Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 10317

Only 35 per cent of five- to 17-year-olds and 62 per cent of children ages 3 and 4 are getting the recommended physical-activity levels for their age group (Editor’s note: around 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily, including vigorous-intensity activity on at least 3 days per week) and that this may be having an impact on the health of their brains.

___ Getting kids outside and active could help with brain health: Participaction report (The Globe and Mail): The physical benefits of kids leading an active lifestyle, including better heart heal…

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The danger, some experts warn, is that A.I. will run into a technical wall and eventually face a popular backlash — a familiar pattern in artificial intelligence since that term was coined in the 1950s. With deep learning in particular, researchers said, the concerns are being fueled by the technology’s limits.

A branch of A.I. called deep learning has transformed computer performance in tasks like vision and speech. But meaning, reasoning and common sense remain elusive.

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A bunch of modern cars already let you unlock your vehicle using your phone, but there isn’t a standard to ensure that the feature will work across devices for years to come. Thankfully, a number of tech firms and automakers are coming together to sort that out.

More than 70 companies, including the likes of Apple, LG, Samsung, Panasonic, Audi, GM, BMW, Hyundai, NXP, Qualcomm, and Volkswagen, have joined hands under the Car Connectivity Consortium to create the Digital Key standard, which is a specification that aims to let you securely unlock and start your vehicle across car and mobile device brands.

The publication of this standard should not only help more companies adopt these features, but also allow owners to share access to their vehicles with others, through their phones.

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A group of researchers from Yale University and Agilent Technologies have developed a #syntheticbiology technique that turns bacterium E. Coli into a phosphorylated protein factory capable of churning out every known instance of this modification in human proteins.

Proteins, the end product of genes, carry out life functions. Most human proteins are modified by a process called serine phosphorylation — a chemical switch that can alter their structure and function. Malfunctions in this process have been implicated in diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s yet are difficult to detect and study. A group of researchers from Yale University and Agilent Technologies have developed a synthetic biology technique that turns bacterium E. Coli into a phosphorylated protein factory capable of churning out every known instance of this modification in human proteins.

“We synthesized over 110,000 phosphoproteins from scratch and we can now study how they all function together,” said Jesse Rinehart, associate professor of cellular and molecular physiology at the Systems Biology Institute and senior author of the research. “This is the future of scientific research — we can build everything we study.”

Previously, researchers were only able to create a single phosphoprotein at a time. The new platform will help scientists create designer proteins by studying the impact of phosphorylation on all potential protein interactions, the authors say. “Biologists want to know which proteins interact with each other because diseases can arise when these interactions go wrong,” said Karl Barber, a Yale graduate student who is the first author on the study and a recently named Schmidt Science Fellow.

Continue reading “New platform will help create designer human proteins in the lab” | >

An international team of astronomers have made the most precise test of gravity outside our own solar system.

By combining data taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, their results show that gravity in this galaxy behaves as predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, confirming the theory’s validity on galactic scales.

In 1915 Albert Einstein proposed his general theory of relativity (GR) to explain how gravity works. Since then GR has passed a series of high precision tests within the solar system, but there have been no precise tests of GR on large astronomical scales.

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The Himalayan Range includes some of the youngest and most spectacular mountains on Earth, but the rugged landscape that lends it the striking beauty for which it is known can also keep scientists from fully understanding how these mountains formed. “We know more about the rocks on parts of Mars than we do about some of the areas in the Himalaya,” said Dr. Alka Tripathy-Lang.

“Many researchers have done extraordinary geologic mapping in this rugged region, but the fact is that some places are just completely inaccessible because of topography, elevation, or geopolitical issues. The rocks in those areas are an important piece of the tectonic puzzle and are important for understanding the way the region evolved,” said Dr. Wendy Bohon. “The tools we used, originally developed for mapping rocks on Mars, were a way to safely access information about the rocks in the Himalayas.”

Bohon and colleagues worked with researchers at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University to use data from the Earth orbiting satellite Terra in the same way planetary geologists have been using data from the Mars orbiting satellite Odyssey.

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