Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 9273

Airborne lead from recycled car batteries at the Exide plant in Vernon ended up in the baby teeth of children living nearby, a USC study shows.

“We found the higher the level of lead in the soil, the higher the amount of lead in ,” said first author Jill Johnston, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. “There’s no safe level of lead; it’s a potent neurotoxin. Our study provides insight into the legacy of the impact of industrial contamination on children.”

The Exide plant, located just southeast of downtown Los Angeles, recycled 11 million auto batteries per year and released 3,500 tons of lead until it closed in March 2015 as part of a legal settlement for hazardous waste violations.

Read more

In the future, your local fast food joint might know your order before you even get to the drive-thru window.

Fast food giant McDonald’s has installed AI-powered kiosks in 700 of its restaurants during an initial trial period. The menus are capable of suggesting menu items that sell best depending on the time of day, the weather, or that are currently trending — think ice cream on hot summer days — as well as add-on items depending on your current order.

It’s a glimpse of a future in which AI does substantial legwork in food service — but also one in which human cashiers could become obsolete.

Read more

The Estonian Ministry of Justice has officially asked Ott Velsberg, the country’s chief data officer, to design a “robot judge” to take care of a backlog of small claims court disputes, Wired reports.

The artificial intelligence-powered “judge” is supposed to analyze legal documents and other relevant information and come to a decision. Though a human judge will have an opportunity to revise those decisions, the project is a striking example of justice by artificial intelligence.

Read more

A Mongolian couple died from the bubonic plague after eating raw marmot meat, sparking a quarantine that trapped tourists for days, officials said Monday.

According to AFP, the couple died May 1 in a remote area of the country’s Bayan-Ölgii province, which borders China and Russia.

A six-day quarantine of 118 people who had come in contact with the couple, including locals and a number of foreign tourists, had been lifted as of Tuesday, Ariuntuya Ochirpurev, a World Health Organization official, told the BBC.

Read more

These scores are a good deal lower than phones using the latest Snapdragon 855 processor, such as the Galaxy S10, as well as the Snapdragon 845 chipset in the Pixel 3 series. However, it surprisingly beat out the Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL, which scored 146,876 and 110,949 on AnTuTu, respectively.

There may be a few graphically-intensive games that could give the Pixel 3a and 3a XL pause, but so far, my experience has been pleasantly smooth.

Read more

Chrome 74 was released only a few days ago, which means v75 has moved up to the Beta Channel. This release doesn’t have any drastic changes, but it does continue to improve the dark theme, and there are some fancy new APIs that web apps can use.

Dark theme changes

Chrome 75 includes a few changes to the dark theme that first arrived in Chrome 74, though you still have to activate the #enable-android-night-mode flag to try it out. The settings menu for it has been changed from ‘Dark mode’ to ‘Themes,’ and you can now force light mode to be on at all times (even when the system itself is in dark mode).

Read more