Lifeboat Foundation

A small energy harvesting device that can transform subtle mechanical vibrations into electrical energy could be used to power wireless sensors and actuators for use in anything from temperature and occupancy monitoring in smart environments, to biosensing within the human body.

In research recently published online in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute developed a predictive model for such a device, which will allow researchers to better understand and optimize its functionalities.

“Sooner or later these harvesters will replace batteries, reducing associated environmentally hazardous waste and maintenance costs,” said Diana-Andra Borca-Tasciuc, a professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering at Rensselaer, who led this research effort.

Scrutiny of the tech industry has ballooned in the nation’s capital in recent years, but until now federal regulators have passed little meaningful legislation or other penalties targeting the companies for perceived transgressions. Consumer advocates and legal experts say the DOJ broadside is an early sign that could be changing.

It could put more pressure on Congress to pass legislation addressing the tech industry.

Elon Musk is on the record stating that artificial superintelligence or ASI could bring the end of the human race. Elon has publicly expressed concern about AI many times now. He thinks the advent of a digital superintelligence is the most pressing issue for humanity to get right.

What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence would have undergone an event called the intelligence explosion, likely to occur in the 21st century. It is unknown what, or who this machine-network would become; The issue of superintelligence remains peripheral to mainstream AI research and is mostly discussed by a small group of academics.

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s Message on Artificial Superintelligence — ASI” »

Moderna is prepping for the global launch of its potential coronavirus vaccine, already taking in $1.1 billion in deposits from governments awaiting the potentially lifesaving drug, the biotech firm said Thursday in its third-quarter earnings report.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company said it was in ongoing talks with the World Health Organization-backed COVAX initiative on a tiered pricing proposal for its potential vaccine, which it’s tentatively calling mRNA-1273. It already has supply agreements in North America, the Middle East and in other regions of the world.

“We are actively preparing for the launch of mRNA-1273 and we have signed a number of supply agreements with governments around the world,” Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a press release. “Moderna is committed to the highest data quality standards and rigorous scientific research as we continue to work with regulators to advance mRNA-1273.”

Madiba & Nature’s ‘ecoboats’ — made out of discarded plastic bottles — are creating jobs, promoting ecotourism and raising awareness of the circular economy.

Africa, like most other parts of the world, is battling a spiraling plastic pollution crisis. In Cameroon, one non-profit company is helping to keep waste plastic out of the ocean while also improving livelihoods and inspiring entrepreneurs in communities across the country.

Madiba & Nature’s ‘ecoboats’ — made out of discarded plastic bottles — are helping fishermen while also creating jobs in the recycling industry, promoting ecotourism and raising awareness of the circular economy.

Continue reading “Q&A: This entrepreneur is turning waste plastic bottles into boats” »

📸 🌍 For 20 years, humans have lived and worked in Earth orbit on the International Space Station. Astronauts photograph our home planet from space almost daily, contributing to a growing archive of over 3 million Earth observations. How these images benefit science: youtu.be/1TtdOVbWjXo # SpaceStation20th.

Are you a cutting-edge AI researcher looking for models with clean semantics that can represent the context-specific causal dependencies necessary for causal induction? If so, maybe you should take a look at good old-fashioned probability trees.

Probability trees may have been around for decades, but they have received little attention from the AI and ML community. Until now. “Probability trees are one of the simplest models of causal generative processes,” explains the new DeepMind paper Algorithms for Causal Reasoning in Probability Trees, which the authors say is the first to propose concrete algorithms for causal reasoning in discrete probability trees.

Humans naturally learn to reason in large part through inducing causal relationships from our observations, and we do this remarkably well, cognitive scientists say. Even when the data we perceive is sparse and limited, humans can quickly learn causal structures such as interactions between physical objects, observations of the co-occurrence frequencies between causes and effects, etc.

Marrying two layers of graphene is an easy route to the blissful formation of nanoscale diamond, but sometimes thicker is better.

While it may only take a bit of heat to turn a treated bilayer of the ultrathin material into a cubic lattice of diamane, a bit of pressure in just the right place can convert few-layer graphene as well.

The otherwise chemically driven process is theoretically possible according to scientists at Rice University, who published their most recent thoughts on making high-quality diamane—the 2-D form of diamond—in the journal Small.

Many of the fundamental principles in biology and essentially all pathways regulating development were identified in so-called genetics screens. Originally pioneered in the fruit fly Drosophila and the nematode C. elegans, genetic screens involve inactivation of many genes one by one. By analyzing the consequences of gene loss, scientists can draw conclusions about its function. This way, for example, all genes required for formation of a brain can be identified.

Genetic screens can routinely be carried out in flies and worms. In humans, a wealth of knowledge exists about genetic disorders and the consequences of disease-relevant mutations, but their systematic analysis was impossible. Now, the Knoblich lab at IMBA has developed a groundbreaking technique allowing hundreds of genes to be analyzed in parallel in human tissue. They named the new technology CRISPR-LICHT and published their findings in the journal Science.

By using cerebral organoids, a 3D cell culture model for the human brain developed in Jürgen Knoblich’s group at IMBA, hundreds of mutations can now be analyzed for their role in the human brain using CRISPR-LICHT.