British biomedical engineers have developed a new generation of intelligent prosthetic limbs that allows the wearer to reach for objects automatically, without thinking — just like a real hand.
The hand’s camera takes a picture of the object in front of it, assesses its shape and size, picks the most appropriate grasp, and triggers a series of movements in the hand — all within milliseconds.
University of Nottingham researchers created an AI system that scanned routine medical data to predict which patients would have strokes or heart attacks within 10 years. The AI system beat the standard method of prediction, correctly making calls in 355 more cases than traditional means. Predicting cardiovascular events like strokes and heart attacks is a notoriously challenging task. In fact, the researchers note in their recent paper that around half of all strokes and heart attacks occur in patients who were never identified as being “at risk.”
The records included a decade of health outcomes, lab data, drug information, hospital records, and demographic information. The team identified the distinguishing characteristics of patients who experienced strokes and heart attacks using 75 percent of the records. They then tested their models against the standard guidelines using the remaining 25 percent of the records. The standard guidelines scored 0.728 out of 1.0, with the latter signifying 100 percent accuracy. The machine models scored between 0.745 to 0.764, with the neural network making 355 more accurate predictions than the standard guidelines, therefore earning the best score. Had those predictions been made in real time, the patients could have been provided with preventative care.
A lunar colony seems an obvious choice for space colonization. It’s relatively close to Earth and we won’t get homesick that easily, right? You’d be surprised to learn the exact opposite. Given its atmosphere is almost non-existent, an underground facility would be in dire need. The settlement on moon should be about 4 meters or 13 feet deep. Do you still want to go there?
Maybe you should read further now and decide for yourself as nine space-age designs have finally been revealed as the winners of the Moontopia competition. Visualizing a decent life on the moon has become the main objective for many architects and designers who submitted their very own proposal to the design magazine Eleven. The competition ran from August to November 2016 and a jury of NASA designers, space-architects, academics and the editorial team at Eleven themselves selected the top nine entries these days.
In January, Angelenos were elated to discover that Star Wars creator George Lucas has selected Exposition Park as the future site of his Museum of Narrative Art. An upcoming presentation to the Los Angeles City Planning Commission has unveiled new renderings for the $1-billion project, suggesting changes from the initial designs presented last year.
Slated for two city-owned parking lots on Vermont Avenue south of Exposition Boulevard, the museum would take the form of a four-story, 115-foot tall building featuring 300,000 square feet of floor area. Plans call for a vacation of 39th Street between Vermont Avenue and Bill Robertson Lane, allowing for the construction of an underground parking garage across the site featuring more than 2,400 vehicle spaces. The subterranean garage levels would be capped with 11 acres of public green space.
The design from Chinese architect Ma Yansong has evolved to beome more compact than the sinewy images last seen in January.
Researches successfully avoided brain-damaging blood loss while the donor head was being attached to the recipient rat.
The world has been gifted, or maybe cursed, with the latest iteration of creepy head transplant experiments.
In a new study published in CNS Neuroscience and Therapeutics, researchers in China grafted the heads of smaller rats onto the necks of larger rats because we all know that rats with two heads are better than rats with one.
Posted in robotics/AI
Summary: Chemical compound mimics the beneficial effects of exercise, including fat burning and increasing stamina, a new study reports.
Source: Salk Institute.
Sedentary mice given the drug ran longer without training.
Every week, there seems to be another story about the health benefits of running. That’s great—but what if you can’t run? For the elderly, obese or otherwise mobility-limited, the rewards of aerobic exercise have long been out of reach.
For those who can only speak one language, people who have the ability to speak multiple are often a source of fascination. What language do they think in? Can they switch mid-way through? Do they only dream in one language or both?
It turns out, these questions are not without merit as people who can speak two languages actually experience time in a different way.
A study from Lancaster University and Stockholm University, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, found that people who are bilingual think about time differently depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events.
Another futurist, Dave Evans, founder and CTO of Silicon Valley stealth startup Stringify, gave his thoughts about Kurzweil’s nanobot idea in an interview with James Bedsole on February.
Evans explained that he thinks such a merging of technology and biology isn’t at all farfetched. In fact, he described three stages as to how this will occur: the wearable phase (where we are today), the embeddable phase (where we’re headed, with neural implants and such), and the replaceable phase.
Researches successfully avoided brain-damaging blood loss while the donor head was being attached to the recipient rat.
