Lifeboat Foundation

One macromolecule to rule them all, from Ebola to Zika and the flu.

Check out my new story for Vice Motherboard on the top things to look out for in 2017: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/five-scientific-trends-2017 #transhumanism

Neural prosthetics, driverless cars, geoengineering and more.

Some end of year thoughts on what we can hope to expect over the next few decades in terms of pushing the envelope of space travel.

Thoughts on a few benchmark dates for pushing humanity offworld and beyond the solar system. Here are few estimates for when we should expect future milestones in our crewed voyages beyond low-Earth orbit and to Proxima Centauri b.

Meaning “alone”, and ipse, meaning “self”) is the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not exist outside the mind. As a metaphysical position, solipsism goes further to the conclusion that the world and other minds do not exist.

This video is targeted to blind users.

Continue reading “Solipsism: Solipsism (/ˈsɒlɨpsɪzəm/; from Latin solus” »

This first trial will study the safety of using CRISPR-edited immune cells as a therapy.

Fans of science fiction movies that depict weird, speculative or dystopian futures have plenty to look forward to in 2017. Here are our picks of the movies you should put on your radar if you enjoy cinematic depictions of future technology, from a couple of space station thrillers to a story that turns our current social media exhibitionist tendencies into an Orwellian take on the importance of privacy in a digital age.

The coming year promises to be a good one for those of us watching the augmented and mixed reality world. And the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), starting Jan. 5 in Las Vegas, Nevada, for its 50th year, is bringing 2017 in with a bang—we’re expecting a ton of great announcements on the horizon.

From the HoloLens developers edition release and ever-churning Magic Leap rumor mill, to Pokémon Go and the resurgence of the smart glasses movement, augmented, mixed, and virtual realities have been all over the place in 2016. So, it’s no surprise that for its second year, CES will dedicate an entire section of the floor to augmented reality called the Augmented Reality Marketplace.

This could be a huge deal, a game changer even.

Definitely research to follow closely.

Continue reading “Immune cells in covering of brain discovered; may play critical role in battling neurological diseases” »

Apple’s first paper on artificial intelligence, published Dec. 22 on arXiv (open access), describes a method for improving the ability of a deep neural network to recognize images.

To train neural networks to recognize images, AI researchers have typically labeled (identified or described) each image in a dataset. For example, last year, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers developed a deep-learning method to recognize images taken at regular intervals on a person’s wearable smartphone camera.

Continue reading “Apple’s first AI paper focuses on creating ‘superrealistic’ image recognition” »