Lifeboat News: The Blog – Safeguarding Humanity

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Mar 17
2023

Revolutionary 3D-printed devices utilize advanced sensing technology

Up until now, it was still infamously difficult to include sensors in 3D designs.

Engineers might be able to create smart hinges that can detect when a door has been opened or gears inside motors that can communicate their rotational speed to a mechanic by integrating sensors into rotational systems.

Even while improvements in 3D printing allow for the quick manufacture of rotational devices, it is still infamously difficult to include sensors in the designs.

MIT

With 3D printing, MIT engineers have now created a method for quickly integrating sensors into these devices.

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Mar 17
2023

New Horizons gives new insight about Pluto, finds bladed terrain

Scientists found large swaths of jagged landforms on Pluto’s surface.

In July 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft had its first close encounter with Pluto and its moons. It went on to explore the icy edge of the solar system, generating a wealth of data in the process.

The formation of Arrokoth.

NASA

The New Horizons team has been sifting through data to solve mysteries about Pluto and our solar system’s smaller bodies. The team presented their latest findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, on March 14. At the conference, they announced not one but three key findings.

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Mar 17
2023

Scientists restore sight in mice using a new gene-editing technique

The research team used a new CRISPR-based genome editing system named PESpRY.

Scientists in China have effectively treated retinitis pigmentosa.

The research team utilized a novel form of CRISPR-based genome editing that is exceptionally adaptable and could potentially remedy numerous genetic mutations responsible for causing different diseases.

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Mar 17
2023

Ex-Uber employee designs new approach to evaluating AI capabilities

The Turing Test, developed in 1950 has become quite obsolete.

Chris Saad, the former head of product development at Uber, has designed a new framework to benchmark the intelligence of artificial intelligence (AI), which is currently undergoing a sea change. The framework, based on a theory that intelligence is not a monolithic construction, was recently shared on Tech Crunch.

AI has been the trending topic for the past few months after OpenAI made public their conversational chatbot, ChatGPT. Users have tested the chatbot in many different areas varying from writing poetry to code and even sales pitches, and the bot hasn’t disappointed.

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Mar 17
2023

Chat GPT is NOT generative AI: Intel scientist

Is generative AI the beginning of the end for humans… or the end of the beginning?

And, did you know generative AI has been around since 1972?

In this TechFirst we chat with Ilke Demir, a research scientist at Intel who is working on ethical generative AI applications, like a speech synthesis project that aims to enable people who have lost their voice to talk again, an open urban driving simulator developed to support development, training, and validation of autonomous driving systems.

And a privacy-focused face generator that allows researchers to mix and match facial regions (nose of person A, mouth of person B, eyes of person C, etc.) to create an entirely new face that does not already exist in a dataset, so that people can request anonymization in public photos.

We also — of course — talk about OpenAI and Chat GPT, and how Ilke feels that it is not actually generative AI.

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Mar 17
2023

GPT-4 Has the Memory of a Goldfish

Large language models know a lot but can’t remember much at all.

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Mar 17
2023

Machine Intelligence and Humanity Benefit From “Spiral” of Mutual Learning

Summary: Humans and computers can interact via multiple modes and channels to respectively gain wisdom and deepen intelligence.

Source: Intelligent Computing.

Deyi Li from the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence believes that humans and machines have a mutually beneficial relationship.

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Mar 17
2023

CRISPR Gene-Editing Technique Reverses Vision Loss in Mice

Summary: Using a highly versatile form of CRISPR gene editing, researchers successfully restored vision in mice with retinitis pigmentosa.

Source: Rockefeller University Press.

Researchers in China have successfully restored the vision of mice with retinitis pigmentosa, one of the major causes of blindness in humans.

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Mar 17
2023

Engineered living materials for sustainable and resilient architecture

Progress in biomimetics allows for the fabrication of man-made materials and surfaces with properties similar to biological ones. These advancements enable the development of a new generation of building materials for architecture that have remarkable properties typically unachievable with a traditional approach.

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Mar 17
2023

How Our Native Language Shapes Our Brain Wiring

Summary: Our native language may affect the way in which our brains are wired and underlie the way we think, a new study reports. Using neuroimaging to analyze neural connectivity in native German and native Arabic speakers, researchers found stronger connectivity between the right and left hemispheres in Arabic speakers, and stronger connectivity in the left hemisphere language area in German speakers.

Source: Max Planck Institute.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have found evidence that the language we speak shapes the connectivity in our brains that may underlie the way we think.

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