steering these simulated planes already had brain electrodes, or at least already had reason to undergo surgery.

To try and figure out how to make this technology more accessible and not require surgical placement of a metal probe into people’s brains, DARPA recently launched the NExt-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program. The plan is to make a device with similar capabilities, but it’ll look more like an EEG cap that the pilot can take off once a mission is done.

“The envisioned N3 system would be a tool that the user could wield for the duration of a task or mission, then put aside,” said Al Emondi, head of N3, according to the spokesperson. “I don’t like comparisons to a joystick or keyboard because they don’t reflect the full potential of N3 technology, but they’re useful for conveying the basic notion of an interface with computers.”

READ MORE: It’s Now Possible To Telepathically Communicate with a Drone Swarm [Defense One]

More on DARPA research: DARPA Is Funding Research Into AI That Can Explain What It’s “Thinking”

The post Military Pilots Can Control Three Jets at Once via a Neural Implant appeared first on Futurism.

ONE IN A MILLION TEN

Today, about 10 people on Earth have bladders they weren’t born with. No, they didn’t receive bladder transplants — doctors grew these folks new bladders using the recipients’ own cells.

On Tuesday, the BBC published a report on the still-nascent procedure of transplanting lab-grown bladders. In it, the publication talks to Luke Massella, who underwent the procedure more than a decade ago. Massella was born with spina bifida, which carries with it a risk of damage to the bladder and urinary tract. Now, he lives a normal life, he told the BBC.

“I was kind of facing the possibility I might have to do dialysis [blood purification via machine] for the rest of my life,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to play sports, and have the normal kid life with my brother.”

All that changed after Anthony Atala, a surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, decided he was going to grow a new bladder for Massella.

ONE NEW BLADDER, COMING UP!

To do that, Atala first removed a small piece of Massella’s own bladder. He then removed cells from this portion of bladder and multiplied them in a petri dish. Once he had enough cells, he coated a scaffold with the cells and placed the whole thing in a temperature controlled, high oxygen environment. After a few weeks, the lab-created bladder was ready for transplantation into Massella.

“So it was pretty much like getting a bladder transplant, but from my own cells, so you don’t have to deal with rejection,” said Massella.

The number of people with lab-grown bladders might still be low enough to count on your fingers, but researchers are making huge advances in growing everything from organs to skin in the lab. Eventually, we might reach a point when we can replace any body part we need to with a perfect biological match that we built ourselves.

READ MORE: “A New Bladder Made From My Cells Gave Me My Life Back” [BBC]

More on growing organs: The FDA Wants to Expedite Approval of Regenerative Organ Therapies

The post Lab-Grown Bladders Can Save People From a Lifetime of Dialysis appeared first on Futurism.