Lifeboat Foundation

Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, joins Ali Velshi to discuss the “pause” on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the United States after the discovery of 6 rare cases of blood clotting in women who were immunized with the shot. The goal, says Hotez, is to identify a specific group who might be at higher risk, and that requires a little time. “Even though the U.S. Has other options, many countries don’t. For many countries, all they have are the J & J, AstraZeneca vaccine and the Russian Sputnik V vaccine,” all of which are non-mNRA and have the potential to behave similarly. Says Hotez, “It is critical to sort this out not only to protect American citizens, but to protect the world.”

You’ll need to prick up your ears for this slice of deepfakery emerging from the wacky world of synthesized media: A digital version of Albert Einstein — with a synthesized voice that’s been (re)created using AI voice cloning technology drawing on audio recordings of the famous scientist’s actual voice.

The startup behind the “uncanny valley” audio deepfake of Einstein is Aflorithmic (whose seed round we covered back in February).

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World Economic Forum.

Continue reading “Mounting e-waste is harming the planet. Here’s how we solve the problem” »

Interesting initiative (US Smart Cities) that could be applied to space cities.

Jeffrey Berns, CEO of Nevada-based Blockchains LLC, envisions a city where people not only purchase goods and services with digital currency but also log their entire online footprint — financial statements, medical records and personal data — on blockchain. Blockchain is a digital ledger known mostly for recording cryptocurrency transactions but also has been adopted by some local governments for everything from documenting marriage licenses to facilitating elections.

The company wants to break ground by 2022 in rural Storey County, 12 miles (19 kilometers) east of Reno. It’s proposing to build 15000 homes and 33 million square feet (3 million square meters) of commercial and industrial space within 75 years. Berns, whose idea is the basis for draft legislation that some lawmakers saw behind closed doors last week, said traditional government doesn’t offer enough flexibility to create a community where people can invent new uses for this technology.

Continue reading “In Nevada desert, Blockchains LLC aims to be its own municipal government” »

Would you let a machine draw your blood?

Find any two people with a diagnosis of depression, and there’s more than a fair chance one of them will also experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their life.

While the triggers for each condition are undoubtedly complex, it’s clear the genes we inherit can play a strong part in setting us up for a lifetime of bad mental health.

A new study led by researchers from the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia has now identified 509 genes shared by both psychiatric disorders.

A new survey illustrates broad acceptance for robots in retail, including these crucial tasks.

Large-scale supercomputer simulations at the atomic level show that the dominant G form variant of the COVID-19-causing virus is more infectious partly because of its greater ability to readily bind to its target host receptor in the body, compared to other variants. These research results from a Los Alamos National Laboratory-led team illuminate the mechanism of both infection by the G form and antibody resistance against it, which could help in future vaccine development.

“We found that the interactions among the basic building blocks of the Spike protein become more symmetrical in the G form, and that gives it more opportunities to bind to the receptors in the host—in us,” said Gnana Gnanakaran, corresponding author of the paper published today in Science Advances. “But at the same time, that means antibodies can more easily neutralize it. In essence, the variant puts its head up to bind to the receptor, which gives antibodies the chance to attack it.”

Researchers knew that the variant, also known as D614G, was more infectious and could be neutralized by antibodies, but they didn’t know how. Simulating more than a million individual atoms and requiring about 24 million CPU hours of supercomputer time, the new work provides molecular-level detail about the behavior of this variant’s Spike.