Category Archives: Singularity

In early 2015, Biznews was barely out of its proverbial nappies when then Barclays Africa executives Stephen van Coller and Eugene Booysen commissioned us to cover Singularity Universitys first ever conference in South Africa. It was a vote of confidence Ill never forget. Even more valuable was how the content transformed my worldview.

Singularitys co-founders Peter Diamandis and Salim Ismail brought along the cream of their Silicon Valley institutions faculty. Between them these gifted minds exposed us to embryonic concepts of abundance and exponentiality, accurately predicting how these disruptive waves would turn old paradigms on their heads.

Not surprisingly, Ive followed Singularitys work ever since. And am now eagerly anticipating Diamandiss new book The Future is Faster Than You Think, which will be released in a fortnight. Its sure to be on the must-read list for everyone interested in decoding our increasingly complex world.

Diamandis provided a taster in his latest newsletter, explaining how Africas revolutionary M-Pesa payment system came from an idea shared by Vodafones Nick Hughes at a 2002 conference where a curious official from the UKs Department of International Development was in the audience. A powerful reminder that when inspiration strikes, never be too shy to share. Because you never knows who is listening.

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M-Pesas reminder: Share inspirational ideas, change the world - BizNews

As software becomes more important than ever, how can engaging the security industry make the road ahead less winding?

Here at CES, the car manufacturers race to launch the latest gadgets in their new models before the competition. And thats hard to do without breaking down the software silos. That would mean using widely developed, open-source toolsets with rich histories, not developing similar functionality thats already available, but in your own black box. Auto manufacturers have resisted this for years.

For example, why arent car makers standardizing around Automotive Grade Linux (AGL)? While some are warming to the idea, its taken years to make even modest progress. An open-source initiative aimed squarely at providing the underpinnings for a new generation of automotive innovation its been a long time coming.

Why? Historically, the car manufacturers have been busy perfecting their technology silos, complete with specialized developers, piles of legacy code (that will last forever) with technology they (mostly) understand. Still, its not a smooth way forward.

No? Ask operating system manufacturers who built the whole stack themselves. Later, they understood the differentiator in the market was in the magic they built on the foundation perfected by others. It worked. Using a foundation of open source yields a product with better features, sooner, which consumers are happy to buy. Not so much in the car market. Yet.

Still, with the advocacy of The Linux Foundation and seemingly glacial pace of buy-in first from the tier one providers in a sort of begrudging forward motion of the automotive manufacturers themselves were finally seeing progress.

I spoke with one proponent of AGL who said hed come from a tier one provider where hed been advocating for using a standardized development environment for graphics for its automotive systems they said no. Viewed with suspicion, standardized build environments were verboten. Years later, theyre starting to see the light.

RELATED ARTICLE: CES Singularity and securing the car

Now AGL seems to be moving down the stack from the infotainment systems to the instrument cluster. It makes sense. Linux has been doing network duties almost since there was a Linux. Now, with the increasing support from their employers, developers in the automotive industry can rapidly accelerate the development process itself, standardize testing, engage a host of experts and, basically, make cars a lot better, very quickly.

It wont be any too soon, as security pundits have been warning for years. But progress is progress, and at CES its as refreshing as a cool desert breeze to see them all huddled in an area facing the same direction forward.

For example, there were several companies at CES offering what seem like standard security techniques for cars, things like network monitors, intrusion detection, whitelisting and the like. But theyre sort of bolt-on patches, because car communication protocols themselves lag far behind current network technology. Most cars on the road today have little, if any, authentication on the systems that control the car itself.

Its most welcome that for the past couple of years there has been significant energy toward upgrading the control communication to be robust enough to have more meaningful authentication, which is a start.

In the future, hopefully, we can get to the business of bringing robust toolsets to bear, and the companies that already have the experience using them, and on to the business of baking in security.

And since your next car will have more networks and electronics than your last one probably much more this can result in lower prices, fuller feature sets and more confidence that the industry is moving in the direction the experts have already paved. If you engage the security industry in this manner, the road ahead just might be a bit smoother.

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Connected cars: How to improve connection to cybersecurity - We Live Security

Will artificial intelligence one day surpass human thinking? The rapid progress of AI, coupled with our standard fear of machines, has raised concerns that its abilities will one day start to grow uncontrollably, eventually leading it to take over the world and wipe out humanity if it decides we are an obstacle to its goals. This moment is usually referred to as the AI singularity.

One argument against the possibility of such a supreme, unstoppable and indefinitely growing intelligence is that it would need, by definition, to be able to accurately predict the future. And quantum theory, one of modern sciences key ways of explaining the universe, says that predicting the future may not be possible because the universe is random. But what if we only think predicting the future is impossible because we arent intelligent enough to know otherwise?

