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Cancer-causing virus masters cell’s replication, immortality – Science Daily

Posted: May 4, 2017 at 2:44 pm

Cancer-causing virus masters cell's replication, immortality
Science Daily
In a paper appearing in the open access journal eLife, a team of researchers from Duke's School of Medicine details just how the Epstein-Barr virus manages to persist so well inside the immune system's B cells, a type of white blood cell that is ...

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Scientists are waging a war against human aging. But what happens next? – Vox

Posted: at 2:44 pm

We all grow old. We all die.

For Aubrey de Grey, a biogerontologist and chief science officer of the SENS Research Foundation, accepting these truths is, well, not good enough. He decided in his late twenties (hes currently 54) that he wanted to make a difference to humanity and that battling age was the best way to do it. His lifes work is now a struggle against physics and biology, the twin collaborators in bodily decay.

He calls it a war on age.

Grey considers aging an engineering problem. The human body is a machine, he told me in the following interview, and like any machine, it can be maintained for as long as we want.

This is not an isolated view. There is a broader anti-aging movement afoot, which seems to be growing every day. As Tad Friend describes colorfully in a recent New Yorker essay, millions of venture capital dollars are being dumped into longevity research, some of it promising and some of it not. Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, is among the lead financiers (hes a patron of Greys organization as well).

Greys work is particularly interesting. For too long, he argues, scientists have been looking for solutions in all the wrong places. There is no monocausal explanation for aging. We age because the many physical systems that make up our body begin to fail at the same time and in mutually detrimental ways.

So hes developed what he calls a divide-and-conquer strategy, isolating the seven known causes of aging and tackling them individually. Whether its cell loss or corrosive mitochondrial mutations, Grey believes each problem is essentially mechanical, and can therefore be solved.

But even if this Promethean quest to extend human life succeeds, several questions persist.

If we develop these anti-aging technologies, who will have access to them? Will inequality deepen even further in a post-aging world? And what about the additional resources required to support humans living 200 or 300 or 500 years? The planet is stretched as it is with 7 billion people living roughly 70 years on average (women tend to live three to five years longer than men) and is already facing serious stresses around food, water, and global warming going forward.

Grey, to his credit, has thought through these problems. Im not sure hes alive to the political implications of this technology, specifically the levels of state coercion it might demand.

But when pressed, he defends his project forcefully.

Is there a simple way to describe theoretically what the anti-aging therapies youre working on will look like what theyll do to or for the body?

Oh, much more than theoretically. The only reason why this whole approach has legs is because 15 or 17 or so years ago, I was actually able to go out and enumerate and classify the types of damage. We've been studying it for a long time, so when I started out in this field in the mid-90s so I could learn about things, I was gratified to see that actually aging was pretty well understood.

Scientists love to say that aging is not well understood because the purpose of scientists is to find things, out so they have to constantly tell people that nothing is understood, but it's actually bullshit. The fact is, aging is pretty well understood, and the best of it is that not only can we enumerate the various types of damage the body does to itself throughout our lives, we can also categorize them, classify them into a variable number of categories

So I just talked about seven categories of damage, and my claim that underpins everything that we do is that this classification is exhaustive. We know how people age; we understand the mechanics of it. There is no eighth category that were overlooking. More importantly, for each category there is a generic approach to fixing it, to actually performing the maintenance approach that I'm describing, repairing the damage.

Can you give me an example of one of these categories and what the approach to fixing it looks like?

One example is cell loss. Cell loss simply means cells dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells, so that happens progressively in a few tissues in the body and it definitely drives certain aspects of aging. Let's take Parkinson's disease. That's driven by the progressive loss of a particular type of neuron, the dopaminergic neuron, in a particular part of the brain.

And what's the generic fix for cell loss? Obviously it's stem cell therapy. That's what we do. We preprogram cells in the laboratory into a state where you can inject them into the body and they will divide and differentiate to replace themselves that the body is not replacing on its own. And stem cell therapy for Parkinson's disease is looking very promising right now.

Is it best to think of aging as a kind of engineering problem that can be reversed or stalled?

Absolutely. It's a part of technology. The whole of medicine is a branch of technology. It's a way of manipulating what would otherwise happen, so this is just one part of medicine.

But you're not trying to solve the problem of death or even aging, really. Its more about undoing the damage associated with aging.

