Category Archives: Singularity

Today, what survives on Earth can be determined entirely by human beings. We can alter the genetics of almost any life form and potentially design entirely new ones. According to renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.

In their book Evolving Ourselves , Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans describe a world where evolution is no longer driven by natural processes. Instead, it is driven by human choices, through what they call unnatural selection and non-random mutation. As a result, we will see the emergence of an entirely new species of human beings.

There is no doubt that Enriquez and Gullans describe a powerful tool for accelerating human progress. We could use it to eradicate genetic diseases, increase our lifespan and design life that can survive on Mars.

Naturally, there are possible negative applications. To what extent should we allow designer babies? Should we bring back extinct species? How do we prevent criminals from designing harmful viruses or bioweapons? Like many other experts, Enriquez and Gullans stress the importance of stimulating an ethical dialogue around such advancements.

As a science author, researcher and entrepreneur, Juan Enriquez has been studying the widespread implications of genomics and other life sciences on society. In a conversation with Singularity Hub, Enriquez painted a radically profound future for humanity.

Your work describes a world in which humanity is altering its genome and controlling its evolution. If Charles Darwin was alive today, how would he describe this new world?

I think we see two parallel evolutionary structures. There is one evolutionary structure that Darwin and Wallace discovered that applied for four billion years, where random mutation and natural selection continue to occur. But then there is a world where the primary determinant of what lives and dies becomes human beings. This is a world of unnatural selection, because humans would rather have dogs and cats than snakes and grizzly bears. Its a world where we deliberately insert genes into bacteria, plants and animals for specific purposes. This is a form of intelligent design, and has nothing to do with random mutations.

In your 2009 TED talk, you say We are becoming a new species, we are becoming Homo Evolutis. How exactly do you envision the Homo Evolutis being different from Homo Sapiens?

If you look at the history of humanity in hominids, there have been at least 32 different species of hominids alive. We coexisted with at least five of them. We interbred with several of them. The normal and natural state of the planet is to have various species of monkeys, elephants, tigers and also hominids. Having other species of hominids walking around is not unusual or unnatural. It involves going back to a normal state.

How long before we see the emergence of Homo Evolutis? Is this something that is already occurring?

Even Darwin had difficulty defining species. We have at least 19 different definitions of the term species. Depending on which of these definitions we adopt, it could be much earlier or much later. Already, we are seeing this by controlling our reproduction, which is the core of evolution.

Imagine you were able to get a time machine, sit down your grandparents when they were 17 and had a birds and the bees talk. You would explain a world where it is normal and natural to have sex and not have a child. That is completely unprecedented in natural history. You would describe a world where you could artificially freeze sperm and eggs, not requiring physical contact to conceive a child. You could go on to describe a world where you can have a child fifty years after it was conceived, separating birth from time.

With these situations, we are basically saying that even the most fundamental aspects of life, that our grandparents took for granted, are completely different today. Given that, our grandparents would probably already see us as a different species.

Would you argue that we have a moral imperative to continue to evolve ourselves?

I think it is a decision that various human societies have to make, and we just have to be aware that theyre making it. There will be societies that say, Lets do it all. There will be other societies that will say, Lets do some of it. There will be societies that say, Absolutely not. Precisely because there are differences in those areas, we will see some speciation.

Our ability to re-engineer and recreate ourselves will allow us to overcome our biological limitations and be a major contributing factor to the survival of our species. But do you think there are scenarios in which it can be detrimental to our progress?

Yes. Most evolution doesnt work. 99 percent of the species that have ever lived are extinct. Evolution is actually a continuous set of experiments, many of which fail. It would not be surprising to see some things go horribly wrong. That is simply what happens in nature.

But if we dont take those steps forward, then we dont have a real chance at eventually allowing our species to live long enough to travel across space. If we dont do these things, it is likely that we will not cure cancer or Alzheimers. There is a cost and a risk to acting, but there is certainly a cost and a risk to not acting.

Human desire and choices can vary across individuals and entire societies. One can imagine there will be some conflict and debate on what characteristic we should choose to select for. Who gets to decide what traits we do select for?

I think each society will have its own moral and ethical structures, and will choose. The reason we have so many different religions is precisely so we can have various options as to where and how we want to live. As long as people are free to choose and understand the potential risks and benefits, then they can make an intelligent decision. I dont believe that any smart person will state a certain number of rules should apply to the entire world, simply because Ive seen those rules change so many times.

