Lifeboat Foundation

From the perspective of critics, there are many reasons to be concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence.

Billionaire inventor Elon Musk — perhaps the world’s most vocal AI antagonist — has warned that the technology could become “an immortal dictator from which we would never escape.”

Several years before his death, Stephen Hawking, the renowned theoretical physicist, said artificial intelligence could bypass biological evolution, leaving humans unable to compete.

Continue reading “Prince Charles Says He ‘Utterly Objects’ to The Idea of People Becoming Part Human, Part Machine” »

The world’s largest offshore windfarm has officially opened. The project commanding the Numero Uno status is the Walney Extension. An official inauguration was marked as September 6, and it now means that the Walney Extension overtakes the London Array as the world’s largest offshore wind farm.

How large? Stats say the farm, located in the Irish Sea off the Walney Island coast in Cumbria, covers an area of around 145 sq km (55 square miles). Project watchers are talking electricity for nearly 600,000 UK homes. It’s especially being touted as having been built on time and on budget.

Continue reading “World’s largest offshore wind farm Walney Extension swings into action for energy” »

When we think of robots manipulating objects, we tend to think of endless banks of robot arms in some high-tech assembly line, dancing their mechanical dance in perfect synchronization. They grab an object, turn it round a bit, and put it down again, before repeating the action with an identical object time and again. But what if a robot could look at any item, and decide how best to pick it up, and perform tasks with it, all by itself? That’s the aim of DON – a new neural network and robotic hand at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

But get ready to change your occupation.

Just a few years after launching its Multi Jet Fusion 3D printer, HP is ready to get into the world of 3D metal printing with Metal Jet, a new commercial platform. (Did you expect it to be called anything else?) While the consumer buzz around 3D printing seems to be cooling off, it’s still a useful technology for large scale manufacturing — especially when it comes to metallic components. The usual benefits of 3D printing still apply: It can be both significantly faster and cheaper than traditional methods.

Today, we are going to take a look at the topic of NAD+, its precursor, nicotinamide mononucleotide, and the debate surrounding the ability of these molecules to pass through the cell membrane.

NAD+ is critical for cellular function

Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) is a redox cofactor, but it is also a critical signaling molecule that regulates cell function and survival in response to environmental changes such as nutrient intake and cellular damage. Age-related changes to the level of NAD+ in the cell impacts mitochondrial function, nutrient sensing and metabolism, redox reactions, circadian rhythm, immune and inflammatory responses, DNA repair, cell division, protein-to-protein signaling, chromatin, and epigenetics.

Why the spike? For years, doctors doled out antibiotics willy-nilly. Even today, up to half of all prescribed antibiotics are unnecessary or used ineffectively.

Whenever antibiotics are used, some mutant bacteria survive. But the more an antibiotic is used, the more rapidly bacteria become resistant, reducing the effectiveness of the drug.

New treatments for superbugs are needed, but there have been no major novel antibiotic developments since the 1960s. That’s largely because pharmaceutical companies are abandoning antibiotic research. It’s time-consuming and expensive to bring a new drug to market — it takes about ten years and $2.9 billion, on average. So companies develop drugs that will make as much money as possible. Since drugs for chronic diseases make people life-long subscribers, and antibiotics are “one and done,” developers opt to make the former. Moreover, growing antibiotic resistance reduces the effective lifespan of new drugs, further limiting profits.

Continue reading “Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs Are Getting Deadlier” »

Chances are you make it through most days without sparing a thought for Antarctica. At just over 5.4 million square miles, it’s a massive chunk of land that is nearly twice the size of Australia and dwarfs the continental United States. It’s also covered in ice, which makes it a lot less appealing as a potential vacation destination.

Still, it’s of great interest to scientists and researchers, and a new mapping effort has yielded the most stunning, high-resolution glimpse of the continent ever.

Scientists have developed a photoelectrode that can harvest 85 percent of visible light in a 30 nanometers-thin semiconductor layer between gold layers, converting light energy 11 times more efficiently than previous methods.

In the pursuit of realizing a sustainable society, there is an ever-increasing demand to develop revolutionary solar cells or artificial photosynthesis systems that utilize visible light energy from the sun while using as few materials as possible.

The research team, led by Professor Hiroaki Misawa of the Research Institute for Electronic Science at Hokkaido University, has been aiming to develop a photoelectrode that can harvest visible light across a wide spectral range by using gold nanoparticles loaded on a semiconductor. But merely applying a layer of gold nanoparticles did not lead to a sufficient amount of light absorption, because they took in light with only a narrow spectral range.

Continue reading “Photoelectrode that can harvest 85 percent of visible light” »