Certainly the goal is to undo the damage that accumulates during life, and whether you call that solving aging is up to you.

What would you say is your most promising line of research right now?

The great news is that we have this divide-and-conquer strategy that allows us to split the problem into seven subproblems and address each of them individually. That means we're constantly making progress on all of them. We pursue them all in parallel. We actually don't pursue stem cell therapy very much, simply because so many other people are doing it and basically everything really important is being done by somebody else, so it's not a good use of our money.

We're a very small organization. We only have $4 million a year to spend, so we're spread very thin. We're certainly making progress. Over the past year we've published really quite high-profile papers relating to a number of main research programs, so there's no really one thing that stands out.

What do you say to those who see this as a quixotic quest for immortality, just the latest example of humanity trying to transcend its condition?

Sympathy, mainly. I understand it takes a certain amount of guts to aim high, to actually try to do things that nobody can do, that nobody's done before. Especially things that people have been trying to do for a long time. I understand most people don't have that kind of courage, and I don't hate them for that. I pity them.

Of course, the problem is that they do get in my way, because I need to bring money in the door and actually get all this done. Luckily, there are some people out there who do have courage and money, and so we're making progress.

Ultimately, the fact is aging has been the number one problem of humanity since the dawn of time, and it is something that, until I came along, we have not had any coherent idea how to address, which means the only option available to us has been to find some way to put it out of our minds and find a way to get on with our miserably short lives and make the best of it, rather than being perpetually preoccupied with this ghastly thing that's going to happen to us in the relatively distant future. That makes perfect sense. I don't object to that.

The problem is that suddenly we are in a different world where we are in striking distance of actually implementing a coherent plan that will really work, and now that defeatism, that fatalism, that resignation, has become a huge part of the problem, because once you've made your peace with some terrible thing you know, it's very hard to reengage.

Are there any ethical questions or reservations that give you pause at all?

Not at all. Once one comes to the realization that this is just medicine, then one can address the entire universe of potential so-called ethical objections in one gut. Are you in favor of medicine or not? In order to have any so-called ethical objection to the work we do, the position that one has to take is the position that medicine for the elderly is only a good thing so long as it doesn't work very well, and thats a position no one wants to take.

Ive no doubt youve been asked this question before, but I think its too important to gloss over. You talk enthusiastically about transitioning to a post-aging world, but there are many people who worry about what it means to increase the humans time on earth. We dont necessarily have an overpopulation problem, but we certainly have an inequality problem, and we seem to need more resources than we have. If 90 percent of people die from aging now, and suddenly people are living for 200 or 300 years, how will we be able to sustain this kind of growth?

First of all, thank you for prefacing the question with the thought that I've probably heard this question a lot, because of course I have. But you'd be astonished at how many people have presented this question to me starting with, "Have you ever thought of the possibility that..." as if they genuinely had a new idea.

But yes, overpopulation is the single biggest concern that people raise, and I have basically three levels of answers to these questions. First, the answer is specific to the individual question. So in the case of overpopulation, essentially I point to the fact that fertility rates are already plummeting in many areas. And people often forget: Overpopulation is not a matter of how many people there are on the planet but rather the difference between the number of people on the planet and the number of people that can be on the planet with an acceptable level of environmental impact, and that second number is of course not a constant; it's something that is determined by other technologies.

So as we move forward with renewable energy and other things like desalinization to reduce the amount of pollution the average person commits, we are increasing the carrying capacity of the planet, and the amount of increase that we can expect over the next, say, 20 years in that regard far exceeds what we could expect in terms of the trajectory of rise in population resulting from the elimination of death from aging. So that's my main answer.

The second level of answer is at the level of sense of proportion. Technology happens or doesn't happen, whatever the case may be, and maybe the worst-case scenario is that we will end up with a worse overpopulation problem than what we have today.

What does that actually mean? It means we're faced with a choice in a post-aging world, in a world where the technology exists a choice between either, on the one hand, using these technologies and having more people and having fewer kids than we would like or, on the other hand, letting stuff go on the way it is today, which involves not using technology that will keep people healthy in old age and therefore alive.

Ask yourself, which of those two things would you choose? Would you choose to have your mother get Alzheimer's disease or to have fewer kids? It's a pretty easy choice, and people just don't do this.

