Lifeboat Foundation

A new system called HeroSurg, developed by researchers at Deakin and Harvard Universities, is set to increase what surgeons can achieve via robotic surgery, using a haptic feedback system to provide a sense of touch. It also brings other improvements over existing tech, such as collision avoidance, to make robotic surgery safer and more accurate.

Robotic surgery, wherein human-controlled robots perform delicate surgical tasks, has been around for a while. One great example of the tech is the da Vinci robotic surgical system from Intuitive Surgical – a setup made up of numerous robotic arms, a console to operate the instruments, and an imaging system that shows the surgeon what’s happening in real time. In 2008, Professor Suren Krishnan, a member of the team behind HeroSurg, became the first surgeon to perform ear, throat and nose operations using the da Vinci robotic surgical system.

Since then, we’ve seen numerous breakthroughs, including improvements to the original da Vinci system, and other robots emerging capable of achieving impressive tasks, such as performing surgery on a beating heart, or successfully stitching soft tissue.

Elon Musk spent two hours detailing his plan to bring humanity to Mars. We cut it down to less than 90 seconds. You’re welcome.

I’m on BBC World Service and some NPR stations over the next 6–10 hours talking politics and transhumanism with Prof. Lawrence Lessig and others. Jill Stein also on show. Give it a listen:

Why can’t a third party candidate become US president?

D-Wave Systems announced Tuesday (Sept. 28, 2016) a new 2000-qubit processor, doubling the number of qubits over the previous-generation D-Wave 2X system. The new system will enable larger problems to be solved and performance improvements of up to 1000 times.

D-Wave’s quantum system runs a quantum-annealing algorithm to find the lowest points in a virtual energy landscape representing a computational problem to be solved. The lowest points in the landscape correspond to optimal or near-optimal solutions to the problem. The increase in qubit count enables larger and more difficult problems to be solved, and the ability to tune the rate of annealing of individual qubits will enhance application performance.

Continue reading “D-Wave Systems previews 2000-qubit quantum processor” »

A newly-approved wired Ethernet standard could deliver 2.5GbE and 5GbE connections over existing infrastructure. After nearly 20 years, are we finally ready to move past gigabit Ethernet?

Soon, scientists will be able to record your dreams.

Its co-founder may have this skeptical New Yorker convinced.

Anyone who is, or will be, anywhere near these potentially severe earthquake damage zones, be safe!

A series of quakes under the Salton Sea may be a signal that the San Andreas Fault is on the verge of buckling. For the next few days, the risk of a major earthquake along the fault is as high as 1 in 100. Which, holy crap.

“It’s driven by infinite improbability.”