Lifeboat Foundation

Osaka University researchers discovered that worms may be coated with hydrogel sheaths that contain useful cargo such as anti-cancer medications

James Bond’s famed quartermaster Q provided the secret agent with an unlimited supply of equipment and gadgets to aid him on his missions. Now, scientists from Japan have shown that they are equally adept in providing microscopic worms with a surprising variety of useful and protective components.

Researchers from Osaka University have discovered that microscopic, free-living worms known as nematodes may be coated with hydrogel-based “sheaths” that can be further customized to transport functional cargo.

Could a brain ever exist on its own, divorced from or independent of a body? For a long time, philosophers have pondered such “brain-in-a-vat” scenarios, asking whether isolated brains could maintain consciousness when separated from their bodies and senses. Typically, a person’s experiences are characterized by a web of interactions between the human brain, body and environment. But recent developments in neuroscience mean this conversation has moved from the realm of hypothetical speculation and science fiction, to isolated examples where consciousness could be sealed off from the rest of the world.

It may sound like science fiction, but can actual science keep a brain alive in a vat?

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The Neuro-Network.

#Fetal #Brain begin to #experience #pain #neuroscience #science #Biology #consciousness

Context Proposed federal legislation would require physicians to inform women seeking abortions at 20 or more weeks after fertilization that the fetus feels pain and to offer anesthesia administered directly to the fetus. This article examines whether a fetus feels pain and if so, whether safe and effective techniques exist for providing direct fetal anesthesia or analgesia in the context of therapeutic procedures or abortion.

Continue reading “ABSTRACT: @Nicholiscience” »

Meta, the Facebook parent company, has announced its new, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven language translation model, which claims to be able to translate 200 languages worldwide, in real-time. In a blog post from earlier today, Meta said that this is the first AI language translator model that brings a large number of fringe and lesser known languages from around the world — including fringe dialects from Asia and Africa.

The AI model can also carry out these translations without needing to first translate a language to English, and then translate it to the originally intended language. This, Meta said, does not only help in speeding up the translation time, but is a breakthrough of sorts since many of the 200 languages that its AI model can understand had little to no available public data for AI to train on.

The initiative is part of the company’s No Language Left Behind (NLLB) project, which it announced in February this year. The new AI model, called NLLB-200, has achieved up to 44% higher BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) score in terms of its accuracy and quality of translation results. For Indian dialects, NLLB-200 is 70% better than existing AI models.

Circa 2018

Debugging code is drudgery. But SapFix, a new AI hybrid tool created by Facebook engineers, can significantly reduce the amount of time engineers spend on debugging, while also speeding up the process of rolling out new software. SapFix can automatically generate fixes for specific bugs, and then propose them to engineers for approval and deployment to production.

SapFix has been used to accelerate the process of shipping robust, stable code updates to millions of devices using the Facebook Android app — the first such use of AI-powered testing and debugging tools in production at this scale. We intend to share SapFix with the engineering community, as it is the next step in the evolution of automating debugging, with the potential to boost the production and stability of new code for a wide range of companies and research organizations.

Continue reading “Finding and fixing software bugs automatically with SapFix and Sapienz” »

Circa 2021

Suppose you are trying to transmit a message. Convert each character into bits, and each bit into a signal. Then send it, over copper or fiber or air. Try as you might to be as careful as possible, what is received on the other side will not be the same as what you began with. Noise never fails to corrupt.

In the 1940s, computer scientists first confronted the unavoidable problem of noise. Five decades later, they came up with an elegant approach to sidestepping it: What if you could encode a message so that it would be obvious if it had been garbled before your recipient even read it? A book can’t be judged by its cover, but this message could.

Continue reading “Researchers Defeat Randomness to Create Ideal Code” »

It’s not easy being green.

Dark matter is made up of axions, elementary particles that are full of suspense.

About 85 percent of our universe is believed to be composed of dark matter, a hypothetical material that does not interact with light. So it neither reflects nor emits nor absorbs any light rays, and therefore, we can not see this unusual form of the matter directly. However, to understand and explain the nature of dark matter, scientists have created various models.

Continue reading “Good news, universe! Scientists are one step closer to finally understanding dark matter” »