The third level is perhaps the strongest of all, which is that it's about who has the right to choose. Essentially if we say, Oh, dear, overpopulation, let's not go there. Let's not develop these technologies, then what we are doing as of today is we are delaying the arrival of our technology. Of course it will happen eventually. The question is how soon? That depends on how hard we try.

If we know that, then what we're doing is we're delaying the arrival of the technology and thus condemning a whole cohort of people of humanity of the future to the same kind of death and disease and misery that we have today in old age, when in fact we might have relieved that suffering had we developed the therapies in time.

I dont want to be responsible for condemning a vast number of people to death. I dont want to be in that position. I think theres a strong argument that we should get on developing these technologies has quickly as we can.

I take your points there, but those questions are far easier to answer in theory than they are to solve in practice. For instance, we cant simply decide that people will have fewer children without potentially dangerous levels of state coercion. The politics of this is complicated at best, dystopian at worst.

In any event, let me at least raise one more concern. What is your sense of the cost and the accessibility of these therapies should they become available? People concerned with bioengineering, for example, worry that technologies like this, if they arent equally distributed, will produce inequalities of the sort weve never seen before and cant sustain.

Its a valid concern. It needs to be addressed, but luckily, like the overpopulation one, it's a really easy one to address. Today what we see with high-tech medicine is that it is even in countries with a single-payer system it's pretty much limited by the pay because there's only so much resources available.

But part of the problem now is that our current therapies for elderly people dont work well. It postpones the ill health of old age by a very small amount if we're lucky, and then people get sick anyway, and we spend all the money that we would have spent in absence of the medicine just keeping the person alive for a little longer in a miserable state.

Now compare that with the situation where the medicine actually does work, where the person actually stays healthy. Yes, they live a lot longer, and sure enough, it may be that we have to supply these therapies multiple times because they are inherently periodic therapies, so we could be talking about a substantial amount of money. But the thing is these people would be healthy, so we would not be spending the money on the medicine for the sick people that we have today.

Plus, on top of that, there would be massive indirect savings. The kids of the elderly would be more productive because they wouldn't have to spend time looking after their sick parents. The elderly themselves would still be in an able-bodied state and able to actually contribute wealth to society rather than just consuming wealth.

Of course, there are lots and lots of big uncertainties in these kinds of calculations, but there is absolutely no way to do such a calculation that does not come to the absolutely clear conclusion that the medicines would pay for themselves many times over, really quickly.

So what that means, from the point of view of government setting aside the fact that it would be politically impossible not to support this is that it would be suicidal from a purely mercenary economic point of view not to do this. The country will go bankrupt because other countries will be making sure their workforce is able-bodied. The world will be frontloading their investments to ensure that everybody who is old enough to need them will get these therapies.

When will the therapies youre developing be ready for human experimentation?

That will happen incrementally over the next 20 years. Each component of the SENS panel will have standalone value in addressing one or another disease of old age, and some of them are already in clinical trials. Some of them are a lot harder, and the full benefit will only be seen when we can combine them all, which is a long way out.

How confident are you that someone alive today will not die of aging?

It's looking very good. Of course this is primary technology, so we can only speculate. It's very speculative what the time frame is going to be, but I think we have a 50-50 chance of getting to work on longevity escape velocity, the point where we are postponing the problem of aging faster than time is passing and people are staying one step ahead of the problem. I think we have a 50-50 chance of reaching that point within 20 years of now, subject only to improved funding on the early-stage research that's happening at the moment.

Escape velocity is an interesting analogy. The idea is to keep filling up the biological gas tank before it runs out, staying a step ahead of the aging process?

Right. The point is that these are rejuvenation therapies, which means they are therapies that genuinely turn back the clock. They put the body into a state that is analogous or similar to how it was at an earlier [stage] rather than just stopping or slowing down the clock. Every time you do this, you buy time, but the problem gets harder because the types of damage that the therapy reverses will catch up, and those imperfections just need to be progressively partially eliminated. The idea, then, is that you asymptotically approach the 100 percent repair situation but you never need to get there. You just need to keep the overall level of damage below a certain tolerable threshold.

For more about de Grey's work, visit the SENS website.

