Lifeboat Foundation

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The uncharted nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has caused uncertainty globally, resulting in many health care professionals and key-workers being left with supply shortages in medical consumables and personal protective equipment, exacerbated by supply line issues and in some cases delays resulting from governmental policies. 3D printing (3DP) has played an important role in providing essential items to hospitals and the wider communities, such as visors, face masks, and ventilator components. This short-review article covers the potential of antimicrobial materials in the manufacturing of 3DP essential products, as an approach for added protection against pandemics.

How is Cuba’s one dose vaccine working 🤔

HAVANA, Dec 20 (Reuters) — Cuba has vaccinated more of its citizens against COVID-19 than most of the world’s largest and richest nations, a milestone that will make the poor, communist-run country a test case as the highly contagious Omicron variant begins to circle the globe.

The Caribbean island has vaccinated over 90% of its population with at least one dose, and 83% of the population is now fully inoculated, placing it second globally behind only the United Arab Emirates among countries of at least 1 million people, according to official statistics compiled by ‘Our World in Data.’

Continue reading “Cuba soars to near top of COVID vaccination charts on decades-old bet” »

WASHINGTON, December 24, 2021 – Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger says that further use of artificial intelligence will call into question what it means to be human, and that the technology cannot solve all those problems humans fail to address on their own.

Kissinger spoke at a Council on Foreign Relations event highlighting his new book “The Age of AI: And Our Human Future” on Monday along with co-author and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a conversation moderated by PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff.

Schmidt remarked throughout the event on unanswered questions about AI despite common use of the technology.

A good deal of evidence points to declining kidney function as a cause of declining cognitive function in aging. There are strong correlations between loss of kidney function and risk of dementia, for example. Correlation isn’t a smoking gun in matters of aging, however: it is possible for any one of the underlying forms of molecular damage that cause aging, or for intermediate consequences of that damage, to give rise to otherwise unrelated pathologies in different parts of the body. Those pathologies appear more often in people with greater amounts of that form of damage, and thus appear correlated.

Nonetheless, there are good reasons to think that kidney failure and its downstream consequences contribute meaningful to neurodegeneration, perhaps largely by degrading the function of the vascular system. Vascular aging can cause damage and dysfunction in brain tissue via numerous mechanisms, including the pressure damage of hypertension, similar damage resulting from an acceleration of atherosclerosis, failing to delivery sufficient nutrients and oxygen to the energy-hungry brain, and disruption of the blood-brain barrier, allowing inflammatory cells and molecules into the brain.

Interactions Between Kidney Function and Cerebrovascular Disease: Vessel Pathology That Fires Together Wires Together.

The idea of a tritium power cell is pretty straightforward: stick enough of the tiny glowing tubes to a photovoltaic panel and your DIY “nuclear battery” will generate energy for the next decade or so. Only problem is that the power produced, measured in a few microwatts, isn’t enough to do much with. But as [Ian Charnas] demonstrates in his latest video, you can eke some real-world use out of such a cell by storing up its power over a long enough period.

As with previous projects we’ve seen, [Ian] builds his cell by sandwiching an array of keychain-sized tritium tubes between two solar panels. Isolated from any outside light, power produced by the panels is the result of the weak green glow given off by the tube’s phosphorus coating as it gets bombarded with electrons. The panels are then used to charge a bank of thin-film solid state batteries, which are notable for their exceptionally low self-discharge rate.

Continue reading “Tetris Handheld Powered By Tritium Cell, Eventually” »

(betavoltaic cell or betavoltaic battery) is a type of nuclear battery which generates electric current from beta particles (electrons) emitted from a radioactive source, using semiconductor junctions. A common source used is the hydrogen isotope tritium. Unlike most nuclear power sources which use nuclear radiation to generate heat which then is used to generate electricity, betavoltaic devices use a non-thermal conversion process, converting the electron-hole pairs produced by the ionization trail of beta particles traversing a semiconductor.^[1]

Betavoltaic power sources (and the related technology of alphavoltaic power sources^[2]) are particularly well-suited to low-power electrical applications where long life of the energy source is needed, such as implantable medical devices or military and space applications.^[1].

A Japanese professor invents a prototype TV that sprays flavours onto a lickable “hygienic film”.

Real Time Heart Rate Detection using Eulerian Magnification + YOLOR is used for head detection which feeds into a Eulerian Magnification algorithm developed by Rohin Tangirala. Courtesy of Dragos Stan for assistance in this demo and code.

⭐️Code+Dataset — https://lnkd.in/deRj6SPf.

Continue reading “Heart Rate Detection using Eulerian Magnification + YOLOR” »