Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 2385

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — An eruption of Papua New Guinea’s tallest volcano that raised regional tsunami fears subsided Tuesday, but thick ash still billowed into the sky and coated roofs and palm trees nearby.

One of the South Pacific nation’s most active volcanoes, Mount Ulawun erupted on Monday, spewing ash as high as 15 kilometers (50,000 feet).

Papua New Guinea’s Geohazards Management Division said while the eruption had been downgraded since Monday from the maximum alert level, there were no signs that it was ending.

Read more | >

As a dog owner of two little muppets, this is serious, scary, and deadly.

According to a KSLTV article, “veterinary laboratories in several states are investigating an unusual respiratory illness in dogs, and encouraging people to take basic precautions to keep their pets healthy as veterinarians try to pin down what’s making the animals sick.”

The “outbreak” of this respiratory illness is currently in three states: Oregon, Colorado, and New Hampshire. Research is being done right now in the Granite State.

Read more | >

Treating cancer is becoming increasingly complex, but also offers more and more possibilities. After all, the better a tumor’s biology and genetic features are understood, the more treatment approaches there are. To be able to offer patients personalized therapies tailored to their disease, laborious and time-consuming analysis and interpretation of various data is required. Researchers at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin have now studied whether generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT can help with this step. This is one of many projects at Charité analyzing the opportunities unlocked by AI in patient care.

If the body can no longer repair certain genetic mutations itself, cells begin to grow unchecked, producing a tumor. The crucial factor in this phenomenon is an imbalance of growth-inducing and growth-inhibiting factors, which can result from changes in oncogenes – genes with the potential to cause cancer – for example. Precision oncology, a specialized field of personalized medicine, leverages this knowledge by using specific treatments such as low-molecular weight inhibitors and antibodies to target and disable hyperactive oncogenes.

Read more | >

Why does it feel like everybody at OpenAI has lost their mind?

In what’s arguably turning into the hottest AI story of the year, former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was ousted by the rest of the company’s nonprofit board on Friday, leading to a seemingly endless drama cycle that’s included hundreds of staffers threatening to quit en masse if the board doesn’t reinstate him.

A key character in the spectacle has been OpenAI chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever — who, according to The Atlantic, likes to burn effigies and lead ritualistic chants at the company — and appears to have been one of the main drivers behind Altman’s ousting.

Read more | >

Ms. McCauley and Ms. Toner [HF — two board members] have ties to the Rationalist and Effective Altruist movements, a community that is deeply concerned that A.I. could one day destroy humanity. Today’s A.I. technology cannot destroy humanity. But this community believes that as the technology grows increasingly powerful, these dangers will arise.

McCauley and Toner reportedly worried that Altman was pushing too hard, too quickly for new and potentially dangerous forms of AI (similar fears led some OpenAI people to bail out and found a competitor, Anthropic, a couple of years ago). The FT’s reporting confirms that the fight was over how quickly to commercialize AI

The back-story to all of this is actually much weirder than the average sex scandal. The field of AI (in particular, its debates around Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-4) is profoundly shaped by cultish debates among people with some very strange beliefs.

Read more | >

In a new multidisciplinary study, researchers at Texas A&M University showed how quantum computing—a new kind of computing that can process additional types of data—can assist with genetic research and used it to discover new links between genes that scientists were previously unable to detect.

Their project used the new computing technology to map gene regulatory networks (GRNs), which provide information about how can cause each other to activate or deactivate.

As the team published in npj Quantum Information, will help scientists more accurately predict relationships between genes, which could have huge implications for both animal and human medicine.

Read more | >

The Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2), initially identified in Drosophila several decades ago, was found to be a key controller of developmental genes. Subsequent research revealed that PRC2 alters chromatin structure to suppress the expression of specific genes.

This initial understanding of PRC2’s ancestral function — functioning primarily to control genes during development — was challenged when it was found to be active in unicellular organisms, in which no development takes place.

Read more | >

It is estimated that 95% of the planet’s population has access to broadband internet, via cable or a mobile network. However, there are still some places and situations in which staying connected can be very difficult. Quick responses are necessary in emergency situations, such as after an earthquake or during a conflict. So too are reliable telecommunications networks that are not susceptible to outages and damage to infrastructure, networks can be used to share data that is vital for people’s well-being.

A recent article, published in the journal Aerospace, proposes the use of nanosatellites to provide comprehensive and stable coverage in areas that are hard to reach using long-range communications. It is based on the bachelor’s and master’s degree final projects of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) graduate David N. Barraca Ibort.

The paper is co-authored by Raúl Parada, a researcher at the Telecommunications Technological Center of Catalonia (CTTC/CERCA) and a course instructor with the UOC’s Faculty of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications; Carlos Monzo, a researcher and member of the same faculty; and Víctor Monzón, a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for Security Reliability and Trust at the University of Luxembourg.

Read more | >

Nov 20 (Reuters) — Following a surprise ouster, OpenAI co-founder and former CEO Sam Altman joined Microsoft (MSFT.O) as the head of artificial intelligence research along with the ChatGPT maker’s former President Greg Brockman and other staff.

The developments come less than a year after OpenAI kicked off the generative AI frenzy with the launch of viral chatbot ChatGPT and bagged Microsoft as an investor, among other big names.

The shakeup is not the first at OpenAI, which was launched in 2015. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a co-founder of the non-profit, was once its co-chair, and in 2020 other executives departed, going on to found competitor Anthropic, which claims to have a greater focus on AI safety.

Read more | >