Lifeboat Foundation

Animal models provide benefits for biomedical research, but translating such findings to human physiology can be difficult. The human heart’s energy needs and functions are difficult to reproduce in other animals, such as mice and rats. One new system looks to circumvent these issues and provide a functional view of how different treatments can help ailing cells in the heart following oxygen and nutrient deprivations.

Researchers have unveiled a new silicon chip that holds human lab-grown heart muscle cells for assessing the effectiveness of new drugs. The system includes heart cells, called cardiomyocytes, patterned on the chip with electrodes that can both stimulate and measure electrical activity within the cells. The researchers discuss their work in this week’s APL Bioengineering.

These capabilities provide a way for determining how the restriction of blood supply, a dangerous state known as ischemia, changes a heart’s conduction velocity, beat frequency and important electrical intervals associated with heart function.

Today, we want to highlight an interview with billionaire investor Jim Mellon that our friend, Adam Ford of Science, Technology, and the Future, has conducted. Like us, Adam was at the Undoing Aging conference in Berlin earlier this year, and, just as we were, he was busy conducting a number of interviews with the researchers and industry thought leaders there.

Jim Mellon is an interesting figure in the industry and the cofounder of Juvenescence, a company that has been investing in a number of promising companies that are developing rejuvenation biotechnology to treat age-related diseases.

Continue reading “Adam Ford Talks With Jim Mellon of Juvenescence” »

With the rise of fad diets, “superfoods,” and a growing range of dietary supplement choices, it’s sometimes hard to know what to eat.

This can be particularly relevant as we grow older and are trying to make the best choices to minimize the risk of health problems such as high blood pressure, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart (cardiovascular) problems.

We now have evidence these health problems also all affect brain function: they increase nerve degeneration in the brain, leading to a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other brain conditions including vascular dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

Putin’s robo-nauts prepare for lift-off: Fedor as he gets ready to board the International Space Station crew next week…

Icknamed Fedor, the anthropomorphous machine — which is remarkably agile — was seen undergoing a battery of stress-tests at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, last month.

Continue reading “Russia’s space agency releases eerie footage of human-like android” »

How much would it cost to build a city on Mars? According to Elon Musk over the weekend, it could be the most expensive construction project in human history — and cost up to an eighth of the value of the entire global economy.

The SpaceX CEO’s vision includes not only sending the first humans to Mars, but to use that mission as a starting point to build a permanent settlement. Assuming all goes to plan, Musk believes that a self-sustaining city could take shape as early as 2050.

What happens after that point is anyone’s guess. Inverse has spoken to experts from a number of fields, who have flagged a series of issues those first inhabitants will need to address. They could mutate and develop new physical attributes, they could find the city’s confines stifling and develop a national identity, and they could develop a new, ground-up economy.

Two trends that are dominating the technology industry are the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). But for industrial automation, these two technologies are much more than the buzzwords or trending topics. The convergence of AI and IoT will redefine the future of industrial automation. It is set to lead the Industry 4.0 revolution.

IoT and AI are two independent technologies that have a significant impact on multiple industry verticals. While IoT is the digital nervous system, AI becomes the brain that makes decisions which control the overall system. The lethal combination of AI and IoT brings us AIoT — Artificial Intelligence of Things — that delivers intelligent and connected systems that are capable of self-correcting and self-healing themselves.

To appreciate the promise of AIoT, we need to look at the evolution of connected systems.

The company will soon start employing a second net-equipped boat during orbital launches, in an attempt to snag both halves of its rockets’ payload fairings before they splash down in the ocean, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk confirmed via Twitter on Friday (Aug. 9).

Blockchain startup BitFury launched an artificial intelligence (AI) unit, Reuters reports on Aug. 13.

“Data is the new oil”

Bitfury chief executive officer and co-founder Valery Vavilov reportedly said that the company’s dive into AI is motivated by the need to analyze and extract information from great quantities of data. He reportedly noted that data is becoming the new oil and stated:

Algorithms meant to spot hate speech online are far more likely to label tweets “offensive” if they were posted by people who identify as African-American.

AI systems meant to spot abusive online content are far more likely to label tweets “offensive” if they were posted by people who identify as African-American.

The news: Researchers built two AI systems and tested them on a pair of data sets of more than 100,000 tweets that had been annotated by humans with labels like “offensive,” “none,” or “hate speech.” One of the algorithms incorrectly flagged 46% of inoffensive tweets by African-American authors as offensive. Tests on bigger data sets, including one composed of 5.4 million tweets, found that posts by African-American authors were 1.5 times more likely to be labeled as offensive. When the researchers then tested Google’s Perspective, an AI tool that the company lets anyone use to moderate online discussions, they found similar racial biases.

Continue reading “Google’s algorithm for detecting hate speech is racially biased” »