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Britain’s Astronomer Royal, Prof Lord Rees, says that if we were to make contact with extraterrestrials from outside our solar system, it would be with intelligent machines, rather than with organic aliens.

While addressing an audience at the Cheltenham Science Festival last week, Rees said that an incoming SETI-like signal would likely be from machines built by a previous extraterrestrial civilization, since machines would be more suited to the rigors of space travel, as opposed to their biological creators, who are likely to have died out long beforehand.
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Researchers have created the world’s first biological replacement limb, grown in a lab from the creature’s own cells.

Dr Harald Ott of the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Surgery has grown the replacement forelimb for a rat, using the forelimb of another rat that had previously died as a template for the cellular structure to grow over. The donor limb was treated with a detergent solution to stop it’s cells, then was injected with healthy muscle and blood vessel cells from the recipient rat, and given the necessary oxygen and other nutrients to enable it to grow. Within three weeks, the new limb was ready for transplant.
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For years, science has theorized that the human brain ran solely on reactions to stimulus from it’s exterior environment, but in recent years scientists have been discovering that it instead runs a series of predictive abilities. Now, researchers have located what part of the brain is connected to this ability.
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The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, more commonly known as DARPA, is developing a system intended to enable aerial drones to be able to choose what combat targets to engage by themselves, without input from human controllers. However, this may constitute a violation of the Geneva convention.
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