Lifeboat Foundation

On the Zanzibarian island of Pemba, sea turtle meat is considered a delicacy — but it also, apparently, can fatally poison you.

As the Associated Press and other outlets report, nine people have died and 78 others were hospitalized after eating sea turtle on Pemba, an island in the Zanzibar archipelago in the Indian Ocean.

The veal-tasting meat of green turtles is, like in other coastal communities throughout Asia and Africa, still a delicacy on Zanzibar — despite the endangered status of the animals and, as this incident indicates, its predisposition towards severe and sometimes fatal food poisoning.

China is testing an AI assistant for neurosurgeons at seven hospitals in Beijing and other cities in coming months, one of many initiatives the government is backing to try and harness the technology.

Here’s my latest Opinion piece for Newsweek. It discusses the panel I chaired at the House of Lords, UK Parliament supporting enhanced athletes & the Enhanced Games!

Antagonists of the Enhanced Games say it will be dangerous. Some insist athletes will overdose and possibly die while competing. D’Souza said these fears are overblown. The Enhanced Games will also have some regulations, including pre-competition tests that show an athlete is healthy to compete, regardless of what they’re on.

Many athletes don’t seem to mind the risks. That’s partially because they’re being offered large financial sums to compete. Magnussen was offered $1.5 million dollars to try to break the 50-meter freestyle world record, and he appeared quite happy with that sizable amount of money. Furthermore, many athletes have already been taking enhancements, so now they’d just be out in the open about it.

Continue reading “Let’s Support Enhanced Athletes” »

The quantity of dysfunctional monocytes appears to indicate poor cardiovascular prognosis in patients with type 2 diabetes, data suggested.

A diet high in protein sure sounds like a good idea, but it might depend on where the protein comes from. Dr F Perry Wilson explains.

With the continued advancement of human space exploration, how can forensic science—which contributes to the criminal justice system by analyzing evidence through a myriad of methods—be applied to outer space? This is what a soon-to-be-published study in Forensic Science International Reports hopes to address as a team of international researchers led by Staffordshire University investigated how bloodstain patterns behave under microgravity conditions. This study holds the potential to help scientists and astronauts better understand how Earth-based science can be applied to space, specifically long-term spaceflight.

“Studying bloodstain patterns can provide valuable reconstructive information about a crime or accident,” said Zack Kowalske, who is a PhD student at Staffordshire University and a Crime Scene Investigator for the Roswell Police Department in the State of Georgia, and lead author of the study. “However, little is known about how liquid blood behaves in an altered gravity environment. This is an area of study that, while novel, has implications for forensic investigations in space.”

For the study, the researchers conducted blood spatters experiments on parabolic flights onboard a modified Boeing 747 with an emphasis on observing various angles of impact of the blood droplets and comparing their splatter patterns to those obtained under normal gravity conditions. The reason parabolic flights were used was due to their ability to simulate microgravity conditions, as they are designed to rapidly drop in altitude, thus providing passengers with a few moments of weightlessness.

Covariant this week announced the launch of RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1). Peter Chen, the co-founder and CEO of the UC Berkeley artificial intelligence spinout tells TechCrunch the platform, “is basically a large language model (LLM), but for robot language.”

RFM-1 is the result of, among other things, a massive trove of data collected from the deployment of Covariant’s Brain AI platform. With customer consent, the startup has been building the robot equivalent of an LLM database.

“The vision of RFM-1 is to power the billions of robots to come,” Chen says. “We at Covariant have already deployed lots of robots at warehouses with success. But that is not the limit of where we want to get to. We really want to power robots in manufacturing, food processing, recycling, agriculture, the service industry and even into people’s homes.”

The crypto scene continues to remain so hot that bitcoin is hitting one new high after another. It surpassed $72,700 on Monday. This was initially driven by the approval of spot bitcoin ETFs, but is now being pushed higher ahead of a “halving” event, which will limit the amount of new supply put into circulation from bitcoin miners.

Bitcoin has increased 9.5% in the past seven days and is up 50% on the month, according to CoinMarketCap data. The total crypto market cap across all tokens has increased 10% on the week to $2.71 trillion, with bitcoin making up 52.7% of that amount.

There is, of course, no way of telling how high bitcoin can rise during the current bull frenzy. While many are feeling the hopium, there’s at least one indicator that thinks we’re nearing the top of the highs, with price dips to quickly follow.

Researchers managed to crack Meta’s Quest VR system, allowing them to steal sensitive information, and manipulate social interactions.