Lifeboat Foundation

Robots are watching us. Literally.

Google has curated a set of YouTube clips to help machines learn how humans exist in the world. The AVAs, or “atomic visual actions,” are three-second clips of people doing everyday things like drinking water, taking a photo, playing an instrument, hugging, standing or cooking.

Each clip labels the person the AI should focus on, along with a description of their pose and whether they’re interacting with an object or another human.

Continue reading “Google’s AI is binge-watching human behavior on YouTube” »

Recently, we have explored the benefits that rejuvenation biotechnologies promise to bring to ourselves and the people close to us. I would imagine that most people have no difficulty acknowledging these benefits, but even so, many people tend to focus on potential large-scale downsides of rejuvenation while neglecting entirely its benefits on society at large.

The following is a brief discussion of how, in my opinion, anti-aging biotechnologies would positively impact the whole of humanity—assuming they were widely employed, as they should be.

Gennady Stolyarov shares his #IAmTheLifespan story for Longevity Month. Share your story too!

https://www.leafscience.org/longevity-month-2017-tell-us-your-story/

Robert C. W. Ettinger’s seminal work, The Prospect Of Immortality, detailed many of the scientific, moral, and economic implications of cryogenically freezing humans for later reanimation. It was after that book was published in 1962 that the idea of freezing one’s body after death began to take hold.

One of the most pressing questions is, even if we’re able to revive a person who has been cryogenically preserved, will the person’s memories and personality remain intact? Ettinger posits that long-term memory is stored in the brain as a long-lasting structural modification. Basically, those memories will remain, even if the brain’s “power is turned off”.

This infographic delves into the mechanics and feasibility of cryonics – a process that thousands of people are betting will give them a second shot at life.

Physicists theorize that a new “traversable” kind of wormhole could resolve a baffling paradox and rescue information that falls into black holes.

Five years. That’s how soon batteries can be expected to sprout all over the electric grid as utilities and homeowners drop in on a wave of falling prices, a Duke Energy executive said in Chicago Thursday.

“There’s going to be a lot of excitement around batteries in the next five years. And I would say that the country will get blanketed with projects,” said Spencer Hanes, a managing director of business development with the Charlotte, North Carolina-based utility.

“With the way that the cost curves are coming down it’s a big opportunity for all of us to deliver what customers want.”

Continue reading “In 5 Years, Batteries Will Blanket The U.S., Duke Executive Says” »

DeepMind’s Professor David Silver describes AlphaGo Zero, the latest evolution of AlphaGo, the first computer program to defeat a world champion at the ancient Chinese game of Go. Zero is even more powerful and is arguably the strongest Go player in history.

Previous versions of AlphaGo initially trained on thousands of human amateur and professional games to learn how to play Go. AlphaGo Zero skips this step and learns to play simply by playing games against itself, starting from completely random play. In doing so, it quickly surpassed human level of play and defeated the previously published champion-defeating version of AlphaGo by 100 games to 0.

Continue reading “Discovering new knowledge” »

DARPA asked robot-developers for a way to let small infantry units deploy swarms of 250 or more robots in urban areas.

CHICAGO — Small RNA molecules originally developed as a tool to study gene function trigger a mechanism hidden in every cell that forces the cell to commit suicide, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study, the first to identify molecules to trigger a fail-safe mechanism that may protect us from cancer.

The mechanism — RNA suicide molecules — can potentially be developed into a novel form of cancer therapy, the study authors said.

Cancer cells treated with the RNA molecules never become resistant to them because they simultaneously eliminate multiple genes that cancer cells need for survival.

Continue reading “Suicide molecules kill any cancer cell” »