Lifeboat Foundation

On September 14, 1956, IBM announced the 305 and 650 RAMAC (Random Access Memory Accounting) “data processing machines,” incorporating the first-ever disk storage product. The 305 came with fifty 24-inch disks for a total capacity of 5 megabytes, weighed 1 ton, and could be leased for $3,200 per month.

In 1953, Arthur J. Critchlow, a young member of IBM’s advanced technologies research lab in San Jose, California, was assigned the task of finding a better data storage medium than punch-cards.

The information explosion (a term first used in 1941, according to the Oxford English Dictionary) has turned into the big digital data explosion. And the data explosion enabled deep learning, an advanced data analysis method, to perform today’s AI breakthroughs in image identification and natural language processing.

Continue reading “History Of AI In 33 Breakthroughs: Digital Storage” »

The story of the damage done to the world’s biodiversity is a tale of decline spanning thousands of years. Can the world seize its chance to change the narrative?

The story of the biodiversity crisis starts with a cold-case murder mystery that is tens of thousands of years old. When humans started spreading across the globe they discovered a world full of huge, mythical-sounding mammals called “megafauna”, but by the end of the Pleistocene, one by one, these large animals had disappeared. There is no smoking gun and evidence from ancient crime scenes is — unsurprisingly — patchy. But what investigators have learned suggests a prime suspect: humans.

😗

Even though it has a diameter of just two inches.

Every year, the EU generates over 2.5 billion tonnes of waste – that’s 5 tonnes per person. The good news is that much of this waste can be recycled and reused. The bad news, however, is that doing so requires proper collection processes, which is often easier said than done.

“The challenge with waste collection is that it is a widely dispersed process,” says Tjerk Wardenaar, a consultant at EGEN, part of the PNO Group, the project’s lead partner. “Individual consumers discard small amounts of waste, local and regional authorities implement collection systems, waste management companies do the actual collecting, recycling companies recover materials, and so on.”

With the support of the EU-funded COLLECTORS project, Wardenaar aims to increase our understanding of how these various steps relate to one another. “Waste collection depends on a combination of social and technical factors,” he explains. “Our goal is to identify best practices that decision makers can use to implement an integrated waste collection system that supports Europe’s transition to a waste-free, circular economy.”

Immune players called B cells are partly to blame for the decline in vaccine efficacy for people over 65.

If wormholes in space exist, they look a lot like black holes from a particular angle, physicists claim, raising the possibility we’ve seen examples of this long-sought phenomenon without knowing it.

Is pancreatic cancer hereditary? Are there any genetic mutations associated with it? Our pancreatic cancer expert Florencia McAllister, M.D., weighs in on these questions and seven more.

Identifying how to help a loved one struggling with mental health challenges can feel overwhelming. Our helpful guide is filled with tips, strategies, and resources that can accelerate the journey to recovery.

In a study from Yale-NUS College, researchers found evidence that metabolic dysfunction is a primary cause of Alzheimer’s disease is the most common neurodegenerative disease affecting the elderly worldwide, as well as one of the most common causes of dementia. In Singapore, one in 10 people aged 60 or above is believed to suffer from dementia.