Lifeboat Foundation

Nthing new; nice to see more folks waking up.

We’re moving beyond just prosthetics and wearable tech. Soon, we’ll all by cyborgs in one way or another.

From The Six Million Dollar Man to Inspector Gadget to Robocop, humans with bionic body parts have become commonplace in fiction. In the real world, we use technology to restore functionality to missing or defective body parts; in science fiction, such technology gives characters superhuman abilities. The future of cyborgs may hinge on that distinction.

Continue reading “Cyborgs Aren’t Just For Sci-Fi Anymore” »

The discomfort and stigma of loose or missing teeth could be a thing of the past as Griffith University researchers pioneer the use of 3D bioprinting to replace missing teeth and bone.

The three-year study, which has been granted a National Health and Medical Research Council Grant of $650,000, is being undertaken by periodontist Professor Saso Ivanovski from Griffith’s Menzies Health Institute Queensland.

As part of an Australian first, Professor Ivanovski and his team are using the latest 3D bioprinting to produce new, totally ‘bespoke,’ tissue engineered bone and gum that can be implanted into a patient’s jawbone.

Continue reading “Team uses 3D tissue engineering to revolutionize dental disease” »

With 3D printers; many small mom-and-pop manufacturers are easy to set up anywhere. Which brings in some interesting challenges when thinking about regulatory compliance and safety. Imaging a neighbor who was laid off gets a 3D printer and begins building and shipping things from their home. Plus they’re stock piling chemicals and other things in their basement or garage as “bi-products” in the production of the goods that they are building with their $15K 3D printer. Question for many is — how safe is it? how can this be monitored and controlled?

Manufacturers haven’t been able to fully exploit advancements in new materials, because computer-aided design and engineering tools haven’t kept pace, says a program manager for the government agency.

Continue reading “DARPA Project to Seek Lightyear-Like Leap in Design, Manufacturing” »

Another reason for being in east TN this month.

Genevieve Martin/ORNL This rendering illustrates the excitation of a spin liquid on a honeycomb lattice using neutrons. As with many other liquids, it is difficult to see a spin liquid unless it is “splashed,” in this case by neutrons depicted as moving balls. The misaligned and vibrating spin pair in the middle signifies the ephemeral Majorana fermion constantly in motion. The ripples formed when the neutrons hit the spin liquid represent the excitations that are a signature of the Majorana fermions. The atomic structure on the left signifies the honeycomb alpha-ruthenium trichloride, in which each ruthenium atom has a spin and is surrounded by a cage of chlorine atoms.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and UT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Department of Physics and Astronomy used neutrons to uncover novel behavior in materials that holds promise for quantum computing.

Continue reading “ORNL, UT Team Up on Breakthrough That Could Aid Quantum Computing” »

Very cool.

For more than a decade, biomedical researchers have been looking for better ways to deliver cancer-killing medication directly to tumors in the body. Tiny capsules, called nanoparticles, are now being used to transport chemotherapy medicine through the bloodstream, to the doorstep of cancerous tumors. But figuring out the best way for the particles to get past the tumor’s “velvet rope” and enter the tumor is a challenge scientists are still working out. Drexel University researchers believe that the trick to gaining access to the pernicious cellular masses is to give the nanoparticles a new look—and that dressing to impress will be able to get them past the tumor’s biological bouncers.

Targeted cancer therapy is most effective when the medication is released as close as possible to the interior of a tumor, to increase its odds of penetrating and killing off cancerous cells. The challenge that has faced cancer researchers for years is making a delivery vehicle that is sturdy enough to safely get the medication through the bloodstream to tumors—which is no smooth ride—but is also lithe enough to squeeze through the tumor’s dense extra cellular space—a matrix stuffed with sugars called hyaluronic acid.

Continue reading “Dressed to kill: Tailoring a suit for tumor-penetrating cancer meds” »

HUGE deal for wearables and biomed technologies.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a new approach to modifying the light absorption and stretchability of atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials by surface topographic engineering using only mechanical strain. The highly flexible system has future potential for wearable technology and integrated biomedical optical sensing technology when combined with flexible light-emitting diodes.

“Increasing graphene’s low light absorption in visible range is an important prerequisite for its broad potential applications in photonics and sensing,” explained SungWoo Nam, an assistant professor of mechanical science and engineering at Illinois. “This is the very first stretchable photodetector based exclusively on graphene with strain-tunable photoresponsivity and wavelength selectivity.”

Continue reading “Crumpling approach enhances photodetectors’ light responsivity” »

Very nice; we’re getting closer.

But superposition is fragile, and finding ways to preserve it is one of the chief obstacles to developing large, general-purpose quantum computers. In today’s Nature, MIT researchers describe a new approach to preserving superposition in a class of quantum devices built from synthetic diamonds. The work could ultimately prove an important step toward reliable quantum computers.

In most engineering fields, the best way to maintain the stability of a physical system is feedback control. You make a measurement — the current trajectory of an airplane, or the temperature of an engine — and on that basis produce a control signal that nudges the system back toward its desired state.

Continue reading “Advance may make quantum computing more practical” »

Stuart Russell received his B.A. with first-class honours in physics from Oxford University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1986. He then joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he is Professor (and formerly Chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UC San Francisco and Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Council on AI and Robotics. He has published over 150 papers on a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, and global seismic monitoring. His books include “The Use of Knowledge in Analogy and Induction”, “Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Rationality” (with Eric Wefald), and “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach” (with Peter Norvig).

Abstract:

Autonomous weapons systems select and engage targets without human intervention; they become lethal when those targets include humans. LAWS might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate enemy combatants in a city, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. The artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics communities face an important ethical decision: whether to support or oppose the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS).

CYMATICS

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