Lifeboat Foundation

“We know that very small things act quantum, but then big things like you and me don’t act very quantum,” says William Burton, with the MIT physics department. “So we can see how far apart we can stretch a quantum system and still have it act coherently when we bring it back together.”

KITCHENER — Just a few days are left to see Themuseum’s quantum exhibit before it packs up to tour the country.

Quantum: The Exhibition is at the downtown Kitchener museum until Jan. 1.

“It’s a really cool exhibit,” said David Marskell, Themuseum’s chief executive officer.

Continue reading “Quantum exhibit soon leaves Kitchener for nationwide tour” »

Swarm robotics, autonomous delivery vehicles, and machine-learned preferences will help deliver your food faster.

Well before the family came in to the Batson Children’s Specialty Clinic in Jackson, Mississippi, they knew something was wrong. Their child was born with multiple birth defects, and didn’t look like any of its kin. A couple of tests for genetic syndromes came back negative, but Omar Abdul-Rahman, Chief of Medical Genetics at the University of Mississippi, had a strong hunch that the child had Mowat-Wilson syndrome, a rare disease associated with challenging life-long symptoms like speech impediments and seizures.

So he pulled out one of his most prized physicians’ tools: his cell phone.

Using an app called Face2Gene, Abdul-Rahman snapped a quick photo of the child’s face. Within a matter of seconds, the app generated a list of potential diagnoses — and corroborated his hunch. “Sure enough, Mowat-Wilson syndrome came up on the list,” Abdul-Rahman recalls.

Continue reading “How machine learning Is revolutionizing the diagnosis of rare diseases” »

Jürgen Schmidhuber is the most important A.I. engineer and thinker you don’t know about.

Scientists may have found proof that E.T. really is phoning home — in the form of powerful radio signals, which have been detected repeatedly in the same exact location in space.

Astronomy experts with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have discovered six new fast radio bursts (FRBs) emanating from a region far beyond our Milky Way galaxy, according to a recent report in the Astrophysical Journal.

The discovery — made in the direction of the constellation Auriga — is significant considering the fact that at least 17 FRBs have now been detected in this area. It is also the only known instance in which these signals have been found twice in the same location in space.

Continue reading “Scientists say radio signals from deep space could be aliens” »

To address the world’s incoming senior citizens, IBM is developing a robot that can help the elderly live alone without sacrificing safety.

Actors try to make sense out of an AI-written screenplay in the movie Sunspring.