What are some human traits you are looking forward to tackling with genetic engineering?

Firstly, there are several horrendousyet simplegenetic diseases we can get rid of. Cystic fibrosis is caused by a single letter change among 3.2 billion letters, something we can eradicate with these advancements. Sickle cell anemia, hemophilia and cancer genes are other examples.

Beyond that, there are traits that may make us more radiation-resistant, and that may be something we want to do if we ever want to colonize Mars. There are traits that may give us aesthetics or sports benefits, and the standard of safety for that better be high before we allow it. We take risks every day. We take risks crossing the street, when we get in the elevator or when we do plastic surgery. As long as the risks are clear, the procedure is relatively safe and the individual is well-informed, I think that individuals should be allowed to make these decisions.

So far our conversation has been focused on changing life as we know it, which is based on DNA. But do you think we can design a completely new and alternative genomic language to DNA?

First of all, there is a whole series of ways in which you can modify gene expression within the DNA code itself. We can alter the expression of that code. We can modify how the environment interacts with the code. We can modify the metabolism or the microorganisms that execute on that code. We already have instruments at many different levels to modify the expression of that DNA, even if it is written exactly the same way.

That aside, we are starting to see scientists who are able to create heredity using alternative chemical structures. So we can add or substitute letters to DNA and still have living organisms that inherit in different ways. This means DNA is not the only solution for life; we could have alternative chemistries that are not DNA-based. This means the chances of finding life in the universe are very high.

Finally, would you say that you are optimistic about the future of humanity?

I realize how many things can go horribly wrong. I realize how awful leadership can be sometimes. But within that context, Im quite optimistic about the future of humanity. We are doing things our grandparents would see as magical. Our grandkids will take for granted things that surprise, shock and awe us, because I think this whole thing is accelerating.

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The Rise of a New Species of Human Being - Singularity Hub

Posted on March 20, 2017 by Nick Farrell - Business, News, Science

Some of Silicon Valleys top brains are trying to work out how to stuff their grey matter into the machines they build.

Bryan Johnson, the founder of Braintree online payments, and Elon Musk have both been trying to work out how to store their brains on their PCs to obtain a form of immortality.

According to MIT Technology Review, Johnson is effectively jumping on an opportunity created by the Brain Initiative, an Obama-era project which ploughed money into new schemes for recording neurons.

That influx of cash has spurred the formation of several other startups, including Paradromics and Cortera, also developing novel hardware for collecting brain signals. As part of the government brain project, the defense R&D agency DARPA says it is close to announcing $60 million in contracts under a program to create a high-fidelity brain interface able to simultaneously record from one million neurons the current record is about 200 and stimulate 100,000 at a time.

Several tech sector luminaries are looking for technology that might fuse human and artificial intelligence. In addition to Johnson, Elon Musk has been teasing a project called neural lace, which he said at a 2016 conference will lead to symbiosis with machines.

And Mark Zuckerberg declared in a 2015 Q&A that people will one day can share full sensory and emotional experiences, not just photos. Facebook has been hiring neuroscientists for an undisclosed project at Building 8, its secretive hardware division.

However, Elon Musk has been also moaning that the current speeds for transferring signals from brains are ridiculously slow.

Tags: brain, braintree, mit, musk

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Silicon Valley's top brains try to sort out the singularity - TechEye

The much-heralded technological singularity will happen in 2029, according to Googles director of engineering.

Ray Kurzweil, a futurist who has made a name for himself through his predictions, shared his thoughts about whats in store for humans and machines in an interview with SXSW in Texas.

He believes that the so-called singularity the moment when artificial intelligence exceeds man's intellectual capacity and creates a runaway effect, which many believe will lead to the demise of the human race is little over a decade away.

By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence, said Mr Kurzweil. That leads to computers having human intelligence, our putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are.

Today, thats not just a future scenario. Its here, in part, and its going to accelerate.

However, unlike a number of famous experts, Mr Kurzweil isnt worried about artificial intelligence.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently warned that AI could make humans irrelevant, and called for humans to merge with machines in order to continue serving a purpose.

Mr Kurzweil, meanwhile, believes that machines will improve us, and even help us become better humans.

Whats actually happening is [machines] are powering all of us. Theyre making us smarter. They may not yet be inside our bodies, but, by the 2030s, we will connect our neocortex, the part of our brain where we do our thinking, to the cloud.

