Lifeboat Foundation

The company will pause hiring soon, and expects up to 30% of non-customer-facing roles will be replaced by automation in the next five years.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jU1DsipURcM

A new NASA animation highlights the “super” in supermassive black holes. These monsters lurk in the centers of most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, and contain between 100,000 and tens of billions of times more mass than our sun.

“Direct measurements, many made with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, confirm the presence of more than 100 supermassive black holes,” said Jeremy Schnittman, a theorist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “How do they get so big? When galaxies collide, their central black holes eventually may merge together too.”

Continue reading “NASA animation sizes up the universe’s biggest black holes” »

Many people who have come close to death or have been resuscitated report a similar experience: Their lives flash before their eyes, memorable moments replay, and they may undergo an out-of-body experience, sensing they’re looking at themselves from elsewhere in the room. Now, a small study mapping the brain activity of four people while they were dying shows a burst of activity in their brains after their hearts stop.

The authors say the finding, published today in the, may explain how a person’s brain could replay conscious memories even after the heart has stopped. It “suggests we are identifying a marker of lucid consciousness,” says Sam Parnia, a pulmonologist at New York University Langone Medical Center who was not involved in the study.

Although death has historically been medically defined as the moment when the heart irreversibly stops beating, recent studies have suggested brain activity in many animals and humans can continue for seconds to hours. In 2013, for instance, University of Michigan neurologist Jimo Borjigin and team found that rats’ brains showed signs of consciousness up to 30 seconds after their hearts had stopped beating. “We have this binary concept of life and death that is ancient and outdated,” Parnia says.

An AI-based decoder that can translate brain activity into a continuous stream of text has been developed, in a breakthrough that allows a person’s thoughts to be read non-invasively for the first time.

The decoder could reconstruct speech with uncanny accuracy while people listened to a story – or even silently imagined one – using only fMRI scan data. Previous language decoding systems have required surgical implants, and the latest advance raises the prospect of new ways to restore speech in patients struggling to communicate due to a stroke or motor neurone disease.

“For a noninvasive method, this is a real leap forward compared to what’s been done before, which is typically single words or short sentences.”

What if someone could listen to your thoughts? Sure, that’s highly improbable, you might say. Sounds very much like fiction. And we could have agreed with you, until yesterday.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have decoded a person’s brain activity while they’re listening to a story or imagining telling a story into a stream of text, thanks to artificial intelligence and MRI scans.

Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array telescope’s data will now help scientists hunt for technosignatures.

The hunt for alien life will get a shot in the arm with one of the world’s most powerful radio telescope arrays joining the mission, situated about 50 miles west of Socorro, New Mexico.

The National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) will now help gather the information that enables researchers to analyze emissions that only artificial transmitters make, which signals the existence of an advanced civilization far beyond.

It can generate enough energy to power 1.5 million households a year.

The first of China’s wind and solar energy projects being built in the desert areas is now connected to the electricity grid and has begun generating power, media outlet ChinaDaily.

With the planet needing to reduce carbon emissions, countries are now innovating in generating greener energy. Interesting Engineering reported earlier this year how Switzerland installed 5,000 solar panels on the highest dam in Europe. On its part, China is looking to convert the arid regions of its geography into power generation zones.

It works for retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

Science Corp has conceived of a new bionic eye that targets and cures two diseases that cause blindness. “Today we’re excited to take the covers off of our first flagship product development program: the Science Eye, a visual prosthesis targeted at retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), two forms of serious blindness presently without good options for patients,” said the firm in a post from November 2022.

How does it work? By targeting the functioning of the diseases.

Continue reading “This bionic eye cures diseases that cause blindness” »

The AI model employs radiomics, a technique for extracting critical information from medical images that are not always visible to the naked eye.

An artificial intelligence (AI) model that accurately identifies cancer has been developed by a team of scientists, doctors, and researchers from Imperial College London, the Institute of Cancer Research in London, and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust.

Reportedly, this new AI model uses radiomics, a technique that extracts critical information from medical images that may not be visible to the naked eye. This, in turn, aids in determining whether the abnormal growths detected on CT scans are cancerous.