Lifeboat Foundation

As ESA’s ɸ-week continues to provoke and inspire participants on new ways of using Earth observation for monitoring our world to benefit the citizens of today and of the future, it is clear that artificial intelligence is set to play an important role.

Taking place at ESA’s centre of Earth observation in Frascati, Italy, on 12–16 November, ɸ-week has drawn hundreds of people from numerous disciplines to explore innovation, new technologies and cross disciplinary cooperation – to see how satellite data coupled with new technologies such as artificial intelligence can bring benefits to science, business, the economy and society at large.

Continue reading “Harnessing artificial intelligence for sustainability goals” »

NVIDIA’s playing a bigger role in high performance computing than ever, just as supercomputing itself has become central to meeting the biggest challenges of our time.

Speaking just hours ahead of the start of the annual SC18 supercomputing conference in Dallas, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told 700 researchers, lab directors and execs about forces that are driving the company to push both into “scale-up” computing — focused on large supercomputing systems — as well as “scale-out” efforts, for researchers, data scientists and developers to harness the power of however many GPUs they need.

Continue reading “SC18: HPC Demand Surges, Accelerated” »

Bullets that never miss, super soldiers with extreme strength and robot warriors capable of rising up against humans may sound like the stuff of science fiction… but the truth is that they have all already been developed.

A top-secret US government body called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is behind these space-age innovations, which it has developed as part of its mission to revolutionize the way America fights the wars of the future. (Just think of Q’s lab in James Bond, but for the US army).

Ever since it was established in 1958, DARPA has been the subject of conspiracy theories claiming — among other things — that the agency was covering up UFO landings, trying to develop mind control and working on Earth-shattering super-weapons like death rays.

Continue reading “Bullets that don’t miss, weaponized insects and more: Innovations from DARPA, America’s secret lab” »

An interview with Drs. Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova on the demography of life extension.

Many people are concerned that vastly extended healthy lifespan might lead us to catastrophic overpopulation, and the best way to mitigate this fear is probably to talk to an experienced demographer. To learn more about this and other interesting questions related to life extension, we spoke to Drs. Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova, respectively Principal Investigator and Research Associate at the Center on Aging in Chicago University. Both of them have specialized in the biodemography of aging and longevity and possess nearly endless resumes.

Natalia and Leonid, your field of expertise is the biodemography of aging and longevity. What drew you to this field of research?

Continue reading “An Interview With Leonid Gavrilov And Natalia Gavrilova” »

A recent large population study claims to conclusively prove that male and female brains are different. Of course, it does no such thing. As such, Dr Dean Burnett is quite annoyed.

Privacy advocates have raised concerns about patients’ data after Google said it would take control of its subsidiary DeepMind’s healthcare division.

Google, which acquired London-based artificial intelligence lab DeepMind in 2014, said on Tuesday that the DeepMind Health brand, which uses NHS patient data, will cease to exist and the team behind its medical app Streams will join Google as part of Google Health.

It comes just months after DeepMind promised never to share data with the technology giant and an ethics board raised concerns over its independence.

Continue reading “Privacy concerns as Google absorbs DeepMind’s health division” »

Inspiration for game-changing science can seemingly come from anywhere. A moldy bacterial plate gave us the first antibiotic, penicillin. Zapping yeast with a platinum electrode led to a powerful chemotherapy drug, cisplatin.

For Dr. Andrew Pelling at the University of Ottawa, his radical idea came from a sci-fi cult classic called The Little Shop of Horrors. Specifically, he was intrigued by the movie’s main antagonist, a man-eating plant called Aubrey 2.

What you have here is a plant-like creature with mammalian features, said Pelling at the Exponential Medicine conference in San Diego last week. “So we started wondering: can we grow this in the lab?”

Continue reading “Ears Grown From Apples? The Promise of Plants for Engineering Human Tissue” »

“We’re going to get these massive pools of sequenced genomic data,” Metzl said. “The real gold will come from comparing people’s sequenced genomes to their electronic health records, and ultimately their life records.” Getting people comfortable with allowing open access to their data will be another matter; Metzl mentioned that Luna DNA and others have strategies to help people get comfortable with giving consent to their private information. But this is where China’s lack of privacy protection could end up being a significant advantage.

To compare genotypes and phenotypes at scale—first millions, then hundreds of millions, then eventually billions, Metzl said—we’re going to need AI and big data analytic tools, and algorithms far beyond what we have now. These tools will let us move from precision medicine to predictive medicine, knowing precisely when and where different diseases are going to occur and shutting them down before they start.

But, Metzl said, “As we unlock the genetics of ourselves, it’s not going to be about just healthcare. It’s ultimately going to be about who and what we are as humans. It’s going to be about identity.”

Continue reading “Designer Babies, and Their Babies: How AI and Genomics Will Impact Reproduction” »

The tech firms plan to use AI to combat the spread of drug use.

Health.