Lifeboat Foundation

At the recent RSA Conference it was virtually impossible to find a vendor that was not claiming to use machine learning. Both new and established companies are now touting “machine learning” as a major component of the data science being used in their products. What the heck is machine learning anyway? And is it really going to reshape cyber security in 2016?

For brevity’s sake, I’ll define machine learning as the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. Over the past decade, machine learning has enabled self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and has vastly improved our understanding of the human genome. Machine learning is so pervasive today that we use it dozens of times a day without knowing it. Many researchers also think machine learning is the best way to make progress towards human-level Artificial Intelligence.

[ MORE MACHINE LEARNING: Machine learning: Cybersecurity dream-come-true or pipe dream? ].

Continue reading “Machine learning is reshaping security” »

Researchers at the ASU School of Life Sciences may have found a way to improve crop performance and yield with the help of some new biotechnology. They’ve discovered a method to enhance a plant’s tolerance to stress, which could help them survive inclement conditions and still produce food.

The world’s population is currently exploding. There is already well over 7 billion people on Earth, and that number is expected to grow even larger in the next few years. This means that feeding the human race will become more of a challenge in the coming decades.

As the human population grows, climate change is taking its toll. Weather conditions are shifting in areas that are usually used to grow crops, which means that plants in those areas may not produce as much as they normally would. Drought, abnormal heat and other conditions could cause farms to lose production.

Continue reading “New Biotechnology Improves Crop Tolerance To Stress And Absorption Of Nutrients” »

Washington D.C.: A new study has revealed that fruit flies, who have similar sleeping habits like humans, can tell a lot about the connection between sleep deprivation and metabolic disorders like diabetes, obesity, and blood glucose levels.

The study conducted by the Florida Atlantic University is the first to identify that a conserved gene called translin works as a modulator of sleep in response to metabolic changes.

The study establishes that translin is an essential integrator of sleep and metabolic state, with important implications for understanding the neural mechanism underlying sleep deprivation in response to environmental challenges.

Continue reading “Gene responsible for sleep deprivation discovered” »

The toughest thing about HIV is the fact that it can mutate and hide and pretend to be a healthy cell. This is what makes it hard to cure HIV or AIDS. However there has been progress in Temple University as their researchers were able to find a way to eradicate HIV-1 from the body through gene-snipping.

FRIDAY, March 25, 2016 — Brain stimulation may ease major symptoms of the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, a typically hard-to-treat condition, a new study suggests.

British researchers evaluated anorexia patients before and after they underwent repetitive transcranial stimulation (rTMS), a treatment approved for depression.

“With rTMS we targeted … an area of the brain thought to be involved in some of the self-regulation difficulties associated with anorexia,” study first author Jessica McClelland, a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College London, said in a school news release.

Continue reading “Brain stimulation may help people with anorexia” »

York Instruments, Royal Halloway develop HyQUID.

A new DARPA challenge seeks to help defense and commercial wireless users cohabitate on airwaves, but DOD’s CIO warns “there is a physical limitation to how fast we can move” to free up frequencies.

DARPA, NASA spend millions to develop the needed technologies to go really fast.

Researchers at Xerox PARC are working on a way to cheaply print efficient solar cells at a large scale.