Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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LONDON The world’s first life-saving gene therapy for children, developed by Italian scientists and GlaxoSmithKline, has been recommended for approval in Europe, boosting the pioneering technology to fix faulty genes.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said on Friday it had endorsed the therapy, called Strimvelis, for a tiny number of children with ADA Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (ADA-SCID) for whom no matching bone marrow donor is available.

Around 15 children a year are born in Europe with the ultra-rare genetic disorder, which leaves them unable to make a type of white blood cell. They rarely survive beyond two years unless their immune function is restored with a suitable bone marrow transplant.

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Blast from the past. Someone in an astrobiology group seemed to question the validity of the question in my recent story on 5 Questions For E.T. about whether the universe is artificial. Here’s my response:

In the dog days of summer, when a gush of hot air from a Fifth Avenue subway grate can feel as real as it gets, take heart that the downtown traffic nipping at your heels may just be part of a cosmic-scale computer simulation.

The idea that the cosmos and everything in it could be a super-advanced civilization’s version of Xbox first came to the fore a little over a decade ago.

In a Philosophical Quarterly paper, philosophy professor Nick Bostrom at Oxford University in the U.K., posits that what we observe as our universe may in fact be a very advanced simulation designed by our distant progeny.

Continue reading “Brainstorming New Ways To Test If Cosmos Is One Big Computer Simulation” | >

However, Rob Ott, a computer scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who did work on the system—Deep Learning Interface for Accounting (DELIA)—notes that it simply held all of the missing money, some $40,120.16, in a “rainy day” account. “I don’t think you can attribute malice,” he says. “I’m sure DELIA was going to give the money back.”

Technologists shocked by program’s ability to set its own priorities—such as getting rich.

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The inventors of liquid metal batteries give their original creation an upgrade using calcium, an abundant and inexpensive element.

With his latest upgrade to liquid metal batteries, there’s no better (and indeed, more apt!) way to describe MIT Professor and materials engineer Donald Sadoway than to say that he just keeps going and going and going…

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In a video presented at IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s annual conference, Chinese engineering students guide a living cockroach along S-shaped and Z-shaped paths using brain-to-brain interface: a bluetooth electroencephalogram (EEG) headset, translated and wirelessly sent to an electronic backpack receiver attached to the cockroach. The electrical impulses then stimulated the antennae nerves of the cockroach through a microelectrode implanted into its head. Watch the video released:

(Announced 16 June 2015 but only just came to our attention. And no, this is not April Fools post.)

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HONG KONG (Reuters) — Like innumerable children with imaginations fired by animated films, Hong Kong product and graphic designer Ricky Ma grew up watching cartoons featuring the adventures of robots, and dreamt of building his own one day.

Unlike most of the others, however, Ma has realized his childhood dream at the age of 42, by successfully constructing a life-sized robot from scratch on the balcony of his home.

The fruit of his labors of a year-and-a-half, and a budget of more than $50,000, is a female robot prototype he calls the Mark 1, modeled after a Hollywood star whose name he wants to keep under wraps. It responds to a set of programed verbal commands spoken into a microphone.

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The machine overlords of the future may now, if it pleases them, eliminate all black and white imagery from the history of their meat-based former masters. All they’ll need is this system from Berkeley computer scientist Richard Zhang, which allows a soulless silicon sentience to “hallucinate” colors into any monochrome image.

It uses what’s called a convolutional neural network (several, actually) — a type of computer vision system that mimics low-level visual systems in our own brains in order to perceive patterns and categorize objects. Google’s DeepDream is probably the most well-known example of one. Trained by examining millions of images of— well, just about everything, Zhang’s system of CNNs recognizes things in black and white photos and colors them the way it thinks they ought to be.

Grass, for instance, has certain features — textures, common locations in images, certain other things often found on or near it. And grass is usually green, right? So when the network thinks it recognizes grass, it colors that region green. The same thing occurs for recognizing certain types of butterflies, building materials, flowers, the nose of a certain breed of dog and so on.

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