Lifeboat Foundation

Fascinating vision/plan by the one and only Sam Altman of how to update our economic systems to benefit everyone in the context of rapidly accelerating technological change.

My work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe. Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do. Even more power will shift from labor to capital. If public policy doesn’t adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today.

We need to design a system that embraces this technological future and taxes the assets that will make up most of the value in that world–companies and land–in order to fairly distribute some of the coming wealth. Doing so can make the society of the future much less divisive and enable everyone to participate in its gains.

Continue reading “Moore’s Law for Everything” »

What do people see when they die? New research finds what people can recall after surviving a cardiac arrest.

Voids, or empty spaces, exist within matter at all scales, from the astronomical to the microscopic. In a new study, researchers used high-powered microscopy and mathematical theory to unveil nanoscale voids in three dimensions. This advancement is poised to improve the performance of many materials used in the home and in the chemical, energy and medical industries—particularly in the area of filtration.

Magnification of common filters used in the home shows that, while they look like a solid piece of material with uniform holes, they are actually composed of millions of randomly oriented tiny voids that allow small particles to pass through. In some industrial applications, like water and solvent filtration, paper-thin membranes make up the barriers that separate fluids and particles.

“The materials science community has been aware of these randomly oriented nanoscale voids within filter membranes for a while,” said Falon Kalutantirige, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduate student.

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collaborators have developed an organic photovoltaic film that is both waterproof and flexible, allowing a solar cell to be put onto slothes and still function correctly after being rained on or even washed.

One of the potential uses of organic photovoltaics is to create wearable electronics — devices that can be attached to clothing that can monitor medical devices, for example, without requiring battery changes.

However, researchers have found it challenging to achieve waterproofing without the use of extra layers that end up decreasing the flexibility of the film.

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists reversed an aggressive cancer, reverting malignant cells towards a more normal state. Rhabdoid tumors are an aggressive cancer which is missing a key tumor suppressor protein. Findings showed that with the missing tumor suppressor, deleting or degrading the quality control protein DCAF5 reversed the cancer cell state. These results suggest a new approach to curing cancer — returning cancerous cells to an earlier, more normal state rather than killing cancer cells with toxic therapies — may be possible. The results were published today in Nature.

“Rather than making a toxic event that kills rhabdoid cancer, we were able to reverse the cancer state by returning the cells toward normal,” said senior author Charles W.M. Roberts, MD, PhD, Executive Vice President and St. Jude Comprehensive Cancer Center director. “This approach would be ideal, especially if this paradigm could also be applied to other cancers.”

“We found a dependency which actually reverses the cancer state,” said first author Sandi Radko-Juettner, PhD, a former St. Jude Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences student, now a Research Program Manager for the Hematological Malignancies Program at St. Jude. “Standard cancer therapies work by causing toxicities that also damage healthy cells in the body. Here, it appears that we’re instead fixing the problem caused by the loss of a tumor suppressor in this rhabdoid cancer.”

Neuroprosthetics, a technology that allows the brain to control external devices such as robotic limbs, is beginning to emerge as a viable option for patients disabled by amputation or neurological conditions such as stroke.

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Scientists have tested a novel method of providing cells with healthy mitochondria to fight Parkinson’s disease [1].

Parkinson’s disease is the second-most prevalent neurodegenerative disorder, and it affects 10 million people worldwide. The disease is age-related, as its prevalence rises rapidly in people older than 65, although some people are diagnosed much earlier. Parkinson’s disease is characterized by both motor and mental problems: tremor, rigidity (stiffness), and slowness of movement along with memory and thinking deficits.

Parkinson’s disease is caused by the loss of dopamine-producing (dopaminergic) neurons in a brain region called the substantia nigra. Therapeutic options are limited, and some of the existing ones cause nasty side effects.

Strategy could stop an overdose or produce an antidote to a poison.