Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 5488

Circa 2019

When Ken-Ichiro Kamei, a microengineer at Kyoto University, goes out drinking with his friends, he usually brings along one of his “bodies on a chip.” When the topic of work inevitably comes up, he’ll whip out the chip – which looks like a lab slide, but with an added crystal-clear silicone rubber layer containing faintly visible troughs and channels – and declare, “I’m making these devices to recreate humans and animals.”

Wows inevitably ensue. “It’s like I’m a magician and my friends have asked me to do some tricks,” Kamei chuckles.

Kamei is at the forefront of a new field of biotechnology that seeks to replicate organs, systems and entire bodies on chips such as the one he likes to show off. While traditional biochemical experiments carried out on lab plates are static and isolated, the chips Kamei uses contain an interconnected system of channels, valves and pumps that allow for more complex interactions – to the point that they can mimic a living system. Recognizing the potential such chips have for revolutionizing medical research, in 2016 the World Economic Forum named “organs-on-chips” in their top 10 emerging technologies of the year. But while those specialised chips mimic particular tissues or organs, Kamei and his colleagues aim to eventually mimic whole animals. “It’s quite ambitious,” he says.

Continue reading “How “bodies on a chip” can transform animal welfare” | >

Circa 2021

Seoul National University Hospital completed a liver transplant procedure using a robot and a laparoscope that left no huge abdominal scars for both the donor and recipient.

Suh Kyung-suk, a professor on the liver transplant team, noted that the new surgical procedure also reduces complications associated with the lungs and scars and shortens the recovery time.

The use of a robot and a laparoscope that allowed a transplant without opening the donor’s abdomen was the world’s first.

Continue reading “Seoul hospital completes robotic liver transplant surgery” | >

The plan is there is no plan.

So it turns out we may be America’s worst-designed city. Lack of “official” zoning. Messy roads and meager public transportation options. Complete chaos. We get it, our predecessors sucked at design. But that may not necessarily be a bad thing. In fact, there are a bunch of ways in which the city totally (and unintentionally) came out ahead in the whole “the plan is there is no plan” deal.

Love it or hate it, Houston’s lack of zoning may actually be what shielded it from the popped housing bubble that rocked the rest of the country. Picture Margot Robbie explaining this all whilst in a bubble bath drinking champagne. While housing prices soared as the national bubble inflated, Houston’s costs remained modest; and when all hell broke loose when the bubble burst, H-town remained largely unaffected.

As discussed in an article from the Chron, senior economist Bill Gilmer found that zoning regulations were partly to blame. First, the laws constricted supply, which resulted in raising the cost of new home construction. As housing demand increased, cities with strict zoning laws saw prices increase due to the lack of supply. In turn, the high housing prices extinguished demand and — BOOM — the mortgage market collapsed and chaos consumed the majority of the country — minus Houston, where the increase in demand was met with an increase in construction/supply. Or something like that. Whatever. Margot Robbie in a bubble bath.

Continue reading “Unintended Benefits of Houston Being America’s Worst-Designed City” | >

Over the past decade or so, many researchers worldwide have been trying to develop brain-inspired computer systems, also known as neuromorphic computing tools. The majority of these systems are currently used to run deep learning algorithms and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have recently conducted a study assessing the potential of neuromorphic architectures to perform a different type of computations, namely random walk computations. These are computations that involve a succession of random steps in the mathematical space. The team’s findings, published in Nature Electronics, suggest that neuromorphic architectures could be well-suited for implementing these computations and could thus reach beyond machine learning applications.

“Most past studies related to focused on cognitive applications, such as ,” James Bradley Aimone, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “While we are also excited about that direction, we wanted to ask a different and complementary question: can neuromorphic computing excel at complex math tasks that our brains cannot really tackle?”

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