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"When analysing the seeds, the scientists came across a surprising discovery: "the seeds of the infested fruits are not always aborted, but rather it depends on how many seeds there are in the berries", explains Dr. Katrin M. Meyer, who analysed the data at the UFZ and currently works at the University of Goettingen"

"Open Threat Exchange! The world's most authoritative crowd-sourced threat intelligence exchange."

I hope you've had a chance to watch Ray Kurzweil's presentation on yesterday's post. My interest was piqued by several things he mentioned. (I wish I could think about them all at the same time, but possessing that kind of capability will have to wait for some heavy duty augmentation.) One thing in particular got a good grasp on my attention. Ray spent about 2 seconds on the idea that technological advances in virtual reality and artificial intelligence will allow me to create several virtual personalities to perform the routine transactions made necessary by modern life.

Thanks for posting this, Joseph. Very funny!

Parody of "intelligent design" science education advocates.

Dolphins have been declared the world's second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as "non-human persons".

A new study by MIT shows that babies can perform sophisticated analyses of how the physical world should behave. The scientists developed a computational model of infant cognition that accurately predicts infants' surprise at events that violate their conception of the physical world. The model, which simulates a type of intelligence known as pure reasoning, calculates the probability of a particular event, given what it knows about how objects behave. The close correlation between the model's predictions and the infants' actual responses to such events suggests that infants reason in a similar way, says Josh Tenenbaum, associate professor of cognitive science and computation at MIT.

Brain, bodily awareness, and the emergence of a conscious self: these entities and their relations are explored by Germanphilosopher and cognitive scientist Metzinger. Extensively working with neuroscientists he has come to the conclusion that, in fact, there is no such thing as a "self" -- that a "self" is simply the content of a model created by our brain - part of a virtual reality we create for ourselves. But if the self is not "real," he asks, why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct the self? In a series of fascinating virtual reality experiments, Metzinger and his colleagues have attempted to create so-called "out-of-body experiences" in the lab, in order to explore these questions. As a philosopher, he offers a discussion of many of the latest results in robotics, neuroscience, dream and meditation research, and argues that the brain is much more powerful than we have ever imagined. He shows us, for example, that we now have the first machines that have developed an inner image of their own body -- and actually use this model to create intelligent behavior. In addition, studies exploring the connections between phantom limbs and the brain have shown us that even people born without arms or legs sometimes experience a sensation that they do in fact have limbs that are not there. Experiments like the "rubber-hand illusion" demonstrate how we can experience a fake hand as part of our self and even feel a sensation of touch on the phantom hand form the basis and testing ground for the idea that what we have called the "self" in the past is just the content of a transparent self-model in our brains. Now, as new ways of manipulating the conscious mind-brain appear on the scene, it will soon become possible to alter our subjective reality in an unprecedented manner. The cultural consequences of this, Metzinger claims, may be immense: we will need a new approach to ethics, and we will be forced to think about ourselves in a fundamentally new way. At

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) - IQ, the standard measure of intelligence, can increase or fall significantly during our teenage years, according to research funded by the Wellcome Trust, and these changes are associated with changes to the structure of our brains. The findings may have implications for testing and streaming of children during their school years.

Metamaps.cc is a free and open source web platform for changemakers, innovators, educators and students. It enables individuals and communities to build and visualize their shared knowledge and unlock their collective intelligence.

The Trivedi Foundation is a non-profit organization that is working in the realm of combining the forces of modern science and spirituality. It was founded by Mahendra Kumar Trivedi who since an early age displayed distinct and extraordinary brilliance and spiritual intelligence.

Trivedi Effect is a well-known phenomenon of transmitting Universal Intelligence power through the power of thoughts to create transformation.

"We are a machine intelligence team focused on deep learning. We advance the state of the art in order to have a positive impact on the world."

"INVESTIGATIVE INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM Delivering a unique investigative experience to solve real world data driven problems"

"Magenta is a Google Brain project to ask and answer the questions, "Can we use machine learning to create compelling art and music? If so, how? If not, why not?" Our work is done in TensorFlow, and we regularly release our models and tools in open source. These are accompanied by demos, tutorial blog postings and technical papers. To follow our progress, watch our GitHub and join our discussion group."

A magazine written for the intelligent layman.

"Our mission at YC is to enable as much innovation as we can. Mostly this means funding startups. But startups aren't ideal for some kinds of innovation-for example, work that requires a very long time horizon, seeks to answer very open-ended questions, or develops technology that shouldn't be owned by any one company."