Lifeboat Foundation

A new coronavirus variant, C.1.2, has been detected in South Africa and a number of other countries, with concerns that the variant could be more infectious and evade vaccines, according to a new preprint study by South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform. The study is awaiting peer review.

The C.1.2 variant first detected in South Africa is more mutated compared to the original virus than any other known variant.

Circa 2019 o.o!

Groq, a rapidly growing startup that previously hired ten executives from Google for developing chipset architecture, has announced its new architecture named Tensor Streaming Processor that can perform 1 Peta operations per second on a single chip.

Tensor Streaming Processor (TSP) is the world’s first architecture to achieve this feat of performing 1 Peta or 1 quadrillion operations or 1e15 ops/s. Groq’s new architecture can also perform up to 250 trillion floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).

Continue reading “This New Chip Architecture Can Deliver 1 Quadrillion Operations Per Second” »

Much of the recent progress in AI has come from building ever-larger neural networks. A new chip powerful enough to handle “brain-scale” models could turbo-charge this approach.

Chip startup Cerebras leaped into the limelight in2019when it came out of stealth to reveal a 1.2-trillion-transistor chip. The size of a dinner plate, the chip is called the Wafer Scale Engine and was the world’s largest computer chip. Earlier this year Cerebras unveiled the Wafer Scale Engine 2 (WSE-2), which more than doubled the number of transistors to 2.6 trillion.

Now the company has outlined a series of innovations that mean its latest chip can train a neural network with up to 120 trillion parameters. For reference, OpenAI’s revolutionary GPT-3 language model contains 175 billion parameters. The largest neural network to date, which was trained by Google, had 1.6 trillion.

Israel-based AI healthtech company, DiA Imaging Analysis, which is using deep learning and machine learning to automate analysis of ultrasound scans, has closed a $14 million Series B round of funding.

Backers in the growth round, which comes three years after DiA last raised, include new investors Alchimia Ventures, Downing Ventures, ICON Fund, Philips and XTX Ventures — with existing investors also participating, including CE Ventures, Connecticut Innovations, Defta Partners, Mindset Ventures, and Dr Shmuel Cabilly. In total, it has taken in $25 million to date.

The latest financing will allow DiA to continue expanding its product range and go after new and expanded partnerships with ultrasound vendors, PACS/Healthcare IT companies, resellers and distributors while continuing to build out its presence across three regional markets.

A laser blast in California ignites a fleeting, self-sustaining chain reaction.

On August 8 2021, an experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s) National Ignition Facility (NIF) made a significant step toward ignition, achieving a yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ). This advancement puts researchers at the threshold of fusion ignition, an important goal of the NIF, and opens access to a new experimental regime.

The experiment was enabled by focusing laser light from NIF — the size of three football fields — onto a target the size of a BB that produces a hot-spot the diameter of a human hair, generating more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for 100 trillionths of a second.

“These extraordinary results from NIF advance the science that NNSA depends on to modernize our nuclear weapons and production as well as open new avenues of research,” said Jill Hruby, DOE under secretary for Nuclear Security and NNSA administrator.

It’s one of the most profound innovations of our time — and Manhattan-based Australian Kate Crawford wants us to wake up to AI’s inherent risks.

Spot is onsite at the Autodesk Technology Center in Boston. Learn how you can join them to research robotics in construction innovations and efficiencies.

CFP to explore new uses for robot dog Spot with Autodesk.

Let the record show that the current COVID-19 vaccines work, and they work well. But what is the next step in vaccine development, especially amid increasing rates of breakthrough infections and emergence of variants of concern?

In a new Northwestern Medicine study in mice, researchers took one of the current vaccines, which is based on the novel coronavirus’s infamous spike protein, and added a different antigen, the nucleocapsid protein, to form a new, potentially improved version of the COVID vaccine. The nucleocapsid protein, which is an internal RNA-binding protein, may help kick the immune system into high gear much more quickly than the spike protein is capable of since it is among the most rapidly and highly expressed proteins in coronaviruses.

“At this point, we’re just trying to figure out ‘What should the 2.0 vaccines be?’” said senior and corresponding study author Pablo Penaloza-MacMaster, an assistant professor of microbiology-immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “It seems like adding nucleocapsid to the vaccine renders it more protective, relative to having only the spike.”