Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists and dietitians are starting to agree on a recipe for a long, healthy life. It’s not sexy, and it doesn’t involve fancy pills or pricey diet potions.

Fill your plate with plants. Include vegetables, whole grains, healthy fats, and legumes. Don’t include a lot of meat, milk, or highly processed foods that a gardener or farmer wouldn’t recognize.

“There’s absolutely nothing more important for our health than what we eat each and every day,” Sara Seidelmann, a cardiologist and nutrition researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told Business Insider.

Continue reading “This Study on Nearly Half a Million People Has Bad News For The Keto Diet” »

Microchip implants are going from tech-geek novelty to genuine health tool—and you might be running out of good reasons to say no.

A ten-year-old beagle with prostate cancer is helping researchers at The University of Queensland use nanomedicines to accurately diagnose and target the disease.

Hoover is the first patient in the world to receive the nanomedicine, which the research team hopes will help track and treat his cancer, and lead to better treatment for people with the same disease.

Nanomedicine is the science of developing tiny particles for applications in health — in this case therapeutics to specifically target a protein found in prostate cancer.

Continue reading “Hoover gives hope for novel nanomedicine cancer treatment” »

Do you think NASA needs a new logo?

Michael D. Shaw is a biochemist and freelance writer. A graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, and a protégé of the late Willard Libby, winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in chemistry, Shaw also did postgraduate work at MIT. Based in Virginia, he covers technology, health care and entrepreneurship, among other issues.

Continue reading “Why NASA Needs a New Logo” »

Japanese Researchers Create Immature Human Eggs From Stem Cells : Shots — Health News A Japanese research team made immature human eggs from stem cells that were derived from human blood. The technique brings scientists a step closer to being able to mass-produce human eggs.

All three of these surprising achievements are highlighted in the Goalkeepers 2018 Data Report, written by Bill and Melinda Gates and released on Sept. 18. But the dispatch—an assessment of the progress made so far on the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals and done with the help of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation—is anything but rah-rah. For every encouraging data point, indeed, there is one that alarms. For every promising advance in the global war on poverty and disease is a perilous outcome if we lose focus or steam.

A report from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation focuses on four key areas: Health, education, sanitation, and family planning.

Recently, there has been an explosion of interest in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to medicine. Whether explicitly or implicitly, much of this interest has centered on using AI to automate decision-making tasks that are currently done by physicians. This includes two seminal papers in the Journal of the American Medical Association demonstrating that AI-based algorithms have similar or higher accuracy than physicians: one in diagnostic assessment of metastatic breast cancer compared to pathologists and the other in detecting diabetic retinopathy compared to ophthalmologists.

While promising, these applications of AI in medicine raise a number of novel regulatory and policy issues around efficacy, safety, health workforce, and payment. They have also triggered concerns from the medical and patient communities about AI replacing doctors. And, except in narrow domains of practice, general AI systems may fall far short of the hype.

We posit that the applications of AI to “augment” physicians may be more realistic and broader reaching than those that portend to replace existing health care services. In particular, with the right support from policy makers, physicians, patients, and the technology community, we see opportunities for AI to be a solution for—rather than a contributor to—burnout among physicians and achieving the quadruple aim of improving health, enhancing the experience of care, reducing cost, and attaining joy in work for health professionals.

Chinese vice-premier Liu He called on the world to work together to address complex ethical, legal and other questions raised by artificial intelligence as he kicked off a gathering in Shanghai bringing together the globe’s AI elites.

“As members of a global village, I hope countries can show inclusive understanding and respect to each other, deal with the double-sword technologies can bring, and together embrace AI,” said Liu, a highly influential official who has been China’s top trade negotiator in the US-China trade war and is also on the country’s technology development committee.

The star-studded World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which opened Monday morning, comes as China has emerged as one of the world’s top players in AI, which promises to revolutionise everything from health care to driving to policing.

Continue reading “Chinese vice-premier calls on global AI elites to tackle ethics questions” »