Lifeboat Foundation

Contrary to certain sensationalist articles declaring that video games are harmful, there is, in fact, growing evidence that playing video games may have a positive effect on cognitive health, particularly in older people [1].

Today, we will be taking a look at the scientific evidence to see if brain training or hitting your favorite video game titles could help keep you healthy as you age.

The industry partners will use the money to train artificially intelligent laboratory robots.

Many people assume that when robots enter the economy, they’ll snatch low-skilled jobs. But don’t let a PhD fool you — AI-powered robots will soon impact a laboratory near you.

The days of pipetting liquids around were already numbered. Companies like Transcriptic, based in Menlo Park, California, now offer automated molecular biology lab work, from routine PCR to more complicated preclinical assays. Customers can buy time on their ‘robotic cloud lab’ using any laptop and access the results in a web app.

Continue reading “DARPA Awards Ginkgo Bioworks and Transcriptic $9.5M to Bring AI into the Lab” »

Incredible!

NASA’s Juno probe continues to whip around Jupiter and beam back incredible new colour photos of the giant planet.

But images that capture the planet’s stormy poles in infrared light, which is invisible to human eyes, are helping to crack the mysteries of Jupiter’s inner workings.

Continue reading “Jupiter’s North Pole Looks Totally Insane in These New Photos From NASA” »

JUST IN:

NASA released an infrared tour of Jupiter’s North Pole on Wednesday, April 11.

The 3D movie depicts the densely packed cyclones and anti-cyclones on the planet, according to NASA.

Continue reading “NASA releases INCREDIBLE video tour of Jupiter -- it looks bizarre” »

New strategic investments from Boeing and Rolls-Royce, additional investment from BAE Systems

– Financial investments from Baillie Gifford Asset Management and Woodford Investment Management

12 April 2018 – Reaction Engines Limited (‘Reaction Engines’) today announced that it has raised a further £26.5 million in a strategic fundraising by securing backing from some of the most influential names in aerospace and finance which will support its development of SABRE™ – a revolutionary new class of aerospace engine combining jet and rocket technologies.

Continue reading “Reaction Engines Secures £26.5M Investment From New Industrial And Financial Investors” »

Maybe one of those times where you shouldn’t have consulted a numerologist?

Silly fringe theories about Planet X—an imagined planet typically named Nibiru that is on course to hit or pass by Earth with disastrous consequences—are the kind of thing normally relegated to vanity press-published books or those tabloids you browse in the supermarket checkout aisle. On Wednesday, they made it into Fox News, with the added caveat that maybe some other Biblical catastrophe could surprise us instead.

The Planet X theory first emerged in 1995 and is usually evidenced by tortured interpretations of religious texts, with vague suppositions that NASA either hasn’t detected this ominous celestial body or is actively covering up its existence to prevent widespread panic. In an article filed to Fox’s website on Wednesday, this time the prophesied doomsday comes courtesy of an article in British rag the Daily Express citing numerologist David Meade’s interpretation of the Bible’s Revelation 12:1–2:

Continue reading “Either Planet X Will Kill Us All on April 23rd or the Rapture Can Happen Any Time, Take Your Pick” »

Tracking methane in the air is hard because it rises and spreads from the source. Measurements taken on the ground and from planes vary all over the place.

Hamburg says the satellite, called MethaneSAT, is the best thing yet for quantifying and tracking the gas: “It will be able to see where it’s happening [and] how much, across the globe — not just the big sources, but all the sources collectively, and understand the scale of the problem. That’s the kind of data we don’t have anywhere in the world.”

The satellite will be about the size of a beer keg and is due for launch in three years. It’s funded with money raised from wealthy philanthropists.

Continue reading “Environmental Group Plans Methane-Tracking Satellite” »

US regulators Wednesday approved the first device that uses artificial intelligence to detect eye damage from diabetes, allowing regular doctors to diagnose the condition without interpreting any data or images.

The device, called IDx-DR, can diagnose a condition called diabetic retinopathy, the most common cause of vision loss among the more than 30 million Americans living with diabetes.

Its software uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze images of the eye, taken with a retinal camera called the Topcon NW400, the FDA said.

Continue reading “US approves artificial-intelligence device for diabetic eye problems” »

We talk to Mark O’Connell about transhumanism, the evolution of the human species and his Wellcome Book Prize-shortlisted book To Be A Machine.