Lifeboat Foundation

The subtractive manufacturing process involves etching, drilling, or cutting from a solid board to build the final product. It is ideal for applications using a wide variety of materials and in the PCB fabrication of large-size products. In the additive manufacturing process, a product is developed by adding material one layer at a time and bonding the layers together until the final product is ready. The ability to control material density and the possibility of including intricate features makes this process versatile. It is used in a range of engineering and manufacturing applications, especially in custom manufacturing.

Benefits of 3D printing in medical device manufacturing.

3D printing is economical and offers quick PCB prototyping without the need for complex manufacturing steps. It optimizes the PCB design process by avoiding possible design faults in the initial PCB design stages. 3D printing is easy on flex PCBs and multilayer PCB printing is possible using the latest design software. With the growing manufacturing trends and improving software, 3D printing will be more than a prototyping tool and can be a viable alternative for production parts. 3D printing has been recently used for the end-part manufacturing of several medical devices like hearing aids, dental implants, and more. It is more beneficial for low-volume productions.

Genetic mutations which cause a debilitating hereditary kidney disease affecting children and young adults have been fixed in patient-derived kidney cells using a potentially game-changing DNA repair-kit. The advance, developed by University of Bristol scientists, is published in Nucleic Acids Research.

In this new study, the international team describe how they created a DNA repair vehicle to genetically fix faulty podocin, a common genetic cause of inheritable Steroid Resistant Nephrotic Syndrome (SRNS).

Podocin is a protein normally located on the surface of specialised kidney cells and is essential for kidney function. Faulty podocin, however, remains stuck inside the cell and never makes it to the surface, terminally damaging the podocytes. Since the disease cannot be cured with medications, gene therapy which repairs the genetic mutations causing the faulty podocin offers hope for patients.

Capturing the world on an atomic scale is a challenging feat. But scientists have this possible after atoms swimming in liquid were caught on camera!

Cheap and quick to produce, the plasma sensors could help scientists predict the weather or study climate change.

The money, which is in addition to regular state funding, comes from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), a $1.9 trillion federal pandemic stimulus bill signed by President Biden last year.

Under the state budget passed last week, Pennsylvania’s conservation programs will receive a one-time, pandemic-related federal booster shot of $765 million for state parks, forests, streams, open space, farms, and home energy efficiency — an amount one environmental advocate called “generational.”

The funding means three new state parks, one possibly in the Philadelphia region, as well as a new ATV park, though locations haven’t been announced. The money, which is in addition to regular yearly budget funding, comes from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), a $1.9 trillion federal economic stimulus bill signed by President Joe Biden last year as part of COVID-19 relief.

The ARPA funds, combined with an additional $56 million from the state’s Oil and Gas Lease Fund, and a $12 billion state surplus, mean that agencies routinely faced with declining or stagnant spending plans are suddenly getting a big lift.

The greatest artistic tool ever built, or a harbinger of doom for entire creative industries? OpenAI’s second-generation DALL-E 2 system is slowly opening up to the public, and its text-based image generation and editing abilities are awe-inspiring.

The pace of progress in the field of AI-powered text-to-image generation is positively frightening. The generative adversarial network, or GAN, first emerged in 2014, putting forth the idea of two AIs in competition with one another, both “trained” by being shown a huge number of real images, labeled to help the algorithms learn what they’re looking at. A “generator” AI then starts to create images, and a “discriminator” AI tries to guess if they’re real images or AI creations.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s DALL-E 2: A dream tool and existential threat to visual artists” »

So, Artificial intelligence predicts selfies would dominate, ghoulish humans, holding mobiles, at the end of the earth, an event that would destroy every sign of life. Indeed, it is hypothetical and difficult to imagine the situation. An AI image generator, Midjourney, an obscure but close associate of Open AI, imagined a few of them revealing how scary they can be. Shared by a tik-tok account, @Robot Overloads, the images were hellish in tone and gory in substance. The images generated depict disfigured human beings with eyes as big as rat holes and fingers long enough to scoop out curdled blood from creatures of another world. These frames artificial intelligence has generated go beyond the portrayal of annihilation. Firstly, they are cut off from reality, and secondly, they are very few. The end of the world is billion years away when selfies would become a fossilized concept and humans are considered biological ancestors of cyborgs.

The pictures are stunning though in the sense that the elements like huge explosions going off in the background while a man maniacally staring into the camera are included in one frame. The imaginative spark of artificial intelligence should really be appreciated here. Perhaps it must have taken a hint or two from images of people taking selfies in the backdrop of accidents and natural calamities, to use them as click baits. Apparently, image generators give the users the power to visualize their imagination, how much ever removed from reality. However, the netizens are finding them captivating pleasantly, so much so that one of them wonders if they are from nibiru or planet X theories!! That one tik-tok video has got more than 12.7 million views and the reply, “OK no more sleeping,” posted by a Tik Tok user summarises, more than anything, the superficiality of melodramatic AI’s image generating capability.

The ongoing monkeypox outbreak is unprecedented. This research could help to explain why.