Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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This week, Kathy Niakan, a biologist working at the Francis Crick Institute in London received the green light from the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to use genome editing technique CRISPR/Cas9 on human embryos.

Niakan hopes to answer important questions about how healthy human embryos develop from a single cell to around 250 cells, in the first seven days after fertilization.

By removing certain genes during this early development phase using CRISPR/Cas9, Niakan and her team hope to understand what causes miscarriages and infertility, and in the future, possibly improve the effectiveness of in-vitro fertilization and provide better treatments for infertility.

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Since Albert Einstein first predicted their existence a century ago, physicists have been on the hunt for gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime. That hunt is now over. Gravitational waves exist, and we’ve found them.

That’s according to researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), who have been holed up for weeks, working round-the-clock to confirm that the very first direct detection of gravitational waves is the real deal. False signals have been detected before, and even though the rumors first reported by Gizmodo have been flying for a month, the LIGO team wanted to be absolutely certain before making an official announcement.

That announcement has just come. Gravitational waves were observed on September 14th, 2015, at 5:51 am ET by both of the LIGO detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington. The source? A supermassive black hole collision that took place 1.3 billion years ago. When it occurred, about three times the mass of the sun was converted to energy in a fraction of a second.

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Enough said; hope folks are paying attention when re-creating those “Cognitive Thinking” skills in AI; otherwise, they miss the boat with almost 60% of the world’s population.

NEW YORK: Male and female behavioural differences correlate with their different brain networks, say researchers, including one of Indian origin.

Structural differences in the brain may relate to male and female behaviour differences such as men being more likely to be better at learning and performing a single task at hand and women being more likely to exhibit superior memory and social cognition skills, the study said.

“Our results suggest a synchrony between sex-related differences in the brain network and behaviour,” said senior study author Ragini Verma, associate professor at Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania in the US.

Continue reading “Women have superior memory, social skills than men” | >

A landmark day for Einstein and our understanding of the universe: the detection of gravitational waves. World Science Festival’s own Brian Greene explains the discovery.

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More advancement in Quantum Computing — researchers in Finland have found a way to keep the processor chip cooled without causing disrupting computer operations which has been a big challenge for Quantum Chips.

AALTO, Finland, Feb. 11, 2016 — A thermal-transport method that uses photons as carriers has been demonstrated over 1-m distances. The fundamental advance in heat conduction could drive the development of quantum computers.

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The late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said, “Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.”

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more and more advanced, can the same statement apply to computers?

According to many technology moguls and policymakers, the answer is this: We’re not quite there yet.

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