Lifeboat Foundation

Using brain-scanning technology, artificial intelligence, and speech synthesizers, scientists have converted brain patterns into intelligible verbal speech—an advance that could eventually give voice to those without.

It’s a shame Stephen Hawking isn’t alive to see this, as he may have gotten a real kick out of it. The new speech system, developed by researchers at the Neural Acoustic Processing Lab at Columbia University in New York City, is something the late physicist might have benefited from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOTS0HS7aq4&feature=share

Among many things I like here, at 112 min David mentions 20 top scientists in the field are working together.

Researchers have been struggling for years to find a treatment for patients who have a recurrence of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), an aggressive blood cancer that is one of the most lethal cancers. About 19,520 news cases are diagnosed a year, and about 10,670 people a year die from it, according to the American Cancer Society.

Purdue University researchers are developing a series of drug compounds that have shown promise in treating such cases. About 30 percent of AML patients have a mutation caused by a kinase called FLT3, which makes the leukemia more aggressive. Inhibitors of FLT3, such as Radapt, approved last year by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, have shown good initial response to treating leukemia. Gilteritinib, another FLT3 inhibitor, was recently approved toward the end of 2018. But AML patients on FLT3 inhibitor therapy often relapse because of secondary mutations in the FLT3 and existing treatments have not been fully successful in treating those cases.

Researchers on a team led by Herman O. Sintim, the Drug Discovery Professor of Chemistry in Purdue’s Department of Chemistry, say they have developed a series of compounds that work not only on AML with common FLT3 mutation, but also drug-resistant AML harboring problematic mutations, such as the gatekeeper F691L mutation, which some leukemia patients who relapse harbor.

Continue reading “Drug compound could be next-generation treatment for aggressive form of leukemia” »

Current medical treatment boils down to six words: Have disease, take pill, kill something. But physician Siddhartha Mukherjee points to a future of medicine that will transform the way we heal.

The entangled photons were beamed to three ground stations across China, each separated by more than 700 miles—a new record.

We specialize in the cryo-preservation of humans and pets, DNA & tissue storage as well as cryonics outreach and public education.

Testing blood levels of a protein that brain cells leak when faulty or dying detected people with Alzheimer’s disease years before their symptoms emerged.

‘It’s sort of this beautiful synergy between the human and the machine’

History Made

In a scientific first, Columbia neuroengineers have created a system that translates thought into intelligible, recognizable speech. By monitoring someone’s brain activity, the technology can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity. This breakthrough, which harnesses the power of speech synthesizers and artificial intelligence, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain. It also lays the groundwork for helping people who cannot speak, such as those living with as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or recovering from stroke, regain their ability to communicate with the outside world.