Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 13

The Automated Intimate Partner Violence Risk Support System (AIRS) utilizes clinical history and radiologic data to pinpoint patients seen in the emergency room who may be at a risk for intimate partner violence (IPV). Developed over the past five years, AIRS has been rolled out to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Emergency Rooms in Boston as well as surrounding primary care sites. Currently, the tool has been validated at the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center and is being evaluated by the Alameda Health System for its role in clinical workflow.

“Data labeling quality is a huge concern—not just with intimate partner violence care, but in machine learning for healthcare and machine learning, broadly speaking,” says cofounder Irene Chen. “Our hope is that with training, clinicians can be taught how to spot intimate partner violence—we are hoping to find a set of cleaner labels.”

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In 1989, political scientist Francis Fukuyama predicted we were approaching the end of history. He meant that similar liberal democratic values were taking hold in societies around the world. How wrong could he have been? Democracy today is clearly on the decline. Despots and autocrats are on the rise.

You might, however, be thinking Fukuyama was right all along. But in a different way. Perhaps we really are approaching the end of history. As in, game over humanity.

Now there are many ways it could all end. A global pandemic. A giant meteor (something perhaps the dinosaurs would appreciate). Climate catastrophe. But one end that is increasingly talked about is (AI). This is one of those potential disasters that, like climate change, appears to have slowly crept up on us but, many people now fear, might soon take us down.

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Scientists have recorded the first-ever brain scan of a dying human.

A man suddenly died during a routine brain scan, revealing intriguing insights into what happens in our final moments.

An 87-year-old man undergoing a routine EEG for epilepsy suffered a fatal heart attack. Researchers found that in the 30 seconds before and after his heart stopped, his brain waves resembled those seen during dreaming, memory recall, and meditation.

This suggests that the commonly reported phenomenon of “life flashing before your eyes” may have a neurological basis. However, since this is a single case study, more research is needed to confirm how common this experience may be.

The findings, published by Dr. Ajmal Zemmar and his team, showed a surge in gamma waves — high-frequency neural oscillations linked to memory and consciousness — just before and after death.

These waves are typically observed when people recall memories, adding weight to the idea that the brain may replay key life events in its final moments. While this discovery cannot fully explain the mysteries of death, it offers a fascinating glimpse into the brain’s last activity and opens the door for further research on human consciousness at the end of life.

Continue reading “A replay of life: What happens in our brain when we die?” | >

Melanized fungi although dangerous to human biology actually are remarkable because they adapted to the radiation which could give more clues to how humans could evolve to survive radiation exposure long term.

There’s an organism thriving within the Chernobyl disaster zone that is not only enduring some of the harshest living conditions imaginable, but potentially helping to improve them too.

The fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 is still fascinating the scientific community nearly 40 years on, with new developments emerging all the time.

The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine features a level of radiation that is six times the legal limit of human exposure for workers at 11.28 millirem – but there is still a living organism that has adapted to live and thrive there.

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We evaluated the long-term treatment outcomes and toxicities in patients with clinically localized and locally advanced prostate cancer (PC) who underwent high-dose-rate brachytherapy (HDR-BT) with external beam radiotherapy (EBRT). We retrospectively analyzed 417 patients with PC who underwent HDR-BT with EBRT. The treatment dose was 19-and 13-Gy HDR-BT in two and single fractions, respectively, both combined with external irradiation of 46 Gy in 23 fractions, and hormonal therapy (HT). The median observation period was 7.2 (range, 2.0–17.6) years. The 7-year recurrence-free, PC-specific, and overall survival rates were 93.3%, 99.1%, and 94.8%, respectively, with only six PC mortalities. Multivariable analysis showed that pre-radiotherapy prostate-specific antigen (PSA) of 0.05 ng/mL after neoadjuvant HT was an independent poor prognostic factor of recurrence (HR, 4.44; 95% CI 1.56–12.63; p = 0.005) and overall mortality (HR, 2.20; 95% CI 1.11–4.39; p = 0.025). The 7-year cumulative incidence rate of grade ≥ 2 toxicities in genitourinary and gastrointestinal tracts were 15.7% and 2.0%, respectively. HDR-BT combined with EBRT shows promising disease control and tolerant toxicities for PC. Poor PSA response to neoadjuvant androgen deprivation predicts worse survival measures. These patients may require more intensive multidisciplinary treatment in combination with radiotherapy.