Were going to get more neocortex, were going to be funnier, were going to be better at music. Were going to be sexier. Were really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree.

Stephen Hawking has gone further than Mr Musk, saying, You're probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you're in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there's an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let's not place humanity in the position of those ants.

He has also suggested that a world government could be used to control technological advancements.

Ultimately, it will affect everything, Mr Kurzweil continued. Were going to be able to meet the physical needs of all humans. Were going to expand our minds and exemplify these artistic qualities that we value.

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The singularity: AI will make humans sexier and funnier, says ... - The Independent

The US Navy is calling on gamers to help it plan for and deal with the Singularity and the possible rise of highly capable, "greater-than-human" artificial intelligence. The technological singularity hypothesizes that the invention of artificial superintelligence will trigger a runway effect that will alter human civilization. Some experts predict the singularity will happen within the next few decades.

To address the issue of the singularity and prep for a post-singularity future, the US Navy is launching a week-long, browser-based multiplayer online game to crowdsource ideas for dealing with the Singularity.

"Technology has advanced to the point that we can see the Singularity on the horizon," Dr. Eric Gulovsen, director of disruptive technology at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) said in a statement. "What we can't see, yet, is what lies over the horizon. That's where we need help from players.

"This is a complex, open-ended problem, so we're looking for people from all walks of life Navy, non-Navy, technology, non-technologist to help us design our Navy for a 'post-Singularity' world."

In the Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI), players will be able to post ideas and interact with each other to build, collaborate, debate, counter or call for further expertise, the ONR said. Ideas that are popular and achieve critical mass may be adopted by the Navy and "elevated to action plans for further development or adoption."

The description for the new MMOWGLI reads: "A tidal wave of change is rapidly approaching today's Navy. We can ride this wave and harness its energy, or get crushed by it. There is no middle ground. What is the nature of this change? The SINGULARITY. We can see the SINGULARITY on the horizon. What we can's see, YET, is what lies OVER that horizon. That's where you come in. Help us design our Navy for the Post-Singularity World."

Launched in 2011, MMOWGLI has been previously used to address other topics as well including combating piracy off the coast of Somalia, helping the Navy reduce its consumption of fossil fuels as well as streamlining the acquisition process.

"MMOWGLI was designed to identify solutions to difficult challenges by tapping into the intellectual capital of a broader community," Director of innovation at Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock and project lead Garth Jensen said. "It can be applied to any scenario.

"We mainly want to understand what occurs when your insights merge with the observations and actions of another player. Will that combination yield a game-changing idea or solution, or will the MMOWGLI platform teach us something about our traditional thought processes?"

The Maritime Singularity MMOWGLI is currently open for signups and will launch on 27 March.

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The Singularity: US Navy calls on gamers to help it plan for the rise ... - International Business Times UK

Miami Herald

Have a big idea to tackle climate change? Singularity U's Global Impact Challenge wants you Miami Herald Singularity University is an education and innovation center based in Silicon Valley that uses exponential technologies to tackle the world's biggest challenges. Its Miami Global Impact Challenge invites individuals from any technology or science ...

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Have a big idea to tackle climate change? Singularity U's Global Impact Challenge wants you - Miami Herald

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured itd be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the citys most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings films youre not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, were of the mind that its time extremely well-spent.

BAMcinmatek

Edward Yangs Taipei Story has been restored and begins playing this week.

Metrograph

A great sci-fi series kicks off with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A print of Dennis Hoppers The Last Movie plays on Friday and Sunday.

Film Forum

A rare 35mm print of Ozus Passing Fancy screens with musical accompaniment this Sunday, as does Nicolas Roegs The Witches.

Manhattan continues.

Nitehawk Cinema

A monster-movie coupling at midnight and before noon, respectively: Cloverfield and Pacific Rim, as well as Leprechaun in the Hood.

IFC Center

They Live, The Terminator, The Day After Tomorrow, and El Topo all have late-night screenings.

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NYC Weekend Watch: 'Taipei Story,' the Singularity, 'The Last Movie' & More - The Film Stage (blog)

The singularity is going to make us even better at being human, says leading futurist Ray Kurzweil. When it comes and we upload our brains into the cloud, we wont need all the brain space we spend on information, he says.

When that happens, Kurzweil says: Were going to get more neocortex, were going to be funnier, were going to be better at music. Were going to be sexier. Were really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree.

