Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Lockheed Martin engineers are collaborating with customers and academia to research, develop and implement the technology that will detect and defeat swarms.

“We are currently developing a 60-kilowatt system that combines multiple fiber lasers to generate the high power weapon beam,” said Rob Afzal, senior fellow with Lockheed Martin’s Laser and Sensor systems division.

Because the system relies on many modular fiber lasers, it is easily scalable to meet different levels of power. With this parallel approach, there is no single point of failure that will compromise the laser’s power and functionality – as long as power exists. The laser weapon system can fire over and over, essentially creating an unlimited magazine of ‘bullets.’

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In Brief:

Researchers at MIT have developed an easy-to-use “biological programming language” that allows genetic engineers (or just about anyone) to design biological circuits and “hack” the genomes of living cells.

The evolution of human technology has proceeded in lockstep with the biological evolution of our species. For millions of years we were content with our primitive Oldowan choppers and Acheulean bifaces; in the Neolithic, we started playing with more sophisticated tools, and the Bronze and Iron ages followed in quick succession.

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A paralysed woman in the Netherlands is the first to be fitted with a new type of brain implant that allows patients who cannot speak or move to communicate using nothing but their thoughts.

The new implant, which works with a computer interface to help her spell out words and sentences, can be used anywhere, allowing her to communicate with people in the outside world, without medical experts on hand to help.

“This is a world first,” neuroscientist and lead researcher Nick Ramsay, from the University Medical School Utrecht, told CNN. “It’s a fully implantable system that works at home without need for any experts to make it work.”

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The Tesla P100 represents a large departure for Nvidia, a company that has focused almost solely on developing chips for workstations and gaming rigs. With the P100, Nvidia is setting their sights on data centers and deep-learning technology.

This is a huge risk as it involves the development of many other things, like a new architecture, new interconnect, and new process, all of which went into the creation of the Tesla P100.

“Our strategy is to accelerate deep learning everywhere,” said Huang.

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It’s one of the most fundamental compounds on Earth, and it makes up roughly 60 percent of the human body, and yet water is turning out to be stranger than we could have ever imagined.

Researchers have been investigating the physical properties of water, and found that when it’s heated to between 40 and 60 degrees Celsius, it hits a ‘crossover temperature’, and appears to start switching between two different states of liquid.

As a chemical compound, water is so vital to life on Earth, we’ve been underestimating how legitimately weird it is.

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Humans have been storing, retrieving, manipulating, and communicating information since the Sumerians in Mesopotamia developed writing in 3000 BCE. Since then, we have continuously developed more and more sophisticated means to communicate and push information. Whether unconsciously or consciously, we seem to always need more data, faster than ever. And with every technological breakthrough that comes along, we also have a set of new concepts that reshape our world.

We can think back, for example, to Gutenberg’s printing press. Invented in 1440, it pushed printing costs down and gave birth to revolutionary concepts like catalogs (the first was published in 1495 in Venice by publisher Aldus Manutiu and listed all the books that he was printing), mass media (which enabled revolutionary ideas to transcend borders), magazines, newspapers, and so on. All these concepts emerged from a single “master” technology breakthrough and have had a great impact on every single aspect of individuals’ lives and the global world picture.

A hundred years later, the core idea of data distribution has not changed much. We still browse catalogs to buy our next pair of shoes, we create catalogs to sell our products and services, and we still browse publications looking for information.

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“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears…in…rain. Time to die.” — Roy Batty, Blade Runner

Artificial intelligence has fascinated mankind for more than half a century, with the first public mention of computer intelligence recorded during a London lecture by Alan Turing in 1947. More recently, the public has been exposed to headlines that have increasingly contained references to the growing power of AI, whether that’s been AlphaGo’s defeat of legendary Go player Lee Se-dol, Microsoft’s racist AI bot named Tay or any other number of new developments in the machine learning field. Once a plot device for science-fiction tales, AI is becoming real — and human beings are going to have to define their relationship with it sooner rather than later.

Peter Diamandis, co-founder and vice-chairman at Human Longevity, Inc., touches on that relationship in a post he authored on LinkedIn, titled “The next sexual revolution will be digitized.” Diamandis points to recent reports showing that the Japanese are increasingly abandoning sex and relationships, while a growing subset of men report that they prefer to have virtual girlfriends over real ones.

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Immunotherapies and progressing rapidly and could be a way to help your own body fight cancer by allowing the immune system to see the cancer cells and attack them.

A Ludwig Cancer Research study shows that an experimental drug currently in clinical trials can reverse the effects of troublesome cells that prevent the body’s immune system from attacking tumors. The researchers also establish that it is these suppressive cells that interfere with the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors. This class of immunotherapies lifts the brakes that the body imposes on the immune system’s T cells to unleash an attack on cancer cells.

“Though checkpoint inhibitors have durable effects when they work, not all patients respond to the treatment,” says Taha Merghoub, an investigator at the Ludwig Memorial Sloan Kettering Collaborative Laboratory who led the study with Director Jedd Wolchok. “Part of the reason for this is that some tumors harbor -associated myeloid , or TAMCs, that prevent T cells from attacking .”

In a study published online today in Nature, Merghoub and his team used mouse models of cancer to show that the effects of TAMCs can be reversed by an appropriately targeted therapy.

Continue reading “Researchers show how a targeted drug overcomes suppressive immune cells” | >

Lookout the Russian Robots are coming.

A new pair of Russian robots has been developed that can track and attack humans from more than four miles away. The devices are designed for use on the Russian border and claim to accurately detect and attack ground and aerial threats long before they reach Russian soil.

Key technology at the robots’ disposal includes radar, HD and thermal video imaging, and multiple long-range grenade launchers. The first of the two new robots will act as a pair of scrupulous eyes for Russian border guards.

The ‘Flight’ robot is armed with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance tools to spot potential intruders, such as low-flying drones and other vehicles, from over six miles away. Russian engineers claim it could be used to pick out targets for long-range explosive weaponry. But the impressive device will mostly be used for general surveillance.

Continue reading “Russia unveils killer robots with deadly range more than FOUR miles” | >