Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Celine halioua drops into a crouch and greets Bocce, a Chihuahua-dachshund mix with soulful brown eyes, like a long-lost friend. “Oh my God, you’re so beautiful!” she chirps. The two have just met in an upstairs room at Muttville Senior Dog Rescue in San Francisco, where light streams in through the open windows and urine occasionally streams onto the floor. About a dozen elderly dogs, none taller than a kneecap, putter around on the gray linoleum or nap on blankets. When Halioua kneels, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulder, Bocce rests his head blissfully in her lap.

A tragedy of human-canine relations is that a 10-year-old dog such as Bocce is old, while a 28-year-old person such as Halioua is in the prime of life. Bocce is one of the lucky ones. Many dogs can only dream of living as long as he likely will, because dog lifespan is inversely correlated with body size. It’s the opposite of the wider pattern in the animal kingdom, where elephants easily outlast mice, which in turn outlive mosquitoes. A Chihuahua can expect roughly 15 years of life; an Irish wolfhound or Great Dane around seven or eight.

Halioua hopes that the startup whose name is emblazoned on her slim black T-shirt— Loyal —can start to fix this bug in humanity’s 14,000-year-plus wolf bioengineering project. The company, which she founded in 2019 and leads as CEO, is developing drugs to delay aging in dogs and extend their healthy lifespan. She has raised around $58 million and has two drugs in development. In a few years, she hopes to have the first commercial drug—for any species—to state on the label that it delays aging or extends lifespan. That alone would be a triumph, but Halioua sees it as a springboard to a still greater feat: creating similar drugs for humans.

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A series of buzzing, bee-like “loop-currents” could explain a recently discovered, never-before-seen phenomenon in a type of quantum material. The findings from researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder may one day help engineers to develop new kinds of devices, such as quantum sensors or the quantum equivalent of computer memory storage devices.

The quantum material in question is known by the chemical formula Mn3Si2Te6. But you could also call it “” because its manganese and tellurium atoms form a network of interlocking octahedra that look like the cells in a beehive.

Physicist Gang Cao and his colleagues at CU Boulder synthesized this molecular beehive in their lab in 2020, and they were in for a surprise: Under most circumstances, the material behaved a lot like an insulator. In other words, it didn’t allow electric currents to pass through it easily. When they exposed the honeycomb to magnetic fields in a certain way, however, it suddenly became millions of times less resistant to currents. It was almost as if the material had morphed from rubber into metal.

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Generalized in-hand manipulation has long been an unsolved challenge of robotics. As a small step towards this grand goal, we demonstrate how to design and learn a simple adaptive controller to achieve in-hand object rotation using only fingertips. The controller is trained entirely in simulation on only cylindrical objects, which then – without any fine-tuning – can be directly deployed to a real robot hand to rotate dozens of objects with diverse sizes, shapes, and weights over the z-axis. This is achieved via rapid online adaptation of the robot’s controller to the object properties using only proprioception history. Furthermore, natural and stable finger gaits automatically emerge from training the control policy via reinforcement learning.

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The form gets rolled out on a concrete slab or other foundation, then inflated with an air pump; at this point, it may look a little like one of those bouncy houses you see at children’s parties. Then a ready mix truck shows up—these trucks can mix concrete on their way to a site or at the site itself—and pumps concrete into the form. The company’s website says they can use local ready mix concrete, aircrete (a lightweight version of concrete that incorporates air bubbles instead of traditional aggregate), sustainable cement, and other “pumpable building materials.”

The concrete-pumping step is a bit like 3D printing, though 3D printed homes use concrete as printer “ink” to put walls down layer by layer rather than spitting all the concrete into a form at once. This is even faster; Bell told New Atlas, “For our 100-square-foot and 200-square-foot prototypes, the inflation took 7 to 10 minutes with air. Then the concrete pump filled them in 1.5 hours.”

Once the concrete has dried, the form isn’t stripped away; it stays right where it is, serving as an airtight barrier for waterproofing and insulation. The final step is to add all the things that make a house look and function like a house rather than a giant clay art project, that is, a facade, windows, doors, drywall, HVAC, and plumbing.

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This book explores the psychological impact of advanced forms of artificial intelligence. How will it be to live with a superior intelligence? How will the exposure to highly developed artificial intelligence (AI) systems change human well-being? With a review of recent advancements in brain–computer interfaces, military AI, Explainable AI (XAI) and digital clones as a foundation, the experience of living with a hyperintelligence is discussed from the viewpoint of a clinical psychologist. The theory of universal solicitation is introduced, i.e. the demand character of a technology that wants to be used in all aspects of life. With a focus on human experience, and to a lesser extent on technology, the book is written for a general readership with an interest in psychology, technology and the future of our human condition. With its unique focus on psychological topics, the book offers contributions to a discussion on the future of human life beyond purely technological considerations.

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Our cells change over our lifespan and while some of the changes are necessary and beneficial to our body, sometimes they change in a dangerous and life-threatening way.

Knowing what type of cancer mutation you have is one of the best things you can do to narrow down treatment plans and eligibility for clinical trials. A great way to do that is to get Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) testing done.

NGS Testing is a simple procedure that requires blood work, a tissue sample, or both. The test is often encouraged in advanced cancer patients.

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An interdisciplinary team of researchers has developed a blueprint for creating algorithms that more effectively incorporate ethical guidelines into artificial intelligence (AI) decision-making programs. The project was focused specifically on technologies in which humans interact with AI programs, such as virtual assistants or “carebots” used in healthcare settings.

“Technologies like carebots are supposed to help ensure the safety and comfort of hospital patients, and other people who require health monitoring or physical assistance,” says Veljko Dubljević, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor in the Science, Technology & Society program at North Carolina State University. “In practical terms, this means these technologies will be placed in situations where they need to make ethical judgments.”

“For example, let’s say that a carebot is in a setting where two people require medical assistance. One patient is unconscious but requires urgent care, while the second patient is in less urgent need but demands that the carebot treat him first. How does the carebot decide which patient is assisted first? Should the carebot even treat a patient who is unconscious and therefore unable to consent to receiving the treatment?”

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