Lifeboat Foundation

Who wants to live forever? Thanks to these scientific breakthroughs, increased lifespans and reverse aging could be possible.

Designer babies are on the horizon after an influential group of scientists concluded that it could be ‘morally permissible’ to genetically engineer human embryos.

In a new report which opens the door to a change in the law, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, said that DNA editing could become an option for parents wanting to ‘influence the genetic characteristics of their child.’

Although it would be largely used to cure devastating genetic illnesses, or predispositions to cancers and dementia, the experts said they were not ruling out cosmetic uses such as making tweaks to increase height or changing eye or hair colour, if it would make a child more successful.

Continue reading “Designer babies on horizon as ethics council gives green light to genetically edited embryos” »

NIAID-supported discovery could lead to therapy for deadly illness.

The future of medical care is here 😯 Virtual Surgery Intelligence uses mixed and augmented reality to allow doctors and patients to see scans in 3D!

Think you’re totally in control of your thoughts? Maybe not as much as you think, according to a new San Francisco State University study that examines how thoughts that lead to actions enter our consciousness.

While we can “decide” to think about certain things, other information—including activities we have learned like counting—can enter our subconscious and cause us to think about something else, whether we want to or not. Psychologists call these dispositions “sets,” explains SF State Associate Professor of Psychology Ezequiel Morsella, one of four authors on a new study that examines how sets influence what we end up thinking about.

Morsella and the other researchers conducted two experiments with SF State students. In the first experiment, 35 students were told beforehand to not count an array of objects presented to them. In 90 percent of the trials, students counted the objects involuntarily. In a second experiment, students were presented with differently colored geometric shapes and given the option of either naming the colors (one set) or counting the shapes (a different set). Even though students chose one over the other, around 40 percent thought about both sets.

NASA has recently announced it would give funds to a California-based 3D printing company for finding ways to turn asteroids into giant, autonomous spacecrafts, which could fly to outposts in space, the media reported.

Made In Space’s project, known as RAMA (Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata), could one day enable space colonization by helping make off-Earth manufacturing efficient and economically viable, Space.com reported.

The company plans to use 3D printing to turn the asteroids into self-flying vehicles by 2030.

Continue reading “NASA Funding Project To Turn Asteroids Into Spaceships: Report” »

Aging may seem like the most natural—and inevitable—thing in life. Yet according to a new study in Nature Medicine, rejuvenating an aging body may be as easy as kitchen renovations. Simply swap drill and hammer for a cocktail of two drugs already on the market; rather than pulling out decrepit cabinets, kill off aged “zombie” cells.

These so-called senescent cells are a curious oddity: they’re frail, beat-up, and unable to perform their usual roles. Yet they simply refuse to die. What’s more, zombie cells actively leak inflammatory chemicals into their surroundings, damaging nearby tissue and—in a sense—“spreading” the negative effects of aging.

Yet because they’re extremely rare, amounting to only eight percent of the body’s cells at most, scientists have long wondered just how much they contribute to the aging process.

Continue reading “This Drug Combo Extends Lifespan and Healthspan in Mice” »

When I leave China, I feel I’ve gone back 10 years…

Surging use of mobile payment apps WeChat and Alipay has transformed daily life.

About the future death of explainability to understand AI thinking, the writing is on the wall…

These divergent approaches, one regulatory, the other deregulatory, follow the same pattern as antitrust enforcement, which faded in Washington and began flourishing in Brussels during the George W. Bush administration. But there is a convincing case that when it comes to overseeing the use and abuse of algorithms, neither the European nor the American approach has much to offer. Automated decision-making has revolutionized many sectors of the economy and it brings real gains to society. It also threatens privacy, autonomy, democratic practice, and ideals of social equality in ways we are only beginning to appreciate.

At the simplest level, an algorithm is a sequence of steps for solving a problem. The instructions for using a coffeemaker are an algorithm for converting inputs (grounds, filter, water) into an output (coffee). When people say they’re worried about the power of algorithms, however, they’re talking about the application of sophisticated, often opaque, software programs to enormous data sets. These programs employ advanced statistical methods and machine-learning techniques to pick out patterns and correlations, which they use to make predictions. The most advanced among them, including a subclass of machine-learning algorithms called “deep neural networks,” can infer complex, nonlinear relationships that they weren’t specifically programmed to find.

Continue reading “The Digital Poorhouse” »