Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have sustained human embryos in a petri dish for 13 days, shattering the previous record of nine days. The breakthrough will allow researchers to study early fetal development in unprecedented detail, and brings us one step closer to viable “artificial wombs.” But it’s adding fuel to an already heated ethical debate.

Two separate papers published this week, one in Nature and one in Nature Cell Biology, have reported culturing human embryos for nearly two weeks, going well beyond previous efforts. There’s no reason to believe that the embryos couldn’t have survived beyond the two-week mark, but the experiment had to be halted to adhere to the internationally agreed 14-day limit on human embryo research.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-to-build-an-artificial-womb-476464703

Continue reading “Artificial Wombs Just Got One Step Closer to Reality” »

Google wants you to browse the internet with your contact lenses.

The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot successfully completed open bowel surgery on its pig patients.

Here is the real challenge to ask the average parent or grandparent on the street: are you willing to allow your 5 year old child or grandchild to have a brain tumor removed by an autonomous robot without any trained & experienced surgeon or nurse supervision?

An unmanned robot has been used to stitch together a pig’s bowel, moving science a step closer to automated surgery, say experts.

Unlike existing machines, the Star robot is self-controlled — it doesn’t need to be guided by a surgeon’s hands.

Continue reading “Unmanned robot surgery works in pig trial” »

My verdict will continue to be out on this version. Unless we truly see a QC environment where the full testing of Cryptography, infrastructure, etc. is tested then at best we’re only looking at a pseudo version of QC. Real QC is reached when the infrastructure fully can take advantage of QC not just one server or one platform means we have arrived on QC. So, I caution folks from over-hyping things because the backlash will be extremely costly and detrimental to many.

IBM has taken its quantum computing technology to the cloud to enable users to run experiments on an IBM quantum processor.

Big Blue has come a long way, baby. IBM announced it is making quantum computing available on the IBM Cloud to accelerate innovation in the field and find new applications for the technology.

Continue reading “IBM Brings Quantum Computing to the Masses” »

(Source: Jimmy Pike & Christopher Wilder ©Moor Insights & Strategy)

Microsoft and Facebook recently announced how they plan to drive leadership in the digital transformation and cloud market: bots. As more companies—especially application vendors—begin to drive solutions that incorporate machine learning, natural language, artificial intelligence, and structured and unstructured data, bots will increase in relevance and value. Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft see considerable opportunities to enable vendors and developers to build solutions that can see, hear and learn as well as applications that can recognize and learn from a user’s intent, emotions, face, language and voice.

Bots are not new, but they have evolved over time through the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, ubiquitous connectivity and increases in data processing speeds. In the mid-1990s, the first commercial bots were developed. For example, I was on the ground floor for the first commercial chat providers called ichat. As with many disruptive media-based technologies, as was the case with ichat, early adopters tend to be the darker side of the entertainment industry. These companies saw a way to get website visitors to stay online longer by having someone to interact with their guests at 3AM. Out of this necessity, chatbots were developed. Thankfully, the technology has evolved and now bots are mainstream and are being used to helping people perform simple tasks and interact with service providers.

Continue reading “Rise Of The Machines (Part 2): Artificial Intelligence And Bots Promise To Disrupt” »

I find this amusing because much of the top US AI talent has worked for many decades in the National Labs and not always in academia. National labs often is a mix of top scientists, engineers as well as academia; not academia only. Granted universities do incubations such a GA Tech, VA Tech, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, etc.; however, the bulk of AI and other patented innovations truly have come out of the national labs such as X10, Los Alamos, Argonne, over the years.

The high demand for AI talents at giant corporations This means the academe is directly affected because their smartest AI experts are rapidly transferring to the corporate world and leaving the academe.

Iridium oxide (IrO₂) nanoparticles are useful electrocatalysts for splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen — a clean source of hydrogen for fuel and power. However, its high cost demands that researchers find the most efficient structure for IrO₂ nanoparticles for hydrogen production.

A study conducted by a team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory, published in Journal of Materials Chemistry A, describes a new empirical interatomic potential that models the IrO₂ properties important to catalytic activity at scales relevant to technology development. Also known as a force field, the interatomic potential is a set of values describing the relationship between structure and energy in a system based on its configuration in space. The team developed their new force field based on the MS-Q force field.

Continue reading “Iridium Oxide Nanoparticles Used to Harvest Hydrogen” »

Deep Space Industries and the Luxembourg Government announce partnership to commercialize space resources.

Asteroid mining company Deep Space Industries, together with the Luxembourg Government and the Société Nationale de Crédit et d’Investissement (SNCI), the national banking institution in Luxembourg, have signed an agreement formalizing their partnership to explore, use, and commercialize space resources as part of Luxembourg’s spaceresources.lu initiative.

The Luxembourg Government will work with Deep Space Industries to co-fund relevant R&D projects that help further develop the technology needed to mine asteroids and build a supply chain of valuable resources in space.

Continue reading “Prospector-X™: An International Mission to Test Technologies for Asteroid Mining” »