Lifeboat Foundation

Doctors have been using radiation to treat cancer for more than a hundred years, but it’s always been a delicate art to direct treatment while avoiding healthy tissue.

To help them, scientists with the University of Chicago have designed an army of tiny flower-shaped metal-and-organic nanoparticles that deliver a one-two punch—first boosting the effects of radiation at the tumor site and then jumpstarting the immune system to search out any remaining tumors.

The research, published March 26 in Nature Biomedical Engineering, led to a candidate molecule currently beginning phase 1 clinical trials.

Continue reading “Scientists build army of metal-organic nanoflowers to treat cancer” »

Making a giant leap in the ‘tiny’ field of nanoscience, a multi-institutional team of researchers is the first to create nanoscale particles composed of up to eight distinct elements generally known to be immiscible, or incapable of being mixed or blended together. The blending of multiple, unmixable elements into a unified, homogenous nanostructure, called a high entropy alloy nanoparticle, greatly expands the landscape of nanomaterials—and what we can do with them.

This research makes a significant advance on previous efforts that have typically produced nanoparticles limited to only three different elements and to structures that do not mix evenly. Essentially, it is extremely difficult to squeeze and blend different elements into individual particles at the nanoscale. The team, which includes lead researchers at University of Maryland, College Park (UMD)’s A. James Clark School of Engineering, published a peer-reviewed paper based on the research featured on the March 30 cover of Science.

“Imagine the elements that combine to make nanoparticles as Lego building blocks. If you have only one to three colors and sizes, then you are limited by what combinations you can use and what structures you can assemble,” explains Liangbing Hu, associate professor of materials science and engineering at UMD and one of the corresponding authors of the paper. “What our team has done is essentially enlarged the toy chest in nanoparticle synthesis; now, we are able to build nanomaterials with nearly all metallic and semiconductor elements.”

Unveiled in the Federal Register today, new visa forms would require any Facebook and Twitter screennames used in the last five years.

While Big Tech has gotten more headlines in 2018 with its impact on healthcare, where artificial intelligence has even more potential to impact is actually in education. An early winner in the field has been identified.

Sana Labs is an education tech startup founded by Joel Hellermark, 21 who happens to be an AI-prodigy. Education is a 6-trillion dollar industry and the most robust first AI solution to impact it, stands to become a giant in the future of the industry.

Stockholm is home to many emerging startups and of note, Spotify, but this company has a pretty major unique value proposition. Sana Labs is aiming to build a scalable platform where AI will be able to change how we learn. It’s even gotten the attention of Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg.

Continue reading “Sana Labs is showing how Artificial Intelligence will Disrupt Education” »

Wednesday Apr. 4, 2018 at 7 PM ET

The live webcast will appear on this page.

Continue reading “A Material World – Building a Future from the Atoms Up: Rob Moore Public Lecture” »

PARIS (Reuters) — French President Emmanuel Macron promised 1.5 billion euros ($1.85 billion) of public funding into artificial intelligence by 2022 in a bid to reverse a brain drain and catch up with the dominant U.S. and Chinese tech giants.

French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech during the Artificial Intelligence for Humanity event in Paris, France, March 29, 2018. Etienne Laurent/Pool via Reuters.

Today we bring you an interview with Professor Steve Horvath pioneer of the epigenetic clocks of aging.

Steve Horvath is a Professor of Human Genetics and Biostatistics at UCLA. His research sits at the intersection of biostatistics, bioinformatics, computational biology, cancer research, genetics, epidemiology, epigenomics, machine learning, and systems biology.

Stupefied astronomers on Wednesday unveiled the first and only known galaxy without dark matter, the invisible and poorly-understood substance thought to make up a quarter of the Universe.

The discovery could revise or even upend theories of how galaxies are formed, they reported in the journal Nature.

“This is really bizarre,” said co-author Roberto Abraham, an astronomer at the University of Toronto.

Continue reading “Astronomers find the ‘impossible’: a galaxy without dark matter” »

Push Beyond Your Limits. Go Stronger, Longer, and Safer.

Experience the first of its kind robotic powered exoskeleton to superpower your knees during alpine skiing and snowboarding. The sensors and the software on the exoskeleton senses user intent and automatically adjusts torque at the knee via air actuators effectively mimicking the quadricep muscles. The device is fully programmable and automated but with manual overrides thus always keeping user in control.

Extend your ski day, access longer challenging terrain, make stronger turns, or simply enjoy the sport without the pain. All the while keeping your knees safer.