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Scientists are waging a war against human aging. But what happens next? - Vox

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Scientists develop novel chemical ‘dye’ to improve liver cancer imaging – Science Daily

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Scientists develop novel chemical 'dye' to improve liver cancer imaging
Science Daily
A research team led by Assistant Professor Edward Chow (right), Principal Investigator from the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore at NUS and Department of Pharmacology at NUS Yong Loo Lin of Medicine, has developed a novel nanodiamond-based ...

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The absurd turn-based tactic game Post Human W.A.R enters in early access on May 3rd – Develop

Posted: at 2:42 pm

Tactical war will outlive mankind. Sanity wont.

Post Human W.A.R is a turn-based tactical and psychological strategy game. At the dawn of our third millennium, mankind went extinct, leaving behind a deeply affected planet Earth. Ferocious mutated animals, household robots converted to warfare and inventive monkeys in tracksuits battle it out to decide the fate of the human heritage.

TEASER: https://youtu.be/ILupl_PopO8

Now on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/462240/Post_Human_WAR/

Through online PvP or local campaigns, pick your faction and strategize your victory. Be wary, your enemy will be equally armed.

On May 3rd, Post Human W.A.R enters into a 2-month early access period with the goal to:

About PLAYDIUS:

Under the wing of Plug In Digital, its parent company, PLAYDIUS Ent. has a proven experience in the distribution and publishing of indie games. We provide our talented developers with production and marketing support to let them do what they do best: create amazing titles. More information here: http://www.playdius-ent.com or here: http://www.playdius-ent.com/PHW/press/

About StudioChahut:

The unique world of Post Human W.A.R was created and developed over several years by the small team of Studio Chahut,based in Grenoble, France.

It stems from our long-lasting love for unforgiving turn-based games, and our strong conviction that the genre deserved a fun, brand new universe.

More information about the game here: http://www.posthumanwar.com/?lang=en

Join the community on discord here: https://discordapp.com/invite/9BHzKzv

GLOBAL MEDIA CONTACT

Thibaud Rouquet

Thibaud@rpconseils.com

Games Press is the leading online resource for games journalists. Used daily by magazines, newspapers, TV, radio, online media and retailers worldwide, it offers a vast, constantly updated archive of press releases and assets, and is the simplest and most cost-effective way for PR professionals to reach the widest possible audience. Registration for the site and the Games Press email digest is available, to the trade only, at http://www.gamespress.com

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‘Cruel and indefensible’: Human Rights Watch slams Hamas for holding two mentally ill Israelis – Washington Post

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JERUSALEM A day after militant Islamist group Hamas updated, and some say softened, its founding charter, an internationalhuman rights watchdogslammed the group as cruel and torturous over its continued incarceration of two Israelis withserious mental health conditions.

[Palestinians think Trump can make a deal]

In a report published Tuesday, Human Rights Watch shed light onthe disappearance of Avera Mangistu, an Israeli Jew of Ethiopian descent, and Hisham al-Sayed, a Bedouin Israeli. Both men were seenon Israeli security cameras entering Gaza, Mangistu in September 2014 and Sayed in April 2015.

Neither hasbeen heard from since.

Hamashas not confirmed that the men are in Gaza, but it has not denied it either. Over the past two years, officials from the Strip have made coy references to them and to the bodies of two Israeli soldiers killed in the 2014 summer war between Israel and Hamas.

[Palestinians and Israelis are now fighting over corpses]

Two weeks ago, Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaldeclared that any information about Israeli captives would carry a price indicating the two men are to be used as bargaining chips in exchange for Hamas combatants serving time in Israeli jails.

Hamas officials interviewed for the Human Rights Watch report suggested the two Israelis were legitimate prisoners of war because every Israeli male serves in the army. In one instance, the groups military wing,Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades,published computer-altered photographs of the men dressed Israeli army uniforms.

AHuman Rights Watch investigation revealed that both Mangistu and al-Sayed were rejected from Israeli military service on the grounds of their mental health.

Hamass refusal to confirm its apparent prolonged detention of men with mental health conditions and no connection to the hostilities is cruel and indefensible, saidSarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. No grievance or objective can justify holding people incommunicado and bartering over their fates.

The scolding from the Human Rights Watch comes as Hamas tries to rehabilitate its standing in the world. The Islamist militant groupis viewed as a terrorist organizationby Israel and the United States. But on Monday, it released a new manifestorebranding itself as an Islamic national liberation movement. While it no longer explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel, it does retain the goal of liberating historic Palestine.