On Monday, Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, spoke at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas with his daughter Amy Kurzweil, a cartoonist and adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. During the talk, Ray Kurzweil highlighted three big things: that we have to continue to predict change, that the singularity will happen by 2029, and that humans merging with A.I. will only make us better. Like Elon Musks neural lace, Kurzweil sees merging with artificial intelligence as the future. But he isnt suggesting this because of the threat of a robot takeover. Instead, it will make us even more human.

Kurzweil doubled down on the advent of the singularity, which will happen in 12 years.

By 2029 computers will have human-level intelligence, he says. This is earlier than other expert predictions about the rise of computers as smart as people, which have hit closer to 2045.

Predicting the future of information technology and artificial intelligence means challenging the linear nature of human thought, says Kurzweil. Our brains think linearly, and thats the primary difference between my critics and myself.

Since he has witnessed information technology double every year since his undergraduate career, he sees the future of A.I. changing at an exponential rate. Its incredible that people have lived through this exponential change and they fall off the horse, they cant imagine it can change ever again, he says.

What I talk about, ultimately, that leads to computers having human intelligence, our putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are. Today, thats not just a future scenario, he says. Its here, in part and its going to accelerate.

But hes not particularly worried about it. The future isnt going to look like a science fiction story with a few super intelligent A.I.s that attack us.

Thats not realistic. We dont have one or two A.I.s in the world. Today we have billions, he says. And unlike Musk who imagines the rise of the A.I. as something that threatens human existence, Kurzweil says that doesnt hold with how we interact with A.I.s today.

Whats actually happening is they are powering all of us. Theyre making us smarter. They may not yet be inside our bodies but by the 2030s we will connect our neocortex, the part of our brain where we do our thinking, to the cloud.

This isnt just a pipe dream to Kurzweil, whos had reasonable luck predicting where the future is going to go. There are people with computers in their brains today Parkinsons patients, he points out. Thats how these things start. Following the path of steps from the technology we have now, to what will happen twenty years from now, Kurzweil says, in the 2030s there will be something you can take that will go inside your brain and help your memory. And thats just the beginning.

Uploading our brains into the cloud will allow humanity to waste less time on lower-level types of mental tasks, Kurzweil says. Hes very interested in the idea of uploading the neocortex because its responsible for things like art, music, and humor. By allowing our brains to connect more on that level, by melding with artificial intelligence, we will expand our ability to do these things and be better people. Ultimately it will affect everything, he says. Were going to be able to meet the physical needs of all humans. Were going to expand our minds and exemplify these artistic qualities that we value.

You can watch the entire talk here:

Photos via Hanson Robotics, SXSW

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The Singularity is Coming in 2029 and Will Make Humans 'Sexier' - Inverse

From domestication to selective breeding and right up to DNA editing, humans have long sought to bend the genetic makeup of animals and plants to our needs. Now an international team has taken a significant step towards building the genome of a complex organism from scratcha major milestone in the quest for fully synthetic life.

Led by Jef Boeke, a geneticist at New York University Langone Medical Center, the Synthetic Yeast Project (Sc2.0) has now built five new synthetic chromosomes for the single-celled fungus S. cerevisiae, more commonly known as Bakers yeast.

Boekes lab had previously synthesized the first synthetic yeast chromosome in 2014, meaning that more than a third of the organisms genome16 chromosomes in totalhas now been replaced with engineered alternatives. The consortium has also finished designing the entire genome and expects to have synthesized working versions of all the chromosomes within the year.

Sc2.0 is not the first major effort to create synthetic life. In 2010, geneticist Craig Venter manufactured the entire genome of the bacteria Mycoplasma mycoides and transplanted it into another Mycoplasma species, creating the first self-replicating synthetic organism. This genome was almost identical to the original, but then last year his team released new research in which they had whittled down the organisms genome to just 473 genesthe bare bones required for life.

As impressive as these feats are, though, M. mycoides is far simpler than yeast, with just a single chromosome. Yeast is a eukaryote, a group that includes all complex lifelike plants and animalsand is also at the heart of crucial processes like baking, brewing and, more recently, synthesizing chemicals.

The organism has been genetically modified to mass-produce insulin, antibiotics, vaccines, biofuel and even perfume. Lab experiments have shown yeast can be tweaked to produce a wide variety of chemicals, and it has even been used to generate electricity in microbial fuel cells.

