At MIT, researchers have developed a stretchable bandage-like device capable of sensing skin temperature, delivering drugs transdermally, and containing electronics that include LED lights for displaying information. The various components of the system are designed to work together, for example the drug dispenser activating only when skin temperature is within a certain range and the LEDs lighting up when the drug reservoirs are running low. While this is only a prototype device, it certainly points toward future flexible devices that stay attached to a person’s skin, or even internally, for extended periods of time while providing health data and taking therapeutic actions in an intelligent way.
The device is based on a stretchable hydrogel matrix that reliably holds onto embedded metallic components linked by pliable wires. The hydrogel was made to have a stiffness similar to human soft tissues so that it blends well with the body when attached to it. When wires, drug reservoirs, delivery channels, and electronic components were built-in, the team tested the stretchiness of the final result showing that it maintains functionality even after repeated stress.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google Life Sciences, the Silicon Valley giant’s new foray into health and medicine, announced a new name Monday that slips easily off the tongue but might sound antiquated to a high-tech, life-sciences ear: Verily.
“Verily, I swear,” as Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII.
The word means “truly” or “certainly.” It dates back to 13th century Middle English and fell out of common use … well, a while ago. It often pops up, however, in the still very popular King James Bible.
Exciting news as another group proposes to explore telomerase therapy for the Cardio Vascular system. This no doubt follows on from DePhino et al work on the P53-telomerase-PCG-1 aging axis work which showed the effects of short telomeres on vascular aging (and other organs) and its direct link to Mitochondrial function and Stem cell Decline via the P53-telomerase-PCG-1 aging axis.
How can a person see around a blind corner? One answer is to develop X-ray vision. A more mundane approach is to use a mirror. But if neither are an option, a group of scientists led by Genevieve Gariepy have developed a state-of-the-art detector which, with some clever data processing techniques, can turn walls and floors into a “virtual mirror”, giving the power to locate and track moving objects out of direct line of sight.
The shiny surface of a mirror works by reflecting scattered light from an object at a well-defined angle towards your eye. Because light scattered from different points on the object is reflected at the same angle, your eye sees a clear image of the object. In contrast, a non-reflective surface scatters light randomly in all directions, and creates no clear image.
However, as the researchers at Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh recognised, there is a way to tease out information on the object even from apparently random scattered light. Their method, published in Nature Photonics, relies on laser range-finding technology, which measures the distance to an object based on the time it takes a pulse of light to travel to the object, scatter, and travel back to a detector.
Flashing some interplanetary gold bling and sipping “space water” might sound far-fetched, but both could soon be reality, thanks to a new US law that legalizes cosmic mining.
In a first, President Barack Obama signed legislation at the end of November that allows commercial extraction of minerals and other materials, including water, from asteroids and the moon.
That could kick off an extraterrestrial gold rush, backed by a private aeronautics industry that is growing quickly and cutting the price of commercial space flight.
It seems like every day we’re warned about a new, AI-related threat that could ultimately bring about the end of humanity. According to Author and Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom, those existential risks aren’t so black and white, and an individual’s ability to influence those risks might surprise you.
Image Credit: TED
Bostrom defines an existential risk as one distinction of earth originating life or the permanent and drastic destruction of our future development, but he also notes that there is no single methodology that is applicable to all the different existential risks (as more technically elaborated upon in this Future of Humanity Institute study). Rather, he considers it an interdisciplinary endeavor.
“If you’re wondering about asteroids, we have telescopes, we can study them with, we can look at past crater impacts and derive hard statistical data on that,” he said. “We find that the risk of asteroids is extremely small and likewise for a few of the other risks that arrive from nature. But other really big existential risks are not in any direct way susceptible to this kind of rigorous quantification.”
In Bostrom’s eyes, the most significant risks we face arise from human activity and particularly the potential dangerous technological discoveries that await us in the future. Though he believes there’s no way to quantify the possibility of humanity being destroyed by a super-intelligent machine, a more important variable is human judgment. To improve assessment of existential risk, Bostrom said we should think carefully about how these judgments are produced and whether the biases that affect those judgments can be avoided.
“If your task is to hammer a nail into a board, reality will tell you if you’re doing it right or not. It doesn’t really matter if you’re a Communist or a Nazi or whatever crazy ideologies you have, you’ll learn quite quickly if you’re hammering the nail in wrong,” Bostrom said. “If you’re wrong about what the major threats are to humanity over the next century, there is not a reality click to tell you if you’re right or wrong. Any weak bias you might have might distort your belief.”
Noting that humanity doesn’t really have any policy designed to steer a particular course into the future, Bostrom said many existential risks arise from global coordination failures. While he believes society might one day evolve into a unified global government, the question of when this uniting occurs will hinge on individual contributions.
“Working toward global peace is the best project, just because it’s very difficult to make a big difference there if you’re a single individual or a small organization. Perhaps your resources would be better put to use if they were focused on some problem that is much more neglected, such as the control problem for artificial intelligence,” Bostrom said. “(For example) do the technical research to figure that, if we got the ability to create super intelligence, the outcome would be safe and beneficial. That’s where an extra million dollars in funding or one extra very talented person could make a noticeable difference… far more than doing general research on existential risks.”
Looking to the future, Bostrom feels there is an opportunity to show that we can do serious research to change global awareness of existential risks and bring them into a wider conversation. While that research doesn’t assume the human condition is fixed, there is a growing ecosystem of people who are genuinely trying to figure out how to save the future, he said. As an example of how much influence one can have in reducing existential risk, Bostrom noted that a lot more people in history have believed they were Napoleon, yet there was actually only one Napoleon.
“You don’t have to try to do it yourself… it’s usually more efficient to each do whatever we specialize in. For most people, the most efficient way to contribute to eliminating existential risk would be to identify the most efficient organizations working on this and then support those,” Bostrom said. “The values on the line in terms of how many happy lives could exist in humanity’s future, even a very small probability of impact in that, would probably be worthwhile in pursuing”.
Buried two kilometres underground in an active ore mine, DEAP-3600 is the most sensitive dark matter detector of its kind. Scientists are hoping to shine a light (so to speak) on one of the deepest mysteries of physics.
Watch the video Russia planning to build permanent base on the moon on Yahoo News. The Kremlin plans to build a permanent base on the surface of the moon by 2030, according to Russian state-run news agency TASS.
