Lifeboat Foundation

Because of how much it impairs the ability to breathe, a seemingly simple injury—a broken rib—is the second leading cause of trauma deaths. A team of Penn State surgeons and a biomedical engineer have invented a better way to help broken ribs heal.

There are 6,000 tweets sent a second. In the time you have read this sentence, 42,000 tweets will have been sent. At an average of 34 characters per tweet that’s 1,428,000 characters.

A new study suggests that printing drugs on a QR code that patients can scan with their phones could pave the way for personalized medicine.

As a group, simple creatures following simple rules can display a surprising amount of complexity, efficiency, and even creativity. Known as swarm intelligence, this trait is found throughout nature, but researchers have recently begun using it to transform various fields such as robotics, data mining, medicine, and blockchains.

Ants, for example, can only perform a limited range of functions, but an ant colony can build bridges, create superhighways of food and information, wage war, and enslave other ant species—all of which are beyond the comprehension of any single ant. Likewise, schools of fish, flocks of birds, beehives, and other species exhibit behavior indicative of planning by a higher intelligence that doesn’t actually exist.

Continue reading “How Swarm Intelligence Is Making Simple Tech Much Smarter” »

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How to improve your memory in 4 minutes.

Rewriting Life

This new company wants to sequence your genome and let you share it on a blockchain.

People will be able to earn cryptocurrency in exchange for letting pharma companies use their data.

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The head-banging birds seem healthy, but deposits in their brain could signify damage.

Damaged or chipped teeth can be reconstructed.

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A sleep expert explains what happens to your body and brain if you don’t get sleep.