Lifeboat Foundation

A new vaccine targeting dozens of new strains of pneumonia could potentially save “hundreds of thousands of lives” according to researchers. Early studies show the new vaccine effectively protects against a variety of bacteria that causes pneumococcal disease including pneumonia, meningitis and sepsis.

Since the introduction in the early 2000s of vaccines targeting the most deadly forms of pneumonia, the World Health Organization has estimated global deaths of children from the disease have been cut in half. Alongside better nutrition and access to antibiotics, a vaccine against the 23 most deadly pneumonia-causing bacteria has been held as responsible for the millions of lives saved.

Now a team of scientists from the University at Buffalo and New York University’s Langone Medical Center has developed a new vaccine that targets another 50 strains of a bacterium called Streptococcus pneumoniae, the primary bacteria responsible for pneumococcal disease.

This thing can chill wine in less than 30 seconds (via In The Know).

A lobbying group representing top artificial-intelligence companies including Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google issued a warning to lawmakers on Tuesday: hands off our algorithms.

General Motors says its most recent test vehicle meets some of the requirements for total autonomy.

Are you ready to live longer?

Throw out all your clocks and your body still has a rough idea of the time of day. That’s because it has it’s own clock – the body clock. It tells the cells in your body what time of day it is and so controls a whole bunch of different processes that need to be carefully timed and coordinated in order for your body to work properly.

Keeping your cells in sync creates a certain rhythm to what they do all day and night – a circadian rhythm. And it isn’t just us that have it but plants and animals too.

Circadian rhythms roughly follow a 24-hour cycle, so we feel sleepy at night and awake in the morning. It also affects our eating habits, digestion, body temperature and alertness. How? By controlling hormone production.

Over the past few years, there has been a tradition of longevity researchers and activists around the world to organize events on or around October 1 — the UN International Day of Older Persons, or Longevity Day. In recent years this has been extended to include the entire month of November as a Longevity Month where activists organize various activities and events to raise awareness for aging research.

This year we have continued this tradition with the Longevity Month “I am the Lifespan” event, where people tell us their story and how they got interested in aging research and doing something about age-related diseases. and it has been a great success so far. Lots of people have sent in their stories and we have been publishing them on our Facebook page the last few weeks. We wanted to share some of these stories with you and a little about the people behind them.

Robots are watching us. Literally.

Google has curated a set of YouTube clips to help machines learn how humans exist in the world. The AVAs, or “atomic visual actions,” are three-second clips of people doing everyday things like drinking water, taking a photo, playing an instrument, hugging, standing or cooking.

Each clip labels the person the AI should focus on, along with a description of their pose and whether they’re interacting with an object or another human.

Continue reading “Google’s AI is binge-watching human behavior on YouTube” »

Recently, we have explored the benefits that rejuvenation biotechnologies promise to bring to ourselves and the people close to us. I would imagine that most people have no difficulty acknowledging these benefits, but even so, many people tend to focus on potential large-scale downsides of rejuvenation while neglecting entirely its benefits on society at large.

The following is a brief discussion of how, in my opinion, anti-aging biotechnologies would positively impact the whole of humanity—assuming they were widely employed, as they should be.