All of this has been done using established genetic engineering approaches, where sections of the organisms DNA are substituted with useful genes from elsewhere. But the ability to build the organisms entire genome from the bottom up could give scientists far greater control over what the yeast is able to produce.

This work sets the stage for completion of designer synthetic genomes to address unmet needs in medicine and industry, Boeke said in a press release. Beyond any one application, the papers confirm that newly-created systems and software can answer basic questions about the nature of genetic machinery by reprogramming chromosomes in living cells.

The breakthrough was revealed in a series of seven papers published in a special edition of the journal Science last Thursday March 9, featuring more than 200 authors from labs across the world. In the main paper, researchers led by Joel Bader, a professor of biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, explain how the synthetic genome has been redesigned to make it easier to manipulate.

By removing non-coding DNA, the new genome has been made roughly eight percent smaller than the natural one, and also includes 17 rather than 16 chromosomes. Thats because all of the yeasts transfer RNA (tRNA)responsible for putting amino acids in the right order when building proteinsnormally spread out through the genome have all been put into a single extra chromosome. This helps boost the robustness of the genome because tRNA are notoriously unstable and prone to mutation due to how often they are transcribed.

The new design also includes a biochemical system known as SCRaMbLE that makes it much easier to customize chromosomes. Some 5,000 DNA tags placed throughout the genome can be targeted with a mutation that causes protein to randomly modify the organisms genetic code. Scientists can then see if the changes lead to any desirable characteristics, such as producing interesting new chemicals or strains able to survive in extreme environments.

Were shortcutting evolution by millions of years, Patrick Cai, whose lab at the University of Edinburgh is building the 17th chromosome, told Wired. Our goal here is not engineering a particular kind of yeast, but the kind of yeast that is amenable to engineering.

Key to the international collaboration at the heart of the project was the creation of a piece of software called BioStudio. Effectively a piece of version control software, the program allows multiple users to simultaneously edit the genome and accept and reject changes. Most importantly, it allows rollbacks to previous designs when problems crop up.

Translating this code into real-life chromosomes follows a similar incremental process, with small chunks of genome being sequentially introduced into live yeast that is then compared against natural yeast to see how the modified strains do. If the synthetic yeast encounters problems, the researchers know which section is carrying the fault and can go back and debug the faulty code.

One of the most impressive aspects of the research is the wholesale changes the group has made to the organisms genetic code. The fact that they were able to do this across five different chromosomes, and the fitness is still similar to wild-type cells, thats pretty impressive, Dan Gibson at Synthetic Genomics, a biotech company developing synthetic chromosomes in another yeast species, told New Scientist.

Genome synthesis is not simple or cheap, though. Harvard University geneticist George Church told Nature its unlikely to replace tools like CRISPRa workhorse of genetic engineering that allows targeted genetic edits by adding or removing short sections of DNAin anything other than the most complicated rewrites of the genetic code.

Nonetheless, the research has dramatically expanded the scope of whats possible in genetic engineering. Theyve been able to induce radical changes in the code, so it emboldens you to be even more radical, said Church.

Image Credit: CDC/Maxine Jalbert, Dr. Leo Kaufman

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How Fully Synthetic Complex Life Just Got a Lot Closer - Singularity Hub

The towering trees with their sprawling branches in the redwood forests have always reminded me of neurons in the brain.

Like trees, each neuron extends out tortuous, delicate branches in a quest to make contact with others in its ecosystem. By communicating through thousands of contact pointssynapsesdotted along their branches, neurons coordinate their activation patterns across the brain. In this way, bits and pieces of information integrate into unified experiences that are our memories, feelings and awareness of the world.

In other words, the secret of conscious thought may lie in the connections of neuronal trees.

In the 140 years of mapping neuronal projection, scientists have seen it all: stubby ones, lopsided ones, and shockingly long branches that thread all the way from the back of the head, the brainstem, to the very front.

But the brain has more surprises in store.

This week at the BRAIN Initiative meeting in Maryland, Dr. Christof Koch, the president of the Allen Institute of Brain Science based in Seattle, announced the discovery of three neurons with branches that extensively span both hemispheres of the brain.

Incredibly, these neurons sit in the claustrum, a mysterious, thin sheet of cells that Koch believes is the seat of consciousness. Among the three, the largest neuron wrapped around the entire circumference of the mouse brain like a crown of thornssomething never seen before.

A single neuron, projecting across the entire cortex! Absolutely astonishing! Koch exclaimed during his talk.

