Lifeboat Foundation

There weren’t many people who had heard of bioterrorism before 9/11. But shortly after the September 11th terrorist attacks, a wave of anthrax mailings diverted the attention of the public towards a new weapon in the arsenal of terrorists—bioterrorism. A US federal prosecutor found that an army biological researcher was responsible for mailing the anthrax-laced letters, which killed 5 and sickened 15 people in 2001. The cases generated huge media attention, and the fear of a new kind of terrorist warfare was arising.

However, as with every media hype, the one about bioterrorism disappeared quickly.

But looking toward the future, I believe that we may not be paying as much attention to it as we should. Although it may be scary, we have to prepare ourselves for the worst. It is the only way we can be prepared to mitigate the damages of any harmful abuses if (and when) they arise.

Continue reading “The Future of Extremism: Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Biology Will Transform Terrorism” »

It definitely can.

NEW YORK (CNN) — There was another big win in the advancement of immunotherapy treatments for cancer this week.

The Food and Drug Administration approved an immunotherapy drug called Keytruda, which stimulates the body’s immune system, for the first-line treatment of patients with metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer.

Continue reading “Can your own immune system kill cancer?” »

As I have stated many times; anyone not adding QC to their 5 yr roadmaps is not planning well.

Scientists are getting closer to a breakthrough in quantum technology — one where the transfer of information via quantum principles makes the process almost instantaneous.

Scientists from the Polytechnique Montreal and France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) have brought the world closer to a time when information can now be transferred instantaneously.

Continue reading “A Quantum Era: Scientists Now Closer to Instantaneous Information Transfer Between Matter and Light” »

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 14, 2016 /PRNewswire/ IBM (NYSE: IBM) and NVIDIA (NVDA)today announced collaboration on a new deep learning tool optimized for the latest IBM and NVIDIA technologies to help train computers to think and learn in more human-like ways at a faster pace.

Deep learning is a fast growing machine learning method that extracts information by crunching through millions of pieces of data to detect and rank the most important aspects from the data. Publicly supported among leading consumer web and mobile application companies, deep learning is quickly being adopted by more traditional business enterprises.

Deep learning and other artificial intelligence capabilities are being used across a wide range of industry sectors; in banking to advance fraud detection through facial recognition; in automotive for self-driving automobiles and in retail for fully automated call centers with computers that can better understand speech and answer questions.

Continue reading “IBM and NVIDIA Team Up on World’s Fastest Deep Learning Enterprise Solution” »

Quantum computing is heralded as the next revolution in terms of global computing. Google, Intel and IBM are just some of the big names investing millions currently in the field of quantum computing which will enable faster, more efficient computing required to power our future computing needs.

Now a researcher and his team at Tyndall National Institute in Cork have made a ‘quantum leap’ by developing a technical step that could enable the use of quantum computers sooner than expected.

Conventional digital computing uses ‘on-off’ switches, but quantum computing looks to harness quantum state of matters – such as entangled photons of light or multiple states of atoms – to encode information. In theory, this can lead to much faster and more powerful computer processing, but the technology to underpin quantum computing is currently difficult to develop at scale.

Continue reading “Tyndall Technology Lights the way for Quantum Computing” »

QC micro devices are coming.

Researchers from The University of Manchester have taken a significant step closer to demonstrate that it is possible to create miniscule – but very powerful – computers that could work at atomic scale.

Scientists have been working on the developing the theory of quantum computing for decades – that is, highly efficient and powerful computing created at atomic scale. Such computing would perform some computational tasks far more efficiently than the computers we currently use.

Continue reading “Manchester Researchers a Step Closer to Developing Quantum Computing” »

I told folks that we would find that crystalized formations is truly making a difference in the future of QC. There is so much more for us to learn how impactful the formations are in some many areas of communications and technology.

It does make one step back and ponder that perhaps we truly are connected in so many ways as John Wheeler has described many times.

Zinc selenide is a crystal in which atoms are precisely organized, and it is considered a well-known semiconductor material, conducive to introducing tellurium impurities, which can effectively trap positively-charged “holes.” Electron holes are not physical particles like negatively-charged electrons, but can be thought of as the absence of an electron in a particular place in an atom.

Continue reading “Creating Ultrafast Qubits In Zinc Selenide Crystal” »

Immune system decline one of the hallmarks of aging and something that we should be concerned about addressing.

The age associated decline in immune function is preceded in mammals by a reduction in thymic output. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence of a link between immune competence and lifespan. One approach to determining thymic output is to quantify signal joint T cell receptor excision circles (sj-TRECs), a method which has been developed and used in several mammalian species. Life expectancy and the rate of aging vary in dogs depending upon their breed. In this study, we quantified sj-TRECs in blood samples from dogs of selected breeds to determine whether there was a relationship between longevity and thymic output. In Labrador retrievers, a breed with a median expected lifespan of 11 years, there was an age-associated decline in sj-TREC values, with the greatest decline occurring before 5 years of age, but with sj-TREC still detectable in some geriatric animals, over 13 years of age. In large short-lived breeds (Burnese mountain dogs, Great Danes and Dogue de Bordeaux), the decline in sj-TREC values began earlier in life, compared with small long-lived breeds (Jack Russell terriers and Yorkshire terriers), and the presence of animals with undetectable sj-TRECs occurred at a younger age in the short-lived breeds. The study findings suggest that age-associated changes in canine sj-TRECs are related to breed differences in longevity, and this research highlights the use of dogs as a potential model of immunosenescence.

Citation: Holder A, Mella S, Palmer DB, Aspinall R, Catchpole B (2016) An Age-Associated Decline in Thymic Output Differs in Dog Breeds According to Their Longevity. PLoS ONE 11(11): e0165968. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0165968

Continue reading “An Age-Associated Decline in Thymic Output Differs in Dog Breeds According to Their Longevity” »

With bots the size of a single blood cell, this could spur a huge leap in the field of non-invasive surgeries.

Scientists have developed the world’s first light-seeking synthetic nanorobot which may help surgeons remove tumours and enable more precise engineering of targeted medications.

It has been a dream in science fiction for decades that tiny robots can fundamentally change our daily life. The famous science fiction movie “Fantastic Voyage” is a very good example, with a group of scientists driving their miniaturised Nano-submarine inside human body to repair a damaged brain.

Continue reading “Scientists develop world’s first light-seeking synthetic nanorobot” »