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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 ...

Originally published by Southwest Research Institute, on June 14, 2023 SwRI Lead Scientist Dr. Christopher Glein was part of a team that found phosphorus, a key building block for life, from the subsurface ocean of Saturn's small moon, Enceladus. Liquid water erupts from the moon's subsurface ocean, forming a plume that contains grains of frozen ocean water. Some of these ice grains go on to form Saturn's E ring. The team analyzed Cassini spacecraft data from ice grains in the E ring, which revealed fingerprints of soluble phosphate salts from Enceladus' ocean. Credit: Cassini Imaging Team/SSI/JPL/ SWRI/ Freie Universität Berlin The search for extraterrestrial life in our solar system j ust got more exciting. A team of scientists including Southwest Research Institute 's Dr. Christopher Glein has discovered new evidence that the subsurface ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus contains a key building block for life . The team directly detected phosphorus in th...