Lifeboat Foundation

Every minute in the United States, 30 people require a blood transfusion. That equates to a lot of blood, and the problem is that not enough people donate. This bottleneck has long been an issue for medicine, and so many have been trying to find a way to artificially create large volumes to meet this demand.

A team of researchers from the University of Bristol and NHS Blood and Transplant may have finally cracked it. They’ve made a major breakthrough in the process of mass producing red blood cells, in what could technically be an unlimited supply of the stuff. While they now have a biological way of achieving this, they now need the manufacturing technology on a large enough scale in order to mass produce it.

Scientists have been able to create artificial blood before, but these earlier methods have been incredibly inefficient. They worked by taking stem cells, and then directly inducing them to form red blood cells. By doing this, they could create maybe 50,000 cells in one go, far short of the trillions typically needed for a blood transfusion.

Continue reading “Major Breakthrough Could Enable Mass Produced Artificial Blood” »

Farming is about to change forever.

Professor says all spacecraft have an ultimate speed limit just below that of light. Let’s hope he’s wrong.

Hypothetical photon rocket drives might one day dramatically shrink interplanetary travel times.

“Harnessing the Sun’s power may require concerted international coöperation.”

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Former model Irene Major is the wife of Canadian oil tycoon Sam Mail and has used skin lightening creams.

The sale of the product provoked outrage, with some accusing the chain of encouraging racist ideals. Yet Irene, who’s 34 and lives with her husband and four children in a Kent mansion, claims that in some communities the pressure on women to use such products is overwhelming.

Continue reading “The women who’ll do anything to have whiter skin” »

This Australian bar has Nutella on tap.

First drive of a release candidate version of Model 3 https://t.co/zcs6j1YRa4

We’ve discovered that evolution strategies (ES), an optimization technique that’s been known for decades, rivals the performance of standard reinforcement learning (RL) techniques on modern RL benchmarks (e.g. Atari/MuJoCo), while overcoming many of RL’s inconveniences.

In particular, ES is simpler to implement (there is no need for backpropagation), it is easier to scale in a distributed setting, it does not suffer in settings with sparse rewards, and has fewer hyperparameters. This outcome is surprising because ES resembles simple hill-climbing in a high-dimensional space based only on finite differences along a few random directions at each step.

My work mentioned. This story out in various languages: #Italian, #French, #Portuguese, English, etc. http://fr.radiovaticana.va/news/2017/03/24/troisi%C3%A8me_m%…sa/1300835 & https://zenit.org/articles/father-cantalamessas-3rd-lent-homily-2017/ & http://www.cantalamessa.org/?p=3274 &

http://www.diocesedeamparo.org.br/index.php/2017/03/24/3a-pr…de-cristo/