Lifeboat Foundation

Of the roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world, not one commonality has been found connecting them all together — until now.

Researchers at MIT have found what they’re calling a “language universal,” which focuses on sentence structure as a link among languages.

Edward Gibson, a professor of cognitive sciences at MIT and an author of the study, joined HuffPost Live on Friday to discuss his findings.

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Despite worries about threats from artificial intelligence, debates about the proper role of government regulation of AI have generally been lacking.

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As the brain ages, it becomes less efficient at recycling and eliminating build up of waste; ‘removal vans’ fail to do the rounds, and accumulation starts to overtake removal.

“We found that people in their 30s typically take about four hours to clear half the amyloid beta 42 from the brain,” says Randall J. Bateman. “In this new study, we show that at over 80 years old, it takes more than 10 hours.”

Research has uncovered that a protein called amyloid beta 42 (a natural byproduct of neural activity), is normally removed effectively in youth but the rate of clearance was found to slow progressively with age. Accumulation of amyloid beta 42 can lead to aggregation and consequent plaque formation and a slowdown in removal was tied to symptoms of dysfunction including memory loss and personality change. The study found that the brain disposes of this protein through a number of channels, and more work could uncover ways of boosting waste mangement in ailing brains, thus avoiding this toxic accumulation.

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Need an obscure medicinal compound found only in a jungle plant? Just print it.

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Technology » Forum Email Print Ban Killer Robots before They Become Weapons of Mass Destruction By Peter Asaro | August 7, 2015 Vladislav Ociacia/Thinkstock SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Last week the Future of Life Institute released a letter signed by some 1,500 artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and technology researchers. Among them were celebrities of science and the technology industry—Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak—along with public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett. The letter called for an international ban on offensive autonomous weapons, which could target and fire weapons without meaningful human control.

This week is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together killing over 200,000 people, mostly civilians. It took 10 years before the physicist Albert Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell, along with nine other prominent scientists and intellectuals, issued a letter calling for global action to address the threat to humanity posed by nuclear weapons. They were motivated by the atomic devastation in Japan but also by the escalating arms race of the Cold War that was rapidly and vastly increasing the number, destructive capability, and efficient delivery of nuclear arms, draining vast resources and putting humanity at risk of total destruction. They also note in their letter that those who knew the most about the effects of such weapons were the most concerned and pessimistic about their continued development and use.

The Future of Life Institute letter is significant for the same reason: It is signed by a large group of those who know the most about AI and robotics, with some 1,500 signatures at its release on July 28 and more than 17,000 today. Signatories include many current and former presidents, fellows and members of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, the Association of Computing Machinery and the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society; editors of leading AI and robotics journals; and key players in leading artificial-intelligence companies such as Google DeepMind and IBM’s Watson team. As Max Tegmark, Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor and a founder of the Future of Life Institute, told Motherboard, “This is the AI experts who are building the technology who are speaking up and saying they don’t want anything to do with this.”

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A human rejuvenation trial is set to go ahead in October, in which victims
of Alzheimer’s disease will be given a transfusion of young blood.

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“Increased Internet connectivity among cars, appliances, major infrastructure and everyday devices has opened the door to new threats of digital terrorism, say experts at the international digital security conference Black Hat.”

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Responding to this nugget from Engadget:

Tokyo’s district court has ruled that it’s not possible for people to own bitcoin, and therefore they cannot sue for compensation in the wake of Mt. Gox’s collapse.

The ruling comes days after the head of the world’s largest bitcoin exchange was arrested on charges of fraud. Judge Masumi Kurachi felt that bitcoins do not possess “tangible qualities” to constitute owned property. Mt. Gox held thousands of individual accounts, and so there’s plenty of angry customers looking for compensation.

Continue reading “Japanese Court: Bitcoin Cannot be Owned” »

Study uncovers a role for a protein that works as a master regulator of regeneration in the skin.

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