Lifeboat Foundation

The American Academy of Pediatrics also called on parents Thursday to get their children up-to-date on routine shots as families prepare for the return of in-person classes in the fall.

“We understand many families understandably delayed visits to their doctors during the pandemic,” Yvonne Maldonado, who chairs the group’s committee on infectious diseases, said in a statement. “We urge families to get their children caught up with their routine immunizations now. States have begun opening up, and as families move about in their community, we are concerned that we could see outbreaks of measles, whooping cough and other life-threatening diseases that could spread rapidly.”

The CDC data from 10 jurisdictions provides further evidence of the pandemic’s impact on routine childhood and adolescent vaccination rates, which were documented last year as parents across the country canceled well-child checkups to avoid coronavirus exposure.

More organizations feel the pain as the ransomware scourge grows more pernicious.

Toshiba’s research team has broken a new record for optical fiber-based quantum communications, thanks to a new technology called dual band stabilization.

National Geographic announced Tuesday that it is officially recognizing the body of water surrounding the Antarctic as the Earth’s fifth ocean: the Southern Ocean.

The change marks the first time in over a century that the organization has redrawn the world’s oceanic maps, which have historically only included four: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic Oceans.

“The Southern Ocean has long been recognized by scientists, but because there was never agreement internationally, we never officially recognized it,” National Geographic Society geographer Alex Tait told the magazine.

Preliminary results from young blood plasma transfusions in mice are showing some really promising results!

For organisms like us, survival is a team sport. I do not mean in the sense of being a pack animal that forms mutually beneficial relationships with others in order to increase the likelihood of acquiring protection and resources (although this is certain true), but instead to the fundamental functions of our biology. The cells which make up our body are all in essence working towards the goal of survival, and in turn work with one another in a variety of different ways. As anyone who has ever worked in a team will tell you, communication is key, and without it a team is doomed to failure. However, often poor or incorrect communication can be even worse than no communication at all.

The three billionaires are locked in a race to reach space — but some future visions look more promising than others.

The growing population of avatars that use AI smarts to interact with us is a major clue.

In the fictional worlds of film and TV, artificial intelligence has been depicted as so advanced that it is indistinguishable from humans. But what if we’re actually getting closer to a world where AI is capable of thinking and feeling?

Tech company UneeQ is embarking on that journey with its “digital humans.” These avatars act as visual interfaces for customer service chatbots, virtual assistants, and other applications. UneeQ’s digital humans appear lifelike not only in terms of language and tone of voice, but also because of facial movements: raised eyebrows, a tilt of the head, a smile, even a wink. They transform a transaction into an interaction: creepy yet astonishing, human, but not quite.

Continue reading “Are Digital Humans the Next Step in Human-Computer Interaction?” »

The scientists found that there are some key differences between different FRBs, some of which were one-off bursts and some of which rapidly repeated, according to CNN. That lead them to believe that the different categories are given off by fundamentally different sources of cosmic phenomena, they said in research presented Wednesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The next steps, of course, are to figure out what those sources actually are.

Thanks to just a year’s worth of observations that greatly expanded the known number of FRBs, the scientists now have much more to work with as they try to figure out what’s causing them. It also highlights the fact that FRBs, once thought to be rare occurrences, appear to be common phenomena in the grand scheme of things.

“That’s kind of the beautiful thing about this field — FRBs are really hard to see, but they’re not uncommon,” MIT physicist and CHIME member Kiyoshi Masui said in a press release. “If your eyes could see radio flashes the way you can see camera flashes, you would see them all the time if you just looked up.”

Stefan Thomas really could have used a quantum computer this year.

The German-born programmer and crypto trader forgot the password to unlock his digital wallet, which contains 7002 bitcoin, now worth $265 million. Quantum computers, which will be several million times faster than traditional computers, could have easily helped him crack the code.

Though quantum computing is still very much in its infancy, governments and private-sector companies such as Microsoft and Google are working to make it a reality. Within a decade, quantum computers could be powerful enough to break the cryptographic security that protects cell phones, bank accounts, email addresses and — yes — bitcoin wallets.