Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 9,480

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

A new AI chip can perform image recognition tasks in nanoseconds

The news: A new type of artificial eye, made by combining light-sensing electronics with a neural network on a single tiny chip, can make sense of what it’s seeing in just a few nanoseconds, far faster than existing image sensors.

Why it matters: Computer vision is integral to many applications of AI—from driverless cars to industrial robots to smart sensors that act as our eyes in remote locations—and machines have become very good at responding to what they see. But most image recognition needs a lot of computing power to work. Part of the problem is a bottleneck at the heart of traditional sensors, which capture a huge amount of visual data, regardless of whether or not it is useful for classifying an image. Crunching all that data slows things down.

A sensor that captures and processes an image at the same time, without converting or passing around data, makes image recognition much faster using much less power. The design, published in Nature today by researchers at the Institute of Photonics in Vienna, Austria, mimics the way animals’ eyes pre-process visual information before passing it on to the brain.

Gene Therapy Is Successfully Treating a Common Form of Inherited Blindness

This month, K.L. became one of the first patients to receive a new experimental gene therapy for children with a severe form of inherited vision loss. The treatment, currently not yet named, targets young men who are susceptible to a particularly vicious genetic disorder that gradually destroys the light-sensing portion of their eyes.

Within a month following a single injection, “my vision was beginning to return in the treated eye. The sharpness and depth of colors I was slowly beginning to see were so clear and attractive,” said K.L.

The trial, a first-in-human case for X-linked Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), was led by Dr. Robert MacLaren at the University of Oxford but spanned multiple centers including the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami, which previously championed Luxterna, the first FDA-approved gene therapy for a type of inherited blindness. The results are some of the first targeting a particularly difficult gene prone to mutation in humans. Amazingly, despite some inflammation in early stages, the therapy provided massive improvements in eyesight as early as two weeks following treatment.

Our eye movements help us retrieve memories, suggests new study

In a recent study, scientists at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute (RRI) found that research participants moved their eyes to determine whether they had seen an image before, and that their eye movement patterns could predict mistakes in memory. They obtained these results using an innovative new eye tracking technique they developed.

“Our findings indicate that eye movements play a functional role in retrieval,” says Dr. Jennifer Ryan, senior scientist at the RRI and Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory. “They can tell us a lot about someone’s memory.”

This study builds on previous Baycrest research examining the link between eye movements and memory, including the role of our eye movements in memorization and the weakening connection between our eye movements and our brain activity as we age.

High energy Li-Ion battery is safer for electric vehicles

A lithium-ion battery that is safe, has high power and can last for 1 million miles has been developed by a team in Penn State’s Battery and Energy Storage Technology (BEST) Center.

Electric vehicle batteries typically require a tradeoff between safety and . If the has and , which is required for uphill driving or merging on the freeway, then there is a chance the battery can catch fire or explode in the wrong conditions. But materials that have low energy/power density, and therefore high safety, tend to have poor performance. There is no material that satisfies both. For that reason, battery engineers opt for performance over safety.

“In this work we decided we were going to take a totally different approach,” said Chao-Yang Wang, professor of mechanical, chemical and materials science and engineering, and William E. Diefenderfer Chair in Mechanical Engineering, Penn State. “We divided our strategy into two steps. First we wanted to build a highly stable battery with highly stable materials.”

MERS Coronavirus Disease Blocked by Remdesivir in Monkeys

Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) report new data that support the hypothesis that remdesivir, a drug with broad antiviral activity, may be a promising treatment against Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV).

In the team’s experiments, remdesivir reduced the severity of disease, virus replication, and damage to the lungs when administered to infected monkeys. The authors suggest that it be considered for implementation in clinical trials and that it may also have utility for other, related coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-2 (previously known as 2019-nCoV).

The experimental antiviral remdesivir successfully prevented disease in rhesus macaques infected with MERS-CoV. Remdesivir prevented disease when administered before infection and improved the condition of macaques when given after the animals already were infected.

The designer baby debate could start a war

Is it so outlandish to believe that countries in the future might resort to military force to prevent other countries from altering the shared genetic code of humanity? Many countries have been invaded for far less.

The genetics revolution that will transform our health care, the way we make babies, the nature of the babies we make, and ultimately our evolutionary trajectory as a species has already begun. Just like parents in many places will need to make tough choices about whether, if at all, to genetically engineer their children, states will be forced to make monumental collective decisions on these issues with potentially fateful consequences.

Imagine you are the leader of a society that has chosen to opt out of the genetic arms race by banning embryo selection and the genetic alteration of human sperm, eggs, and embryos. Because your country is progressive enough to make a collective decision like this, parents desiring these services are free to go elsewhere to get what they want. But preventing the genetic alteration of your population by definition requires both restricting genetic enhancement at home and enhanced people or expectant mothers carrying genetically altered embryos from entering your country.

To protect the genetic integrity of your populations and keep genetically enhanced people out, you would need to perform genetic tests on all people entering the country. But there would likely be no way of knowing whether a person had been genetically enhanced without knowledge of their genetic baseline—their genome prior to any changes. For those few people for whom genetic information from the moment a few days after their conception is available, their former and current genetics could be compared. Everyone not able to provide baseline genetic information might be banned from entering the country or threatened with long jail terms for procreating with a citizen of it.