Lifeboat Foundation

I gotta admit although effective and innovative, it’s also kinda creepy.

Last year, Monash University scientists created the “DishBrain” – a semi-biological computer chip with some 800,000 human and mouse brain cells lab-grown into its electrodes. Demonstrating something like sentience, it learned to play Pong within five minutes.

The micro-electrode array at the heart of the DishBrain was capable both of reading activity in the brain cells, and stimulating them with electrical signals, so the research team set up a version of Pong where the brain cells were fed a moving electrical stimulus to represent which side of the “screen” the ball was on, and how far away from the paddle it was. They allowed the brain cells to act on the paddle, moving it left and right.

Continue reading “Computer chip with built-in human brain tissue gets military funding” »

Triple-negative breast cancer is a combative cancer type with a highly inflated histological grade that leads to poor theragnostic value. Gene, protein, and receptor-specific targets have shown effective clinical outcomes in patients with TNBC. Cells are frequently exposed to DNA-damaging agents. DNA damage is repaired by multiple pathways; accumulations of mutations occur due to damage to one or more pathways and lead to alterations in normal cellular mechanisms, which lead to development of tumors. Advances in target-specific cancer therapies have shown significant momentum; most treatment options cause off-target toxicity and side effects on healthy tissues.

Novel Harm Reduction Strategies For The Opioid Epidemic — Harmguard FX — Jermonica Boardley & Joseph Scrocco — Sivad Group LLC / Diagnostic Solutions Group

Jermonica Boardley is President and CEO of SIVAD Diagnostic Medical Group LLC (https://sivadppe.com/), a minority-owned company dedicated to addressing the unique needs of underserved and unserved communities in the United States and globally, which most recently announced the launch of HarmGuard FX (https://www.harmstopper.com/), a single, low-cost strip that provides an affordable, reliable way for people to test substances for fentanyl and xylazine (popularly known as tranq), two dangerous adulterants that are exacerbating the already critical opioid epidemic.

Continue reading “Jermonica Boardley & Joseph Scrocco — Novel Harm Reduction Strategies For The Opioid Epidemic” »

Alex’s lemonade stand foundation — fighting childhood cancer, one cup at a time! liz scott, co-executive director, alex’s lemonade stand foundation.

Liz Scott is Co-Executive Director, of Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation for Childhood Cancer (ALSF — https://www.alexslemonade.org/), an organization which emerged from the front yard lemonade stand of her daughter, Alexandra “Alex” Scott (1996−2004).

Continue reading “Liz Scott, Co-Executive Director, Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation for Childhood Cancer” »

Sci-fi writers and AI researchers worry: What happens if technology, specifically artificial intelligence, reaches singularity?

In March 2020, an experiment in science philanthropy was hatched in the span of a five-minute call.

Patrick Collison, the now 34-year-old billionaire CEO of the online payments company Stripe, and economist Tyler Cowen were chewing over a shared concern: Scientific progress seemed to be slowing down. As the first pandemic lockdowns went into effect, researchers were in a holding pattern, waiting to hear if they could redirect their federal grants to COVID-related work. Collison and Cowen worried that the National Institutes of Health wasn’t moving quickly enough, so they launched Fast Grants to get emergency research dollars to virologists, coronavirus experts, and other scientists rapidly.

“We thought: Let’s just do this,” Cowen recalls. “It was a bit like put up or shut up.”

Elon Musk, the omnipotent ruler of the Twitterverse, has chimed in and has decreed that the actual physical universe is “possibly” twice as old as we think it is.

Make of that what you will.

Musk was responding to noted misinformation peddler and comedian Joe Rogan, who linked to a press release about a controversial new paper that indeed suggests the universe could be 26.7 billion years old, almost twice as the general consensus among scientists.

Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla is currently in ‘early’ discussions to license its self-driving technology with a ‘major’ automaker.

At the end of his opening remarks for Tesla’s Q2 2022 earnings call following the release of the automaker’s financial results, CEO Elon Musk said that he wanted to “strongly emphasize” that Tesla is open to licensing its self-driving technology to other automakers.

That’s something that the CEO has been frequently mentioning as of late.

James Cameron has no intention of using artificial intelligence to write a film script. In a new interview with CTV News, the Oscar winner expressed doubt over AI bots being able to write “a good story.”

According to Cameron: “I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it…I don’t believe that’s ever going to have something that’s going to move an audience. You have to be human to write that. I don’t know anyone that’s even thinking about having AI write a screenplay.”