Intelligence is a very complex and abstract concept without an agreed definition. However, there is common agreement about some of the components that make up every sort of known intelligence. One of those is the ability to solve problems, which requires the ability to plan by anticipating the future. To solve a problem, it is pivotal to understand the current conditions, predict how the environment will evolve, and to anticipate the outcome of the actions that will be applied.

Recent theories in physics suggest the universe is extremely chaotic and random. Take the example of unstable chemical elements that eventually undergo radioactive decay into another substance. You can estimate how long it will take a certain amount of this element to decay but you cant say for sure when any single atom of it will. Similarly, you can measure the position or momentum of a particle but, for certain reasons related to quantum theory, you cannot know both at the same time with complete accuracy. (This is known as Heisenbergs uncertainty principle.)

Assuming these theories are correct, they suggest that, beyond a certain level of detail, the universe is ultimately unpredictable, chaotic and unstable. This would mean that any sort of growing intelligence would eventually reach a point where it can no longer improve its predictions of the future and so cannot further increase in intelligence. In other words, there is no risk of a runaway AI, because physical laws of the universe pose some very constraining hard limits. For instance, given the known limits on weather predictability, an AI system will not be able to outsmart humans by exploiting extremely accurate long-term weather forecasts for planning future actions.

It is very comforting to believe that the nature of the universe is, in some sense, preventing an AI escalation. But there is an alternative perspective. What if humans perceive the universe as random and chaotic only because our cognitive and reasoning capabilities are too limited? We are aware of some of the limits of human understanding but, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we dont know what we dont know.

Taking this perspective, it may be the case that the universe is instead deterministic, and therefore fully predictable, but in an extremely complex way that we as humans cannot grasp. Albert Einstein argued that quantum theory was an incomplete description of the universe and that there must be hidden variables that we dont yet understand but that hold the key to determining future events.

That would turn the table on the possibility of an AI singularity. A super-advanced intelligence could be in the position to reveal these hidden variables and so understand the predictable nature of the universe, unleashing the machines full potential. Its worth noting that AI approaches are already used for automatically making discoveries in physics.

On a practical level, the singularity doesnt seem that plausible given how limited AI actually still is. Recent breakthroughs in AI have been achieved via whats known as narrow AI, designed to perform a well defined task such as playing chess or driving a car. While narrow AI can outperform humans in some tasks, theres little to suggest that more general AI that can emulate humans ability to respond to many different tasks will be delivered and put humans at risk in the near future.

But we cant rule it out completely. As we still have limited knowledge of the nature of the universe, and of the power of AI, perhaps it is better to play safe. Even without a singularity, AI will have a dramatic impact on human society. We need to work as hard as possible to ensure that AI is beneficial for humanity, not a threat to it.

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Will AI take over? Quantum theory suggests otherwise - The Conversation UK

At this years Consumer Electronics Show, one of the worlds largest helicopter manufacturers will showcase what a city might look like with high-volume aerial transit options. Bell is showing off a connected city concept with miniature versions of its Nexus air taxi and APT cargo drone flying from building to building, as three layers of software and detect-and-avoid systems ensure their safe arrival.

Onlookers can watch the system of aircraft automatically react to inclement weather and emergency situations as well as request flights via iPads stationed around the stage.

In a few short years, the moonshot concept of flying taxis as an integral part of future cityscapes has become a sober, earnest pursuit attracting billions of dollars in investment from companies across the mobility and transportation space. A futuristic industry once thought to be gated behind decades of steady technological advancementor written off entirelyis now concerned regulators, city planners, and the public wont be able to keep up.

Leonardo da Vinci drew designs for an aerial screw in the 1480s, but practical vertical flight didnt emerge until the middle of the 20th century. The ability to take off and land anywhere felt future-defining. In reality, the high operating costs, annoying rotor noise, and single point of failure innate to helicopters prevented them from becoming affordable and widely-accepted transit options. Helicopter airlines rose and fell during the decades that followed, their fate sealed by rising fuel costs and a few high-profile accidents.

Todays electric and hybrid-electric air taxi designs, made possible by continuous improvements in power storage density, electric propulsion, promise to solve the fundamental problems presented by helicopters. In addition to dramatically lower fuel costs offered by electric and hybrid vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (known as eVTOLs for short), electric motors are simpler and cheaper to maintain than turbine engines. Distributed electric propulsionleveraging anywhere from four to dozens of separately-powered rotorsmay reduce the vehicles total noise output and eliminate safety concerns associated with a single main rotor (though batteries have their own significant safety challenges).

Great advancements are also underway in the realm of automation, with pilots representing both one of the largest fixed expenses in helicopter operation and pilot error one of the most common causes of fatal accidents. LA-based startup Skyryse recently demonstrated a commercial helicopter modified to fly completely autonomously, a system they hope will allow newly-certified pilots to deliver a flight experience and safety record that rivals commercial airlines.

