Lifeboat Foundation

“Now is the moment for a rigorous portrait of Elon Musk.”

Alex Gibney, an award-winning filmmaker, is working on a new documentary about Elon Musk. The movie “Musk” aims to be “a definitive and unvarnished investigation” of the multibillionaire CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter. The project has been in the works for months.

Other documentaries by Gibney have explored topics such as Steve Jobs, Enron, WikiLeaks, Elizabeth Holmes, Scientology, and more.

Continue reading “‘Musk,’ a new documentary, is being shot by an acclaimed filmmaker” »

Summary: Bumblebees are able to learn to solve puzzles by watching more experienced bees complete a task. This new behavioral preference then spreads throughout the entire colony. The bees that learned from others became more adept and began to prefer the learned solution over alternatives.

Source: PLOS

Bumblebees learn to solve a puzzle by watching more experienced bees, and this behavioral preference then spreads through the colony, according to a study published March 7^th in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Alice Dorothy Bridges and colleagues at Queen Mary University of London, UK.

So why not sidestep this conundrum and use neural tissue directly as a biocomputer?

This month, a team from Johns Hopkins University laid out a daring blueprint for a new field of computing: organoid intelligence (OI). Don’t worry—they’re not talking about using living human brain tissue hooked up to wires in jars. Rather, as in the name, the focus is on a surrogate: brain organoids, better known as “mini-brains.” These pea-sized nuggets roughly resemble the early fetal human brain in their gene expression, wide variety of brain cells, and organization. Their neural circuits spark with spontaneous activity, ripple with brain waves, and can even detect light and control muscle movement.

Continue reading “Biocomputing With Mini-Brains as Processors Could Be More Powerful Than Silicon-Based AI” »

Recently, Scientists have outlined a plan for a potentially revolutionary new area of research called “organoid intelligence”, which aims to create “biocomputers”, where brain cultures grown in the lab are coupled to real-world sensors and input/output devices.

The term now covers all types of technology and innovation designed to address health issues that solely, or disproportionately, impact women’s health, from menstrual cycle tracking apps and sexual wellness products to cardiovascular medical devices and mental health therapies.

Giving FemTech its own name helped the community of people working in the sector to find each other, but also gave investors reassurance about where they were putting their money, Tin said.

“It’s a little easier to say you’re invested in FemTech than, you know, a company that helps women not pee their pants … It kind of bridged the gap over to men as well, which was important, still is important, because so many investors are men.”

Europe was covered in thick ice sheets around the time of the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago, during which time sea levels were more than a hundred metres lower than today.

Shielding themselves from the frigid conditions in western Europe, cave-dwelling humans occupied rock shelters and caverns and in one site near Granada in Spain, archaeologists have unearthed remains providing the oldest human genome recorded in the region.

This 23,000-year-old genome from Cueva del Malalmuerzo is the oldest found in the Andalusian region and one of the oldest recorded. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have connected these genetic remains to those of a 35,000-year-old Belgian specimen found in 2016.

A team of biologists has discovered how to awaken neural stem cells and reactivate them in adult mice.

Some areas of the adult brain contain quiescent, or dormant, neural stem cells that can potentially be reactivated to form new neurons. However, the transition from quiescence to proliferation is still poorly understood. A team led by scientists from the Universities of Geneva (UNIGE) and Lausanne (UNIL) has discovered the importance of cell metabolism in this process and identified how to wake up these neural stem cells and reactivate them. Biologists succeeded in increasing the number of new neurons in the brain of adult and even elderly mice. These results, promising for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, are to be discovered in the journal Science Advances.

<em>Science Advances</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal that is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It was launched in 2015 and covers a wide range of topics in the natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, and physics.

From Google’s Bard to Microsoft’s new Bing, here are all the major contenders in the AI chatbot space.

Quantum bits inspired by Schrödinger’s cat could allow quantum computers to make fewer mistakes and more efficiently crack algorithms used for encryption.

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan