Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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For children suffering from rare diseases, it usually takes years to receive a diagnosis. This “diagnostic odyssey” is filled with multiple referrals and a barrage of tests, seeking to uncover the root cause behind mysterious and debilitating symptoms.

A new speed record in DNA sequencing may soon help families more quickly find answers to difficult and life-altering questions.

In just 7 hours, 18 minutes, a team of researchers at Stanford Medicine went from collecting a blood sample to offering a disease diagnosis. This unprecedented turnaround time is the result of ultra-rapid DNA sequencing technology paired with massive cloud storage and computing. This improved method of diagnosing diseases allows researchers to discover previously undocumented sources of genetic diseases, shining new light on the 6 billion letters in the human genome.

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As if drive-through ordering wasn’t frustrating enough already, now we might have a Siri-like AI to contend with. McDonald’s just rolled out a voice recognition system at 10 drive-throughs in Chicago, expanding from the solitary test store they launched a few years ago.

But when will it come to your neighborhood Golden Arches?

“There is a big leap between going from 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants across the U.S. with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect permutations, weather — I mean, on and on and on and on,” admitted McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski, reports Nation’s Restaurant News.

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We promise, this isn’t a joke.

A Seattle-based startup called Cybercat developed an aftermarket kit that will convert your shiny new Tesla Cybertruck into a catamaran, and there’s even an option for a hydrofoil extension, a report from InsideEVs reveals.

The hype around Tesla’s Cybertruck keeps growing in spite of a long stream of production delays. Several companies have aimed to cash in on that hype in recent months and years by announcing aftermarket additions to the EV pickup, including an RV attachment that has garnered its creators $100 million worth of preorders.

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Are you afraid of the dark?

Hopefully, none of the astronauts vying to join the Artemis crewed Moon missions are similarly nyctophobic. If a new NASA image is anything to go on, they’ll need to get over it.

“NASA astronauts are no strangers to extreme environments,” Megan Dean, a NASA spokesperson tells Inverse. Just as well. In a hauntingly beautiful photograph posted on Twitter this week, NASA teases just how extreme the environment may be when NASA astronauts reach the Moon as part of the Artemis III mission, currently slated for 2025.

Artemis III will be the first crewed Moon landing as part of the NASA program to return humans to the Moon. It will be the first such mission since 1972, when Apollo 17 landed astronauts on the Moon for the last time. Artemis III is geared to land in the Moon’s south pole region — an unexplored zone some of which lies in permanent shadow (although other areas are rather bright).

Continue reading “Behold! NASA teases how Artemis astronauts will explore the Moon’s south pole” | >

Machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, vastly speeds up computational tasks and enables new technology in areas as broad as speech and image recognition, self-driving cars, stock market trading and medical diagnosis.

Before going to work on a given task, algorithms typically need to be trained on pre-existing data so they can learn to make fast and accurate predictions about future scenarios on their own. But what if the job is a completely new one, with no data available for training?

Now, researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have demonstrated that they can use machine learning to optimize the performance of particle accelerators by teaching the algorithms the basic principles behind operations—no prior data needed.

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