Lifeboat Foundation

A collaboration of researchers from MIT and Microsoft have developed a system that helps identify lapses in artificial intelligence knowledge in autonomous cars and robots. These lapses, referred to as “blind spots,” occur when there are significant differences between training examples and what a human would do in a certain situation — such as a driverless car not detecting the difference between a large white car and an ambulance with its sirens on, and thus not behaving appropriately.

CRISPR/Cas9 is a form of genetic editing that holds a lot of promise, such as the killing of cancer cells, but also comes with some hefty warnings, such as that it may cause DNA damage. So far, scientists have been using CRISPR/Cas9 in a variety of plants and animals to edit genetic information, including attempts to practice what is called ‘active genetics’.

This last approach is an attempt to edit the genome that controls which of the two copies of a gene is passed to the next generation. But the technique is complicated and rife with obstacles so thus far been used only on insects. Not anymore!

A team of biologists has now achieved the world’s first CRISPR/Cas9-based approach to control genetic inheritance in a mammal.

Continue reading “World’s First Mammal CRISPR/Cas-9 Genetic Inheritance Control Achieved” »

The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.

The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.

This insight snapped into focus one day while one of us (Lanza) was walking through the woods. Looking up, he saw a huge golden orb web spider tethered to the overhead boughs. There the creature sat on a single thread, reaching out across its web to detect the vibrations of a trapped insect struggling to escape. The spider surveyed its universe, but everything beyond that gossamer pinwheel was incomprehensible. The human observer seemed as far-off to the spider as telescopic objects seem to us. Yet there was something kindred: We humans, too, lie at the heart of a great web of space and time whose threads are connected according to laws that dwell in our minds.

Continue reading “How Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself” »

Researchers have achieved a new kind of chimeric first, producing sheep-human hybrid embryos that could one day represent the future of organ donation – by using body parts grown inside unnatural, engineered animals. Scientists have created the first interspecies sheep-human chimera, introducing human stem cells into sheep embryos, resulting in a hybrid creature that’s more than 99 percent sheep – but also a tiny, little bit like you and me.

Admittedly, the human portion of the embryos created in the experiment – before they were destroyed after 28 days – is exceedingly small, but the fact it exists at all is what generates considerable controversy in this field of research.

Continue reading “Scientists Created The First Successful Human-Animal Hybrids” »

A concrete or steel wall along the southern border of the U.S. is not impenetrable; daily news programs show how concrete walls are burrowed under or driven over with car carriers and hydraulic ramps, while steel walls are breached with grappling hooks and inexpensive metal saws. And while a fiber-optic fence is also vulnerable to a physical cut, it can be discretely buried or placed along existing infrastructure, and (unlike concrete or steel) can fundamentally detect the location of a cut with high accuracy so that border patrol agents can be dispatched to understand the breach and apprehend the humans (easily distinguished from animals) crossing over the fence.

Let’s put our money and photonics technology to more effective use.

Success against sickle-cell would be “the first genetic cure of a common genetic disease” and could free tens of thousands of Americans from agonizing pain.

An artificial intelligence solution (AI) can accurately identify precancerous changes that could require medical attention in images from a woman’s cervix. Researchers from the National Institutes of Health and Global Good developed the computer algorithm, which is called automated visual evaluation.

Researchers created the algorithm by using more than 60,000 cervical images from a National Cancer Institute (NCI) archive of photos collected during a cervical cancer screening study that was carried out in Costa Rica in the 1990s.

More than 9,400 women participated in that population study, with follow up that lasted up to 18 years. Because of the prospective nature of the study, the researchers said that they gained nearly complete information on which cervical changes became pre-cancers and which did not.

Continue reading “Can AI Really Be a Game Changer in Cervical Cancer Screenings?” »

Using historical data to train risk assessment tools could mean that machines are copying the mistakes of the past.

No matter how abundant or renewable, solar power has a thorn in its side. There is still no cheap and efficient long-term storage for the energy that it generates.

The solar industry has been snagged on this branch for a while, but in the past year alone, a series of four papers has ushered in an intriguing new solution.

Scientists in Sweden have developed a specialised fluid, called a solar thermal fuel, that can store energy from the sun for well over a decade.

Continue reading “Scientists Create Liquid Fuel That Can Store The Sun’s Energy For Up to 18 Years” »