Toggle light / dark theme

Harrison.ai, a Sydney-based company that creates medical devices with AI technology, announced today it has raised $129 million AUD (about $92.3 million USD) in what it called one of the largest Series B rounds ever for an Australian startup.

The funding was led by returning investor Horizons Ventures and included participation from new investors Sonic Healthcare and I-MED Radiology Network. Existing backers Blackbird Ventures and Skip Capital also returned for the round, which brings Harrison.ai’s total raised over the past two years to $158 million AUD.

Harrison.ai announced it has also formed a joint venture with Sonic Healthcare, one of the world’s largest medical diagnostics providers, to develop and commercialize new clinical AI solutions in pathology. The partnership will focus first on histopathology, or the diagnosis of tissue diseases.

Finland’s first quantum computer was commissioned at a research center near the capital Helsinki, where scientists will use it to study next-generation computing power.

The 5 quantum-bit computer was developed “to learn how to build a quantum computer, how to program one and how to operate one in the future,” Pekka Pursula, research manager at the VTT Technical Research Centre, said by phone on Tuesday. The machine was the joint work of VTT and quantum computing hardware company IQM Finland Oy.

“This 5-qubit computer has relatively low computational power, and it’s not enough to solve practical problems,” Pursula said. The researchers plan to build a 50-qubit machine by 2024 that could be used for applications such as modeling viruses and drugs, and designing materials that today’s technology is ill-equipped to handle.

A 2D nanomaterial consisting of organic molecules linked to metal atoms in a specific atomic-scale geometry shows non-trivial electronic and magnetic properties due to strong interactions between its electrons.

A new study, published today, shows the emergence of magnetism in a 2D organic material due to strong electron-electron interactions; these interactions are the direct consequence of the material’s unique, star-like atomic-scale structure.

This is the first observation of local magnetic moments emerging from interactions between electrons in an atomically thin 2D organic material.

If history is a guide, people always need to believe in something bigger than themselves, in higher powers, so I wouldn’t be surprised if in the interim, we might get all sorts of movements, including the religious ones. But as opposed to rigid religious doctrines, spirituality most of the time requires finding your own personal path to God and enlightenment through introspection and spiritual growth. And that, I believe, would be the key going forward. Religiosity is unavoidably cultural, spirituality is, in contrast, a higher-order transcendental metaphysics, cognized subjectively.

#CyberSpirituality #SiliconValley #Singularity #Metaverse #Theogenesis #Cybergods #Cybertheism


Futurist and evolutionary cyberneticist Alex Vikoulov was recently interviewed by Magda Gacyk, San Francisco-based correspondent for Wyborcza, the most prestigious daily newspaper in Poland, and her article “Prophecies of the Tech Spirituality: A New Gospel of Silicon Valley” appeared in the last Saturday issue of November.

Here’s their conversation (shortened for readability):

The market introduction of the MR-Linac technology improves the patient care via the real-time imaging of the targeted PTVs. Conventional Water Phantoms with ferromagnetic material become prohibited due to safety reasons. To overcome this situation, LAP introduced the MR-compatible Water Phantom THALES 3D MR SCANNER. Dr Thierry Gevaert, medical physicist and co-ordinator at the UZ Brussel institute, will share his experience with the THALES 3D MR SCANNER during the commissioning of the MRIdian Linac of Viewray. Furthermore, he will highlight which benefits played an important role for his clinical workflow.

During the webinar you will also learn more about the THALES technology for commissioning and quality-assurance processes of conventional Linacs.

Recently, Microsoft Azure joined the Top 10 club of the TOP500 super computer rankings by delivering 30.05 Petaflops. It was based on Microsoft’s recently announced Azure NDm A100 80GB v4, available on demand. These Azure NDm A100 v4 instances are powered by NVIDIA GPU acceleration and NVIDIA InfiniBand networking.

Microsoft today highlighted the latest (December 2021) MLPerf 1.1 results in which Azure delivered the #2 performance overall and the #1 performance by a cloud provider.

This is a short videoclip I made of the CBS News Special program entitled “Forever Young_Searching for the Fountain of Youth” aired on Nov 29, 2021.

The entire program lasts 43 minutes and in this 2-minute videoclip I highlight the excerpts I found most relevant. In the description of the video is the link to see the entire program.

El videoclip cuenta con subtítulos en Español.


An Italian energy storage company, Energy Dome, has announced the close of its $11M Series A fundraise, with the goal of deploying the first commercially viable CO2 battery in a demonstration project in its native Sardinia, Italy. The proposed 100 megawatt-hours (MWh) CO2 Battery could support the increased use of renewable power in the generation mix and address the growing need for energy storage on electrical grids.

The CO2 Battery’s optimal charge/discharge cycle ranges from 4 to 24 hours, positioning it perfectly for daily and intra-day cycling. The company points out that this is a fast-growing market segment, not well served by existing battery technologies. Significantly, the CO2 Battery can be charged during the daytime when there is a surplus solar generation and dispatched during the subsequent evening and next-morning peaks, when solar generation falls short of demand. The modular, scalable energy storage solution will allow for solar and wind generation to be dispatchable 24 hours per day.

Using low-cost, off-the-shelf components, the company claims that its CO2 battery achieves a 75–80% round-trip efficiency. Unlike lithium-ion batteries, which degrade significantly in performance after roughly a decade of use, the battery maintains its performance during its expected 25-year operational life. This means the cost of the storage will be about half of the cost of storing with similar-sized lithium-ion batteries.