Theres a reason why people with means travel via helicopter and private airplanes: Its much faster than taking the increasingly congested streets below, though limited by available landing locations. Comparing a 300-mile car trip to an airplane flight, the skies are clearly the way to gobut for a 20-mile trip across town, as urban air mobility hopes to offer, theres much less time to save.

But what if the proposed route contains a geographic obstacle that prevents quick travel on the ground, such as Vancouver Harbouror traffic conditions as bad as Mumbai, So Paulo, or Los Angeles? Blade Air Mobility, which currently offers service in New York City from a helipad in Lower Manhattan to JFK airport (and many other destinations), charges $200 for a five-minute helicopter ride over the East River that takes more than an hour via taxi or public transit.

Of course, the Blade experienceor Uber Copter, which offers a similar servicedoesnt take five minutes door-to-door, especially if ones final destination isnt a helipad or an airport. Once ground transit to and from the helicopter and waiting for departure are included, journalists from the New York Post found Ubers service was three minutes slower than public transportation.

The money-for-time value proposition of urban air mobility will depend on reducing the time spent traveling to and from air transit nodes and increasing passenger throughput. Commercial air transportation is often disconnected from other forms of urban transit; airports almost always lie beyond city limitsoutside the reach of complicated zoning and airspace restrictions.

Urban air mobility will have to be properly integrated into existing and future metro, bus, and other transit options for the full-trip time savings of taking to the air to be realized. Many cities also do not currently have enough helipads to build a useful network of destinations, a challenge which infrastructure investment and real estate development firms are beginning to tackle.

In addition to creating time savings, the consumer cost of 3D urban transit must come down if it is to become a market worthy of the trillion-dollar expected valuations its been given by analysts.

Blade, Uber, and Vooma subsidiary of aerospace giant Airbushave reduced the cost of on-demand helicopter transit substantially, from thousands per trip to roughly $200 through tech, data, and ridesharing. Electric vehicles, and eventually autonomy, promise to bring this cost down further, but will that be enough to present a cost-viable alternative to cars and public transit?

Its also a moving cost target that urban air mobility is trying to hit, as auto manufacturers and tech companies invest billions into autonomous driving capabilities, electric vehicles, and advanced manufacturing capabilitiesall of which threaten to reduce the cost and friction of car-based transportation, which has the tremendous physics advantage of not having to overcome gravity. Uber revolutionized the on-demand car experience in ways unimaginable 10 years ago. What will air taxis be up against by the time theyre certified and ready for prime time?

Its hard to understate how revolutionary the targeted scale of urban air mobility is for the aerospace industry writ large.

On average, in the US, there are nearly three million people flying through the sky every day, sipping on ginger ale and apple juice, facing an incredible rate of just 0.2 deaths per ten billion passenger miles for commercial air travel750 times safer than driving. While an astounding accomplishment of steady industry progress, the 5,000 airplanes flying across US airspace simultaneously at peak operational times hardly compare to the 1.4 billion estimated cars on the road worldwide. Meeting that bar with tens of thousands of low-altitude vehicles crisscrossing the sky will require precise and instantaneous air traffic control systems without a human in the loopa 180-degree departure from the human-centric system in place today.

For urban air mobility to succeed, the aerospace industry will have to safely manufacture, operate, and maintain aircraft at a scale never before imagined while meeting the publics astoundingly high expectations for air safety. Its unsurprising that many leading eVTOL aircraft developers have taken strategic investment from leading auto manufacturers including Daimler, Hyundai, and Toyotacompanies which have experience manufacturing by the million, rather than the hundred, and are angling to stay relevant in a world that has likely reached peak internal combustion engine.

There are many, many reasons to doubt the urban air mobility industry will take off or reach the scale and unit economics its greatest advocates promise. Even if the aircraft, airspace, and regulatory challenges are solved, urban air mobility may have little to offer over existing transportation without proper integration, and city planners are already making critical decisions for 2030.

The World Economic Forum recently partnered on an industry study with the city of Los Angelesone of three cities Uber aims to launch commercial air taxi service in by 2023 through its Elevate ecosystembut educating and convincing cities, with constituents who may be skeptical of spending taxpayer infrastructure dollars on flying cars, will be an uphill challenge. A single high-profile accident could set urban air mobility back years, especially as the public struggles to process the industry-wide safety failure that was the Boeing 737 MAX.

Right now, over two hundred electric and hybrid aircraft projects are under development, though most industry observers guesstimate that somewhere between two and five will succeed in producing an FAA-certified aircraft capable of carrying multiple passengers. The urban air mobility world is likely experiencing an investment bubble, still full of insane promises, newcomers to aerospacethe best way to make a million bucks in aerospace is to start with a billionand outright grifters.

