Lifeboat Foundation

Facebook has just announced it’s going to hire 10,000 people in Europe to develop the “metaverse”.

This is a concept which is being talked up by some as the future of the internet. But what exactly is it?

**What is the metaverse?
**
To the outsider, it may look like a souped-up version of Virtual Reality (VR) — but some people think the metaverse could be the future of the internet.

Continue reading “Apparently, it’s the next big thing. What is the metaverse?” »

Alfredo Munoz — Digital Twins of Martian Cities as a new frontier for Space Analogs.

From the 24th Annual International Mars Society Convention, held as a Virtual Convention worldwide on the Internet from October 14–17, 2021. The four-day International Mars Society Convention, held every year since 1,998 brings together leading scientists, engineers, aerospace industry representatives, government policymakers and journalists to talk about the latest scientific discoveries, technological advances and political-economic developments that could help pave the way for a human mission to the planet Mars.

Continue reading “Digital Twins of Martian Cities — Alfredo Munoz — 2021 Mars Society Virtual Convention” »

As a scientist at both NASA and JAXA, James O’Donoghue has studied the planets. In his free time, he makes award-winning animations of them.

Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Beta are, at their core, safety systems. They may be advanced enough to make driving tasks extremely easy and convenient, but ultimately, CEO Elon Musk has been consistent with the idea that Tesla’s advanced driver-assist technologies are being developed to make the world’s roads as safe as possible.

This is something that seems to be happening now among some members of the FSD Beta group, which is currently being expanded even to drivers with a Safety Score of 99. As the company expands its fleet of vehicles that are equipped with FSD beta, some testers have started sharing stories about how the advanced driver-assist system helped them avoid potential accidents on the road.

FSD Beta tester @FrenchieEAP, for example, recently shared a story about a moment when his Model 3 was sitting at a red light with the Full Self-Driving Beta engaged. When the light turned green, the all-electric sedan started moving forward — before braking suddenly. The driver initially thought that the FSD Beta was stopping for no reason, but a second later, the Model 3 owner realized that a cyclist had actually jumped a red light. The FSD Beta just saw the cyclist before he did.

Steelmaking is currently extremely carbon intensive, accounting for about 7% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. As we continue to use ever more steel for new infrastructure around the world, the task of decarbonising the industry is growing ever more urgent. Hydrogen can now perform that task and Volvo has just taken delivery of the first consignment of carbon-free steel. So how is it done, and will it be a gamechanger for the auto industry and wider world?

Video Transcripts available at our website.
http://www.justhaveathink.com.

Continue reading “Carbon Free Steel becomes a reality at Volvo and Mercedes Benz” »

An artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology rapidly diagnoses rare disorders in critically ill children with high accuracy, according to a report by scientists from University of Utah Health and Fabric Genomics, collaborators on a study led by Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. The benchmark finding, published in Genomic Medicine, foreshadows the next phase of medicine, where technology helps clinicians quickly determine the root cause of disease so they can give patients the right treatment sooner.

“This study is an exciting milestone demonstrating how rapid insights from AI-powered decision support technologies have the potential to significantly improve patient care,” says Mark Yandell, Ph.D., co-corresponding author on the paper. Yandell is a professor of human genetics and Edna Benning Presidential Endowed Chair at U of U Health, and a founding scientific advisor to Fabric.

Worldwide, about seven million infants are born with serious genetic disorders each year. For these children, life usually begins in intensive care. A handful of NICUs in the U.S., including at U of U Health, are now searching for genetic causes of disease by reading, or sequencing, the three billion DNA letters that make up the human genome. While it takes hours to sequence the whole genome, it can take days or weeks of computational and manual analysis to diagnose the illness.

😗

More AI in the exam room means doctors can spend more time actually talking to patients.

Circa 2019 😀

Because they can process massive amounts of data, computers can perform analytical tasks that are beyond human capability. Google, for instance, is using its computing power to develop AI algorithms that construct two-dimensional CT images of lungs into a three-dimensional lung and look at the entire structure to determine whether cancer is present. Radiologists, in contrast, have to look at these images individually and attempt to reconstruct them in their heads. Another Google algorithm can do something radiologists cannot do at all: determine patients’ risk of cardiovascular disease by looking at a scan of their retinas, picking up on subtle changes related to blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking history and aging. “There’s potential signal there beyond what was known before,” says Google product manager Daniel Tse.

The Black Box Problem

Continue reading “Rise of Robot Radiologists” »

The Mayo Foundation Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved the study. All patients gave written informed consent to have their medical records reviewed and samples analyzed according to IRB requirements and federal regulations. Patients were eligible for this retrospective study if they: were diagnosed with AL amyloidosis between January 2000 and May 2015; were classified as amyloidosis complete hematologic response by immunofixation electrophoresis (IFE), serum free light chain (FLC) by consensus criteria;^6,7 had a negative bone marrow by six-color flow cytometry; and had both a stored research sample prior to starting a line of therapy and a repeat sample while in complete hematologic response. The diagnosis of amyloidosis was made by Congo red with green birefringence under polarized light; the typing of the amyloid was with immunohistochemical stains or proteomics^8,9. Supplementary Figure 1 is a consort diagram illustrating patient selection. Median time from institution of therapy to complete response (CR) sample was 18 months (interquartile range 9.1, 20 months).

The serum IFE (SIFE), urine IFE (UIFE), FLC, and bone marrow measurements were done as part of routine clinical practice as previously described^4,5. Urine samples were concentrated to a maximum of 200× to achieve final concentrations of urine protein between 20 and 80 g/L^4,5. The FLC assay (Freelite™, The Binding Site Ltd.) was performed on a Siemens BNII nephelometer¹⁰, and an abnormal FLC result was defined as an abnormal FLC κ/λ ratio. Bone marrow clonality was determined by six-color flow cytometry¹¹. This method has sensitivity of ~10⁻⁴ to 10⁻⁵.

For MASS-FIX, immunoglobulins were enriched from serum using camelid-derived nanobodies directed against the heavy-chain constant domains of IgG, IgA, and IgM or the light-chain constant domains of κ and λ (Thermo Fisher Scientific)^4,5. The +1 and +2 charge states of the light chains and heavy chains were measured by configuring the mass spectrometer to analyze ions between an m/z of 9000–32,000 Da.