Lifeboat Foundation

Fans of science fiction movies that depict weird, speculative or dystopian futures have plenty to look forward to in 2017. Here are our picks of the movies you should put on your radar if you enjoy cinematic depictions of future technology, from a couple of space station thrillers to a story that turns our current social media exhibitionist tendencies into an Orwellian take on the importance of privacy in a digital age.

The coming year promises to be a good one for those of us watching the augmented and mixed reality world. And the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), starting Jan. 5 in Las Vegas, Nevada, for its 50th year, is bringing 2017 in with a bang—we’re expecting a ton of great announcements on the horizon.

From the HoloLens developers edition release and ever-churning Magic Leap rumor mill, to Pokémon Go and the resurgence of the smart glasses movement, augmented, mixed, and virtual realities have been all over the place in 2016. So, it’s no surprise that for its second year, CES will dedicate an entire section of the floor to augmented reality called the Augmented Reality Marketplace.

This could be a huge deal, a game changer even.

Definitely research to follow closely.

Continue reading “Immune cells in covering of brain discovered; may play critical role in battling neurological diseases” »

Apple’s first paper on artificial intelligence, published Dec. 22 on arXiv (open access), describes a method for improving the ability of a deep neural network to recognize images.

To train neural networks to recognize images, AI researchers have typically labeled (identified or described) each image in a dataset. For example, last year, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers developed a deep-learning method to recognize images taken at regular intervals on a person’s wearable smartphone camera.

Continue reading “Apple’s first AI paper focuses on creating ‘superrealistic’ image recognition” »

Some research suggests macrophages might be the best target for senescent cell therapies. Here is Mantas from cell age answering a reader question “Are senescent macrophages the problem of other cell types?”

Mantas from CellAge answers a question from one of our readers who asked if senescent macrophages (the cleaner cells of the body) should be the focus of senescent cell removal. Some research this year by Gudkov et al. suggests that macrophages become tainted by senescent cell signals and become dysfunctional and that removing them could be beneficial as they could be replaced with macrophages that do work properly.

Continue reading “CellAge Campaign Q&A: Are Senescent Macrophages The Problem Or Other Cell Types?” »

Now you can turn your smartphone into an eye doctor.

Amazon has designed a floating warehouse that sits thousands of feet in the air, from which the internet retailer could dispatch swarms of delivery drones to metropolitan areas.

The company has patented futuristic plans for enormous “airborne fulfillment centres” that would be used as bases for aerial deliveries to homes.

Flying at up to 45,000 feet, the warehouses would be suspended by cables from zeppelin-style airships, and stocked with popular items. When a shopper makes an order, an onboard drone would dive down to earth and deliver it, before being sent back up to the station by a shuttle that could also restock and refuel the floating warehouse.

Continue reading “Amazon’s flying warehouses to dispatch drone deliveries from the sky” »

With almost $10 million in funding, Superflex wants to redesign DARPA exoskeleton technology for the aging mainstream.

Some technological trends fizzle out while others overturn everything. Author Amy Webb explains how she discerns which ones will go in which direction.