Lifeboat Foundation

Just like our healthy cells, malignant cancer cells need energy to survive. Dr. Sophia Lunt explains how she intends to cut off cancer cells’ survival potential, and pioneer a new way of halting their growth.

Dr. Sophia Lunt began her training in metabolism at Princeton University, where she received her Ph.D. studying the metabolic consequences of the antibiotic drug trimethoprim. As a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, she focused on cancer metabolism, and was awarded the CDMRP PRCRP Visionary Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Department of Defense to support her research. She currently runs a research lab focused on cancer metabolism at Michigan State University.

Continue reading “Starving cancer away | Sophia Lunt | TEDxMSU” »

The shape of our Universe has long been recognized to be flat. But that isn’t the only possibility.

Drone pilot Reuben Burciaga was fined $20,000 by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) after his fly-away DJI Phantom 3 drone landed right next to an active runway at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. The drone incident took place in June of 2018 when Burciaga wanted to take an aerial photo of a Ferris wheel. Early on during the flight, he lost control of the DJI Phantom 3. The drone then slowly drifted for more than two miles towards the airport before landing right next to an active runway. The FAA issued the ‘careless and reckless” drone pilot a fine of $14,700 that increased to around $20,000 after Burciaga failed to pay or appeal on time. We have included the original video of the drone flight that was uploaded by Burciaga below.

Welcome to the 2020’s.

The technology powering Amazon Go convenience stores also could be licensed to other retailers.

Forrester projects that artificial intelligence will severely impact jobs like cubicle workers, location-based workers, and loan processors.

Named “speech by crowd,” the Debater A.I. groups and summarizes large numbers of disparate arguments made by individuals.

This week at MIT, academics and industry officials compared notes, studies, and predictions about AI and the future of work. During the discussions, an insurance company executive shared details about one AI program that rolled out at his firm earlier this year. A chatbot the company introduced, the executive said, now handles 150,000 calls per month.

Later in the day, a panelist—David Fanning, founder of PBS’s Frontline—remarked that this statistic is emblematic of broader fears he saw when reporting a new Frontline documentary about AI. “People are scared,” Fanning said of the public’s AI anxiety.

Fanning was part of a daylong symposium about AI’s economic consequences—good, bad, and otherwise— convened by MIT’s Task Force on the Work of the Future.

The news: Alphabet X, the company’s early research and development division, has unveiled the Everyday Robot project, whose aim is to develop a “general-purpose learning robot.” The idea is to equip robots with cameras and complex machine-learning software, letting them observe the world around them and learn from it without needing to be taught every potential situation they may encounter.

For now: The early prototype robots are learning how to sort trash. It sounds mundane, but it’s tough to get robots to identify different types of objects, and then how to grasp them. Alphabet X claims that its robots are currently putting less than 5% of trash in the wrong place, versus an error rate of 20% among the office’s humans.

The big idea: Robots are expensive and confined to performing very specific, specialized tasks. Getting robots that can operate safely and autonomously in messy, complex human environments like homes or offices is one of the biggest challenges in robotics right now.