Whats next for those building the flying car future?

A wave of bankruptcy, consolidation, and lowered expectations may be imminent. But after that course correction, cities around the world might see electric on-demand air taxis in their skyline, sooner than one may thinkand if were lucky, they might actually be affordable.

Brian Garrett-Glaser is assistant editor for Avionics International. He is the author of The Skyport, a free bi-weekly newsletter covering the rise of drones and air taxis.

Banner Image: Bells latest air taxi concept, the Bell Nexus 4EX, draws on tiltrotor technology the company developed for the V-22 Osprey military aircraft. Its intended for inner-city or suburb-to-city travel. Image Credit: Bell

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What Needs to Happen to Get to the Flying Car Future - Singularity Hub

A man told his girlfriend he "doesn't wash his genitals" and, if you need us, we'll be screaming into the void. Image is a model, not the homophobe in question.(Elements Envato)

There is a real living breathing male who does not wash his genitals because he feels touching his own penis is gay and we are ready to catapult ourselves into a black hole and be crushed into a singularity of pure suffering.

The latest example of an actual human male embodying the Fellas, is it gay? meme, a reddit user took to the r/relationship_advice board to tell the troubling tale of her 24-year-old boyfriend who never washes his private regions and even opts for a bidet so he wont have to wipe.

Deep breaths, dear reader, deep breaths.

So basically, she wrote in the lengthy post, he explained that he doesnt touch himself there, ever, because its gay.

Therefore, he cant clean the area specifically and just lets it get wet in the shower, thats it. Other than this his hygiene is fine.

Taking bets whether he uses three-in-one shampoo, conditioner and body wash. But perhaps he should take a leaf from another reddit users book, who kept his penis minty fresh by using toothpaste as lube.

Yes, you read it right: He thinks washing his penis would be gay, the 23-year-old continued.

In fact, he thinks any touching of anything between his legs is gay. This was completely ridiculous and I started asking him what about masturbating?

What about wiping after he poops?

Well it turns out, the reason he uses a bidet is so he wont have to wipe. Using a bidet is not a problem to me, and Ive never experienced a problem with his hygiene in that regard.

But the fact he installs a bidet not out of cleanliness preference but to avoid being gay by wiping his own ass is just

I cant believe thats a real thing.

We cant believe it either, to be fair. But bidets just said male rights!

She then went onto explain that her boyfriend never uses public bathrooms, and he allegedly never masturbates either as thats also gay and he felt weird when he first did it.

He says any contact a guy has with the male ass or pubic areas is in a gay realm.

I said that makes absolutely no sense when its your own body. Its not gay to tend to your own self, gay involves other people!

Were not exactly sure what the gay realm is, or whether we can move there, but its definitely a dimension where people happily sit in comfortable chairs, recycle and appreciate beautiful sunsets.

This even extends into our sex life, a horror story in seven words.

I found out the reason he didnt want to try doggy style is because thats a gay position. IM NOT A DUDE, HOW IT IS GAY LMAO. Like this is so f**king ridiculous.

Yes, yes it is.

As the post slowly descends into the original poster scrambling to work out what her boyfriends logic is, it ignited a tidal wave of responses from the reddit community to such an extent that moderators locked the post in under a day.

That is as much advice on this deeply unpleasant topic, one moderator wrote.

Many redditors cautiously counselled that the man seek therapy or contact his primary doctor, being that he himself might be gay or may have had a trauma at some point in his life, with his centring of not doing things that are perceived as gay being a method to deny this.

Jokes aside, the users stressed, its possible this is how he deals with some sort of repressed trauma.

Either way, he obviously needs therapy.

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This homophobe refuses to wash his genitals because he thinks touching his own penis is gay - PinkNews

Global Superstars BTS continue to break records - even their own.

Suga just released the highly anticipated intro, 'Interlude: Shadow" for BTS' upcoming album Map of the Soul: 7 and the music video continues to dominate YouTube charts. In just 11 hours after its release, it already surpassed 3 million likes, becoming BTS' fastest trailer music video to reach its mark, surpassed 10 Million views in 9 hours 5 minutes, and ranked #1 in YouTube Worldwide trends.

With Shadow's phenomenal success, it's now the fastest MV by a Korean soloist to reach 10 Million views on YouTube, dethroning fellow members J-Hope's "Chicken Noodle Soup" (9hrs 33m) andV's "Singularity" (15hrs) who held the title since its release on May 6, 2018- a very impressive feat.

You can watch Interlude: Shadow here

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These "Three Kings" hold the record of the Fastest MVs by Korean Soloists to reach 10M views on YouTube - allkpop

(Photo : scx1.b-cdn.net)The universe is in constant change since the big bang, in 50 years there will be secrets revealed and more mysteries to solve.

Nothing is permanent. Everything has always been in a state of change that ordinary people may not always understand. Physics and the universe are like a puzzle but it can be deciphered, or not? As it is the cosmos gets weirder, even as scientists learn more and the man on the street believes that the earth is in a sea of stars.

Lord Kelvin once proclaimed that physic is done and there is nothing left to know. A mistake and everything that happened till now is proof of the constant change in the universe. If anyone wants to know who and what they are in the cosmos, this will be a start.

In the next 50 years, there will be changes and everyone will learn the secrets of the universe. With technology as a crutch for the scientifically challenged, that will make things more understandable to anyone with access to the information. Ordinary people can be scientists, scientists will be able to speak better to non-scientists.

How are we alive and what is the universe at large?

To make it simple, it all began in a big fireworks display called the "big bang". Before the big bang, everything existed as zero energy, with no mass or charge. But it formed into a dot or singularity as the seed that leads to the creation of everything.

What was made is a mix of matter and anti-matter that are in a tug of war, to expand or compress the cosmos into a single dot. What is seen as light are the remnants of the big bang from day one, reversing the progression of events will bring everything to point zero. This will be the start of the big bang, everything will stop existing.

Read: Physicists constrain dark matter

There is a tool used by scientist to crack the Pandora's box, reveal the secrets of the subatomic world. One of those tools used by quantum scientists is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This device is used to collide particles are high speed and see what happens when they collide. It is one method to check the matter and anti-matter reaction inside it.

Technology will be the tool to understand the stars

Instead of using the naked eye to see the universe, astronomers and astrophysicists have tools to help see into the dark cosmos. Modern telescope and machines can see the spectrum and energy wavelengths, even the background cosmic radiation can be seen by electronic and digital instruments. Tools like them are used to produce pictures and take a reading of astronomical phenomenon and it gets better too.

Space agencies are construct machines and other constructs to visit outer space. Even go to Mars as the first messengers of mankind too. These advanced AI machines are at the front of space exploration where a man cannot go.

Where will everyone be in fifty years

By that time, the genie in the bottle (universe) might open up and reveal new secrets. These secrets will give new and stranger views of the universe, both the scientist and ordinary person will be witness to the cosmos unseen before.

Related Article: In the Next 50 Years Our Place in the Universe Will Change Dramatically - Here's How

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In 50 Years, The Universe Will Change And The Cosmos Will Be Stranger - Science Times

Space and time are intertwined, called space-time, and gravity has the ability to stretch space-time. Objects with a large mass will be able to stretch space-time to the point where our perception of it changes, known as time dilation. The more mass an object has, the more it stretches and slows down time.

For example, Sagittarius A* the gigantic black hole at the centre of the galaxy would almost be able to stretch time to a point where it almost comes to a complete standstill.

Sagittarius A* has a radius of 22 million kilometres and a mass of more than four million times that of the Sun.

In other words, it is very dense.

And because it is so heavy, it has the ability to completely stretch out space-time, and travelling towards its centre means time would almost come to a standstill for you.

Emma Osborne, an astrophysicist at the University of Southampton, previously told an audience at New Scientist Live: Anything mass will stretch space-time. And the heavier something is, or the more mass it has, the more it will stretch space-time.

If you were to stand just outside the event horizon of Sagittarius A*, and you stood there for one minute, 700 years would pass because time passes so much slower in the gravitational field there than it does on Earth.

However, when one reaches the singularity the infinitesimally small point expect to be torn to shreds by the intense gravitational pull.

This is due to a process called spaghettification. The immense gravitational pull is so strong that the force is much stronger at the base than the top.

READ MORE:NASA news: Space agency shows galactic firework display

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Black hole shock: THIS is where you will travel to if you fall into a black hole - Express.co.uk

About a decade ago, when the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel rounded forty, her workpreviously a gale-force project of unbridled self-mythologizingstarted to look backward and inward in a different way. She began dealing more explicitly in unease and defiance, and she considered what her mythology had wrought. She wrote a piece for Elle, in 2009, about having been temporarily credentialed by extraordinary beautygrowing up thinking that love would be simpler than tying a string bikini, the kind I wore a lot while waiting on the beach for my ship to come in. She had figured out how to get what she wanted in most situations, she explained, but she hadnt learned, either as a terrifically brooding and mature teenager or as a whiny and puerile adult, how to actually connect with the men she was chasing. Now shed finally begun to find some attractive stability, graduating from Yale Law School and working as an attorney at Boies Schiller Flexner. But she was forty-oneon the cusp, she believed, of losing the lambent physical magnetism that shed both used perfectly and perhaps only ever misused.