The report also came out on the eve of Wednesday's meeting between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbasand President Trump at the White House. Though Abbas is the elected leader of the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, he has no sway with Hamas.

Research for the report was carried out in September 2016, the first time since 2008 that Israel had allowed representatives of the nongovernmental organization to enter Gaza, an area that has been under an Israeli and Egyptian land and sea blockade since Hamas took controlin 2007.

Israel has not been sympathetic to the work of Human Rights Watch, often claiming that the organization singles Israel out on its human rights violations, while overlooking some of the worlds worst violators. In February, an American investigator from Human Rights Watch was deniedentry to Israel on the grounds that the NGO is systematically anti-Israel and works as a tool for pro-Palestinian propaganda.

[Israel calls Human Rights Watch a propaganda tool, says it is not welcome]

This time, however, it is Hamas that is failing to comply with international humanitarian law by breaking commitments made in April 2014under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Under the treaty, states must provide protections for people with psychosocial, or mental health, disabilities, wrote Human Rights Watch in its report.

According to the report, Mangistu, 30, entered Gaza through a barbed wire fence near a beach on Sept. 7, 2014. Sayed, 29, simply walked across the border into Gaza on April 20, 2015.

The family of a third Israeli citizen, Jumaa Abu Ghanima, also said their son had disappeared into Gaza, sometime in July 2016. Human Rights Watch, however, wrote it could not independently corroborate that account.

Mangistu and al-Sayed, an Ethiopian Jew and Palestinian Bedouin with mental health conditions, come from among the most marginalized communities in Israeli society, Whitson said. There is nothing patriotic or heroic in forcibly disappearing them.

The groups calls on Hamas to unconditionally disclose the mens whereabouts and release them unless they can provide a credible legal basis for continuing to hold them. It also said Hamas should allow the men to immediately make contact with their families.

Israeli has also called on Hamas to return Mangistu and Sayed, as well as the bodies of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, the two Israeli soldiers killed in the 2014 summer war between Israel and Hamas.

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Landlord violated Muslim tenants’ rights for not respecting prayer time: Human rights tribunal – National Post

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TORONTO A landlord who repeatedly ignored his tenants requests to respect their prayer times and remove his shoes in their prayer space violated their religious rights, Ontarios human rights tribunal has ruled.

John Alabi is facing a $12,000 fine after the decision, which found he discriminated against his tenants on the grounds of their Muslim faith.

The decision handed down from tribunal adjudicator Jo-Anne Pickel outlines a turbulent tenancy for Walid Madkour and Heba Ismail, who rented a unit from Alabi for less than three months after moving to Toronto from Montreal.

The issues that came before the tribunal all took place in January and February 2015 the time between when both parties mutually agreed to terminate the lease and the day the couple moved out.

Conflicts centred around requests the couple had made while Alabi was trying to show their unit to prospective tenants.

Alabi told the tribunal he felt Madkour and Ismail were imposing their way of life on him, a claim flatly rejected in Pickels decision.

Unfortunately, attempts by Muslims to practice their faith have increasingly been interpreted as an attempt to impose their way of life on others, Pickel wrote.

There was absolutely no evidence that the applicants requests for additional notice and for the removal of shoes in this case were an attempt by them to impose their way of life on the respondent or anyone else. Far from seeking to impose their way of life on anyone, the applicants were merely making simple requests for the accommodation of their religious practices.

Between late January and late February 2015, Alabi had agreed to give the couple 24-hours notice if someone was planning to view the apartment, in accordance with Ontarios Residential Tenancies Act.

Madkour and Ismail, however, asked for additional notice up to an hour before Alabi planned to enter the apartment.

While they did not disclose the religious grounds for their request at first, they eventually explained that they wanted to be certain the visits did not coincide with prayer times designated by the Quran, the tribunal heard. As practising Muslims, both Madkour and Ismail pray five times a day during designated time periods.

Unfortunately, attempts by Muslims to practice their faith have increasingly been interpreted as an attempt to impose their way of life on others

Ismail also wanted to have enough time to ensure she was wearing her hijab and other modest attire in order to comply with another tenet of her faith, the tribunal heard.

Alabi frequently denied these requests or provided only momentary notice via text message before entering the apartment, the tribunal heard.

