A team of UCLA scientists have found that Myelin (the fatty layer of insulation coating neural wiring in the brain) plays a critical role in determining intelligence. The amount of Myelin is largely genetically determined. And as you remember from one of my past columns, we're getting close to being able to genetically engineer humans to spec. Read the full article from Technology Review.

Recently the 2nd Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) aimed at the creation of "thinking machines with general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond," has been published.

Keynoter Juergen Schmidhuber projects a date for the Singularity (when an explosive growth of more than human intelligence happens) of 2040, compared to Ray Kurzweil's 2045.

In the paper, a proposed roadmap for the development of AGI was proposed. Read the full article at H+ Magazine.