Lifeboat Foundation

At TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY, Siri creator Dag Kittlaus performed the first public demo of Siri’s new cousin, Viv. Kittlaus described the brains of Viv as, “software that’s writing itself,” which is a pretty bold statement with some implications that call to mind the dreariest of Skynet dystopias. But what exactly makes it any better than Siri?

The fact is we don’t yet know how good this new voice assistant will be, but we can reflect a little bit on what we see during the controlled demo in the video below. For starters, Viv is designed to integrate seamlessly with third party apps, which is a major deficit on Siri’s part. The new AI was able to send money via Venmo, book a room through Hotels.com, and hail a cab from Uber. And it did so quickly and with no apparent hassle. Kittlaus later in the presentation described Viv as a “marketplace” that he saw as an improvement upon app stores.

Continue reading “Siri Creator Demos New AI That Doesn’t Suck This Time” »

Researchers discovered that people respond to stimuli differently enough that it is possible to create a unique signature, a brainprint, that could one day replace fingerprints in a number of instances.

For the longest time, the world has relied on fingerprints as a way to easily identify individuals. This is because a fingerprint is unique (and permanent) for each person—so what happens when someone’s fingerprint is stolen? This may sound a little farfetched, but it is easy enough to take a fingerprint from another, you just need to swipe a glass that they held.

And of course, you can’t grow a new finger to replace the print. This means that, when it gets compromised, it’s compromised forever. But now, researchers from Binghamton University have found a more efficient way to identify people—using brain waves.

Continue reading “Scientists Can Now Identify Individuals Based on Brain Waves—And It’s 100% Accurate” »

We could see commercials for the “Spotless Mind” someday and in various releases. However, why stop there?

Recently, scientists did find the gene that ties serial and mass murders together as a cause for their evil deeds and CRISPR could someday eliminate these people from existing which is a great thing. However, what happens if folks in power believe everyone in Europe and the US cannot have any religious belief and/ or values in order (in their own belief) to keep everyone equal; so they use this technolgy to eradicate how people believe or view the world. Just imagine; like John Lennon’s “Imagine”.

Jim Carrey’s role as shy and morose Joel Barish in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is deeply memorable in the context of his predominantly comedic repertoire of movie roles. And context is everything when it comes to recollection of memories. Though the kind of memory erasing technologies showcased in Eternal Sunshine may be too farfetched to ever become reality, scientists have nonetheless managed to make astounding progress in understanding and manipulating memories.

Continue reading “A breakthrough in science of memory: How a ‘Spotless Mind’ could soon be Reality” »

A new mode of operation for others to follow?

Mindfulness and meditation help Google, Facebook and others’ employees do their best work, says Happify CEO Tomer Ben-Kiki.

Nice; let’s hope they hit the right target.

“I need a stealth bomber that’s going to get close, and then it’s going to drop a whole bunch of smalls – some are decoys, some are jammers, some are [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] looking for where the SAMs are. Some of them are kamikaze airplanes that are going to kamikaze into those SAMs, and they’re cheap. You have maybe 100 or 1,000 surface-to-air missiles, but we’re going to hit you with 10,000 smalls, not 10,000 MQ-9s. That’s why we want smalls.”

SAMs stands for “Surface-to-Air Missile,” and they’re one of the reasons that the Air Force has invested so much in stealth technology over the years: if a missile can’t see a plane, it can’t hit it. The problem is that the economics don’t quite work that way: it’s easier to make a new, better missile than it is to make an existing airplane even stealthier, and modern Air Force fighters serve for around 30 years each—longer if they’re bombers. Missiles are generally cheaper than airplanes, so anyone who wants to protect against aerial attack just needs to invest in a lot of missiles.

Continue reading “Air Force wants swarms of small ‘kamikaze’ drones to defeat missiles” »

Hmmm;

The intelligence community’s research arm released its annual solicitation looking for the most innovative ideas the private sector has to offer.

Cell phones do not cause brain cancer.

Mobile phone use has not caused a rise in brain cancer in Australia, says a new study led by the University of Sydney.

“Daniel Chao, a Stanford-trained neuroscientist, and Brett Wingeier, a biomedical engineer, founded Halo Neuroscience in 2013. … Halo Sport uses electrodes to stimulate the brain’s motor cortex, which controls planning and voluntary movements. Energized motor neurons send stronger signals to athletes’ muscles, which Chao says allows them to reap greater rewards from every rep.”

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A study of the embryonic nervous system of the fruit fly throws light on how two neuronal cell lineages that develop at different times and in different places in the ventral nerve cord of the embryo can ultimately result in very similar neuronal subtypes. The study, publishing in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology on 5th May, is a collaboration between research teams in Madrid (Spain) and Linköping (Sweden).

In the paper, Hugo Gabilondo, Johannes Stratmann and their colleagues report that a crucial terminal selector gene, col, is activated by different sets of spatio-temporal selector genes in the two different neuronal cell lineages. In dAp neurons, which are present throughout the thorax and abdominal segments, col is activated directly by the action of the early temporal genes Kruppel (Kr) and pdm, and the GATA transcription factor gene grain (grn). By contrast, in Tv1 neurons, which are specific to the thoracic segments, col is activated by the late temporal gene cas, together with several other genes that feed forward onto the terminal selector gene cascade downstream of col. The result is expression of the neuropeptide Nplp1 in both dAp and Tv1 neurons.

The developing nervous system generates many different neuronal cell types; understanding this process of cell fate specification remains a major challenge for biologists. Complex cascades of regulatory genes are known to be involved, starting with spatial and temporal selector genes and finishing with terminal selector genes, all of which act in various combinations to dictate the ultimate neuronal cell type. A particular neuronal cell type often arises in several parts of the nervous system and at different stages of development, however, suggesting that different spatio-temporal cues can converge on the same terminal selectors to generate a similar cell fate. This study reports evidence of this phenomenon in an example from the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.

Continue reading “Gene cascade specifies two distinct neuron sets expressing Nplp1” »