Lifeboat Foundation

Facial recognition is going mainstream. The technology is increasingly used by law-enforcement agencies and in schools, casinos and retail stores, spurring privacy concerns. In this episode of Moving Upstream, WSJ’s Jason Bellini tests out the technology at an elementary school in Seattle and visits a company that claims its algorithm can identify potential terrorists by their facial features alone.

A biohacker injected himself with DNA sequence made from parts of the Bible and Koran in a risky experiment because he “wondered whether it would be possible.”

Adrien Locatelli, from Grenoble in France, translated religious passages into DNA code to build unknown proteins which he then poured into his body.

The high-school student risked potentially fatal consequences after conducting the procedure without any knowledge of the effects the proteins would have on his body.

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We’re taught at school that energy can’t be created, merely converted from one form to another. But at the birth of the Universe – that is, everything – the energy needed for the Big Bang must have come from somewhere. Many cosmologists think its origin lies in so-called quantum uncertainty, which is known to allow energy to emerge literally from nowhere. What isn’t clear, however, is why this cosmic energy persisted long enough to drive the Big Bang.

But many experts, even those mindful of such risks, have a more positive outlook, especially in health-care and possibly in education.

Most experts canvassed by Pew say artificial intelligence will leave most of us better off by 2030. But there are fears about jobs and mayhem.

Mayo Clinic has been using 3D printed models for over a decade to help guide surgery and treatment, education, and patient-specific simulation.

Project for Awesome (P4A) 2018 is finally here, and you can help us to win much-needed funds at no cost to you by voting for the videos supporting our charity.

Every year, a number of charities are chosen through voting, and they each receive a sum of money based on what the fundraiser at P4A has raised. In the past, charities have received around $25,000 each, which is a considerable sum, especially for a small non-profit org such as LEAF.

Continue reading “Support the Drive to End Age-Related Diseases During Project for Awesome” »

Antoine Henri Becquerel (born December 15, 1852 in Paris, France), known as Henri Becquerel, was a French physicist who discovered radioactivity, a process in which an atomic nucleus emits particles because it is unstable. He won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Marie Curie, the latter of whom was Becquerel’s graduate student. The SI unit for radioactivity called the becquerel (or Bq), which measures the amount of ionizing radiation that is released when an atom experiences radioactive decay, is also named after Becquerel.

Becquerel was born December 15, 1852 in Paris, France, to Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel and Aurelie Quenard. At an early age, Becquerel attended the preparatory school Lycée Louis-le-Grand, located in Paris. In 1872, Becquerel began attending the École Polytechnique and in 1874 the École des Ponts et Chaussées (Bridges and Highways School), where he studied civil engineering.

A whale that lived 33 million years ago when present-day Oregon was part of the ocean floor has been newly named after a curator at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle.

And Elizabeth Nesbitt’s whale isn’t your typical cetacean: An analysis of the fossil, published in the Nov. 29 issue of Current Biology, suggests that Maiabalaena nesbittae bridged a gap between species of whales that had teeth and species that have a different mouth-feeding mechanism known as baleen.

“For the first time, we can now pin down the origin of filter-feeding, which is one of the major innovations in whale history,” study co-author Nicholas Pyenson, the National Museum of Natural History’s curator of fossil marine mammals and an affiliate curator at the Burke Museum, said in a news release.

Continue reading “Fossil named after Burke Museum curator tells whale of a tale” »