Lifeboat Foundation

The World Economic Forum has partnered with the Inter-American Development Bank and the Colombian Inspector General’s Office to explore how distributed ledger technology can improve public transparency and integrity in school meal procurement.

The project, which is taking place this year, is multi-faceted and includes a software implementation with blockchain technology for the selection of school food vendors. It is co-designed with several partners from academia, the IT industry, and the non-profit world, including economists and computer scientists from the blockchain economics and governance consulting firm Prysm Group, the National University of Colombia, U.C. Berkeley, and the blockchain security firm Quantstamp.

A professor at the University of Chicago believes he is on his way to creating a wearable for market that will manipulate your muscles with electrical impulses to cause you to move involuntarily so you can perform a physical task you otherwise didn’t know how to do, like playing a musical instrument or operating machinery.

Dr. Pedro Lopes, who heads the Human Computer Integration lab at the university, is all about integrating humans and computers, closing the gap between human and machine. His team, which focuses on engineering the next generation of wearable and haptic devices, is exploring the endless possibilities if wearables could intentionally share parts of our body for input and output, allowing computers to be more directly interwoven in our bodily senses and actuators.

Lopes’ vision: a wearable EMS device that would look like a sleeve and be able to send electrical impulses in the right timing and in the right fashion to make a user’s muscles move involuntarily to perform a physical task. EMS stands for electrical muscle stimulation.

Amazon was expected to announce a home robot this week. It didn’t — perhaps because the market is more challenging than the company anticipated.

This thorough review focuses on the impact of AI, 5G, and edge computing on the healthcare sector in the 2020s as well as a look at quantum computing’s potential impact on AI, healthcare, and financial services.

The Federal Aviation Administration has given UPS approval to run a drone fleet, enabling the company to create a UAV delivery airline.

UPS announced on Tuesday that the federal agency granted the company a Part 135 certification—a high level of certification used by charter airlines—to operate its drones. This permits UPS to fly drones that carry loads exceeding 55 pounds, to fly drones at night, and to fly the devices out of sight of operators. As UPS puts it, the “certification has no limits on the size or scope of operations.”

ASTEROID experts increasingly believe mining water-rich space rocks can create the next-generation of rocket fuel, it has been revealed.

When LIGO and Virgo detected the echoes that likely came from a collision between a black hole and a neutron star, dozens of physicists began a hunt for the signal’s electromagnetic counterpart.

~ David Wood

“Harvard Medical School professor David Sinclair has written a remarkable book that will do for an emerging new paradigm in healthcare what a similarly remarkable book by Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom has been doing for an emerging new paradigm in artificial intelligence.”

A triple drug combination has been used to extend the lifespan of fruit flies by 48% in a new study led by UCL and the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing.

The three drugs are all already in use as medical treatments: lithium as a mood stabiliser, trametinib as a cancer treatment and rapamycin as an immune system regulator.

The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggest that a combination drug treatment may one day be helpful at preventing age-related diseases in people.