Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 87

Artificial intelligence in various forms has been used in medicine for decades — but not like this. Experts predict that the adoption of large language models will reshape medicine. Some compare the potential impact with the decoding of the human genome, even the rise of the internet. The impact is expected to show up in doctor-patient interactions, physicians’ paperwork load, hospital and physician practice administration, medical research, and medical education.

Most of these effects are likely to be positive, increasing efficiency, reducing mistakes, easing the nationwide crunch in primary care, bringing data to bear more fully on decision-making, reducing administrative burdens, and creating space for longer, deeper person-to-person interactions.

Read more | >

Quantum computers have the potential to solve complex problems that would be impossible for the most powerful classical supercomputer to crack.

Just like a has separate yet interconnected components that must work together, such as a memory chip and a CPU on a motherboard, a quantum computer will need to communicate between multiple processors.

Current architectures used to interconnect superconducting quantum processors are “point-to-point” in connectivity, meaning they require a series of transfers between , with compounding error rates.

Read more | >

Experiments support a controversial proposal to generate electricity from our planet’s rotation by using a device that interacts with Earth’s magnetic field.

“It seems crazy,” says Chris Chyba of Princeton University, talking about the hollow magnetic cylinder he has built to generate electricity using Earth’s magnetic field. The cylinder doesn’t move—at least not in the lab—but it rotates with the planet and is thus dragged through Earth’s magnetic field. “It has a whiff of a perpetual motion machine,” Chyba says, but his calculations show that the harvested energy comes from the planet’s rotational energy. He and his colleagues now report that 18 microvolts (µV) are generated across the cylinder when it is held perpendicular to Earth’s field [1]. Next they have to convince other scientists that the effect is real.

Chyba became interested in electricity generation about a decade ago while studying a possible warming mechanism in moons moving through a planet’s magnetic field. He wondered if a similar effect might occur for objects on Earth’s surface.

Read more | >

In human society, men tend to be seen as risk-takers, while women are seen as being more cautious. According to evolutionary psychologists, this difference developed in the wake of threats to each sex and their respective needs. While such generalizations are, of course, too binary and simplistic to faithfully describe complex and multifaceted human behavior, clearcut differences between females and males are often evident in other animals, even in simple organisms such as worms.

In a new study published in Nature Communications, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers showed that male worms are worse at learning from experience and find it hard to avoid taking risks—even at the cost of their own lives—and that allowing them to mate with members of the opposite sex improves these capabilities.

The scientists also discovered a protein, evolutionarily conserved in creatures from worms all the way to humans, that appears to be responsible for the different learning abilities of the two sexes.

Read more | >