Lifeboat Foundation

Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they’d designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop.

Then one of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle. Eyeing a human egg through a camera, it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell. Altogether, the robot was used to fertilize more than a dozen eggs.

The result of the procedures, say the… More.

Continue reading “The first babies conceived with a sperm-injecting robot have been born” »

Harvard University plans to use an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT as an instructor on its flagship coding course.

Students enrolled on the Computer Science 50: Introduction to Computer Science (CS50) programme will be encouraged to use the artificial intelligence tool when classes begin in September.

The AI teacher will likely be based on OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 or GPT 4 models, according to course instructors.

🤣😂 My how things have changed considering AI. #TotallyFunny

The technology could eventually revolutionize health care. We’ve seen CRISPR start to be used experimentally to treat children with cancer, for example. It is being explored for lots of genetic diseases. And last year, a company used CRISPR to try to treat a woman with dangerously high cholesterol.

But CRISPR could also transform farming, including aquaculture. This week, I wrote about researchers who inserted an alligator gene into catfish. The idea isn’t to make these fish more alligator-like, but to make them more resistant to disease. It turns out that alligators have a particular talent for fighting off infections.

These gene-edited fish, pigs, and other animals could soon be on the menu.

Continue reading “How CRISPR is making farmed animals bigger, stronger, and healthier” »

Understanding the basics of artificial intelligence in healthcare.

Healthcare spending simply isn’t keeping up. Healthcare systems will struggle to remain viable unless big structural and transformational changes are implemented. Automation, along with artificial intelligence (AI), has the potential to revolutionize healthcare.

Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare is utilized to analyze and avoid illness treatment procedures. AI is employed in many fields of healthcare, including diagnosis, drug research, medication, patient monitoring care centers, and so on.

The human body reveals compelling evidence of evolution. By examining its intricacies, we uncover remnants of our animal ancestors. One such example is the palmaris longus, a vestigial muscle in the forearm. Although it no longer affects grip strength, it can be removed for reconstructive surgeries. Our outer ear muscles also bear witness to our evolutionary past. While their movement is limited to humans, they once aided early nocturnal mammals in sound localization. Today, electrodes can detect slight muscle activity in response to sudden sounds.

Goosebumps offer another intriguing clue. When we’re cold, tiny muscles connected to body hairs contract, causing the hair to stand upright, and creating bumps on the skin. This response, useful for furry mammals’ insulation, can also be triggered by intense emotions or surprising musical moments in humans. Lastly, the tailbone, or coccyx, composed of fused vertebrae, represents the vestiges of our ancestors’ tails. Although all humans develop a tail during embryonic stages, it regresses and disappears, except in rare cases of a vestigial tail present at birth. These remnants within our bodies provide tangible proof of evolution. Delving into these fascinating traces deepens our understanding of our evolutionary journey and our place in the natural world.

There are three things that I make sure I do when I’m out and about. I seek out the best coffee I can find. I make sure I use a VPN when using public Wi-Fi, and I always make sure I use a USB data blocker, otherwise known as a USB condom, whenever I use a third-party charger (such as those you find in coffee shops). #DataProtection

Better to have USB data protection and not need it, than need it and not be prepared.

Just to shake it up a little bit more, Chatbot Arena is an LLM benchmark platform created by the Large Model Systems Organization (LMSYS Org). It is an open research organization founded by students and faculty from UC Berkeley.

Their overall aim is to make large models more accessible to everyone using a method of co-development using open datasets, models, systems, and evaluation tools. The team at LMSYS trains large language models and makes them widely available along with the development of distributed systems to accelerate the LLMs training and inference.

Chatbot Arena is a benchmark platform for large language models, where the community can contribute new models and evaluate them.

Developments in AI are moving fast but Matin Durrani is not convinced that top-down regulation is the best approach.