Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: Researchers have identified a protein that could be leveraged to help microglia in the brain stave off Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Source: The Conversation.

Many neurodegenerative diseases, or conditions that result from the loss of function or death of brain cells, remain largely untreatable. Most available treatments target just one of the multiple processes that can lead to neurodegeneration, which may not be effective in completely addressing disease symptoms or progress, if at all.

The drug, midazolam, is often used before surgery to make a patient feel more relaxed. According to a new study, it is associated with an increased risk of heart damage when surgeries are performed at night.

According to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, a popular drug that makes patients sleepy and less anxious before surgery is associated with an increased risk of heart damage when surgeries are performed at night.

The results provide further proof that a drug’s effectiveness might vary depending on the time it is administered.

It has been described as “bringing your army right to the enemy.”

There’s a promising new therapy that makes the immune system kill bone marrow cancer cells. It has thus far been successful in as many as 73 percent of patients in two clinical trials, according to a report released by researchers from The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

The novel therapy, called talquetamab, binds to both T cells and multiple myeloma cells and directs the T cells to exterminate multiple myeloma cells. It has been described as “bringing your army right to the enemy.”

Continue reading “‘New lease on life’: Bone marrow cancer therapy successful in 73% of patients” »

More than three years ago, this editor sat down with Sam Altman for a small event in San Francisco soon after he’d left his role as the president of Y Combinator to become CEO of the AI company he co-founded in 2015 with Elon Musk and others, OpenAI.

At the time, Altman described OpenAI’s potential in language that sounded outlandish to some. Altman said, for example, that the opportunity with artificial general intelligence — machine intelligence that can solve problems as well as a human — is so great that if OpenAI managed to crack it, the outfit could “maybe capture the light cone of all future value in the universe.” He said that the company was “going to have to not release research” because it was so powerful. Asked if OpenAI was guilty of fear-mongering — Musk has repeatedly called all organizations developing AI to be regulated — Altman talked about the dangers of not thinking about “societal consequences” when “you’re building something on an exponential curve.”

The audience laughed at various points of the conversation, not certain how seriously to take Altman. No one is laughing now, however. While machines are not yet as intelligent as people, the tech that OpenAI has since released is taking many aback (including Musk), with some critics fearful that it could be our undoing, especially with more sophisticated tech reportedly coming soon.

Microsoft today announced that it acquired Lumenisity, a U.K.-based startup developing “hollow core fiber (HCF)” technologies primarily for data centers and ISPs. Microsoft says that the purchase, the terms of which weren’t disclosed, will “expand [its] ability to further optimize its global cloud infrastructure” and “serve Microsoft’s cloud platform and services customers with strict latency and security requirements.”

HCF cables fundamentally combine optical fiber and coaxial cable. They’ve been around since the ’90s, but what Lumenisity brings to the table is a proprietary design with an air-filled center channel surrounded by a ring of glass tubes. The idea is that light can travel faster through air than glass; in a trial with Comcast in April, a single strand of Lumenisity HCF was reportedly able to deliver traffic rates ranging from 10 Gbps to 400 Gbps.

“HCF can provide benefits across a broad range of industries including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, retail and government,” Girish Bablani, CVP of Microsoft’s Azure Core business, wrote in a blog post. “For the public sector, HCF could provide enhanced security and intrusion detection for federal and local governments across the globe. In healthcare, because HCF can accommodate the size and volume of large data sets, it could help accelerate medical image retrieval, facilitating providers’ ability to ingest, persist and share medical imaging data in the cloud. And with the rise of the digital economy, HCF could help international financial institutions seeking fast, secure transactions across a broad geographic region.”

Thin films made of carbon nanotubes hold a lot of promise for advanced optoelectronics, energy and medicine, however with their manufacturing process subject to close supervision and stringent standardization requirements, they are unlikely to become ubiquitous anytime soon.

“A major hindrance to unlocking the vast potential of nanotubes is their multiphase manufacturing process which is extremely difficult to manage. We have suggested using artificial neural networks (ANN) to analyze experimental data and predict the efficiency of single-walled carbon nanotubes synthesis,” explains one of the authors of the study and Skoltech researcher, Dmitry Krasnikov.

In their work published in the prestigious Carbon journal, the authors show that machine learning methods, and, in particular, ANN trained on experimental parameters, such as temperature, gas pressure and flow rate, can help monitor the properties of the carbon nanotube films produced.

Responsive material changes its behavior based on earlier conditions.

Inspired by living systems, a new material has been developed that changes its electrical behavior based on previous experience, effectively giving it a basic form of adaptive memory. Such adaptive materials could play a vital role in the next generation of medical and environmental sensors, as well as in soft robots or active surfaces. The breakthrough was achieved by researchers at Aalto University in Finland.

Responsive materials have become common in a range of applications, from glasses that darken in sunlight to drug delivery systems. However, existing materials always react in the same way each time. Their response to a change doesn’t depend on their history, nor do they adapt based on their past.

In a new study published by Alzheimer’s & Dementia, scientists from Rush University and Tufts University were the first to compare cognitive decline factors to vitamin D concentrations not only in the blood, but in the brain as well.

Researchers analyzed participants of the Rush Memory and Aging Project (MAP)—an ongoing longitudinal study that aims to identify risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive decline disorders—before and after death to see how their vitamin D levels impacted cognitive function in their later years.

Free of known dementia at the time of enrollment, all MAP participants agreed to participate in annual evaluations and organ donation when they died. In this study, the average age of participants was 92 at the time of death.

Discusses the possibility of Femtotech and the technological possibilities it may unlock. Not long ago nanotechnology was a fringe topic; now it’s a flourishing engineering field, and fairly mainstream. For example, while writing this article, I happened to receive an email advertisement for the “Second World Conference on Nanomedicine and Drug Delivery,” in Kerala, India. It wasn’t so long ago that nanomedicine seemed merely a flicker in the eyes of Robert Freitas and a few other visionaries!

But nano is not as small as the world goes. A nanometer is 10–9 meters – the scale of atoms and molecules. A water molecule is a bit less than one nanometer long, and a germ is around a thousand nanometers across. On the other hand, a proton has a diameter of a couple femtometers – where a femtometer, at 10–15 meters, makes a nanometer seem positively gargantuan. Now that the viability of nanotech is widely accepted (in spite of some ongoing heated debates about the details), it’s time to ask: what about femtotech? Picotech or other technologies at the scales between nano and femto seem relatively uninteresting, because we don’t know any basic constituents of matter that exist at those scales. But femtotech, based on engineering structures from subatomic particles, makes perfect conceptual sense, though it’s certainly difficult given current technology.

Continue reading “Hugo de Garis — From Nanotech to Femtotech — There’s Plenty More Room at the Bottom” »