Year: 2022

SMALLEST ARTIFICIAL GENE SET. "In a 1995 Science paper, Venter’s team sequenced the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium, a sexually transmitted microbe with the smallest genome of any known free-living organism, and mapped its 470 genes. By inactivating genes one by one and testing to see whether the bacterium could still function, the group slimmed this list down to 375 genes that seemed essential." https://lnkd.in/eFyYj-B View in LinkedIn

THIRTY PERCENT OF UNKNOWN FUNCTION. "Astoundingly, Venter says that his team could not identify the function of 149 of the genes in syn3.0’s genome, many of which are found in other life forms, including humans. “We don’t know about a third of essential life, and we’re trying to sort that out now." https://lnkd.in/eFyYj-B View in LinkedIn

TREMBLAYA BACTERIA use ancient bacterial genes horizontally transferred to the host mealybug in order to have a tiny genome. In other words, its ancestors parked its genes in the host to achieve simplicity. "With only 120 genes, its genome is the smallest known and smaller than many scientists consider necessary for life." https://lnkd.in/dyPjkcB View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends contemplating the simplicity that underlies the complexity in nature. From genes to proteins, this seems to be the rule. From the small number of elements to the vast number of compounds, this again holds true. It is intuitive that this is how nature must be organized. But the big jumps come when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts (Euclid) through the phenomena of emergence. View in LinkedIn

SEEING PATTERNS in huge data sets and applying hypotheses to yield better predictions. Robot scientists with big data. https://lnkd.in/dDgxbbq View in LinkedIn

"DATA TO ACTIONS. Our learning machine doesn’t just recognize one type of input, it comprehends relationships between all inputs. With an insatiable thirst for data, the AI-powered research engine distills potent insights from an ocean of information so that you can make the best–informed decisions possible. We examine data from every angle. We bombard it with hypotheses. We tweak it on every dimension. We squeeze out the most relevant insights. Often ones you didn’t know existed." https://lnkd.in/dDgxbbq View in LinkedIn

"MACHINE INTELLIGENCE in the virtual world. This time we’re seeing it in the physical world, in the many flavors of autonomous systems: self-driving cars, autopilot drones, robots that can perform dynamic tasks without every action being hard coded. It’s still very early days—most of these systems are just barely useful, though we expect that to change quickly." https://lnkd.in/d4R2gad View in LinkedIn

AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS. "Computer vision, the combination of deep learning and reinforcement learning, natural language interfaces, and question-answering systems are all building blocks to make a physical system autonomous and interactive. Building these autonomous systems today is as much about integrating these methods as inventing new ones." https://lnkd.in/d4R2gad View in LinkedIn

COMPUTER LANGUAGE. "The C language uses almost every character on the keyboard, but to be generous in my calculations I’ll only assume that we need the 26 lower-case alpha characters. How many 66-character combinations are there? The answer is 26 raised to the 66th power, or 26^66. That’s roughly 2.4 x 10^93 (10^93 is 1 followed by 93 zeros)." https://lnkd.in/dZqxxrU View in LinkedIn

C LANGUAGE COMBINATIONS. "To get a feel for this number, it is estimated that there are about 10^80 subatomic particles in the known universe, so there are as many 66-character combinations in our example as there are subatomic particles in 10 trillion universes. There are about 4 x 10^17 seconds in the history of the universe, assuming that the universe is 13 billion years old." https://lnkd.in/dZqxxrU View in LinkedIn