Lifeboat Foundation

China, which face population collapse due to low fertility rate, is starting to take steps to encourage more births.

China’s fertility rate is 1.1 children per woman. Replacement level to maintain a stable population size is 2.1 children per woman.

A total of 17 Chinese government departments on Tuesday jointly released a guideline on support policies in finance, tax, housing, employment, education and other fields to create a fertility-friendly society and encourage families to have more children, as the country faces growing pressure from falling birth rates.

Continue reading “17 Chinese govt departments issue guideline to boost population growth amid falling birth rate” »

AgeX Therapeutics, a preclinical biotech looking to turn back the clock on aging, may have to wind down, announcing “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue as money runs dry and debts mount.

The California biotech made $12,000 in revenue for the second quarter and recorded $1.6 million in operating expenses over the same period, according to financial results posted August 12.

During the first quarter, the biotech borrowed the final half million of credit available under a 2020 agreement with Juvenescence—a separate anti-aging biotech—and entered a new deal in which Juvenescence will provide $13.2 million in credit for a year. AgeX drew an initial $8.2 million of the line of credit and used $7.2 million to refinance the principal and the loan origination fees under a 2019 loan agreement with Juvenescence.

Revival of pig tissue could pave the way for salvaging more human organs for transplant, and even bringing people back to life hours after death.

The number of bots and spam accounts on the platform has been a sticking point for Musk throughout the deal. After months of back and forth, Musk’s issues with spam accounts eventually led him to publicly pull out of the $44 billion deal.

Last month, Musk accused Twitter of withholding information about the number of bots on the platform, later citing it as the reason for withdrawing his bid.

Musk’s lawyers claimed in a termination letter that his analysis indicated the percentage of false accounts on Twitter was “wildly higher than 5%” — the number Twitter disclosed in its financial reports.

Researchers have observed the formation of 2D ice on gold surfaces that were thought to be too hydrophilic and too rough to support this type of ice.

Mobile devices use facial recognition technology to help users quickly and securely unlock their phones, make a financial transaction or access medical records. But facial recognition technologies that employ a specific user-detection method are highly vulnerable to deepfake-based attacks that could lead to significant security concerns for users and applications, according to new research involving the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.

Mobile devices use facial recognition technology to help users quickly and securely unlock their phones, make a financial transaction or access medical records. But facial recognition technologies that employ a specific user-detection method are highly vulnerable to deepfake-based attacks that could lead to significant security concerns for users and applications, according to new research involving the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.

The researchers found that most application programming interfaces that use facial liveness verification—a feature of facial recognition technology that uses computer vision to confirm the presence of a live user—don’t always detect digitally altered photos or videos of individuals made to look like a live version of someone else, also known as deepfakes. Applications that do use these detection measures are also significantly less effective at identifying deepfakes than what the app provider has claimed.

“In recent years we have observed significant development of facial authentication and verification technologies, which have been deployed in many security-critical applications,” said Ting Wang, associate professor of information sciences and technology and one principal investigator on the project. “Meanwhile, we have also seen substantial advances in deepfake technologies, making it fairly easy to synthesize live-looking facial images and video at little cost. We thus ask the interesting question: Is it possible for malicious attackers to misuse deepfakes to fool the facial verification systems?”

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An analysis of the 200 largest fossil fuel companies suggests that just 10 shareholders could influence the fate of nearly half of the world’s remaining fossil fuels.

Our new book Intuitive Rationality describes how to marry intuition and other heuristics with logic to create amazing predictions. Intuality AI’s predictive analytics platform has produced remarkable accurate forecasts in different sectors, like financial markets, elections, health and sports.

Companies specializing in cutting-edge construction techniques are aiming to make a difference by churning out high-quality homes at a lower cost than traditional industry standards. Among these are 3D printed homes, “foldable” homes, and homes that ship in kits then are assembled like Ikea furniture.

Now a new player is joining the list, and it just got a serious financial boost. Vantem Global has already helped construct a total of over three million square feet of living space in six different countries, and earlier this month closed a Series A funding round co-led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Breakthrough was founded by Bill Gates in 2015 to invest in sustainable energy and emissions-reduction technologies).

Continue reading “This Gates-Backed Startup Builds Modular Homes Out of Energy-Efficient Panels” »