Lifeboat Foundation

China put tiny spy chips on many U.S. servers. That’s the word from Bloomberg Businessweek, whose cover story published Thursday asserts that Beijing persuaded Chinese hardware manufacturers to install a surveillance chip, half the size of a grain of rice, on the motherboards of hundreds of thousands of data servers sold around the world by a U.S. company called Supermicro, including to Amazon and Apple.

Sometimes, people say that around 80 years of life will be enough for them, but have they thought it through?

When asked how long they want to live, people often say no more than ten years above their country’s average lifespan. This, mind you, is in a world where aging is still inevitable; people know they won’t be in top shape during those ten extra years, and yet, perhaps hoping they might be an exception to that rule, they still wish they could get that little extra time. Even when told that they will live these extra years in complete health, the most common choice is the current maximum recorded human lifespan, which is roughly 120 years.

If we assume that no rejuvenation therapies are available to extend the time you spend in youthful health, then it is somewhat understandable if you don’t feel up for a very long life, because the odds are that its final decades will be increasingly miserable ; however, if rejuvenation therapies were available, and you could be fully healthy for an indefinite time, why stop at 120 years? Life extension advocates have probably all had their fair share of conversations with people who insist that 80-odd years will be more than enough for them, health or no health—worse still, some don’t care about preserving their health precisely because they think that 80 years is a sufficiently long time to live.

Continue reading “Are You Sure Eighty Years Are Enough?” »

Now in its 12th year, the Cell & Gene Meeting on the Mesa continues to grow, much like the stem cells that are the center of its business and scientific discussions.

Elon Musk unveiled prototypes of Tesla’s Solar Roof tiles In October 2016. They came in four styles that looked just like normal roofing material but were essentially miniaturized versions of traditional solar panels.

The announcement helped Tesla justify its $2.6 billion acquisition of SolarCity one month later and represented Musk’s vision for what the businesses could do together.

Continue reading “What Happened To Tesla’s Solar Roof Tiles?” »

Imagine what it can do for business.

The new digital communications policy (NDCP) 2018, approved by the Cabinet on Wednesday, looks too good to believe. It has promised to create an additional four million jobs in five years and reskill another one million people in new-age skills and sectors such as 5G LTE and artificial intelligence. Six lakh villages will be connected which will eventually lead to creating jobs and several earning avenues such as managing WiFi hotspots and laying optical fibre, among others. The policy will give an impetus to the job market.

NDCP is bound to create a massive infrastructure and help the debt-ridden telecom sector emerge from its current turbulence. The policy document envisages the reduction in levies and ease of doing business, and this will help restore the financial health of the long-bleeding sector. The focus will be on the proliferation of telecom services and facilitating low-cost financing. The government’s ambitious plan of Digital India will get a booster shot. Thanks to the promise of 50 Mbps speed in the broadband connection, the consumer will be the ultimate beneficiary.

Plans are afoot to reform the licensing and regulatory regime to facilitate investments and innovation, besides promoting ease of doing business. The success of the policy will depend on the execution of the policy.

Continue reading “DNA Money Edit: Telecom sector awaits a turnaround” »

Salesforce has showcased new natural language features for enabling its Einstein AI platform to further simplify the work of sales agents, marketers and business leaders.

On ‘AI Day’ at the Dreamforce conference, members of Salesforce’s data science team demonstrated how Einstein Voice—an emerging speech interface—can be used to better access sales figures and projections, automate repetitive tasks, and receive business insights, including through Amazon’s and Google’s smart speakers.

Jim Sinai, Salesforce’s vice president of marketing, said in a keynote that Salesforce had been working on Einstein Voice for the last year to better deliver Einstein’s data discovery, deep learning and machine learning capabilities.

Continue reading “Salesforce’s Einstein has found its voice” »

Very interesting article on the ideas and daily life of the businessman and biohacker Serge Faguet.

Silicon Valley millionaire Serge Faguet thinks pills, injections and implants will turn him into a superhuman. Could they?

In a world increasingly driven by industries that rely on advanced technical learning and innovation, fluency in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) becomes more vital every day. Yet our education system isn’t keeping up. Five years ago, a Business-Higher Education Forum study found that 80% of high school students either lacked interest or proficiency in STEM subjects. Meanwhile, a college and career readiness organization known as ACT reported last year that the number of students pursuing STEM careers is growing at less than 1% annually.

The Amgen Foundation is doing something about it. As the principal philanthropic arm of Amgen, the largest independent biotechnology company, the Amgen Foundation has been committed to inspiring the next generation of scientists and innovators by making immersive science education a focus of its social investments for almost 30 years. While Amgen has reached millions of patients around the world with biotechnology medicines to combat serious illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and migraines, the Amgen Foundation has reached more than 4 million students globally—and it is poised to launch a new program called LabXchange with the potential to reach millions more.

“As a scientist, it’s clear to me that the most effective way to learn science is by doing it,” says David Reese, executive vice president of Research and Development at Amgen and member of the Amgen Foundation board of directors. “It’s time to transform the science learning experience. We need to move from information acquisition to application and exploration, from students as passive listeners to active participants in the learning process, from teachers as knowledge transmitters to facilitators and coaches.”

Continue reading “Philanthropy Assignment: Inspire Tomorrow’s Leaders With Science” »