Lifeboat Foundation

Without a new legal framework, they could destabilize societal norms.

Autonomous weapon systems – commonly known as killer robots – may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity’s final one.

Autonomous weapon systems are robots with lethal weapons that can operate independently, selecting and attacking targets without a human weighing in on those decisions. Militaries around the world are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 2016 and 2020.

Continue reading “Could Autonomous Robots Be More Dangerous than Nukes?” »

Moving beyond the digital revolution, librarians are now confronting the Fourth Industrial Revolution, thinks Bohyun Kim. She sees the lines between the physical, the digital, and the biological spheres becoming blurred. Implications regarding virtual, augmented, and mixed reality will affect the future of libraries.

Summary: The brain’s reward system plays a key role in helping behaviors and empathy.

Source: Tel Aviv University.

Are mammals at all able to demonstrate empathy for one another, engage in pro-social behavior, and help others in distress? New research from the Tel Aviv University examined the issue based on an animal model (rats) and found that just as with humans, rats are also split into various groups with different indicators, to the point that they only come to the aid of members of their group but do not help rats from other groups.

Like many other living organisms, humans are born, survive, compete for resources, reach maturity, reproduce, take care of their young, sometimes the young of their young, continuously decline, and die. Evolution needs us for just two purposes – adapt and reproduce. But, unlike other species, humans are very conscious of their fate. Humans are very much aware that after reaching peak performance they will eventually grow old and die. We are very conscious of our fate after reaching peak performance – loss of function, frailty, and eventual loss of everything we worked so hard to earn.

We observe our parents, and other elderly around them, attend funerals, and understand that eventually we will get into this state. We are also very contempt with that fate as evolution made sure that. The more ambitious of us are trying to advance science, the rest seek refuge in religion, some in philosophy, some in accumulation of wealth, and some see the continuation of ourselves in our children. But despite the many technological advances transpiring in the laboratories all over the world, there is nothing we can do at this point to escape aging. There are diets, exercises, sleep, and supplements, but these provide very marginal benefits. We do not see 120+ old yoga and diet practitioners or marathon runners around. But these simple habits do help look younger longer. And many people that have very harmful habits like smoking but still diet and exercise to look younger.

Autonomous weapon systems – commonly known as killer robots – may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity’s final one.

Autonomous weapon systems are robots with lethal weapons that can operate independently, selecting and attacking targets without a human weighing in on those decisions. Militaries around the world are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 2016 and 2020.

Meanwhile, human rights and humanitarian organizations are racing to establish regulations and prohibitions on such weapons development. Without such checks, foreign policy experts warn that disruptive autonomous weapons technologies will dangerously destabilize current nuclear strategies, both because they could radically change perceptions of strategic dominance, increasing the risk of preemptive attacks, and because they could become combined with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons themselves.

The firm worked with UK weather forecasters to create a model that was better at making short term predictions than existing systems.

First protein folding, now weather forecasting: London-based AI firm DeepMind is continuing its run applying deep learning to hard science problems. Working with the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, DeepMind has developed a deep-learning tool called DGMR that can accurately predict the likelihood of rain in the next 90 minutes—one of weather forecasting’s toughest challenges.

In a blind comparison with existing tools, several dozen experts judged DGMR’s forecasts to be the best across a range of factors—including its predictions of the location, extent, movement, and intensity of the rain—89% of the time. The results were published in a Nature paper today.

Continue reading “DeepMind’s AI predicts almost exactly when and where it’s going to rain” »

A possible explanation for life from nonliving material.

Exactly how life first emerged from non-living matter is one of the most enduring mysteries of science. In a new study, Japanese scientists have created self-replicating protocells in the lab, which they say could represent the “missing link” between chemistry and biology.

Primitive Earth was covered with a sludgy mix of chemicals, containing organic molecules that formed the precursors for vital biological components like proteins and amino acids. There are several different hypotheses for how and where life sprang out of this soup, but one of the first ideas was known as chemical evolution, which is what the new study investigated.

Continue reading “Self-replicating protocells created in lab may be life’s ‘missing link’” »

Amazingly, nacre has the rigidity of a stiff material and durability of a soft material, giving it the best of both worlds,” he explains. “It’s made of stiff pieces of chalk-like matter that are layered with soft proteins that are highly elastic. This structure produces exceptional strength, making it 3,000 times tougher than the materials that compose it.

Scientists from McGill University develop stronger and tougher glass, inspired by the inner layer of mollusk shells. Instead of shattering upon impact, the new material has the resiliency of plastic and could be used to improve cell phone screens in the future, among other applications.

While techniques like tempering and laminating can help reinforce glass, they are costly and no longer work once the surface is damaged. “Until now there were trade-offs between high strength, toughness, and transparency. Our new material is not only three times stronger than the normal glass, but also more than five times more fracture resistant,” says Allen Ehrlicher, an Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at McGill University.

Continue reading “Unbreakable glass inspired by seashells” »

Bill Andrews gives us the simplest definition of aging as well as what he thinks to be accomplished to really admit aging has been cured.

This is an excerpt of a presentation he made last year at the NHIMA. See the description of the video for details.

Continue reading “Bill Andrews on age reversal and the Betty White Test (videoclip con S/T en Español)” »