Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Dangerous thought.

The scientific world was set ablaze of late as discussions ramped up about the resurrection of the wholly mammoth. I know what you’re thinking: Jurassic Park. Well, not quite — but maybe not that far off, either. Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York, wonders: what if we could clone the Neanderthal, or a dinosaur, based solely off their genomes?

George Church, geneticist and director of Harvard University’s Church Labs, believes that we can clone a Neanderthal in our lifetime. So much so that he thinks all we need is “one extremely adventurous human female.” While he doesn’t advocate for the project to be attempted straight away, he does encourage discussion on the matter. Church believes that with current stem cell technology and our completed sequence of the Neanderthal genome, we are equipped with the potential to clone a Neanderthal.

The Neanderthals went extinct tens of thousands of years ago, so cloning one from recovered DNA would be impressive enough of a feat — but what about something from 65 million years ago? Dr. Kaku addresses this, admitting that cloning a dinosaur won’t be as easy as cloning a Neanderthal or a mammoth (which wouldn’t very “easy” to begin with) — but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

Continue reading “Forget Mammoths, We Could Bring Dinosaurs and Neanderthals Back to Life” | >

A 3D bioprinter able to create human skin is already being used to help burns patients and carry out skin testing, Alfredo Brisac, CEO of Spanish bioengineering company BioDan, told Radio Sputnik.

Last month, scientists at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the BioDan Group presented a prototype 3D bioprinter that can create human skin suitable for transplantation to patients or for use in cosmetic, chemical or pharmaceutical testing.

One of the first living human organs to be created using bioprinting, the 3D-printed skin is created using bio-inks with living cells that are deposited onto a structure that replicates nature. The bio-ink contains the key elements of keratinocytes, fibroblasts and fibrin, which can recreate the structure of the skin.

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Our artificial intelligence systems are continuing to get smarter, with scientists demonstrating that a system called DeepCoder is now clever enough to borrow bits of code from other programs to solve basic problems.

But the team behind the tool don’t want to put human programmers out of a job – they want to make it easier for people to build programs without any coding knowledge.

DeepCoder is a project run by Microsoft and the University of Cambridge, using deep learning techniques to mimic the neural network of a brain, where vast amounts of data are processed and evaluated to make decisions.

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Na JPMorgan Chase & Co., uma máquina de aprendizagem está analisando os acordos financeiros que antes mantinham equipes jurídicas ocupadas por milhares de horas.

O programa, chamado COIN, para o Contrato de Inteligência, faz a tarefa de interpretar acordos de empréstimo comercial que, até que o projeto foi lançado em junho, consumiu 360 mil horas de trabalho por ano por advogados e agentes de crédito. O software revê os documentos em segundos, é menos propenso a erros e nunca pede férias.

No que diz respeito à COIN, o programa ajudou a JPMorgan a reduzir os erros de manutenção de empréstimos, a maioria resultante de erro humano na interpretação de 12.000 novos contratos por ano, de acordo com os seus criadores.

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BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Three types of potatoes genetically engineered to resist the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine are safe for the environment and safe to eat, federal officials have announced.

The approval by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration late last week gives Idaho-based J.R. Simplot Company permission to plant the potatoes this spring and sell them in the fall.

The company said the potatoes contain only potato genes, and that the resistance to late blight, the disease that caused the Irish potato famine, comes from an Argentine variety of potato that naturally produced a defense.

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Colloidal particles, used in a range of technical applications including foods, inks, paints, and cosmetics, can self-assemble into a remarkable variety of densely-packed crystalline structures. For decades, though, researchers have been trying to coax colloidal spheres to arranging themselves into much more sparsely populated lattices in order to unleash potentially valuable optical properties. These structures, called photonic crystals, could increase the efficiency of lasers, further miniaturize optical components, and vastly increase engineers’ ability to control the flow of light.

A team of engineers and scientists from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, the NYU Center for Soft Matter Research, and Sungkyunkwan University School of Chemical Engineering in the Republic of Korea report they have found a pathway toward the self-assembly of these elusive photonic crystal structures never assembled before on the sub-micrometer scale (one micrometer is about 100 times smaller than the diameter of a strand of human hair).

The research, which appears in the journal Nature Materials, introduces a new design principle based on preassembled components of the desired superstructure, much as a prefabricated house begins as a collection of pre-built sections. The researchers report they were able to assemble the colloidal spheres into diamond and pyrochlore crystal structures — a particularly difficult challenge because so much space is left unoccupied.

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If you aren’t already, you’re likely soon to find yourself looking forward to the day when quantum computers will replace regular computers for every day use. The computing power of quantum computers is immense compared to what regular desktops or laptops can do. The downside is, current quantum computing technology are limited by the bulky frameworks and extreme conditions they require in order to function.

Quantum computers need specialized setups in order to sustain and keep quantum bits — the heart of quantum computing — working. These “qubits” are particles in a quantum state of superposition, which allows them to encode and transmit information as 0s and 1s simultaneously. Most computers run on binary bit systems which use either 0s or 1s. Since quantum computers can use both at the same time, they can process more information faster. That being said, Sustaining the life of qubits is particularly difficult, but researchers are investigating quantum computing studies are trying to find ways to prolong the life of qubits using various techniques.

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