sent2null space

In another ground breaking advance to the science of stem cell pluripotent modification a team of researchers has succeeded in inducing a cell to change into the earliest known embryonic state. This is great news as it is exactly what would need to be possible so that full comparative analysis between different cell lines induced into creation can be had. Comparative analysis will then enable the key genes that differentiate different stem cell types for different tissues to be genetically characterized and once that happens the ability to point genetically shift cells from type to type (even post differentiation) will be possible. This is a hugely important feat because it isolates an ability to identify from the zoo of genes the specific pathway expressions that crystalize the cells that constitute living organisms and enable their macroscopic functions. The sequencing of any given genome gives one a book filled with words but no chapter titles or division labels. All t...

You know one thing I've been thinking about in the last few days.... It is of the solution that Feynman came up with for describing quantum electrodynamics and resolving a whole host of problems which up to that time were intractable. The integration of renormalization into the theory and the first class representation of histories of evolution for particle dynamics that spanned the present the future and the past in the wave function description. I asserted a few days ago that so far as enabling the mathematical resolution there is no proof that any real particles can travel backward in time...some mathematical tools are just that and despite being useful should never be expected to be "realized". A good example of this from mathematics and engineering is the complex plane and the astonishing landscape of possibility it opened up. What is "i" ?? In the same way that a particles history can be seen as a present position that emerged from an i...

A recent medium post contained the following quote: "I promise you, my reaction to the project’s cancelation wasn’t “Too bad, let me find my next longshot!” It was more like grief that a year of my life had been wasted, guilt that I’d wasted the efforts of my team, fear of reputation damage, and determination to work on something next time that would actually matter. As individuals, we have no portfolio strategy — so those 10% odds are no longer palatable. When we fail, most rational people respond by trying to avoid dumb ideas and pick smart bets with clear impact the next time. People who happen to have a hit in their first few tries are even more vulnerable to the belief that they have to succeed every time (and take it harder when subsequent failures inevitably occur.) And that’s it — the dead-end for innovation. I’ve met a few people who don’t seem to have this reaction (serial entrepreneurs every one of them) and I can’t tell you what makes them react differently...

These type of discoveries in a subtle way describe the long game on why the idea of drug prohibition is as extinct as the dodo. You won't have to traverse dark alley ways to buy impure product trafficked from far away lands. Instead you will sit in your basement bio lab with elemental components and code together the necessary little functionality that you wish to have your host of living beasties produce for you. From heroine to vanilla, oil to alcohol.... when every one can bio synthesize what ever they want from scratch ...what need for outside suppliers? Drug dealing will go extinct  and in it's place will spring up a wide industry where templates for production of all kinds of inebriating or mind dulling agents will emerge....the same way maker 3D files are shared online for use in 3D printers...or modeling files are shared for rendering CGI. As people will be able to clandestinely supply their own drugs the risk of trying to buy them illegally doesn't have t...

A new trailer to a new Science Fiction take on the robot future is out and it is called  A utomota . It mixes some tried and true ideas in Science fiction but principle among them is the plot hinge on the idea of two "protocols". These are similar to Issac Azimov's 3 robot rules for those that recall his classic work on the matter "I,Robot". Automata: 2 protocols: 1) A Robot cannot harm any form of life. 2) A robot cannot alter itself or others. I am going to explain why such ideas are fundamentally flawed, first the idea that it would even be possible to enforce setting anything like rules of behavior as abstract as the protocol 1, in the film would require a great deal of semantic disambiguation. I posit it will require enough that the ability to understand the sentence and take action to enforce it necessitates a sense of self as well as a sense of other in order to build an intrinsic understanding of what "harm" is. That last par...

Sounds almost crazy doesn't it? Not according to  Google Ventures . But then so did the idea of a lightbulb as an engine of productivity in 1879...yes that's just after  Edison's year of work trying to make it practical (a device invented 60+ years earlier) paid off  but still there was so much to do, there was  no grid, no national or state or even city power system , in fact there were no efficient ways to generate and distribute electric power....there were motors and generators but for building a grid different approaches were required. So creative engineers like  Nikola Tesla  (who was hired by Edison at one point) and others implemented AC generators using 3 phase designs and others contributed all manner of technology for defining a grid and transmitting power to remote locations. Camps formed between Edison's lighting company and Westinghouse , the electric wars began! In 1882 the first electrically powered building was turned...

This morning I awoke to find a message from a Facebook user (who I am not friends with as yet) regarding the subject of pain: "Spekulation: Pain: When the parameters upholding consciousness leaves the definition space for those parameters. Tickeling and pleasure: When you travel along the rand of the definition space of consciousness. Of course, the definition space changes as the neuroplasticity redefines how singlas are processed, hence pain happens when signals deviate too quickly from the normal. Do you know of any hypothesis which comes close to the above?" Immediately the problem in this definition can be identified by realizing that biologically pain is truly a spectrum of alerts and is not a critical threshold where some system goes from signal to noise as would be the case if it were a rapid deviation from "normal" (however that is defined). Biologically the pain receptors are distributed across the body along with other sensors that can identify pressure....