Lifeboat Foundation

G iving all men with suspected prostate cancer an immediate MRI scan would save thousands of lives a year, the results of a new study suggest.

A trial by British scientists found the comprehensive scan was 12 per cent more likely to detect dangerous tumours than the traditional biopsy, and that the number of men who undergo a biopsy needlessly could be reduced by 28 per cent.

Every year more than 120,000 men in the UK undergo a biopsy, which involves inserting an ultrasound probe into the affected area to take a sample of cells from the prostate that might contain cancer.

Continue reading “MRI for all men suspected of prostate cancer could save thousands of lives” »

You may have heard of Numerai — the unorthodox hedge fund that crowdsources predictive stock market models from data scientists around the world. It is now seeking more brain power and announced today that it is giving away $1 million worth of cryptocurrency to Kaggle users who sign up. The San Francisco-based hedge fund incentivizes its community members by giving them digital tokens they can stake during tournaments to express confidence in their predictions. The best trading algorithms are then selected based on how they perform on the live market, and their creators are rewarded with more tokens.

Looking at most Wall Street hedge funds’ models, it’s fair to say open, collaborative efforts aren’t at their core. Movies like Wall Street, which portrays a greedy Gordon Gekko, and The Wolf of Wall Street, which highlights the derailing decadence of power and money, paint a rather unflattering picture of egocentric traders and financiers. Numerai founder and CEO Richard Craib is looking to change that.

The 30-year-old South African wants to create a more open and decentralized ecosystem for hedge funds. Rather than restricting access to trading data, Craib encrypts it before sharing it with his global network of data scientists, which effectively prevents them stealing and replicating the trades on their own. They can, however, use the shared information to build predictive models for the hedge fund.

Continue reading “Numerai will give $1 million in crypto tokens to Kaggle users who sign up to its crowdsourced hedge fund” »

Elon Musk has a reputation for pushing the envelop and making bold declarations. In 2002, he founded SpaceX with the intention of making spaceflight affordable through entirely reusable rockets. In April of 2014, his company achieved success with the first successful recovery of a Falcon 9 first stage. And in February of this year, his company successfully launched its Falcon Heavy and managed to recover two of the three boosters.

But above and beyond Musk’s commitment to reusability, there is also his longer-term plans to use his proposed Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) to explore and colonize Mars. The topic of when this rocket will be ready to conduct launches was the subject of a recent interview between Musk and famed director Jonathon Nolan, which took place at the 2018 South by Southwest Conference (SXSW) in Austin, Texas.

Continue reading “The first SpaceX BFR should make orbital launches by 2020” »

It seems Mastercard is gradually softening its stance on cryptocurrency, after CEO Ajay Banga downplayed non-government mandated digital currencies as “junk” back in October last year.

In a conversation with Financial Times, Ari Sarkar, Mastercard co-president for the Asia-Pacific region, said the company is open to explore cryptocurrencies created and backed by governments.

“If governments look to create national digital currency we’d be very happy to look at those in a more favourable way [compared with existing cryptocurrencies],” Sarkar told Financial Times.

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Editor’s Note: The American Chemical Society is also issuing a press release today embargoed for 5am Eastern Time that can be requested at [email protected] or call 504−670−6721.

NEW ORLEANS, March 19, 2018 — Up until now, local inflammation and scar tissue from the so-called “foreign body response” has prevented the development of in-body sensors capable of continuous, long-term monitoring of body chemistry. But today scientists are presenting results showing tiny biosensors that become one with the body have overcome this barrier, and stream data to a mobile phone and to the cloud for personal and medical use.

“While fitness trackers and other wearables provide insights into our heart rate, respiration and other physical measures, they don’t provide information on the most important aspect of our health: our body’s chemistry,” explained Natalie Wisniewski, Ph.D. “Based on our ongoing studies, tissue-integrated sensor technology has the potential to enable wearables to live up to the promise of personalized medicine, revolutionizing the management of health in wellness and disease.” Dr. Wisniewski, who leads the team of biosensor developers, is the chief technology officer and co-founder of Profusa Inc., a San Francisco Bay Area-based life science company.

Continue reading “Injectable Body Sensors Take Personal Chemistry to a Cell Phone Closer to Reality” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KtWIbjZY35k

Through a pilot program between the city of South Burlington and Propy, a blockchain platform designed to facilitate real estate transactions, a Vermont woman became the first person in the U.S. to sell a home using blockchain.

On February 20, Vermonter Katherine Purcell did something extraordinary: She sold her home. And yes, people sell their homes every year—scores of them. But Purcell’s sale was fundamentally different: There’s a record of it on a blockchain.

March 19 is the first day of IBM Think 2018, the company’s flagship conference, where the company will unveil what it claims is the world’s smallest computer. They’re not kidding: It’s literally smaller than a grain of salt.

But don’t let the size fool you: This sucker has the computing power of the x86 chip from 1990. Okay, so that’s not great compared to what we have today, but cut it some slack — you need a microscope to see it.

Continue reading “IBM has created a computer smaller than a grain of salt” »

Current cancer therapies have terrible side effects and aren’t always effective. And with things like radiotherapy and chemotherapy, the number of treatments one needs to endure makes side effects progressively worse over time. A new technique developed by researchers at Stanford University uses two agents which when combined, alert the body’s immune system to the presence of cancer, in order to eliminate it.

Just one injection can be effective for a solid tumor. Such a targeted approach could limit nasty side effects and may even be more effective than current therapies. These results were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Dr. Ronald Levy was the study’s senior author. He told Medical News Daily, “When we use these two agents together, we see the elimination of tumors all over the body.”

Dr. Levy and colleagues injected minute levels of two “immune-stimulating agents,” into malignant solid tumors in mice. The most remarkable thing is that it treated not only the tumor it was injected into, but distant malignancies at other locations inside the body. Researchers believe it’ll be able to treat all different kinds of cancer. Using T-cells to kill cancer has long been a driving focus of immunotherapy.

Continue reading “New therapy cures cancer with just one injection” »