Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 10479

Mukherjee is now 47 and lives in New York; Marsh, 67, lives in Oxford. To different extents both of these doctors still practise in their respective fields – Mukherjee at Columbia University’s cancer centre, Marsh as a visiting doctor at various hospitals around the world, including in Kathmandu in Nepal. Both men have continued to write: Marsh a second volume of autobiography, called Admissions, published this year, and Mukherjee a study of genetics called The Gene: An Intimate History, published last year. When they sat down to talk to each other over Skype one Saturday afternoon in November, they began with a subject on which their two lifelong disciplines overlap: the treatment of brain cancer.

The cancer specialist and the neurosurgeon talk about treating cancer, writing and facing death in their own families by .

Read more

There are a lot of people in the world that need glasses on a daily basis. Despite their often expensive price tag, they do little more than correct poor eyesight. Let Glass updates glasses for the 21st century by integrating them with smart home connectivity.

While maintaining a slim form factor, Let Glass features audio entertainment, telephone communication, and voice interaction. Using Alexa and a built-in microphone, these frames allow users to control their smartphones without fumbling through their pockets. Simply tapping the legs of the smart glasses activate remote control functions, while voice commands handle everything else. In addition to Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Google Now are also supported.

Keeping with a traditional appearance, audio is produced using bone conduction technology. Instead of a speaker, the glasses vibrate the small bones in the ear to produce sound. This also keeps ears open to other noises, ensuring users remain aware of their surroundings. This allows users to listen to music, track activity, use voice navigation, call a friend, and more.

Read more

Yes.

Physicists in the QUTIS Quantum Biomimetics and Quantum Artificial Life research group at the Department of Physical Chemistry, University of the Basque Country in Spain have harnessed the unprecedented power of the IBM Q Cloud Quantum Computer —recently made available for public use ( IBM makes 20 qubit quantum computing machine available as a cloud service) —to reproduce the hallmark features of Darwinian life and evolution in microscopic quantum systems, proving they can efficiently encode quantum features and biological behaviors that are usually associated with living systems and natural selection.

Read more

A team at MIT has genetically modified bacteria cells and developed a new 3D printing technique to create a “living tattoo” that can respond to a variety of stimuli.

Electronic tattoos and smart ink technologies are showing exciting potential for reframing how we think of wearable sensor devices. While many engineers are experimenting with a variety of responsive materials the MIT team wondered if live cells could be co-opted into a functional use.

The first step was to look at what organic cells could be utilized, and it turned out that the strong cell walls of bacteria were the best target for use as they could survive the force of a 3D printer’s nozzle. Bacteria also proved to be perfectly compatible with the hydrogels needed for accurate 3D printing.

Read more

In the mid-1900s, art historian Maurits Michel van Dantzig developed a system to identify artists by their brush or pen strokes, which he called Pictology. Dantzig found shape, length, direction, and pressure all contributed to a kind of stroke signature, unique to each artist.

New research with contributions from The Hague suggests that Pictology might be the key to helping machines understand art, allowing systems to quickly verify whether brushstrokes were from an original painter or a forger.

After analyzing 80,000 brushstrokes from 297 digitized sketches and drawings, an AI system was able to spot forged drawings in the style of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Egon Schiele with 100% accuracy. The “fakes” were commissioned recreations of specific drawings, which the algorithms had not been shown previously.

Read more

An Interview with Jennifer Gidley

by Tracey Follows, Founder/Director of the Female Futures Bureau

Jennifer Gidley is a former President of the World Futures Studies Federation (2009−2017), a UNESCO and UN partner and global peak body for futures studies scholarship, she led a network of hundreds of world leading futures scholars and researchers from around the globe. An adjunct Professor at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, UTS in Sydney, futurist, author, psychologist and educator, Jennifer is a prolific author of dozens of academic papers, serves on several academic boards, and most recently authored Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures (Springer, 2016) & The Future: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2017).

Tracey: I spoke to Jennifer about her perspective on Female Futures.

One of the issues we discuss a lot at The Female Futures Bureau is why more female futurists don’t have a higher profile. And Jennifer agrees that it’s not because they aren’t around:

“I actually believe there are a large number of female futurists globally, and probably always have been. I would suggest that there are as many women involved in futures studies and foresight work as there are men…”

Read More

Daniel Ellsberg gained notoriety in the early 1970s for leaking the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s top-secret history of the Vietnam War, and then for outspokenly protesting the war and the government’s secrecy which sustained it. Yet few, then or now, are aware that he spent much of the previous decade immersed in highly classified studies of the U.S. nuclear-war machine: how it works, who can launch an attack, and how much devastation it can wreak if someone ever pushed the button.

His new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, is his long-gestating memoir of those times and the years since, and it is one of the best books ever written on the subject—certainly the most honest and revealing account by an insider who plunged deep into the nuclear rabbit hole’s mad logic and came out the other side.

Dr. Strangelove “was a documentary,” writes the man behind the Pentagon Papers.

Read more

Lots of futurists are in it. A 5-min section on my #transhumanism work, including the Transhumanist Bill of Rights (image of me below writing the first version on steps of US Supreme Court), is in the doc. My section starts about 45:30, and there are some YouTube versions out there too now (google the title Cyborgs Entre Nosotros) if there are issues to watch outside Spain: http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/la-noche-tematica/noche-t…s/4341838/

Read more