Once inside, another bone of contention often arose when Madkour or Ismail would request that people remove their shoes before walking through the unit.

The Quran states that the area in which prayers are conducted must be clean, the tribunal said, adding that potential contamination would result in extra work to cleanse the area.

In video evidence shown to the tribunal, Pickel said the couple is heard asking Alabi and a prospective tenant to remove their shoes before entering the bedroom, which they used as their prayer space.

Pickels decision said the video shows the prospective tenant wearing only socks, but clearly shows Alabi walking through the bedroom in shoes despite protests from Ismail, who is heard telling him that wearing footwear in the area is disrespectful.

Alabi told the tribunal that he ignored her request in order to avoid making a scene in front of the tenant and because he felt her stance was propaganda designed to make him look bad.

Pickel took a different view.

I fail to see how such a request would make the respondent look bad if he complied with it, she wrote. If anything, it was the respondents non-compliance with the request that made him look bad in front of prospective tenants.

She also pointed to some text messages sent to Madkour in response to his request for additional notice before an apartment viewing. One of those messages read Welcome to Ontario, Canada, prompting Pickel to find that Alabi was not respectful of the couples religious rights under the Human Rights Code.

She ordered Alabi to pay Madkour and Ismail $6,000 each, as well as to take an online course on human rights and rental housing.

Neither Alabi nor his legal representative immediately responded to request for comment.

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Landlord violated Muslim tenants' rights for not respecting prayer time: Human rights tribunal - National Post

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This audio clip of a robot as Trump may prelude a future of fake … – Washington Post

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What if you could make President Trump say whatever you wanted?Like this.

Or here he is again with his simulated frenemies, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:

How about listening to thevaguely robot-like voice of yourself, programmed into an app based on a sample of your speech? The technology will be readysoon,according to ateam of researchers from the University of Montreals institute for computer-based learning algorithms.

Now theyre seeking investors for theirproduct,Lyrebird,and hopetojoinGoogle in the fast-expandingbusiness ofmimicking human voices.

Virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri have driven the voice technology into the mainstream, where we can controlourphones, cars and even refrigerators through verbal commands. And now we face a future where the perfect vocal replication of the president of the United States or you, or anyone could be just a few years away, some experts say. How does thatfuturesound?

Whoever wins the development race, experts in technology and ethical fields are gearing up for products that will do to voice what Photoshop did to photos make reality verydifficultto tell from a simulation.

Lyrebirdis aware of the downsides. Thetechnology isexciting with potentially dangerous consequences such as misleading diplomats, fraud and stealing the identity of someone else, according to an ethical disclaimer on Lyrebirds website. The developersdid not immediately respond to an interview request.

Nevertheless,the inventorsplan to begin selling what they call the first technology to allow copying voices in a matter of minutes with fine tuning for emotional control.

Scientific American notes that Lyrebird and a competing Alphabet-ownedproject called WaveNetuse neural network technology code patterned after neurons in thehuman brain to simulate human speech on the fly.

In contrast, existingvoice assistants such as Siri and Alexa work by cobbling together words and phrases from prerecorded files of one particular voice.

Lyrebird saysitstechnology, once released, will be able to mimic any voice based on as little as aminute of audio recording though one of the developers told TechCrunch that longer samples would reduce the distinctly metallic rasp that the outlet noted in clipsreleased so far.

[Burger King thought it had a great idea. Instead, it ended up with a Whopper of a problem.]

While Lyrebirds developers have not announced a release date for their product, they claimit will simulate audio much faster than Googles WaveNet.

When the tech giants artificial intelligence unit demonstrated WaveNetlast year, listeners rated it as the closest simulationyet of human speech, according to the Verge.

However, the outlet noted, Googles team had to manually tweakthe audiooutputor it sounded like AIbaby babble.

Timo Baumann, a speech processing researcher atCarnegie Mellon University, told Scientific American that Lyrebirds audio sounded a tad robotic but that convincing human simulations voice assistants that people might treat like friends were a few years away.

Five major tech giants: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon.com arepursingwhat The Washington Posts Elizabeth Dwoskincalled an arms race to create the next generation of virtual assistants to make our personal devices converselike humans, if not also sound like them.