Four years later, Wurtzel published one of the best things she ever wrote, an essay for New York magazine about what she termed her one-night stand of a life. I am proud that I have never so much as kissed a man for any reason besides absolute desire, she wrote, and I am more pleased that I only write what I feel like and it has been lucrative since I got out of college in 1989. Prozac Nation, her blockbuster memoir from 1994, had bought her freedom, and she had spent that freedom carelessly, and with great gratitude, she wrote. Why would I do anything else? Then a stalker named Maria appeared in Wurtzels Bleecker Street apartment and threatened to slash up her face. Being unmoored instantly lost its glamour: At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24. This ordeal had made her harsh and defeated, and yet, she added, the story had the best possible ending: she herself was telling it.

In 2015, Wurtzel wrote for Vice about being diagnosed with breast cancer, and mocked the very prospect of anyone feeling sorry for a woman like Elizabeth Wurtzel. (Later, in the Guardian, she wrote, I am worse than cancer. And now I have cancer. All anyone can do is forgive me. Which is exactly what they have been doing all along.) All my life, I had problemsgalore!with no answers, she wrote. At long last, I find myself in trouble and there are solutions. She knew that her cancer might kill her, but depression and drug addiction had taught her that we are never so free as when we are running for our lives.

A little more than a year ago, she published an essay titled Bastard, about learning, at age fifty, that the man shed thought was her father, a distant nonentity with whom shed long fallen out of touch, was not her father. Her biological father was the photographer Bob Adelman, famous for his photos of the civil-rights movement. Wurtzel saw that she had been trying, all her life, to solve the wrong problemand that those flailing attempts to make sense of herself constituted her life. I never understood why I was so wild, she wrote. I never knew how come I had to be a firebrand. I thought there was something wrong with me. Then I realized there is something right with me. Now I know I was born this way. I did not invent myself after all. She also learned that she had inherited the BRCA mutation that caused her breast cancer from Adelman, but she didnt report how she felt about that. People see me now, I look the same, there I am with the same artificial blonde hair Ive always had, and they think cancer was a phase, she wrote. If it was a phase, she wasnt out of it. Before she died, Wurtzel was putting together a manuscript for a book called Bastard, which, she told me, she often wrote on her iPhone while she was taking her dog, Alistair, to the park.

I was friends with Elizabeth Wurtzel, though something cautions me against overstating the matter. I met her in 2015, after trying to interview her, getting stalled by a publicist, and, weeks later, receiving a late-night, two-hundred-and-seventy-word text message that began Jia. Hi. This is Elizabeth Wurtzel. During the next few years, I became familiar with her West Village apartment, stacked floor to ceiling with books and CDs and records and filled with plants and candles and amazing curios and photos, often of her. We went out to dinner in dark downtown restaurants, sometimes with Alistair, an aloof and striking husky mix, who rebuked me with a nip every time I tried to pet him. (People think he has this great personality, she said. But really its just that hes so beautiful everyone gets confused.) There was always red wine, and then more red wine, in little glasses; always her long hair and huge brown eyes floating in front of me, as if she was a deviant Alice in Wonderland and a grinning Cheshire Cat both. Returning the relentless volleys of her arguments and proclamations, I felt alternately trapped and enthralled, infuriated and liberateda grain-alcohol-strength distillation of the way it sometimes felt to read her work. I had the sense that I was occupying a place in a procession of younger female writers in whom shed perceived a resemblance. Like others, I was grateful for thisfor the way shed lived out an advance trajectory of what might happen when your writing career centers on your charisma and the strong feelings that people tend to have about young women, how that could boost and confine you, could make you dissemble (she once told me that she didnt read her press or think about how her success had to do with her being beautiful), and could acquaint you with exactly who you are.

I also just liked her. I admired her singularity, and I loved her absolutely chaotic instincts. More than once she suggested that I ought to break up with my boyfriend, even though Id given no signs of wanting to do so. Shed stopped doing drugs a long time before, but she still remembered all the best restaurant bathrooms in Manhattan for doing cocaine. She had lived through the experience of being a generational icon, and shed only ever understood herself as someone who would be loathed and fawned over; all her recent writing had analyzed, with more devotion and brutality than anyone else could possibly muster, exactly how that had warped and lit up her life. I found these later essays much more interesting than Prozac Nation, the memoir that had prompted the Times Book Review to call her Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna and had expressed an irreconcilable tension between Wurtzels desire to represent a collapse at the center of the Zeitgeist and her desire to be more special, more unusual, more everything than everyone else.

