Lifeboat Foundation

In just 32 years, humans won’t speak to each other and will instead communicate through a worldwide consciousness instead – using just our brains — new research shows.

According to artificial intelligence research, this “hybrid intelligence” will understand the feelings of the people connected to it, and use their minds to help it grow.

Called HIBA, which stands for Hybrid Intelligence Biometric Avatar, it will take on the personas of its users, exchange information with them and become part of the very fabric of the human brain.

Continue reading “Worldwide AI consciousness may replace human speech” »

A new ultrathin elastic display that fits snugly on the skin can show the moving waveform of an electrocardiogram recorded by a breathable, on-skin electrode sensor. Combined with a wireless communication module, this integrated biomedical sensor system, called “skin electronics,” can transmit biometric data to the cloud.

This latest research by a Japanese academic-industrial collaboration, led by Professor Takao Someya at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Engineering, is slated for a news briefing and talk at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas on February 17th.

Thanks to advances in semiconductor technology, wearable devices can now monitor health by measuring vital signs or taking an electrocardiogram, and then transmitting the data wirelessly to a smartphone. The readings or electrocardiogram waveforms can be displayed on the screen in real time, or sent to the cloud or a memory device where the information is stored.

Continue reading “Japanese researchers develop ultrathin, highly elastic skin display” »

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have developed a CRISPR technique to efficiently correct the function of heart cells in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). It involves making a single cut at strategic points along patient’s DNA, with the team claiming their new approach has the potential to correct most of the 3,000 mutations that cause DMD.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is one of nine neuromuscular disorders that affect the strength of muscles and nerves, specifically caused by defects in the gene that makes the dystrophin protein. Typically, one in every 3,500 boys born will be diagnosed with the disease at around three to four years of age, with their ability to walk gradually decreasing until they reach young adolescence. Most patients live until their 30s, but will require a wheelchair and respirator as the muscles in vital organs deteriorate over time.

Networks that harness entanglement and teleportation could enable leaps in security, computing and science.

• By Davide Castelvecchi, Nature magazine on February 16, 2018

I will be doing a facebook live with my good friend Professor Ian Hale. If you would like to hear from the main man comnent below.

Yandex. Taxi self-driving car safely navigates the streets of Moscow after a recent snowstorm managing interactions with traffic, pedestrians, parked vehicles and other road hazards on snowy streets.

Беспилотный автомобиль Яндекс.Такси уверенно чувствует себя на дорогах Москвы после прошедшего снегопада. Посмотрите, как он ведёт себя не в условиях полигона, а на настоящих улицах с другими машинами, знаками дорожного движения, пешеходами и сугробами.

Based on data from NASA’s K2 mission, an international team of scientists has confirmed nearly 100 new exoplanets. This brings the total number of new exoplanets found with the K2 mission up to almost 300.

“We started out analyzing 275 candidates, of which 149 were validated as real exoplanets. In turn, 95 of these planets have proved to be new discoveries,” said U.S. doctoral student Andrew Mayo at the National Space Institute (DTU Space) at the Technical University of Denmark. “This research has been underway since the first K2 data release in 2014.” Mayo is the main author of the work being presented in the Astronomical Journal.

The research was conducted partly as a senior project during his undergraduate studies at Harvard College. It also involved a team of international colleagues from institutions such as NASA, Caltech, UC Berkeley, the University of Copenhagen, and the University of Tokyo. The Kepler spacecraft was launched in 2009 to hunt for exoplanets in a single patch of sky, but in 2013, a mechanical failure crippled the telescope. However, astronomers and engineers devised a way to repurpose and save the space telescope by changing its field of view periodically. This solution paved the way for the follow-up K2 mission, which is still ongoing as the spacecraft searches for exoplanet transits.

Scientists have been culturing meat in labs for years, but Just and other startups like Finless Foods, which is growing fish meat, have been feverishly pursuing this so-called “clean meat” of late. Just is chasing a cultured chorizo and a cultured nugget in addition to the foie gras. And Tetrick claims his startup has finally made the process cost-effective enough to take to market: At the end of this year, he says, Just will officially introduce an as yet undisclosed lab-grown meat, the first time the stuff will hit shelves.

The challenges of engineering meat in the lab is one thing, but convincing consumers to turn away from the storied kill-it-and-grill-it method of eating is another. And while it’s easy to imagine how lab-grown meat would be better for the planet, there’s actually little data to back that up.

Whether or not Just makes it to market this year, and whether or not their meat tastes and smells and feels like meat, the era of clean meat is approaching. (Just declined to let us taste their food, saying it wasn’t ready for public consumption.) Soon enough, burgers will grow not just in fields, but in vats. Farther down the line, your T-bones may not come from a cow, at least not in the traditional sense. If the sound of that bothers you, know that you’re not alone.

The man who brought the world Teslas can start excavating along the city’s New York Avenue, an early step in his plans to develop a new mode of transportation.