Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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But the F-35 program, usually not one to shy away from boasting about their achievements, has been hushed about the prospect of defeating one of the gravest threats to the US.

“I can tell you that the F-35 is a multi-mission fighter,” Commander Patrick Evans of the Office of the Secretary of Defense told Business Insider when asked about the program. “It would be inappropriate to speculate on future capabilities or missions of the weapon system.”

Rep. Duncan Hunter, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, was more open to speculating about why the Pentagon hadn’t gone through with missile intercepting planes.

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In a bold first-of-its-kind experiment, scientists have edited a person’s genes directly inside living tissue in an ambitious bid to cure a man of a rare, crippling genetic disorder.

While CRISPR has broken ground in things like editing human embryos and injecting patients with genetically edited cells, this alternative technique pioneers a new real-time approach to infusing a person’s blood with a gene-editing virus.

“For the first time, a patient has received a therapy intended to precisely edit the DNA of cells directly inside the body,” says CEO of Sangamo Therapeutics, Sandy Macrae, whose company is testing the experimental procedure.

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Thirty-seven years after Dr. Amar Bose hit on the idea of beefing up a loudspeaker’s electromagnetic driver to be an adaptive car suspension, Bose is selling off the technology to ClearMotion, another Boston-area tech company founded by MIT graduates. Bose got as far as developing prototype cars that were exhibited in 2004, though it did bring to market an offshoot, electromagnetically suspended seats for long-haul truck drivers.

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Chinese AI-powered robot Xiaoyi took the country’s medical licensing examinations and passed, according to local reports. Xiaoyi is just one example of how much China is keen on using AI to make a number of industries more efficient.

Experts generally agree that, before we might consider artificial intelligence (AI) to be truly intelligent —that is, on a level on par with human cognition— AI agents have to pass a number of tests. And while this is still a work in progress, AIs have been busy passing other kinds of tests.

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Stanford researchers have developed an that offers diagnoses based off chest X-ray images. It can diagnose up to 14 types of medical conditions and is able to diagnose pneumonia better than expert radiologists working alone.

A paper about the algorithm, called CheXNet, was published Nov. 14 on the open-access, scientific preprint website arXiv.

“Interpreting X-ray images to diagnose pathologies like pneumonia is very challenging, and we know that there’s a lot of variability in the diagnoses radiologists arrive at,” said Pranav Rajpurkar, a graduate student in the Machine Learning Group at Stanford and co-lead author of the paper. “We became interested in developing machine learning algorithms that could learn from hundreds of thousands of chest X-ray diagnoses and make accurate diagnoses.”

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Multiband tunable antennas are a critical part of many communication and radar systems. New research by engineers at the University of Bristol has shown significant advances in antennas by using optically induced plasmas in silicon to tune both radiation patterns and operation frequency.

Conventional antenna tuning is performed with diodes or Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) switches. However, these approaches have significant drawbacks as systems become more complex and move to higher frequencies, which is anticipated for 5G systems.

The first paper, published in IET Optoelectronics, co-authored by Dr Chris Gamlath, Research Associate in RF Engineering during his PhD, shows how a silicon superstrate placed over a slotted microstrip patch can be used to tune radiation patterns.

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Biologist Mark Roth, at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, is working with animal subjects, putting them into suspended animation. The idea is that a patient who is in medical crisis could be put into a suspended state like hibernation, until he or she could be stabilized and in this way, get past it.

Though we tend to expire when the oxygen level is low, many animals go into a suspended state in extremely low oxygen environments. In the lab, one must enter into such an environment quickly. Roth is currently working with nematodes—a kind of roundworm—and expects to eventually work up to humans.

A vegetative state is another aspect of what we consider the gray zone between life and death. Medically, this is when sufficient damage to the brain has occurred, where the person isn’t aware of and can’t respond to their surroundings. They may breathe, have a heartbeat, move their eyes, even show reflexes, but they can’t respond to stimuli or interact with the world. Their brain stem is operating normally, but other parts of the brain may be damaged or inoperable. Most patients who enter such a state never leave it.

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