The original cover of her second book, Bitcha collection of essays that was published in 1998 and was subtitled In Praise of Difficult Womenshowed Wurtzel topless and giving the finger. The books analytical framework was amazingly inconsistent, but the essays were often several orders bolder than the endless Internet-era deconstructions of complicated female pop-culture icons that would follow. They mostly concern women who, like Wurtzel, manifested a mixture of prettiness and pollution so striking and inexplicable that it is as hypnotic and paralyzing as a skyscraper burning down, so strange that mystification becomes inevitable. She wonders if bad girls often meet nasty ends because of a lack of conviction: they recoil at their own badness and try to be the sweethearts they were raised to be.

But my favorite book of Wurtzels is More, Now, Again, from 2001, which approaches the territory that her later essays would cover, finally admitting the real possibility of regret. Its a memoir of her prodigious descent into Ritalin and cocaine addiction while working on and promoting Bitch, a process that involved literally moving into her publishers office and getting drugs FedExed to stops on her book tour. Tweaking out in Florida, she becomes fixated on abolishing the death penalty; she tweezes out all her leg hairs individually; she spends days online tracking the status of Mir, the Russian space station. In the clarity of recovery, she announces, I think I am ten times prettier than I actually am. She wonders if maybe all the mess shes made will be worth itmaybe shell have produced a work of genius. Trouble is, you never know, she writes. You never know until its all done.

I havent been able to concede yet that that moment has come for Wurtzel already. I was always terrified of the way she spoke about death, as if it were a joke shed been telling to the devil for years. I hope she wrote enough of the Bastard manuscript that we get to read it. A new kind of grace was emerging in her writing, which felt all the more profound for coming from a person whod long had more interest in being shocking than in being graceful. I have always made choices without considering the consequences, because I know all I get is now, she wrote, at the close of her essay for New York, seven years ago. Maybe I get later, too, but I will deal with that later. I choose pleasure over what is practical. I may be the only person who ever went to law school on a lark. And I wonder what I was thinking about with all those other larks, my beautiful larks, larks flying away.

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The Chaotic, Beautiful Larks of Elizabeth Wurtzel - The New Yorker

I rarely use the words transformative or breakthrough for neuroscience findings. The brain is complex, noisy, chaotic, and often unpredictable. One intriguing result under one condition may soon fail for a majority of others. Whats more, paradigm-shifting research trends often require revolutionary tools. When were lucky, those come once a decade.

But I can unabashedly say that the 2010s saw a boom in neuroscience breakthroughs that transformed the field and will resonate long into the upcoming decade.

In 2010, the idea that wed be able to read minds, help paralyzed people walk again, incept memories, or have multi-layered brain atlases was near incomprehensible. Few predicted that deep learning, an AI model loosely inspired by neural processing in the brain, would gain prominence and feed back into decoding the brain. Around 2011, I asked a now-prominent AI researcher if we could automatically detect dying neurons in a microscope image using deep neural nets; we couldnt get it to work. Today, AI is readily helping read, write, and map the brain.

As we cross into the next decade, it pays to reflect on the paradigm shifts that made the 2010s the decade of the brain. Even as a boo humbug skeptic Im optimistic about the next decade for solving the brains mysteries: from genetics and epigenetics to chemical and electrical communications, networks, and cognition, well only get better at understanding and tactfully controlling the supercomputer inside our heads.

Weve covered brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) so many times even my eyes start glazing over. Yet I still remember my jaw dropping as I watched a paralyzed man kick off the 2014 World Cup in a bulky mind-controlled exosuit straight out of Edge of Tomorrow.

Flash forward a few years, and scientists have already ditched the exosuit for an implanted neural prosthesis that replaces severed nerves to re-establish communication between the brains motor centers and lower limbs.

The rise in BCIs owes much to the BrainGate project, which worked tirelessly to decode movement from electrical signals in the motor cortex, allowing paralyzed patients to use a tablet with their minds or operate robotic limbs. Today, prosthetic limbs coated with sensors can feed back into the brain, giving patients mind-controlled movement, sense of touch, and an awareness of where the limb is in space. Similarly, by decoding electrical signals in the auditory or visual cortex, neural implants can synthesize a persons speech by reconstructing what theyre hearing or re-create images of what theyre seeingor even of what theyre dreaming.

For now, most BCIsespecially those that require surgical implantsare mainly used to give speech or movement back to those with disabilities or decode visual signals. The brain regions that support all these functions are on the surface, making them relatively more accessible and easier to decode.

But theres plenty of interest in using the same technology to target less tangible brain issues, such as depression, OCD, addiction, and other psychiatric disorders that stem from circuits deep within the brain. Several trials using implanted electrodes, for example, have shown dramatic improvement in people suffering from depression that dont respond to pharmaceutical drugs, but the results vary significantly between individuals.

