Lifeboat Foundation

A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego and La Jolla-based startup Nanovision Biosciences Inc. have developed the nanotechnology and wireless electronics for a new type of retinal prosthesis that brings research a step closer to restoring the ability of neurons in the retina to respond to light. The researchers demonstrated this response to light in a rat retina interfacing with a prototype of the device in vitro.

They detail their work in a recent issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering. The technology could help tens of millions of people worldwide suffering from neurodegenerative diseases that affect eyesight, including macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa and loss of vision due to diabetes.

Despite tremendous advances in the development of retinal prostheses over the past two decades, the performance of devices currently on the market to help the blind regain functional vision is still severely limited—well under the acuity threshold of 20/200 that defines legal blindness.

Transhumanism appearing in the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) magazine: Science…

Modern technology and modern medical practice have evolved over the past decades, enabling us to enhance and extend human life to an unprecedented degree. The two books under review examine this phenomenon from remarkably different perspectives.

Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine is an examination of transhumanism, a movement characterized by technologies that seek to transform the human condition and extend life spans indefinitely. O’Connell, a journalist, makes his own prejudices clear: “I am not now, nor have I ever been, a transhumanist,” he writes. However, this does not stop him from thoughtfully surveying the movement.

Continue reading “Life and death: When the end arrives, should we upgrade or shut down?” »

Na JPMorgan Chase & Co., uma máquina de aprendizagem está analisando os acordos financeiros que antes mantinham equipes jurídicas ocupadas por milhares de horas.

O programa, chamado COIN, para o Contrato de Inteligência, faz a tarefa de interpretar acordos de empréstimo comercial que, até que o projeto foi lançado em junho, consumiu 360 mil horas de trabalho por ano por advogados e agentes de crédito. O software revê os documentos em segundos, é menos propenso a erros e nunca pede férias.

No que diz respeito à COIN, o programa ajudou a JPMorgan a reduzir os erros de manutenção de empréstimos, a maioria resultante de erro humano na interpretação de 12.000 novos contratos por ano, de acordo com os seus criadores.

Continue reading “JPMorgan Software Does in Seconds What Took Lawyers 360,000 Hours” »

He also said there are a lot of opportunities for India but it is China which is seizing them. “India must rise to the role it should be playing for its benefit, for the benefit of science and rest of the world,” he added. India and China have been growing rapidly in the last few decades and both have doubled their GDP. But China, he said, in this period doubled its investment in science and technology while India’s funding reminded at the same level. South Korea, a much smaller country, is also investing a lot in science and the results are showing, he said.

Funding delays and legal challenges preventing the country from achieving greatness, says Nobel Laureate David Gross.

Continue reading “India can become a leading scientific power in the world” »

Last week, the US Patent and Trademarks Office ruled on the most-watched patent proceeding of the 21st century: the fight for Crispr-Cas9. The decision was supposed to declare ownership of the rights to the revolutionary gene editing technique. But instead, the patent judge granted sorta-victories to each of the rival parties—a team from UC Berkeley and another with members from both MIT and Harvard University’s Broad Institute. That’s great for those groups (and their spin-off, for-profit gene editing companies with exclusive licenses). But it leaves things a bit murkier for anyone else who wants to turn a buck with gene editing.

The Crispr discoverers now have some authority over who gets to use Crispr, and for what. And while exclusive licenses aren’t rare in biotech, the scope of these do stand out: They cover all the 20,000-plus genes in the human genome. So this week, legal experts are sending a formal request to the Department of Health and Human Services. They want the federal government to step in and bring Crispr back to the people.

Crispr is new, but patent laws governing genetic engineering date back decades. In 1980, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled that genetically engineered microbes were patentable, Congress passed something called the Bayh-Doyle Act. The law gives permission for universities to patent—and license—anything their researchers invented with public funds, making it easier to put those inventions back in the hands of citizens.

A new and extensive interview I did at New Atlas, including ideas about my #libertarian California Governor run. Libertarianism has many good ideas, but two core concepts are the non-aggression principle (NAP) and protection of private property rights—both of which I believe can be philosophically applied to the human body (and the body’s inevitable transhuman destiny of overcoming disease and decay with science and technology):

Zoltan Istvan is a transhumanist, journalist, politician, writer and libertarian. He is also running for Governor of California for the Libertarian Party on a platform pushing science and technology to the forefront of political discourse. In recent years, the movement of transhumanism has moved from a niche collection of philosophical ideals and anarcho-punk gestures into a mainstream political movement. Istvan has become the popular face of this movement after running for president in 2016 on a dedicated transhumanist platform.

We caught up with Istvan to chat about how transhumanist ideals can translate into politics, how technology is going to change us as humans and the dangers in not keeping up with new innovations, such as genetic editing.

Continue reading “Zoltan Istvan on transhumanism, politics and why the human body has to go” »

Don’t be the CIO that sees their own this market as most Healthcare CIO’s will not allowed to stay given they are now a brand liability not to mention all those lawsuits that are coming from lawyers of the patients.

Electronic health record databases proving to be some of the most lucrative stolen data sets in cybercrime underground.

Medical insurance identification, medical profiles, and even complete electronic health record (EHR) databases have attracted the eyes of enterprising black hats, who increasingly see EHR-related documents as some of the hottest commodities peddled in the criminal underground. A new report today shows that complete EHR databases can fetch as much as $500,000 on the Deep Web, and attackers are also making their money off of smaller caches of farmed medical identities, medical insurance ID card information, and personal medical profiles.

Continue reading “Stolen Health Record Databases Sell For $500,000 In The Deep Web” »

Who needs a Tesla when you can build your own automated copilot using free hardware designs and software available online?

Taxation and redistribution.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and world’s richest man, said in an interview Friday that robots that steal human jobs should pay their fair share of taxes.

“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social Security tax, all those things,” he said. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

Continue reading “Robots that steal human jobs should pay taxes, Gates says” »