Lifeboat Foundation

There’s a nebulous concept that’s floating around the public conscious, called quantum advantage or quantum supremacy. One of these days, someone is going to boldly declare that they’ve created a quantum computer that can solve some complex problem that a regular computer can’t.

“If something goes wrong, I can just chop off that part of the skin.” Josiah Zayner took a swig from his beer and squinted into the spotlight. He was already kind of drunk. He also hadn’t bothered to write a speech. Tattooed and heavily pierced with a shock of blue-gray hair, he shuffled around uneasily on stage. But 150-odd people had flown in from around the country to hear him speak—the mad pirate-king of biotech. “It all is coming from my heart,” he said, choking up a little. “Everything you’re going to hear today is me to the core.” Advertisement Zayner’s audiencesat in the fashionably…

“There is no excuse for acting surprised when you see video of a mushroom cloud” on TV, said Adam Mount of the Federation of American Scientists for nuclear and defense policy.

North Korea has launched 18 missile tests in 2017, and 13 were successful.

Concept artist Maciej Rebisz created this awesome image of Project Lyra laser sail spacecraft flying by the interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua! Please have a look at the Project Lyra paper, which is currently going viral: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03155

You can find more of Maciej’s incredible art here:
http://maciejrebisz.com/

More than 15,000 scientists around the world have issued a global warning: there needs to be change in order to save Earth.

It comes 25 years after the first notice in 1992 when a mere 1,500 scientists issued a similar warning.

This new cautioning — which gained popularity on Twitter with #ScientistsWarningToHumanity — garnered more than 15,000 signatures.

Continue reading “More than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries issue ‘warning to humanity’” »

Artificial intelligence could be the powerful tool we need to solve some of the biggest problems facing our world, argues Raia Hadsell. In this talk, she offers an insight into how she and her colleagues are developing robots with the capacity to learn. Their superhuman ability to play video games is just the start.

Raia Hadsell is a research scientist on the Deep Learning team at DeepMind. She moved to London to join DeepMind in early 2014, feeling that her fundamental research interests in robotics, neural networks, and real world learning systems were well-aligned with the agenda of Demis, Shane, Koray, and other members of the original team. Raia’s research at DeepMind focuses on a number of fundamental challenges in AGI, including continual and transfer learning, deep reinforcement learning, and neural models of navigation. Raia came to AI research obliquely. After an undergraduate degree in religion and philosophy from Reed College, she veered off-course (on-course?) and became a computer scientist. Raia’s PhD with Yann LeCun, at NYU, focused on machine learning using Siamese neural nets (often called a ‘triplet loss’ today) and on deep learning for mobile robots in the wild. Her thesis, ‘Learning Long-range vision for offroad robots’, was awarded the Outstanding Dissertation award in 2009.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence, Video Games and The Mysteries of the Mind” »

Cancer can often evade the immune system by sending signals that fool it into thinking that the cancer cells are normal, healthy cells and that it should ignore them. Earlier this year, we reported on an approach to treating cancer in which the immune system can be taught to detect cancer by seeing past the cancer cell’s attempts to hide.

One of these attempts involves a signaling pathway that sends a “don’t Eat Me” signal to the immune system. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered a second biological pathway that signals the immune system not to engulf and consume cancer cells.

By Michael Kanis, National Sales Engineering Manager, Proven Process Medical Devices, and Jodi Hutchins, RAC, CQA

All Those in Favor of Using Real World Evidence, Say Aye!

Medical Devices are used in the real world every day, so shouldn’t they be tested in the real world? You would think so. But the FDA hasn’t necessarily been of that mindset — until now.

Continue reading “Medical Device Development and The Case for Real World Evidence (RWE)” »

The international authorities overseeing the creation of a unified standard for 5G mobile technologies are expected to release the initial specifications next year and the final phase in 2019, paving the way for the commercial deployment of 5G services by mobile network operators from 2020.

China is one step closer to achieving the reality of seamless, super high speed communications that will enable driverless cars, virtual reality education and nationwide health care services after a partnership comprising China Mobile, Qualcomm and ZTE accelerated efforts to finalise technical standards for the next generation of smartphones.

With the world’s largest population and most number of internet users, China is making a huge bet that the wide roll-out of 5G mobile infrastructure by the country’s three main telecommunications network operators would support the country’s rapid digital transformation – enabling a raft of advanced applications and services that were the stuff of science fiction just decades ago.

Continue reading “A future of driverless cars, virtual reality and other advanced services beckon as China’s ZTE bets on massive 5G roll-out” »