Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Some people will tell you that the Golden State Warriors are the future of basketball — a migration towards overlapping skill sets, a dozen similar 6-foot-8ish frames playing multiple positions, all switchy and, most importantly, twitchy from behind the 3-point line. This narrative hypothetical has been well-circulated — that we’re moving towards a version of basketball defined by a few unicorns and a surplus of redundantly versatile supporting players.

But what if the future of basketball doesn’t include players at all?

At the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference at the end of February, researches Thomas Seidl and Aditya Cherukumudi presented a paper called Bhostgusters: Realtime Interactive Play Sketching With Synthesized NBA Defenses. The abbreviated summary is that they have developed an app which would allow an NBA coach to sketch a play on their tablet and then receive an animated estimation of how the defense would respond, taking into account the spatial tendencies of the specific defense as well as the players on the floor, defensive roles, the players’ foul trouble and potential fatigue based on minutes played, as well as the time and score. The program also returns an expected value for the offensive play the coach has drawn, given the projected defensive response.

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Walmart has opened a new tech incubator in Austin to focus on emerging technologies.

Engineers, developers and scientists at the incubator are working on the future of shopping and exploring machine learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing, according to a blog post by Walmart.

“The work we’re doing is ultimately about enabling our coworkers to be even more impactful in their jobs,” stated Rachel Brynsvold, data scientist at the lab. “I also see lots of opportunities to make financial impact for the company, which contributes to Walmart’s mission to help people save money and live better.”

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Summary: Treatability of cancer was raised to over 80% by a new intelligent system that sifts through massive genetic datasets to pinpoint targets for cancer treatment, say these scientists. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Scientists in Singapore have discovered a significantly improved way to treat cancer by listening to many different computer programs rather than just one.

Their new computer program reaches a consensus on how to treat a specific tumor, and it is significantly more accurate than existing predictive methods. The system isolates the Achilles heel of each individual tumor, helping doctors to choose the best treatment.

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Summary: UCSD researchers just reported that a strain of bacteria prevents skin cancer. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

The human microbiome is emerging a major player in protecting our health and researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) just reported that some strains of skin bacteria safeguard against cancer.

Leading the study is Richard Gallo, MD, Ph.D., a Distinguished Professor and the chair of the Department of Dermatology at the UCSD School of Medicine, who says.

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Castle Bravo was the first in a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapon design tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, as part of ‘Operation Castle’.

The operation’s ultimate objective was to test designs for a powerful nuclear weapon that could be delivered by aircraft.

Detonated on March 1st 1954, Castle Bravo remains the most powerful nuclear device detonated by the United States.

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The researchers also suggested that aliens could “gift” us with an artificial intelligence (AI) system that may trick humans into developing self-replicating nanobots and eventually deploy them to wreak havoc on our planet. The researchers argue that it would be cheaper for aliens to “send a malicious message to eradicate humans compared to sending battleships”.

In one scenario, the researchers argued that a message from aliens could be a panic-inducing statement like “We will make your sun go supernova tomorrow”. According to the researchers, if such a threatening message is received in just one location, it may be possible to contain and even destroy it. “If it is received repeatedly, perhaps even by amateurs, containment is impossible,” the researchers wrote in a paper available online on arXiv.

In another scenario, the scientists argue that humans could be tricked into begetting their own demise by aliens offering the “gift” of knowledge. For instance, aliens could transmit a message that reads: “We are friends. The galactic library is attached. It is in the form of an artificial intelligence (AI) which quickly learns your language and will answer your questions. You may execute the code following these instructions…”

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A team of astronomers led by Prof. Judd Bowman of Arizona State University unexpectedly stumbled upon “dark matter,” the most mysterious building block of outer space, while attempting to detect the earliest stars in the universe through radio wave signals, according to a study published this week in Nature.

The idea that these signals implicate dark matter is based on a second Nature paper published this week, by Prof. Rennan Barkana of Tel Aviv University, which suggests that the signal is proof of interactions between normal matter and dark matter in the early universe. According to Prof. Barkana, the discovery offers the first direct proof that dark matter exists and that it is composed of low-mass particles.

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