Lifeboat Foundation

While NASA is well-known for advancing various technologies for the purposes of space exploration, whether it’s sending spacecraft to another world or for use onboard the International Space Station (ISS), the little-known fact is that these same technologies can be licensed for commercial use to benefit humankind right here on the Earth through NASA’s Spinoff program, which is part of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and its Technology Transfer program. This includes fields like communication, medical, weather forecasting, and even the very mattresses we sleep on, and are all featured in NASA’s annual Spinoff book, with NASA’s 2024 Spinoff book being the latest in sharing these technologies with the private sector.

“As NASA’s longest continuously running program, we continue to increase the number of technologies we license year-over-year while streamlining the development path from the government to the commercial sector,” Daniel Lockney, Technology Transfer Program Executive at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. “These commercialization success stories continually prove the benefits of transitioning agency technologies into private hands, where the real impacts are made.”

One example is a medical-grade smartwatch called EmbracePlus developed by Empatica Inc., which uses machine learning algorithms to monitor a person’s vitals, including sleep patterns, heart rate, and oxygen flow. EmbracePlus reached mass production status in 2021 and has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with the goal of using the smartwatch for astronauts on future spaceflights, including the upcoming Artemis missions, along with medical patients back on Earth.

Google’s Bard chatbot is powered by a new Gemini model. Early users rate it as similar to GPT-4.

Google’s head of AI, Jeff Dean, announced the new Gemini model on X. It is a model from the Gemini Pro family with the suffix “scale”

Thanks to the Gemini updates, Bard is “much better” and has “many more capabilities” compared to the launch in March, according to Dean.

The latest in the intersection of large language models and life science: virus sequences, virus proteins, and their function.

Large language models improve annotation of prokaryotic viral proteins.

Ocean viral proteome annotations are expanded by a machine learning approach that is not reliant on sequence homology and can annotate sequences not homologous to those seen in training.

The ambition is to supercharge human capabilities, treat neurological disorders like ALS or Parkinson’s, and may be one day achieve a symbiotic relationship between humans and artificial intelligence.

“The first human received an implant from Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well,” Musk said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

“Initial results show promising neuron spike detection,” he added.

Amid a massive wave of tech company layoffs in favor of AI, Google is firing thousands of contractors tasked with making its namesake search engine work better.

As Vice reports, news of the company ending its contract with Appen — a data training firm that employs thousands of poorly paid gig workers in developing countries to maintain, among other things, Google’s search algorithm — coincidentally comes a week after a new study found that the quality of its search engine’s results has indeed gotten much worse in recent years.

Back in late 2022, journalist Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to refer to the demonstrable worsening of all manner of online tools, which he said was by design as tech giants seek to extract more and more money out of their user bases. Google Search was chief among the writer’s examples of the enshittification effect in a Wired article published last January, and as the new study out of Germany found, that effect can be measured.

AI processing can take a huge amount of computing power, but by the looks of this latest joint project from the Jülich Supercomputing Center and French computing provider Eviden, power will not be in short supply.

“But can it run Crysis” is an old gag, but I’m still going to see if I get away with it.

Feng Guo, an associate professor of intelligent systems engineering at the Indiana University Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, is addressing the technical limitations of artificial intelligence computing hardware by developing a new hybrid computing system—which has been…

A team of IU bioengineers are building the intersection of brain organoids and artificial intelligence, which could potentially transform the performance and efficiency of advanced AI techniques.

If you read and believe headlines, it seems scientists are very close to being able to merge human brains with AI. In mid-December 2023, a Nature Electronics article triggered a flurry of excitement about progress on that transhuman front:

“‘Biocomputer’ combines lab-grown brain tissue with electronic hardware”

Continue reading “Here Come the Cyborgs: Mating AI with Human Brain Cells” »

The U.S. Department of Defense plans to develop a program to estimate prices and predict supplies of nickel, cobalt and other critical minerals, a move aimed at boosting market transparency but one that throws a new, uncertain variable into global metals markets.