Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Canada’s billionaire power couple, Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman, have donated C$100 million ($75 million) to the University of Toronto for an artificial intelligence complex.

The gift, from the duo behind private-equity firm Onex Corp. and Indigo Books & Music Inc., is the largest in the university’s history and biggest for Canada’s technology sector, said the academic institution. It will be used to build the Schwartz Reisman Innovation Centre starting this year.

“You’ve seen companies like Uber and Google and so many others starting to make real commitments to Toronto, and this is drawing people from around the world to come to Toronto to be part of this,” Schwartz, Onex’s founder and chief executive officer, said in an interview at Indigo’s headquarters in the city. “That legacy is going to last for a long time.”

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Aside from harvesting solar, wind, and hydrogen energy to produce electricity, many energy experts believe that developing compact fusion facilities can give humankind a stable and sustainable source of power that can last forever.

Jon Menard, a physicist from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), has reportedly examined the possibility of expediting the development of compact fusion facilities to generate safe, clean, and limitless energy.

In his study, Menard looked into the concept of creating a compact tokamak powered by high-temperature superconducting magnets.

It appears that this kind of magnet can generate the higher magnetic fields needed to produce and sustain fusion reactions.

Continue reading “New Research Boosts Potential of Compact Fusion Power” | >

Maybe one of our observatory domes can be painted to look like this? :-D.

In a galaxy far far away (Germany) Hubert Zitt, professor at the Zweibrücken University of Applied Sciences and known for Star Trek and Star Wars lectures, along with a small team, transformed the Zweibrück Observatory of the Natural Science Association into a giant R2-D2 – and it is out of this world.

The sci-fi professor completed the project in September 2018, aided by his father-in-law Horst Helle, the master painter Klaus Ruffing and several helping students and it has caught the eyes of Star Wars fans everywhere. The most notable fan of the re-design was Star Wars actor Mark Hamill who tweeted about it, “R2-D2 Observatory Transformed Germans Into Giant Nerds.”

While spectacular, Zitt and his team aren’t the first fans to complete a Star Wars design challenge. Goodsell Observatory at Carleton College in Minnesota was also transformed into an R2-D2 back in 2010.

Continue reading “German Professor Who Is A Hardcore Star Wars Fan Has Just Repainted An Observatory Into R2-D2” | >

Researchers at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, have developed an approach to regenerate heart muscle using stem cells. Their method for priming stem cells to become heart tissues could potentially enable heart regeneration stem cell therapies, according to their study published in the journal Cell Reports.

The self-regeneration of human following injury is extremely limited. Scientists have been studying techniques to prompt different kinds of stem to differentiate into cell precursors, which could then help rebuild heart muscle fibres. However, their approaches have not yet met regulations set forth by the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency for regenerative therapies.

Dr. Lynn Yap, a Senior Research Fellow at Duke-NUS’ Cardiovascular and Metabolic Disorders (CVMD) Programme and the study’s first author, explained, “Regulatory authorities specifically require these stem-cell-derived precursors be prepared from human-only cells and in cultures that use clearly defined chemicals and no animal components. The method must be reproducible, and the cells must have clear characteristics while not leading to adverse side effects when injected.”

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By Rohit Talwar, Steve Wells, April Koury, and Alexandra Whittington

Image https://pixabay.com/images/id-4045661/ by geralt is licensed under CC0

Can human roles in retail survive the relentless march of the robots? Much of the current debate on automation focuses on the possible demise of existing jobs and the spread of automation into service and white-collar sectors – and retail is certainly one industry poised to follow this automation path in pursuit of the next driver of profits. From the advent of the steam engine and mechanisation of farming, through to the introduction of personal computing — jobs have always been automated through the use of technology. However, as new technologies have come to market, human ingenuity and the ability to create new products and services have increased the scope for employment and fulfilment. Retail has enjoyed enormous benefits from technology tools, but has the time come when automation poses a threat to jobs? Here we present two possible scenarios for retail 2020–2025: one where automation eliminates the majority of retail jobs and a second which sees the emergence of new paid roles in retail.

Scenario One: Robo-Retail Rules

Continue reading “Robo-Retail vs. Humanity at a Price? Two Possible Futures for Retail” | >

The presence of senescent cells has been implicated in a wide range of age-related diseases and even conditions such as T1 diabetes. Today, we want to draw your attention to a new publication that explores the relationship between senescent cells and intervertebral disc degeneration (IDD).

It was already known that senescent cells increase during the progression of IDD, but it was not known if they were a driver or a consequence of IDD.

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A century ago, the periodic table looked much different than it does today! It had blank spots throughout, and the entire bottom row – the actinides – were not even part of the table as most of those elements did not exist in nature and had not been created in the lab. But researchers theorized their existence. And starting in the 1930s scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – or, the Rad Lab, as it was called then – began building the big machines and assembling the teams of scientists and engineers to chase those elements down.

Over the next several decades Berkeley Lab researchers were credited with discovering, Lab researchers were credited with discovering, or creating collaboratively with other labs, #16elements. Read more here.

In this video, Berkeley Lab scientists Lee Bernstein, Barbara Jacak, Jose Alonso, Jacklyn Gates, Rebecca Abergel, and Frances Houle tell the story of these incredible scientific discoveries.

Full story » https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2019/01/28/16-elements-berkeley-l…dic-table/

Continue reading “16 Elements: Berkeley Lab’s Contributions to the Periodic Table” | >

Today’s efforts in AI are somewhat less flashy, though still potentially revolutionary, and all seem to recognize one vital lesson: treating patients is both art and science. Rather than attempting to replace the physicians in medical practice, AI can, and should, say more experts, become a valuable tool in enhancing what doctors do.

Here’s where AI in medicine excels — and where it doesn’t yet measure up.

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