https://www.jcvi.org/research/first-minimal-synthetic-bacterial-cell QT:{{” Researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) and Synthetic Genomics, Inc. (SGI) have accomplished the next feat in synthetic biology research—the design and construction of the first minimal synthetic bacterial cell, JCVI-syn3.0.
Using the first synthetic cell, Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 (built by this same team in 2010), JCVI-syn3.0 was developed through a design, build, and test (DBT) process using genes from JCVI-syn1.0. The new minimal synthetic cell contains only 531,000 base pairs and just 473 genes making it the smallest genome of any self-replicating organism. “}}
Archive for the '–' Category
First Minimal Synthetic Bacterial Cell | J. Craig Venter Institute
December 29, 2025Arthur Samuel (computer scientist) – Wikipedia
December 29, 2025https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Samuel_(computer_scientist) QT:{{” Arthur Lee Samuel (December 5, 1901 – July 29, 1990)[3] was an American pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence.[2] He popularized the term “machine learning” in 1959.[4] The Samuel Checkers-playing Program was among the world’s first successful self-learning programs, and as such a very early demonstration of the fundamental concept of artificial intelligence (AI).[5] “}}
…from here to DeepBlue & AlphaGo
Selective Attention/ Invisible Gorilla Experiment: See Through Your Focus – Academy 4SC Learning Hub
December 29, 2025https://learn.academy4sc.org/video/selective-attention-invisible-gorilla-experiment-see-through-your-focus/#:~:text=The%20study%20was%20conducted%20in,a%20gorilla%20thumping%20its%20chest. QT:{{” The study was conducted in 1999 at Harvard University. It involved a short video of people in white t-shirts and black t-shirts passing a basketball to people in the same colored shirt. Participants were asked to watch this video and count the number of passes the white team made. Most could correctly list the number of passes and thought it was a relatively easy task. Yet despite this, over half of the participants failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walk between the basketball players, stand and face the camera, bang their chest, and walk offscreen.
This goes against nearly everyone’s intuition: we’d expect to be able to spot such an obvious occurrence. Yet repeated studies have gathered similar results: we aren’t as observant as we like to think. If we don’t expect to see something, odds are we won’t notice it. Selective attention has its benefits, but it can cause you to miss out on something as obvious as a gorilla thumping its chest.
“}}
AlexNet – Wikipedia
December 29, 2025Demis Hassabis – Wikipedia
December 29, 2025Gene-Level Loop-ome Ties Up Regulatory Loose Ends
December 29, 2025Top Tech Billionaires
December 28, 2025https://www.trueup.io/billionaires
interesting list
Opinion | Sal Khan: A.I. Will Displace Workers at a Scale Many Don’t Realize – The New York Times
December 28, 2025Inside the Data Centers That Train A.I. and Drain the Electrical Grid
December 28, 2025QT:{{”
Users ask questions, prompting the A.I. to produce individual units of intelligence called “tokens.” A token might be a small square of pixels or a fragment of a word. To write a college term paper, an A.I. might produce about five thousand tokens, consuming enough electricity to run a microwave oven at full power for about three minutes. As A.I. fields increasingly complex requests—for video, for audio, for therapy—the need for computing power will increase many times over.
Multiply that by the more than eight hundred million people who use ChatGPT every week, and the data-center explosion makes sense. ChatGPT is now more popular than Wikipedia
…
Data centers “are perhaps bigger, by an order of magnitude, than anything we’ve connected to the grid before,” he said. “If you think about the city of Philadelphia, its load is about one gigawatt. Now imagine adding one-gigawatt-sized data centers to the grid, and not just one, but multiples of them.”
…
The modern approach to A.I. development has been to vacuum up any online data available—including audio, video, practically all published work in English, and more than three billion web pages—and let lawyers sort through the mess.
But there is now talk of a data shortage. There are thought to be about four hundred trillion words on the indexed internet, but, as the OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has noted, much of that is “total garbage.” High-quality text is harder to find. If trends continue, researchers say, A.I. developers could exhaust the usable supply of human text between 2026 and 2032.
“}}
Witt, S. (2025, October 27). Inside the data centers that train A.I. and drain the electrical grid. The New Yorker.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/inside-the-data-centers-that-train-ai-and-drain-the-electrical-grid
Nice numbers on energy usage
Why the Time Has Finally Come for Geothermal Energy
December 27, 2025Why the Time Has Finally Come for Geothermal Energy | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/24/why-the-time-has-finally-come-for-geothermal-energy
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