Lifeboat Foundation

The city he described did not exist for much longer. A bishop soon destroyed the heritage of many generations of ancient minds in the name of a new faith. In 391 AD, the beautiful temple of wisdom was ruined. There is no evidence of the existence of the library after that date, but it seems that the people of Alexandria, the legendary philosophers, scientists, and their supporters saved some of the books. However, in 642 AD, when the city was captured by Muslims, they burned all the books not related to Islam that they found in public places.

The monumental Musaeum of Alexandria was famous for its legendary library. The tragic story of the building’s destruction continues to be a painful one for people who love ancient history and literature. So what treasures were lost in its devastating fire?

The Musaeum, or Mouseion, was a home to art, music, poetry, and philosophy. It is extremely difficult to find out exactly what was located on the shelves of the library, but generations of passionate researchers have created some possible lists of the lost scrolls’ authors.

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• Tencent Music on Monday set the price for its US initial public offering after global markets got a boost from a truce in the US-and-China trade war.
• The company said American Depository Receipts will price between $13 and $15, helping it raise as much as $1.2 billion.
• The IPO was initially scheduled for October 18, but was postponed due to stock-market volatility.
• Monday’s filing comes after President Donald Trump agreed to postpone new tariffs on Chinese imports by 90 days and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to buy a substantial amount of US goods and name Fentanyl a controlled substance.

Tencent Music Entertainment filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday to set the price for its US initial public offering — one day after President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a truce in the trade war between the US and China.

The China-based streaming-music service backed by tech giant Tencent said the offering price will be in the range of $13 and $15 per American Depository Receipt, helping it raise as much as $1.2 billion.

Replicas of famous paintings are routinely created with printers that use only four inks – cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. RePaint, a new technique developed at MIT, combines artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and a rich 10-ink palette for much more faithful results in any lighting condition.

• Once dismissed as a “party drug,” ketamine is emerging as a potential alternative treatment for depression.
• A growing list of academic medical centers now offer the drug, including Columbia University, which began offering ketamine to patients with severe depression this fall.
• Ketamine works differently from common antidepressants like Celexa or Prozac and has been called “the most important discovery in half a century.”
• Pharmaceutical companies, including Allergan and Johnson & Johnson, are also working on developing blockbuster antidepressants inspired by ketamine.

Ketamine, a drug once associated with raucous parties, bright lights, and loud music, is increasingly being embraced as an alternative depression treatment for the millions of patients who don’t get better after trying traditional medications.

The latest provider of the treatment is Columbia University, one of the nation’s largest academic medical centers.

In a collaborative study presented by scientists primarily affiliated with Stanford and Brown Universities, participants suffering from significant paralysis were successfully able to use non-modified applications on an Android tablet using their brain waves. In previous studies, “point-and-click” computer functionality interpreted from these kinds of signals has been accomplished, but the applications available to participants was limited to software and devices that had been specialized and personalized for users’ specific needs. This study has demonstrated technology that overcomes this limitation and enables access to the full range of software available to non-disabled users. Participants enjoyed applications previously unavailable to them such as streaming music services and a piano keyboard player.

To accomplish the study’s objectives, scientists capitalized and combined existing technologies for their unique end. Brain waves from participants’ brain implants were sent to a commercially available recording system and then processed and decoded by an existing real-time interpreter software. The decoded data was then transmitted to a Bluetooth interface configured as a wireless mouse which was paired to an Android tablet. While the steps to accomplish the task at hand are many, the result somewhat resembles telepathy but largely resembles greater accessibility for the disabled.

Continue reading “Paralyzed individuals successfully use brain waves to operate tablet computers” »

Thoughts on the Eurosymposium on Healthy Ageing held by Heales in Brussels.

When I first learned about the possibility of achieving human rejuvenation through biotechnological means, little did I know that this would lead me to meet many of the central figures in the field during a conference some seven years later—let alone that I would be speaking at the very same event. Yet, I’ve had the privilege to attend the Fourth Eurosymposium on Healthy Ageing (EHA) held in Brussels on November 8–10, an experience that gave me a feel of just how real the prospect of human rejuvenation is.

A friendly, welcoming environment

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Researchers at the Research Center for IT Innovation of Academia Sinica, in Taiwan, have recently developed a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) that has binary neurons at the output layer of the generator. This model, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, can directly generate binary-valued predictions at test time.

So far, GAN approaches have achieved remarkable results in modeling continuous distributions. Nonetheless, applying GANs to discrete data has been somewhat challenging so far, particularly due to difficulties in optimizing the model distribution toward the target data distribution in a high-dimensional discrete space.

Hao-Wen Dong, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore, “I am currently working on music generation in the Music and AI Lab at Academia Sinica. In my opinion, composing can be interpreted as a series of decisions—for instance, regarding the instrumentation, chords and even the exact notes to use. To move toward achieving the grand vision of a solid AI composer, I am particularly interested in whether deep generative models such as GANs are able to make decisions. Therefore, this work examined whether we can train a GAN that uses binary neurons to make binary decisions using backpropagation, the standard training algorithm.”

Continue reading “BinaryGAN: a generative adversarial network with binary neurons” »

The Commute tab for Maps first popped up in a limited rollout in early September, but starting today it’s rolling out to users on Android and iOS. Google says that this new feature is designed to help you “take control over your commute.” It built the feature with the fact that, in many cities across North America, rush hour traffic can result in a commute that takes up to 60% longer than expected.

With the new Commute tab, Google Maps can provide live data on traffic to help you best manage your daily trip to work. It automatically accounts for accidents or heavy traffic and can help you better budget your time to account for that or provide alternate routes. Android users will have notifications on these updates sent to their device before getting caught in the delay.

Continue reading “Google Maps adds ‘Commute’ tab w/ live traffic info, Spotify, Apple Music integration” »

The Imagine Science Films Festival is happening on October 12-19th, 2018 in New York, at a variety of venues, and this year, it is featuring a theme close to home: survival.

Crisis. Entropy. Extinction. This year we look at the high stakes for all life on Earth and beyond. Between nuclear proliferation, species loss and dwindling resources, existence itself is not assured. But for every dystopia, a corresponding utopia may be within reach. It may be a struggle, but the record of all life is that of an eon-spanning fight to stay alive. We’ll feature tumultuous natural history and startling feats of adaptation. Apoptosis versus immortal cell lines. Half-lives and radical life extension. The deaths of stars and extraordinary paths to SURVIVAL.

With this year’s theme including life extension, we may well see some interesting and thought-provoking films on the topic. Lifespan.io is also an official event sponsor for the festival, as we strongly feel that the worlds of filmmaking and science can be a perfect match in helping to encourage a wider dialogue about aging and doing something about it.