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Simon Coghlan and Kobi Leins for The Conversation. In 2020, scientists made global headlines by creating 'xenobots' – tiny 'programmable' living things made of several thousand frog stem cells. These pioneer xenobots could move around in fluids, and scientists claimed they could be useful for monitoring radioactivity, pollutants, drugs or diseases. Earl...

In 2020, scientists made global headlines by creating “xenobots” – tiny “programmable” living things made of several thousand frog stem cells. These pioneer xenobots could move around in fluids, and scientists claimed they could be useful for monitoring radioactivity, pollutants, drugs or diseases. Early xenobots survived for up to ten days. A second wa...

As the world’s eyes were on Glasgow, where more than 100 world leaders provided pledges to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the focus was on governments and industry. Not mentioned in the dispatches, although almost certainly present unofficially was the massive global military complex. The environment is subject to degradation by governments and industry ...

“Just what do you think you are doing, Dave?” – HAL, 2001: A Space Odyssey November 9, 2021 | by Kobi Leins & Anja Kaspersen As AI systems are being leveraged and scaled, frequently calls are made for, “meaningful human control” or “meaningful human interaction on the loop.” Originally an engineering term, requiring a human “in the loop” who could h...

One of the last frontiers of science remains the human mind – but not for much longer. Scientists can already manipulate memories and emotions such as fear or anger, at the switch of a nanolaser, using a technique called optogenetics. Rafael Yuste, a biology professor at Columbia University, said that scientists ‘have already succeeded in implanting in th...

An AI Terminology Cheat Sheet for Lawyers, Policy Makers, Politicians and Experts The first challenge of working in a cross-disciplinary environment is understanding the lingo from areas outside your own. This cheat sheet will provide a breakdown of the types, and the component parts, of AI, to hopefully help to start more meaningful interdisciplinary co...