Parent company Alphabet would provide services in response to data harvested.
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Man Modifies His Own Genes
Posted in biotech/medical
ProPublica has been documenting the many ways health care dollars are being wasted. We’ve shown how hospitals throw out brand new supplies, nursing homes flush tons of unexpired medication and drug companies concoct costly combinations of cheap medication. Recently we described how arbitrary drug expiration dates cause us to toss safe and potent medicine.
Often, large swaths of the medical and pharmaceutical communities know about this waste — even about solutions to it — but do nothing. Those who end up paying the bill, in one way or another, are consumers.
The makers of cancer drugs also make vials with too much medication for many patients. The excess drugs are tossed in the trash — another reason health care costs are so high.
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Can the process of aging be delayed or even reversed? Research led by specially appointed Professor Jun-Ichi Hayashi from the University of Tsukuba in Japan has shown that, in human cell lines at least, it can. They also found that the regulation of two genes involved with the production of glycine, the smallest and simplest amino acid, is partly responsible for some of the characteristics of aging.
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Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords
Posted in robotics/AI
Last year, Dr. Sergio Canavero created quite the ruckus (to put it mildly) when he vowed to be the first person to transplant a human head onto a deceased donor’s body. Yes, he is planning on attempting the world’s first human head transplant (or body transplant, depending on how you look at it).
In fact, it has been about a year since his initial proclamation, and the Italian neurosurgeon still stands firm on his declaration, despite claims from other experts that it is nothing but a PR Stunt (at best) or a hoax. Some have even hypothesized it’s all just a plot meant to promote Metal Gear Solid.
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The computer that stunned humanity by beating the best mortal players at a strategy board game requiring “intuition” has become even smarter, its creators claim.
Even more startling, the updated version of AlphaGo is entirely self-taught — a major step towards the rise of machines that achieve superhuman abilities “with no human input”, they reported in the science journal Nature.
Dubbed AlphaGo Zero, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) system learnt by itself, within days, to master the ancient Chinese board game known as “Go” — said to be the most complex two-person challenge ever invented.
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Trust My Science
Posted in biotech/medical, science
Transmedics, une machine qui permet de « réanimer » un coeur ayant cessé de battre. Une belle avancée pour augmenter considérablement le nombre de greffons disponibles pour les transplantations!
Via Explore Science
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Debate between Facebook’s head of Artificial Intelligence, Yann LeCun and Prof. Gary Marcus at New York University. The debate was moderated by Prof. David Chalmers and recorded Oct 5th, 2017.
A “nature-nurture” debate took place in the foundations of artificial intelligence. Advocates of deep learning, including Yann LeCun, held that to create advanced artificial intelligence systems, general mechanisms for learning from the environment would play the most important role.
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