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  Alan Turing and John von Neumann saw it early: the logic of life and the logic of code may be one and the same. Image source: Miguel Romero, Adobe Stock Originally published in thereader.mitpress.mit.edu by Blaise Agüera y Arcas Image source: Miguel Romero, Adobe Stock   I n 1994, a strange, pixelated machine came to life on a computer screen . I t read a string of instructions, copied them, and built a clone of itself — just as the Hungarian-American Polymath John von Neumann had predicted half a century earlier . It was a striking demonstration of a profound idea: that life, at its core, might be computational. This article is adapted from Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s book “ What Is Intelligence? ” An open access edition of the book is available here . Although this is seldom fully appreciated, von Neumann was one of the first to establish a deep link between life and computation . Reproduction, like computation, he showed, could be carried out by machines following ...

‘Bricks’ of DNA, some of which have chemical tags, could one day be an alternative to storing information electronically. Originally published By Heidi Ledford at Nature, on 23 October 2024 Chemical markers attached to pre-fabricated units of DNA can easily encode data. Credit: Nobeastsofierce/SPL DNA has been humanity’s go-to data repository for millennia . Tough and compact, it is so information-dense that just one gram of it can hold enough data for 10 million hours of high-definition video . But there is always room for improvement . An innovative method now allows DNA to store information as a binary code — the same strings of 0s and 1s used by standard computers . That c ould one day be cheaper and faster than encoding information in the sequence of the building blocks that make up DNA , which is the method used by cells and by most efforts to harness DNA for storing artificially generated data . The method is so straightforward that 60 volunteers from a variety...

Originally pyblished by Stanford University , on September 21, 2024 Cells before and after TRAMs were introduced. TRAMs link a shuttle protein (red), and a target protein (green). Without the TRAM, the target protein resides in the nucleus (left), and upon TRAM treatment, the target protein is pulled into the cytoplasm by the shuttle protein (right). Credit: Steven Banik and Christine Ng Cells are highly controlled spaces that rely on every protein being in the right place . Many diseases , including cancers and neurodegenerative disorders, are associated with misplaced proteins . In some cancers , for instance, a protein that normally stands watch over DNA replicating in the nucleus is sent far from the DNA it is meant to monitor, allowing cancers to grow. Steven Banik, assistant professor of chemistry in the School of Humanities and Sciences and institute scholar at Sarafan ChEM-H at Stanford University , and his lab have developed a new method to help force misplaced prote...