Lifeboat Foundation

How badly do we want this?

An incredible new nanotechnology could one day enable us to see in the dark. It works on mice, and there’s little to say it wouldn’t be equally effective on other mammals. The only drawback — how are you with needles to the eyeball?

Research led by the University of Science and Technology of China produced particles that adhere to light-detecting cells in the retina and help them respond to near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths.

Continue reading “Scientists Just Took a Major Step Towards Injecting Eyes With Night Vision” »

Still, Estonia’s research prowess is an example of how quickly a small country can turn its scientific fortunes around with international support and well-designed domestic policies — and its success has drawn attention from other nations looking to build their scientific capacity. Latvia, for instance, borders Estonia and joined the EU at the same time. “We started from a very similar position,” says Dmitrijs Stepanovs, Latvia’s deputy state secretary and director of the higher-education and science ministry, but “now we are far behind and must try to catch up.”

A small nation found strength in research after joining the European Union.

Whether Chinese will take over the world is missing the point: If you want to follow future trends, look at what Chinese companies are doing in the developing world. And with the U.S. waging a trade war, it’s even more important to look at China’s activity outside mature markets.

If you’re sweating on a hot summer day, for example, the fabric allows heat to escape. But when the outside temperature is cooler and the air drier, and your body gets cooler, the fabric becomes more compact, retaining heat from the wearer’s body, researchers say. The researcher’s paper, “Dynamic gating of infrared radiation in a textile,” was published in the journal Science.

If you work in a large office building, there’s a decent chance you tailor your attire to two separate weather forecasts.

There’s the outdoor weather, an evolving state of dynamic atmospheric conditions dictated by seasonal patterns. Then there’s the indoor weather, an evolving state of arbitrary conditions dictated by an all-powerful being known as the building manager, an individual whose atmospheric whims unleash equal amounts of cursing and praise.

Continue reading “U-Md. researchers develop smart fabric that automatically warms or cools you off” »

Texas A&M University researchers are developing a new kind of flame-retardant coating using renewable, nontoxic materials readily found in nature, which could provide even more effective fire protection for several widely used materials.

The attack threatens users with location-tracking, DoS, fake notifications and more.

Privacy-breaking flaws in the 4G and 5G mobile protocols could allow attackers to intercept calls, send fake amber alerts or other notifications, track location and more, according to a research team from Purdue University and the University of Iowa.

In a paper presented at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, the researchers explained that the issues arise from weaknesses in the cellular paging (broadcast) protocol. They started with the fact that when a mobile device is in its idle, low-power state, it will conserve battery life partly by polling for pending services only periodically.

A team of University of Central Florida researchers has overcome a long-standing problem in laser science, and the findings could have applications in surgery, drilling and 3D laser mapping.

Using the principle of supersymmetry, they have developed the first supersymmetric laser array. Their findings were published recently in the journal Science.

Supersymmetry is a conjecture in physics that says every particle of matter, such as an electron, has one or more superpartners that is the same except for a precise difference in their momentum.

Continue reading “UCF Researchers Develop First Supersymmetric Laser Array” »

The is ideal for deep learning application developers and data scientists seeking a faster and efficient deep learning training workflow for various industry verticals such as Intelligent Video Analytics (IVA) and Medical Imaging. Transfer Learning Toolkit abstracts and accelerates deep learning training by allowing developers to fine-tune NVIDIA provided pre-trained models that are domain specific instead of going through the time-consuming process of building Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) from scratch. The pre-trained models accelerate the developer’s deep learning training process and eliminate higher costs associated with large scale data collection, labeling, and training models from scratch.

The term “transfer learning” implies that you can extract learned features from an existing neural network and transfer these learned features by transferring weights from an existing neural network. The Transfer Learning Toolkit is a Python based toolkit that enables developers to take advantage of NVIDIA’s pre-trained models and offers technical capabilities for developers to add their own data to make the neural networks smarter by retraining and allowing them to adapt to the new network changes. The capabilities to simply add, prune and retrain networks improves the efficiency and accuracy for deep learning training workflow.

Last year, my brother, then an employee at Silicon Valley-based tech company Nvidia, declared that all the AI and deep learning that is happening in healthcare is being powered by Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs)…however that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Nvidia holds a dominant position in terms of making the chips that power artificial intelligence projects, but can the Silicon Valley tech company with roots in the world of gaming and graphics succeed in healthcare?

By Arundhati Parmar

Continue reading “Meet the ‘preeminent AI company on earth,’ but can it succeed in healthcare?” »