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Glen Anderson’s created an analog computer that uses water to demonstrate digital logic

A computer that uses water instead of electricity? That’s what Glen Anderson and his daughter, Dale, are demonstrating at Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend. He invites kids to fill buckets and dump them into one of four water tanks. On Friday, I asked him how it was going. “I am adding 1 and 1 but getting 1,” he said. Something was wrong and he was working to fix it.

Glen said his goal for the project was to demystify how computers “think”

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John Smart has taught and written for over 20 years on topics like foresight and futurism as well as the drivers, opportunities, and problems of exponential processes throughout human history. John is President of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, co-Founder of the Evo-Devo research community, and CEO of Foresight University. Most recently, Smart is the author of Introduction to Foresight, which in my view is a “one-of-a-kind all-in-one instruction manual, methodological encyclopedia, and daily work bible for both amateur and professional futurists or foresighters.”

During our 2-hour conversation with John Smart, we cover a variety of interesting topics such as the biggest tech changes since our 1st interview; machine vs human sentience; China’s totalitarianism and our new geostrategic global realignment; Citizen’s Diplomacy, propaganda, and the Russo-Ukrainian War; foresight, futurism and grappling with uncertainty; John’s Introduction to Foresight; Alvin Toffler’s 3P model aka the Evo-Devo Classic Foresight Pyramid; why the future is both predicted and created despite our anti-prediction and freedom bias; Moore’s Law and Accelerating Change; densification and dematerialization; definition and timeline to general AI; evolutionary vs developmental dynamics; autopoiesis and practopoiesis; existential threats and whether we live in a child-proof universe; the Transcension Hypothesis.

My favorite quote that I will take away from this interview with John Smart is:

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In an amazing achievement akin to adding solar panels to your body, a northeast sea slug sucks raw materials from algae to provide its lifetime supply of solar-powered energy, according to a study by Rutgers University–New Brunswick and other scientists.

“It’s a remarkable feat because it’s highly unusual for an animal to behave like a plant and survive solely on photosynthesis,” said Debashish Bhattacharya, senior author of the study and distinguished professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology at Rutgers–New Brunswick. “The broader implication is in the field of artificial photosynthesis. That is, if we can figure out how the slug maintains stolen, isolated plastids to fix carbon without the plant nucleus, then maybe we can also harness isolated plastids for eternity as green machines to create bioproducts or energy. The existing paradigm is that to make green energy, we need the plant or alga to run the photosynthetic organelle, but the slug shows us that this does not have to be the case.”

The sea slug Elysia chlorotica, a mollusk that can grow to more than two inches long, has been found in the intertidal zone between Nova Scotia, Canada, and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, as well as in Florida. Juvenile sea slugs eat the nontoxic brown alga Vaucheria litorea and become photosynthetic – or solar-powered – after stealing millions of algal plastids, which are like tiny solar panels, and storing them in their gut lining, according to the study published online in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

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Predicting the lifetime of an electric ion thruster is notoriously difficult. You have to account for the chamber wall effects, which are not present in space environments. Researchers within several different aerospace disciplines in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign worked together to simulate the ion activity, then validate it in a unique experiment that will help predict the lifespan of electric thrusters.

“We can simulate the damage to the engine caused by sputtering, but until now, we could not validate that our simulations were correct,” said Professor Huck Beng Chew.

“Because both the engine and chamber walls are coated with impact-resistant carbon, we didn’t know whether the coating damage was from accelerated ions directly hitting the engine or whether the coating damage was artificially mitigated by the deposition of carbon from ion bombardment off the chamber walls.”

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