The next decade may see non-invasive ways to manipulate brain activity, such as focused ultrasound, transcranial magnetic or direct current stimulation (TMS/tDCS), and variants of optogenetics. Along with increased understanding of brain networks and dynamics, we may be able to play select neural networks like a piano and realize the dream of treating psychiatric disorders at their root.

Rarely does one biological research field get such tremendous support from multiple governments. Yet the 2010s saw an explosion in government-backed neuroscience initiatives from the US, EU, and Japan, with China, South Korea, Canada, and Australia in the process of finalizing their plans. These multi-year, multi-million-dollar projects focus on developing new tools to suss out the brains inner workings, such as how it learns, how it controls behavior, and how it goes wrong. For some, the final goal is to simulate a working human brain inside a supercomputer, forming an invaluable model for researchers to test out their hypothesesand maybe act as a blueprint for one day reconstructing all of a persons neural connections, called the connectome.

Even as initial announcements were met with skepticismwhat exactly is the project trying to achieve?the projects allowed something previously unthinkable. The infusion of funding provided a safety blanket to develop new microscopy tools to ever-more-rapidly map the brain, resulting in a toolkit of new fluorescent indicators that track neural activation and map neural circuits. Even rudimentary simulations have generated virtual epilepsy patients to help more precisely pinpoint sources of seizures. A visual prosthesis to restore sight, a memory prosthesis to help those with faltering recall, and a push for non-invasive ways to manipulate human brains all stemmed from these megaprojects.

Non-profit institutions such as the Allen Institute for Brain Science have also joined the effort, producing map after map at different resolutions of various animal brains. The upcoming years will see individual brain maps pieced together into comprehensive atlases that cover everything from genetics to cognition, transforming our understanding of brain function from paper-based 2D maps into multi-layered Google Maps.

In a way, these national programs ushered in the golden age of brain science, bringing talent from other disciplinesengineers, statisticians, physicists, computer scientistsinto neuroscience. Early successes will likely drive even more investment in the next decade, especially as findings begin translating into actual therapies for people who dont respond to traditional mind-targeting drugs. The next decade will likely see innovative new tools that manipulate neural activity more precisely and less-invasively than optogenetics. The rapid rise in the amount of data will also mean that neuroscientists will quickly embrace cloud-storage options for collaborative research and GPUs and more powerful computing cores to process the data.

First, brain to AI. The physical structure and information flow in the cortex inspired deep learning, the most prominent AI model today. Ideas such as hippocampal replaythe brains memory center replays critical events in fast forward during sleep to help consolidate memoryalso benefit AI models.

In addition, the activation patterns of individual neurons merged with materials science to build neuromorphic chips, or processors that function more like the brain, rather than todays silicon-based chips. Although neuromorphic chips remain mainly an academic curiosity, they have the potential to perform complicated, parallel computations at a fraction of the energy used by processors today. As deep neural nets get ever-more power hungry, neuromorphic chips may present a welcome alternative.

In return, AI algorithms that closely model the brain are helping solve long-time mysteries of the brain, such as how the visual cortex processes input. In a way, the complexity and unpredictability of neurobiology is shriveling thanks to these computational advancements.

Although crossovers between biomedical research and digital software have long existedthink programs that help with drug designthe match between neuroscience and AI is far stronger and more intimate. As AI becomes more powerful and neuroscientists collaborate outside their field, computational tools will only unveil more intricacies of neural processing, including more intangible aspects such as memory, decision-making, or emotions.

I talk a bunch about the brains electrical activity, but supporting that activity are genes and proteins. Neurons also arent a uniform bunch; multiple research groups are piecing together a whos who of the brains neural parts and their individual characteristics.

Although invented in the late 2000s, technologies such as optogenetics and single-cell RNA sequencing were widely adopted by the neuroscience community in the 2010s. Optogenetics allows researchers to control neurons with light, even in freely moving animals going about their lives. Add to that a whole list of rainbow-colored proteins to tag active cells, and its possible to implant memories. Single-cell RNA sequencing is the queen bee of deciphering a cells identity, allowing scientists to understand the genetic expression profile of any given neuron. This tech is instrumental in figuring out the neuron populations that make up a brain at any point in timeinfancy, youth, aging.

But perhaps the crown in new tools goes to brain organoids, or mini-brains, that remarkably resemble those of preterm babies, making them excellent models of the developing brain. Organoids may be our best chance of figuring out the neurobiology of autism, schizophrenia, and other developmental brain issues that are difficult to model with mice. This decade is when scientists established a cookbook for organoids of different types; the next will see far more studies that tap into their potential for modeling a growing brain. With hard work and luck, we may finally be able to tease out the root causes of these developmental issues.

Image Credit: NIH

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These Breakthroughs Made the 2010s the Decade of the Brain - Singularity Hub