Lifeboat Foundation

Head coverings and fake beards have foiled face recognition technologies, but a new system overcomes many of the challenges while raising privacy concerns.

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With a disabled AIDS virus, doctors supply a gene to boys with a degenerative neural condition.

Wind turbines produced double the amount of power required to meet Scotland’s electricity needs Monday, according to researchers.

Environmental group WWF Scotland said Friday that analysis of data provided by WeatherEnergy showed the country’s wind turbines sent 86,467 megawatt hours of electricity to the National Grid on Monday.

That day, total electricity consumption in Scotland – including homes, industry and businesses – was 41,866 megawatt hours, WWF Scotland said, meaning that wind power produced the equivalent of 206 percent of the nation’s needs.

Continue reading “Scotland’s wind turbines are becoming increasingly efficient at meeting the nation’s power needs” »

Do you remember all the hoopla last year when the Higgs Boson was confirmed by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider? That’s the one called the ‘God particle’, because it was touted as helping to resolve the forces of nature into one elegant theory. Well—Not so fast, bucko!…

First, some credit where credit is due: The LHC is a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets interspersed by accelerators that boost the energy of the particles as they whip around and smash into each other. For physicists—and anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of what goes into everything—it certainly inspires awe.

Existence of the Higgs Boson (aka, The God Particle) was predicted. Physicists were fairly certain that it would be observed. But its discovery is a ‘worst case’ scenario for the Standard Model of particle physics. It points to shortcomings in our ability to model and predict things. Chemists have long had a master blueprint of atoms in the Periodic Table. It charts all the elements in their basic states. But, physicists are a long way from building something analogous. That’s because we know a lot more about atomic elements than the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy. _{[continue below image]}

Continue reading “Fundamental Particles & Forces: What do we know?” »

Throwback from 6 October 2016…

According to Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder of the AI startup Luka, memorial bots are ‘the future.’ The CEO recently unveiled the ‘digital monument’ to her deceased friend Roman Mazurenko, feeding thousands of text messages to a neural network to create a Luka chatbot in his image.

In the App Store, Luka is described as ‘a new messenger with AI-powered chatbots. They help you find GIFs and funny videos, make plans together, pick places to eat, play trivia games and have fun.’

Continue reading “Would YOU talk to a dead friend an as AI? ‘Memorial’ chatbot revealed” »

Researchers map human genome in 4D as it folds.

Time-lapse view reveals new mechanism that brings DNA elements together.

A multi-institutional team spanning Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, Stanford University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has created the first high-resolution 4D map of genome folding, which tracks an entire human genome as it folds over time. The report, which may lead to new ways of understanding genetic diseases, appears on the cover of Cell.

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Payne and another Google employee demonstrated a conversation between someone speaking Swedish and another person responding in English.

During the demonstration, one employee, speaking Swedish, had Pixel Buds and the Pixel phone. When the phone was addressed in English, the earbuds translated the phrase into Swedish in her ear. The Swedish speaker then spoke back in Swedish through the earbuds by pressing on the right bud to summon Google Assistant translated that Swedish reply back into an English phrase, which was played through the phone’s speakers so the English speaker could hear.

While this idea might sound far-fetched, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told investors in January that Google Translate was set to make big leaps this year.

Continue reading “Google shows off wireless headphones that it says can translate languages on the fly” »

It may sound like the plot from the latest science fiction blockbuster, but uploading your brain onto a computer to achieve immortality could soon become a reality.

In a new interview, Professor Brian Cox said that the technique, known as ‘technological singularity’ could be available sooner than you think.

Continue reading “Brian Cox says we’ll soon upload our brains onto computers” »