Its about taking the way that humans have naturally interacted with each other for thousands of years and applying that to the way they interact with services, Dag Kittlaus, a co-f0under of the Siri app now in every iPhone, told Dwoskin. Hewas working on a conversational artificial intelligence technology he hoped would replace it.

Theprospect of computer-simulated voice concerned a security technologist from Harvard University, who told Scientific Americanthat a new reality of fake audio clips was on the horizon.

A refined version of this system could replicate a persons voice with incredible accuracy, making it virtually impossible for a human listener to discern the original from the emulation, Gizmodo warned. The day is coming when vocal speech, like an image processed in Photoshop, can be manipulated without our knowing.

When Adobe demonstrated yet another form of voice-faking software last year one that rearranges words in pre-recorded audio clips a technology researcher at the University of Stirling expressed horror to the BBC.

It seems that Adobes programmers were swept along with the excitement of creating something as innovative as a voice manipulator, Eddy Borges Rey told the outlet, and ignored the ethical dilemmas brought up by its potential misuse.

[The next hot job in Silicon Valley is for poets]

The creators of Lyrebird said they want their technology to be used for good:Giving back the voice to people who lost it to sickness, being able to record yourself at different stages in your life and hearing your voice later on, one of Lyrbirds developers told Gizmodo.

The teamtold TechCruch it plansto makeits voice simulator available to anyone with an Internet connection with free samples for fake audio in a voice of ones choosing, and a fee-per-sentence thereafter.

We hope that everyone will soon be aware that such technology exists and that copying the voice of someone else is possible, the developers wrote.

More reading:

Think your dog talks like people? Scientists say you might just be right.

Terrorists are building drones. France is destroying them with eagles.

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This audio clip of a robot as Trump may prelude a future of fake ... - Washington Post

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Bosses believe your work skills will soon be useless – The … – Washington Post

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Nearly a third of business leaders and technology analysts express no confidence that education and job training in the United States will evolve rapidly enough to match the next decades labor market demands, a new report from the Pew Research Center finds.

About 30 percent of the executives, hiring managers, college professors and automation researchers who responded to the Pew survey felt future prospects looked bleak, anticipatingthat firms would encounter more trouble finding workers with their desired skill sets over the next decade.

Barring a neuroscience advance that enables us to embed knowledge and skills directly into brain tissue and muscle formation, there will be no quantum leap in our ability to up-skill people, wrote Andrew Walls, managing vice president at Gartner, an IT consulting firm.

Seriously? Youre asking about the workforce of the future? added another respondent, a science editor who asked to stay anonymous. As if theres going to be one?

Lee Rainie, Pews director of Internet, science and technology research, the studys co-author, helped canvass, reaching out to 8,000 decision makers in Pew's database. About 1,400 responded, and many of those told the researchers they were bracing for machines to transform the ways humans work -- sometimes in unpredictable ways.

People are wrestling with this basic metaphysical question: What are humans good for? he said. Its important to figure that out because this blended world of machines and humans is already upon us and its going to accelerate.

Most of the business and technology professionals expected new training programs to emerge, both at schools and on the private market, to better prepare the future labor force. But 30 percent of the 1,408 respondents doubted such a quick transformation could take place. They felt, according to the report, that adaptation in teaching environments will not be sufficient to prepare workers for future jobs.

Jerry Michalski, the founder at REX, a technology think tank in Portland, Ore., feared public schools and universities arent keeping up with changes in the economy.

They take too long to teach impractical skills, he wrote, and knowledge not connected to the real world.

Im skeptical that educational and training programs can keep pace with technology, added Thomas Claburn, editor-at-large at Information Week, a news site.

Jason Hong, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, argued the country can train small numbers of individuals for more computerized roles at community colleges and in the university system. And while coding classes, for example, are cropping up on campuses, learning how to work in the computer realm just isnt part of the broader American curriculum.

There are two major components needed for a new kind of training program at this scale: political will and a proven technology platform, Hong wrote. Even assuming that the political will (and budget) existed, theres no platform today that can successfully train large numbers of people.

The next generation of workers should learn how to code, the Pew report asserts, or brush up on data science both skills that would serve them well in increasingly automated workplaces. But they shouldnt underestimate the importance of so-called emotional intelligence, or the ability to gracefully manage employees, co-workers and clients.

