IBM (IBM) has begun the deeper deployment of Watson to help fight cancer. Last month, the company announced a partnership with Jupiter Medical Center in Florida to enable oncologists to tap into Watson’s cancer knowledge to make the best cancer treatment decisions.
The deal with Jupiter marked the first step in bringing Watson to the fight against cancer at a US (SPY) community health facility.
Posted in biotech/medical
Will vegetarians start eating meat if this works out?
Lab-grown meat is a not a new concept. We’ve had the meatball, the world’s most expensive beefburger, and possibly shrimp. Now it’s the turn of chicken and duck.
San Francisco-based startup, Memphis Meats, has produced the very first “clean meat” poultry grown from cells in a lab, serving them up in a taste test that included classic southern fried chicken and decidedly fancy duck a l’orange.
Memphis Meats is one of a handful of biotech companies hoping to create commercially available in vitro meat that has all the flavor, texture, and nutrition of meat, without the killing of animals. Using the same technique as their previous beef meatball, the scientists cultured regenerative stem cells taken from the birds and placed them in bioreactor tanks. Once culturing in a sugar and mineral solution, it only takes a few weeks before they are ready to harvest.
The workplace is going to look drastically different ten years from now. The coming of the Second Machine Age is quickly bringing massive changes along with it. Manual jobs, such as lorry driving or house building are being replaced by robotic automation, and accountants, lawyers, doctors and financial advisers are being supplemented and replaced by high level artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
So what do we need to learn today about the jobs of tomorrow? Two things are clear. The robots and computers of the future will be based on a degree of complexity that will be impossible to teach to the general population in a few short years of compulsory education. And some of the most important skills people will need to work with robots will not be the things they learn in computing class.
There is little doubt that the workforce of tomorrow will need a different set of skills in order to know how to navigate a new world of work. Current approaches for preparing young people for the digital economy are based on teaching programming and computational thinking. However, it looks like human workers will not be replaced by automation, but rather workers will work alongside robots. If this is the case, it will be essential that human/robot teams draw on each other’s strengths.
For people interested or working on Crispr related stuff.
*Benefits of performing arrayed CRISPR RNA (crRNA) screening.
*How to setup a successful arrayed crRNA screen.
*Examples of functional analysis assays for arrayed screening.
Science has taken another step toward delivering the perfect newborn – or at least a bouncing baby free of certain genetic defects.
Chinese researchers used a genome editing technique called CRISPR to rid normal embryos of hereditary diseases that cause blood disorders and other ailments, according to New Scientist. Experts who reviewed the project told the publication that, even though it involved just six embryos, it carries promise.
“It is encouraging,” Robin Lovell-Badge, a human genome expert at the Francis Crick Institute in London, told New Scientist.
This is nowhere near the power of the biggest systems, but still allows us to participate in research and development powered by supercomputer.
The idea that a computer could deliver an increase in life expectancy arises for a number of reasons, Prof Desplat says. Major gains are expected from the emergence of personalised medicine, care specifically tailored to match your genetic make-up. This will be driven in the not too distant future by “deep artificial intelligence learning” run on a supercomputer. These will also deliver faster more accurate early diagnosis, he says.
These computers are used in a variety of ways, from weather forecasting and climate modelling to energy usage modelling, statistical processing and seismic analysis when prospecting for oil and gas.
