Lifeboat Foundation

Fable Studio has announced two new conversational AI virtual beings, or artificial people. Their names are Charlie and Beck, and they will be able to hold conversations as if they were real people.

The new characters are a blend of storytelling and artificial intelligence, a marriage that Fable is pioneering in the belief that virtual beings will become a huge market as people seek companionship and entertainment during the tough climate of the pandemic.

CEO Edward Saatchi believes that virtual beings are the start of something big. He organizes the Virtual Beings Summit, and this summer he noted that virtual beings companies — from Genies to AI Foundation — have raised more than $320 million.

Just as engineers once compressed some of the power of room-sized mainframes into desktop PCs, so too have Stanford researchers shown how to pack some of the punch delivered by today’s ginormous particle accelerators onto a tiny silicon chip.

Um wtf o.o

Denmark culled 17 million minks in November in response to Covid-19 outbreaks at more than 200 mink farms. Now the country plans to dig up the dead animals after they started to rise out of their shallow graves.

The journey to see future technology starts in 2022, when Elon Musk and SpaceX send the first Starship to Mars — beginning the preparations for the arrival of the first human explorers.

We see the evolution of space exploration, from NASA’s Artemis mission, humans landing on Mars, and the interplanetary internet system going online. To the launch of the Starshot Alpha Centauri program, and quantum computers designing plants that can survive on Mars.

Continue reading “TIMELAPSE OF FUTURE TECH: From 2022 — 4000+” »

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) — A Fairbanks clinician suffered anaphylactic symptoms after being given the Pfizer Inc coronavirus vaccine, a hospital said on Friday, becoming the third Alaska health care worker to suffer an adverse reaction to the new drug. The clinician, whose name was not released, started showing symptoms about 10 minutes after being inoculated on Thursday, according to Foundation Health Partners, operator of the Fairbanks Memorial Hospital. The health care worker was treated in the hospital’s emergency room with epinephrine and released about six hours later, Foundation Health Partners said in a written statement. “Allergic reactions, though uncommon, can occur with injections of medications and vaccines,” Foundation Health Partners’ Chief Medical Officer Dr. Angelique Ramirez said in the statement.

“A reactogenic vaccine is not the same thing as an unsafe vaccine,” says Saad Omer, a vaccinologist and the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.”

The COVID-19 vaccine will make some people feel sick. But they’re not—that’s the immune system doing its job.

As we sit here in 2020, in the middle of a major viral pandemic, we can’t forget the fact that a century after the first antibiotics were created, drug resistant bacterial infections have become a major threat around the globe, exactly at the same time that the antibiotic pipelines of pharma companies have either dried up, or they have gotten out of the business.

In the U.S. alone, Centers For Disease Control (CDC) estimates that antibiotic resistance causes more than 2 million infections, several million hospital stay days, and over 35, 000 deaths per year. Worldwide, such infections cause 750, 000 deaths every year. And a recent United Nations (UN) report concluded that by 2050, “super bugs” could kill 10 million people globally every year, if no action is taken to combat the problem.

Continue reading “Dr. Robert Schooley MD — Harnessing Phage Therapies In The Fight Against Drug Resistant ‘Super-Bugs’” »

Emerging and reemerging infections present an ever-increasing challenge to global health. Here, we report a nanoparticle-enabled smartphone (NES) system for rapid and sensitive virus detection. The virus is captured on a microchip and labeled with specifically designed platinum nanoprobes to induce gas bubble formation in the presence of hydrogen peroxide. The formed bubbles are controlled to make distinct visual patterns, allowing simple and sensitive virus detection using a convolutional neural network (CNN)-enabled smartphone system and without using any optical hardware smartphone attachment. We evaluated the developed CNN-NES for testing viruses such as hepatitis B virus (HBV), HCV, and Zika virus (ZIKV). The CNN-NES was tested with 134 ZIKV-and HBV-spiked and ZIKV-and HCV-infected patient plasma/serum samples. The sensitivity of the system in qualitatively detecting viral-infected samples with a clinically relevant virus concentration threshold of 250 copies/ml was 98.97% with a confidence interval of 94.39 to 99.97%.

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Smartphone systems can also benefit from the recent unprecedented advancements in nanotechnology to develop diagnostic approaches. Catalysis can be considered as one of the popular applications of nanoparticles because of their large surface-to-volume ratio and high surface energy (11–16). So far, numerous diagnostic platforms for cancer and infectious diseases have been developed by substituting enzymes, such as catalase, oxidase, and peroxidase with nanoparticle structures (17–20). Here, we adopted the intrinsic catalytic properties of platinum nanoparticles (PtNPs) for gas bubble formation to detect viruses on-chip using a convolutional neural network (CNN)–enabled smartphone system.

On today’s episode we are going to continue our virtual global road trip over to the country of South Africa, to the Soweto township of the city of Johannesburg, and meet up with Ms. Sibongile Mongadi, Founder of Uku’hamba Pty Ltd, a start-up company that focuses on biotechnology and healthcare manufacturing with a goal of improving lives of amputees across Africa.

Uku’hamba is a 100% black youth women owned company and Uku’hamba means “To Walk” in Zulu.

Continue reading “Sibongile Mongadi, STEM Innovator, Founder, Uku’hamba, Improving The Lives Of Amputees Across Africa” »