Lifeboat Foundation

Robots like this, nanobots that can work in the body, should be the main focus for curing all disease. And instead of focusing on Drug Delivery, have the nanobots just go in and attack or fix the problem themselves.

A Brock University research team has created a microscopic robot that has the potential to identify drug resistance to tuberculosis faster than conventional tests.

The World Health Organization (WHO) calls tuberculosis drug resistance “a formidable obstacle” to treatment and prevention of a disease that killed 240,000 people in 2016.

Continue reading “Tiny robot could be game-changer in fight against tuberculosis” »

As the master code of life, DNA can do a lot of things. Inheritance. Gene therapy. Wipe out an entire species. Solve logic problems. Recognize your sloppy handwriting.

Wait, What?

In a brilliant study published in Nature, a team from Caltech cleverly hacked the properties of DNA, essentially turning it into a molecular artificial neural network.

Continue reading “DNA Computing Gets a Boost With This Machine Learning Hack” »

Impressive.

Controlling prosthetic limbs through the power of thought and AI.

Which future are you going to pick?

Today, I would like to tell you two short stories describing what your far future might look like, depending on the choices that you €”though not only you €”will make in the near future. Feel free to leave a comment to let others know which one you’d rather have as your real future.

Story 1: A day in 2140

Continue reading “Choose Your Own Story” »

Agriculture uses 70 percent of the water in the world, and this appears to be an upward trend regarding water needs. As the demand in other industry sectors is also increasing, and the effects of climate change exacerbate water shortages, water saving measures have become an unavoidable challenge for maintaining the sector and preserving life.

Agronomy researcher Rafael González has developed a model to predict in advance the water that users will need each day. This tool came about from a drive to ally with water resource sustainability.

The model applies artificial intelligence techniques including fuzzy logic, a system used to explain the behavior of decision making. It also mixes variables that are easier to measure, like agroclimatic ones or the size of the plot of land to be watered, with other more complicated variables, like traditional methods in the area and holidays during watering season.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence saves water for water users associations” »

The enzyme laccase is able to alter the chemical structure of wood on its surface and thus facilitate biochemical modifications without changing the structure of the material. By attaching functional molecules, Empa researchers develop waterproof or antimicrobial wood surfaces, for instance. Also it is possible to make adhesive wood fibers, which can be pressed to fiberboards without any chemical binding agents. These solvent-free fiberboards are used for insulation of eco houses.

The problem: There are many variants of laccase, which differ in the architecture of the chemically active center, and not all of them react with the desired substrate. As it is extremely difficult to predict whether or not a particular laccase will react with a specific substrate, costly and time-consuming series of experiments are required to identify suitable laccase-substrate pairs. Molecular simulations could solve the problem: You simply need a precise structural analysis of the laccase to simulate the chemical reaction mechanism for every desirable combination on the computer. However, this requires a high computer computing—capacity and, even then, would be extremely time-consuming and expensive.

But there is a shortcut: “deep learning.” A computer program is trained to recognize patterns with data from the literature and own experiments: Which laccase oxidizes which substrate? What might be the best conditions for the desired chemical process to take place? The best thing about it: The search works even if not all details about the chemical mechanism are known.

Title is a bit misleading — atheism is only unpolular with totalitarian regimes (and Templeton Foundation?) — interesting.

Although Johnson said he found the team’s research useful and important, he was unimpressed by their claim to have outperformed previous predictive methods. “Linear regression analysis is not very powerful for prediction,” he said. “I was a little surprised by the strength of their claims.” He cautioned that we should be skeptical about the word prediction in relation to this type of model. Opinion might be better.

“It’s great to have as a tool,” he said. “It’s like, you go to the doctor, they give an opinion. It’s always an opinion, we never say a doctor’s prediction. Usually, we go with the doctor’s opinion because they’ve seen many cases like this, many humans who come in with the same thing. It’s even more of an opinion with these types of models, because they haven’t necessarily seen many cases just like it—history mimics the past but doesn’t exactly repeat it.”

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Shows Why Atheism Is Unpopular” »

Is it a tram, or is it a train, or even a fancy bus?

The world’s first electric-powered ‘trackless train’ has been launched in China.

Using virtual rail lines on the streets of Zhuzhou, Hunan Province, the new Autonomous Rail Rapid Transit (ART) system can travel up to speeds of 43 mph.

Continue reading “New ‘trackless train’ which runs on virtual rail lines launched in China” »

PwC forecast that AI would displace 20% jobs by 2037, but it would also create just as many jobs. That suggests fears about robots rendering humans useless may be overblown.