Lifeboat Foundation

By ransdell pierson and bill berkrot.

(Reuters) — U.S. health officials on Thursday reported the first case in the country of a patient with an infection resistant to a last-resort antibiotic, and expressed grave concern that the superbug could pose serious danger for routine infections if it spreads.

“We risk being in a post-antibiotic world,” said Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, referring to the urinary tract infection of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman who had not traveled within the prior five months.

Continue reading “Corrected: U.S. sees first case of bacteria resistant to last-resort antibiotic” »

The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman uses evolutionary game theory to show that our perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions.

Nearly 2,400 years after his death, archaeologists believe they’ve finally found the tomb of Aristotle. Researchers made the discovery during a 20-year dig in the ancient Greek city of Stagira, reports Atlas Obscura.

Aristotle was born there in 384 BC, but he died in a different city, Chalcis, about 50 miles north of Athens. Literary sources mention that Aristotle’s remains were moved to Stagira after his death, but his burial site has been a topic of debate for many years, the International Business Times reports.

The tomb in Stagira believed to be the philosopher’s is a 32-foot-tall dome with a marble floor and views of the entire city. “The thing is, the archaeologist data is in fine accordance with historical sources,” archaeologist Konstantinos Sismanidis tells CNN.

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Perhaps it’s serendipitous, then, that the machines have finally arrived. Truly smart, truly impressive robots and machine learning algorithms that may help usher in a new Green Revolution to keep humans fed on an increasingly mercurial planet. Think satellites that automatically detect drought patterns, tractors that eyeball plants and kill the sick ones, and an AI-powered smartphone app that can tell a farmer what disease has crippled their crop.

Forget scarecrows. The future of agriculture is in the hands of the machines.

A Digital Green Thumb

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And it’s not made of cardboard.

https://www.facebook.com//videos/496701823842355/

Say ‘Goodbye’ to Cracks, Self-Healing Concrete Has Arrived.

Fujitsu is building a robot that uses 3D laser sensors to detect motion without the need for athletes to wear any special suits. The robot will be ready for the Olympics in 2020 in Japan, and will precisely score gymnasts based on measurements taken by the sensors.

Japan is making sure the 2020 Olympics will be a technological festivity. They even may be spending a staggering $8.1 million for an artificial meteor shower.

In addition to the “fireworks,” Fujitsu, in partnership with the Japan Gymnastics Association, is developing the ultimate judge to end all biases in the Olympics: a robot programmed to precisely score gymnasts at the Olympics with absolute fairness by using 3D laser sensors capable of measuring 76,800 points of motion per frame up to 30 times per second.

Continue reading “Fujitsu is Making a Robot to Judge Tokyo’s 2020 Olympics” »

https://www.facebook.com/newscientist/videos/10154279383894589/

This implant turns heartbeat into electricity.