Editing human embryos is restricted in much of the world--and making an edited baby is fully illegal in most countries surveyed by legal scholars. But advancing technology could render the embryo issue moot. New ways of adding CRISPR, the revolutionary gene editing tool, to the bodies of people already born could let them easily receive changes as well. It's possible that in 125 years, many people will be the beneficiaries of multiple rare, but useful, gene mutations currently found in only small segments of the population. These could protect us against common diseases and infections, but eventually they could also yield improvements in other traits, such as height, metabolism, or even cognition. But humanity won't necessarily do things the right way.

Early humans nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago when the population of our ancestors dropped to just 1,280 individuals, research suggests. A new study has found that the human race was almost wiped out as it approached a severe cooling period in the Earth's history known as the Middle Pleistocene. This severe'bottleneck' lasted over 100,000 years and was a threat to humanity as we know it today, experts say. A team from East China Normal University developed a model that could look at modern gene lineages and use them to estimate past population size. They used their model to analyse the DNA of 3,154 modern humans from both African and non-African populations.

An AI that can mimic evolution itself was created by researchers at the Universities of California, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Salesforce Research, the science division of the software firm based in San Francisco. This doesn't mean the AI produced a kind of superhuman evolutionarily superior, however; rather, it constructed the protein-building sequences of 20 amino acids. Some of the sequences performed equally well when compared to those produced by millions of years of evolution, which is nature's workmanship. It's interesting that researchers didn't create an AI from scratch but rather modified a language model from a different subject. The "sentences" of biological proteins, which are essentially a language of amino acids, were the focus of the study, which made use of Salesforce's ProGen natural language processing capabilities.

Come check out the highlights of the week with Showmetech TRIO! We will also talk about the changes that Elon Musk did in his early days as owner of the Twitter. In addition, we compared the cameras of the Galaxy S22 Ultra and Google Pixel 7 Pro, great highlights of the Google e Samsung for the year 2022. Come check out the highlights of the week with the Showmetech TRIO! Officialized on October 27, 2022, the purchase of Twitter finally had an ending: Elon Musk finally is the owner of the social network. Despite having many chapters that include a process in court and even withdrawal by Musk, we can finally announce that yes, the owner of Tesla also owns Twitter.

Do We Need To Make Robots More Responsive? Robotics is at a crossroads. Are developers going to design "humanoids" that can barely be distinguished from real people? Or is shape a cosmetic consideration, and should we concentrate instead on creating increasingly multifunctional robots that allow us to become more human ourselves? I believe the latter option is the better one, but it's not straightforward.

DRL is an AI technique that aims to take appropriate actions to maximise reward in a certain situation (game/simulation/reality). Before further explaining, it is necessary to give some definitions: - Agent: It is the "player" of the game, the entity who's taking actions, he follows a strategy (called policy) to evolve in the environment. His ultimate goal is to maximize his reward. The environment is said to be in a state s at a given time - Policy: It is the strategy which drives the Agent actions, it is designed by a NN. The policy can change as the Agent learns from his experiences - Reward: A metric aiming to determine the performance of the Agent's actions within the environment Now let's take an example to illustrate the mecanisms of DRL: The famous card game of Poker Texas Hold'em (PTH). In PTH, the agents are the players and the environment is the set of rules of PTH (blinds, number of cards, minimum bet, playing order…).

Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man was published in 1871. Ever since, it has been the foundation stone of human evolutionary studies. Richerson et al. reviewed how modern studies of human biological and cultural evolution reflect the ideas in Darwin's work. They emphasize how cooperation, social learning, and cumulative culture in the ancestors of modern humans were key to our evolution and were enhanced during the environmental upheavals of the Pleistocene. The evolutionary perspective has come to permeate not just human biology but also the social sciences, vindicating Darwin's insights. Science , aba3776, this issue p. [eaba3776][1] ### BACKGROUND Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man , published on 24 February 1871, laid the grounds for scientific studies into human origins and evolution. We look at the advances in our understanding of these processes through the lenses of modern speciation theory. Applying this theory to specific cases requires one to identify and understand the nature of (i) the ancestor and various preexisting adaptations and traits that it possessed that allowed or simplified the speciation process, (ii) evolutionary forces responsible for major differences between the emergent species and its close relatives, and (iii) the most salient adaptations characteristic of the new species and its evolutionary history (such as genetic, morphological, behavioral, spatial, and temporal). ### ADVANCES Modern research shows that we share many developmental, physiological, morphological, cognitive, and psychological characteristics as well as about 96% of our DNA with the anthropoid apes. We now know that since our last common ancestor with the other apes 6 million to 8 million years ago, human evolution followed the path common for other species with diversification into closely related species and some subsequent hybridization between them. Since Darwin, a long series of unbridgeable gaps have been proposed between humans and other animals. They focused on tool-making, cultural learning and imitation, empathy, prosociality and cooperation, planning and foresight, episodic memory, metacognition, and theory of mind. However, new insights from neurobiology, genetics, primatology, and behavioral biology only reinforce Darwin’s view that most differences between humans and higher animals are “of degree and not of kind.” What makes us different is that our ancestors evolved greatly enhanced abilities for (and reliance on) cooperation, social learning, and cumulative culture—traits emphasized already by Darwin. Cooperation allowed for environmental risk buffering, cost reduction, and the access to new resources and benefits through the “economy of scale.” Learning and cumulative culture allowed for the accumulation and rapid spread of beneficial innovations between individuals and groups. The enhanced abilities to learn from and cooperate with others became a universal tool, removing the need to evolve specific biological organs for specific environmental challenges. These human traits likely evolved as a response to increasing high-frequency climate changes on the millennial and submillennial scales during the Pleistocene. Once the abilities for cumulative culture and extended cooperation were in place, a suite of subsequent evolutionary changes became possible and likely unavoidable. In particular, human social systems evolved to support mothers through the recruitment of males and nonreproductive females. The most distinctive feature of our species, language, appeared arguably driven by selection for simplifying cooperation. Reliance on social learning and conformity led to the emergence of new factors constraining and driving human behavior, such as morality, social norms, and social institutions. These forces often act against the immediate biological or material interests of individuals, promoting instead the interests of the society as a whole or of its powerful segments. Continuous engagement in cooperation has led to the evolution of strong coalitionary psychology, which can bring us together whenever we perceive that our identity group faces outside threats. Coalitionary psychology also has an undesirable byproduct: often negative or even hostile reaction to others who differ from us in their looks, behaviors, beliefs, caste, or class. ### OUTLOOK Our society faces challenges, including climate change; various types of inequality; economic crises; political, cultural, and religious conflicts; and pandemics. Similar challenges have repeatedly arisen and were dealt with in the past with varying success. What makes the current situation different is not only the scale of societal threats but also that modern science can provide guidance on how to respond to them. Adequately answering these challenges requires understanding humans’ social behavior and the roles of cooperation, social learning, and culture for human decision-making. Evolutionary perspective is already helping to synthesize the contributions of social sciences, including anthropology, psychology, economics, political science, and history. The impact of Descent on the social sciences and on the development and implementation of different policies by practitioners and policymakers to improve our society will only grow. ![Figure][2] Depictions of organic evolution versus cultural evolution. (Left) Organic evolution and (right) cultural evolution, as depicted in Alfred L. Kroeber’s 1923 textbook Anthropology: Cultural Patterns and Processes . Biological inheritance is rigid from parents to offspring in eukaryotes, and species mostly do not exchange genes. Culture is potentially acquired from anyone in a person’s social network, and ideas spread rather readily from culture to culture. IMAGE: N. CARY/ SCIENCE Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man , published 150 years ago, laid the grounds for scientific studies into human origins and evolution. Three of his insights have been reinforced by modern science. The first is that we share many characteristics (genetic, developmental, physiological, morphological, cognitive, and psychological) with our closest relatives, the anthropoid apes. The second is that humans have a talent for high-level cooperation reinforced by morality and social norms. The third is that we have greatly expanded the social learning capacity that we see already in other primates. Darwin’s emphasis on the role of culture deserves special attention because during an increasingly unstable Pleistocene environment, cultural accumulation allowed changes in life history; increased cognition; and the appearance of language, social norms, and institutions. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aba3776 [2]: pending:yes

Competition for mates between prehistoric human women may have contributed to'concealed ovulation' – a lack of any notable physical clues that a woman is fertile, experts say. Using computational models, US researchers found evidence that concealed ovulation in humans – which is unusual in the animal kingdom – evolved to allow women to hide their fertility status from other females. This would have helped avoid female conflict, perhaps driven by aggression towards potential rivals for male mates. Previously, scientists have thought women evolved to conceal ovulation from males to encourage them to help with looking after children. The new research shows that the origin of concealed ovulation might have actually have been much more female-oriented than previously thought. 'The study of human evolution has tended to look at things from a male perspective,' said senior study author Athena Aktipis, associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University in the US.

Meadows and Dinwiddie: The Venus Project is a non-profit organization that presents a new socio-economic model utilizing science and technology. For the past 40 years, we have maintained a 21-acre research center in Venus, Florida. We propose a new scientific foundation in transcending humanity's current problems by testing a new social design for organizing our society as a global "operating system". Taken as a whole, the Venus Project fills the egregious gap between the sciences and the humanities by combining a social philosophy of the future with technical knowledge applied at a global scale to solve the problems of the human condition. Our methodologies are designed to realize the full potential of science and technology to achieve social betterment for all living systems-- without exception. Our approach to social organization calls for changes in governance, economics, urban planning, education, human relationships, language, and values.

Change is inevitable, evolution can't be ignored and the impact of technology cannot be overstated. The world is changing at the speed of light, the world we had decades ago is not the one we have today. Technology has changed every aspect of our life. And one of those changes is the innovation and evolution of artificial intelligence. Whether we agree with its ethics or not, artificial intelligence is part of our daily life.