Lifeboat Foundation

Swine fever has made its way into China, home to half the world’s pigs. Farmers in Estonia are already counting the cost.

A far better approach, then, is the middle course. Rather than prejudge the products of biotechnology, regulators should screen new plants and single out those that might need special monitoring or restrictions. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration does something similar on a voluntary basis for foods made from plants with engineered proteins. Companies submit data about their new products, and if the FDA decides it has no further questions, they can claim their foods are “generally recognized as safe.”

Europe and the U.S. should avoid an all-or-nothing approach to regulating plants made with Crispr.

Findings from the UCLA study could lead to new treatments for patients.

In this Viewpoint, Geoffrey Hinton of Google’s Brain Team discusses the basics of neural networks: their underlying data structures, how they can be trained and combined to process complex health data sets, and future prospects for harnessing their unsupervised learning to clinical challenges.

This robot spider could one day be used in medical procedures.

As an immediate application, Neural Lace could potentially help patients suffering from brain injuries and certain illnesses. However, the utimate goal and mission of Neuralink are to successfully merge the human brain with machine, fusing human intelligence with Artificial Intelligence. As a result, this is expected to bring humanity up to a higher level of cognitive reasoning.

Neural Lace: How it works

Continue reading “Neuralink: How The Human Brain Will Download Directly From a Computer” »

An extraordinary new anti-ageing technique could see humans live to 150 years old and allow them to regrow their organs by 2020.

Harvard Professor David Sinclair and researchers from the University of New South Wales developed the new process, which involves reprogramming cells.

Continue reading “New pill could see humans live to 150 ‘for the price of a coffee’” »

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, known simply as “Luca” to generations of human geneticists, died this week at age 96. More than any other human geneticist, Cavalli-Sforza believed in the potential of genes and culture together to trace humanity’s origins. In the course of his work, he pioneered new ideas and models that brought together these two distinct areas of science.

Like most scientists, many of his ideas would turn out to be wrong in the details. But his work helped form the foundation of our current knowledge of human genome variation across the world.

In 1991, Cavalli-Sforza wrote an essay for Scientific American that explained the course of his life’s work to that point. He recollected a time as a young man when he worked in the Cambridge laboratory of Ronald A. Fisher, one of the founders of modern evolutionary theory.

Continue reading “The man who tried to catalog humanity” »

The red tide that is choking Florida’s southwest coast is causing symptoms including coughs, headaches and shortness of breath, local doctors say.