Lifeboat Foundation

A pill’s active ingredient can be absorbed quickly or slowly depending upon your body posture after taking it.

Corneal blindness occurs when the transparent membrane that covers the front of the eye and acts as a lens becomes opaque and prevents the light from reaching the back of the eye, inhibiting vision. It can be solved with a transplant, but experts estimate that 12.7 million people are currently waiting for a cornea donation. These membranes are in short supply: for every 70 that are needed, only one is available. In view of this problem, especially in countries where there are fewer donations of human corneas due to limited infrastructure, a group of Swedish researchers tested corneas made from pig skin collagen in 20 people who needed transplants (all of them Iranian or Indian citizens; 14 of them were blind). After two years, they all showed improvement, and those who were blind could see again. Although more complex clinical trials are still necessary to validate the measure, the first test of this bioengineered corneal tissue has proven to be safe. The results of this pilot study were published in the Nature Biotechnology journal.

There is also a socioeconomic aspect to corneal blindness: one million new cases are diagnosed every year, but according to researchers, most are concentrated in low-and middle-income countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East – precisely where it is most difficult to obtain a donated human cornea, due to endless “economic, cultural, technological, political and ethical barriers.” Finding an alternative to the human cornea transplant is key, the authors point out, to fighting keratoconus, a disease that weakens and thins the cornea, and which is the reason for most transplants.

In order to find an alternative to donated human cornea, the researchers bioengineered collagen, the main protein in the human cornea, as a raw material. “For an abundant yet sustainable and cost-effective supply of collagen, we used medical-grade collagen sourced from porcine skin, a purified byproduct from the food industry already used in FDA-approved medical devices for glaucoma surgery and as a wound dressing,” they explain in the article. Unlike the human corneas, which must be used in less than two weeks, bioengineered corneas can be stored for up to two years.

Circa 2015 face_with_colon_three

Molecular Electronics: Nanogap Electrodes towards Solid State Single-Molecule Transistors (Small 46/2015)

Ajuan Cui, Huanli Dong, Wenping Hu.

Continue reading “Nanogap Electrodes towards Solid State Single‐Molecule Transistors” »

Quantum computers promise to propel computing far beyond what today’s computers are capable of, but this potential has yet to be realized. In their search for a way to demonstrate quantum supremacy, researchers working in the EU-funded PHOQUSING project are developing a hybrid computational system based on cutting-edge integrated photonics that combines classical and quantum processes.

The project’s goal is to develop a quantum sampling machine that will put Europe at the forefront of photonic quantum computing. With this goal in mind, PHOQUSING project partner QuiX Quantum in the Netherlands has created the largest quantum photonic processor compatible with quantum dots (nanometer-sized semiconductor crystals that emit light of various colors when illuminated by ultraviolet light). The processor is the central component of the quantum sampling machine, a near-term quantum computing device able to show a quantum advantage.

“Quantum sampling machines based on light are believed to be very promising for showing a quantum advantage,” reports a news item posted on the QuiX Quantum website. “The problem of drawing samples from a probability distribution, mathematically too complex for a classical computer, can be solved easily by letting light propagating [sic] through such quantum sampling machines. At the very core of quantum sampling machines there are large-scale linear optical interferometers, i.e. photonic processors.”

Circa 2017 face_with_colon_three

Stuart Russell weighs up a book on the risks and rewards of the AI revolution.

Circa 2019 face_with_colon_three Biological singularity here we come :3.

Scientific Reports volume 9, Article number: 12,181 (2019) Cite this article.

❤️ Check out Fully Connected by Weights & Biases: https://wandb.me/papers.

📝 The paper “Minerva — Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models” is available here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.

Continue reading “Is Google’s New AI As Smart As A Human? 🤖” »

Today, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier supercomputer was crowned fastest on the planet in the semiannual Top500 list. Frontier more than doubled the speed of the last titleholder, Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer, and is the first to officially clock speeds over a quintillion calculations a second—a milestone computing has pursued for 14 years.

That’s a big number. So before we go on, it’s worth putting into more human terms.

Imagine giving all 7.9 billion people on the planet a pencil and a list of simple arithmetic or multiplication problems. Now, ask everyone to solve one problem per second for four and half years. By marshaling the math skills of the Earth’s population for a half-decade, you’ve now solved over a quintillion problems.

NIA-funded researchers identified areas of the genome responsible for accelerating or slowing down brain aging.