These results are the latest to come out of a national, concerted effort to map the projections of individual neurons throughout the entire brain.

To hook up or troubleshoot electronic systems, the first step is to dig up their wiring diagrams. The same principle holds for deciphering the brain.

Since information processing in neurons is deeply rooted in their structure, scientists believe that building a map of these connections can eventually help us crack the neural codethat is, the electrochemical language in which neurons talk to one another.

Its a behemoth of a task.

The brain has billions of neurons, including thousands of cell types connected into circuits by trillions of synapses. To trace neuronal projections, scientists generally inject a virus or a dye into a single neuron, and wait for the labeling agent to travel down the projections.

Scientists then thinly cut the brain, image each section under the microscope and manually trace the dye or virus. Its slow, its tedious and scaling the process to the entire brain is completely unfathomable.

To automate the process, Koch and his collaborator Dr. Qingming Luo at Wuhan University in China devised a method that slices and images the brain continuously.

The team focused on neurons in the claustrum, a beautiful part of the brain that doesnt get enough recognition, jokes Koch.

They engineered a line of transgenetic mice so that a drug activates a gene in the brain that produces a green florescent protein. Under UV light, neurons labeled with this protein glow a brilliant green, allowing them to pop out from the dark background.

The researchers then carefully fed the mice a small amount of the drug so that only a few neurons were able to switch on the genes. This is a good thing, since a sea of glowing, intertwined neurons would make it impossible to tease out individual projection trees.

The scientists then embedded the brain in a Jello-like substance, and took an image of the top surface of the brain with a microscope. Next, they used a diamond blade to precisely slice off an ultra-thin layer of tissue, and imaged the next layer. After about 10,000 cycles, the resulting images were stitched back up to digitally recreate, in 3D, the three glowing cells.

This technique allows us to gain structural informationwith uniform precision and high resolution for the individual whole brain, says Luo in an email to Singularity Hub, Our technique is revealing more and more curious structures of neurons and circuits.

The fact that the cells were found in the claustrum is perhaps not that surprising.

The enigmatic claustrum is a thin, irregularly-shaped sheet of cells tucked away under the cortex. The nondescript brain region caught Kochs eye when imaging studies showed that it may be the most connected structure in the brain, based on volume.

[Looking] at the white matter fibers coursing to and from the claustrum reveal that it is a neural Grand Central Station. Almost every region of the cortex sends fibers to the claustrum, explains Koch.

And according to Koch, connection is the secret sauce for consciousness.

Virtually all scholars agree that the defining characteristic of any subjective experience, once it reaches the consciousness level, is that its unified, he says.

When you look at the face of a loved one, for example, brain regions that support sight, smell, memories and emotions all activate individually, and these pieces of informationboth external and internal perceptionintegrate into a unified conscious experience.

The claustrum, given its massive connections, may be coordinating the inputs and outputs like a conductor of consciousness, says Koch.

Kochs theory is hard to prove, though a medical case in 2014 gives it tangential support.

While stimulating various brain regions of an alert epileptic woman to identify the source of her seizures, neurosurgeons zapped the nerve bundles near the claustrum, and the woman became unresponsive.

She stopped reading, stared blankly into space, didnt respond to auditory and visual commands and slowed her breathing, the team reported at the time. As soon as stimulation stopped, the woman restarted all activities, without any memory of the event. The neurosurgeons repeated the test over two days, and 10 out of 10 times the same thing happened.

To Koch, the finding that neurons in the claustrum project so extensively across the brain further adds evidence for his theory.

This really supports, or is at least compatible, with the idea that Francis Crick and I wrote about in terms of the involvement of the claustrum in consciousness, he says.

According to an email from the Allen Institute to Singularity Hub, the team is in the process of packaging up their results into a scientific manuscript, and details of the technique will be released to scientists around the world.

Other neuroscientists are more hesitant to link claustrum neurons to consciousness, but applaud Koch and Luos new imaging technique.

Its quite admirable, says Dr. Rafael Yuste at Columbia University to Nature.

According to Yuste, the technology could help scientists better identify different cell types in the brain based on morphology. The 3D reconstructions can then be compared to other datasets, such as gene expression patterns, to better understand the different neuron populationsand how they interactin our brains.

As for Koch, he plans to keep mapping neurons in the claustrum, although the technology is currently still too expensive to reconstruct the entire brain region. The team is also looking at ways to further develop the technique, so that it can image multiple neurons in multiple brain regions at the same time.

