Lifeboat Foundation

How dumb AI came to run the world

“People are becoming trained to just blindly follow their mapping apps. The concern is the apps aren’t making any distinction between what happens when cars travel on highways and when they travel on city streets by schools and through neighborhoods,” says Hans Larsen, public works director in Fremont, California, a San Francisco Bay area suburb on the fringes of Silicon Valley.”

“The traffic being diverted off clogged highways during the morning and evening commutes became so insufferable in Fremont that city leaders decided about a year ago to try to outwit the apps. The city of about 230,000 people started to ban turns at several key intersections at certain times along the shortcuts being touted by Waze and other mapping services.”

Continue reading “Car navigation tech brings new twists and turns to driving” »

Oxford scientists are collaborating with artificial Intelligence company Insilico Medicine to prevent unnecessary animal sacrifice and derive more data from experiments in age related research.

The MouseAge.org initiative is being managed by UK charity; Biogerontology Research Foundation and will also include researchers from Harvard and Youth Laboratories in the development of tools for cross-species analysis and novel biomarkers of ageing and various diseases in mice.

Insilico Medicine which provides advanced machine learning services to skin care companies, is using the field of ‘omics’ to introduce a broad range of deep-learned biomarkers of ageing and age-related diseases.

Continue reading “Oxford scientists collaborate with A.I firm on ageing related diseases” »

By treating one of the root causes of aging – senescent cells – a new class of drugs, known as senolytics, has the potential to treat a wide range of age-related diseases rather than the traditional approach of dealing with them one at a time. We all age, but the research suggests that we may not have to suffer from age-related ill health.

So what are senescent cells?

As we age, increasing amounts of our cells enter into a state known as senescence. Normally, these cells destroy themselves by a self-destruct process known as apoptosis and are disposed of by the immune system. Unfortunately, as we age, increasing numbers of these cells evade apoptosis and linger in the body.

Manufacturing startup Made In Space takes 3D printing to the final frontier.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — President Donald Trump’s administration is set to unveil revised self-driving vehicle guidelines next week in Michigan, responding to automakers’ calls for elimination of legal barriers to putting autonomous vehicles on the road, sources briefed on the matter said on Tuesday.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao was expected to unveil the revised guidelines next Tuesday at a self-driving vehicle testing facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, four people briefed on the matter said.

A spokesman for Chao did not immediately comment. The White House Office of Management and Budget approved the undisclosed Transportation Department changes to the guidelines on Aug. 31, according a posting on a government website.

Continue reading “U.S. to unveil revised self-driving car guidelines: sources” »

SINGAPORE (Reuters) — Researchers in Australia have found a new way to build quantum computers which they say would make them dramatically easier and cheaper to produce at scale.

Quantum computers promise to harness the strange ability of subatomic particles to exist in more than one state at a time to solve problems that are too complex or time-consuming for existing computers.

Google, IBM and other technology companies are all developing quantum computers, using a range of approaches.

Continue reading “Australia researchers say find new way to build quantum computers” »

On the road to killer robots: the samsung SGR-1.

The Samsung SGR-1 patrols the border between North and South Korea, called the Demilitarized Zone. South Korea installed the stationary robots, developed by Samsung Techwin and Korea University.

The SGR-1 was initially built with the capability to detect, target, shoot intruders from two miles away.

Continue reading “These weapons can find a target all by themselves — and researchers are terrified” »

Using scintillating fiber to detect particles

After five years of work, EPFL’s physicists, together with some 800 international researchers involved in the LHCb project, have just taken an important preliminary step towards significantly enhancing their experimental equipment. They have decided to build a new detector — a scintillating fiber tracker dubbed SciFi.

Construction of the tracker, which incorporates 10,000 kilometers of scintillating fibers each with a diameter of 0.25mm, has already begun. When particles travel through them, the fibers will give off light signals that will be picked up by light-amplifying diodes. The scintillating fibers will be arranged in three panels measuring five by six meters, installed behind a magnet, where the particles exit the LHC accelerator collision point. The particles will pass through several of these fiber ‘mats’ and deposit part of their energy along the way, producing some photons of light that will then be turned into an electric signal.

Unable to accept his own end, he decides to freeze his body. Sixty years later, in the year 2084, he becomes the first cryogenically frozen man to be revived in history. Marc discovers a startling future, but the biggest surprise is that his past has accompanied him in unexpected ways.