Lifeboat Foundation

Microsoft today is unveiling new artificial intelligence technology that’s something of an artist – a “drawing bot.” The bot is capable of creating images from text descriptions of an object, but it also adds details to those images that weren’t included the text, indicating that the AI has a little imagination of its own, says Microsoft.

“If you go to Bing and you search for a bird, you get a bird picture. But here, the pictures are created by the computer, pixel by pixel, from scratch,” explained Xiaodong He, a principal researcher and research manager in the Deep Learning Technology Center at Microsoft’s research lab in Redmond, Washington, in Microsoft’s announcement. “These birds may not exist in the real world — they are just an aspect of our computer’s imagination of birds.”

The bot is able to generate a variety of images, researchers say, including everything from “ordinary pastoral scenes,” like those with grazing livestock, to the absurd – like “a floating double-decker bus.”

Continue reading “Microsoft’s new drawing bot is an AI artist” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtL1fEEtLaA&t=0s

Mel Gibson and Joe Rogan, talk on Stem Cells:

Mel Gibson is an actor and filmmaker. Neil Riordan, PA, PhD is one of the early pioneers and experts in applied stem cell researchttps://www.cellmedicine.com/

Nearly 500 years ago in what we now call Mexico, a disease started rippling through the population. Red spots appeared on the skin, accompanied by wretched vomiting, bleeding from multiple orifices, and eventually, death. Combined with an invasion from Europe and horrific droughts, it was generally not a pleasant time or place to be alive.

It bore the name cocoliztli, meaning ‘pestilence,’ and it killed between five and 15 million people in just three years. As many plagues were at the time, it proved deadly and mysterious, burning through entire populations. Occurring centuries before John Snow’s work on cholera gave rise to epidemiology, data on the disease’s devastation was sparse. Over the years, researchers and historians attempted to pin the blame for the illness on measles, plague, viral hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola, and typhoid fever—a disease caused by a variation of the bacteria Salmonella enterica.

In a paper published this week in Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers present evidence that the latter was the most likely candidate in this cast of microbial miscreants. The study was pre-printed in biorxiv last year. The researchers detected the genome of a different variety of Salmonella enterica (the specific variety is Paratyphi C) in teeth of individuals buried in a cemetery historically linked to the deadly outbreak.

We talked a bit, and I had dinner at the presidential palace. Here’s a quick snapshot I got of us chatting! There are some professional pictures coming too. #transhumanism

Seven (!) digital touchscreens, and a virtual personal assistant that’s a fish.

But it remains to be seen whether drug regulators will go along with a new way of making medicines. To do so, agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will need to rewrite their rules for validating the safety of medicines. Instead of signing off on the production facility and manufactured drug samples, regulators would have to validate that reactionware produces the desired medication. Cronin agrees it’s a hurdle. But he argues that future printed reactors could simply include a final module containing standard validation tests that produce a visual readout, much like a pregnancy test. “I think it’s manageable.”

Digitized chemistry on demand could also undermine drug counterfeiters.

Macromolecular damage contributes to the chronic diseases of aging. Geroscientists hope to repair the damage by inducing autophagy.

Looking back at best of 2017)

A clinical trial of rapamycin on healthy seniors. The anti-aging drug extends the lifespan of mice and reduces inflammation markers.