The skills necessary at the higher echelons will include especially the ability to efficiently network, manage public relations, display intercultural sensitivity and just enough creativity to think outside the box, wrote Simon Gottschalk, a sociology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Frank Elavsky, a data and policy analyst at Acumen LLC, an analytic tool developer, said people can hone those skills in this digital age by remembering to interact with other people.

The most important skills to have in life are gained through interpersonal experiences, he wrote. Human bodies in close proximity to other human bodies stimulate real compassion, empathy, vulnerability and social-emotional intelligence.

B. Remy Cross, an assistant professor of sociology at Webster University in Missouri, expressed doubt that future workers could easily bolster their social skills in an increasingly online world.

It is too hard to adequately instruct large numbers of people in the kinds of soft skills that are anticipated as being in most demand, Cross wrote. As manufacturing jobs move overseas or are fully mechanized, we will see a bulge in service jobs. These require good people skills, something that is often hard to train online.

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In 10 Years, Humans Have Utterly Transformed the Arctic – Futurism

Posted: at 2:42 pm

As the Arctic loses ice and breaks high temperature records, it experiences a profound shift into a new state of normal. This is as clear a sign as any that climate changes worst effects are already here. Taken in context with the jarring changes scientists have already tracked including alarming accidental findings such as green ice caused by microorganism growth in waters at unprecedented high temperatures the findings from the northernmost regions of our planet all spell out the urgency of the climate change fight in no uncertain terms.

River ice now melts one month earlier than it did only 15 years ago, and in at least one instance a melting glacier cut off its water source, causing an entire river to disappear over the course of four days. Thinning sea ice, glaciers riddled with holes, unusual cycles of seasonal ice, and disruptions to the Arctic food chain are all apparent.

Like the rest of the planet, the Arctics warmest temperatures in recorded history occurred between 2011 to 2015. However, unlike the rest of the planet, temperatures are rising twice as fast in the Arctic. Over the past four decades, sea ice has declined by 65 percent. In fact, whereas most sea ice used to remain frozen, now, for the first time, most Arctic sea ice is new.

These changes have worldwide consequences. A new survey shows that, without action to curb CO2 emissions, sea levels may rise an additional foot. According to a report from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, scientists are now measuring changes in the Arctic that are significant enough to have global repercussions from flooding in coastal cities and extreme record temperatures to intensifying monsoons.

Even so, Environment and Climate Change Canada cryosphere scientist Ross Brown insists there is hope. The report also shows that aggressive intervention can slow the warming of the Arctic that climate change is causing. If strong enough steps to reduce emissions were taken, parts of the Arctic, including sea ice cover, could recover.

There is a choice there to be made, and if we can actually follow through, there is a chance well be able to stabilize the changes that are happening, he said to E&E News. I dont know if its optimism, but I think it shows that if we do take action, there is a real concrete result to it.

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Tesla May Be Launching a Mysterious Startup For Materials Recycling – Futurism

Posted: at 2:42 pm

In Brief A recent filing reveals that some of Tesla's executives are involved with a venture startup that will recycle materials for manufacturing. Could the California-based firm Redwood Materials be another Tesla project?

Elon Musk has been hitting the headlines lately because of two companies he recently startedup: his Boring Company and his brain-hacking venture Neuralink. The serial entrepreneur has been very busy lately, what with SpaceXs recent accomplishments and the latest developments in Tesla. And speaking of Tesla, rumor has it that theres another new venture in the works.

Evidence about this new initiative comes from an SEC filing which revealed a $2 million investment in a recently incorporated firm called Redwood Materials. According to a write-up by CB Insights, this supposed new company doesnt involve Musk directly, just some of Teslas executives: CTO JB Straubel and Special Projects head Andrew Stevenson. Both Straubel and Stevenson are listed as executives of Redwood Materials, with the latter as CFO.

The Califronia-based firm describes itselfas focused on advanced technology and process development for materials recycling, remanufacturing, and reuse. Could Redwood Materials be Teslas entry into the recycling industry, as part of its efforts to make manufacturing greener?

Until Tesla official says anything about it, we can only surmise what connections it has if any to Redwood Materials. Its possible though, especially since Stevenson once mentioned in a speechthat re-thinking the materials supply chain is an area of innovation for Tesla. Recycling materials could well be useful for Teslas vehicle and solar technologies.

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