Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Just five years ago, artificial intelligence-enabled computers could barely recognize images fed to them, much less analyze them anything like people can. But suddenly, they’ve turned the tables.

“In 2011 their error rate was 26 percent,” says Jeff Dean, chief of the Google Brain project, which along with other tech giants has helped lead a recent revolution in image recognition as well as speech recognition and self-driving cars. Now, he says, computers’ ability to view and analyze images (pictured) exceeds what human eyes can do.

“If you ’ d have told me that would be a possible just a few years ago, I would ’ ve never believed you,” Dean said during an appearance at a research event in Heidelberg, Germany. But thanks to AI-enabled computer vision advances, computers “can now see … and that has opened our eyes (about) what is possible.”

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Huge queues formed at airports around the world today after an IT system vital to scores of airlines crashed due to one faulty switch.

A program run by a huge tech firm called Amadeus is behind computers for British Airways, Air France, Lufthansa and other carriers, who use it every day to check passengers onto flights.

But the system was sent into meltdown today when the firm accidentally triggered a computer crash, causing long lines of upset passengers to form at airports across the globe.

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NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos have announced a new partnership for human exploration of the moon and deep space. Both agencies signed a joint statement on cooperation today (Sept. 27) at the 68th International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.

The decision to partner with Russia on human missions to the moon and beyond came about as NASA continues to flesh out ideas for its “deep-space gateway” concept, a mission architecture designed to send astronauts into cislunar space — or lunar orbit — by the 2020s. Traveling to and from cislunar space will help NASA and its partners gain the knowledge and experience necessary to venture beyond the moon and into deep space.

A crewed mission to the moon and ultimately deep space would likely involve NASA’s gigantic new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion space capsule. “This plan challenges our current capabilities in human spaceflight and will benefit from engagement by multiple countries and U.S. industry,” NASA officials said in a statement. [Photos: NASA’s Space Launch System for Deep Space Flights].

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Lockheed Martin has revealed plans to set up a ‘Mars base camp’ orbiting the red planet — and says it hopes to launch it within ten years.

Using NASA’s Orion spacecraft as the command deck, the orbiting outpost could give astronauts the ability to operate rovers and drones on the surface in real time, helping us better understand the Red Planet and plan for manned missions.

‘The time is now,’ Lockheed Martin said in a video revealing the project at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia, where it also showed off a lander that could eventually take astronauts form the station to the red planet’s surface.

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(Natural News) A rigorous new study conducted at the The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and published in the science journal Human Reproduction Update finds that human sperm production has declined 59.3% from 1973 to 2011, trending toward a collapse of human population.

Via Science Daily:

…The researchers found …a 59.3 percent decline in total sperm count, among men from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand who were not selected based on their fertility status. These findings strongly suggest a significant decline in male reproductive health that has serious implications beyond fertility and reproduction, given recent evidence linking poor semen quality with higher risk of hospitalization and death.

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Some of my work in this new funny story on AI and politics: http://metro.co.uk/2017/09/28/6-reasons-why-robots-would-mak…s-6924685/ #transhumanism

A quarter of people in the UK believe robots would be better than human politicians.

Well, I’m here to persuade the other three-quarters that having a robot in Parliament would be better than having Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson.

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Drawing a roadmap to combat the spread of deserts worldwide. It’s the mission of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in the Inner Mongolian city of Erdos. The host country, China, was praised for a law it passed in 2002 — the world’s first integrated law dedicated to combating desert expansion. With this goal in mind, China has carried out several projects that have been successful, including at one desert in northern China. CGTN’s Frances Kuo reports.

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Very recently, the World Health Organization, which is essentially the United Nations’ agency for coordinating international health-related efforts, has launched The Global Online Consultation on Research Priority Setting for Healthy Aging. A corresponding survey is available on the WHO website and can be filled until September 30. As WHO is the main source of policy recommendations for the UN member states, its position can significantly influence the allocation of state funding to different areas of scientific research.

This is why we at LEAF urge you to step in and fill out the WHO survey; our community needs to demand more focused efforts to understand the basic mechanisms of aging, to develop innovative therapies to address these mechanisms, and to remove the barriers delaying the implementation of rejuvenation technologies into clinical practice.

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