Reddit has sold its content to OpenAI

AI techniques are making inroads into the field of drug discovery. As a result, a growing number of drugs and vaccines have been discovered using AI. However, questions remain about the success of these molecules in clinical trials. To address these questions, we conducted a first analysis of the clinical pipelines of AI-native Biotech companies. In Phase I we find AI-discovered molecules have an 80–90% success rate, substantially higher than historic industry averages. This suggests, we argue, that AI is highly capable of designing or identifying molecules with drug-like properties. In Phase II the success rate is ∼40%, albeit on a limited sample size, comparable to historic industry averages. Our findings highlight early signs of the clinical potential of AI-discovered molecules.

It used to be that you needed years and lots of specialist skills to build humanoid robots. Not anymore. Now base models are open-source. Want more complex appendages? Companies like Shadow Robot are making and selling those. Open-source AI is almost as good as closed-source industry leaders. Unitree's new advanced humanoid robot starts at only $16,000. You can bet Chinese manufacturing will keep lowering that cost.

So it's reasonable to think complex, advanced, and powerful humanoid robots may cost < $5,000 by 2030 or so. Sci-fi has imagined lots of robot futures, but I don't recall it often anticipating that aspect. Robots will be cheap to buy and own. Economists, and by extension our governments, have anticipated this even less.

37 Humanoid Robots - Youtube Video

Two surveys of millions of stars in our galaxy have revealed mysterious spikes in infrared heat coming from dozens of them. Astronomers say this could be evidence for alien civilisations harnessing energy from their stars by using a vast construction known as a Dyson sphere – although they can’t fully rule out more mundane explanations.

First proposed in the 1960s, Dyson spheres are hypothesised structures that could surround entire stars to absorb their energy, a possible means by which advanced aliens might draw huge amounts of power. If such objects exist, they should be warm enough to give off a detectable infrared glow – a “technosignature” that could alert us to the presence of alien life.

To search for potential Dyson spheres, two teams of astronomers, one led by Matías Suazo at Uppsala University in Sweden and the other by Gaby Contardo at the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy, combined data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite – which is mapping the position and motion of billions of stars in our galaxy – with infrared survey results from ground and space telescopes.

Each team analysed the same 5 million stars from the combined datasets, and both turned up signs of excess infrared heat that couldn’t be explained by known natural processes. “The most fascinating explanation could be actual Dyson spheres,” says Suazo.

His team spotted strange signals at seven red dwarfs within 900 light-years of Earth. These stars are smaller and dimmer than our sun, but appeared up to 60 times brighter in infrared than expected.

This excess would have been caused by something with a temperature of up to 400°C, consistent with what we might expect for a Dyson sphere. Up to 16 per cent of each star would have to be obscured to account for the signal, meaning it would more likely be a variant of the idea called a Dyson swarm – a collection of large satellites orbiting a star to collect energy – if the cause is truly of artificial origin. “This isn’t like a single solid shell around the star,” says team member Jason Wright at Pennsylvania State University.

Contardo’s results are broader, with 53 candidates found among larger stars, including some sun-like stars, at distances of up to 6500 light years from Earth. “Both sets of candidates are interesting,” she says, though inconclusive. “You need follow-up observations to confirm anything.”

One natural explanation that could mimic the properties of a Dyson sphere is that the stars are surrounded by hot, planet-forming debris disks, but most of the stars found by both teams appear to be too old for this. Another possibility is that each star could coincidentally be positioned in front of a distant galaxy giving off an infrared glow.

The infrared signals could also result from some unknown natural process. “It might be something that happens very rarely, like if two planets collide and produce an enormous amount of material,” says David Hogg at New York University, who worked with Contardo. “I think it’s most likely to be a natural phenomenon.”

The James Webb Space Telescope could shed further light on these stars, revealing if the infrared heat comes from natural dusty material or something else.

“Either we’ll rule them all out and say Dyson spheres are quite rare and very hard to find, or they’ll hang around as candidates and we’ll study the heck out of them,” says Wright.

Vanguard's new forecasting framework suggests AI is likely to be the catalyst for a surge in economic growth, surpassing the impact of the personal computer and the internet.

Opal Sandy, aged 18 months, was born completely deaf due to condition auditory neuropathy

A new study provides some theoretical underpinning to warp drives, suggesting that the superfast propulsion tech may not forever elude humanity.

Sci-fi fans — especially "Star Trek" devotees — are familiar with warp drives. These hypothetical engines manipulate the fabric of space-time itself, compressing the stuff in front of a spaceship and expanding it behind. This creates a "warp bubble" that allows a craft to travel at incredible velocities — in some imaginings, many times faster than the speed of light.

In 1994, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre published a groundbreaking paper that laid out how a real-life warp drive could work. This exciting development came with a major caveat, however: The proposed "Alcubierre drive" required negative energy, an exotic substance that may or may not exist (or, perhaps, the harnessing of dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to be causing the universe's accelerated expansion).

Alcubierre published his idea in Classical and Quantum Gravity. Now, a new paper in the same journal suggests that a warp drive may not require exotic negative energy after all.

"This study changes the conversation about warp drives," lead author Jared Fuchs, of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and the research think tank Applied Physics, said in a statement. "By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we've shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction."

The team's model uses "a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics," according to the statement.

Understanding that model is probably beyond most of us; the paper's abstract, for example, says that the solution "involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric."

The proposed engine could not achieve faster-than-light travel, though it could come close; the statement mentions "high but subluminal speeds."

This is a single modeling study, so don't get too excited. Even if other research teams confirm that the math reported in the new study checks out, we're still very far from being able to build an actual warp drive.

Fuchs and his team admit as much, stressing that their work could end up being a stepping stone on the long road to efficient interstellar flight.

"While we're not yet preparing for interstellar voyages, this research heralds a new era of possibilities," Gianni Martire, CEO of Applied Physics, said in the same statement. "We're continuing to make steady progress as humanity embarks on the Warp Age."

The team's study was published online on April 29. You can find it here, though all but the abstract is behind a paywall; a free preprint version is available via arXiv.org.