Bit by bit, the goal is to reconstruct the entire brain, says Koch.

If the brain is a language, were still learning the alphabet, remarks Yuste. But every characterization of every single neuron brings us closer to identifying key components of neural networks that control our thoughts, feelings, behavior, and yesmaybe even consciousness.

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Are These Giant Neurons the Seat Of Consciousness in the Brain? - Singularity Hub

As I start to look at the emerging trends of 2017 from the vantage ofIndieBio, where we see hundreds of biotech startup applications and technologies per year, a few key themes are already emerging. Even as political landscapes change, science and technology continue to push forward.

Most of us have seen science fiction shows that show future doctors regrowing and replacing entire organs. That fiction is now becoming a reality with cell therapies from companies like Juno (curing two infants with leukemia of their previously treatment resistant cancers with engineered T-cells), induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) pioneered by the Nobel prize winning scientist, Shinya Yamanaka that can becomeany cell in the body, growing organoids (mini organs with some function of a fully grown organ like thestomach organoids grown by researchers in Ohio), and entirely re-grown organs.

There are a plethora of biotechs focused on developing the next generation of regenerative therapies. United Therapeutics is focused on growing humanized organs in Xenograph models (pigs),OneSkinis focused on growing and regenerating human skin, and companies likeScaled Biolabshave grown kidney organoids in the lab (with all 27 cells present in a full kidney present in the mini-organ).

Researchers in Taiwan have managed to sequence a little under half of the simple fruit flys brain with single neuron resolution over the last decade. Thats60,000 neurons with a resolution of 1 gigabyte each. The human brain dwarfs the fruit fly with 86 million neurons. Using the same imaging protocol, it was estimated it would take 17 million years to image the human brain, but luckily, technology continues to advance and accelerate in neuroscience.

Continued improvements in knowledge of other species, better resolution technologies from MRIs, CAT scans and EEGs, combined with machine learning, have resulted in dramatically improved understanding of the human brains functioning. Companies likeTruusthave developed technologies based off of high-dimensional 3D representations of energy flows within the brain (modeled off of the CERN particle accelerator) to improve our understanding of energy flows. The human (brain) connectome is being mapped, and were learning how to expand our treatments to include not just classical therapeutics and electrical stimulation, but also the use of ultrasound and magnetic stimulation (likeBerkeley UltrasoundandNeuroQuore).

Were also now exploring the use of previously banned substances like LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, and other psychoactive compounds for the treatment of depression, PTSD, and other mood and anxiety disorders with very promising results. In one study psilocybin (magic mushroom) caused a remission in previously treatment-resistant depression, an incredible life-changing result for these patients.

Beyond just the understanding and treatment of disorders of the brain, we stand on the cusp of true human enhancement with improved human-machine interfaces directly with the brain. Bryan Johnson founded Kernel, a company dedicated to creating a true implantable brain-machine interface, and Elon Musk claims he will shortly release information on a neural lace interface hes been developing for humanity. Human augmentation of the brain is just a short few years away.

It isnt software that will eat the world, its intelligence. Machine learning started to penetrate biotech R&D a few years back, with AI that could run and test hypotheses, in fact findingnovel regenerative pathwaysin planarium worms (worms that can be cut in half and regenerate).

At the start of this year, we saw the first FDA-approved application ofdeep learning for diagnosing heart conditions.Arterys system takes an average of 15 seconds to produce a result for one case which would take a professional human analyst between 30 minutes to one hour. The most interesting aspect of this is the more data, the better of a cardiologist Arterys system becomes.

Other companies likeMendel.aiare focusing on unleashing machine learning on understanding individual cancer cases and, at first, recommending clinical trials. They aim to eventually recommend treatments for patients that should exceed any one oncologists knowledge base with the latest published data.

Other companies likeAtomwise,GEA enzymes,andA2Aare designing better molecules, enzymes, and peptides for the treatment of diseasesin-silicoand novel foods augmented by machine learning.

This, however, is just the start for machine intelligence, which will affect everything from food, consumer goods, hospital informatics, logistics, diagnostics, treatment, and epidemiology. IBMs Watson is the past. Deep learning algorithms pioneered by GooglesTensorFlowand their new spin-off Verily, which just raised$800m at the start of this year to bring intelligence to healthcare, are the future.

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