Lifeboat Foundation

Metaverse though considered, a world under construction, has already created exciting promises. An individual can replicate his identity and even enhance them. How is it possible for a virtual world to create the exact replica of a person in zeroes and ones? There is not just one technology aiding in creating the fascinating world of Metaverse and IoT is one amongst them.

IoT connects digital devices via sensors and gadgets. It connects voice-activated speakers, medical gadgets, thermostats, and weather sensors, to data sources. Metaverse’s IoT applications collect and distribute data from the physical world to create an accurate representation of an object. A person’s replica in a Metaverse might have a unique biophysical response for example when the real person relocates to a place with different weather.

3D environments become easy and seamless to adapt in Metaverse as it connects a range of real-life devices through IoT. Making simulations within the Metaverse, particularly with digital twins becomes a lot easier making the physical and digital worlds indistinguishable all while providing a tailored interface environment for IoT. For example, with the gaming interface, elevated heart and breathing rates can trigger the individual’s avatar to make it more susceptible to replicating the person in real.

A look at the concept of Self-Replicating Machines, Universal Assemblers, von Neumann Probes, Grey Goo, and Berserkers. While we will discuss the basic concept and some on-Earth applications like Medical Nanotechnology our focus will be on space exploration and colonization aspects.

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Three Seattle biotech companies are joining forces to support open-access development of protein folding and design software.

The project, called OpenFold, brings together Cyrus Biotechnology, Outpace Bio, and Arzeda, startups developing new proteins that can be used as drugs or in industrial applications.

“It doesn’t make sense for all of us to replicate the same work,” Cyrus CEO Lucas Nivon told GeekWire. “Especially if it doesn’t give any one company a competitive advantage.”

Summary: Researchers identified a novel brain network that includes the fronto-parietal networks and fusiform gyrus which helps with the encoding of visual mental imagery.

Source: Paris Brain Institute.

Every day, we call upon a unique capacity of our brain, visual mental imagery, which allows us to visualize images, objects or people ‘in our heads’. Based on the recent case of a patient with a specific brain lesion, Paolo Bartolomeo’s group (Inserm) in the PICNIC Lab at the Paris Brain Institute has identified a region that may be key in mental visualization.

Research led by Suresh Alahari, Ph.D., Professor of Biochemistry at LSU Health New Orleans schools of Medicine and Graduate Studies, suggests a combination of drugs already approved by the FDA for other cancers may be effective in treating chemo-resistant triple-negative breast cancer. The results are published in Molecular Cancer.

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) tumors lack estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors, and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). A subtype representing 12–55% of triple-negative breast cancer tumors has androgen receptors (AR). Since androgen receptors stimulate tumor cell progression in estrogen receptor-negative breast cancers, they have become a target of triple-negative breast cancer therapy. As well, since a substantial number of patients with triple-negative breast cancer develop resistance to paclitaxel, the FDA-approved chemotherapeutic agent for triple-negative breast cancer, new therapeutic approaches are needed.

Working in a mouse model and tissue from patients with triple-negative breast cancer, the research team screened 133 FDA-approved drugs that have a therapeutic effect against androgen receptor cells. They found that ceritinib, an FDA-approved drug for lung cancers, efficiently inhibited the growth of androgen receptor triple-negative breast cancer cells. To improve the response, they also selected enzalutamide, an FDA-approved androgen receptor antagonist for prostate cancer treatment.

Forget your bulky AR headsets, smart contact lenses are coming to place augmented reality displays right there on your eyeball. Last week, Mojo Vision CEO Drew Perkins volunteered to test the first feature-complete prototype of his company’s design.

Smart wearables are all about super-portable convenience, and until scientists can plumb an AR display directly into your visual cortex, the smallest and most portable form factor we can imagine is that of a contact lens. Mojo Vision has been working on a smart contact lens design since 2015, and its latest prototype Mojo Lens packs in a pretty impressive amount of gear – especially for something that has to live behind your eyelid.

For starters, it has the world’s smallest and highest-density display capable of showing dynamic content – a green monochrome MicroLED display measuring less than 0.5 mm (0.02 in) in diameter, with a resolution of 14,000 pixels per inch. It’s got an ARM Core M0 processor, a 5-GHz radio capable of communicating at ultra-low latency, and enough accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers to track your eye movements with extreme precision, allowing the image to stay stable even as you move your eyes around.

Blockchain is a digital technology that allows a secure and decentralized record of transactions that is increasingly used for everything from cryptocurrencies to artwork. But Yale researchers have found a new use for blockchain: they’ve leveraged the technology to give individuals control of their own genomes.

Their findings are published June 29 in the journal Genome Biology.

“Our primary goal is to give ownership of genomic data back to the individual,” said senior author Mark Gerstein, the Albert L. Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics and professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, of computer science, and of statistics and data science.

Environmental sensors are a step closer to simultaneously sniffing out multiple gases that could indicate disease or pollution, thanks to a Penn State collaboration. Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics in the College of Engineering, and Lauren Zarzar, assistant professor of chemistry in Eberly College of Science, and their teams combined laser writing and responsive sensor technologies to fabricate the first highly customizable microscale gas sensing devices.

They published their technique this month in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

“The detection of gases is of critical importance to various fields, including pollution monitoring, public safety assurance and personal health care,” Cheng said. “To fill these needs, sensing devices must be small, lightweight, inexpensive and easy to use and apply to various environments and substrates, such as clothing or piping.”

This study explores the relationship between the adoption of industrial robots and workplace injuries using data from the United States (US) and Germany. Our empirical analyses, based on establishment-level data for the US, suggest that a one standard deviation increase in robot exposure reduces work-related injuries by approximately 16%. These results are driven by manufacturing firms (−28%), while we detect no impact on sectors that were less exposed to industrial robots. We also show that the US counties that are more exposed to robot penetration experience a significant increase in drug-or alcohol-related deaths and mental health problems, consistent with the extant evidence of negative effects on labor market outcomes in the US. Employing individual longitudinal data from Germany, we exploit within-individual changes in robot exposure and document similar effects on job physical intensity (−4%) and disability (−5%), but no evidence of significant effects on mental health and work and life satisfaction, consistent with the lack of significant impacts of robot penetration on labor market outcomes in Germany.